PeterMorville (link) 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?

ChristinaWodtke'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)

ClayShirky - 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.

I'm not sure why I like to check Mashable and Techcrunch every day. They profile a bunch of startups every day. Part of it is that I like to see what's out there. But I do wish they'd be a bit less web 2.0-y.

It just occurred to me that Borat is a much more appropriate character to show America than Ali G, who worked better in the stiff upper lip English environment. Borat shows America's racial problems, Ali G showed the UK's class problems.

ok I turned off that automatic link to performancing. I understand why they do it, and since it's free and very useful I'll go with it, but that was almost evil.

Testing performancing

I've been very happy with Windows Livewriter, especially for its handling of rich text and images, but it loads up slightly slowly, so I'm testing out the performancing blogging plugin today.

powered by performancing firefox

Why you need 50000 songs, not 500

the weblog of Lucas Gonze: "I remember times in my life where I had a strictly limited music collection, and I kept things fresh by listening at finer and finer levels of detail. Those days should be over for most of us, though. It's important for individuals to grow their collections past the "enough" marker, whether that's 50,000 songs or even just 500, because at that point you stop listening in the old way.

The new way is to treat music more like a newspaper than a book, so that a continuous stream of fresh content is intrinsic to the media. If you hear a good hook somewhere, the next day you should find that hook remixed into another song. You should never again, post 20th century, post the era when music and manufactured goods were synonomous, think of music as something so static that 500 songs could encompass it."

Interesting. I always have fun with calling stuff "the X of Y". So this is the psychology of abundance? :)

The Joy of Scrolling Long Pages.

The Dilbert Blog: Good News Day. Need some happy thoughts? Read this.

And on a related note: that page is an example of the Joy of Scrolling Long Pages. Don't break that page up and destroy the magic. Don't commit informationarchitecturitis. :) Sometimes, a really long page should just be a really long page.

Bllshit Google how clueless can you be?

Official Google Blog: Do you "Google?" "Usage: 'Google' as verb referring to searching for information via any conduit other than Google.
Example: "I googled him on Yahoo and he seems pretty interesting."
Our lawyers say: Bad. Very, very bad"

So now Google is telling us when to use the word "Google". That's not even funny. That's just clueless.

Health , Diet and Fitness videoblogs and podcasts - a list of videblog and podcast RSS feeds on mefeedia

Who knew there were so many? Health , Diet and Fitness videoblogs and podcasts - a list of videblog and podcast RSS feeds on mefeedia

Vox

Somehow, Vox (SixApart's new service that came out of beta today) just doesn't appeal to me. Not sure why that is.

evhead: The Birth of Obvious Corp.

evhead: The Birth of Obvious Corp.: "We are attempting to create a new model for building and running web products. Nearly everyone I know in the Internet business is either at one of the giants, wishing they were at a startup, or at a startup that hopes get bought by a giant."

swipr.com

swipr.com: "swipr is basically a plug-in toolset for Microsoft Visio. It allows you to create a set of HTML pages that integrate screenflows or sitemaps and wireframes. Anyone can navigate thorugh your sitemap and see the wireframes of the pages in the sitemap just by clicking through it. You can also create links on your wireframes, effectively turning your basic wireframe deliverable into a low-fi prototype."

The new Firefox is pretty nice with feeds: it displays a "nice" looking page for feeds and gives you the option to subscribe using various feedreaders. Smooth and friendly!

Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease » Blog Archive »

Cool, the new firefox now has close buttons on each tab. Just as I suggested in 2004. World domination next!

35,000 in Secret Prisons | CorrenteWire

Are 35,000 people in America's secret prisons? That is fucking crazy. Is America the new nazi state? Is that a question I shouldn't ask?

35,000 in Secret Prisons | CorrenteWire: "I’m at the Center for American Progress, listening to Sid Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald talk about the Imperial Presidency, and one thing is important enough for me to want to live blog. Sid says that Wilkerson, Powell’s old chief of staff, believes that the correct number of victims in secret Bush prisons is 35,000, only %5 of which “mayâ€? have to do with terrorism. More than twice what I thought, and hardly any to do with the “war on terror.â€?

All videos and podcasts in List of BBC Podcasts - a list of videblog and podcast RSS feeds on mefeedia

This page has a mixed list of all the podcasts (video and audio) of the BBC.

In the spirit of good citizenship, it also has an rss feed, but all the links in the RSS feed point back to the BBC as much as possible, instead of republishing stuff and pointing back to mefeedia as seems to be the norm with directories these days.

What the hell is a whotel?

Why the hell would this post for the search query whotel send me lots of traffic to this page: curry: podcasts and videoblogs about curry?

That's just weird. I can't even figure out what a whotel is?

Metroblogging Vancouver: All in the Cards

A good story about very specific categories (Lost A Cat? Suitable For Marriage) that sell more cards.

I proceed to the Marketplace floor of the department store (that's on the same level at the Skytrain ticket booths, just at the bottom of the first escalators in Granville station). They've recently renovated as well - there's a pharmacy and a new deli counter and yes - a card section (right next to Godiva Chocolates). A big huge multi-aisle card section was just what I needed. So I start browsing the rows of greetings and sympathies. I look under the heading "Religious" and it's not there... I eventually find it right under "Baptism", how convenient. Oh, but the convenience didn't stop there. I discovered ALL kinds of card categories that the Bay has laid out for us and I'm not talking about the usual sections of "Birthday - Son" or "From all of us".

Oh no, The Bay really wants us to find what we're looking for. Here are some examples of their card section categories:

"Still thinking of you". In case the "thinking of you" cards just don't cut it anymore.

"Loss of Cat" was a category in the Religious section, next to "Friends are praying for you", well okay that's understandable I suppose pets can become family members and their loss can be profound.

"Suitable for Remarriage" Now, I'm not sure if the card itself is suitable for someone who is getting remarried or if it's to congratulate you on being suitable... for marrying again.

Now here's where it just gets outta hand.

An entire section of cards labeled "You've been through so much but you're never alone" and another couple rows reserved for cards that all express, in some way or another, "We stay friends despite our busy Schedules".

 

Link to Metroblogging Vancouver: All in the Cards

Xark!: How the Internets work

A great diagram about how the internets work. Finally we understand!

Link to Xark!: How the Internets work

SecondLife podcasts and videoblogs - a list of videblog and podcast RSS feeds on mefeedia

And here's a list of secondlife podcast rss feeds

List of BBC Podcasts and more..

I made a  List of BBC Podcasts, using a new lists feature on mefeedia. I coded the list feature in a few hours, launched it this afternoon, and so far we've already gotten a few useful lists:

• A complete list of NPR audio podcast RSS feeds
• A list of Vloggercon source feeds
• List of IBM podcasts IBM is doing well with adopting blogs and such internally.
• A complete list of ABC News Feeds

Enjoy! OPML and all that goodness is for later, the next few days I have no time whatsoever :)