This is a test: reposting a vlog entry.

# Mar 27, 2005

Keeping Found Things Found: "The goal of this study is to understand better the ways in which people manage information for subsequent re-access and re-use." Donna should find this interesting :)

# Mar 26, 2005

Hoe begin ik een gratis videoblog?

This is a Dutch translation of freevlog.

Stap 1 – Een gratis blog

Op deze pagina leggen wij uit hoe je een GRATIS videoblog kan beginnen. We gaan een gratis blog opzetten, en gratis video hosting bij het Internet Archive.

Als je al een blog hebt kun je deze stap overslagen. Eerst moeten we een gratis blog opzetten. Een blog is gewoon een soort website. Ga naar Blogger.com, start een gratis account. Blogger is in het Engels- hopelijk maken ze snel een Nederlandstalige website. Start een blog, en schrijf je eerste post.

Here is the link to my tutorial on how to set up a free Blogger blog. (Engels)

Stap 2: een video.

OK, nu we ons blog hebben, gaan we er een video op zetten. Ik veronderstel dat je al een filmpje klaar hebt.

De beste plaats om je video te bewaren is het Internet Archive. Het internet archive is een gratis host, het is een non profit gestart door een internet billionaire. Het is een goede website. Dus ga naar het internet archive en start een gratis account. Doe het nu!

Hier is een voorbeeld van een filmpje:
Voorbeeld movie

Dan moet je CCPublisher downloaden.

Download CCPublisher.

CCPublisher is een programma dat het gemakkelijk maakt om videos naar het Internet Archive te sturen.

Als je nog geen filmpje hebt, maak er een. Houd het simple, gewoon zeggen “dit is mijn eerste videoâ€? is genoeg. Wanneer de video af is, start de CCPublisher en stuur de video naar het Archive. Het duurt ongeveer een dag voor het in feite beschikbaar is. Dus je wacht een dag, en dan ga je naar je account op de website van het internet archive en je copieert de URL. Als je de URL hebt ga je naar je blog en je schrijft een post met die URL.

Stap 3 – Een RSS feed met enclosures

Nu dat je een videoblog hebt, moet je zorgen dat mensen je video kunnen vinden. Je blog heft een RSS feed, maar wat je eigenlijk nodig hebt is een RSS feed met enclosures. Dit maakt het mogelijk voor mensen die tools zoals ANT of Mefeedia gebruiken om je videos te vinden.

Om dit te doen neem je je Blogger RSS feed en ga je naar Feedburner.
Hier is meer uitleg (Engels) over Feedburner.

OK, nu dat je je Feedburner feed hebt, kun je je feed toevoegen aan videoblogger directories. De Mefeedia directory is voorlopig de grootste. Kopieer je Feedburner feed URL en voeg hem toe aan de Mefeedia directory.

ANT heeft nog geen directory, ondertussen kun je in del.icio.us je Feedburner URL toevoegen met de tag “antfeedsâ€?.
Ga ook naar videoblogging.info en geef je informatie in.

Stap 5 - Maak deel uit van de community

Nu ben je een videoblogger!

Je kun deel uitmaken van de internationale discussie door lid te worden van the videoblogging Yahoo group.

Tenslotte, zeg het volgende luidop:
Ik, __________, beloof regelmatig videos te sturen naar mijn blog, ook al heb ik het druk op mijn werk en niet echt tijd, en ook al voel ik me alsof ik eigenlijk niets interessants te zeggen heb. Ik beloof ook tenminste 5 mensen uit te leggen wat videobloggen is en waarom het interessant is.

En je kunt linken naar dit artikel.

# Mar 26, 2005

About being "first to market" with new functionality. I just realized something. Sometimes you need to roll out new functionality quickly, before the competition does. The reason is not so much to lock in users or to get early adopters, it is to influence practices of technology use. Because new technology gets shaped by its users as much as by its designers. If you can join that dance with your users early on, you will shape each other, and in that way set examples for the future and shape the world.

# Mar 26, 2005

(via the fcd) Now online: check out Ranganathan's original Colon classification.

# Mar 25, 2005

Anyone has experience with versionhost
?

# Mar 25, 2005

I will be giving an Information Architecture Workshop in Brussels, Belgium on April 13. I'm excited about it - I hope to give quite a few workshops in Europe during the coming year. You don't need to be an information architect to attend, or even be that familiar with the field, but it will be an intense workshop - I plan to cover a lot of ground. If you *are* an IA, you should learn quite a bit too. I also have a workshop in Barcelona coming up - more details on that later.

Go check it out!

# Mar 25, 2005

the trouble with translation on Flickr - Photo Sharing!: Christina's example of semantic overlap.

# Mar 24, 2005

Waw, by searching A9 for "peter van dijck", I found 3 books I am mentioned in (apart from my own). 3! I didn't even know! Amazing.

# Mar 23, 2005

You know that smartmob thing I was part of? Improv Everywhere Mission: Look Up More

# Mar 23, 2005

Brightcove (presentation) looks like ANT (desktop aggregating) + Ourmedia (storage, web service) + Mefeedia (tagging, web service). I'm not sure doing all things at once is going to be the winning approach. At least in our approach, things can be swapped out and compete (there can be more than one of each element). We'll see.

# Mar 23, 2005

The sigia list is thinking of folksonomies as on a continuum:

# Mar 23, 2005

"Dear Mr. Van Dijck,
We need to restock your book Information for Designers. Unfortunately, I cannot locate the name of the publisher ..." I think this is good news :)

# Mar 23, 2005

Donna: Maybe we do need IA research. Woohoo, we have a convert ;) Yes, we need research. Or we'll end up like the knowledge management guys. (No offense.) The amount of stuff we don't know yet is staggering.

# Mar 23, 2005

I helped out a bit with the Ourmedia metadata work, and they were nice enough to label me "metadata nerd" on their project team page. Chech out Ourmedia. It's a brilliant and worthwhile project.

# Mar 23, 2005

Something I just realized: in the history of science, very little research has been done into research methods. What works, what doesn't and why. I actually met someone in London once who was starting up research into research methods as an academic discipline - can't find his name now though. Fascinating stuff.

The same applies to IA. Sure, we have cardsorts and such, but not a lot of insight, really, in what works, and especially why. Rashmi (academic with a superpractical bent) and Donna are two of our best thinkers in that field.

Related: my research agenda for IA post.

# Mar 22, 2005

O'Reilly Network: Hypermedia: Why Now?: "my hunch is that we'll soon see a tidal wave of creative work."

# Mar 22, 2005

MSNBC - Ready for your close-up? Here come the vlogs And yes they mention my baby.

# Mar 21, 2005

Factoid: Technorati has 12,000,000 tags, as compared to the average English vocabulary of 25,000 words.

# Mar 21, 2005

chained Bibles

# Mar 20, 2005

Gerry McGovern: "In 1996, I started this weekly opinion piece with the objective of helping to build my personal brand name. I wanted to become known as an expert in web content so that I could make a good living from this area."

# Mar 20, 2005

Upcoming content management seminars, workshops and talks by Gerry McGovern: information architecture, writing for the Web. Gerry McGovern is doing like a crazy world tour of workshops. Check it out.

# Mar 20, 2005

I was in Flashmob yesterday night, and it was great fun. We all went in a big store on 14th St and stood in windows and did certain moves. The passersby were weirded out :) Video to come later.

# Mar 20, 2005

Eleanor Rosch Interview

# Mar 19, 2005

I asked some people at the recent IASummit about folksonomies in the hallways. PeterMe thinks the IAs have a better conversation going on around folksonomies than the techies - I'm not so sure. I've been a bit dissapointed with the lack of IA's speaking up in the blogosphere about this.

The panel at the IA Summit was good though. It lacked insights about integrating folksonomies with other approaches (how exactly, folks?), and there were some misconceptions (synonyms are NOT a problem with folksonomies, they're a problem with the technology. Google solved search query synonyms pretty well, the folksonomies will do the same.), but overall it was great to hear IA's speak up. Too bad we don't do this publicly, enough (and I'm as guilty as the next guy).

Peter Morville's part of the panel was brilliant. I'd actually never seen him speak - he had me laugh out lout quite a few times. David Weinberger's favourite metaphor (folksonomies are leaves falling of the trees) was extended in many ways. Peter Morville: "what happens with leaves that are raked together? They rot. And become food. For trees. Which then live long and useful lives." There was more talk about trees having many shapes, trees blocking out the light for new things to grow, people bumping into trees which can cause pain and so on. Fun.

Anyways,
here's the movie
(Quicktime, 7M)

# Mar 19, 2005

Christina: "Lots of interesting stuff in thsi series-- in particular the global IA session and its attendant implications I found fascinating. The session was less about IA and more about understanding, interacting with and perhaps even shaping culture via translation & internationaliation activities.

If you realize that categorization is essentially a framing activity, a la lakoff, then taxonomy translation (as opposed to localization) is an imperialist activity."

# Mar 19, 2005

This Blog Sits at the: transformation watch: "Americans have been whitening their teeth at such a furious pace that the makers of caps, crowns and in-fills cannot match the new American mouth. Their stuff just isn't white enough."

# Mar 18, 2005

The Economist had a supercool picture on the cover.

# Mar 18, 2005

Rashmi: "Folk taxonomies are a well studied subject. Whats interesting about them is not how much people differ, but how much consensus there is about categorization schemes."

# Mar 18, 2005

The Japanese are really relentless about inventing the future of robotics as seen in 80s anime tv shows. They just keep going.

# Mar 18, 2005

The Shifted Librarian: Kailee Is Older than Yahoo:

"Brent: "So Yahoo is only 10 years old? I thought it was more like 20."
Jenny: "No, it's almost as old as you are." (Brent is nine years old.)
Brent: "Wow. So there was no Yahoo before I was born?"
Jenny: "That's right. Before you were born, there wasn't really an internet or the web or email. There was a very basic form for people in the military and at universities, but there were no web sites to visit and no web games to play."
Brent: "So Runescape didn't exist?"
Jenny: "Nope. You're older than Runescape."
Brent: "So computers were worthless ten years ago?"

# Mar 18, 2005

Low-Literacy Users (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox). I did a project for low literacy users once (a lot of US website are targeted partly at them). We didn't do any usability testing specifically targeted at them though.

# Mar 16, 2005

Example (with reusable code) of the Fade Anything Technique

# Mar 15, 2005

Just a note: if you're looking for an IA job, going to the IA Summit is probably the best investment you could make. If you didn't make it, there are some postings (Google! Yahoo!) on the IA Summit 2005 blog.

# Mar 15, 2005

Just had an insight about opening API's. If you have the best process for adding new valuable data (your users add it, or you have a great web spider, or whatever), it makes great sense to open up your api's. People will become dependent on you. You remove a lot of competition. If you don't, in other words, if you already have pretty much all the data you're going to have, it does not make sense to open up your data through an api. You'd be giving away your store.

So competitive advantage lies in the ability to expand and improve your data more reliably than others.

# Mar 14, 2005

Is it just me, or is there new life in the home-grown software business? When Microsoft and Co made it pretty hard for anyone to run a small software business in the 90s, the landscape wasn't looking good. But now, with web apps and web-driven apps, there seems to be a new creativity out there, and a bunch of new small software developers.

DrunkenBlog: Inside Ranchero with Brent and Sheila Simmons: "One of the joys of running your own business is that you can tell the hypothetical MBAs to hypothetically get lost." Love that quote.

# Mar 14, 2005

If you still don't get delicious, check Jon Udell's screencast: Jon Udell: language evolution in del.icio.us

# Mar 14, 2005

Underused IA tools

Us IA's have a lot of tools at our disposal (personas, sitemaps, task analysis, ...), most of them taken and adapted from other disciplines. But I have the feeling we're somehow selective in which tools we appropriate. Here are some tools that we don't seem to use much, even though they can be extremely useful.

Content testing. One of the best talks I saw at the IASummit was Testing Translations: Content, Images, and Perception by Mark Nolan. He explained how they tested content. And I realized: too often we develop IA's without spending a LOT of time on the content itself. The presentation was an eye opener: the content was tested in detail, and many lessons were learned. Content testing lets users not just FIND content but then use it, and tests for understanding and such. Be honest: have you ever done focussed content testing?

Object models. I don't mean detailed, programmer-like object models, but high level object models that help you think through certain domains.

Business process analysis. I really don't understand why IA's don't talk more about business processes. For people who work in enterprise settings, understanding them and finding ways to support them with IA is crucial.

What underutilized methods have I missed?

# Mar 14, 2005

Lou is looking for The Journal of IA Failures

# Mar 14, 2005

peterme.com: Using Document Genres - Good and Bad: good thoughts on using genre versus roles to let people self-select information.

# Mar 14, 2005

LoQUo is a Spanish Craigslist clone - seems to be based in Barcelona. As opposed to the Spanish Barcelona Craigslist (which has exactly 9 rooms/flats/.. for rent/sale/...), it IS quite active.

# Mar 14, 2005

I'm dissapointed with Blogger. I don't expect much from a free service, but I do expect it to work. It gives me a "004 dk.eos.net.FtpError: Login incorrect. " error when I try to publish (to Blogspot), and the FTP instructions are not particularly helpful (which is why I resigned to using Blogspot in the first place). Agh.

# Mar 13, 2005

First Swahili office suite released in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania - Wikinews

First Swahili office suite released in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania - Wikinews
The suite contains more than 99% of the strings in Swahili. The ones that are left in English (less than 100 strings out of 18,000) will be worked out in the next release.

# Mar 10, 2005

Tagging is great. Check out the growing sharing of love at Mefeedia.

# Mar 7, 2005

Peter Morville is kicking butt in a talk about folksonomies. I love folksonomy, but he makes good points and makes them very well. Blog it, Peter! A quote: "what happens with leaves that are raked together? They rot. And become food. For trees. Which then live long and useful lives."

# Mar 5, 2005