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?
A Welsh View: British Isles Venn Diagram: the British empire finally explained. I was in Scotland not long ago, and in the airport I had to follow signs to either "UK" or "Ireland". So I had to figure out Scotland is a part of the UK. Categories.
BlogWalkWiki : BlogWalkSeven in Mechelen, Belgium.
Headshift :: smarter, simpler, social: "Headshift is a specialist Internet consulting firm with a strong technical capability and a deep understanding of the social impact of information and communication technologies." In other words, they get companies to try social software, bottom-up metadata and such.
Is this too specialized for a consultancy?
Korean schools learn a little cellphone etiquette - Engadget - www.engadget.com: "The Seoul Office of Education is distributing leaflets on cellphone etiquette to elementary, junior high, and high schools."
Ahhhhhhh. They finally installed cable internet in the new appartment today which means no more stealing of the neighbours' extremely spotty wireless. Good.
LoicLeMeur Wiki - The european blogosphere
Seth's Blog: Small is the new big: "Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs.
Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.
Small means that you can answer email from your customers."
I find Godin's writing to be a bit too much of the all-American-self-help-book style, but hey, it beats my writing any day. And he hits some nails on the head in this post. Good to hear that staying small is ok :) A client told me I could make a lot of money by hiring a bunch of IA's and starting an IA consultancy. Probably. But I don't really want that responsibility, that need to be billable, to hit certain sales figures every month just to stay alive. I like the flexibility of staying small.
Fancy math takes on je ne sais quoi | csmonitor.com: will Google provide *reasonable* automated translation?
DonnaM: A beginning means an end: Donna is starting a life as an independent IA consultant. I've followed her work and spoken with her on various occasions, and I can highly recommend her if you're looking for an information architect, especially in Australia (where she works). Good luck Donna!
Google Sitemaps lets you put a simple XML file on your server that tells Google how to spider your site.
Camping in NY state without car?
I am trying to plan some camping trips this summer in NY state (or NJ), starting from Manhattan. We don't have a car though, and I find renting one always ends up costing something like $150/weekend, which is steep enough to keep me from doing it.
So this is a call for help. Where can I find information about camping? Is it possible without a car? I was thinking I might take a train upstate and take it from there. Recommended spots? Tips?
Comments might take a day or so to be approved, but I do check and approve them!
An attempt at an international logo for RSS feeds (via Thomas) I'm not crazy about it, but it might grow on me.
- Which locales should we use?
- What content/functionality should we translate?
- What should be the balance between local control over content, presentation and structure, and central control?
- How can we find out if just translating a site into language X will be acceptable?
- What aspects of the IA should be different for local sites?
- Can we just translate a taxonomy?
- When should a taxonomy not just be translated, but adjusted to local circumstances?
- What are useful concepts to understand cultural differences between locales that matter for IA?
- Do different cultures have different information needs?
- Is IT the great cultural equalizer?
- Does work culture override local (national) culture in regards to information use?
- Do different cultures have different information preferences?
- How is information usage evolving worldwide? Are poorer countries "behind", and going through evolution in internet/information use that's simply a few years behind of richer countries?
- Are Hofstede's dimensions useful for global IA?
- What do we know about multilingual information needs and preferences? Do people prefer access to the original, for example? In what cases?
- Culture is a subtle thing, often invisible. What are some good ways to research cultural differences related to IA?
- Apart from differences in information needs and preferences, what other cultural aspects might influence IA?
- Do we know enough about IA tout court to start worrying about global IA? In what areas don't we?
- How does search behaviour differ between cultures, if at all?
- What are the big questions, and what are the small questions?
- Apart from their nationality, what other aspects determine someone's culture in regards to global IA?
- What are cost-effective ways to do research, and what research should be done?
- What kind of local involvement in your IA research should you get?
The CIA is sponsoring anthropologists and thus there is a lot of discussion about whether that is acceptable.
How to combine tags with facets
Information architects (like me) tend to say we should combine different methods of increasing findability. In this post I'll explain one way of combining user generated metadata with editorial metadata, and more specifically, tags with facets. I'm not gonna do definitions and such (ok, I heard that collective sigh of relief!). The big advantage of adding metadata in the form of facets is that we know how to make an easy to use interface for facets. Check Flamenco. We could try adding ontology-like metadata, but we don't know yet how to create good interfaces with those. Let's look at your standard tagcloud page:
If we added a few facets to this it could look something like this (quick and nasty mockup):
Notice that the facets I came up with are relatively techie, reflecting delicious' userbase. If we dig deeper into the data, we'll probably find more facets like event, time and such. Other tagclouds might need different facets.
Also notice that this new arrangement makes it much easier for users to find something if they're looking for a specific item. It makes the tagcloud more browsable. And something I just noticed myself: we can bring up less popular items in less popular facets to the homepage.
The big difference in browsability (arg!) happens when a user moves into the tagcloud. When looking at a tag, they can refine their search by the various other facets (as is standard in faceted browsing systems). Check epinions.com for a nice example - if I had all day I'd mock it up. This makes it easy for a user to refine a search in a really large tagcloud.
How do we scale the assigning of tags to facets?
Simple: editors create facets (it takes some consideration to create a useful and valid facet), and users assign tags to facets. We can let users assign tags because facets are mutually exclusive, that is, tags can only logically be classified in 1 facet, not in multiple ones. So there should be little confusion as to what facet a tag should belong to (apart from the expected tags with more than 1 meaning). The mutual exclusivity comes from the editorial selection of facets: we choose our facets so that they are (at least pretty much) mutually exclusive. I expect a small number of facets (between 5 and 10) to be quite useful.
Asking users to assign tags to facets shouldn't be too hard. You can do it when they add a tag, or when they're browsing a tag that hasn't been assigned yet. The question can look something like this:
Again, because of the mutual exclusivity requirement for facets, disagreement on what facet a tag belongs to should be limited. So I would just let the system assume that each tag belongs to one facet.
So what do we know so far?
- We can let editors come up with a few useful facets, and let users assign tags to facets. This should work because of the mutual exclusivity requirement of facets: the hard work (creating facets) is done by editors, the easier work (assigning facets) is distributed (it is easy but a lot MORE work) amongst our users. This should work, and should scale.
- Once we have facets for some of our tags, browsing is made a lot easier for our users. The browsing interface is well known and tested, and should just work.
- This is good because we have now found a way to combine the strenghts of editors (ie., spend a whole afternoon considering what a certain facet should be) with the strength of user generated metadata (ie., you get lots of it if the decision is easy).
- Will users indeed find it easy to classify tags in facets without much disagreement? (They should if we create our facets following the exclusivity requirement.)
Joi Ito's Web: Technorati.jp beta launched
I'm spending a week in Belgium, at my moms house, lazing about. French fries, mmm. With mayo. Slowly gearing up to work on my global IA research.
Exactly 1 year ago me and Jay started the videoblogging mailing list. In the past year, it has become an amazing community. 100s of videoblogs have grown up around it. Happy birthday.
IA as a competitive advantage
Wired News: The Beeb Shall Inherit the Earth: "America's entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe's biggest broadcasters -- the BBC -- is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it."
The BBC is indeed quietly getting waay ahead of most other media companies.
I often talk about IA as a competitive advantage: the BBC gets that. (I shouldn't define IA this broadly, but hey). They have consistent URI's for every program ever made (working on it at least), they have API's in the new BBC Backstage, they embrace RSS and let users play with their data. In other words: they architect their information with an eye towards the future. Long term metadata. Good URI's. Open to users.
What will happen (and this is where the "IA as a competitive advantage" comes in), is that its competition (CNN, ...) will wake up one day and see the advantage they have built. The CEO will proclaim: "Let's build the same". They'll try to find vendors. The CEO will assume she can buy this.
But the way the beeb is architecting its information is as much a cultural achievement as a technical one. It takes dedication, love and years of time to make a company open up its information, even if it's in the statutes that the company is there to serve the public, as in the beebs' case. IA is hard work.
The big advantage the BBC has had is that it's attitude towards information hasn't been lead by vendor pitches, but by passionate and talented people for years. You can't just buy that, or expect to catch up with that in a year or two. That's IA as a competitive advantage.
Akshaya, a project in India that I visited and blogged about extensively, wins the ARS Electronica PRIX for digital communities (via Dina).
Language Log: Pass the hat.: Google searches with accents. Mmm.
ITworld.com - Filing system taxonomy blues: "All those pieces of paper. They all need to be filed somewhere. But where? Is this piece of paper best filed under 'insurance', or 'house' or 'Acme Insurances Inc.' or 'bills'? So many options, so many incorrect taxonomies to choose from. So much desire to find the one that is perfect. I should know better of course. There is no perfect taxonomy for a filing system." (via Jon Udell)
SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching: May 2005 Archives: "In a March 29 2005 paper, Ira Machefsky and John Fernandez of search engine Accoona, clue us in to some key differences between searchers in China and the US. The authors compared search terms used in the US and Chinese versions of Accoona. Whereas US searchers focus on news, gossip, and entertainment, Chinese searches show a strong focus on business information, particularly manufacturing."
I've been interested in finding out differences in search habits in different cultures. Any other pointers?
The RSS wars
Here's what might happen: Apple, Google, Yahoo et al will start expanding RSS (with namespaces) or creating their own. Their tools will use these namespaces, so developers will start supporting them as well (to get their stuff into iTunes and such). So brace for the RSS wars.
I finally approved a bunch of recent comments (the comment spam means no comments go through unapproved these days), and my Enterprise search still a technology conversation post has a lot of good ones. Check it and leave yours - I promise to moderate faster!
Poorbuthappy guide to India | Holy men, immodium and technology. I'm slowly starting writing at my India discussion site again.
Anthropology at work: "Brenda runs through the mundane minutiae of her daily life: how her three sons like her to iron their T-shirts and tracksuits, but hate it when she gets them mixed up - so she has created a labelling system to tell the identical, perfectly pressed T-shirts apart."
antropologi.info: "according to dance anthropologist Judith Lynne Hanna, there may be as many dance languages as humanity's 6,000-plus verbal languages."
The Collier Classification System Of Very Small Objects. A kind of art project. All Caps Titles With Words Like Everything or Very are Cool.
The Application of Weblike Design to Data: Designing Data for Reuse: "Every episode uniquely identifiable and addressable, forever!"
Simple yet long term useful metadata is the best metadata. I am often surprised by how ambitious some people are when trying to do enterprise-wide metadata: "We'll collect dozens of fields of metadata for each piece of content!" Yeah right. The BBC didn't make that mistake: simplicity first, yet great ambition at the same time. Brilliant.