Tales of Drudgery and Boredom:
Tales of Drudgery and Boredom: (in Dutch) "Yow! Stijn! Iets voor u: XFML, eXchangeable Faceted Metadata Language. Enfin, denk ik toch. Korte introductie tot het dinges te vinden op xml.com."
Lutin's blog: (in French) "Ah ben voilà un truc qui me plait, mais je ne sais pas quoi en faire. Ou plutôt, j'ai tellement d'usages en tête que je ne saurais pas par où commencer si j'en avais les moyens. Je vais vous confier un secret: j'adore classer les informations. C'est pour ça que la référence de A frog in the valley me fait froncer les sourcils." (He's saying he doesn't know what to do with XFML because there are too many things you can do with it. I sympathize :)
David Galbraith: "I am less sure about XFML led by Peter Van Dijk, where the serialization of topics and facets seems to only allow 2 levels of hierarchy i.e. don't see how you can have subfacets of facets or subtopics of topics. Now it is true that you don't stricly need hierarchy beyond facet -> topics, but you get bloat, rather like flat file databases. Someone correct me if I am wrong." (he is wrong - XFML allows for unlimied depth in the hierarchies)
Looking at these architecture models,
Looking at these architecture models, I wondered, in real life architecture, about the role models play, and how that tranlates to information architecture models. The architecture models are beautiful. Sitemaps are inadequate as models, although they can be beautiful. Mmm...
RCCS: Who We Are: "The
RCCS: Who We Are: "The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies is an online, not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to research, teach, support, and create diverse and dynamic elements of cyberculture."
So I found myself asking:
So I found myself asking: why does hardly anyone use LABEL tags? They are useful, accessible and well enough supported. Even HotBot, with it's advanced CSS and javascript and what not doesn't use them - and they could really add value to those radio buttons.
Wired News: The U.S. Military
Wired News: The U.S. Military Needs Its Speed: (ues - the drug) "The Air Force claims amphetamine use is strictly voluntary. To substantiate this, Air Force spokespeople note that the "informed consent" form signed by pilots who receive Dexedrine mentions the voluntary nature of the program no fewer than seven times. However, the form also notes that the pilot can be grounded for exercising his right not to imbibe."
Amazon Tries Word of Mouth
Amazon Tries Word of Mouth (NYT, password): "Now Amazon has turned its quantitative prowess on one of the most vexing questions in marketing: Is television advertising worth the expense? Amazon's answer is no. And it has canceled plans for any television or general-purpose print advertising this year. The company is so sure of its decision that it has dismantled its five-member advertising department, assigning the employees to other roles.
[...]
Mr. Bezos said canceling all advertising is much more efficient than scaling it back. "By eliminating the whole activity of doing broad-scale television advertising it simplifies things," Mr. Bezos said. "We don't need anyone to figure out what type of TV campaign to do."
Benetech - The Martus Project:
Benetech - The Martus Project: "Martus, which is the Greek word for witness, brings new technology into the service of the field of human rights work."
Jeremy Shantz: An Introduction to
Jeremy Shantz: An Introduction to the Cardinal XFML Parser: "Although it is possible to create and process XFML documents using standard XML parsers, Cardinal XFML Parser provides a convenient abstraction that simplifies working with XFML. It models the XFML specification and its concepts and provides built-in ways to traverse a document's network cloud, import occurrences, and work with occurrence strength. For example, the XFMLDocument's ImportOccurrences method downloads the remote XFML files indicated by each element's children, selects and processes all occurrences from connected topics, and adds them to the output. It can traverse the XFML document's entire network cloud by doing this for each relevant element in all of the downloaded XFML files. All of this in one line of code. That kind of ease of use makes creating XFML Tools faster by enabling you to work directly with a model of the XFML language, without the need to write helper code. We hope that this leads to increased development of XFML."
Not sure if this is supposed to be released yet, but brilliant.
Shipping the prototype: "Years ago,
Shipping the prototype: "Years ago, when the paint was barely dry on Visual Basic 3.0, a developer showed me a CD-ROM-burning application he'd written using that toolkit. The idea was to prototype the UI in Visual Basic, then rewrite in C for performance. But in the end, he admitted somewhat sheepishly, "we shipped the prototype." I saw nothing to be ashamed of. It was -- and is -- a brilliant strategy. My only regret is that it hasn't been adopted more widely."
Nucleus Support: XFML theme &
Nucleus Support: XFML theme & template: "Users of Nucleus 1.99 (the dev version) can just download the zip file, import the skin/template and upload xmfl.php to their website root directory and get started."
ivan's-blog: "The language structure of
ivan's-blog: "The language structure of XFML is pretty cool in that you can further break down the information for better defined searches."
Gotzeblogged: "XMLifying my site, Take 2. Another day, another feed :-)"
Nuts and bolts: "Muito interessante as considerações, observações e testes de Mark Pilgrim a respeito de um novo formato de XML, o XFML (eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language). Essa nova tecnologia pode interessar ao pessoal aqui do Instituto que está discutindo exaustivamente a criação de um vocabulário controlado para a enciclopédia de artes visuais. Sim, pois o XFML categoriza de forma cruzada os assuntos de um website e cria uma área de cross-sections. As facetas são assuntos gerais de primeiro nível, que devem ser mutuamente excludentes e não ambígüos (os arquitetos devem evitar a criação de facetas com atributos do tipo "Lugares para ir" e "Cidades", por exemplo). Em seguida, são criados os tópicos das facetas, ou seja, o segundo grau hierárquico da taxonomia. Desta forma, o XFML permite que um tópico faça parte de duas ou mais facetas ao mesmo tempo, sem subverter as regras de entradas e a padronização de informação. Funciona muito como nosso cérbero, que trabalha por associações."
Meltsner: "And this is a relatively straightforward example. RSS, and all of its variations, is worse. I may just switch to XFML, since it's strictly defined, but I'm sure someone will decide that it just needs a few changes to be perfect..."
Accessify.com - all the tools,
Amazon.com Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering:
Amazon.com Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering: "By comparing similar items rather than similar customers, item-to-item collaborative filtering scales to very large data sets and produces high-quality recommendations.
[...]
The click-through and conversion rates [of recommendations based on collabirative filtering] two important measures of Web-based and email advertising effectivenessvastly exceed those of untargeted content such as banner advertisements and top-seller lists.
[...]
Unlike traditional collaborative filtering, our algorithm's online computation scales independently of the number of customers and number of items in the product catalog. Our algorithm produces recommendations in realtime, scales to massive data sets, and generates high-quality recommendations.
[...]
Rather than matching the user to similar customers, item-to-item collaborative filtering matches each of the user's purchased and rated items to similar items, then combines those similar items into a recommendation list."
Term Tree 2000 Thesaurus Software
Term Tree 2000 Thesaurus Software Home Page is reportedly working on XML export.
design4results.com: Damn good sales copy
design4results.com: Damn good sales copy for a small web company.
Buying documentaries: "In the light
Buying documentaries: "In the light of this situation, it is obvious that we are looking for more unique, original and ultimately more sellable films, films of high quality and edgy, contemporary and important content."
Intuitive Ranking - drop.org: "Base
Intuitive Ranking - drop.org: "Base the ratings on normal selfish use of the content." Like it.
Nuclear Warheads, Cocaine, and Polo
Nuclear Warheads, Cocaine, and Polo shirts: "I just want to hang out and explore and meet people." My buddy Jay wants to go to Iran and started a blog. Give him pointers :)
WSJ.com - First Impressions: "The
WSJ.com - First Impressions: "The New York Times' Web site will begin displaying half-page magazine-style ads adjacent to its articles, making its online pages appear more similar to their print counterparts. [...] The navigational links that typically appear on the far left side of the page will move to the top of the screen, making room for the text of the article to the left of the ad."
News! A corporate blurb that
News! A corporate blurb that makes sense! Wordmap: "Wordmap's Taxonomy Management System allows an organisation to use consistent terminology in all of its applications, assets and activities. Wordmap was designed from the ground up for enterprise deployment, and
has been proven in use by leaders such as Factiva, DaimlerChrysler and SchlumbergerSema."
Bloug: "The Halstead Principle: 80%
Bloug: "The Halstead Principle: 80% of untested business generalizations are made up by 20% of management consultants."
Fine Print in Electronic Arts'
Fine Print in Electronic Arts' Results: (NYT) "The company's president, John S. Riccitiello [...] disclosed that some seasoned video game players were giving very low ratings to the Sims Online."
Competitors Shape Strategy to Gain
Competitors Shape Strategy to Gain Edge in Web Services: (NYT, requires login blabla) "Web services are among the few bright spots for the industry amid the slump in technology spending. Corporate customers speak optimistically of the promise of cost savings and productivity gains from Web services."
Markup gurus: how should you
Markup gurus: how should you correctly markup a post with multiple languages in it like this? "Someday I would like to go to Buga a la Iglesia de los Milagros creo que se llama."
If you have a website
If you have a website and feel like spreading the word, even if you're not going yourself you should consider add a link to United for Peace on your site. I'm not a political person but this is just silly.
Webword: Would you be willing
Webword: Would you be willing to pay $1000 to avoid a war with Iraq?
Coding from Scratch: A Conversation
Coding from Scratch: A Conversation with Virtual Reality Pioneer Jaron Lanier, Part One (via Victor): "I think the whole way we write and think about software is wrong. If you look at how things work right now, it's strange -- nobody -- and I mean nobody -- can really create big programs in a reliable way. If we don't find a different way of thinking about and creating software, we will not be writing programs bigger than about 10 million lines of code, no matter how fast our processors become."
A lot more yummie stuff in there.
So me and Maria finally
So me and Maria finally saw The Lord of the Rings yesterday. Lessons learnt:
1. You need to come 30 mins early in any movie theathre in NYC to get a decent seat.
2. Computer animation has reached adulthood with this movie. A landmark. Gollum was the most alive, emotionally rounded out character in the movie. I will never again be able to say "My precious" to my girlfriend without her getting the shivers.
Hixie's Natural Log: And on
Hixie's Natural Log: And on the Eighth Day, He brought forth Progress. And it was good.: "The fact that xHTML2 won't be widely used before the end of the decade is not a problem."
Lesson: some technologies take the slow approach - and that's ok.
Mitch Kapor's Weblog: Chandler in
Mitch Kapor's Weblog: Chandler in Organizations: "Since the outset, we've intended that Chandler be useable by groups without requiring a server. Sharing calendars among a small group should not require the considerable effort and expense of purchasing and maintaining an Exchange server. Instead, a peer-to-peer protocol can be used to coordinate the flow of information.
[...]
What has become crystal clear though is that we must also support more centralized approaches if we are to gain the organizational adoption crucial to having the impact we hope to have."
Lesson: often creators of applications think their app is revolutionary because it will allow people to work differently. Reality: sometimes people don't want to work differently - creators of these apps need to think about migration paths - not technological but cultural.
AIFIA | The Problems with
AIFIA | The Problems with CMS: "There's plenty of criticism of content management systems (CMS). Discovering what bothers us most can help us start to address these problems constructively. We conducted a survey to identify the biggest obstacles to effective content management systems."
The New Global Job Shift:
The New Global Job Shift: "The driving forces are digitization, the Internet, and high-speed data networks that girdle the globe. These days, tasks such as drawing up detailed architectural blueprints, slicing and dicing a company's financial disclosures, or designing a revolutionary microprocessor can easily be performed overseas. That's why Intel Inc. (INTC ) and Texas Instruments Inc. are furiously hiring Indian and Chinese engineers, many with graduate degrees, to design chip circuits. Dutch consumer-electronics giant Philips (PHG ) has shifted research and development on most televisions, cell phones, and audio products to Shanghai. In a recent PowerPoint presentation, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) Senior Vice-President Brian Valentine--the No. 2 exec in the company's Windows unit--urged managers to "pick something to move offshore today." In India, said the briefing, you can get "quality work at 50% to 60% of the cost. That's two heads for the price of one."
The Internet Topic Exchange: "This
The Internet Topic Exchange: "This is the first public implementation of the Ridiculously Easy Group Forming concept. It's a central server to host TrackBack-powered channels. It's designed to let anyone effortlessly create a channel to archive pointers to information on a given topic."
Getting my Bearings: Mapping an
Getting my Bearings: Mapping an Existing Architecture: "One of the most challenging projects I have undertaken recently is to map the existing architecture of a mature public site. Discovering the underlying principles of the site was difficult because there were no overt principles, only tendencies and history. The project often felt more like anthropology than architecture."
BBC - A to Z
BBC - A to Z index - M: nice. A-Z index with facets and subjects integrated.
Digital Web Magazine - Features:
Digital Web Magazine - Features: User-Centered Design for Large Government Portals: "During a project for a Canadian provincial government, information architect Alex Wright (www.agwright.com) completed a facet "mapping" exercise, which established content relationships and provided a solid basis for metadata definition. Common "facets" identified at the State of Minnesota and other e-government initiatives have been:
- Audience: Children, Students, Teachers, Lawyers, Businesses, Voters, Health Care workers, Architects...
- Department: Department of Health, Department of Transportation, Department of Finance...
- Life Events: Having a Baby, Buying a Home, Getting Married, Getting Divorced, Paying Taxes...
- Forms: Tax Forms, Planning commission, Small Business...
- Topic: (Hierarchy: Topic > Sub-topic) Business, Travel, Health, Environment, Government, Education...
- Content Type: News Releases, Features, Transactional, FAQs...
- Location: (Hierarchy: State > County > City)"
This is a goldmine. Dewey
This is a goldmine. Dewey Decimal Classification : Tips : Classification Tips : The Moon, the Sun, and the DDC: "Why are two seemingly similar books classed in two different places? In classifying two books by Jane Kelly, What's inside the moon? and What's inside the sun?, I noticed that LC put the former under 559.91 and the latter under 523.76. Why does one go in geology but the other in astronomy? Shouldn't both be under either the 520s or the 550s? -
No. The Class-here note at 550 says to use the 550s for phenomena of celestial bodies directly comparable to earth; thus, the 559.91 is correct for the book about the moon. But because the sun is a star, not a planet, as the Earth is, it cannot be classed in the 550s. 523.76 is the correct number. (Also, geology is the study of the solid matter of a world. The sun does not have a solid interior.)"
Dewey Decimal Classification : Tips
Dewey Decimal Classification : Tips : Classification Tips : Photo Quality: Typical example of the limitatons of a non faceted classification system: "Where should a book of photographs of the homeless/poor in Kharkiv, Ukraine, be cataloged?
The first question to ask when you are confronted with a book of photographs is: Is the focus of the work on the artistic value of the photography? In other words, does the work truly belong in the category of arts? If yes, the work belongs in 779 ; if no--if the focus of the work in this example is on the plight of the poor rather than the artistic qualities of the photographs--the work should be classed with the subject." Using facets you could just classify under type > art > photography and under subject > people > homeless and under geography > Ukraine (you get the idea).
Dewey Decimal Classification : Tips
Dewey Decimal Classification : Tips : Classification Tips : Kermit's Song: "How do I catalog a book on the vocalizations of frogs? - The comprehensive number for "Vocal communication--animals" is indexed under the vertebrate number, because vertebrates are the only kind of animals that communicate by vocal chords."
Hivelogic: "After several years of
Hivelogic: "After several years of creating and publishing software for the Internet community for release here on Hivelogic (and in a few other places), and after much deliberation, research, and development, you have finally decided that the time to launch your own small software company is - precisely - right now." It feels like lots of people are starting companies the last year or so. Or maybe that's my lack of historical perspective?
JBG: Personal Knowledge and Collective
JBG: Personal Knowledge and Collective Representations: "This paper examines the loose relation between personal knowledge and collective representations using examples from Americans' ethnobiology, salmon fishing, and bartending."
Andrew points to this brilliant
Andrew points to this brilliant SIGIA-L post about recommender systems and classification that I somehow missed.
Scopeware - The Simple, Elegant
Scopeware - The Simple, Elegant Knowledge Management Solution: "Vision works the way your mind works, and simultaneously presents the four key dimensions which mirror human recall." Uses facets Time, Type, Look and Essence. Gonna try it out. But it does seems like the facet People is notably missing if you pretend to organize email.
David Galbraith: "Google is not
David Galbraith: "Google is not the right animal [t]o fully take advantage of metadata such as is contained in RSS."
InformationWeek > Search Engines >
InformationWeek > Search Engines > City Ogles Google Impact > January 22, 2003: "For instance, the public would get no results when it entered the word "maps" when looking for directions to city facilities, and employees had little success with terms such as "GroupWise" (the Novell E-mail software used by city workers) and "E-Pay" (a tool that provides intranet access to direct-deposit check stubs). When the city asked Verity how to solve the problem, the vendor suggested an upgrade to its K2 knowledge-management suite, as well as a taxonomy engine.
That option would have cost the city more than it wanted to spend, but as luck would have it, Google came knocking. Bill Cull, the city's E-government program manager, says that because city officials were so familiar with Google, it was hard to ignore the vendor's pitch. It also didn't hurt that it was being offered a special price as a public entity." Google kicks ass compared to pricey and immature taxonomy offerings. Mmm.