Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

The whole metadata thing I’m working on with Simon Willison is becoming more and more obvious. I’m really surprised nobody has done this: the more I think about it and now that it’s taking shape, the more absolutely obvious it seems: metadata should be syndicated and connected. Somewhat like news items (RSS). I can’t even remember why exactly it took me so long to get my head around it all.

Thanks to Simon’s Secret XML Powers, it’s also turning out to be surprisingly easy to code. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have working code in about 20 hours of work. I’m interviewing this week, so I don’t have a lot of time for coding, but even so it’s not as much work as I’d thought. I think we’re succeeding well avoiding the political pitfalls that make the RSS specifications such a mess - the advantage of dictatorship I think.

Coding together while living in different countries seems to be working out as well - mostly because we divide our work clearly. We’ll see how it goes, I’m curious how we’ll deal with coding together without using CVS or some versioning system.

I think the first real life applications will be on my colombia website, and then I want to make it work with a mailing list archive. Maybe the Sigia-L list? We’ll see how it goes…

Work on the Secret Metadata Project has started…

Techie stuff IA’s need to know. (I know, I was going to stop posting. I’m trying, really!)

Semantic Research Inc.: “Semantica is expert-centric: We recognize that every organization, at all levels, has subject matter experts that have tacit understanding of the organization’s processes, markets, products and assets. “

Usability Junction: a new South African usability company, set up by a friend of mine. If you need South African usability testing, contact them!

The Disintermediation Blues / On the sad state of online car- and mortgage-buying services: “It’s not news that in recent years people with expertise (or, heaven forbid, degrees) in the social sciences were usually ignored when it came to handing out the top job in Silicon Valley” (Still taking time off, just couldn’t help myself posting this for future reference. Via IASlash.)

Since it’s the fashionable thing to do, I’m gonna take a few weeks off from this blog. Got a book to finish, a job to apply for and summer to enjoy. You enjoy too!

Simon Willison: “Moment of realisation: I just figured out what it is about Flash that bugs me so much. Flash is rubbish at text. Sure it can render text in pretty ways, but it never feels like real words. Flash takes good old fashioned text and locks it away in a pretty but shallow world, one that is out of reach of search engines, screen readers and my all important right mouse button. What good is text is text if I can’t search it, select it, copy it, paste it and generally processs it in whatever way I see fit?”

Amazon Light: very very very cool. This amazon interface (based on Google) might actually be more useful than the real amazon.

Great Jobs at Google.

Lycos are looking for a usability engineer in Boston, MA (USA). More usability jobs.

Another Tire Swing Cartoon although I preferred an earlier version (but were did it go?). More usability comics

Need a summer project?

Upgrading Movable Type went smooth :)

Shirky: Communities, Audiences, and Scale (In case you missed this in April - I did)

“Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large audience, but also allows all the members of that audience to engage with one another like a single community?” The answer seems to be “No.”

oreilly.com — Creating Applications with Mozilla coming in September: looking pretty cool!

Useful bookmarklet: Page Weight & Speed (includes image weight!)

Clever discussion on webgraphics about generating navigation for a website in Flash automatically from a link tag that points to a file containing a TOC (XFML maybe?).

Wired 10.08: The Bandwidth Capital of the World

“AT FIRST GLANCE, Seoul seems like just another sprawling metropolis: Its buildings, hastily constructed with dubious financing in the months leading up to South Korea’s 1997 economic crisis, are the sort of blocky, concrete-and-glass high-rises that give many modern cities the air of prefab homogeneity. Wide boulevards are choked with the oppressive traffic common in East Asia or, for that matter, Silicon Valley. Megamalls and underground shopping centers filled with Body Shops and Burger Kings cater to teens and young professionals. There’s none of the high tech visual overload you see in Tokyo, or the clean-scrubbed, old-meets-new urbanism of Scandinavia - nothing to indicate that Seoul is the most wired city on the planet.”

Functional Spec Tutorial :: What and Why: a really good looking tutorial.

Interesting classification scheme spotted at Safeway

Amazon.com: Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web: Christina is still editing, but the book virutally exists :)

Many people pointed to this, here it is for my own archiving purposes: After the Dot-Bomb

ieSpell - Spell Checker add-on for Internet Explorer” “ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage.”

Matt made the switch.

The papers for IBM’s Make IT Easy conference 2002 are up (via, again, Victor).

Victor points to Dubliners, in which Joe Clark (when is that book published? I’m waiting for it!) laments that Dublin Core isn’t used. Ha, I know why: centrally imposed metadata structures aren’t sexy. Ask Victor : his categories are crazy as hell, but they are his. That’s the point. What would be the value for him adding boring metadata that is so general to the point of becoming useless. That’s why I have hope for XFML.

I’m on the plane reading up on some blogs I’ve missed lately! No, it’s not Internet over the Atlantic, it’s IE’s Work Offline feature (Mozilla has it too). Very very cool. I wish there was a way to just point my browser to a set of bookmarks (when am I gonna get a decent bookmark managaging function?) when on a fast connection and say “suck them all in baby, I’ll watch them offline”. Maybe an idea for the Moz guys?

PS: I’m typing this on the plane as well, in Notepad. I also wish there was a way for Movabletype to work offline. But I guess that’s what we have Radio for.

I’ve been using Photomesa for a few months now, and it is great. ZUI’s (Zoomable USer Interface) are a great and logical way to manage your picture collection. I’ve got three months worth of pictures in there, and I see no problem scaling it up to many years of pictures. It’s too bad nobody has made a commercial product out of it (it could do with a bit of polishing and additional features). For that matter, it’s too bad nobody has made a decent picture management tool, ever, as far as I know. I’m a photographer by training, and I know there’s a market there. I’m sure a company could easily create an amazingly useful tool that all professional photographers and many consumers would use. I’m not sure why that hasn’t happened, but it’s dissapointing. Maybe because it would be too easy for MS to incorporate the zooming metaphor as an option for viewing folders in their next release of Windows, thereby killing the product mentioned above. No, that’s not it, the zoomable interface is only part of what I want, there is a lot more: annotation, proper metadata, … MS actually have some decent research on this, too bad I can’t find it - wanna try? My email+blogging time is limited to 40 minutes today and they’re running out.

Innovation seems so damn slow.

I just found the preview edition of Groove on my machine again, an online collaboration tool. Anyone care to install it as well and try it out?

I’m also still looking for the killer tool to manage my social network. Any ideas?

I have a question box on one of my sites, and I was considering building a system that would allow multiple people to answer the questions I get, and to archive them online; this email message made me think about the privacy aspect of it:

“Thanks. I hope my question won’t be posted on any public message boards — I’d be embarrassed to have it posted! It’s just a question that I asked because I am trying to get a better understanding of the experience that my friend is going through”.

When I do find time to design this system, I’ll use this quote with one of the personas.

eDesign (pointer by Jeff at IASlash) has some really good stuff, like this story of assistive technology for disabled users. Too bad I had to hack the URL to link to it, and too bad the new site suffers from bad links and error pages, else I would have subscribed straight away.

For those interested in DTD’s: I am now uploading the DTD’s for XFML to Yahoo! Groups : xfml Files. Feedback on the DTD’s very welcome, we’re version 0.41 at the moment. Version 0.4 introduced IDREF’s.

Here’s the thing: with the book almost finished, and XFML moving towards a stable spec fast, I am starting a new secret project. It’s gonna be all about (surprise!) metadata.

I’m not a real programmer myself (although I’ve build a CMS or two in my time), so I’m looking for someone to work with me on this with PHP and XML skills. If you’re interested, drop me a line at peter@poorbuthappy.com. If things work out as planned, this little project is gonna kick some serious ass.

I’m a New York Blogger!

kottke.org :: Elastic, not sticky

kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches: “Over the course of past week, I’ve seen a lot of explanations both here and around the net of exactly what we were raising money for.
I think the clearest way I can put it is: you just purchased Kuro5hin.org.

I wish I had put it this way to begin with, but even I was a little (probably more than a little) muddled about what the exact transaction here was. Simply put, it was this: If you collectively contribute enough money for me to live on for the next few months, I will contribute my equity in and ownership of Kuro5hin.org, do a lot of legal work, and what we’ll end up with is a nonprofit organization that will own and operate the site in perpetuity, and hopefully become a strong base of support for collaborative media in general.”

Interesting approach, and maybe a model for popular yet free sites?

Some good stories are being shared at webproducers.org. Don’t sign up if you want to keep a naive outlook on the web business.

Online ads, e-mail don’t click: “THE CURRENT so-called average click-through rate on e-mail advertisements is an anemic 1.8% [...] the average click-through rate for all online ads in June was a mere 0.84%.”

Business 2.0 - The Technology Secrets of Cocaine Inc.: (via Slashdot)

“Colombian cartels have spent billions of dollars to build one of the world’s most sophisticated IT infrastructures. [...] A high-level DEA official would go only this far: “It is very reasonable to assume that people were killed as a result of this capability. Potential sources of information were compromised by the system. [...] The drug lords have deployed advanced communications encryption technologies that, law enforcement officials concede, are all but unbreakable. They use the Web to camouflage the movement of dirty money. They track the radar sweeps of drug surveillance planes to map out gaps in coverage. They even use a fleet of submarines, mini-subs, and semisubmersibles to ferry drugs — sometimes, ingeniously, to larger ships hauling cargoes of hazardous waste, in which the insulated bales of cocaine are stashed. “Those ships never get a close inspection, no matter what country you’re in,” says John Hensley, former head of enforcement for the U.S. Customs Service. Most of the cartels’ technology is American-made; many of the experts who run it are American-trained.High-tech has become the drug lords’ most effective counter-weapon in the war on drugs”

Colombian Cartels built (10 years ago) an advanced data mining application that was used to sniff out traitors.
(more…)

netWert Ideapad: Turns out that: “1800flowers.com uses XML and “XFML”–Floral XML–for markup.” :)

Joel on Software - Top vijf (foutieve) redenen waarom je geen testers hebt: Joel in Dutch! Cool.