I'm waiting in Newark airport for a connecting flight to Montreal, where I'll spend some time with Maria and be at the IA Summit - maybe the friendliest conference around. I'll be talking with Liv and Jorge about global IA, and basically filling my IA brain for the next year.

David Wienberger on Taxonomies and Tags. One thing many people fail to see, I think, are good ways to combine the strengths of various system. I'm working on an experiment with faceted tagging (better than facetious), so we'll see how that turns out :)

Bloggers Add Moving Images to Their Musings: a NYT article about videobloggers. It even mentions Mefeedia.com, my fun little crazy side project.

I am subscribed to the feed with all new tags added to Mefeedia. Sometimes I just have to check it out: http://mefeedia.com/tags/rocktapus/

Google Movies. Yet Another Category Killer. from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent: "The big decision, from a content producer's point of view, is not whether aggregation is the way forward, but where in the aggregation chain to put yourself. "

Second p0st: Selecting intersecting sets from MySQL: how do do tagging in SQL. Phil really helped me out, and the comments there are adding to the conversation.

I'm looking for advice on finding a place in Barcelona to stay for 2 months. It doesn't have to be big. It'd be nice if it had internet. And be in an interesting part of town. What parts of town should I be looking at?

Textdrive seems an interesting hosting service. They have plans for life! For bloggers.

Sanyo Xacti J4: Digital Photography Review

Sanyo Xacti J4: Digital Photography Review: seems like a pretty good videoblogging camera: gets mp4, you can zoom while filming, ....

Implementing a Rating-Based Item-to-Item Recommender System in PHP/SQL: reminder to self for mefeedia.

Collecting some references (I'm a javascript beginner who wants to make a simple form) around XMLHttpRequest and PHP.

Using the XML HTTP Request object

XMLHttpRequest, REST and the Rich User Experience : Paul James

A French article that looks like a good start.

Russell Beattie Notebook - Six Apart Price Pool? Russel wonders how much Six Apart will sell out for. That's assuming they plan to sell out anytime soon.

The brilliance of Typepad has always seemed to me that people are storing their personal life there, in a form that's not easy to take out and move somewhere else. Who wants the blog they've put their souls in for years to dissapear? A lot of money to be made.

The bigger lesson seems to be, for me, that it's all about the community and the data. Technology is easy to replace or copy. Lock-in isn't. Community takes years to build, and that's what big companies pay for. Look at Craigslist - easy technology to copy, but Craigslist isn't technology. It's community and data where the value lies.

Audioblogging 2.0. Via Lucas Gonze. In short: the A-bloggers are getting the story about who "invented" podcasting wrong. Come one A-bloggers. Help out the little guy here.

Information architecture exercises

I am preparing some information architecture workshops, and I'm collecting various types of exercises. I've managed to identify some general rules for developing workshop exercises as well:

• Involve food items. Snacks, preferably. People get hungry in these workshops.
• Make it fun.
• Loosen people up at first.

A lot of exercises can consist of trying out information architecture research techniques. There are of course the classics: card sorting (open or closed), doing contextual interviews, .... Jess McMullin suggested "sorting buttons (the clothing kind), or other materials with facets. (buttons have lots of obvious facets: size, shape, color, material, texture, formality, etc. and you can buy assorted bags of them at many thrift shops)." Jess also suggested "Get Veer or another stock photo print catalog, cut the pictures out, and sort them (more facets)". Jess also mentioned "Play a 20 questions guessing game about a favorite movie (thanks to Rashmi Sinha for this one, from the 2003 IA Institute preconference)". This is a great technique for developing facets, also mentioned to me by Margareth Hanley. The user has to guess which thing you're thinking about in 20 questions, and you only answer yes or no. From this, you can try to determine facets that matter to the user. Anna mentioned: "I had my students Interactive Media make groups of 4/5 and take out all their cards from their wallet and put them together: creditcards, membercards, discountcards etc. and categorize them. Then I brought up the subject of overlap; would it be better to have every piece in a category of its own, or would it be ok to find the same card under different categories? For instance NS-daluren (railways) gives both entrance and discount. This way they gained more insight in the matter than when I had tried to explain." Jason Pryslak said that "Lou does a popular excercise at his seminar where he gives everyone a Little Debbie snack and asks them to describe from the perspective of a marketer and a product manager. " Alfred Werner suggested "How about a word association game to loosen everyone up? You start by saying a word and each person in the room does an association with the previous word." I have thaught before, and exercises to loosen people up are generally superuseful. Alfred also wrote: "Bring some boxes with balls, pieces of cloth, magazine clippings, jacks, and other random stuff and have people put them into piles and then justify their sorting criteria." This might help understand people that many people categorize things differently. A good way to loosen things up (if needed) is to introduce an IA buzzword bingo game, like the business bingo card. More IA-related games: Wordmenu. Finally, maybe Mapping Springfield is an Information Architecture exercise, too. Please leave more ideas in the comments. I'll add them to this list.

wixonomy is a combination of a wiki and a taxonomy: a wiki where anyone can edit the taxonomy.

Silent Eloquence: Languages or Dialects?: "When I tell people that my mother tongue is Malayalam, first they look at me like I am playing a tongue-twister game and then a good % of them follow up with " Oh, so that is an Indian dialect". And I ever so patiently try to explain that Malayalam is not a "dialect", it is a "language" on its own. Regardless of whether they nod in agreement after or without further discussion, a nagging thought always lingers in my mind whether they really agree that my beloved Malayalam is a language and not just a dialect."

Jon Udell talks about screencasts today, and is the screencast pioneer. On Mefeedia (video aggragator), there's a screencast tag collecting screencasts: http://mefeedia.com/tags/screencast/

I have a MySQL database optimization job: I need some tables optimized and some queries written. I have a short spec explaining things in detail that I'll send to you. I can pay a small amount of $. Get in touch at peter van dijck (no spaces) at gmail... and I'll send you the spec. It's for Mefeedia.com

I am looking for someone to have an ongoing relationship with- little jobs. I write decent specs, but often we need to discuss requirements before implementing. If you're a "just tell me what to do" kind of guy, don't bother. If you're a "yeah, but is that good for the user?" kind of guy, or "here's a simpler way that'll scale much better", I want to talk to you.

fac.etio.us: little babysteps in the direction of faceted browsing of tags.

� Podcasting: Zero to 3075 in six months (much, much faster ramp up than blogs). Vlogging is taking slower, basically going to about 200 vlogs (rough estimate) in a year. We're still under the radar of most people. That might be because we don't have the famous cheerleaders podcasting has, or because there are a few more technical obstacles to overcome for videoblogging, and we've yet to hit that tipping point.

Micro Persuasion: Google Gets Away With What Microsoft Couldn't: "Google today launched a new version of its toolbar that employs a new feature called Autolink that turns non-linked content on Web sites into hotlinks back to Google properties and other sites."

Back off Google. This is eeevil territory. How long did that take he?

All I can say is: I hope they remove this soon. JustdDon't go there. I can't believe they would be this stupid, but obviously they are.

Ryanne's Video Blog: a video entry about the buster controversy: where a bunny is being censored because they mention same sex couples.

Another old movie, this one from early 2004. Jay talking about videoblogging (Quicktime, 38M).

This is an old movie - the first one I ever edited. It's Jay pre-videoblogging, talking about ways to connect. Jay in 2003. (Quicktime, 7M)

I went to see The Gates in NYC central park. I saw so many people making video with small digital cameras, I wish they were all vloggers. This is my video (Quicktime, 10M):

My own private TechTV on Flickr - Photo Sharing!: Eric Rice's audioblog.com is getting bigger. Good stuff.

Apple doesn't get tags

http://mefeedia.com/tags/gates/: this week Christo's crazy art project "the gates" is in central park. Videobloggers are filming it (let's be honest, EVERYONE I saw there was filming it) and movies are gathered in mefeedia around the 'gates' tag.

Vloggercon: Tools. (Quicktime) I was in this session. The cool thing with these vlogging tools is that, no matter how hard the big $$ companies try, all the really cool tools are being developed by us kids in the basement.

Vloggercon: Content is king. (Quicktime) "Discussion leaders: Steve Garfield, Mica Scalin, Ryanne Hodson, Chris Weagel, Jay Dedman Creating and posting videos is the key."

Vloggercon: sustainability (Quicktime) Just another word for making money? Or more? I'm linking to these videos here so they can be tagged, sliced and diced in Mefeedia.

Vloggercon Masses Media (Quicktime) Discussion with Eli Chapman.

Vloggercon opening sessions. (Quicktime movie) The start of vloggercon.

Tagsurf: discussion software ("forum") that uses tags instead of threads. Interesting experiment.

Alright, computer science majors, help needed:

A simple clustering algorythm; objects have tags assigned to them. How do I figure out which tags are "relate", in other words, if given a tag, which other tags have been used to tag the same movies?

It needs to be efficient in MySQL, and the tables look like this:

objects (id, ...)
tags2objects (tagid, objectid)
tags (id, ...)

(1.2M Quicktime). I was trying to compare two cameras by filming simultaneously and then editing it together, but having different movie formats in my Vegas editing program really messed up the rendering: it ended up taking hours and hours. So I ended up with this little piece of crappy movie that doesn't really let you compare the quality of the two cameras very much. Right.

The cameras I was comparing are the Mustek DV 4000 ($120) and the Canon Powershot SD 100 ($190 at Amazon).

The Canon is much better for videoblogging: better picture, better sound, and much better build quality. It will last a lot longer, and is not that much more expensive either. Disadvantages of the Canon: you can only film for about 30 secs on max resolution, a few minutes on the mid resolution (which is what I always use). It doesn't adjust light to changing conditions, so if you move to a dark hallway while filming things come out very dark.

The Mustek:

The Canon:

Google Maps is really, really impressive. Too bad it seems to be US only.

(Quicktime, 1.5M) I was trying to compare two cameras, but when I started editing it things went wrong, rendering two different formats in one movie took hours, and I ended up with this useless crap. Oh well :)

(11M, Quicktime). We were walking and talking about walking.

Since I can't get my external harddrives to work correctly with my laptop, I am using a different backup method now: FTP. I use SyncBack (free) to set up daily backups to a webserver I run. I'll report back about how well this works. So far so good, I've started backing stuff up.

I'm quite happy using OpenOffice, except for its presentation program. Powerpoint is just so much better. So I want to buy Powerpoint. It's 200 US$, can I get it somewhere cheaper? It seems such a drag to buy Powerpoint, I just want to get the key and pay. Microsoft has a free trial, but they send a CD - you can't download it! I don't want to wait for a CD! It's already installed on my Dell laptop, I just want the product key.

I have 50 Gmail invites so if you want one just leave a comment. It won't show up straight away (moderation), but I'll get it.

Something I have learned: in the USA, if you get an overdraft notice or something, just call your bank and ask them to remove the penalty charge, and they'll almost ALWAYS remove it. Just ask, and give a reason they can enter in their computer system, like "I was out of the country" or something. It almost always seems to work.

My Hoboken vlogtour: I walked around Hoboken and gave a tour. Click the animated gif to see the movie (Quicktime, 83M)

Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease �

I still have the same problem with my harddrive. I would pay someone to tell me how to fix this.

Basically, I have 2 external firewire harddrives, and they work fine on one compute, but with my laptop (using a firewire card), they 'break' if I write more than a few MEgs to them (like in a backup). It happens again and again. I have SP2 installed, which is supposed to fix the problem. More details in the link. I would really love some help! I depend on my laptop and I need to back up my files, and dragging them in one by one just doesn't cut it.

A really good and easy guide on which free software to use to get your Windows machine protected: 2BrightSparks.com | Resources | Safe Computing

Ask Jeeves is apparently buying Bloglines. Let's hope they don't fuck it up - I use Bloglines ALL the time, and I'd hate having to go somewhere else.

Lucas Gonze found a bug in Google.

Jakob wrote Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain (by Jakob Lodwick): "If I could tag my tags, then I would tag the word "Victoria" with "female".

The article is brilliantly illustrated, check it out.

More on i18n folksonomies: ButtUgly
And that means that tags will become "language polluted." Take a look at the Technorati tag for "Macintosh", for example. Many of the blog entries are in Japanese. If you look at Orkut, many of the parts of it suddenly became "owned" by Brasilians, which essentially drove away English speakers."

I disagree: the internet didn't become language-polluted. What will happen is that tag "namespaces" will develop, somewhat mirroring languages, but also other social groups like interest groups, specialist communities, ... All these will develop their own tagspaces.

See also my post Folksonomies in Japanese.

folksonomy | taxonomy | i18n | metadata | taxonomy