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?"

vaginavlog: SAY IT LOUD, SAY IT PROUD

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.

Example (with reusable code) of the Fade Anything Technique

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

Lou is looking for The Journal of IA Failures

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

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.

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.

The Community Engine Blog: IBM's Intranet and Folksonomy

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.

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

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."

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.