A nice example of a videoblog. Watch movie 5.7 min 18.7 MB (Original post, via Ourmedia MediaRSS Feed)
Forbes.com put Mefeedia in its 'Best of the Web': "BEST: Breadth of offerings, including links to other vlog portals. Quick free registration. WORST: Forums are like a ghost town and design is wanting."
All true :) Their "Obtain the Forbes Best of The Web logo for use on your site" is coorporate bullshit though: you need to fax them for approval to use their logo. You got to be kidding me - what a scam.
Bloug: World's Oldest Information Architect? (check the great picture!): "Mariano Amartino's abuelita, 89 years old, has a message for the folks at O'Reilly (which I've taken the liberty to translate): "Where the heck is the Spanish version of the second edition of the Polar Bear? Enough waiting already! You should be very, very ashamed of yourselves."
This is why we set up the translations group at the IA Institute. Here's the Spanish page, with a whole bunch of articles about IA in Spanish. But not enough.
The best compliment ever for Mefeedia: "I love what you did to the place. So close to homemade but no lumps".
Although there are plenty of lumps left :)
Two cultures of fauxonomies collide... (via David)
Discusses, basically, how tag usage evolves and how different people tag differently.
"At a really grand level, if you can imagine a one hundred year tag-cloud around a gay novel, then it might start with lots of people using the tag invert, with this gradually giving way to homosexual, then gay and potentially after that, queer."
That's all pretty interesting, but things get much more exciting when we starting thinkig about other languages and really different cultures.
I wrote about tag namespaces before: "tag ânamespacesâ? will develop, somewhat mirroring languages, but also other social groups like interest groups, specialist communities."
In other words, different communities develop their own categories and language, and this will be reflected in their tag use. We might even be able to infer communities from commonalities in tag use.
See also "Tagclouds and cultural changes", which talks about the spreading of the âAjaxâ concept.
Today I'm reviewing (and perhaps testing) a location aware mobile media app. Fun!
So I checked my stats after a long time and poorbuthappy.com has been serving over 1,000,000 pages (not hits) a month for the last few months. Wazanga!, I would say, were I to say such things.
Yahoo's new cross-lingual (not multi-lingual) video search is wicked cool, but they have this weird use of a checkbox. There are 2 radio buttons and one checkbox. If you click the checkbox, the two radio buttons grey out. The only explanation I can think of is that it's a hack in the code - somehow it was easier to implement this than to just have the checkbox as a third radiobutton (which would be the correct way). Strange though, to see such a beta UI hack on Yahoo.
Sometimes a picture works better: this is how Mefeedia (the first video aggregator) supports rel="payment". If you put a link with rel="payment" in your blog post, Mefeedia will show a support link in its interface.
When we thought of it, it made sense. Only slowly am I realizing now why it makes sense, and why it might make less sense for text bloggers.
Rich media aggregators (or enclosure aggregators) like FireANT, Mefeedia and iTunes, don't get their content from the RSS feeds that's already been syndicated. The media content is linked from the RSS, not embedded, like text content. So you HIT the owner's bandwidth every time someone watches or downloads a movie or a podcast. It costs them. That's why it makes more sense to have a payment link for rich media than for text media.
Or it might just be the early morning coffee.
Cross lingual search
Yahoo! Search blog: Sprechen Sie Deutsch?: Yahoo is getting some brilliant cross-lingual search out there. Cross lingual search is when you retrieve documents in various languages. There are different ways of doing it: translate the query, or translate the documents. I think they're translating the queries. But they go the extra step and provide machine translations for the returned results.
Congo Girl - Thoughts about Kinshasa: "It is coming up on a year now that I have lived here, and in talking to a colleague a week or two ago, I realized that adjusting to this environment has been difficult for one reason that I had overlooked. I am trying to adjust to two new cultures. The first is, of course, Congolese culture. Very different from the US, the South, New Orleans -- though I've found more links between NOLA and Kin than I ever would have though possible. The second is Belgian/European culture. As a previously colonized country, there are a lot of holdovers in style and approach and work ethic and education methods, as well as food and drink and entertainment. When I am inclined to escape from Congolese culture and retreat back into what I know, I find it isn't really there. "
The unexpected culture adjustments are often the hardest ones :)
After fixing the lock-out problem with my blog (which is why I wasn't posting much lately), I'm gonna go post crazy. Beware.
Getting logged out of Wordpress and can't log back in?
If you haveWordPress 1.2.2, and you have your blog directory in, say, http://domain.com/myblog/, and your wordpress directory in a different directory, say, http://domain.com/wordpress/, and you delete your cookies, it can be impossible to log back in, even if you have the correct username and password. How can you tell? You are trying to log in, and it doesn't let you but reloads the login form, but without an error. That means you have the right username and pass, but something else is wrong. Here's how to fix this problem.- Go to Mysql, you can use PHPMyAdmin, most hosts have that installed.
- Go to the options table, and find the row in which the option_name field = http://domain.com/myblog/. On the command line, or in PHPMyAdmin's SQL page, you can enter this: SELECT * FROM `options` WHERE option_name = 'home';
- Change the value of that field to your wordpress directory: http://domain.com/wordpress/
- Now go login to your wordpress. It should work fine and let you log in.
- Back to the same row in the database, change the value back to http://domain.com/myblog/
- Go check your blog. It should work fine.
rel = "payment" proposal
Yesterday, I met with Jay, Josh and Kenyatta. We were talking about standards for videobloggers, and how we can set good standards now, before the likes of Apple, MSN or XXX try to control the space. Jay said: "how can we get people paid with standards?" (Getting some $$ is a big thing for videobloggers, with hosting costs and all.) Josh was explaining an idea with an RSS namespace. I said "rel=donate". It just made sense. Josh proposed we changed it to rel="payment", which made even more sense. Jay posted a video.
I implemented it for Mefeedia this morning - still testing but it works. Post a post with a video and a rel="payment" link, and it'll show a nice "Like this video? Support this videoblogger" link.
Why might this work? producing video is (perhaps) more work than text. Videobloggers love to be paid. As for the standard: it's supersimple. Only the aggregators need to support it, not the creation software. And it degrades perfectly. Share and enjoy :) Standards are about implementation, not definition. We'll see.
rel = "payment" proposal
Yesterday, I met with Jay, Josh and Kenyatta. We were talking about standards for videobloggers, and how we can set good standards now, before the likes of Apple, MSN or XXX try to control the space. Jay said: "how can we get people paid with standards?" (Getting some $$ is a big thing for videobloggers, with hosting costs and all.) Josh was explaining an idea with an RSS namespace. I said "rel=donate". It just made sense. Josh proposed we changed it to rel="payment", which made even more sense. Jay posted a video.
I implemented it for Mefeedia this morning - still testing but it works. Post a post with a video and a rel="payment" link, and it'll show a nice "Like this video? Support this videoblogger" link.
Why might this work? producing video is (perhaps) more work than text. Videobloggers love to be paid. As for the standard: it's supersimple. Only the aggregators need to support it, not the creation software. And it degrades perfectly. Share and enjoy :) Standards are about implementation, not definition. We'll see.
A great new blog about how we are the media. Lots of videoblogging there. Give him some linky love.
Bre is using the Mefeedia quoting tool and made this quote which has been cracking us up all morning: "I think it is important to try to look into the dirty face or reality".
Quoting and linking
I released version 3 (still beta) of Mefeedia today. It has lots of cool stuff, but what I'm most proud of is the first version of a video quoting tool. Here's a screenshot:
Basically, it lets you select a part of a bigger movie, and create a new movie out of that. You can then link to that on your blog. The idea is that in the videoblogging world, people don't link a lot to each other like text bloggers do. I think it's because videobloggers can't easily quote a post and then comment on it and link to it. So I'm trying to change that. Let's see if it works.
Here's an example quoted movie, by the way. âLike Iâm trying to pull a fast one or something.â? (Quicktime movie)
I am still experimenting with what works best.
- Include a thumb and a reference to the original blogpost? Just link the quote?
- Add a frame at the end of the movie that gives some metadata?
Programmers are lazy. The easy things get skipped. Which might be why we still don't have decent text areas and one-click RSS subscribe. Or is it? It might be a matter of standards, support and politics? Which?
iTunes 4.9 - 1 click subs on your site!. iTunes now does podcasts (and videoblogs!), and lets you create 1-click subscribe buttons.
It's a little bit tricky to create a one click subscription link for iTunes.
Create the xml file like this (via here):
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>< !DOCTYPE
pcast PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PCAST 1.0//EN" "http://www.itunes.com/DTDs/pcast-1.0.dtd"><pcast
version="1.0"><channel><link rel="feed" type="application/rss+xml"
href="http://www.deltaparkproject.com/feed.cfm" /><title>Delta
Park Project</title><category>Comedy</category><subtitle>A
great weekly show with comedy clips, pop culture reviews, the small town police
blotter and funny songs. Hosted by married duo Jason and Anna.</subtitle></link></channel></pcast>
Save it as a file and give it a .pcast extension (it requires that so iTunes can pick up the file, so a .php extension won't work. A query string extension also doesn't work, so .pcast?id=4 doesn't work.)
Now link to it. You can use an image or just a text link. Then, when a user clicks the link, if they have iTunes 4.9 installed, it will subscribe to the feed.
Naked translations: "If you click on your country on the site, the UK for example, a screen appears saying âOur guess: you are in United Kingdom and speak Englishâ?. Fair enough. However, there was a problem with the localisation for people in Belgium; the screen said âA notre avis: vous êtes en Belgique et vous parlez français.â? Belgians really, really didnât like that and thought it showed ignorance bordering on contempt for their culture, as they speak Dutch in the North, French in the South and German in a small region in the East.
[...]
Leviâs issued an apology explaining that their website was only translated into five major languages (French, English, Spanish, Italian and German) and that they thought French was the most accurate guess for Belgium. Interestingly enough, if you now click on âBelgiumâ? on their website, the language that youâre offered is⦠English."
IA in Cuba.
Javier: "In my last post, I mentioned that the course on UCD at UCV might be the first in Latin America. I’m glad to discover that there’s a slightly older course on IA. Universidad de La Habana, in Cuba, offers a course on Information Architecture as part of their Library Science program. They’ve already been through three terms, kudos to them. "
I tried to upgrade Wordpress to 1.5, got a weird "allowed memory" error on the upgrade script. This sucks. I am getting less and less patient with installation problems. Meanwhile, I am still logged out on my laptop and cannot log back in.
Help! One one computer, I am still logged into my Wordpress (1.2.2). On my other computer, after deleting all y cookies, I am logged out. I cannot log back in. I can change my password on my one computer, but still can't log back in on the other one ("wrong login"). My blog is in a different directory than my wordpress admin site. Email me if you have an answer...
PHP 5.1 introduces (finally) a single set of functions for database access, regardless of the database used. No more mucking about with those horrible PEAR classes. SitePoint's PHP Blog asks: "Could this be the killer feature that draws developers to PHP 5.1 when real-world adoption of PHP 5 is still lagging?" Perhaps, but not for me. I'm still quite happy with PHP4.x. I'll consider adopting PHP 5 in a year (or two). I guess I fall in the "conservative" camp, not the early adopter camp. Here's the thing: there is nothing I can't do in PHP4 right now that makes the learning curve for 5 worth it. And I use libraries that are PHP4. I am a conservative coder. Wait. I'm not really a coder. I'm someone who codes because he has to and can't afford to hire a real coder. I code because I want to build cool stuff, and you need code for that. I am a coder by necessity.
I am also a bad coder, but good enough to get the job done. I used to code professionally. That company went down. (No correlation there, I believe.) Now, I still code pretty much the same way I did back then, and it works. I use a few libraries for the hard stuff. I use templates. I use SQL. Good enough for most apps. I fool myself that the vision and things like UI and usability make up for my lack of coding skill.s I'll shut up now. Damn coffee.
Mmm... green tea icecream! No roman emperor ever had *that*.
IA in Italy is finally taking off
For a long time, there was a lack of IA discussion/practice in Italy. Emanuele (an IA from Italy) let me know that the Italian IA list suddenly become much more popular (or at least got revived) this week, after posting a call for Italian IA's on various lists.
The list has about 400 subscribers now, and was created in september 2003 by Laura and Beatrice with the help of Luca Rosati (who runs http://www.trovabile.org, the Italian findability.org). Some other famous italian ias on the list are Umberto Fieno and Fabrizio Ulisse. The main themes of discussion have been the role of ia in Italy, the definition, facets, cms, ... The usual stuff. See also the Italian IA translations at the IA Institute.
Google maps switched up Belgium and Holland. Belgium is where Holland (Netherlands) should be, and the other way round.
Flickr is finally adding photo print capabilities. I hope they have good prices - photo print is super competitive right now.
Joho the Blog: Linnaeus' paper: David visits the Linnaeus society: "She draws our attention to the two page spread devoted to the Animal Kingdom. On the extreme right is the category "Vermes" (worms) which Linnaeus used as a catchall. If it wasn't an insect, he put it into the Worms, as close as Linnaeus came to having a "Misc." category."
Joel: "Summer interns at Fog Creek have better chairs, monitors, and computers than the most senior Microsoft programmers."
Press article mentioning Mefeedia
Emanuele (one of the few information architects in Italy) finished an overview paper on folksonomies. I am encouraging him to write an overview of the Italian IA scene.
Yahoo! Groups : videoblogging Messages : Message 14050 of 14077: "If Google were here with me in this room right now I wouldn't speak to it."
Netscape co-founder eyes video blogs | CNET News.com: "Video blogging will be interesting, but the tools to make it don't exist yet," said David Hornik, a partner at August Capital. "People are spending an amazing amount of time consuming video content on the Internet."
Another high-profile entry in the market (after the Allaire guy with Brightcove).
YouTube - Your Digital Video Repository: let's you upload your video's for "free". I hate services that tell you they're free but don't tell you why, or what the business model is. How can I trust my data to them?
tagbert.com - tag you're it: another tag aggregator.
Library Journal - Googlizers vs. Resistors: "Googlization sends our users a dangerous message. It suggests that we no longer believe in the advantages provided by traditional techniques like field search, or in the power of controlled vocabularies. If it all works like Google, why would these powerful search tools be necessary?"
I think many librarians still miss the point: Googlization (ugh!) does NOT mean throwing out CV's, field search and such. You can build all that in. Making it easy to use doesn't mean having simplistic functionality! Making powerful functions easy to use is hard, and training your users isn't the only answer. That's what the librarians have always missed.
By the way, Google trains its users of adsense: I have a little (hardcopy) booklet from Google (free) that explains adsense functionality. I've developed similar booklets for portal clients to hand out to their users on launch. A lot of websites don't consider hardcopy help systems to be worth it. Big mistake.
I follow the delicious tag for taxonomy, and it's interesting to see how different people discover the same things at different times. Different communities too. For example, the library scientists discovered facets in the 1930s, then, recently, the academics discovered their usefulness for the web with the experiments around Flamenco. The IA community discovered Flamenco around 2003-ish (if memory serves me), and epinions and there was a lot of discussion, blog writing, creating of mailing lists and xml formats and such. Now, the tagging community (which overlaps somewhat with the IA community, but not totally, at all) is rediscovering facets and figuring out if they can use it in their practices in some way.
It'd be interesting to have some kind of analysis of WHO is tagging in delicious, cluster that and through that analyse which community are discussing which concepts, and how concepts move between communities.
Sometimes I write up these ideas without all the links a good blogger would add. Oh well.
Local patterns in newspaper categorization systems
El Tiempo (a highly respected newspaper from Colombia) has an interesting new top-level category (it looks like it's new from 2 days ago) called "Tierras y ganados" ("lands and cattle"). Colombia is partly an agricultural society in which the rich own most of the land.
El Diario NY (a NYC Spanish newspaper) has an interesting category in between "local", "national" and "international" news. It is aimed at the immigrant population, and added a category called "nuestros paises" ("our countries").
The New York Times, like most newspapers, has most of the generic categories, a few local ones ("Washington", "New York/Region") and the obligatory outlier ("Obituaries"). The NY Times obituaries page is a big thing in the social life of NYC - it indicates who is important. Comments on the relevance of this category are very welcome!
So it seems like newspaper categories follow a predictable pattern: a bunch of basic categories ("Business", "Technology", ...), a few local geographical categories ("Bogota", "New York/Region", ...), and a very specific outlier category for each newspaper, which is closely tied to the cultural makeup of the local audience. In Colombia it's "Land and Cattle". In NYC (rich white people) it's "Obituaries" or (Latin immigrants) "Nuestros paises".
I had only looked at these 3 websites when this pattern emerged. I expect it to hold for others, but no time right now to check :) Comments?
IA Institute Sponsors the First German IA Conference: "The first conference for information architecture (IA) in Germany took place in Frankfurt on Saturday and Sunday June 28-29, 2005 with just under 50 participants from around the country."
The IA retreat in Germany sounds like it was a success.
Asa Dotzler on firefox, cats, mars, and more: ie's tabbed browsing is an embarrassment: "The more I play with IE MSN toolbar (now with tabbed browsing) the more I just feel embarrassed for the MSN developers who (probably pushed by 'marketing') released this POS to users in this pre-alpha state.
It's obviosly a hack thats actually based on new windows for each tab. I can crash it at will. It's so flickery as to be completely unusable. It's filled with serious dataloss bugs. It's just crap, plain and simple. Anyone that makes any excuse for this embarrassment, please trackback me because I'm very interested in hearing how anyone can defend it."
On Discovery channel I just saw a "sandfish", a little creature that actually swims throug the sands in the desert. Frank Herbert's sandtrout creatures in his Dune books must be inspired on that. Amazing.
I wonder, by the way, if keeping a blog will improve my memory.
I totally forgot that I reviewed the tipping point for an ACM publication in 2001. Even now, looking at the web page, I don't remember doing it. Blank. And that's just a few years ago. That's memory for you!
Institute of Design : Profile : Project: Design for the Base of the Pyramid: "Our approach is to develop solutions that harness the entrepreneurial spirit of local citizens
[...]
Through disposable camera studies, video ethnography, interviews and other design-oriented user observation methods, the team identified a wide variety of profitable businesses already taking place in and around slums."
A Visible City: How do anthropologists blink?: "Pat and others at ID have a project called Design for the Base of the Pyramid. Most of the research has been conducted remotely in India. The ID folks have set up templates and sent them to various researchers in India (social workers, architects, and MBAs, all new to observational research) with instructions to gather information in the slums of Mumbai."
Can you distribute research? I heard that at least some user research for US companies is done by Indian companies. Outsourcing UX?