India Still Waits: Rural Poor Not Yet Ready For the Promise of Radio: "They're ready and raring to go. But for development workers wanting to launch their own micro-powered community radio stations, it's like a case of shouting with their mouths gagged.
Since the mid-nineties, community groups have expected permissions to come for them to set up non-profit ultra low-powered FM radio stations. But till date, this has not come, leading to some protagonists to try everything short of pirate radio to get themselves heard."
How many pixels are there in a frame of 35mm film?: a really good explanation.
Musings: Review of SchemaLogic: "The primary use for SchemaServer right now seems to focus on Controlled Vocabulary Management. [...] Changes to a vocabulary can be made through an automated voting process."
Has anyone used voting in a real life environment to manage changes to a controlled vocabulary?
Better Living Through Software - Normalization == good?: "I've debugged scalability problems in a wide range of systems, and one of the most frequent causes of scalability and manageability bottlenecks in the state management tier is excessive normalization. These are fun problems to solve, because the DBAs have been conditioned with normalization religion and often don't see any way out of their problems. When they come to realize that normalization is just a technique meant to serve a particular purpose, and not a universal law, it can be liberating."
Most valuable asset [dive into mark]: "It's like when I smoked, and all my friends were smokers. If someone quits smoking, you stop socializing with them, not because you hate them for quitting or they're actively avoiding you (although both are probably true), but simply because all your socialization happens around cigarettes. It's not even something you necessarily notice, until you quit, and you realize you have no friends to hang out with because all your hanging out happened at smoke breaks."
Six Apart is the first company I know of that understands the power of creating open standards. Microsoft creates standards and then tries to keep them proprietary and exert full control. Six Apart seems to understand that you can create a totally open standard (like TrackBack), and still profit substantially from it. You profit because you are the first one to implement it, and you (at least partly) control its evolution. Others are continually playing keep-up, not only in their development departments, but also in the minds of the public.
When I created XFML, I felt some of those possibilities. XFML is a totally open standard, but its evolution is controlled, mostly, by me. (Even though anyone can develop a new version of XFML.) Not because I want to, but because, of the few people that truly, entirely understand it and its purpose, I'm probably the only one interested in evolving it. If I were to start creating tools using that standard, others would continually have to play keep-up. The more I were to make it open and promote it as a standard, the more others would be forced to stay at least compatible.
I need to think this through a bit more, but these were my initial thoughts after seeing TypeKey: "TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites." From Six Apart, Typekey is kinda what Microsoft was trying to do with Passport, but without the money. I wonder how it compares with SharedID (I haven't looked into that too much).
Ah - a business model! "We'll be providing documentation on how to integrate TypeKey authentication into your own applications shortly after the service launches. At that point, there will also be information about what is required to make use of TypeKey services in commercial applications."
I had missed many of the discussions (summary, questions by Dave Winer, Shelley's comments) already going on about TypeKey. In short, people are naturally suspicious of any centralized identity technology.
Fast Company | How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows: "But Google is also a case study in savvy management -- a company filled with cutting-edge ideas, rigorous accountability, and relentless attention to detail."
XML.com: The Library of Congress Comes Home [Mar. 17, 2004]: "Let's assume that I've convinced you to consider implementing a classification scheme at home. Which one should you use? There are several possibilities: Library of Congress Classification (LCC), Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), Colon Classification (CC), Bliss Classification (BC).
[...]
The problem with only arranging your collection physically by alphabetical order is that, without a computerized index of the collection, you can't form queries like, "show me all the resources that are about Spanish anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism" or "show me all the resources that are about Buddhist folk magic"."
This does not make sense to me. If you're going to organize your books, make your own scheme. Don't re-use a library scheme that was created for different purposes alltogether. Will it let you look up books by your favourites? By the ones signed by authors? By the ones you're using for you rennovation project?
Kendall also doesn't mention Amazon's book search. Why classify your books for retrieval if you can already search them using Amazon, and then just use a simple scheme (alphabetical, ...) to retrieve the book?
XML.com: Hacking the Library: "Kendall Clark tries to figure out if he can make the librarians and the geeks happy at the same time."
The first Release Candidate of PHP 5 is finally here! The move from Beta stage to RC stage means that PHP 5 is now feature complete, and is quite stable - stable enough for everyone to start playing with."
Time to start playing.
MSN Personas! (via InfoDesign)
Who knew there were experts in mouthfeel (The way that a food product feels inside a person's mouth.) You really don't want to get into food product design (this site seems to be the B&A of the food design discipline). (I hereby promise this will be my last post about mouthfeel ever to see the light of your monitor.)
Second International Conference on Trust Management 2004: "A trust management conference looking at trust from multidisciplinary pespectives: legal, pyschology, philosophy, economic, sociology as well as information technology. The Second International Conference on Trust Management will take place at St. Anne's College, Oxford, UK, from 29th March to 1st April 2004."
Ask Joel - Is Microsoft leaving the small business market?: "The best way to avoid competing with Microsoft is to stick to verticals. Microsoft always does horizontal applications, never verticals. You'll never see Microsoft Tire Warehouse 1.0."
Experimenting with BitTorrent and RSS 2.0. So that's how that works.
You include enclosures in your RSS feed. An enclosure is not text, but a small-ish (25k) file that contains all the information needed for BitTorrent to download a big file. So you don't download a huge file within your RSS, just a pointer to a huge file.
Now, you can distribute large files by including small pointers to them in your RSS feed. The users who have the right stuff on their computers will then automatically download, P2P, your large files overnight to the users computer.
Your computer isn't hit too hard because of the way Bittorrent works (it's P2P). And you can distribute (push, almost) large audio or video files.
Very nice. I'm impressed.
Yesterday riding home on the train in NJ, USA, there were lots of police on the tracks and in the train.
http://despam.org
Lazyweb: a spider that spiders any weblog against a master list of comment spam. So:
- I go to http://despam.org
- I enter my weblog's URL and click "Despam me"
- It tells me if I have any comment spam, and tells me what to do next.
- I can ask it to despam me weekly and email me the results.
If you're using MT-Blacklist to stop comment spams, feel free to copy my blacklist.txt file in your list. I searched for blacklist files and copied about 20 of them into my master file. Each had at least 10 domains the previous ones didn't have. Afterwards, I ran the despam, and it found a bunch of spam my manual efforts had missed.
(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.