Mapping business: Worthwhile: Pecking orders and network orders: "Take the org chart. Treat it not in the usual way as a network of people but as a network of positions. Look at how many people report in to each position. Diagram it. The picture that emerges looks little like a neat hierarchy in which the lower you go, the more leaves there are on the tree. Instead, the org chart now looks like a diagram of self-organizing networks: A handful of hugely linked nodes and a whole bunch of ones with just a few links. Further, most of the biggest clusters belong to mid-range positions. "It's a diamond, not a pyramid" says Jeff."

I'm in the middle of another comment spam attack (which means I delete a few hundred spams, a few minutes later I have 20 more comment spams), so I installed Kitten's Spaminator, which should automatically delete spam. Let's see how it works. I couldn't find a Wordpress setting that lets you temporarily just stop commenting over all the site.

The magic that makes Google tick - ZDNet UK Insight: "Google's vice-president of engineering was in London this week to talk to potential recruits about just what lies behind that search page."

At the end of the article: "One big area of complaints for Google is connected to the growing prominence of commercial search results -- in particular price comparison engines and e-commerce sites. Hölzle is quick to defend Google's performance "on every metric", but admits there is a problem with the Web getting, as he puts it, "more commercial". Even three years ago, he said, the Web had much more of a grass roots feeling to it. "We have thought of having a button saying 'give me less commercial results'," but the company has shied away from implementing this yet."

I've noticed Google getting really bad results for commercially contested searches. The ads are often more relevant. That's bad, and they should fix it. They have a lot of goodwill, but it doesn't last forever.

I have a new What is category, which is, if I may say so myself, looking promising.

Using search log analysis to divine emerging stories

What is a Weighted List?

"1005 comments deleted." With 2 clicks. Fuck those comment spammers. Bring it on.

Translating categories, translating terms

My series of posts on international information architecture:

1. Translating taxonomies and categories
2. Translating categories, translating terms (this post)
3. Translating the Dewey Decimal Classification system
4. Designing the relationship between content and locales
5. Emergent i18n effects in folksonomies
6. The Maori versus Dewey, and why limiting access can be culturally appropriate.

In the previous post, I talked about the various types of problems with translating categories:

1. Culture-specificity: not all categories exist in all cultures. For example: "chowder" soup is a typical american category.
2. Semantic overlap: a lot of categories don't mean exactly the same in different languages. "Fille" (French) and "girl" (English) don't mean 100% the same.
3. Differences in granularity: Germans don’t have a word for skidding, but they do have two words, Rutschen and Schleudern, for skidding forwards and skidding sideways.

I'd like to explore those problems a bit further today, and talk about the seemingly different positions on this in the library science world. First, a lot of work on translating terms has been done by the thesaurus people. The International Standard Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri - ISO 5964, 1985 (and paralleled in the British Standard BS 6723, 1985) talks about the problems I mentioned above. (You can buy the standard for a few 100$.) In the UK, they are in the process of revising the two BS Standards on mono- and multi-lingual thesauri as one work under the title Structured vocabularies. They regard translating thesauri, in a way, as a special case of mapping thesauri. Here are some examples of translation problems they address: English: clocks French: horloge et pendule En French, you need two words to include the different types of clocks that the English word "clocks" describes. French hierarchy: Betail > gros betail > boeuf English hierarchy: livestock > --- > cattle In other words, English doesn't have a category for "gros betail" (which means something like large livestock). Another example: German hierarchy: Gastropode > Schnecke > Gehauseschnecke English hierarchy: Gasropods > --- > snails I will talk more about their excellent work in future posts. But what matters for today's post is that the library science folks are well aware of the problems with translating categories. Meanwhile, I was emailing with David Weinberger and he mentioned how the people of the Dewey Decimal Classification System explained him that it is based on a "concept tree" and therefore can be easily translated. It seems like the Dewey people believe that, because of the fact that they created a "concept tree", that translation is just an implementation detail. And indeed, Dewey has been translated into over 30 languages. So my question is: are these two separate movements in the library science world? Do they know of each others' work? My second question is: do Dewey translators have the kinds of translations problems spelled out in my last post? If not, is it because Dewey has been carefully constructed as a concept list? Or is it for some other reason? I am having a hard time finding stuff about this on the web, so pointers related to Dewey translation are welcome. Next, let's look a bit at how different types of categories may pose different translation challenges. Top level categories. Somehow, I just don't think "About Us", "Products & Services" or "News" would be hard to translate into any popular language. What is different about these categories? Basic level categories. "Cat" is a basic-level category, whereas "feline" isn't. Are basic-level categories easier to translate? You'd think that they would. Ad-hoc categories. An as-hoc category is something like: "Things you have eaten today", or "Books other people have also bought when looking at this book". It's a category that is created at the moment of using it (something like that). I would expect these would be easy to translate. Ambiguity: the strongest predictor of how easy a category is to translate, is, as far as I've figured it out, how easy it was to create in the first place. In other words, if you have to do user research and such to create a category, you'll have to put in some work to translate it as well. And it seems that, the more ambigous the category is (the more discussion possible about what goes in it and what doesn't), the more work it is to create it. Thoughts?

A good interview with Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress.

MSN Spaces(Microsofts' just launched blogging service) seems to have a signup bug: I sign up, and then I get the same "Get started" page again?

If you don't have wireless at home yet, you can now get a Netgear MR814 802.11b Wireless 4-Port Cable/DSL Router at Amazon for, after rebates, US$7.

Nick Finck follows up on my A-Z post: "The qualitative data we are seeing from the current Annual Readership Survey thus far show that the A-Z Index is the third most used facet on the site with the topic map being first and, of course, the internal search engine being second. Quantitative data analysis shows that while the topic map is the most used facet, the category index is the second most used and the A-Z index is the third most used facet."

"Do We" Really Know Dewey?. a brilliant explanation of the Dewey system, for kids.

Meet Melvil:

CBC News - Viewpoint: Blair Shewchuk: "Some people were calling the 2006 Winter Games the Torino Olympics. Others opted for the Turin Olympics."

Even something seemingly uncontroversial like city names can cause many translation problems.

What is "relay translation? The translation of a text in one language into another language via a third language. For example, translate a Dutch text first into English, then into Hindi.

GTH - Glossary-guide for Translating Husserl: "a multilingual guide for translating the works of Edmund Husserl."

A glossary is often crucial in translating texts with a lot of specialized language. How do you translate "About Us", for example? You better agree on something, or you'll end up with lots of different translations throughout your website.

How do you translate the word of god?: "The translation of Scripture should faithfully reflect the Word of God in the original human languages. It must be listened to in its time-conditioned, at times even inelegant, mode of human expression without "correction" or "improvement" in the service of modern sensitivities."

I'm getting hit with 1000s of comment spam, but I figured out an even faster way to delete them all in Wordpress. Go to Edit>comments. Do a search for whatever word is in them ("gambling"), the click "mass edit mode", scroll down, click "Select all checkboxes" (this might take a few seconds), then click delete all checked. Rock. All basic Wordpress install, no plugins needed, and you can delete 1000s of spams in a few seconds like this.

I turned on comment approval for a while. Every comment has to be approved now.

Joho the Blog: Berkman Lunch: National Health Information Infrastructure: "Alan Goldberg of Goulston & Storrs (and HealthLawyer) is giving a Tuesday lunchtime talk on the national health information infrastructure.

He says it's a big deal: Medicare has 1 million providers who are involved in 1 billion claims per year. NHII crosses political boundaries; everyone from Bush to Hillary, from Ted to Newt, all support having an infrastructure that enables electronic record sharing. The NHII will require technologies, standards, systems, values, applications, and laws."

Standards are the invisible structure that keeps society running, and the people creating the standards are often just as invisible. It's all messy, political and hard work, just like information architecture.

Which PHP libraries do you use?

A Look at "Guided Navigation" for Enterprise Search -- Featured Product -- CMS Watch: A good article on Endeca's "guided navigation" (their marketing term for using a faceted classification system).

"Indeed, the success of multifaceted taxonomies in the commerce space has raised substantial expectations that similar clarity could be brought to bear on enterprise content repositories. It turns out, of course, that enterprise content is not so neatly structured."

AIFIA | IA Progress Grants: "Two grants will be awarded in February, 2005. Applicants must be AIfIA members. Each grant is for US$1000, with $500 awarded upon project initiation and $500 awarded upon completion. [...] Applications should propose work that has the potential to benefit information architecture practioners in a practical way. This includes, for example, original research, a new synthesis of important existing research, or development of an innovative new technique."

Staying up to date with IA

Here is my list of resources to stay up to date if you are into information architecture. I haven't included all the general UX lists, these are fairly specific for ia, metadata and search and such. Add your own to the comments and I'll add them to this list. I am especially trying to include not-well-known but useful resources. Must have's: don't miss these 2:

• Sigia-L
• AIfIA Members

Mailing lists for discussion:

• Sigia-L: the original IA list, and still good, although some people unsibscribed because of occasional noise and nastyness. I still find it very valuable.
• AIfIA Members: members only list similar to Sigia-L, but definitely worth the AIfIA subscription fee.
• IA-CMS: low volume, focused on IA for CMS.
• Faceted classification list. Active on and off.
• Searchloggers: low volume but specialized.

Newsletters:

• Gavilan Research metadata newsletter. Example: September 2004.
• The Rockley Bulletin. Example.
• AIfIA announce: announcements around AIfIA.
• Finders list at findability.org. Not many posts yet, but I included it because it is totally on topic here.
• New thinking newsletter, by Gerry McGovern. Example.
• (Sorry about the plug.) My own announcements list.

Blogs and RSS feeds. I only included blogs that are almost only about IA, or the list would be endless. I didn't include any of the numerous library blogs.

• IASlash: IA blog. RSS
• Bloug: Lou Rosenfelds blog. RSS
• PeterMorville's blog. No known RSS feed.
• Searchtools blog. Ugly but useful.
• IAWiki Recent changes: Keep track of what's new on the IA wiki. RSS

Other languages.

• Aifia runs IA mailing lists in Spanish and some other languages. Members only.

Want more? More mailing lists and newsletters on the IAWiki (most of the ones here are also there, but not all).

iaslash A-Z Indexes for Web Sites: Usage and Implementation

iaslash A-Z Indexes for Web Sites: Usage and Implementation. IASlash asks why IA's don't implement more A-Z indexes, and the answer seems to be that it is a specialized skill, and we're not used to it.

Maybe the answer is really much simpler. A-Z indexes are particularly effective for known item searching (when you know what you're looking for and what it's called). But there is a technology that is much cheaper to implement and also very effective for known-item searching. It's called a search engine.

For an example of an A-Z index on the web, check the BBC A-Z index. Notice the value it ads by having human editors choose terms (like "Accidents") and grouping BBC sites and pages underneath those (like "First Aid"). This way they help users with the paraphrase problem. It's definite added value, but similar added value can be used in a search engine by proposing additional search terms to users and using best bets.

Reducing the Cost of Translation through Reuse. A decent talk by Ann Rockly. You can just sign up (use any email address, no confirmation required) and watch the talk. There is some marketing stuff at the beginning and the end of the talk, you can skip that by jumping to "Speaker 2" in the index dropdown. (Thanks to Liv.)

Ann talks about the translation lifecycle and cost, and her approach to a unified content strategy. The approach of using reusable "content objects" (small bits of content, like a paragraph, that only have to be created (and translated!) once) sounds like a good fit for fairly structured content (press releases, product info), but less of a good fit for fairly unstructured content. Any experiences with an approach like this?

Searching for a cheap VoIP telephone service

I am looking to get a phone number. I spend time in Belgium, New York, and sometimes in other countries in Europe, so a VoIP number I can take with me would be good. I also want to be able to receive faxes. I already have Skype, so I can use that for outgoing calls, if needed, so I don't need unlimited outgoing calls. I mainly need incoming cals. It should of course have voicemail. Finally, I'm working for myself now, and it should be affordable.

1. BroadVoice 20$, unlimited free calling to Belgium, US, Canada and a bunch of other countries. Or, for $9.95 unlimited calls within NY state only.
2. Lingo is similar: $19.95 for unlimited calls with anyone in Canada, the US and western Europe. The basic plan is $15 and gives you 500 worldwide minutes.
3. Sunrocket: for 25$ you get unlimited US calls and free equipment.
4. Vonage is $24 for the unlimited plan (US and Canada only), $15 for the basic plan (500 minutes in US or Canada). It doesn't include Western Europe, so for me, that's bad.
5. A regular landline in NYC. How much would that be?
6. Get an extra line on my girlfriend's cellhpone. 10$

Can I get fax service with any of these? Experiences? Note that charges are always more than you expect in the US. Broadvoice has a good table explaining other charges. The Broadvoice service ends up being $312 a year, or 26$ a month, not $20.

Startup's Offer Lowers the VOIP Price Floor Still Further: "A voice over IP startup whose founders hail from MCI has come up with a new consumer-scale calling package that brings the monthly unlimited charge down to $16.58 if subscribers sign up for a year."

If you want a Gmail invite (I have 3), add a comment. Invites go to the first three commenters. Don't forget to leave your email address.

Some stats - it's getting to be the end of the year after all. Russel Beatie started it.

On the poorbuthappy.com domain, which serves both my Colombia site and this weblog (and some other, less popular stuff like my new India site), during the last month, I got an average of 3800 visits a day, viewing 20,000 pages (and an average of 3 hits per page). I served 15 Gigs over the month, half a gig a day. My host has limitations (no mod_rewrite on subdomains) ,but for 5 bucks a month, who am I to complain? And service is decent. The Google ads on the Colombia site make me about 200$ a month, so that's pretty nice.

There were 57056 404 pages (I should do something about that). My RSS feeds gets 25,000 hits a month, about 900 a day. The top 3 entry pages are my RSS feed, my Colombia homepage and the homepage of this blog.

Here's a view on how my traffic has been evolving in 2004. There's a strange peak in hits this month that isn't reflected in pageviews or visitors, so that's probably some redesign I did that I already forgot about, adding more css files or pictures or something.

About 30,000 people come from Google searches, 1500 click through from Bloglines a month.

Interesting search queries: sorry everybody (my site is the 10th result on Google). I pointed to the sorry everybody website. 278 people came through that Google result page. How to make a documentary is still going strong - I'm the second result with a post from january. I almost feel a responsibility there, so I decided to add some navigation within that post to help people find more related stuff.

Days to Christmas: 25 Is your site ready? Those 37 signal guys sure know how to market themselves! This reminds me of an interview I did last year with a guy who was starting a specialized usability consultancy company (specialized in travel sites). His marketing plan was to release some reports for free. 37 signals' approach is just so much more effective.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Wireless Cities: "If cities evolve, what will shape their evolution over the next few decades? Salon has an interesting article today about the use of wireless technologies as the drivers for urban change."

Good question. Cities are slow changers though. European cities centers are still shaped around the same streets they were 500 years ago.

Since I am starting a new discussion site, I have to seed it. There should always be some new content, to pull people in. Until there is enough conversation going on (this might take 6 months), I have to put a lot of writing work in it. This is one reason to only host community sites about topics you're passionate about. Drupal luckily lets you schedule future posts, so I just uploaded a few hundred pictures to my new India community site, and most of them are scheduled to slowly start appearing over the next 6 months. Yey for Drupal.

Wikinews launches. An interesting experiment.

Day 6: conclusions

1. Six days with the Akshaya project: day 1: overview
2. Day 2: technology
3. Day 3: entrepreneurs
4. Day 4: promotion
5. Day 5: training
6. Day 6: conclusions

In the past 5 days, I have tried to describe the project, mostly from a tactical level: how did they do things? I didn't speak much with the strategic people, and I hardly spoke to any users. Today, I'll talk a little bit about possible conclusions and lessons.