BATTLE OF THE ANTS

Ok, so I didn't write for Wired the magazine, I wrote for Webmonkey. But the checks said "Wired" and then "Lycos" so I think it counts.

Anyway.

I was doing a vanity search in Google Books and came across a reference to myself in The Flash Usability Guide (2002). The reference was to a commentary I wrote in 2001, called "Tipping Jakob's Ladder". [The tagline at the top of the commentary is only partially correct, of course, since it's six-plus years old.]

I don't take credit for the title. I had a really, really awesome editor (Evany Thomas). I mean really great.

So yeah. I woke up one day, thought "Jakob Nielsen is really ticking me off," and wrote this thing. Re-reading it now, I don't really disagree with myself. Not much has changed in the six-plus years since I wrote it. In fact, you could just swap out some things like "Flash" with "widgets" and I think the commentary still holds.

So there you go. Insight into my former life. Stuff I can't use on an academic CV. Oh well. Life's hard.