EServer TC Library: "The EServer
EServer TC Library: "The EServer TC Library is a experiment into community-based libraries -- part web portal, part library index -- for professional, scientific and technical communicators."
I will be speaking at
I will be speaking at the 'Society for Technical Communication Belgian Chapter on metadata, topicmaps and such.
(via Catalogablog) AskDCMI: Q&A about
(via Catalogablog) AskDCMI: Q&A about Dublin Core.
I am adding directories to
I am adding directories to SourceSafe, and I have to doubleclick the directory (open it) in the dialog window to add it. If not, I add the parent directory, recursively. I have done this twice this morning and once yesterday, and everytime I only realize this after about 10 minutes of pumping unneeded stuff in there. Little interface glitch, pisses me off.
Jeremy Zawodny's blog: Yahoo Gets
Jeremy Zawodny's blog: Yahoo Gets Slashdotted: "Yahoo got slashdotted today. It was because of Michael Radwin's PHPCon 2002 talk on Yahoo adopting PHP. The funny thing is that it held up just fine--served by a single FreeBSD server running Apache. [...] The fact that public.yahoo.com was serving static files, no PHP or anything fancy, meant that the CPU had time to spare. During the peak of traffic, the CPU was still over 50% idle much of the time."
Jeremy Zawodny's blog: "Wow. I
Jeremy Zawodny's blog: "Wow. I spent much of the day without phone, computer, network, etc. I was up at Inktomi (now "Yahoo! WebSearch" I think) headquarters learning about lots of cool stuff I cannot repeat with out being killed.
However, I did learn that Inktomi's search system knows, uhm... "stuff" about blogs. And I got the chance to see what some of their tools told me about my blog. Neat stuff."
I'm probably late with this,
I'm probably late with this, but here goes: For great justice: All your base + war in iraq. The original was better but the image of Bush with the robot voice is powerful.
Big Dead Place: (via Mike)
Big Dead Place: (via Mike) "If you almost die or something, either at a field camp or by industrial havoc in town, people will be quite fascinated. Restrictions on 'complaining' or on 'acting all badass' may be safely discarded, within reason."
The Register: "Although it took
The Register: "Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a "Second Superpower", it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank to flood Google with Moore's alternative, neutered definition."
I need to set up
I need to set up an environment for developing Taxomita (which is not open source) with a distributed team. I need bugtracking, CVS, and minimal maintenance and cost. I would like something that is easily administered (adding developers, giving permissions, ...) Something like SourceCast maybe, although it's hard to figure out exactly what they offer - very confusing site. Other options? Ideas? Tips? I really need advice! The situation is: I have limited time and limited budget, but I want a development effort that is not open source (I am the dictator) but is distributed. And I do not want to spend my weekends administering a system.
Clasificaciones Facetadas y Metadatos (y
Clasificaciones Facetadas y Metadatos (y II): XFML (Spanish article about XFML)
Simon Willison is building an
Simon Willison is building an RSS aggregator and this seemingly simple project is bringing up a bunch of problems with widely varying RSS feeds.
I am trying to set
I am trying to set up a development process for Taxomita and wondering if I should open source it?
A Day In The Life
A Day In The Life Of BBCi Search: where we learn that:
- "an editorial and taxonomy team at the BBC constantly monitor the searches gaining high volume in order to match the correct content to them"
- "40% of the searches on the service were specifically and unequivocally looking for UK based information [...] 50% of searches were not geographically or culturally focussed on the UK at all. "
- "users were most likely to attempt to use advanced search between 6am and 9am in the morning, and between 3pm and 10pm in the evening, when around 5% of searches showed some attempt to use advanced search. Notably at the peak time for site usage, over the lunch period, users were only half as likely to use advanced techniques - around 2.5% of searches. [...] 1 in 5 attempts to use advanced search fail"
- "When a search is made on the BBCi site, effectively just two pieces of information are passed to the search technology - the search query itself, and the referring page. With these two pieces of information search is able to provide results that are contextualised in places where this is appropriate - for example, different top results for the search term 'china' depending on whether you are on the BBC News site, or on the Antiques site."
- "1 in 12 [search terms] feature incorrect spellings"
- "URLs made up around 3% of searches, and questions just over 0.5% of searches."
- "I found that 36% of searches consisted of just one word and 35% of searches used just two words. [...] 16% contained 3 words, 7% contained 4 words, 3% contained 5 words, and the remaining 3% consisted of six or more words."
- "Overall, this gives us a picture of where the focus of our users is at different times of the day. This is for 'educational' types of searches in the early afternoon. By 4pm the attention of BBCi users has switched to the areas of the site devoted to entertaining them. By the evening, the audience seems divided between two - between children looking for educational material, and adults looking for informative material."
I happen to have received
I happen to have received two emails in one day from people upset with my sites. One is political: "I just clicked on your Guide to war link and I have to tell you this is the last time I will be visiting your site. [followed by a long political rant]".
The other one is also political, but in a different way: "Your site, specifically the portion entitled SoWhatsWrongWithTopicMaps, has led our organization to what I hope is an "unintended" consequence, namely, the possible cessation of work on implememting a well-constructed topic map. [... some ranting] If this has been your intent - to disrupt - you and your site have succeeded. If it is not your intent, I would urge you to consider modifying your content."
I am often surprised by how seriously people take the opinions I post online. Often they are really offended (for example, about this page).
Even my girlfriend has felt offended by some of the opinions I have posted about Colombia. I tried to tell her these are opinions, nothing more, and I may have changed my mind since, but she says many people consider what they read on a website as somehow written by an authority.
Boxes and Arrows has good
Boxes and Arrows has good wrap-ups of the IA summit in Portland. (I wrote one of them - and that guy with the colorful striped sweater is me :)
Internet power 'fails the poor'
Internet power 'fails the poor' (Friday BBC day!): "The problem, according to Ms Mansell, is that international trade rarely occurs between complete strangers.
The internet and e-mail alone are unlikely to generate the type of trust needed for US buyers to take the plunge and source their wares from Africa or other unfamiliar trading partners.
After investigating 180 open e-marketplace websites and interviewing 74 managers of exporting firms, the report concluded that little business with new firms was being generated from business-to-business websites. "
Cost of government websites revealed:
Cost of government websites revealed: (BBC news) "According to a report in the newsletter eGov Monitor, the most expensive website belongs to the Department for Education and Skills, which spent £1,747,000 during the last year.
By contrast, the Ministry of Defence has been positively parsimonious, with just £124,000 - including expenditure on hardware and support costs - going on its site last year." (£124,000 is 193,000 US$)
Furtive phone photography spurs ban
Furtive phone photography spurs ban (BBC news): "As camera phones become more popular, national, governments, local authorities and some businesses are starting to restrict the places they can be used.
Italy's data protection commissioner has issued stringent rules governing how the phones can be used and some other organisations, including strip clubs and gyms, have banned the phones from their premises.
Picture phones are already banned in Saudi Arabia and their use is frowned upon in other Middle Eastern nations.
Some people have already been prosecuted for misusing their mobile phone camera.
[...]
The rules only allow images of people to be snapped for personal use, demand that the images be kept safe and require users to tell people if the image they have taken of them will appear online."
Robot rover simulates Mars trek:
Robot rover simulates Mars trek: (BBC news) "Researchers have deployed an autonomous robot to traverse Chile's Atacama Desert as part of a project to develop advanced rovers for Mars exploration.
[...]
Based on this year's experience, next year's robot should be able to travel about 50 km. The target for the 2005 expedition is 200 km, traversing contrasting areas where life is abundant and areas where life has not been detected."
HelloWorld: social networking platform (via
HelloWorld: social networking platform (via IASlash)
Dave Winer doesn't get why
Dave Winer doesn't get why porn sites spam referrer logs. The audience isn't you Dave, it's Google.
An excellent history of interaction
An excellent history of interaction design (PDF!).
(via Simon) Usability Myths?: Signal
(via Simon) Usability Myths?: Signal vs. Noise debunks the debunkers. There is too much faulty reasoning (Jakob!) in the usability world. It doesn't mean their conclusions are wrong though.
BlogShares is a fantasy stock
BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs. Players get to invest a fictional $500, and blogs are valued by inbound links.
SmartPHP.net (via Simon) Since I've
SmartPHP.net (via Simon) Since I've been developing Taxomita I've been interested again in good PHP (as opposed to my usual make-do PHP).
I am trying to figure
I am trying to figure out how to treat screenshots (I want that nice 3D look where a screen is "standing up", slightly turned away from the viewer, with a little shadow - can't find any example sites right now) for the new Taxomita site (Taxomita 1.0 should launch soon-ish). I also want to do a box image and have an easy way to update that. Any tools out there? Photoshop plugins? Tips?
The IA Summit in Portland
The IA Summit in Portland was fantastic. I am still suffering from a severe cold that seemed to be doing the rounds, but it was by far the best conference I have ever attended.
When my head clears up a bit, I will go through my notes and report on the happenings. Meanwhile:
- Erin Malone
- Adam Greenfield
- Mark Bernstein
- Lieke (aka Pauline)
- The collaborative summit blog
- Lou Rosenfeld
- Victor Lombardi
- Thomas Vanderwal
(Hey, Peterme's back)
A public beta of Taxomita
A public beta of Taxomita can be downloaded here. You will need PHP and MySQL to install it. Please note this is an early beta. Everything should work fine, but no guarantees. If you install it, please join the Taxomita mailing list and tell us your impressions or ask questions.
The Arrogant Empire: "Some in
The Arrogant Empire: "Some in Washington have pointed out that whenever the United States has taken strong military actionfor example, the deployment of Pershing nuclear missiles in Europe in the early 1980sthere was popular opposition in Europe. True, but this time its different.
[...]
the United States will spend as much next year on defense as the rest of the world put together (yes, all 191 countries).
[...]
The U.S. economy is as large as the next threeJapan, Germany and Britainput together. With 5 percent of the worlds population, this one country accounts for 43 percent of the worlds economic production, 40 percent of its high-technology production and 50 percent of its research and development.
[...]
Given this situation, perhaps what is most surprising is that the world has not ganged up on America already.
[...]
go back to 1945. When America had the world at its feet, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman chose not to create an American imperium, but to build a world of alliances and multilateral institutions.
[...]
But should the guiding philosophy of the worlds leading democracy really be the tough talk of a Chicago mobster? In terms of effectiveness, this strategy has been a disaster. It has alienated friends and delighted enemies. Having traveled around the world and met with senior government officials in dozens of countries over the past year, I can report that with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country the administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it."
If you want to ignore
If you want to ignore my war links, they will be called "Pro" or "Con". Con
Application profiles: mixing and matching
Application profiles: mixing and matching metadata schemas: "Application profiles are useful as they allow the implementor to declare how they are using standard schemas."
When Joe Clark says he'll
When Joe Clark says he'll follow up on a presentation, he follows up on a presentation. Good stuff there, even if you haven't seen the presentation itself.
Xsitable 0.8 released. It is
Xsitable 0.8 released. It is a package for running sites that is heavily based on XML technologies like Topicmaps (XTM) and supports XFML. For an example site using it, see Shelter.nu.
Zempt: "What's wrong with you?
Zempt: "What's wrong with you? You stumble upon our super-secret, under development site, and you expect the links to actually work?"
Mike Lee: "I recreated part
Mike Lee: "I recreated part of JJG's Yahoo! Mail diagram. Since I can do text entry with the PocketPC block recognizer pretty well, the diagram came together in about 30 minutes - about as long as it would have taken in Visio. Not surprisingly, I found it difficult to build a diagram while on a moving subway car, train, or ferry."
Jorge A. Toro: (via IASlash)
Jorge A. Toro: (via IASlash) "CardZort is a computer application that runs card sorting exercises. Its main purpose is to offer a complete computer-aided system that allows the fast creation and execution of card sorting exercises, and the analysis of the resulting groups via cluster analysis.
CardZort makes use of a graphical metaphor that closely mimics the real card sorting process. Cards are dragged and dropped over each other to create piles, which is very similar to the way it is done by hand."
HubLog: But why?: "So Seb
HubLog: But why?: "So Seb had some nice ideas, and said let's get everyone to write structured blogs with metadata, and everyone went yeah! that's great let's do that, it'll be semantic. So I made blam!, because I could. And then I thought, that was easy: I could make some kind of Blosqlom, that stored all the files in a database so they could have loads of keywords attached, like metadata, instead of single categories. And I could make a form that was launched by a bookmarklet from an Amazon page that you could fill your review into and it would post your review to blam! and give you the HTML with pictures and metadata and everything to post into your own weblog, where allconsuming could find it as well."
Interesting.
Marc's Voice: some nice thinking,
Marc's Voice: some nice thinking, but this is where it all breaks down: "Each of these would have (one or more) standard format(s)." Standardizing metadata is harder than Marc seems to think. XFML uses published subject indicators (a concept nicked from Topicmaps) and direct connections between topics.