I keep thinking 'indeed' when
I keep thinking 'indeed' when reading Andrew: heyblog: Waste fifteen seconds now!: "I mean, I spend many four-second chunks of my day staring out the windown wondering if it's too early for lunch, or wondering where my left sock went, or fiddling with the crumbs that fall to the bottom of the toaster. If I had these back through some miracle of technology, I'd only spend them doing something equally unproductive. Saving me and all my fellow co-workers two or three seconds a day gives me (and my employer) nothing, nothing valuable."
Blueprints for the web -
Blueprints for the web - a review. I rate books on the amount of underlining and earmarking I do in them, and I thought Christina's was pretty good. (one day I'll write in depth book reviews)
People mention in the previous
People mention in the previous story have more to say:
Jagdish N. Sheth on marketing and customer focus: "Throughout this evolutionary process, we paid lip service to marketing as being customer-driven. This focus had emerged as early as the late 1950s in companies such as General Electric and Pillsbury. In these companies there was much talk of the need to adopt a customer viewpoint, and this became a sort of mantra in Kotler's textbook, i.e. that profits through customer satisfaction should be the objective of the company. But in reality, this was not implemented until the 1980s when the Malcolm Baldrige Award encouraged a stronger customer orientation.
[...]
If I had to summarize all the challenges facing us, the major one springs from the fact that marketing practice has always led the way, leaving academics to follow. In the old days, academics caught on slowly, but today, with the Internet, the practice of marketing is running so far ahead that by the time we "wake up" at our academic institutions, it is already too late.
I tell my students that the "half life" of knowledge is getting shorter and shorter. Much of what you study in college becomes more or less obsolete in two and a half years, i.e. it loses 50% of its value. "
Barbara E. Kahn has some interesting looking papers:
- Shades of Meaning: The Effects of Color and Flavor Names on Purchase Intentions (PDF)
- The Impact of Private vs. Public Consumption on Variety Seeking (PDF): people choose more variety in public than in private.
- Cross-Category Effects of Induced Arousal and Pleasure on the Internet Shopping Experience (PDF): "Two experiments show that if the initial experiences encountered in a simulated Internet shopping trip are higher in pleasure, then there is a positive impact on approach behaviors and subjects engage in more arousing activities (e.g., more exploration, more tendencies to examine novel products and stores, higher response to promotional incentives)."
Books related to the article: Grocery Revolution: The New Focus on the Consumer and Category Management.
Generally, I feel IA has a lot to learn from the marketing folk. If only it was easier to separate the wheat from the caff!
Categorization influences choice
NYT: A Tool to Explain Affirmative Action: (requires a login) "If, for instance, a store arranges yogurt first by brand (like Dannon and Yoplait) and then by flavor within each brand, consumers will tend to select their flavors from the same brand.
On the other hand, the authors write, "If the products had been displayed with all the strawberry yogurts together, then all the lemon-lime yogurts, and so forth, consumers would most likely choose which flavors they wanted first, and then choose which brand name they would most like for that particular flavor."
Similarly, American supermarkets display meats by animal type - beef, chicken, pork, etc. - and then by cut. In Australia, by contrast, grocers arrange meats by the way they might be cooked, and stores use more descriptive labels, like "a 10-minute herbed beef roast." The result is that Australians buy a greater variety of meats.
How we classify goods changes how we make consumer choices."
Jonathon Delacour: the heart of
Jonathon Delacour: the heart of things: "So this is what it's come to: strangers in lifts and movie theaters express to me uninvited their disapproval of the coming war with Iraq." I have had similar experiences in Belgium. Americans underestimate the damage this war has already done them.
My girlfriend's 5G Win iPod
My girlfriend's 5G Win iPod crashed: it just hangs. The screen shows the text (Artists, Albums, ...), battery is loaded but it doesn't do anything no matter what button I press. Connecting it to the computer (win XP) doesn't help - it doesn't get recognized. What to do? Is there a way to reset it? I am really dissapointed...
Auto Discovery Format
IAwiki: AutoDiscoveryFormat: a proposal for a simple autodiscovery format, waiting for your comments. I wonder if putting this on a wiki will work?
AIfIA is holding its first
AIfIA is holding its first Leadership Seminar on March 21 in Portland. It's a full-day event--presented in conjunction with the ASIS&T IA Summit--that promises to tackle "the toughest problems faced by the designers of today's information systems." The AIfIA web site has complete details on the seminar, speakers and topics. I hope they post notes afterwards (I'll be going to the Metadata afternoon - budget!).
Wired News: Da Vinci: The
Wired News: Da Vinci: The Pith Behind the Man: "If Leonardo da Vinci were alive today, he'd probably be known as a geek. 'He was not popular in his own time ... a victim of his commitment to technical and scientific projects.'"
Faceted Approach to Web Redesign:
Faceted Approach to Web Redesign: "We quickly noticed a clear parallel between the topics covered by the site and the types of content clustered under the topics. Each topic had instances of most of the content types, and vice versa. On that basis, we decided to break the content types out as facets of the topics and use these facets as our primary navigation." Here's the thing with facets: Facet analysis is often useful even if you are constructing one big non-faceted tree as your only navigation tool.
Who's Minding the Store?: "Welcome
Who's Minding the Store?: "Welcome to the world of "category management," a bizarre and controversial place in which the nation's biggest retailers ask one supplier in a category to figure out how best to stock their shelves. You'd expect HarperCollins to tell Borders which of its own books are hot, of course. But that's not what's going on here. Borders has essentially tapped Harper to advise it on what cookbooks to carry from all other publishers as well.
[...]
Strange as it may sound, category management is now standard practice at nearly every U.S. supermarket, convenience store, mass merchant, and drug chain. And its use is growing because it works -- at least from a dollars-and-cents standpoint. According to a recent survey by retail consultancy Cannondale Associates, retailers attribute 14 percent sales growth to category management; manufacturers report an 8 percent jump. Both say such collaboration is the key to maximum efficiency.
[...]
Category management is retail's Faustian bargain: Lured by the savings and convenience of getting manufacturers to mind the store, retailers have ceded not only responsibility for their shelves but also any hope of differentiating themselves.
[...]
"The Kremlin would have found it difficult to invent a more subtle and effective way of suppressing original viewpoints and ideas," wrote 29 scholars and activists led by Ralph Nader after hearing of the Borders plan.
Language evolved in a leap:
Language evolved in a leap: "Language probably leapt, not crept, from squeaks to Shakespeare, two physicists have calculated. Human communication, they propose, underwent a 'phase transition', like solid ice melting to liquid water."
Exactly: heyblog on HelloWorld: "Maybe
Exactly: heyblog on HelloWorld: "Maybe you could draw a map of the world scaled so that areas that are personally relevant are enlarged."
Classification for profit.
If you still thought classification was 'objective' (there is no such thing as 'objective' classification): Article suggests 'female sexual dysfunction' created to sell drugs: "Classifying invented medical disorders as "dysfunctions" - especially sexual dysfunctions - could make big money for drug companies." CNN: "[...] cohort of researchers with close ties to drug companies are working with colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry to develop and define a new category of human illness at meetings heavily sponsored by companies racing to develop new drugs."
It was this blogs anniversary
It was this blogs anniversary about a week ago: ethnography and usability. That first post was ported from a poorbuthappy blog hosted on editthispage which seems to be down now (but Google has a cache).
El Mercurio.com: this may well
El Mercurio.com: this may well be the first mention of an "information architect" in a mainstream Spanish newspaper ever: "Pocos entienden más de usabilidad que Javier Velasco, quien en 1999 se convirtió en el primer arquitecto de información chileno y hoy trabaja en MSM-Nurun. Dice que la usabilidad es el grado de facilidad de uso de un sitio web. "Cuando un sistema no es usable, el cliente se confunde, se frustra y nunca más vuelve al sitio. Cuando es usable, se siente cómodo, y abandona el lugar dispuesto a volver"."
Factiva uses a standard set
Factiva uses a standard set of facets: Company, Geography, Industry and Subject.
Large and small companies that use weblogs
Companies that do weblogs:
Lotus: Ed Brill
Macromedia: John Dowdell, Mike Chambers, Matt Brown, Vernon Viehe, and Bob Tartar .
Groove: Ray Ozzie.
Microsoft: Joshua, Andrew Conrad, Benjamin Voigt, Chris Anderson, Chris Hollander, Dare Obasanjo, David Weller, Don Box, Douglas Purdy, Harry Pierson, Jimmy Grewal, Joe Beda, Joe Bork, John Lambert, Keith Ballinger, Matt Williams, Michael Winser, Peter Drayton, Rob Fahrni, Sascha Corti, Tantek Çelik, Tim Ewald, Wolfgang Manousek, Ziv Caspi
Radio Userland: Dave Winer
Moveabletype: Mena G. Trott
Jupiter Research: David Card, Michael Gartenberg, Joseph Laszlo, Robert Leathern, Lydia Loizides, David Schatsky, Gary Stein, Robert Sterling.
I'm sure I have only scratched the surface - please add in the comments and I'll add them here.
Textpattern: web writing tools. The
Textpattern: web writing tools. The first selling point mentioned is ease of use. The second is categorization: "for a start: all the elements that make up a site published with Textpattern code, layout, and content are subject to a rich system of cross-categorization"
The categorizing capabilities offer a fixed set of facets: Category, Section and Linkcategory, in which you can create your own topics/categories. Weak points: no hierarchy, no self defined facets. Tip: if you are building linkcategories yourself, use Claire Harrison's link classification as a starting point. Here's another review, and another one.
Textpatterns has a host of clever features (other than the somewhat dissapointing categorization - better than anything out there right now, but still dissappointing): easy widgets for creating templates (I could see myself doing a good template in Textpatterns, as opposed to one in this site), the very clever See All Comments In One Place per writer, built in Visitor Logs and so on.
I won't be switching soon because there seems to be no overriding reason for me to do so (the categorization capabilities aren't that much better than MT, the ease of use isn't that much better, and it's unproven) I would recommend Dean to focus on one underserved area (Hm, categorization?) and make that really irresistable (while matching all the general functionality we have come to expect from tools like this - including search).
Dive Into Premium [dive into
Dive Into Premium [dive into mark]: "A new and better way to experience the "Dive Into" empire!" Too bad about the note at the bottom, or it could have been really funny.
Cities of Text: Some Notes
Cities of Text: Some Notes On Some Notes on Intranets, Knowledge Management And Urban Planning: "As scattered, disjunctively organized Web servers become unnavigable, search engine technology is purchased to pave over the islands of Webformation with search engine results. As search engine results themselves become unnavigable, meta-search engine technology, or "intelligent agent technology" is purchased, to make sense of the search engine output. And when these fail, other technologies appear, to remedy the shortcomings of the previous technology generation and introduce new dysfunctions into the environment. Layer upon layer of software: a stratigraphy of the failure of information technology."
Another stupid patent?: "Our website,
Another stupid patent?: "Our website, www.museumtour.com has recently received an patent infrin gement notice from SBC Intellectual Property.The letter suggests that any website which has static, linked information (top banners, menus, bottom banners) which are displayed while other sections of the page are displayed as non-static (the area where products appear on most websites) infringes upon the patents they hold." (From the CHI-web list)
Hey, that's me: XML.com: Introduction
Hey, that's me: XML.com: Introduction to XFML : "XFML is a simple XML format for exchanging metadata in the form of faceted hierarchies, sometimes called taxonomies. Its basic building blocks are topics, also called categories. XFML won't solve all your metadata needs. It's focused on interchanging faceted classification and indexing data."
ITU Internet Country Case Studies
ITU Internet Country Case Studies - Country Photos A brilliant collection of pictures of Telecommunications in a wide variety of countries - lots of pictures of internet usage. What a find.
Ease: RFP Available XML: Eric
Ease: RFP Available XML: Eric identifies why this idea wouldn't work: "the RSS generator probably doesn't know anything about the lastmodified data for the other linked resources (eg. FOAF and XFML)." Gets too complex when all tools generating feeds need to tie in with the system. Didn't think about that - too bad.
iVia Open Source Virtual Library
iVia Open Source Virtual Library System: "iVia is an open source Internet subject portal or virtual library system. As a hybrid expert and machine built collection creation and management system, it supports a primary, expert-created, first-tier collection that is augmented by a large, second-tier collection of significant Internet resources that are automatically gathered and described. iVia has been developed by and is the platform for INFOMINE, a scholarly virtual library collection of over 26,000 librarian-created and 80,000 plus machine-created records describing and linking to academic Internet resources. [...] iVia is designed to help virtual library systems scale as the number of high quality resources on the Internet continues to rapidly grow. "
Jupiter Research Analyst Weblogs. Let's
Jupiter Research Analyst Weblogs. Let's see what these guys have to say.
PCWorld.com - Credit Card-Size Hard
PCWorld.com - Credit Card-Size Hard Drive Can Hold 5GB: "StorCard can contain from 100MB to more than 5GB of data on a plastic card. At first glance, it looks like a credit card, and even has a magnetic strip like a credit card, for potential use in standard credit card readers."
Hiptop Nation: "Ok...now the bag
Hiptop Nation: "Ok...now the bag is filling with blood, I don't know why but the whole thing freaks me out. She's so cool about it. I guess some people are better at this sort of thing than others." (Before you freak out, it's about giving blood)
Image Gate is The New
Image Gate is The New York Public Library's first full working version of its new digital image database.
RFP Available XML
This may be daft, but how about a simple format that indicates which feeds and XML metadata files and such are available on a site. Most sites are getting to have lots of stuff available, with RSS and FOAF and XFML and what not. A simple file with Available Xml and other formats would mean that:
- you only need to link to 1 file from every page
- if it has a last updated date a lot of bandwidth can be saved.
Something like this:
<avx>
<file url="http://urloffile.com/metadata/file.xml" homepage="http://urlofhomepage.com"
type="RSS 1.0" typeurl="http://urloftypespec.com/rss1.htm"
latestupdate="10.30.00 10-04-2003">
<name>Frogs feed</name>
<description>Latest content in the frog category</description>
</file>
</avx>
AVX stands for Available XML. (but it could also point to RDF files and such) In the file element, the url attribute points to the file in question, the homepage url to the homepage of the site that file refers to (this is the only attribute I'm not sure about), type is a string indicating the type of feed, typeurl points to the spec of the type. We need both for human readability and for specs that don't have a homepage. If anyone has a better solution for the type/typeurl combination for identifying a type of feed (maybe namespace?) please comment. The lastupdate field needs a better way of indicating time, but is crucial: it means a lot of bandwidth can be saved by checking this (presumably shortish) file instead of downloading large RSS 2.0 or XFML files.
0xDECAFBAD: I second that sacrilege:
0xDECAFBAD: I second that sacrilege: "She was shocked that I, alpha geek and info freako, didn't have some intricate taxonomy of folders into which mail was sorted by carefully crafted filters." The filesystem is dying - Microsoft is working on it. Most geeks have limited taxonomies for personal use - maybe because they know how to conduct a search. Six degrees was a good attempt but everyone who tried it (including me) that I spoke with has given up on it. I will try it again though.
For years now, I've been
For years now, I've been tempted to replace my hown-grown discussion board with a decent system. It's just never quite right. A few things make me hesitate:
- My system will look and work like all these others.
- Even though I am less and less inclined to program, giving up control is hard. It means I won't be able to implement all the nifty features I have in mind...
The build vs. buy problem seems neverending.
Taxonomist, BBC New Media, News:
Taxonomist, BBC New Media, News: "Library or information science background... ...with ideally 3 years experience as an indexer, cataloguer or information architect with specialist knowledge of faceted taxonomies."
3600 Research Essays about the
3600 Research Essays about the Net. Auch. I feel demand for a Matrix-style plug in our brains rising.
Presenting design research: "For every
Presenting design research: "For every minute you propose to present, allow one hour of preparation. For a ten minute presentation, in other words, you need to plan in ten hours of preparation before the Big Day."
Simon Willison: "two way blogging
Simon Willison: "two way blogging technologies [...] are totally invaluable for the vast majority of bloggers - they help with exposure and generally make the blogosphere a more interesting and interactive place." (about Trackback and such, stuff I've been slow to turn on here.)
Jakob Nielsen: (uses no permalinks!)
Jakob Nielsen: (uses no permalinks!) "In investor relations we now know so much that we can provide a recommended standard information architecture to support investors' information needs on any publicly traded company's website." I agree - fairly standardized IA becomes possible for many subsections of websites once we learn enough - this is happening now.
IWIPS 2003, 17-19 of July
IWIPS 2003, 17-19 of July in Berlin. If only I was in Europe. But then I would probably have to miss ASIST 2003 (who'se website is almost up - about time, my budget needs approving!).
AIFIA | Future of Information
AIFIA | Future of Information Architecture: survery results. Read if you're interested in the evolution of an emerging profession.
Ben Hammersley.com: On censorship, borders
Ben Hammersley.com: On censorship, borders and translation: "There's a big world out there. Let's go and say hello." Indeed.
Discussion on a site of
Discussion on a site of mine: what language is this: "alam ko kung bakit pinalabas na ninyo ang ecomoda kahit di pa tapos ang betty lafea"?
Marc's Voice :"A baby step
Marc's Voice :"A baby step towards this future might be public reviews servers, storing reviews that folks are willing to 'share'." A more successful approach might be to use XFML.
Blogs through phones. Who wants
Blogs through phones. Who wants to write a simple format that can encode the location information. You write an entry on your phone/device. It gets sent to your blog. In the code is some simple RDF that says where you were when you wrote this/took this picture.