E-BUSINESS IN THE ENTERPRISE - The mysteries of flexible software: "A software application is nothing more than a mega-squadron of numbers, flying through lots and lots of functions (also made of numbers) in close formation. A gigantic, high speed display of numerical acrobatics. Smell the kerosene.
Given that it is all just numbers, the split between numbers that are easy to change and those that are not, is something that is under our control. Indeed, the very idea that there are numbers which can easily be changed and numbers which cannot be easily changed, is an engineering invention. It is *us* - not the machine - that creates that distinction. We write programs in things called 'computer languages' and we distill out the numbers we need with things called 'compilers'. The rest of the numbers, we put into containers with names like 'databases' and 'XML' and 'configuration files' and 'registries' and so on.
The latter type of number is one we can change relatively easily. The former we cannot, due to rules of the game that we, not the machine, impose.
Given that the phrase 'code change' is almost synonymous with 'cost' we need to think very carefully about parameterization during software design. We need to get our programmers engaged with the idea."
Donna writes about an interesting observation we can all recognize: 'and then' IA: "But something that I have noticed in working with large, primarily hierarchical sites is a very two-layered structure. Sometimes I call this 'and then' IA. What happens is, when people look for information they say 'first I go here, then here' 'AND THEN' I do blah. So, the first step (however many clicks it is) is the prelude to the place that they really want to be."
Electronics Design Chain Magazine: Inside the Apple iPod Design Triumph: so consumer products like that are design with a "design chain": a chain of companies that implement different parts.
The Chronicle: Daily news: 04/09/2004 -- 01: "Google, the popular search-engine company, has teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 16 other universities around the world to provide a way to search the institutions' collections of scholarly papers, according to university officials."
Home - AudioBerkman: "AudioBerkman offers listeners the chance to overhear views on some of the most pressing issues related to Internet law and technology. Tune in through May 2004 for our latest productions!"
gumstix - all things small: "test the size, speed, and ultra-low power consumption of the gumxtix boards in our development platform, the waysmall computer." Nice name - the Waysmall computer.
Hey Crackhead Made me laugh.
Why the Amish might like blogs
I like the way Joi's Moblog2 page gives a bunch of small pictures on one page. It seems to work better than only looking at each picture individually... Maybe an idea for videoblogging?
If you're interested in ethnography and design and business, say hi on the Ethno Cafe.
Some excellent comments on my nested facets posts, describing how this kind of nesting can be better looked at as the "scope" of a facet. I like the "scope" approach. It conflicts with topicmaps' understanding of scope somewhat, but I think that's ok. It's still better than "nested facets".
My friend Jay just posted his first videoblog (and blog altogether) entry! Check it out! Momentshowing.net
I wouldn't write this article the same way anymore, but it sure is a good title: Poorbuthappy : An easy and short introduction to everything.
Chris McEvoy follows up on my PhotoStory post: "Here are a couple of more papers about managing photos:
Active Photos (HP Labs - Mar 04) In this paper we describe an investigation into linkages to multimedia content from individual items in photographs and other printed images. We describe prototypes for authoring and playing such "active photos", and give the results of informal trials. We conclude with lessons learned and next steps.
PhotoTOC: Automatic Clustering for Browsing Personal Photographs (MS Research - Dec 03) This paper presents Photo Table Of Contents (PhotoTOC), a system that helps users find digital photographs in their own collection of photographs. PhotoTOC is a browsing user interface that uses an overview+detail design. The detail view is a temporally ordered list of all of the user's photographs. The overview of the user's collection is automatically generated by an image clustering algorithm, which clusters on the creation time and the color of the photographs. PhotoTOC was tested on users' own photographs against three other browsers. Searching for images with PhotoTOC was subjectively rated easier than all of the other browsers. This result shows that automatic organization of personal photographs facilitates efficient and satisfying search."
For some reason, this comment triggered my blacklist. I have no idea why, anyone?
This domain finally broke through the 100.000 visitors barrier a month (332664 pages, 850776 files, 10 Gigs) in March :)
O'Reilly Network: Why MySQL grew so fast (news from the 2004 MySQL Users Conference) [Apr. 22, 2004] Very good article.
(In short: it looks like Microsoft removed Quicktime support from a social photo sharing tool and thereby crucially handicapped the tool because the exported files are now too large to share. Too bad.)
Microsoft's PhotoStory is a great tool to take a bunch of pictures, put tem in a sequence, narrate your personal stories and export. It is based on some solid research: PhotoStory: Preserving Emotion in Digital Photo Sharing. Internal paper. (Vronay, D., Farnham, S., Davis, J. (2001)), and is one of the few pieces of software that really tries to address some of the sharing challenges with digital pictures.
But, and this is a major but: the files it creates are too large, which makes it really hard to share stories (hard to email a 5 Meg or 20 Meg file). From my experience with optimizing video and pictures, it really should be able to optimize the end result a lot more. It's crucial: I payed for Photostory in order to share stories with my family in Belgium, but the files are too large to email. It defeats the purpose.
Now, and this is where it gets interesting, the paper (see above) mentions exporting as Quicktime: "The advantages PhotoStory offers come at a download size that is not much larger than the photos themselves. Unlike a video, which needs every frame rendered in the file, QuickTime can produce the movie using a single frame for each image, plus a small number of additional bytes for specifying the visual effects and motion."
Photostory does not allow you to export Quicktime. It only exports Microsoft Media Player files. And, as far as I can tell, the files it exports are way too large for what's in there.
So, assuming Quicktime could indeed produce files a lot smaller than WMP, Photostory, a tool for sharing emotional stories through pictures, has been seriously handicapped in its purpose by Microsoft when they removed Quicktime support. I'm annoyed because I want to use this!
InfoDesign: Understanding by Design | Special on Peter Van Dijck My gf likes the picture :)
Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent: Ice and Rock: "Whilst I failed terribly to blog from the desert, the serious hardcore continue to do well. Take Ben Saunders of the the Serco Transarctic Expedition. He's blogging nightly from the Arctic, and it's great great stuff. Human Edge Tech expedition software suppliers are my new heroes."
10 Classics from Cognitive Science: "The editorial board of Cognitive Science has identified several classic articles that appeared in our journal over the last couple of decades." Yum.
Nested facets
A structural element of classification systems that I have never seen discussed explicitly has been hovering in my mind for years, and suddenly became kinda clear to me, so I'm writing this down ;) Sometimes really simple things can take a long time to sink in with me.
Many times, you'll have an overall taxonomy (say, "products") (whatever structure it has, faceted or not), and then, once you reach a certain point within that taxonomy (say, "digital cameras"), you suddenly are offered additional taxonomies to refine your choice (say, "lens type"). These additional taxonomies aren't just nodes within the higher taxonomy, they are additional facets, NOT part of the taxonomy you were browsing so far.
Try browsing epinions.com as an example, or have a look at this diagram:
These kind of nested facets are clearly being used and useful in real life, but I haven't seen their structural or other properties being discussed explicitly anywhere. They are not part of XFML, for example, nor are they part of Travis' Facetmap, afaik.
Maybe they are too obvious to be discussed, but some awareness of the existence and usefulness of nested facets (I'll just call them that, seems to work) would mean there would be more chance of them being built into the standards and tools that define the restrictions within which we often work. So who has worked with nested facets? Any tools that explicitly support them? Any comments on their properties?
- What can I do with an anthropology degree?: "Get as much experience as you can as an undergraduate."
Anthropology majors can capitalize on the growing global marketplace: "Archaeological digs, exciting though they may be, don't exactly qualify as a family-friendly job. Museum work, by all accounts, is tough to come by. And you're not particularly inclined to become a "lifer" on campus, chasing a Ph.D and an academic post.
[...]
"The bachelor's degree, however, does provide suitable background for many different kinds of entry-level jobs, such as research assistant, administrative aide, or management and sales trainee."
- What can an anthropology degree do for you?: "Cultural anthropologists are equipped to work in a variety of fields. In the business world, they can be found in public relations and advertising positions. In the academic world, cultural anthropologists can work as museum educators. Cultural anthropologists with an emphasis on medical anthropology also find jobs in community health. "
- Finding a job in anthropology.
...
I am very impressed with the HP SpeechBot search engine. It searches audio and video content, but get this: it turns audio into text (transcripts based on speech recognition) and searches those transcripts.
"hp has indexed over 10,000 hours of content that you can search." Shows are updated daily. The design of the result is also quite brilliant:
Here's a thought I had yesterday on the train. Since video is hard to search (though there are many projects: Webseek at Colombia University, Altavista video search, SingingFish, Virage, Compaq's Speechbot, ...), classification may become more important with video than with the text-web.
Google's image search (and most video search technologies) search on the text surrounding the video/image.
So here's another idea: if I can link within a videostream (discussed here earlier), I can then annotate and make that content available to Google. So maybe my classification idea sucks - searchability may come from discussing video, not from classifying video. Discussing is, after all, more natural than classifying.
Just wanted to point out that my GuideToEthnography : Recent Changes has a working RSS feed. Enjoy!
Following up on my Racial and Ethnic classifications as an example of classification challenges, livia has this interesting screenshot.
Moblogs By Textamerica: videoblogs from mobile cameras.
Organic Style Love Your Lawn (via WorldChanging): "The secret to having a great lawn without chemicals is Dutch clover. For the past 50 years, clover has been considered a noxious lawn weed, but before that it was an important component in fine lawns—and for good reason. Clover is drought-tolerant, virtually immune to diseases, and distasteful to common turf insects. And it generates its own food by fixing nitrogen in the soil.
So how did this lawn superstar get such a bad rap? Blame the broadleaf herbicides introduced after World War II. Used to kill weeds such as dandelions and plantains, the chemicals also destroyed the clover that was used in many lawn mixes of the time (leaving ugly bare patches in their wake). Today, virtually all seed companies omit clover from their mixes."
HubLog: MP3 to M3U or SMIL playlist A bookmarklet that harvests MP3 links on a page.
BlogAudio - Jon Udell: "Jon Udell has been "quoting" audio and video snippets on the web for some time.
It is presently a very difficult process, but Jon's approach does not need a server to capture any media. He just hyperlinks to a media file and gives it start and end points." Good overview by Bob Doyle.
CMS Videos: more videos and technical notes from Bob Doyle.
Audio and Video from IA Summit 2004. I met Bob Doyle during the latest IA summit when he was videotaping. Great guy, great work. There are some interesting technical notes at the bottom of the page.
Paolo Valdemarin Weblog: "the idea of doing an interview with iChat and post it to the web is great in its simplicity." Easy is good. We're getting to a level where things truly are easy.
I added some new companies to Companies That Do Ethnography. Feel free to add yours if you offer true ethnography services.
urlgreyhot : Video of Lorenzo at the BMA fountain Michael started videoblogging :)
Jim Moore's cybernetics, politics, emergence, etc. :: "This afternoon Dave Winer and I were talking and he told me about his coinage of the term "Personal Television Networks"--PTNs."
Knowspam.net: How knowspam.net works: looks interesting. A lot of people contact me out of the blue though, I wonder how many of them this will scare away?
pOWL - Semantic Web Development Plattform: a PHP and web-based ontology editor.
Video about shipping 100s of computers to ecuador (Real Video). Good video, personal story in interview format. I like it, and I'm figuring out how to link. If you click CTRL-I in Real Player, you get a popup with the URL.
Autometa RPXP: I don't pretend to entirely understand this, but this might make it possible (right now) to link to a certain point within a video stream.
Like an RSS feed for video
Alan from demandmedia.net has a SMIL powered videofeed. The good part is: it addresses the scanning problem (video is hard to scan).
It works like a TV channel with a forward button: if you get tired of a particular video, just click the next >| button and you are taken to the next video within seconds. I like how he uses SMIL to add some text above the videos within Realplayer.
It's kinda like an RSS feed for video, but it's called a playlist because the words "videofeed" should probably be reserved for RSS with enclosed video (or not?): 
DemandMedia SMIL Playlist
(PS: feel free to copy this button if you like it.)
The third video right now is a short history of the internet. Kinda cool. Jay just told me that every time you click the link you get a random selection, so forget that "third video right now" comment.
My commute goes through some great industrial landscapes around Newark. The shot below is from the train window - 106K. Didn't take long to optimize or upload - I used my default settings.