Drupal is a great CMS but it was always kinda hard to follow what was going on with it. So finally, a Drupal newsletter! With an unfortunate name though. Drupal Drops

apophenia: categorization negatively affects memory: "I do a little mental happy dance every time I del.icio.us a link and I say "YES! I *get* to add as many tags as I want and no one can stop me, nyahhh nyahhh!" (really, I do)." (in the comments)

I use Bloglines, and I read about 300 feeds. I wish it would make it easier to remove feeds from my list, since there are quite a lot I don't follow anymore.

I find myself writing series on this blog fairly often: related articles that can be read together. The problem is that blogging software doesn't provide an easy way to create navigation to make sure the individual posts of a series hang together. I have been using numbered bulleted lists of links at the beginning of a post, as in my Akshaya project series, or the series about global IA.

I wish Wordpress (my blog software) would provide some way of indicating a series and then automatically generate navigation for them. In general, I wish blogging software would let me bring much more structure in my blog entries, when needed.

Apart from the fact that it doesn't work on Firefox, yet, Yahoo's new PhotoMailis brilliant. Let the email wars begin! I think Yahoo might seduce me back to their service, after years of neglect.

By the way, if you hadn't noticed, Yahoo is totally the new hip company with cool new products. They've been hiring IA's like crazy, too.

If you are moving in NYC and need someone to help you carry that heavy sofa and stuff upstairs/downstairs, Greg at 917 257 23 17 is experienced, very helpful and has super reasonable rates. He helped me move and I can heartily recommend him.

The Dewey Decimal people are trying to figure out how to classify graphic novels (ie. comic books). Discussion here. The kinds of questions they're trying to answer are:

- should graphic novels go in the 700s (arts) or the 800s (literature)? (Answer: like comic books, 700s)

- Should they be lumped together with comic books? (Answer: yes - "separating graphic novels would be difficult for classifiers to do consistently")

- How do you distinguish between comics, graphic novels, ...? Answer: we can't. ("We have tentatively decided to treat everything from single-frame caricatures to three-frame newspaper comic strips to comic books to graphic novels all in the same way. Although this is a broad range of material, we have found no good places to break the continuum so as to separate the material usefully into different categories.")

- How do we subdivide? Answer: by country of writer/artist. This makes sense, because in the world of comics, styles kind of follow geographical boundaries (the Belgian/French school, the US school, the Japanese school). How long this will last I'm not sure about. Meanwhile, the Dewey editors are considering subarranging by country of original publication, rather than country of artist or writer. The rationale is that artists and writers of different nationalities may collaborate on the same work, and a single artist or writer may contribute to works originally published in different countries, but the artists and writers will aim for the style of the country in which the work is to be published. Mmm...

Meanwhile, on the international front, Discussions are underway on a new Arabic translation of DDC 22. Right now, they are considering an additional optional arrangement in the famously biased 200 Religion schedule. This proposal will be discussed at the ALA Annual Conference in June 2005, and at the IFLA Conference in August 2005.

Broadband Wi-Fi Spreads in Latin America

Oh, that Guru Meditation Error!

Enterprise search still a technology conversation

In short, best bets (where an editor can select the top results for certain search queries) is seen by many information professionals as about the cheapest and best way to improve your search engine, but the enterprise search industry doesn't have much of a clue. Many enterprise search products don't explicitly support this. More generalized, most companies seem to think of search as a technology problem, whereas most of the consultants and experts understand the importance of adding people to the mix. In 2003, I started an article at Onlamp like this: "A useful search engine is more than a search algorithm. This article explains how to create a search query analysis tool, a best bets feature, and a basic controlled vocabulary." The idea was to write for the techies who are building the tools about what we, information architects, think are the things missing from most search engines. Onlamp is O'Reilly's publication for open source hackers, and I was on a mission to spread the word about IA (also to other groups, like designers). My point was: there are easy things you can add to your search engine that let humans add value to it, like best bets, or a search log analysis tool. It's not rocket science - if I could write a techie how-to article, the search vendors should be able to figure this out. Last week, at the 2005 Enterprise search summit, I did a little unscientific survey with the vendors about best bets. I asked them if they had such a functionality in their product (I had to explain it to most), and what they called it. The results were in line with my overall impression of enterprise search. Most of the products work like this:

1. Spider content and rank
2. Auto-generate and auto-populate taxonomies to add value to search

Notice the absence of humans in that process. The control panels of the products tend to contain a section with sysadmin-like functionality, and some analytics (most allow you to see what search queries people have been using). Most of them assume that the person using it has been trained to use this tool. There is surprisingly little functionality aimed at the person whose job it might be to tune the engine with best bets and such. The people I spoke with who actually do that job, use things like Perl scripts or open source software to analyse search queries. (For example, I was told Googlebox doesn't handle logging multilingual search queries (it searches fine), so one person used Webalizer instead.) When I asked the best bets question ("does your product do best bets, defined as ..."), even after explaining the functionality, I got surprisingly many blank stares. Best whats? Why would you want to do that? Some products have best bets, but the closest a lot of them could come was to say you could create rules to improve the result of certain documents. That's like saying, sure, you can do HTML with Word. In theory perhaps, but it's not really useful. Here is an incomplete list of products that do best bets, and what they call it. This is an unscientific and uncomplete survey, which may have mistakes in it. Don't use it to judge a particular product, use it to get a sense of the field.

• Autonomy: you can kinda do them through rules.
• BA-insight: no best bets Yes, through SharePoint.
• FAST: yes (although I have doubts here).
• IBM: yes, they're called Quick Links.
• ISYS: not really.
• Mondosoft: yes, they're called Top Hits.
• Open Text: it's coming up in their next release.
• SER Solutions: no.
• Verity: yes, calls them Sponsored Links.
• Vivisimo: yes, kind of.

I didn't have time to ask the other vendors - feel free to add in the comments. By the way, to work well with users, best bets should appear in-line with the other search results, not separate from them. If I was to do a more complete survey, I'd add that in as a criteria, together with an easy to use admin interface, CV functionality and an easy to use search analysis tool that includes analysis of suddenly popular queries.

This is probably the event that we'll look back at when we think "when did Google loose it's sexyness again?"

Yahoo is the new darling of the technorati (the people, not the company). The circle is round.

I just got to Belgium (for 2 weeks, with a workshop in Edinburgh thrown in). Long flight, crazy jetlag. And lots of paperwork to get done.

Happy birthday Lou!

local6.com - News - Ohio Wal-Mart Caters To Amish: "The store has an expanded parking lot that includes 37 hitching posts for horse-drawn carriages.

Also, the store is stocked with blocks of ice instead of crushed ice and fabrics for clothes to be made at home."

NowPublic.com is a community site to develop citizen news stories.

An Argentinian reference to my IA talk in Madrid.

JD Lassica, the guy behind Ourmedia, is releasing a mini version of his new book at Darknet

The Garamond Agency: "The Garamond Agency represents authors of non-fiction exclusively. Our clients are academics, scholars, journalists, business people, and writers whose books make important ideas accessible to a wide audience of readers."

Linux radio show - LugRadio: the first Lugradio podcast has an audio review of my book. I'm posting this before hearing it, so I don't know if it's positive or negative. Whatever, I got the Japanese translation (just out) the other day, so I'm happy. Anything in Japanese is cool.

Today, everyone's a librarian. A vlog about categories: "We had a huge debate in our family wether we should establish certain categories."

Joho the Blog: Miscellaneous innovation: "To be miscellaneous is to be placed next to things unlike you. Isn't that pretty much a condition for innovation?"

I am continually intrigued with the "everything else" category. (Check it on eBay!)

One of the few blogs about immigration in the US. I spoke with Mario, he's a good guy. Recommended if you need a laywer.

The French worry about Google writing the planet's history. Yes, search is political.

Y! Music Engine: Yahoo is trying to replace Windows Media player, iTunes and the lot. This is big news in the fucked up mediaplayer landscape. Here's the inside story (you need a Yahoo 360 account to read it)

An article in the Guardian about MySpace...: "It's really nice to be called a Social Software expert again - particularly after slightly losing my identity inside the monstrous belly of the BBC. I have felt a bit disconnected from the social software community over the last year or so in that while I feel I still have as much to say, I never really get the chance to express it in public. And that makes you invisible and eventually redundant. I'm going to have to try and spend a little more time engaging in the debates of the day from now on, I think."

I know a lot of IA's who work in small and large companies and have a lot of expertise to share, but don't. I want to encourage them. Write a blog. Or a book. The blog is easier, and it gets you almost as much recognition as a book does, so start with that. It's more fun too. But if you always wanted to write a book, that's cool too. If I've learnt one thing from my time online, it's that conversation is what it's all about. I'll shut up now.

The Disney Muppets: why that just isn't funny. I don't think Disney can bring the muppets back. Something about large corporations - the values of the leaders trickle down, and if those values are cold, hard cash, creativity suffers. I watch a lot of Disney movies (the cartoon ones), including the recent ones. They had a few good ones in the 90s (Alladin, The little mermaid), but mostly they've been dissapointing (The lion king was the best of the bad ones), and the latest 5 years they haven't done 1 decent one (I don't consider the recent brilliant Pixar movies (Toy Story, Finding Nemo) Disney movies. Disney just did the distribution.). Disney will probably fuck up the Muppets, and kill millions of cherised childhood memories along the way. Ah.

Maria is writing in Spanish about New York. Check it out.

Folksonomies: "There only need be a small connecting layer between folksonomies, classic AI and classic IA for the end result to be very, very compelling on many levels." Exactly right.

You remember those Spanish innovative UX guys I spoke about. Javier Canada let me know they are beta-testing La Coctelera, a new free blogging service with a pretty innovative interface. It's light on features, but in that good way that makes it feel easy and sufficient. It's Ruby on Rails and Ajax and all those buzzwords (who cares?), but one of the big, visible innovations is their really easy navigation: to change something, click on the area of the screen that corresponds with it:

Another review in English.

Photoethnography.com: Fieldnotes: My interview fieldkit. And: "I have read of people who go to really dirt-poor parts of the globe and pack a Canon battery-powered 4x6 dye-sub printer, so they can make prints on the spot and give them to the people they photograph as a thank-you gift. In many countries, less blase about photography than our pampered industrial societies, these would become prized family heirlooms."

Photoethnography.com: Fieldnotes: My interview fieldkit: doing foto ethnography on the road.

Waw, in March I served 1,049,751 pages on poorbuthappy.com. That's a million! I wonder how much of th upsurge in traffic the recent months is due to spammers.

Stupid fucking academic burocrats. In order to speak to a researcher to help her with her dissertation, I have to sign and mail or fax a disclosure form to them. I can't just email an "I agree". I am moving and don't have access to a printer. What century is this?

freevlog.org (all NEW) explains stepby step how to set up a completely free videoblog, including free video hosting. Brilliant. (And using none of those crappy free hosting sites that send you popups and stuff).

Not only the most brilliant review of Backpack so far, but I was watching it through Mefeedia, and if you play the video while reading it, it's a surreal multimedia experience. Waw.

It now seems to be ok (legally) to share your Google adsense revenue.

Mark: "Since August 6, 2003, I have made $7915 from Google Adsense. My daily revenue peaked in April 2004 at about $18 per day and has been steadily declining ever since. Last month I averaged just under $9 per day. I have ads on Dive Into Python, Dive Into Accessibility, Dive Into OS X, and dive into mark."

I've made $3,641 since June 2003 - in 4,638,888 pageviews. Not bad. Most of that comes from ads on my Colombia forum. Very little from the ads on my blog, that I have turned on and off at different times.

What this means for working for yourself: ads on a blog won't get you much $$, unless you're a super A blogger and even then. Building a useful community site seems to work much better for generating ad revenue.

I just found a good way to re-arrange pages in Visio. Problem: whenever you add a new page to Visio (insert>page), it adds it to the end of the stack, and then you have to drag it to its right place, its truly annoying using the tab at the bottom. Dragging pages takes like that like 15 seconds each. Fix: open view>drawing explorer window, and re-arrange pages there by simply dragging them around. Much better.

More comments álvaro on my talk in Madrid.

Digital cameras--stop them before they shoot again | CNET News.com: "When you have hundreds of pictures where you used to have one, people are less likely to ever go back to look at any of them,"

True. But also true: people start using pictures in new ways: remixing, interpreting. The same with video.

What's going on these days in ethnography? Popular Ethnographies

Joi Ito's Web: Japanese punctuality: "For instance, in my Silicon Valley meetings people tend to allow important meetings to run overtime and eat into the next meeting whereas in Japan, I will often be ushered from a very important meeting to a completely worthless meeting in order to maintain punctuality."

Everything Basecamp: Important note about sharing RSS feeds: "It's very important that you don't share your RSS feeds with anyone."

The first (and only?) example of 37sig being un-user friendly ;) Trying to educate the user (against their natural instincts of how to use a product) instead of fixing the functionality?

Boing Boing: Whose sign is it anyway?: "This AP photograph of some soldiers in front of a sign in Kabul, Afghanistan looks normal enough, until you notice that the sign they're standing in front of (presumably aimed at the local population) is written in English."

Russell Beattie Notebook - Backpack: Too Bad It's Not Mobile: "Backpack's kinda nice... for a PC app. You know, so much effort being put into a dying platform, it sorta makes you sad. Really, it's too bad there's not a mobile version baked in from the start.
[...]
this stupid AJAX fad just makes their web pages more non-standard and all that much more impossible to re-use, so they decided to skip it."

New Scientist Info-overload harms concentration more than marijuana - News:"he and his team asked 80 volunteers to carry out problem-solving tasks, first in a quiet environment and then while being bombarded with emails and phone calls.

Despite being told to ignore the interruptions, the average IQ of the volunteers dropped by about 10 points. Not everyone was equally affected - men were twice as distracted as women. Studies have also shown that IQs of people high on pot drop by only 5 points."

So it's proven: information overload is more distracting than smoking the funny cigaret.

IA in Spain

After describing the IA scene in Belgium, in this post I will describe the IA scene in Spain. Again, please correct me where I go wrong. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures (couldn't find my camera) when I was there. If you have any pictures, send them over, I'll add them to this post. IA in Europe (and Germany) in general isn't doing that well. People are frustrated with clients who don't know what IA is, and there doesn't seem to be much innovation. Imagine my surprise when I visited Spain and found a small but thriving IA community! I gave a workshop in Barcelona first, organized by Raquel Navarro who works at the department of technology of the Pompeu Fabra university. Attendance was good, there was a variety of people (Spain's largest bank sent 8 attendees), and the workshop went pretty well. Workshops in Spain are fun, by the way, people are not afraid to speak up and ask questions. I also had the pleasure of meeting Ricardo Baeza (Javier Velasco worked with him in Chile) - an expert in information retrieval. Unfortunately I had to run because I was visiting friends that night and the next day I had to be in Madrid. Afterwards Toni Granollers i Saltiveri gave me a ride (and Jesus Lores Vidal), and explained me the UX work (in the GRIHO) they're doing in the university of LLeida. For example, they are experimenting with online cardsorting and building a new tool to make that easier. They are also doing remote classes (online teaching) and seem to have a great deal of experience with this. Then I went to Madrid for an informal talk (a "Cadius lab") organized by Cadius, the Spanish speaking UX mailing list/community. I gave my talk which was mercifully brief, we went to the bars and a good time was had by all. By the way, if you are ever invited to give a Cadius lab, go. They're great hosts. The talk was in La Biblioteca de las Indias Electronicas (Libary of the electronic indians - the BIE), a non-profit small library space focused on Internet research. It has a big iron spider on the ceiling, some sci-fi, a bunch of UX and political books and hand dolls. It felt like home. They do a lot of events there. Here are some of the people I met: Nacho Puell just came back from a trip to Japan, and has one of the oldest weblogs in Spain (since 2000). It's about usability, information visualization and such. Javier Cañada has a weblog too, and Nacho described him as "our most famous person outside Spain", partly for his representation of the UX cosmos (PDF). He and Nacho together are the founders of Cadius. Isa (isabel ines casasnovas) is, within Cadius, the person that organize the Labs (thanks Isa!!) and works at the UX team of Idealista.com. Juan "3 verdades" Leal (works with Isa) explained to me the three truths about men. Ask him. He has an interesting blog, and also runs seisdeagosto.com, where he translates interesting articles originally written in English or Spanish to Portuguese. Isa says about him: "Somehow, he is the "link" between Spain and Portugal in UX matters". Juan "Taliban" Fuertes was doing research on mobile phones so had dozens of them (or so it seemed) with him that night. David de Prado works at the DNXGroup as well. David de Ugarte is one of the world's experts on social networking analysis (you can even follow a course on social network analysis in Madrid!). They're doing social network analysis with a political/enthographic bent - fascinating stuff. He writes a lot at ciberpunk.net Too bad we didn't have more time to talk. He gave me his book ("networks to win a war") - thanks! I really hope it gets translated into English. Apologies to all the other people I met whose names I didn't remember. If you send me an email I'll add you to this list. And here's an (undoubtedly incomplete) list of UX companies in Spain.

• DNX (Nacho Puell works here), founded by Humberto Matas: a user research consulting company who are doing very interesting research work and have a pretty impressive international client list. An extremely talented bunch was my first impression. A tip: if you go to interview with them, no need to shave if you don't want to ;)
• The Cocktail is DNX's big competitor in Spain. Both companies fight for the same clients, but there seems to be a great deal of respect between them. Javier Cañada works here. Another really talented bunch of people.

I was pretty impressed with the Spanish UX scene. Not only are they active, they are innovative. They are coming up with their own ideas and their own research. I see a great future there, especially because they have a common language with (most of) the isolated talent in Latin America, which means they should be able to really innovate outside of the box the traditional/US IA's seem to be stuck in. Keep an eye out for them. More pictures. More comments (in Spanish) (I am now known as "el gran xfml father"). More blog posts about the talk. More pictures from Madrid:

I spend a lot of time in the US, and in the last 15 years I think I've crossed US immigration about that many times. I've grown afraid of entering the US. Nothing but bad experiences, unneccesary arrogance. I get nervous when I get on a plane to the US, even though I tell myself I have no reason to.

When I was called aside to be frisked entering Canada a few months ago, for the first time I experienced a friendly frisking. (No, this isn't going to be a story like that!) The gentleman who did the duties explained me step by step what was happening and why - clearly he'd received some kind of customer service training - and afterwards I felt strangely respected, almost happy. Weird.

A few days ago I entered the US again and had an even weirder experience: a human immigration officer. The man was friendly, he asked the usual questions but then we made a few jokes about it (how he was planning to leave his job too and start a rogue immigration office next to the official one).

A human experience is even better than a professional userfriendly one like the one in Canada. I don't think I'll ever experience this again at US immigration but I just want to thank the gentleman in question. For being human. Thanks.

a n t e n n a

People seem to be noticing Amazon's tabs. I made screenshots of this last year, perhaps they're only rolling this out for everyone now and last years' were tests?

Freetag - an Open Source Tagging / Folksonomy module for PHP/MySQL applications: built to be integrated with other apps.

If you look at the designs for Blogger and Creative Commons (same designer), they look too similar. I am not a designer, and I don't usually write about design, but check out these visuals. The Blogger ones are appropriate, the CC ones seem kinda.. You tell me.