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."

I am starting to think that the best way to get a new site into Google fast is to link to it from a weblog. I linked to brutecreations.com (a friend's site) a few days ago, and she's in Google now. Nr. 1 for handmade colombia jewelry, even though the site is pretty much all images.

My logs show the Googlebot indexed 5 pages, the MSNBot indexed 4 pages.

What would a search-engine friendly robots.txt file look like?

WebEx (they're not paying me) gives you 14 days free trial with unlimited meetings (maximum 3 participants). Try it out if you need to do a set of remote usability tests. It works pretty good.

I'm learning here: I was also guilty of this: "For example, why load all 1000 lines of error handling logic if there were no errors to handle? Why include that library of 101 functions if only one got called for the current request? Why fetch an entire table into a PHP array if you're only going to display 10 records at a time? Why re-render HTML if the content hasn't changed?"

SitePoint Blogs : Dynamically Typed: configuration with arrays smells bad.

I have been guilty of this in the past, just because I didn't know of another method. And it is indeed annoying to maintain. Harry provides two alternatives, including the parse_ini_file() function that I didn't know about. It lets you put configuration stuff in a classic .ini file, and then parses it into variables for you, fast. Nice!

A friend of mine is gathering grass-roots videa: Recover Video: "RECOVER is a new video magazine that is looking for videos that are 5-minutes or less. This issue focuses on the Republican National Convention coming to NYC in
August to nominate George Bush for President.
The deadline is April 15th, 2004." Give him some linky love!

Google Search: salsa near 07030. Nice.

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby :: 2. Kon'nichi wa, Ruby Great writing about a programming language. Worth reading even if you're not into programming.

I am getting about 5 comment spams a day lately. MT-Blacklist - A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin works really well. You can import my blacklist file at http://poorbuthappy.com/blacklist.txt.

So some blogs just mix languages.

Michael: "The frustration I expressed at working in a bureaucrazy turned into outright anger today and then into cunning and finally enlightenment.
[...]
In the end, I lost the battle and was told to go pursue the person who gets feedback/problem email from the site and consider turning that into an FAQ. I gave up and agreed.
[...]
there are progbably other ways you can serve your users as well without having to navigate your political bureaucracy—without seeking approval. What’s that saying? “To ask permission is to seek denial”. You can fly under the radar."

I've heard similar stories all over. One person implemented a best-bets feature in the organizations search engine without telling anyone (best bets can cause political battles). I've flown under the radar a few times myself. What's your experience?

Yahoo! Birth of a New Machine: "Yahoo is rolling out a brand new search engine today, with its own index and ranking mechanisms, casting aside its long-standing use of Google-powered search results."

Firefox and browser lock-in

Browser lock-in is subtle, and Firefox developers should do everything they can to decrease it.

So I download Firefox, and I want to make it my standard browser. I open it. I'm browsing around, and it takes me a while to figure out how to create new tabs instead of new windows. Developers, make ctrl+N open up a new tab, not a new window. Make clicking a link that opens a new window open up in a new tab. Tabs are a major selling point, they should be the default.

I come across a page I like and I want to blog it. But my bookmarklet is on IE, not here. Developers, make an IE bookmarks import function come up automatically the first time I run Firefox. Have it ask me if I'd like to import the bookmarks. Make it painless. I'm at work and have no time to go hunt around for how to import bookmarks.

So I decide to spend a few minutes to create a bookmarklet here. (I'm motivated - I want to use those tabs!) I go to my movabletype page, and it asks me to login. I have long since forgotten my password (IE keeps me logged in forever). So I can't login and I can't ask for my password because I'm at work and the password gets sent to my home email. Developers, make Firefox import cookies when it imports bookmarks.

The end result is that I am forced to go back to IE, and Firefox may just sit on my computer never to be used again unless I find some time to set up all these things.

An Archaeology of Browsing...: "So here's a weird sensation. I'm trying to install a Photoshop upgrade at two in the morning, because i'm jetlagged and can't concentrate on work but can't sleep either so I'm procrastinating. And in order to install said upgrade I'm going to have to restart my browser. So I start the process of closing down windows and tabs and adding them to a little bookmarks stash [..]"

If I ever find time to program PHP again, I'll get The PHP Anthology. Think of it as a pattern language for PHP.

49432 royalty free portraits for your personas. Should cover it.

Last sunday, I made a website for a friend. brutecreations.com I spend most of the morning taking pictures of jewelry she makes, and a few hours putting it all together and finding a domain name and such. (The site needs a bit of polishing, I know.)

It made me think about the process of getting people to feel ownership of their website. Often we know what they should do, what would work for them, but just telling them that isn't always the best thing. I want them to live it, to learn it, not just to nod and say thanks for the site. (That's not what happened here btw.)

Visit her site if you like handmade jewelry by a Colombian artist. And give her some Google juice!

DonnaM: A toybox full of memories: "I was attempting to clean up my daughter's room. I was finding old scraps of drawing and cheap rubbishy toys - things that didn't look important to me - but she wouldn't let me throw them out. I could see in her face that the idea of throwing these things out was quite distressing. I listened to why she wouldn't throw them - it wasn't that she wanted to use them, or that the toys were fun to play with, but that they had memories for her. Some were drawings that someone had done for her, and some of the toys were ones that she remembered where they came from and other associations."

We are running some remote usability tests over Webex. The participant is given control of the mouse (webex lets you do that), and clicks through, while we're all on a conference call. It actually works pretty well, I'm getting good feedback. A good option if you have remote participants.

Micheal is tracking user navigation methods by logging where users click on web pages

Worldchanging points me to How smart does your bed have to be, before you are afraid to go to sleep at night? What a title!

Anyone know if the IA summit will have wifi?

Metadata created by just going about your daily life.

PeterM questions the value of research departments like Microsofts, saying they don't produce real products, whereas Apple (who killed their research department a while back) does keep coming up with innovative UIs.

The Google toolbar has a Valentine's day theme - it's kinda annoying since I can't turn it off. Tim Jarret also noticed it. Oh, and it's friday the 13th!

I am hosting a site on a shared server and I get the Ensim control panel. The site started to give strange mysql errors (corrupted tables), and it took me a while to figure it out. I am using all of my available space, so mysql runs out of space to write to.

Now the html + images is about 30 megs, the databases are about 30 megs as well. I checked and found that the apache error logs are over 200 megs (other logs are fine - 8 megs).

I changed the settings in the ENSIM panel, but it doesn't seem to change the error log, only the other logs. Any ideas?

I'm also confused: I have my email on that server, but nothing else really. Where is all my storage space going? Any tips for optimizing that?

Jeff Lash spots a trend: increased usage of the site footer.

He refers an early article of mine where I analyzed clickthroughs from a sitemap at the bottom of each page compared to the usual site navigation. Jeff implemented the sitemap on every page concept at XPlane - it's gone now. I had it for a few years on my Colombia site, but then I swiched to using Drupal as CMS and I haven't had the coding skills to re-instate it. I'd like to test it again at some point.

Logging the documentary

I'm happy to report that loggnig the documentary happens pretty much at live speed. I just run the tape and log as it goes. So 20 hours of tape means 20 hours of logging. Not too bad.

I created a table in Word. The first column has the timecode (0:25:41), the second the scene ("plane"), the third details ("old man looking"), the fourth comments ("nice image - bad sound"). I only use the comments for 1 out of every 5 rows, more or less. A 1 hour tape turns into about 2 pages in Word. I just run the video on the TV and type in my Word doc as it goes.

I wish I had time to play around with StarLogo.

I should spend some time checking out this OWL thing. RDF and OWL Recommendations: "OWL builds on RDF and RDF Schema and adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. "exactly one"), equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated classes."

I wrote an artikel about IA for the Dutch publication Naar Voren: "Informatie-architectuur is een van die modewoorden die regelmatig rondvliegen in de wereld van de webbouwer." It was surprisingly difficult to talk about these concepts in my mother tongue, for things like controlled vocabulary I had to reverse to English. Not that the word doesn't exist in Dutch, but I don't know it.

Ludicorp is the kind of name I'd give my company - if I had one. It has that hard-to-qualify Lex Luthor feel to it.

Editing the documentary

I've returned from filming in Colombia and now I have 22 tapes (about 16 hours) of video to edit.

The first step is to get an idea of what you have. I fast forwarded through most of the tapes, and used my digital camera to make screenshots of the TV. I then printed out the screenshots (using Windows XP's printing wizard makes it very easy) per scene. I laid out all the scenes to have an easy way of discussing them and getting an overview. Think of it as a high-level sitemap.

Next I will have to watch all 16 hours and make a detailed log: at this timestamp, a man with donkey passes. This timestamp, the interviewee talks about X. I expect this to take 2 weeks, I'll report back. And yes, it's like a content inventory. Yey.

Jon is homing in on a beautiful approach to adding semantics to plain old XHTML elements, for searching and styling. It turns out you can specify multiple class elements like class="personquote Jon". In this example, you can apply styles separately for personquote and for Jon. Sweet.

For my reading/watching list: Future Salon : The revolution will not be televised. It will be streamed.

If blogs are conversations, then aggregators like the excellent Bloglines should look for FOAF files and display a picture and the name of the writer(s) (if they can find it) with a feed. I'd like to see who's talking, and a name+picture makes it easier to do that.

(Bloglines could then add a function to see who this blogger knows and let me subscribe to feeds those people produce.)

I updated my feed to be called "Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease". Now I just have to add a picture. I always resisted having pictures of me floating around on the web (try to find one), but I think maybe I should give in.

Moderation continues to be a tricky art: craigblog: Flagging issues on craigslist: "Hey, we're trying hard to turn over a lot of control over craigslist to the community. That's proving to be a very democratic, effective, and fast way to run things."

(via Catalogablog) Controlling your Language - Links to Metadata Vocabularies: a long list of links to CV's and such, with explanations on how and why to use them.

Flash demo: interesting approach to providing dense information on a real-life map.

Wired News: Iran's Most Wanted: Filmmakers: "Mantini, who works 60-hour weeks at a brick factory, spends weekends and holidays making movies. Each film is totally handcrafted. And each is completely illegal."

Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do) Gotta keep those in mind. A particularly nice example of flat writing: "He wanted to know but couldn't understand what she had to say, so he waited until she was ready to tell him before asking what she meant."

Language Log: schild en vriend: "Those suspected of being Walloons or Frenchmen who could speak Dutch were asked to say schild en vriend "shield and friend", an expression regarded as particularly difficult for those who were not native speakers. Those who did not pronounce it correctly were determined to be the enemy and killed."

Indeed. And the test has stood the test of time. Native French speakers still can't pronounce "schild en vriend" correctly. Neither can native Spanish or English speakers.

To categorize or not: "My aim is to create a "loose" categorization of the services growing up around "social networking" guidelines, and not necessarily all "social software" offerings."

Jon Udell is doing some experimentation with attributes to add more semantics to common HTML elements. He's using these attributes to do searches and generate "dynamic categories".

Automatic Organization for Digital Photographs with Geographic Coordinates (PDF, via Catalogablog): "We describe PhotoCompas, a system that utilizes the time and location information embedded in digital photographs to automatically organize a personal photo collection. PhotoCompas produces browseable location and event hierarchies for the collection. This organization is created using algorithms that interleave time and location to produce an organization that mimics the way people think about their photo collections. In addition, our algorithm annotates the generated hierarchy with geographical names. We tested our approach on several real-world collections and verifed that the results are meaningful and useful for the collection owners."

Does blogging actually make you a better a photographer?

I'm looking for examples of websites that raise awareness on certain issues (refugees for example), and analysis or research on that. Thanks.

Categorization of people you know is turning out to be a challenge for social network websites.

See Orkut
Follies and Clear...
precise and problematic: "The precision shows up in the digital choices we’re given: Is Phil your friend or not? If he is, is he one-star, two-star or three-star sexy? Choices you are not given
include: (i) Sort of sexy. (ii) Could be sexy if he dressed better.
(iii) If I were a woman, I think I’d find him sort of sexy if I went for that type and if he dressed better. So, exactly how many stars does that work out to?"

A nice categorization challenge: how do you categorize the people you want to add to a social networking service?

Here's my take: for most sites, the basic connection should mean that you know who this person is. Not "Friend" but "People I know". Doc Searls seems to think the same.

Further categories would really depend on the site. If I had the time (or someone paid me) I'd work out a categorization framework. But there are taxes to do.

I've always wondered how well Google's translation approach works. They use volunteers to translate their pages in various languages. I checked out the new Dutch toolbar page today, and found some dodgy translations. Not exactyly wrong, but not particularly nice either. Here are a few edits. The English translations are my translations - I couldn't find the relevant English page (maybe it's been changed meanwhile).

- "Meer mogelijkheden van Google" (More possibilities with Google): "Meer mogelijkheden met Google"

- "de installatie vergt slechts enkele seconden" (the installation only takes a few seconds): "de installatie duurt slechts enkele seconden"

There are more edits I could make, but those fall in the realm of good writing. When you translate stuff, good writing often gets lost. I've seen the same in translations between Spanish and English. The translator should really be a writer as well.

World66 looks cool. It's kinda like a huge wiki for travel, but more structured. And they know how to attract people like me: I've visited 22 countries in the world so far (red in the image below). A lot more to go.