Looking for female speakers at your tech events? Ryanne started http://femaletechyspeakers.pbwiki.com/

4 minutes and 3 steps to set up my OpenID

OpenID looks promising. You can use it to log into wikitravel, vox, and lots of other sites. OpenID sounds as if it shouldn't work, but it does. Kinda like wikis. It's secure and everything.

To create an account, do this:

1. I went to http://www.myopenid.com/ and signed up for an account. Confirm email.

2. Add two lines to my site's homepage petervandijck.net as explained here: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-SuperUsers Try view source on http://petervandijck.net/ Those 2 lines mean that I can use http://petervandijck.net as my openID instead of the openid.com one. Easy.

Done! It was only 2 steps!

3. To try it, go to http://wikitravel.org/en/Special:OpenIDLogin and try to log in there... WORKS! Also go to http://simonwillison.net/ and log in... WORKS!

Great! This took all of 4 minutes.

I think openID will take off in 2007, with the geek crowd. In 2008 you'll start seeing it in some large sites owned by Yahoo/Google etc.

Why do I think that? It seems a well thought-out system, open, and adoptable in the sense that it's not too geeky hard.

5 year anniversary

My first blogpost ever on this blog was January 16, 2002. 5 week anniversary in about a week! It was about ethnography and usability :)

A good interview with Om Malik

Seems like 2007 will indeed be the year of offline access. Finally! Hope the dust settles soon and some usable frameworks/approaches are found.

Good article on getting into that flow state.

1. Have a purpose, like: I'm going to write an article about flow state.
2. Be motivated.
3. Make sure it's difficult enough.
4. And more good stuff in the article.
   

ProtectMyPhotos seems like a good solution, and they have a free low-res plan (I think it just means that they only back up low-res versions of your photos). Worth a try!

I played around with the BigContacts demo, a CRM system. Nice, useful Ajax, seems like a useful client management/sales tool.

Found a bug at Google coop today

Google coop has a bug today: doesn't accept valid urls like google.com:

Health , Diet and Fitness videoblogs and podcasts

This might be a good time of the year to check out a list of Health , Diet and Fitness videoblogs and podcasts.

Hey, it's my LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/petervandijck

myheavy.com is a splog

Jay explains clearly why MyHeavy.com went WAY over the line and is basically a spam blog, even though they've had 12.5 million in funding. They have the balls to add THEIR watermark and preroll ads on OUR videos, without attribution, basically violating licenses all over the place. Call the laywers.

Culture & stereotypes

From Target.com:

(via giantant)

The US is just too crazy, I'm outta there. (via Aphowhateverhardtospell); Why Is Genarlow Wilson in Prison? It is the story of a 17 year old "good" kid who will spend 10 years in
prison for child molestation and be forever on the sex offender
registery for having consentual oral sex with a 15 year old. One of the
interesting twists in this case is that this would not have been his
fate had he had vaginal sex with her (oral is a felony; vaginal is a
misdemeanor).

"Many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their
accounts in most places. Forgot your IM password? Sign up again. Forgot
your email address? Create a new one. Forgot your login? Time for a
change."

Comic templates to tell product development stories. Cool.

Recreating history one image at a time: 1 picture a day based on an historical event.

I'm in Colombia (Medellin) making salad - try to make Colombians eat salad! Food culture in Colombia, and especially Antioquia is incredibly "traditional". Sushi is good (it's hard to mess up sushi), but anything "thai" or "indian" gets watered down to the level of being veggies cooked to death without any flavor.

This is an incredible visualization tool.

Peter Morville has a way with words and ideas:

"Next year, after the bubble bursts, we will enter the era of
Information Architecture 3.0. This won’t surprise Tim O’Reilly who
slyly positioned the polar bear atop the #1 Google hit for Web 2.0 and commissioned the third edition just in time to clean up the mess."

And I've added some more sites to the iasearch.net site.

and I've also added these to the IA search engine. Who else? I have the feeling it'll be most efficient if I limit it to the real IA blogs and sites ...

• http://www.bogieland.com/
  
• http://www.noisebetweenstations.com  
• http://www.blackbeltjones.com 
  
• http://www.pixelcharmer.com
• http://blog.jjg.net/ 
  

I've added a list of sites to the IAsearch.net information architecture search engine, the list is now:

• http://semanticstudios.com/
• http://www.lexonomy.com/ 
• http://adaptivepath.com/  
• http://iabook.com  
• http://www.eleganthack.com  
• http://peterme.com 
  
• http://iasummit.org/  
• http://www.iasummit.org/  
• http://boxesandarrows.com
  
• http://www.louisrosenfeld.com/  
• http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/  
• http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/ 
• http://iainstitute.org/  
• http://www.iawiki.net/  
• http://searchtools.livejournal.com/  
• http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/facetedclassification/  
• http://findability.org/ 
• http://www.iaslash.org/
  
• http://blog.jjg.net/
  

Now that I'm playing with the IA of a site of mine, here are some things that keep coming back.

• Start with the user and the content, not with the IA.
  
• Editorial vs. user-generated: it's a mix. Some things need to be editorialized. Some things user generated. Sometimes it's in between, where stuff is user generated and then slightly editorialized. This goes for both org schemes and content.
• Comprehensiveness is very important in some contexts when providing content.
• If you look very very closely at the content, you'll find that it's often not what you thought it was. For example, a travel guide you write while on the ground is different than one you write while remembering how things were.
  

This is too vague - badly written too, let me try to repost this in 2007! :)

By the way, I've spent a while here in Colombia writing some urgently needed travel guides. They have details on where to stay (for example, places to stay in Bogota), prices etc. The current Lonely Planet on Colombia is about the worst LP ever written, so there's definite demand for a better travel guide. I think travelers, with the right help, can write travel guides that are better and address some of the inherent problems of printed guides (like being 3 years out of date and leaving out lots of great places).

I've also found that writing travel guides is kind of fun - I enjoy visiting new places and thinking about the best way to describe them. And I love making maps - I'm an IA after all!

The Performancing plugin sits in your browser and lets me write these quick notes. I like it, I think I'm adjusting my blogging style. Of course there's a bunch of things I'd like it to do... oh well. Gotta keep learning to program better. Or surround myself with more programmers. To get stuff done.

Inside out IA

I'm thinking about Inside Out IA, starting with the users and content, then the local IA (the IA on the page), then the sitewide IA. That's how I find myself doing sites these days. None of that starting-with-the-navigation. Anyways.

Happy Newyear to all my family and friends that I won't talk to the next day or 2!

22nd century!

I just realized that if you have a child this year, they may be alive in the 22nd century!!

Google has 3 video properties now

I noticed Google is promoting Picasa Web Albums (which includes video uploading now) with a little link at the top of my Gmail - where my tools are (Calendar, Docs, ...). That means they have 3 (!) different places where you can upload your video now: Google video, Youtube (owned by Google) and Picasa.

Om talks about the sofaweb, although I like the term gamerweb better. It's all about the new generation of gaming devices (wii, xBox 2, Playstation 3) that are connected to your TV and have broadband internet.

It's a big opportunity, but I'm not sure it'll take off. The mobile internet never took off for 1 reason: it's a closed platform. The mobile companies control too much of the access, and the devil is in the little details. The same thing happened when Sony messed up the PSP: because they loose money on the hardware they never really opened up the platform, a big mistake imo. So sure, these gaming platforms are connected, but the question will be how much control the owners try to excert in subtle ways. If they really open things up, a whole new ecology of startups could grow around these platforms.

I've achieved almost all of my life's goals!

Now that I am Time Magazine's person of the year, after writing a book and getting my face on a stamp (which I'll do in the US where it costs a dollar in January), the only item left on my 15-year old self's List of Things to Achieve is the Nobel Prize for Peace. That one might prove a bit harder, although who knows!

By the way, I like the Performancing plugin for these quick blog notes. It could use some improvements, but it's FAST and right there in my browser, which is a big deal.

Unlimited Skypeout calling for US$ 30 a year? Oh, but it's only to the US and Canada. Oh well, still might be a good deal.

Offline access to web services (email, editing, ...) is the next Big Thing (I'm sure Google must be working hard on this). SocialText seems to have an interesting approach: embed the application in the html (as js), download it, use it to edit and such, and when you're back online synch back. (If I understand the approach correctly). That's smart, it doesn't require a new browser or anything. Could Gmail do this for me?

Christina Wodtke's baby, Publicsquare launches. It's a hosted CMS for magazine style sites, with a focus on editorial workflow. Check it out.

Drupal considered dangerous for startups?

Mike mentioned on a mailing list that he "can think of at least 5 startups that were seriously hurt by using Drupal".

I have to agree, I can think of at least three cases.

But you could say that that's more a case of startups being hurt by technical incompetence because they thought they could use an open source CMS as the basis for their company. Not to say there aren't any successful companies using Drupal, but if you're building anything else than a content company (which you could probably run on any cms), you'd be foolish to start by using Drupal. That's just what I think.

Why? Drupal keeps evolving to solve a lot of different problems, it tries to be a swiss army knife. You'll probably use 20% of Drupal, which means you have 80% cruft (which 20% can be different for everyone), and you'll probably only have 20% of your needs addressed by Drupal, which means you'll have to hack around the 80% cruft to get your 80% needs addressed. It'll just keep frustrating you.

I call this Peter's "generic-cms-warning 80-80 rule".

Check out the would rather eat a turd tag at Amazon ;)

Values in categories of film ratings:

"Mechanical sex is R while sex that shows female pleasure is NC-17.
Heterosexual interactions are PG-13 while homosexual interactions are R."

S3 continues to rock

Amazon S3 really rocks. We generate a LOT of thumbnail images at mefeedia.com for all the videobloggers, and earlier this year all these millions of small jpg files were slowing the server to a crawl (servers aren't generally good at having millions upon millions of little files stored, even though we used a sensible directory approach).

Last month, we were hosting 120 Gigs worth of tiny files on Amazon S3, and transferred 150 Gigs of data. All this for 46 US$ for that  month. You couldn't rent a server for that cheap, let alone you'd have to deal with all the management and scaling problems yourself. Rocks!

I am totally looking forward to the IA summit (as always), almost the only conference worth going to for me, but who the hell decided to hold it in god damn Las Vegas? I was in the Las Vegas airport once, full of slotmachines (or what do you call those), it was as close to hell as I have ever been. Ugh. And don't tell me I can study the user experience of Las Vegas!

Winer and Co are talking about building a true podcast device: no DRM, wifi, podcast subscriptions. It's indeed incredibly that neither Apple, Sony nor M$ have taken this opportunity yet, and I think the community can totally spec and build a device. Open source hardware, it's the next step.

Speed is still a very big deal in UX. This yahoo research says that one of the easiest improvements you can make is having less objects (images, js files, ...) per page, which reduces the amount of requests the browser has to make. There you go, Yahoo said so. Drop those images.

The Colombia migration project (http://colombiamigrationproject.net/) is well underway, with 1 or 2 videos a week. Check it out and give it some linky love!

lack of posts

I've been travelling in Colombia, hence the lack of posts. The silence will continue a bit longer...

Listen to podcast

Original post on November 14, 2005 from SALT - Seminars About Long Term Thinking: (RSS feed)

Clay Shirky - Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories Video

(Via Mefeedia)

If only I was a good programmer, I would have known to expect the weirdest stuff with data coming from outside the system. At mefeedia, we aggregate RSS feeds, and anything you can imagine is out there. Loads of invalid feeds (but we take them anyway), invalid data, missing elements, and so on. What a mess :)

New horizons for IA: 2006 Information Architecture Retreat (Latin America)

Check out New horizons for IA: 2006 Information Architecture Retreat (Latin America)

Here's a thought: a scalable memcached service. So what you provide is a memcached pool. Charge by memory - it doesn't matter how many servers this runs on. x4/MB of memcached. Then, I, as a user, just have to buy some, and call it in my code. And I can easily get more. Nice & sweet, especially because shared hosts and such often can't easily install memcached.

I know, probably a bad idea.