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 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.
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.