Ryanne gets harassed by some guys on the street, and instead of walking on, she takes out her camera and confronts them. A great moment for videoblogging.

I installed flock but for some reason pages loaded really slowly (compared with FF) so that's it for me. Bye!

I published the first version of the poorbuthappy guide to Colombia in PDF format (PDF, 1MB). It's kind of stapled-together quality, and needs a lot more work, but I thought I'd get it out there. As it goes, it's a pretty decent backpacker guide to Colombia, and more up to date than any of the commercial guides. And free, too. It's written by the collective intelligence of 100s of travelers. I'm planning to build some systems that'll make it easier to gather that information.

Anyways, it's ugly but real good. I don't think you'll appreciate how good until you actually use it. :) Not shy today, me.

Does anyone want to analyze the loudness of the cheers during Jobs' keynote speech, and correlate that with what he was announcing, and propose suggestions for how to improve it?

Free idea

Here's a free business idea: branded SecondLife-like experiences.

1. Build a Second-Life tool (hey, it's open sourced, how hard can it be?)
2. Sell branded, managed versions to everyone with a brand: a Star Trek world, a Disney world, you get the picture.
3. Help these brands monetize.

Easy!

that RSS icon

It's taken some time for me to learn to just click on the little RSS icon in the address bar, which then automatically opens my Bloglines subscribe page. I used to hunt around for an RSS link on the page, and I still do sometimes. The new way is better though, nice and consistent, even between FF and IE.

Steve Jobs makes mistakes too: "As other studios throw in with us as 2006 rolls on ..."

Nothing on TV tonight?

Nothing o TV? Watch Steve Job's MacWorld keynote, complete. It's entertaining.

Steve Job's Telephone Number is ... 408 966 1010?

At least according to this picture it is. I'm not in the US, anyone want to try him :) Say I like the phone but won't be able to afford it.

Now that Apple is doing the iPhone (and it's looking good), I wonder if Cingular (their partner) will open up the platform a bit more. I don't think so - Apple isn't known for being very open, they wouldn't have pushed it.

I agree with Ethan Zuckerman: open sourcing SecondLife is cool, but it's still a closed platform. Hence any comparison between SL and the internet itself are thoroughly mistaken.

Installing the me.dium.com Firefox plugin (I got an invite) is painful: you gotta download, restart, then it takes 5 minutes to show a login page, then I can't find the submit button on the login page. And why am I installing this again? (Value proposition??) I disabled it.

"Recently I began to work on an essay about why there are no longer any
good essays about why there are no longer any good novels. In
performing a survey of the literature, I was able to trace things back
to Umak of Sur, who in 6000 B.C. etched into clay a complaint that the
quality of Sumerian pictographic prose had gone down terribly since the
new Gods had been introduced."

More

For search engine optimization, I recommended SEOmoz to someone the other day, purely based on their blog. Apart from the blog, recommendations from people I trust and personal experience, how else am I supposed to know if they're any good? In a field so full of idiots, finding a firm that seems to do good work is a godsend. (or godsent?)

Aha it's the first working day of the year! And I'm not 100% sure what I'll be doing this year yet. :)

A question about OpenID: if you click "Allow" some site access to your id, do they get access to your email as well?

This screencast convinced me to try OpenID, and now I'm sold and I'll be looking for openID signin buttons on every new site I visit.

What also convinced me is that hardcore geeks I respect seem to think it will work.

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!