So I started a wiki about Video Blogging on Me-tv.org, a domain name I registered last week. Sometimes I go crazy with registering domain names, I don't know why that is... I liked this one because it's kinda short and speaks to the idea that you can create your own TV channel. (If we get the technology right, that is.)
Good Friday afternoon stuff: Joho the Blog: Edge-based about-ness: "What something is about often is so implicit that it's precisely the thing that's not stated. And sometimes a page can't even know what it's about: the manual about O-ring maintenance couldn't know that it would actually be about the Challenger disaster."
(via Adam Curry) Program Details for Mosaic2004 04 29: "Mosaic features selections from daily TV news programs produced by national broadcasters throughout the Middle East. The news reports are presented unedited and translated, when necessary, into English."
ongoing · Web Services Theory and Practice: "For big systems with open-ended scaling requirements, architectures that are asynchronous and queued rather than call and response generally seem to win, big time. It's not an accident that IBM and Tibco were making millions selling big robust asynchronous queuing infrastructure long before anyone started talking about 'Web Services'."
Raising the Humble Chicken || kuro5hin.org: "For the last two summers I have maintained a flock of chickens. The results have been ... interesting. More eggs than I could eat, interesting evenings, and a freezer full of what I consider very healthy meat. I plan to share my experiences in this article with the hope that somebody might be inspired to raise a small flock."
Design of a scalable linux fileserver: "512 Mbytes RAM. My mobo can take 1 gig max, so I will be upgrading it with another stick when funds permit. You definitely need a gig of ram. This is the most expensive part of my server - spare no expense to get as much memory as you can."
Some ideas on how to use linking within video on the web on a new Wiki I created: VideoBlogging : How To Link.
After a few weeks of having some small videofiles (300K-ish) up on my site, they have risen to my top files in Kilobytes. I think this is because they load if you load my homepage. I have to find a way to not have them load upon pageload.
---hits------Kilobytes-----File
1 17407 1.90% 628562 6.13% /colombia/forum/7
2 35934 3.92% 612624 5.98% /ease/
3 11476 1.25% 429830 4.19% /colombia/
4 14274 1.56% 341307 3.33% /colombia/image
5 11992 1.31% 340047 3.32% /colombia/life/culture/59
6 935 0.10% 159048 1.55% /ease/video/MVI_1282_very_high_low_audio.mov
7 47945 5.22% 144318 1.41% /colombia/misc/drupal.css
8 1180 0.13% 89122 0.87% /ease/video/MVI_1264_videoblog1.mov
9 48120 5.24% 88647 0.86% /colombia/themes/poorbuthappy/poorbuthappy.css
10 884 0.10% 83637 0.82% /ease/video/MVI_1285_high_low_audio.mov
"Nested Facets ~ Common subdivisions
Claudio Gnoli posted a message to the Faceted Classification group explaining how the Library folks have known (of course!) the concept I discussed recenly of "Nested Facets". (Bad name!)
"Peter,
something very similar to your idea exists indeed in general bibliographic classifications, both faceted and non-faceted: it is usually called common subdivisions, or common auxiliaries, or even common isolates.
Common subdivisions are not a feature exclusive of FCs, hence a librarian would not call them "facets". I agree, however, that they are used in a way similar to facets, and maybe can be seen as a first step towards the idea of FC, namely of concept combinability, which was developed later (since 1920s) in library science.
Faceted classification systems, like BC2, have both common subdivisions and facets. The main difference is that facets are limited to a specific discipline -- EG "habitat" is only a facet within zoology -- while common subdivisions can be applied across disciplines, as in the example above with education and geography."
InfoDesign: Special on Jared Spool. Interview with the excellent Jared Spool: "When a design team has to tackle one of these designs, how do they know what content is required? They could do field studies (contextual inquiries and ethnography) to determine who the users are, what content they need, and when. However, that's an expensive, time consuming process and it comes at the beginning of a project, when resources and funds are extremely tight.
[...]
This research can be very expensive. We fund most of it with money from our conferences, roadshows and publications. A small portion is privately funded with client consulting.
We've come a long way from our roots of being a usability testing service. We really don't do that anymore, primarily because our research has shown that the most successful design teams are those that do their own testing. Farming your testing out substantially reduces its effectiveness. Instead, we help teams start and maintain their own internal testing process.
[...]
It's interesting to note that the more we play down our opinions, the more clients beg us to give them and tend to seriously consider them when making their decisions.
[...]
Since UIE started as a consulting outfit, we had to learn quickly how to prove to people we were valuable. After all, when you're a consultant, you don't eat if nobody believes you're of value.
I learned quickly that business executives didn't care about usability testing or information design. Explaining the importance of these areas didn't get us any more work. [...] We found, early on, that the less we talked about usability or design, the bigger our projects got.
[...]
Yet, was the iPod's design process a standard one? Nope. Have we dissected the process, so that everyone in the field knows exactly how they did it? Nope. Can we explain why Apple is in the process of shutting down all their usability labs? Nope. Have we even tried to answer these questions? Nope. "
Sorry for the extensive quoting. Read the article! Jared is very, very good.
Google files for unusual $2.7 billion IPO | CNET News.com: "Internet search leader Google filed to go public on Thursday, seeking to raise $2.7 billion in an unusual auction-style offering that will give the founders rare control over the company."
And they should, or Microsoft, with its (latest report) 53 billion cash reserve could just buy them outright and take over control.
Information Outlook: Happiness is taxonomy: four structures for Snoopy.(libraries' method of categorizing and classification) Good, long article. I missed the talk at the IA summit.
Quick-'n-Dirty methods to determine which competing label is better: "Cell Phone" or "Mobile Phone"?
On the SIGIA-L mailing list, Stephanie Berger recently asked: "My cohorts are not sure whether to use "cell phone" or "mobile phone". Any evidence that one is better than the other, or one is used more often than the other?"
This is a good example of the kind of labeling questions information architects face all the time. The answer to these labeling questions will depend on the target audience (a better label for whom?), on business requirements (maybe the business want to promote one term over the other) and on the context in which the label will be used.
I'll discuss the conversation that followed here and afterwards point to some useful tools for if you have a labeling question yourself.
Andres Sulleiro: "Without any empirical data I will go with my own opinion. [...] A quick survey of the phone carriers seems to suggest that "wireless" (as in "wireless phone", "wireless customer") is most common among US carriers, though you see some references to "mobile" as well. T-mobile, a European company, uses "mobile" which is more common in Europe as well as being the name of the carrier."
Method: check what other websites call it.
Jason Cho: "I think "cell" is more widespread in the US as Andr�s noted. "Call my mobile" can sound pretentious to Yankee ears. But I would think everyone understands the term "mobile" on a business card."
Method: personal experience.
Peter Van Dijck (and others): "Google for "cell phone" (including quotes): 6,230,000, Google for "mobile phone": 6,360,000. Looks like a tie, assuming your audience is similar. Just pick one and make sure your search engine knows both terms."
Christina Wodtke: "Yahoo for cell phone : 16,800,000, yahoo for mobile phone: 21,200,000. What does this really tell you? you'd have to know who each engine indexes, how much of the web, etc.. better to use a magic 8 ball. ;-)"
Method: check popularity of the terms on the web.
Peter Van Dijck: "My next step would be to find out what people search for on your site,
or if not available, on the web (assuming that's more or less your audience). Google adwords can help."
Method: Find out what people (preferably your target audience) search for.
Dave: "I like "mobile" for the reason that Christina stated (forward compatibility); USers and non-USers will equally understand it. Also, it is more interoperable w/ most of the vCard based addressbook programs out there. I don't know any that are using "cell" or "cellphone" ... I also like the clear and easy two word approach of "mobile phone" ... I'm always wanting to say "cellphone" where "cell phone" is really the more correct version. "cell" though just doesn't feel like a real word b/c the "cell" doesn't fit a meaning to me. I know what it means if I am forced to think about it, but it really doesn't mean anything to me at all."
Method: personal experience, check what software programs use.
Christina Wodtke: "> As can Overture's keyword tool (couldn't find URL straight away).
You also might consider some adaptation of the freelisting technique on a subset of your target. E.G., a write in survey: what portable electronics do you own, then analyze for use of "cell phone" and mobile phone".
Method: freelisting technique.
Eric Reiss: "Having worked closely with several telecommunications companies, including Tellabs (US), Nortel (Canada), ADVA (Germany), and NetTest (Denmark), this discussion is one I've heard before. Europeans generally don't recognize the term "cell phone." North Americans seem to accept both "cell" and "mobile." ATT insists on promoting the term "wireless." In most instances, we've agreed on the word "mobile" since it is understood by the widest audience. Nortel, for instance, used "cell" almost exclusively until the late 90s, but now leans toward "mobile." I think there is a trend here."
Method: ask the subject matter experts.
Pabini Gabriel-Petit: "There's also Wordtracker.
[...]
In this vein, you might try just walking up to people, holding up your cell/mobile phone, and asking them what they call it."
Method: Analyze what people search for.
Method: Find out what labels your users use.
Quick-'n-Dirty methods to determine which competing label is better.
So, as a review, here are some of the methods used to determine which label is better.
1. What do you think?
Method: personal experience/insights.
2. What do your users think?
Method: freelisting technique.
Method: Find out what labels your users use: show them the item you're trying to label and ask them what it is. (You could build an online tool for this).
Method: Find out what people (preferably your target audience) search for / check popularity of the terms on the web. Overture's keyword tool. Google adwords. Wordtracker. Google and Yahoo both list how often a term is used on the web (use quotes around your terms!).
3. What do the experts think?
Method: ask the subject matter experts.
Method: check what other websites/software call it.
Gotcha's: be careful when using these techniques. You are looking for a label that works for your audience and your business requirements. Most of these techniques use audiences that may be very different from yours, and most are indicative only (ie: they're not hard science). Use your judgement.
The LaCie Bigger Disk: a 1 terabyte external harddrive. US$ 1200, ships in May 2004. So by the end of the year the price should have fallen under the $1000 barrier. It's not particularly cheaper than buying smaller external harddrives - the prices continues to hover around US$1 a Gig.
I can't seem to find a good explanation of how to host a bittorrent file on my server. Arg! Pointers welcome.
unmediated: a proper marriage of tv and blogs.
A Google search for Jew does not show an offensive link as the first or second result anymore.
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.