Nielsen-Norman can really chop up their tutorials. Here's a FULL day tutorial on Presenting Company Information on Corporate Websites. In other words, a full day about how to do an About Us section. You have to admire their business chops: do some research, Jakob writes an alert box, they sell a report for about 100$, and they get full day workshops out of it. Not bad.
Amazon now calculates lots of fun facts about books (hover over the book image to get links). One of them is concordance: how often words are used in the book. These are the 100 most popular words in my book:
I really regret using "core" so often - here's a list of pages where I used that. Auch.
By the way, the book is affordable now - US$ 30. That's 1,316 words per dollar, folks!
Cabot Products & Markets, example of facets using Endeca. (via Seth Early)
The New School of Ontologies: "These "bags of keywords" are known by many names. Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Google's GMail call them "tags". Blog authoring and CMS software often call them "categories". Information architects typically call them "facets"."
Jesus Christ, facets are misunderstood. See also this. The original wikipedia entry for folksonomies even said something like that facets are closely related to tags. Sillyness, really.
Merging facets and folksonomies isn't hard, I'll demonstrate in 2 months (more or less) when the new Mefeedia goes live.
The Cognitive Cost of Classification:
"The mental effort required to consistently assign keywords outweighs the benefits for most frontline contributors to content, document, and knowledge management systems. Contrary to KM World’s recent facets summary, faceted classification can actually compound the problem. Facets are oversold in situations where info-civilians have to classify content that they have created themselves. Expecting facets to solve the metacrap problem is naive."
And: "faceted classfications multiply the number of decisions required to classify a given document."
Um, facets aren't meant to make classifying easier, they're meant to make finding easier. And I can think of a few ways of how they'd make classifying easier, too - classifying something in 5 facets is not necessarily more cognitively complex than classifying it one place in a taxonomy. I have to disagree with Jess here.
Mouse Digital - Arquitectos de la Informacion en Chile: Javier is in a newspaper, promoting IA in Chile. Javier's doing great work, and I see him becoming one of the godfathers of IA in Chile. Check back in 10 years.
Boxes and Arrows: Interview: Steve Krug: "BA: What was the trigger for your book?
SK: Honestly? I wrote it so I could double my consulting rates."
If you work for yourself, take note.
Looking for everything else
I was looking for examples of "everything else" categories on Amazon (everything else categories, if they're there, should be found fairly deep in the taxonomy), and found this one called "Paper & other media". I don't think it's a real "everything else" category though, more of a compound category. Something like "Paper and other things you can print on". The category includes things like CD labels and printable magnetic strips. A real "everything else" category would have a variety of stuff in it that didn't fit in other places.
Lucas Gonze (who I admire): "Tags are a beautiful hack. Tag-related punditry is a plague." I've been guilty of that, so there goes.
The Rake - Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes: must read.
Global Voices Online - Tagging for Chinese-Japanese dialogue.: chinese bloggers tagging.
Curs de l'Arquitectura de la Informacion: I am giving a workshop on information architecture in Barcelona next week. There are still a few places, don't miss it. Price is 500 euros, which includes handouts and food. For practical information, contact Raquel at teléfono 93 542 26 12 o correo raquel dot navarro at upf dot edu.
Running your company on web apps. Still figuring out this one myself. Backup is a big thing as well. Any recommendations there?
More crazy Lakoff stuff: Dan talks about Motivated Categories
Dina writes about visual ethnography with Flickr, but how about visual ethnography with Mefeedia? In other words, with movies?
Javier announced www.aichile.org: Arquitectura de Informacion Chile: "The Information Architects group of Chile has been an all-volunteer effort to promote the field in our country and region."
Open Source Usability: The birth of a movement
Google error
Continuing to reverse-engineer Google by screenshot: what does this mean exactly?
Inforworld (a techie magazine) is starting to use folksonomies: "The downside is that we're probably going to phase out or at least simplify the robust taxonomy that we spent so much time and energy building and refining over the years. It's hard to look back on that effort and to think of walking away from all that valuable code and history of manhours."
Donna and Lou point out Knowspam, my favourite spam filter, is shutting down. Now I, like them, am looking for another one.
Also: what's the story behind them shutting down? Lack of cash? Lack of interest from the developers, who might prefer to spend their time on other projects? Maybe someone wants to take over the service?
Skype launched SkypeIn, which means you get a phone number people can call (before you could call 'real' phones but they couldn't call you), and more. This is brilliant for traveling. I use Skype regularly, and now I'll probably even use them more.
Information architecture in South Africa
Jason Hobbs from South Africa wrote me:
"I'm trying to create a network of information architects in south africa since they are near to impossible to find. Do you know of any or could you point me in the direction of people or institutions that could help me?
My interest is in increasing
+ awareness of IA
+ debate around IA
+ use of IA in commercial projects
+ research into IA
...in the context of south africa. There are real and unique challenges which we face in Africa with regards to the use of the internet and IA offers many solutions. I recently published this article in a marketing publication in south africa - you may find it interesting..."
So get in touch with Jason if you're interested in IA in South Africa.
The discussion on European IA continues, also on Lou's blog. If you post a comment on my blog, it won't show up immediatly (due to spam), but I will approve it. Sorry for that!
I'm doing a workshop here in Spain in 2 weeks, so I'll report back about the Spanish scene later :)
I am giving a workshop in Barcelona on Information Architecture on April 26: Curs de l'Arquitectura de la Informaci
Peter Bogaards has some more comments on the state of European IA.
A year ago, we were worrying about running out of bandwidth to host the videos we'd create as videobloggers. Today, there are TWO free and relatively reliable solutions for hosting free video: Google Video (Beta) - Video Upload Program and the Internet archive. That's pretty amazing, and we're not even talking Bittorrent yet.
Koranteng's Toli: Cultural Sensitivity in Technology. Fascinating stuff. (And some good comments on it.)
Page Description Diagrams, an interesting alternative to wireframes. I can see these work in certain environments.
Lou writes about how IA in Germany isn't really taking off.
I did an IA workshop in Brussels yesterday, and after talking with some of the people here I got the feeling that (please feel free to disagree with me here), in Europe, it depends on the country. In France, IA will probably never take off, at least the current style of US-centered IA. In Belgium, there are a few companies doing interesting IA/UX work, mostly for large clients like J&J and such. But as a field it's pretty unknown. I blame Belgian's lack of self-promotion :) In Holland, there is a bit more awareness (and historically more 'design' awareness) around IA, but also some confusion about what IA really is (there's another Dutch 'IA' organization with a very different take on what it means). I'll report back on Spain later, but I have noticed there is a bit of a UX scene there.
I am giving a full day Information Architecture Workshop next week Wednesday in Brussels (April 13, 2005).
Joho the Blog: Advice to young terrorists: "I have been pulled aside for special searches four out of the previous four times I've flown. Yesterday I asked the supervisor at the US Air desk at Logan Airport about it. He said that if you test positive for any two of the following three tests, the computer marks you for searching: A one way ticket, a ticket purchased in the past 24 hours, or paying by cash. On this particular trip, I met the first two criteria. Thus, I am a likely terrorist.
So, here's a word of advice to today's would-be terrorist: Splurge on the round-trip. Sure, it's going to cost an extra couple of hundred, but at the end of the trip, you're not going to care. Also, try to plan your murderous attack well in advance."
Ah, so that's what that is about :)
If IA and organization and classification are all around us, shouldn't you be able to learn something about international IA by closely looking around you at the world, especially when traveling?
I'm leaving for Spain today, expect a month of little blogging. Siesta. Yeah.
Wired News: We're a Hit in Manila! Now What?: "When Friendster first noticed that its social-networking service was gaining a strong following in the Philippines, company executives weren't sure how to capitalize on the unexpected popularity."
Not by putting ads, that's for sure. Interesting article.
Almost no online apps evolve well. Forum software is either geared towards small communities, or large ones. Categorization systems are geared towards lotsa content or just a bit of content. We really need our apps to take into account how usage of them evolves over time. Switches to more different views as things get more populated. Slowly adding functionality. Jotspot seems to understand that.
Wired News: Monster Fueled by Caffeine: "Delicious Monster is the Mac software company behind the hit Delicious Library, [...] the company's headquarters is a Seattle coffee house."
By the way, I gave in. After a few months of exclusively working with (the free) OpenOffice, I purchases Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice still rocks in regards to its file formats: save as PDF, save as Word, it's all easy and good. But it runs behind a bit in terms of usability - especially for the Powerpoint clone. The new release should fix much of that, but I couldn't wait.
Euromail: "North America and Europe are two continents divided by a common technology: e-mail. Techno-optimists assure us that e-mail—along with the Internet and satellite TV—make the world smaller. That may be true in a technical sense. I can send a message from my home in Miami to a German friend in Berlin and it will arrive almost instantly. But somewhere over the Atlantic, the messages get garbled. In fact, two distinct forms of e-mail have emerged: Euromail and Amerimail."
I have the same experience. After working for a few years in the US (and the UK), I am acculturated to their "loose" email use. When I'm emailing with European business partners, I always have to adjust my tone and formalism - because that's what they do.
translation eXchange: "Apparently half of all translations come from American books, and "Who Moved My Cheese?" is China's all-time best-selling translated work."
I bought who moved my cheese in India. A lot of the books for sale on the streets were american bestsellers.
Joho the Blog: [f2c] Lee Rainie: stats on who is online.
Joshua (from delicious): "After seeing my little project go from a small hobby to a large one and then consume all my waking hours, I've decided to quit my job and work on del.icio.us full time. I've given a lot of thought to how to make this happen, and ultimately decided that the best way forward is to take on some outside investment."
Good luck!
Gmail is down
When you live in a world where you feel compelled to share screenshots of a any one website going down, things are way out of hand. Dependency on Google? You betcha!
videobloggingweek2005 is rocking.
I got an invite for Yahoo 360 degrees, and spent 10 minutes on it. Looks alright. They seem to be pulling together a lot of the Yahoo stuff (fotos, groups, ...) through a social network (friends). From my brief look at it, the approach seems to make a lot of sense.
Briefly: We had an interesting chat with JD Lassica from Ourmedia on the videoblogging group (using IRC).
Also, there are weird problems with my blog that I'm not sure I can fix before leaving for Spain on Friday.
Joel on Software - The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part II: "I have never been to Japan but my father, a linguist, once told me the story of the train station in Tokyo, where the announcements were made in Japanese and English. You would hear four or five minutes of nonstop Japanese and then the English translation would be "The train to Osaka is on platform 4." It seems that in Japanese there is simply no way to say something that simple without cosseting it heavily in a bunch of formal etiquette-stuff."
ThoughtStorms: WikiMinion/FightingSpamEverywhere: a tool that goes through public wikis and remove spam. In other words, an anti spambot bot. Brilliant and useful.
Join the IA Institute for free!
This isn't very well know, but if you are an information architect in Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bangladesh, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Colombia, Comoros, Congo,Côte d'Ivoire, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, or a whole bunch of other countries, and if you are a student, you can join the IA Institute for free, and get access to their great mailing list, job boards and all that.
And if you're not, joining is a great deal anyway.
Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Interesting talk.