If you are going to do task analysis and on-site visits, this is a very good and practical book, though on the pricey side:
User and Task Analysis for Interface Design
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 12:33 AM on September 28, 2006

Thanks, vacapinta.

The Firefly recommendation system was primitive in comparison. Of the versions of recommendation systems that Amazon has filed a patent for, this patent application sounds most what is being asked about:

Use of product viewing histories of users to identify related products

It has a section which details "Use of Purchase Histories to Identify Related Items" which seems to address the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 7:11 PM on September 18, 2006

Patti Maes still is a rock star. Love her InterestMap (pdf) paper.

I'll second the recommendation on Greg Linden's blog. If you dig through his archives, he has a series of posts about what it was like to work for Amazon that are very good. In one of them, he talks about some of the challenges he faced while doing some of the programming involving recommendations.
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 8:45 AM on September 19, 2006

There are a number of potential problems that may be causing a lack of pagerank showing for the site.

I don't think that there's a penalty involved. A number of the monthly archives pages are showing pagerank in the Google toolbar.

second, i can't read that primer dhartung, it's for registered (and paid) users only.

Registered maybe, but you don't need to be a paid member of the forum to read that... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 4:58 PM on November 10, 2005 marked best answer

Looks like my link to the second paper didn't come out right. Here is is again:

Link Spam Detection Based on Mass Estimation
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 5:01 PM on November 10, 2005

When Richard Wayne Penniman sung "Tutti Fruiti, aw-rootie" it was rock, and when Charles Eugene Patrick Boone homogenized the same song for the masses, it was pop.
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 10:06 AM on August 15, 2004

I liked the Cooper and Krug and McCloud books referenced above.

I also enjoyed this one from Hackos and Redish: User and Task Analysis for Interface Design
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 8:20 PM on July 29, 2004

If only this were something that could be easily answered in Ask Meta...

There are at least three professionals that can help you do the appropriate planning for your business - an attorney, an accountant, and an insurance agent. Those are the folks that can help you set up the infrastructure of your business. It costs money to talk to folks like this. It can cost you even more not to.

Before you do, there is quite a lot of research that you... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 7:39 PM on July 29, 2004

There's something about the temperment of Haruki Murakami's books that remind me of William Gibson. I'd recommend The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as a good starting point.

It seems, from this marginalia.org post that William Gibson is enjoying Murakami's books.
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 11:02 PM on June 20, 2004

mdn wrote:

"The claim was that hemingway struggled with each sentence as he was writing it, while fitzgerald (I think he was the counterpart - many writers could be, as it probably is the more common way) wrote first, and later went back to clean up / strengthen / alter."

I've enjoyed the comparison between Hemingway and Faulkner written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Gabriel Garcia Marquez Meets Ernest Hemingway.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 6:42 PM on June 17, 2004

I'm enjoying using pmachine, and have a few other people blogging with me.

pmachine can be set to either require registration before comments, or to allow people to comment without registration.

But, if you use pmachine for more than one blog, it requires that people register for comments. Why? I don't know.

There is a fix posted on the pmachine forum. Make sure that you read the whole thread if you're going to try this... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 3:58 PM on June 5, 2004

The link:[mysite] search normally only shows pages that have at least a pagerank of higher than three.

if you do a search in Google for "domainname.com" or using whatever tld is applicable, you may find the rest of them.
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 2:55 PM on May 1, 2004

I like the Nolo Press pages and books on small business. They aren't geared towards tech and ecommerce specifically, but are well written and helpful.

Nick Usbourne's Net Words is a strong primer for copy writing on the web. Andrew Chak's Submit now: Designing Persuasive Web Sites and the Stanford Web Credibility Research pages cover a lot of ideas about building an effective ecommerce site.

There's an excellent course on starting a business... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 1:58 AM on March 13, 2004

You're welcome. They do a nice job of presenting information on their site, and I've read three or four of their books, which were all really well done.
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 2:51 PM on March 13, 2004

I think one of the best uses for usenet is to find product reviews. Or at least, negative product reviews. (It seems like there are always more complaints for most things there then there are recommendations.) Google groups makes it easy to search through those.

Some interesting comments there on Mesh computers.

ps. I built my own over Thanksgiving break. Glad I did. Saved lots of money, and it's a pretty nice machine.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 11:27 AM on March 6, 2004

Sounds like a paraphrase from Judge Posner in a speech he made in November 2002. Unfortunately, the link to that speech from the Eldred site leads to a "not-found" error, though there are a couple of quotes here, including this one:Intellectual property is both the input and output of the intellectual-property industry. The public domain--we don't think much of it. We don't think of it as a major source of societal wealth.If you have a subscription to the National Journal or access to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 8:16 PM on February 28, 2004

It's possible that you cannot use blogger to publish directly to that server.

The error message that you are receiving is very similar to the one I continued to get when Blogger went through the Dano upgrade last summer.

Here's the known issue that I believe you are facing:

publishing your Blog via FTP will not work if your webhost only supports active FTP (those users needing active FTP access had been relying on the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 5:28 PM on January 11, 2004

CSS Zen Garden is a great place to get fired up about what you can do with CSS.

It's founder, Dave Shea has some nice stuff in his blog, mezzoblue, including a really nice CSS Crib Sheet.

Iconomy's most excellent set of links didn't include the very easy to use Layout-o-Matic to go with her posted very easy to use listamatic from Accessify.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 9:51 PM on December 8, 2003

I'd second holloway's caution about the image replacement technique practiced at zen gardens. You might want to mess with other aspects of CSS before you turn to that.
posted to Ask Metafilter by bragadocchio at 3:59 AM on December 9, 2003