Slideshare defaults new Account Type from default!

Slideshare apparently added new Account Type options to improve users profiles. A drop down menu at the head of Personal Information pages offers choices of Default, Company, Event Organizer, and four more. That's all well and good, if one of the types fits you better than the default.

The problem is, on first login since Slideshare's update, I found a hot-linked organizational name glaring from the top corner of the display, which opened My Slidespace when I clicked on it. Though the slidespace then announced "Hello, [+ username]!" at the top right, the "Welcome back, ..." message in the sidebar to the left still displayed the organizational name.

The work around to get back to me required:

1. Opening the user profile page for editing (Edit profile),
2. Switching the Account Type to Default, and
3. Saving the changes.

Talk about a make work proposition for users not seeking to usurp an entire organization's Slideshare identity! Why is it that web site builders seem to think they know better than users do what users' identities and preferences are?

Brainless language defaults: not necessarily so

Though service providers seldom notify individual users of enhanced affordances, it has come to my dumb-founded attention that Google Calendar embedding code generators now offer recovery from defaults imposed according to user ISP locations. Deep among your calendars, you may find:

• Settings:
• Embed This Calendar:
• Customize the color, size, and other options (sorry, no screen shots here because they might violate copyright).
  

Then, after culturally sensitive options like "Week Starts On" (left sidebar, 2009.06.19), there's a drop down menu that enables you to over-ride the default. I've over-ridden the default on two calenders, embedded in singular locations, so far.

If you have more calendars that you wish to appear in certain languages, when embedded in multiple locations, more power to you! You may need to regenerate embedding code in Google, and then replace whatever you've embedded in other websites.

Brainless language defaults (Skype)

From a help link in an English, so-and-so-wants-to-contact-you web-mail message (Yahoo!), opened in Safari, on Mac OS 10.5.7, while operating in English in Japan; I got shunted to a Japanese language page automatically:

• http://www.skype.com/intl/ja/help/guides/ (emphasis added, pab)

Knowing just enough about URLs, and two-character country or language codes, I was able to read that troublesome URL, and figure out that the Skype site had probably read my internet location, and imposed a connection to the Japanese language page in the international users directory ("...intl/ja/...).

In this case, plugging in different language codes that I tried (en and fr) worked to over-ride the default, and made reading the page easier than it would have been in a third language. Thankfully, the Skype URL above was human-reader-friendly.