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.
Hey, Tanya’s blog!
Travis from Facetmap started an interesting discussion on the SIGIA-L list about distributed thesauri.
WebWord.com: “Embrace the Green Dragon”? (look in the green bar)
I’m trying out cloudmark: collaborative filtering against spam!
I see facets.
Put down that knife: “Dremedia has produced an elegant search engine for digital video archives. The British startup could save broadcasters a fortune.” (via intervals)
A blog about design *and* business!
The ia-cms group seems to be starting well. You have to join to read the archives though…
I can’t wait to see what Victor comes up with next.
XHTML, XForms, and device independence: “No one can deny that HTML has been a great success. But… It is a mess. Both in its design and its use. XHTML is trying to improve the situation.” Ha!
What’s wrong with a messy world anyway? Sure, a web full of lovely compliant xhtml (with nicely tagged metadata) would be nice, but that wouldn’t be the web - that is called a library. We already have those. They can’t even get CSS right, I don’t think all this is gonna happen anytime soon. Instead, some parts of the web will go clean, large parts of it never will. It doesn’t matter. Why don’t we focus a bit more on making the web useful - it is still a completely underdeveloped medium. Come on web designers! We have techies, we have designers, now we even have information architects. But where are the people that actually have something to say, to do on the web?
I’m wondering whether it’s a good thing to talk politics on the blog?
ETM (Easytopicmaps.com) is an Open Directory Cool Site! (I promise I’ll stop the self-linking soon…)
PHP has the highest Relative Language Rockatude factor.
Maybe someone else can use my jobsearch wiki. May be worth checking if you are looking for an ia-job in NYC.
And the self linking continues: Maybe I’m wrong on this ontology thing but something about it is just fishy.
I’m happy I have a one year contract with Verizon only so I can get a different provider next year: they are really bad.
NUblog: Has online content jumped the shark?: Joe Clark is running out of things to criticize. I’d like to say: Come on Joe: the web still sucks! Don’t give up. Have some imagination of what it could be, and you’ll have many further years of happy criticising. It’s not because a website is standards compliant and usable that it’s actually any good.
Joel on Software - September 12, 2002: “One person who I was talking to yesterday would have used a custom field for something that we already have a built-in field for. This would have made their database confusing and inconsistent and would have definitely caused more problems than it solved. But it’s still rude of me to tell customers that we don’t have that feature for their own good, even though it usually is, and we’re losing some sales because of it.
Sigh. I guess we could have a custom fields feature but hide it and make it so hard to use that people don’t use it. At least we won’t lose any sales :)
Hawai Creole English (Metafilter): a nice illustration of how most people still think that creoles are somehow “lesser” (less complicated, less valuable, less subtle, …) languages than standard languages (like standard English). The same idea that Black English is somehow a lesser language than standard English, when most linguistics agree it is actually not just a creole but a separate language.
I might as well come out of the closet: I don’t think ontologies, in the sense of descriptions of knowledge and relationships between concepts, are going to be very useful for webdesigners (I use that term in the broadest sense possible) any time soon, if ever. Go ahead, ask me why!
New mailing list: ia-cms.
The topicmapCafe is turning into a who’s who in topicmapland.
XML.com: What Are Topic Maps? [Sep. 11, 2002]: a new and excellent article explaining topicmaps. Still, practical topicmap application seems to take time - there are some non-technical hurdles that seem even harder than the technical ones.
LIFT for Dreamweaver - Nielsen Norman Group edition. NN continue to be the number one brand in usability - much like adaptivepath is becoming the leading brand in information architecture (or is it the bear?). I wonder when they’ll start doing research and charging for reports? I don’t think that’s a bad evolution.
I was told by a librarian (a real one!) that research has repeatedly shown that when indexing information - even with a controlled vocabulary and trained indexers - the maximum rate of agreement hovers around 25%. So for 75% of items, the indexers don’t agree on which terms to use to describe them. Anyone want to (dis)confirm this?
I also recently discovered the existence of language geeks. Compared with the language geeks, your basic Slashdot-type technology geek is nothing but an amateur in geekness, a pathetic wannabe. A friend of mine is cataloging the different words used in New York state legal texts to describe places, and their meaning - as a hobby. He was also translating 18 century German texts into English, learning German to do it. German is harder than Perl, believe me. No debuggers available. Wordnet looks like a typical language geek hangout.
Finally, I was reading Information Anxiety 2 (at amazon.com), and thus learned that Richard Saul Wurman coined the term “information architect” back in 1975. What he meant leans more towards what today we would call an “information designer” though - many information architects wouldn’t meet his definition.
That’s all folks. I’m off to Belgium for a few weeks. Updates will be rare and probably not worth reading.
MS contacted me after seeing the XFML site I’ve been working on. I wouldn’t have applied for the position based on the profile they wrote, it was way of - too much experience needed. They wanted to interview me anyway for a Program Manager position. A program manager is basically someone who determines functionality of a piece of software - and MS set it up in such an ingenious yet obvious way (coders do not report to program managers) that leads to quality code (yes, I just said that) that I’m surprised it hasn’t been copied more in the industry. It really is quite brilliant.
Microsoft are famous for their gruelling interview practices - and I have to agree: it was fun but my brain was fried at the end of the day. But again - it just works. I was impressed. I talked to 6 people, and each gave me a design problem, something they were actually working on. I was then supposed to come up with solutions. It is a great way of interviewing, but it really fries your brain fast. By noon I couldn’t think straight anymore. (They didn’t offer me the job.) Another thing they were trying to find out is if I could be an advocate: had I done talks at conferences? Did I know a lot of people in the industry?
I wore a suit and tie but really shouldn’t have bothered. Microsoft are hiring agressively at the moment, I saw at least 10 other people waiting for interviews. None wore ties. Nobody I met wore ties. I was the sole tie master. For the interview, I was flown to Seattle, MS paid. MS got me a nice hotelroom for two nights so I could check out Seattle day two. It looks like a great place. MS are famous for treating their employees well, I would have liked to work there.
FacetMap is getting really interesting. Read his statement for this month: damn cool stuff.
Meanwhile, with the design of XFML, I’m facing this question: allow for controlled vocabulary features like related, broader, narrower and alternative terms, or just stick with the a categorization using one term for each topic. Mmmm… Any ideas?
Christina’s book is out! Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web.
Some posts by people a lot more cleverder than me on the XFML list: anyone interested in faceted classification and thesauri should read these.
Travis from Facetmap makes some great points:
“(about topics having multiple parents) [...] The example given in ISO2788 is that “organs (musical instruments)” can have the parents “wind instruments” and “keyboard instruments”.
[...]
Many readers of this list probably see where I’m going with this. “wind instruments” and “keyboard instruments” don’t belong in the same taxonomy. They are separate facets of “organs”. “Wind” goes in the “sound production” facet taxonomy along with “percussion”, “string”, etc. “Keyboard” belongs in “input devices”, which would be a
different facet taxonomy because it describes a different aspect of the instrument.
[...]
Having written an XFML implementation from scratch, I would also like to add this: The relational database graph theory involved is much more elegant, and more efficient to run, if you limit facet nodes to a single parent. The practical upshot of such a limitation is, of course, that a facet mapping engine can handle many more facet nodes and resources before it starts to get swamped.”
… and gets responses from the library camp:
“For many years the literature on thesaurus construction has been emphasising the need for facet analysis as an underlying tool to ensure that valid thesaurus relationships are created. It has been good practice to present a controlled vocabulary both as a faceted classification and a thesaurus, since Jean Aitchison “Thesaurofacet” was published in 1969.
[...]
I think we may be talking slightly at cross-purposes here. It may be helpful if I set out the definitions of some of the terms used in the library / information science community, as people coming to this problem from an information technology or “topic map” background have adopted different terms for the same things, which leads to some misunderstandings. [...]“
I updated my personal site since I’m no longer looking for a job.
I am stealing ideas from the RSS people for XFML: I am now using copyrightHolder and copyrightLicense attributes instead of just one copyright attribute: thanks. And to address the scaling problem that occurs when an XFML file gets popular (files can get large), I have added skipDays and skipHours elements as in RSS 0.94. Thanks.
Information architecture: learning how to classify - ia/: “[...] when times change, terms will change.” Very true. When your view of the world changes, your classification changes.
New book:Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies. Looks interesting - I’ll be ordering it. There are few books that deal with non-technical globalisation issues such as workflow and culture.