Online story-telling: a real life
Online story-telling: a real life thriller: 1934 - 2002 ... Het Lam Gods en de Rechtvaardige Rechters (in Dutch) is a website by a retired taxi-driver who is slowly revealing the secret of one of the most famous art-robberies of the 20th century.
A painting was stolen and never found - the site promises to reveal the location of the stolen painting which is according to ransom letters by the thief "in a public place", so the thief couldn't retrieve it "without attracting public attention". The site is breaking all (Belgian) traffic records - and international coverage is starting to happen. Just wait till they get /.ted. It all feels like reality TV - but for real.
No Iraq Attack: An Open
No Iraq Attack: An Open Letter from the academic community opposing a U.S. invasion of Iraq
The Shifted Librarian: "A little
The Shifted Librarian: "A little realized fact outside of libraryland is that we're completely beholden to our database vendors. For the most part, we can't build our own software for running library catalogs, mainly because of a lack of money, time, resources, and programmer librarians. So we have to rely on the handful of vendors that make the software that runs our catalogs. Naturally, these vendors don't really play nicely together, and it's a very drawn-out process to switch from one vendor to another so it's relatively rare." Ah, that explains a lot.
Bitzi: a kind of distributed
Bitzi: a kind of distributed metatagging effort for all types of files - seems focussed on adding metadata to P2P filesharing.
Being in Belgium for a
Being in Belgium for a short while, I get to see the news here again. The first person ever took advantage of a sensible law making euthanasia possible in certain cases. Doctors are starting to use marihuana for pain control purposes with cancer patients - "the effect is not like when you smoke a joint" was reported. A UN research project ranks Belgium the 4th best country in the world to live in (the USA is nowhere up there). And the German speaking part of Belgium (70.000 people! Their own parliament! Their own official language!) are called "the best protected minority in the world". Things are ok in Belgium.
Donna continues to be one
Donna continues to be one of the few blogging IA's who shares her real life stories, doubts and findings. Keep going Donna!
Tanya (who works at a
Tanya (who works at a university) on the MIT open courseware project.
Digital Dashboards, Dirty Dishes, Messy
Digital Dashboards, Dirty Dishes, Messy Desk, Workspaces and Web Logs: how we interact with information in the real world.
a klog apart: "The library
a klog apart: "The library service I want: an Amazon alternative.".
Guide to Search Tools: Why
Guide to Search Tools: Why Searches Fail. Another nice overview article at searchtools.com
Classification Tools - SearchTools.com Listing.
Classification Tools - SearchTools.com Listing. Interesting site.
Clever concept I hadn't heard
Clever concept I hadn't heard of: pre click confidence.
Sopranos Family Tree: a pretty
Sopranos Family Tree: a pretty cool visual representation of some metadata (via highcontext)
Questions Information Architects Ask (Part
Questions Information Architects Ask (Part I) (Bloug)
In spec-writing, focus rules.
[Aquarionics] Journal - Mindless Coding.: "Adding the namespace suddenly made RSS a scary thing because I, as a developer that has to try to understand this crap, now have a potentially infinite number of tags, all of which somebody, /somewhere/ will want me to support. It also means that RSS, far from doing one thing well (which it did), can now do an infinite number of things, many of them identical, at the whim of some tinpot developer. Or, because I don't trust single people to come up with perfect standards alone, Badly."
I very much agree with this sentiment. RSS development definitely got out of hand. Then again, it's been a great, public try out of what to do and what not to do when writing specs or defining formats. Simplicity still rules. Or let me restate that: focus rules.
On a related note: I just dropped some more non-essential elements from the XFML spec. Release is, as they say, imminent.
Jonathon Delacour: "I noticed that
Jonathon Delacour: "I noticed that Phil Ringnalda had added the (blue and white) RDF button to his weblog, presumably to differentiate his RDF feed from his RSS feed (which uses the traditional orange and white XML button). Once I'd created the ESF button for Nicholas Avenell, I made an RSS2 button. However, Dave Winer stated quite definitely that RSS feeds (including RSS 2.0) should use the XML button. Since he hasn't, as far as I'm aware, objected to Phil's RDF button, it seems clear that Dave's concern is that any RSS feed uses the XML button. [...] *all* RSS feeds are supposed to use the XML button and other XML-based feeds can have a separate button with the name of the format."
Thanks Jonathon! 
The Morning News - Roundtable:
The Morning News - Roundtable: Writing on the Web. Somewhat older but intelligent talk on writing for the web, and that's hard to find.
Paolo Valdemarin Weblog "The main
Paolo Valdemarin Weblog "The main reason I like it is that I'm not much a big topics fan. I mean, I think that having to organize everything I post is additional work and I didn't think it was worth the effort. With LiveTopic it's so easy that you get a topics-based organization of your work almost without efforts."
Livetopics (for Radio) looks interesting.
Score Brownie Points: "Give us
Score Brownie Points: "Give us $47 once every two months. We mail something to you. You take it home to your woman. You take all the credit. What do we mail? All you really need to know is that it's girly stuff you wouldn't be caught dead buying." Gotta be kidding...
If anyone wants to design
If anyone wants to design a nicer XFML Core compatible" icon, feel free. My Design Powers have Failed me Again!
The Google Appliance has the
The Google Appliance has the ability to augment the search with a thesaurus to offer the user the option of adding "personal safety restraint devices" when they searched for "seatbelt". This functionality works similarly to Google's spelling corrections.
Game Studies 0102: Sims, BattleBots,
Game Studies 0102: Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata, God and Go. By Celia Pearce: "So the actual process of playing SimCity is really closer to gardening. In either case, your mental model of the simulation is constantly evolving."
Checkershadow Illusion: an optical illustion
Checkershadow Illusion: an optical illustion I hadn't seen (and I thought I'd seen them all).
Discussion on standards for distributed
Discussion on standards for distributed information architecture at ia/.
DonnaM: When is card sorting
DonnaM: When is card sorting useful. I like how Donna publishes her real-life IA experiences. I'll try to do the same.
The book is finished. My
The book is finished. My editor went on her honeymoon - now it's just waiting for the designers to do their crazy job.
The whole distributed information architecture
The whole distributed information architecture meme seems to be taking off. Sharing categories! But also, and even more powerful, sharing indexing efforts!
Cloudmark has reduced my incoming
Cloudmark has reduced my incoming spam from about 20-40 a day to almost 0. Zero spam! Easy setup, no funny rules to enter, it just works. Spam gets filtered automatically to a special spam folder, and it's a lot more reliable than the spam filters Yahoo! or Hotmail use. Recommended, especially because you can still sign up for the beta for free.
I'm trying to find a
I'm trying to find a good and free XML/DTD editor that can validate XML against a DTD?
You have to like a
You have to like a company that invites you to visit all their competitors
Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 2:
Kevin Kelly -- Chapter 2: Hive Mind: "[...] Thus, there is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find the hive. "
Will Lowe sounds like a
Will Lowe sounds like a modern day Hari Seldon: What is the dimensionality of Human Space? (PDF).
A Framework of Guidance for
A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections
Collections principle 1: A good digital collection is created according to an explicit collection development policy that has been agreed upon and documented before digitization begins.
Collections principle 2: Collections should be described so that a user can discover important characteristics of the collection, including scope, format, restrictions on access, ownership, and any information significant for determining the collection's authenticity, integrity and interpretation.
Collections principle 3: A collection should be sustainable over time. In particular, digital collections built with special funding should have a plan for their continued usability beyond the funded period.
Collections principle 4: A good collection is broadly available and avoids unnecessary impediments to use. Collections should be accessible to persons with disabilities, and usable effectively in conjunction with adaptive technologies.
Collections principle 5: A good collection respects intellectual property rights. Collection managers should maintain a consistent record of rightsholders and permissions granted for all applicable materials.
Collections principle 6: A good collection provides some measurement of use. Counts should be aggregated by period and maintained over time so that comparison can be made.
Collections principle 7: A good collection fits into the larger context of significant related national and international digital library initiatives. For example, collections of content useful for education in science, math and/or engineering should be usable in the NSDL.
The paper goes on with a number of object principles and more.
Usability in India (post on
Usability in India (post on CHI list). Aaron Marcus made a great point that I've been thinking about: we need cultural dimensions (in Geert Hofstede style) relevant to the web. Looking it his website by the way, Aaron seems a year or two, three ahead of the curve on a lot of the thinking relevant to IA and webdesign as it relates to cultures. He wrote a good introductory article, making the point that yes, Hofstede's dimensions *are* relevant for the web. Yet they need to be adjusted, and more research is needed.
One thing I'm gonna try to look at the following years is cultural diversity on intranets. I am going to work on a lot of large intranets, and have audiences all over the world, so that is a great opportunity to do that type of research. And try to develop intranets that are sensitive to cultural differences that may exist between countries but also between job roles. Trompenaars (in one of his books, forgot which one) did some work on how Hofstede's dimensions get reflected in job descriptions: how cultures of laywers are different than cultures of HR people for example.
On a related note, I had a chat with a niece of mine - she's an accountant - and was talking about how different managers came in with new methods and how they got received. Culture! I'm happy I took that ethnography course, it will be useful me thinks.
DonnaM: I can't evaluate my
DonnaM: I can't evaluate my work: "Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a small (12 pages) website. I looked at it today and couldn't evaluate it. I can't tell whether the graphics look amateur, whether they take up too much space, whether people will be able to find the secondary navigation, whether the images are too big and whether the colour scheme is good or too green."
I get that too.