Over the past few months, I've added a number of my older papers and technical reports to the site, and some of you might have been wondering why you should care about these relatively ancient documents. (1995?? Did they really have computers then?) Towards this end, I've added present-day annotations to some of these papers, pointing out aspects of the work that I still think are worthy of attention, personal or historical insights about the projects, and post-hoc justifications for what, at the time, honestly seemed like really good ideas, regardless of what ultimately happened. Enjoy.

As an aside, I found that it was a lot of fun to go back through all this stuff and think about it from a more up-to-date perspective. If you happen to have a web site with a similarly historical overview of your own work, I'd highly recommend this -- you'll learn a few things by doing it, and it may provide some additional value to your visitors.

Exocog was an investigation into interactive fiction, in which a story was conveyed by gradually unveiling a carefully-designed collection of e-mail, websites, and other Internet content. "Readers" followed the story by tracking and integrating changes across the sites and messages, and sharing their beliefs about the story's development with other readers. In addition to being worthy of study as a dramatically different form of collective human-computer interaction, these kinds of "immersive" events can be valuable tools for product marketing and audience building.

I'm writing a column for IEEE Internet Computing, focusing on user experience issues. Written from the perspective of a user experience guy talking to research and product development people whose expertise, by and large, is not in user experience, these columns point out new developments in the user experience world that are opening up new opportunities for research and products, and address technology issues that could be helped by thinking more carefully about user experience. If that suits you, come by for a look.