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Entrepreneur aficionado extraordinaire Robert Scoble posited a question on his Rackspace blog yesterday asking if there is push back against HTML5 by the top mobile designers in San Francisco. He cited new apps Path, Storify and Foodspotting as prominent examples of great apps with acclaimed UX that were rendered in native languages as opposed to HTML5. Are top developers really pushing back against HTML5 or is Scoble once again a little too deep in his fantasy world?

If you've used the mobile social network Path recently, it's likely that you enjoyed the experience. Path has a sophisticated design, yet it's easy to use. It sports an attractive red color scheme and the navigation is smooth as silk. It's a social app and finding friends is easy thanks to Path's suggestions and its connection to Facebook.

In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn't the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many people use it and that's particularly important for a social app like Path. Indeed it's where Path may yet fail, but the point is they have given themselves a chance by creating a great user experience. In this post, we outline 5 signs that the tech product or app you're using has a great UX - and therefore has a shot at being the Next Big Thing.

Last week Sears and Kmart became the latest retailers to sell Christmas trees online and deliver them to your doorstep, at least if you live in the lower 48 states of the USA. And while it is great that a company that formerly sold houses via mail order has entered this market, you might get a better deal if you shop elsewhere, both for live and fake trees. Of course, you might be somewhat nostalgic that yet another holiday ritual has been relegated to the digital universe. But while you do your shopping you can see some important user experience lessons to be learned for your own ecommerce site here.

Facebook made significant changes to how it delivers your friends' news and updates today by releasing a ticker feature and a news feed format that arranges missed updates in a newspaper-style format.

The move is an improvement in relevancy of information feeds in social profiles and it demonstrates an intelligent system for delivering information and encouraging interaction on the world's largest social network.

Last year when Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows hit the streets suggesting that the Internet was frying our brains (see our coverage) I asked what we could do to build a less brain damaging Internet. Since then I've been too, well, distracted to pursue that line of thinking.

Fortunately Alex Pang, a visiting fellow at Microsoft Research Cambridge, actively researches this area. Pang proposes a new paradigm called contemplative computing. Today he gave a talk on the idea at the Lift France 2011 conference and has published a PDF of it. You can also find a rough draft of his paper on contemplative computing.

So can computers actually help improve our concentration and contemplation, instead of leading us into distraction?

French Internet research company Miratech has published research on how users interact with media presented in a physical newspaper versus an iPad. Miratech used eye-tracking technology to determine how users approached each medium and tested their memories to see if there was a difference in information retention.

Newspaper readers finished articles slightly quicker than iPad readers, who were more likely to skim content than to read it fully. Newspaper readers also had better retention, with 90% remembering what they read on paper compared to 70% of users of the iPad. See some of their videos after the jump.

We've covered Microsoft Kinect a few times, particularly the release of the hacked open source drivers for the device. Hackers have been building their own projects with it, and Microsoft will be releasing an official SDK for Windows for the product as well. Windows 8 might make use of Kinect and similar features as well.

But even better than open source drivers for the device would be a completely open source alternative. One candidate for this is TLD, aka Predator, an object tracking system that works with normal web cameras on commodity hardware.

You've been asked to build a jump box that will allow users to type into a box and search for a customer id. This is a really simple feature - so how do you build it?

The trick is to build the basic functionality, and then try it out. See what you've missed, then go back and make some tweaks. This isn't so much about fixing a bug or two - it's about building a feature that works really well.

Have you ever pored over Web analytics reports and wished you could see what users did on your site in more detail? Metrics like average page views per visit and bounce rate can be informative, but sometimes those numbers don't offer enough detail to be actionable.

A startup that launched last month called MouseTrace aims to end that ambiguity by giving site owners the ability to watch what visitors do on their site, including those on smartphones.

Running a site doesn't only require Web development skills. Any site where the users can add content and communicate with each other requires a great deal of care and attention if it's going to be a success.

Increasing user participation on your site is achievable if you aim for the old adage KISS, or keep it simple, stupid. Beyond that, there are a few things you can do to get more people to interact with your site. Here are seven tips to set you on that path.