(via Jon) Oracle is now providing licensing seminars. They don't teach you how to use Oracle, but how to pay for it!

This site graphically compares the sites Yahoo returns vs. the ones Google returns for a given query, like yahoo! vs. google: colombia travel. Kinda cool.

Martin Röll pointed out an small error in my Themes and metaphors article - I put one wrong face on a quote. Fixed now. Thanks Martin!

Jorge started BootStudio | Consultoría, Outsourcing, y Diseño Web en Centroamérica y Panamá. A good web studio for central America and Panama.

AIfIA - Español | Arquitectura de Información: Una disciplina "de lujo" en Chile: an article about the state of IA in Chile. The translation project of AIfIA now also is starting to publish original content in other languages (that, in turn, can be translated back into English!).

Audio and Video from IA Summit 2004. You can now see some of the presentations, filmed by Bob Doyle.

Simon Willison: SXSW on a shoe-string: "Anyone going and want to share a hotel room?" Many Hilton-class hotel rooms have 2 beds, so come on guys. Share the wealth.

Dina landed an ethnography job through her blogging contacts. Congrats!

WorldChanging: cool idea of child exploitation?: "South Africa's Roundabout has devised a way to harness the energy generated by kids playing (ingenious in itself), as they spin on an outdoor merry-go-round."

We just came home from going for some food, and my girlfriend had a message on her cellphone answering machine. The message contained the entire conversation we just had in the restaurant! Scary.

A good case for a default locking mechanism on cell-phones. Guess what happened.

PeopleAggregator lets you define more than 1 type of relationship with others:

- know of
- don't know but want to
- know of in passing
- know by reputation
- acquaintance
- friend
- close friend
- relative

Assuming the purpose of this is to provide different functionality depending on the type of relationship, here's my critique:

- know of
- don't know but want to (how can you not know who someone is, yet want to? Is a subset of Know by reputation?)
- know of in passing
- know by reputation
- acquaintance
- friend
- close friend
- relative (good category - it's a yes or no one.)

Question: can you select more than 1? Here's my take:

(categories exclusive: you can choose only 1)
- relative
- friend (non-relative)
(subcategories exclusive: you can choose only 1)
-- grade of friendship: acquaintance
-- grade of friendship: friend
-- grade of friendship: close friend
- know of (non-relative, non-friend)
(subcategories non exclusive: you can choose more than 1)
-- by reputation
-- in passing

These probably need a lot more thinking. A relative can be a friend after all.

One and a half year after creating XFML, I think the main value of the language has been to introduce people to concepts such as facets and topics.

It has become the de-facto standard for exchanging faceted metadata, but on the other hand, very few applications are actually exchanging that kind of information. I think that'll change, but that's a separate story.

It's simplicity has held up well, both conceptually as implementation-wise. Most people understand the spec easily, and it's easy to implement.

When creating the spec, I spend months removing elements and attributes that I thought weren't absolutely necessary. There are a few in there that nobody's using, like the connect element, but I do have some hope they may still be used and become important one day. Then again, maybe I should have made the langauge even simpler. Extreme standard creation: don't include elements you're not entirely sure you'll need.

Another element I'm not sure about is MapInfo. I'm curious to see wether that one will be really used one day.

BlogPulse [BETA]: Automated Trend Discovery for Weblogs: "BlogPulse mines for bursty phrases and person names instead of for the most popular ones. The most popular phrases and names change very slowly over time."

subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale. Very cool.

Boxes and Arrows now have a search box (via Donna). Let's try it out.

A search for Visio on the B&A site gets this top 3:
- Planning your future
- The Book of Probes
- Value-Driven Intranet Design

In short: total irrelevancy.

Google's Search This Site, on the other hand, returns this top 3:

- practical applications: visio or html for wireframes
- three visio tips - special deliverables 4
- automating diagrams with visio

Total relevancy. Either switch to Google, or fix that MT search guys.

I love Firefox's tabs.

One improvement I'd like to see: to close a tab (a very common operation), you have to right-click it and then select close tab. Two clicks for a common interaction. To make matters worse, there's a big red button next to it that closes all tabs, not a common action, inviting mistakes.

What would work better: bring the close-tab functionality to the surface, and hide the close-all-tabs functionality under a right-click. Something like the image below.

If I find some time I'll open an account, read the FAQs and do a Bugzilla report. Meanwhile, if someone else wants to do that, feel free.

At the IA Summit, I saw an impressive demo of UsersFirst. It's a portable usability lab, and the slickest one I've seen. It consists of a Mac laptop, the software and an iCam camera. The software lets you connect to any other laptop (say, a Windows laptop that runs a prototype), and records pixel perfect what's going on there. It also records the user (with the iCam). And it includes logging software that's timestamped. Expect this to make some waves when it comes out of beta in a few months.

The guy who's creating the software has been working on it for years. I talked to him for a while about pricing models, and requirements.

There is a huge market for this if it is done right. I'm surprised nobody else has gone for this. And I'm waiting for a Windows version. Who's going to make one?

Joseph Reagle, referring to my summary, identifies another theme in the semantic web discussion: "People originally resisted the Web and said it was stupid, but now look at it!"

I replaced some code in the individual archive template to not link to people's URL's anymore. The site is getting spammed to death by comment spammers, and I can't keep up, even with using the MT blacklist plugin.

I changed this tag

MTCommentAuthorLink spam_protect="1"

to

MTCommentAuthorLink spam_protect="1" show_url="0"

So the name now links to the email, not the URL. I am wondering if I should show a non-clickable version of the URL? If it doesn't increase pagerank of the spammers I'd do it.

New blog (for me): Thijs van der Vossen (The name means 'Tom of the foxes'. Make of that what you will.)

I don't think I would have made it through the IA summit had I followed Tanya's drinking game suggestion of 2 shots for an epicurious or wine.com screenshot. They were everywhere! Check the fcd mailing list if you're really interested in faceted classification. And introduce yourself - the list kinda works like that.

I like this. Downing Street Says...: "Every day the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman meets a small coterie of political journalists known as 'the lobby' for a topical chat, or 'briefing'." The site makes these notes available for discussion.

I was sitting in on a call to discuss options for photography to go on a corporate website today. The pictures were typical people shots, you've seen these on thousands of sites. The main concern was that the people shown should be representative of the users.

The conversation was interesting - if you're interested in categorizing.

"Everyone looks under 30."

"Our managers don't wear suits, they're more business casual."

"It's not diverse enough, we have a lot of emphasis on diversity here."

"Some people thought it was inapropriate that the man and the woman were touching."

"I don't like the arms crossed like that, it's not very accessible."

"That's the right smile."

"That look is too suity."

"Our people don't wear turtlenecks."

"Last time we used real people from our company they all left within a year."

Bonus: Information Architecture exercise: try to create a taxonomy of people pictures for use on websites after reading these comments.

Ask Joel - Offshoring: "I find this topic fascinating, and incredibly close to my heart at this point, as I'm experiencing much of this first hand currently." Agreement seems to be: you cannot write a spec, send it to India and have some programmers implement it. It's just not how things work.

(via Joho the Blog) Queryster is a meta search engine that makes it real easy to compare searches over different search engines. It overlays a little image that you can click over the search results, so you can jump from Google results for a query to Teoma results for a query with one click. An image might explain it better.

Just came back from the IA summit, my favourite conference. I couldn't kick my brand new wireless card into obedience, so I'll just have to write up some stuff later this week. Meanwhile, check out the most excellent IA Summit 2004 blog.

Triple bottom line taxonomies: "The following is a list of selected taxonomies for triple bottom line - also called sustainable development - reporting."

Ask Joel - Pricing Products (And there's more so click that link):

"(1) As a small software company you are NOT going to compete on price. Don't say to yourself "we have the ability to make this thing cheaper than anyone else, so we should compete on price." Large companies have all kinds of economies of scale that you don't have, and you're not going to be able to sustain a price advantage. Find a different advantage.

(2) Pricing sends messages. Expensive products (like Perforce, $795/copy) "seem" like higher-quality products than cheap ones (Vault, $199/copy) even if they aren't. People believe that "you get what you pay for." A new high price may INCREASE your unit sales if the old price sent a message of "Cheap!"

(3) There are natural limits. Home/consumer users won't spend more than about $20 in cash, or about $50 on a credit card. At most corporations the low level business managers have the right to spend some fixed amount of money on their credit cards without getting any permission, and that amount is usually either $300 or $500. If you set your price at $600 you are arbitrarily losing a lot of these sales because now the low level manager needs to go through purchasing and get approval. For years UserLand Frontier has been priced at $899 ... just out of reach of everybody with a corporate American Express"

Ask Joel - Non-Technical Program Managers: "My organization has in recent years been overrun with program managers who seem better-equipped to make decisions about polo shirts and khaki pants than about technical matters.

They foment confusion by misusing distinct technical terms as if they were interchangable. They're oblivious to technical nuance. Worst of all, they have no natural defenses against the influence of weak engineers. (Hmmm, maybe the weak engineers are the real problem here... Maybe software companies don't need technical PM's.)"

Great writing in the answers. I wish I could write like that.

At work, I still use (the default) Netscape Communicator 4.7 for email. When you open the email client, it shows a webpage with search and some news headlines in the message preview window. A co-worker alerted me to the fact that the news headlines haven't been updated for about 6 months (I couldn't figure out exactly how long). The last headlines (and these have been showing for months) are:

US News: Bush to Sign Partial Birth Abortion Ban
Sports: Judge Rejects Evidence in Olympic Trial
Entertainment: Keith Keeping CMA Awards in Perspective

What happened? They might have had a round of layoffs. I imagine the manager asking: "Does anyone know what that guy in the corner does?" Nobody knows. He gets fired, and the news headlines never get updated again. Nobody notices. If there's a lesson in there somewhere, I haven't found it.

Metadata in the environment - in this case embedded in the sleeves of photographs: Metaphotos of the Bettman Archive. The social life of information has a story about how the smell of certain archives contained metadata for a certain researcher (read the book - I don't remember the details.)

I can highly recommend Bloglines as a news aggregator. It does everything you want, and makes it easy. They also come out with new features every few weeks that not only work well and are easy to use, but are also actually useful. The latest one lets you email your subscriptions.

This means you can set up a newsreader, add a whole set of subscriptions to it, and then email those to your friends/team/... Useful stuff.

According to Joho the Blog, Corbis (Stock photography) are doing interesting things with metadata and categorization. He's writing a Wired article about it, something to look forward to.

To give you an idea of the classification challenges, the guys here at work recently had to find pictures of people, in business casual clothes, with diverse racial features.

Webmonkey, RIP: 1996 - 2004: "Webmonkey, the site that turned humble Web developers into attention-grabbing authors, said last week it is closing down following a round of layoffs in the U.S. division of its parent company, Terra Lycos (also the parent company of Wired News). Judging by blog posts and e-mails, the site’s fans aren’t surprised. Still, they’re sad to see the end of an era."

I started out with Webmonkey. They had some of the best technical writing out there. But the last few years I rarely visited them anymore.

Arquitectura de información para diseñadores: diseñar sitios web para el éxito del negocio - capítulo 2. A Spanish translation of the free chapter of my IA book. Thanks to the excellent translation team at AIfIA.

Living with topic maps and RDF: an excellent article by Lars Marius Garshol about RDF and XTM. Lars writes good stuff - check it out.

This new project looks worth checking out: topic maps Wiki: "The project is called Topiki, and is a Wiki- and topic maps based application for intranet/internet collaborative documentation / CMS. It works almost like other Eiki's, but has subtle Topic maps features that would make it ideal, and really is one of the big bugbears I have with Wiki's today."

Hey, I'm numbe three for a how to make a documentary Google search.

Oh man. From The Price of Loyalty: The Bush Files, a classic memo: "Before a January, 2002, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," Treasury Department public relations chief Michele Davis sent Secretary O'Neill a 3-page memo explaining how he should deal with host Tim Russert. The memo, which coaches O'Neill on how to avoid the substance of Russert's questions, is a classic of political spin. O'Neill was told to answer the first question by praising the President's economic stimulus proposals, "no matter the question." "You need to interject the President's message," Davis coached O'Neill, "even if the question has nothing to do with that."

In the memo are beauties like: ""First Answer, no matter the question: We must act to ensure our economy recovers and people get back to work."

Anil Dash: Compulsion to Blog. I know what that feels like. "The compulsion to quote and link is too strong.... Being stuck in an airport last night without connectivity, I found myself ripping the pages out of a print magazine so that I could refer to them later and quote from them. Soon I'll resort to creating links with scotch tape and thread."

A search strategy I find myself using regularly is adding the word 'blog' to my search query. It tends to filter out the blatantly commercial sites.

Fast Company | Making a Resolution that Matters: Older people offer other valuable advice: "Follow your dreams."

The Observer | Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us: "A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world."

I really like Christina's Widgetopia.

Ah! Some good old fashioned IA discussion.

Mark Hurst writes about The Page Paradigm and gets talked about by Peterme, Christina and others.

As PeterMe says though ("I did a quick assessment of the site Mark points to, and I can say with no reservation that you should totally follow all of Mark's suggestions when you're designing a 26 page site. "), Mark is pretty much missing the ball here.

Mark writes: "Users don't much care "where they are" in the website. So-called "breadcrumb links," which show the user the exact hierarchy of the website as they click further down, are a nice but mostly irrelevant technology. It's not that users don't understand the links; it's that they don't care."

Of course users don't care where they are in the website. Thinking that is a beginners' mistake.

Mark writes: "I emphasize this because Web developers often waste time worring about "where content should live."

But Mark, we don't do that because we think users care about where they are. We do that so that users can more easily find things.

He also writes: "Consistency is NOT necessary."

There are kinds of consistency that are important. Don't put three links on a page with different names that point to the same page. (At least, I think that would be a bad idea. Don't want to make it a rule though.)

Having fun though - I haven't seen an IA debate for a while. Who is right, Mark or Peter? And there's even comic books.

I am becoming more and more convinced that good design gets done by talented teams.

Mm. That sounded too simple.

The comment spam is getting funny (annoying is close now). "Your opinions expressed on your website are great to read. The way you have your website laid out is very cool. I enjoy playing bingo online at ..."

Search Beyond Google: good article about how search engine technology is still evolving with leaps and bounds, and someone might take over from Google.

webservices.xml.com: Quick and Dirty Topic Mapping [Feb. 04, 2002]: "I don't start with a predefined set of topics. Rather, I allow them to emerge from the material as I work my way through it. I don't try to create a topic hierarchy. Having wrestled with questions such as whether XML should be a subcategory of Web Development, or vice versa, I've concluded that this way lies madness." (Note Jon is talking about 'topic maps' but isn't talking about the topicmap standard or XTM in any way.)

a possible database schema that allows to store Topic Maps.

tinyTIM - a tiny TMAPI implementation - a small TopicMap engine: "tinyTIM is a very small easy to use (40kb jarsize) in memory Topic Map engine. It implements the TMAPI interfaces, so one can work with TopicMaps via the TMAPI standard. TMAPI will be what DOM is for XML."