Italian IA Summit

I never really had time to post a follow-up post to the Italian IA Summit, so here are some quick thoughts.

1. They managed to make it a free event, and there were lots of people. Free is good.
   
2. UX and IA are happening in Italy, there are half a dozen small companies doing it, it seems.
3. On the other hand, traditional clients have no idea what IA and UX mean.
4. The Italians are great hosts.
   

I wish I had time to write a more extensive post.

Yey: "The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even
small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a
human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over
France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing
nothing at all for months on end."

Forgotten art indeed!

Some interesting presentations on the future of IA by Victor Lombardi and Joe Lamanta. This stuff is indeed in the air.

Who is working on a new feedreader?

What would a better feedreader be like?

1. It would help me find new feeds. I mean, really help me.
2. It would be social: I could easily find which feeds my friends are subscribed to (publicly) and such.
   
3. It would let me manage my feeds better.
4. It might support commenting and discussion in some smart way, without taking the discussion away from the sources.
   

Of course, the barriers to entry in the feedreader space are huge. Entrenched market leaders. Huge scalability challenges for newcomers.
And of course, the only real way to move into that space is probably to do something very different from the current feedreaders. But they are good. Just not good enough.

How My Bloglines is broken.

Note I still call it "my bloglines". That's because I love my Bloglines. I find Google Reader impossible to use - literally. I tried, 3 times already, a few days each time. Can't do it. It's too slow (simple things like scrolling get stuck, which is strange, because Gmail works fine for me), and doesn't want to mark a feed as "read" once I click it. I hate that.

Anyway.

Bloglines is broken and has been for a few weeks now. All my feeds (almost) show a count of 200 new items, like in the picture below, every day, even though many of them have NO new items, some only have a few. Help Bloglines!

The Breaking Of The Feedreaders

OK I am not alone: "unfortunately the way Google Reader works is that it forces you to look at every single post, so if you have feeds that are very frequently updates, Google Reader is not great at letting you simply skim through them quickly. Almost immediately, my Google Reader account was overwhelmed with thousands of unread posts, and it felt completely out of control. I abandoned it, as I suspect many other people did who went through the same experience."

This is SOOO broken. My basic interaction with my feedreader is:

• Scan the bold feed titles to see where there's something new.
• Click on a few feeds and scan their posts. Now these feeds are "read" and are not bold anymore.
• Rinse and repeat.

Call me crazy. Is this just me? Isn't this how feedreaders should work? So why is Bloglines broken (the bolding of the feeds is broken), and why does Google Reader just doesn't want to do this (if I click a feed, the feed still shows bold, as if I didn't read it.)?

AAAAAAAAARG.

Even though Bloglines plain old broke on me, Google Reader is totally pissing me off. It's too SLOW, and doesn't work smoothly, and my main problem with it continues: once I've clicked a feed and read the posts, it doesn't unbold that feed. Seems like a bug to me - in any case, I find it almost unusable. Is it just me?

My Bloglines is all broken, so I switched to Google Reader, but it's SLOW, compared to Bloglines. Opening feeds takes just a little longer, and especially scrolling down seems to be real slow and get stuck a lot. Anyone else?

I've been talking about startup ideas again. I don't think it's necessarily a great idea to start a company in the middle of a boom, but then again, some ideas are just too promising.

My Bloglines is broken - the count of unread items on feeds all show 200. This has been going on for a week, perhaps I really nee to switch to Google reader now?

How social cascades work: fat isn't bad for us, after all.

Small group conversations

This is probably old news to most of you, but I finally realized: my email inbox is fast becoming only useful for official communication, companies (and some clients) talking to me. It's not where I talk with my friends, mostly. Then again, I'm no twitter/facebook fanboy either, as many people seem to be these days, so I'm not sure what may happen next. But definitely: there's an opportunity there, I'm thinking mostly about small group conversations. A few startups are gunning for it, but I haven't seen anything I like yet.

Leap seconds. Like most categories, it turns out the second isn't as stably defined as you'd think.

Sometimes old posts are active - comments hare happening in my old chupacabre post, for example.

Global IA poetry

Categories are cultural,
locales mix up,
structure mostly translates,
global standards have local exceptions.

Erik from Snap asks: "Why do you think it is so hard to challenge the status quo without rubbing some people the wrong way?"

Erik, you call it "challenging the status quo". I call it breaking the fundamental usability of the web. It's like having sites all in frames. It's like having popups. It's like Microsoft adding links to your pages. All in the name of "it's good for the user", when truly, it's not. Snap preview doesn't make the web easier to use. On snapsucks.org, it's compared with popups somewhere.

So to answer your question: when you break a basic user interaction (hovering over a link) and make it into something it wasn't (popping up a picture and advertising), you're bound to piss people off.

You're challenging one of the few things that really works on the web: the link. And I can't think of ANY startup (or huge company for that matter) that messes with the link that has prospered (although many have tried, and continue to try).

Provide lots of RSS before even thinking about an API.

Nice mashup of slideshare data. Interestingly, the mashup was done using RSS feeds, not their API. I've had similar experiences with mefeedia: make RSS available and people start to make mashups. The RSS feeds get loads of usage. The API often doesn't.

Nablopomo is a project similar to videoblogging week where videobloggers are posting daily. But this time they're following some rules.

Loudtalks is like walkie talkie for the internet. Skype without the calling. Interesting concept.

λöçåļîžåţîöñ copy and paste for testing ;) Localization.

Snap preview sucks mule testicles. Really.

e2r style

Lucas Gonze informed me that the design of the 290s site is in the E2R style. Which I didn't know about. But yes, I like that style too :)

Opensocial technically looking great.

The tech docs of OpenSocial are available now, so I had a chance to check it out. Even though the API's aren't 100% finalized yet, it looks great. Things are really changing with this: I was dreaming of someone doing this ever since Facebook did their opening up thing, and now Google has, and they've done a great job so far. Only nitpick: remove the references to Google gadgets throughout the docs.. if this is Open, then you shouldn't refer to your own systems so much in the documentation.

How much money is Snap previews throwing around?

Vox has implemented Snap previews, Wordpress has, Techcrunch has, jeez, do these guys have some crazy pixie dust that they throw over these bloggers? Snap previews are annoying, and yes, I've seen "real" users hate them Anil, don't tell me "you've seen tests that prove that regular people like them". I'm calling bullshit. I've been around the usability testing block a few too many times to buy the "I've seen tests that prove that X" argument.

Hulu.com built by Russian team?

So if Nginx (a lighttpd-like webserver) powers Hulu.com, then that means that they probably built this by outsourcing to a Russian team? (Since the docs are in Russian and stuff...) Good work then - Hulu is getting good reviews, I wonder who built it?

Nice song, nice video. Didn't realize they still made music videos. I guess they're "Youtube videos" now?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5XVeENmLMk&rel=1]

The Web Application Scale of Stupidity

Cal Henderson has a line that goes something like this: "The Web Application Scale of Stupidity goes from OGF (One Giant Function) to OOP (Object Oriented Programming), like this: OGF <-------- sanity ---------> OO".

Really rings true. Going all the way OO has one unexpected disadvantage: loosing flexibility. Which always drove me crazy when working with Java programmers. "That takes a week to change" was a common answer, where with functions it might have taken a few hours.

Britney Spears has gone Drupal :) Drupal seems particularly popular with websites for places like Sony, MTV, music publishers and such, where a lot of websites have to be developed fast with good social and CMS features, which is exactly what Drupal excels at. Drupal keeps rocking and speeding forward, increasing in popularity, and Dries continues to stay calm as a zen monk in the middle of this storm.

A step by step explanation of a pattern for jquery plugins. Just fill in the blanks!

Do you speak Japanese? What is taggy.jp?

Related: I wrote a post on 290s.com about tagclouds in Chinese and Japanese.

Matt on paid links in templates: "Two years ago I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life when I made
a decision to accept a “sponsorship” on WordPress.org without
considering the ramifications it would have for its users, our
community, and the web as a whole. It pains me to see others going down
a similar path."

Alright so it turns out bloggers DO get paid to put those way annoying snap previews on their blogs.

Wow, Gmail does catch a LOT of spam. I already thought so, I hardly ever get spam, even though my email is all over the place.

A PHP function for SEO-happy titles

This is a simple PHP function (two functions actually) that I wrote that generates SEO-happy URL fragments. This way, you can have /something/its-a-title/ instead of /something/19828/ in your URL's. You'll have to call the function to generate a URL path and store that in the database with your object every time you add an object. It uses dashes instead of underscores because historically they've been better for SEO, although that seems to be changing. Feel free to use this function any way you want. I'm sure it could be improved btw, my PHP skills are of the "it works but it ain't necessarily pretty" variety.

The function lets you add in a tablename and field that it will use to make sure that the url string it generates is unique.

It uses a "clean()" function in the beginning that just cleans up the text, you can remove that or replace it with your own function.

The second function especially is kinda cheapo, but it works and I'm too lazy to improve it.

/**
* Recursive function that generates a unique "this-is-the-title123" string for use in URL.
* Checks optionally against $table and $field and the array $forbidden to make sure it's unique.
* Usage: the resulting string should be saved in the db with the object.
*/
function seo_titleinurl_generate($title, $forbidden = FALSE, $table = FALSE, $field = FALSE)
{
## 1. parse $title
$title = clean($title, "oneline"); // remove tags and such 0)
{
// already taken. So recursively adjust $title and try again.
$title = append_increasing_number($title);
$title = seo_titleinurl_generate($title, $forbidden, $table, $field);
}
}

## 3. check against $forbidden array
if ($forbidden)
{
while (list ($key, $val) = each($forbidden))
{
// $val is the forbidden string
if ($title == $val)
{
$title = append_increasing_number($title);
$title = seo_titleinurl_generate($title, $forbidden, $table, $field);
}
}
}
return $title;
}

/**
* Function that appends an increasing number to a string, for example "peter" becomes "peter1" and "peter129" becomes "peter130".
* (To improve, this function could be made recursive to deal with numbers over 99999.)
*/
function append_increasing_number($title)
{
##. 1. Find number at end of string.
$last1 = substr($title, strlen($title)-1, 1);
$last2 = substr($title, strlen($title)-2, 2);
$last3 = substr($title, strlen($title)-3, 3);
$last4 = substr($title, strlen($title)-4, 4);
$last5 = substr($title, strlen($title)-5, 5); // up to 5 numbers (ie. 99999)

if (is_numeric($last5))
{
$last5++; // +1
$title = substr($title, 0, strlen($title)-5) . $last5;
} elseif (is_numeric($last4))
{
$last4++; // +1
$title = substr($title, 0, strlen($title)-4) . $last4;
} elseif (is_numeric($last3))
{
$last3++; // +1
$title = substr($title, 0, strlen($title)-3) . $last3;
} elseif (is_numeric($last2))
{
$last2++; // +1
$title = substr($title, 0, strlen($title)-2) . $last2;
} elseif (is_numeric($last1))
{
$last1++; // +1
$title = substr($title, 0, strlen($title)-1) . $last1;
} else
{
$title = $title . "1"; // append '1'
}

return $title;
}

Speed matters

Speed matters much more than many people still think. I always felt the raw speed of Google was one of the reasons for its success. "Google increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%. [...] we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue." I remember a quote by Mark Fletcher about Bloglines: every time they increased the speed, pageviews went way up (people would look at more pages if they're faster).

OK I'm trying this with Amelia.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gSZfW4gVhI&rel=1]

Today's IA tip for beginners.

Sites that put "community" in a separate tab most likely think of community as an add-on to their business, not as core to their business.

wtf?: "Diezelfde disclaimer moet dan ook nog getoond worden in een popup als mensen de site verlaten.  ( wtf moment twee)"

I have a serious question. Do bloggers get *paid* to put those annoying SNAP preview thingies on their blogs? Or is it just some kind of collective insanity? I ask that because I see them mainly on high traffic blogs.

Dabah Boyd on understanding social networks: "One of the things that I figured out really quickly is that having a
profile did me absolutely no good. I needed to have friends who would
interact with me so that I would get what it was like to experience the
technology as a mediating force. Thus, I have dragged my friends
kicking and screaming into using these tools just so that I could get
it."

Brazilian IA Summit

The first Brazilian IA summit was last weekend - 2 days of lectures and talks. With about 160 participants, IA seems to be doing great in Brazil.

You don't want to mess with Jonathan Schwartz: After being threatened to be sued: "We have one of the largest patent arsenals on the internet, numbering more than 14,000 issued and pending globally. [...] We're going to use our defensive portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit."

I think some people at NA are going to be doing some serious soul searching today.

How to make a little shrine for your home

We made a little shrine on the wall of our house a few weeks ago. It's really nice, it gives the house a great feeling, especially when a candle is burning on it. Here's a picture (it's next to the door):

I got my inspiration for this little shrine in Asia. There are shrines everywhere, and I always thought they were fascinating. And throughout the years, I've picked up lots of little "religious" thingies from various travels that are perfect to put in a shrine.

In Thailand, for example, they sell these little thingies in markets that represent gods and wise men that you can put in your home, for luck and financial success and so on. Here's a picture:

You see shrines everywhere in Asia: in homes, on the streets, on cars, everywhere. Here's a picture of one in India:

 

Here's a tiny shrine, just a little picture at the foot of a tree:

 

Back to the shrine we made at home. I took a wooden thing to put flowers in (from Ikea), turned it on its side and attached it to the wall.The stand of the shrine was finished. Easy! I like it if the stand is a little rough, this flower stand had been used for a while, so it was a little dirty. That's good.

Then we went through all the religious thingies that we collected throughout the year, and put them on the shrine. See if you can spot:

• The black madonna from a Hispanic religious shop in New York.
• The lotus flower with the tiny Ganesh in it from India.
• The big Indian god.
• The Thai wise men photographs.
• The golden buddha (ok not really gold).
• A picture of Judas, again from New York.
• The african ancestor statue related to circumcision, from Congo.

The Indian pack of candles is thrown in just because it has a beautiful patina :) Here's the picture:

OK, that's the first part of this shrine ready.

One of the big differences between Asia and Europe in the way they experience religion seems to be this: in Europe, they ask "what do you believe in?". In Asia, that sentence has little meaning. Instead, they ask: "What do you practice?" It's all about what you DO, not what you BELIEVE. Believing is easy (and lazy), doing is better. In many places in Asia, every house, shop and business has a little shrine, and there are usually some flowers or a candle there.

So DOING something means offerings. We had a nice dried flowerthingie from Thailand, so we added that. Some candles. And to top it off, regularly, we burn a little candle in this shrine.

So there you go. Add a shrine to your house. It's easy :)

1 pro of living in Belgium: good cheap schools. "Now, you may think he's merely a
curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true.
Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education
and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing
much less of it. It's a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps.
Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see
it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home."

So this is why I still respect Techcrunch: when they make a mistake (linking to themselves instead of the sites they discuss, in order to generate pageviews), they admit it and change their ways. Respect!

Indeed: "Play with the interactive doodads in the advertisement a bit and you
can create a not unfunny amalgam of chicken, bull and duck, or donkey,
dolphin and rhinoceros, etc. It’s a cute idea, but really, it betrays a
probably unintentional appropriateness. It’s just perfect that Lotus
Notes, an application whose awkward integration of multiple feature
sets I’ve only ever heard spoken about with violent disgust, promotes
itself as freakish software. As if frightening, cross-species
aberrations of nature are what we’ve all been looking for in an email
and calendaring solution."

Enterprise software is the worst.

A real video.

A "real" video by Jakob (the guy who started Vimeo which together with blip.tv is where the really cool video kids hang out).


It's Hard To Be Brutally Honest from Jakob Lodwick on Vimeo.

I just published the first free report at 290s consulting about information architecture and user experience for the Latin America locale.

Under Florida law, a 16 and 17 year old who have sex are ok (legally), but if they make pictures of it (and don't show anybody) they are prosecuted for child pornography.

Raymond's tumbler: "Join us and panelists from the most disruptive phenomenons changing the way we live. Let's face it . . . if you're not using Twitter, LinkedIn, craigslist, Facebook, digg, Flickr, Laughing Squid, ValleyWag, Google Earth, Bebo, BoingBoing, Skype, WordPress, eBay, Wikipedia, Second Life, 43 Things, Buzznet, Dodgeball, StumbleUpon or, (gasp) YouTube . . . then you just might step off the earth."

Or, alternatively: "... then you just might not be white, male and middle class." Youtube and eBay excepted.