Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Things have been quiet here for a few days: I’ve moved to NYC and started a new job. Things will probably stay quiet a little bit longer while I get settled.

I think Surf*Mind*Musings is the second site that sports that lovely purple XFML button (in the right hand bar).

TRANSLATE.org.za: Mozilla available in Zulu, Venda and Xhosa. (South African languages)

Wired News: AOL Stops the Pop-Up (via Victor): “In a bid to make its customers happy, America Online is eliminating pop-up ads for the most part.” So this won’t be neede anymore.

The Weblog MetaData Initiative: “But never fear: we’re still in business, and very shortly will be asking for continued help from folks to do some down-and-dirty, real-world testing of some of the concepts that we’ve been hashing out in the forum. We’ll be looking for folks to actually start marking up their weblogs with what we should probably call an “alpha” (or maybe even “pre-alpha”) release version of a proposed spec, and also asking for all those of you who are codingly-inclined to cut loose and start hacking away.”

Introduction to XFML Core concepts. (Evolt.org)

I just realised (yes I’m slow) an RSS reader is an excellent way of following a discussion board.

The Shifted Librarian on XFML

a day late and a :: dollarshort.org: lovely redesign. Good to see something creative being done with weblogs.

Usage Statistics for xfml.org - October 2002: 84 visits/169 pages avg per day.

Chicago Libraries Rock!

Surf*Mind*Musings: “Jumping on the XFML bandwagon, here’s a syndication of what’s new in the top surf*mind*web categories in XFML.”

Novissio - liveTopics: note the XFML Core compatible logo :) First time I’ve seen that anywhere.

Blogorroico, elucubrazioni quotidiane discovers XFML

Catalogablog (via IASlash)

the Information Awareness Office: “Suppose you’re devising a logo for a new wing of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an office charged with developing intelligence tools and integrating the government’s existing surveillance networks. Suppose that it has a vaguely sinister name - say, the Information Awareness Office - and that it’s to be run by a former Iran-contra conspirator. What would your design be?” (via afongen)

Ha’aretz: “It does not bother Rosalind Duke that some people regard her lifetime’s work as “one of the most boring things they can think of.” [...] “Almost every book brings its own problems and needs,” she says when explaining why she finds the cataloging process so engaging. “They are like people in that sense.” [...] Take [Dutch philosopher] Spinoza, she says. “All over the world he’s known as Benedict, but he’s entered in our catalog as Baruch [his Hebrew name], so there is a cross-reference to Benedict, Benedictus and Benedict de. There’s a particular book, Opera Posthuma from 1677, and on its title page [the author's name] is simply written `B. d. S.’ The cataloger is going to have to do some work on that - they might think it’s Spinoza, but they have to verify it and find the publisher.”

End User’s Corner - March 1998: “So, was Ranganathan a Yahoo!? Perhaps it’s a matter of semantics. Considering his complex notation scheme developed for the Colon Classification, as well as his principles of facet analysis as applied to the organization of digital information, I would say yes.” What I want to know is: what have librarians been doing since then? Is faceted classification as good as it gets from the librarian corner?

Excerpts from Ranganathan’s Prolegomena to Library Classification: “These are some definitions and principles taken from S.R. Ranganathan’s Prolegomena to Library Classification (2e) (1957). The terminology isn’t easy to crack without some examples, but just keep in mind that he’s talking about how classification schemes like the Dewey and Library of Congress systems work. They organize knowledge (in books and other things) by deciding what the book is about and then giving it a call number and putting it in order with other books. How that aboutness is decided, to what level of detail, and how the call numbers are made, is what he’s discussing. He’s setting out the basic rules he thinks all classification schemes should use.”

Scripting News: “So, is your brain really hierarchic? I think it is. Here’s the informal demo.”

No, the brain doesn’t think in hierarchies. Categories in the human mind aren’t organised in hierarchies. That’s why hierarchical taxonomies ultimately always fail: we don’t think that way, and the world definitely doesn’t work that way (and even if it did it wouldn’t matter since we still wouldn’t think that way). That’s how I understand George Lakoff anyway.

Browse Tanya’s pixelcharmer weblog at FacetMap, using the facets “process”, “topic”, “format” and “date”. Very cool. Tanya implemented an XFML export in Moveabletype and imported that in Facetmap.

Surfmind has a beta XFML feed.

XFMLManager: authoring hierarchical faceted classification: “XFMLManager is a free authoring tool for hierarchical, faceted metadata. We will also host the upcoming Hierarchical Faceted Metadata Authoring Experiment.”

IBM flushes restroom patent: “IBM has quietly eliminated a patent it received on a method for determining who gets to use the bathroom next.”

A Perl script for generating a date hierarchy in XFML.

XFML Libraries: “XFML libraries are existing libraries with facets and topics you can easily copy when creating a new XFML file.” Starting with an IPTC library.

ContextualAnalysis - Indexing Using Faceted Classification: “No matter what your style of indexing, no matter what software you own, no matter whether you’re a full- or part-time indexer, be you in-house or freelancer, you may find that using facets as an aid to indexing can help you produce better, more consistent indexes.”

This is surprisingly cool, in a twisted kind of way.

TRANSLATE.org.za: “South Africa has eleven official languages - an indication of cultural and language diversity of our nation. Yet most computer software is only available in one language (English) and is poorly supported in another language (Afrikaans), the other 9 languages have no translation. The translation project of translate.org.za plans to address this by coordinating, initiating, sustaining and focusing the efforts of South African translation teams. This project aims to give learners, pensioners and all citizens of South Africa access to computers in their mother tongue. “

A proposal for a general Syndication Subscription Service: no more searching for XFML buttons and pasting URL’s in your newsreader.

Origin of the abbreviation i18n for internationalization: “A DEC employee named Scherpenhuizen was given an email account of S12n by a system administrator, since his name was too long to be an account name. Apparently, this approach to abbreviating long names was humorous and was generalized at DEC. The convention was applied to “internationalization” at DEC. Apparently it passed to Apple quickly. Both companies were using the term by 1985.”

Multilingual thesaurus tools based on RDF.

Facetmap of iaslash - ia/: “[...] I think the main thing people want to see, however, is Peter’s application that will help individuals map topics on disparate systems. Playing with this makes me realize I need to go through the old posts and clasify them.” On its way :)

Bliss Classification Association - Bibliographic Classification Guide: “The standard categories recognised in “classical” facet analysis are: Thing - kind - part - property - material - process - operation - patient - product - by-product - agent - space - time”.

Why do these people try to specify what facets are useful? Surely if I want to classifcy my content using a facet called “How impressed I was with this content when I first saw it” then that is a perfectly valid facet? This underlying assumption that there are “generic” or “correct” ways of categorizing the world is just, well, wrong. The world doesn’t have an “inherent” classification that we just have to discover. All classification gets its meaning from the people using it, not from the objects being classified.

Interesting library-techie blog

Puton your Forrest Gump accent: A wiki is like a huge communal garden. Brilliant metaphor.

The IACommonplaceBook: “Commonplace Book is an old idea that deserves remembering; a single place where we keep bits and pieces of language, knowledge, ideas that we run across.”

BBC NEWS | Technology | E-mail makes surfers emotional: “People can feel a greater connection to commercial organisations that send them regular newsletters, which in turn means more loyalty, the research found.” Based on Nielsen research as described in his latest Alert box: “[...] users have highly emotional reactions to newsletters. This is in strong contrast to studies of website usability, where users are usually much more oriented towards functionality.” Also includes a juicy quote as usual: “From an interaction design perspective, [...] Macintosh is a higher-priced dolled-up variant of Windows”.

This focus on emotions seems to fit in the NNGroups’ newfound appreciation of beauty and pleasure, an emotional reaction.

I’m not sure about the appropriatness of their methodology (they call it themselves “subjective comments”) to find out what people want/need in email newsletters - but then again I can’t evaluate their methods without downloading the report (is that info even in there?). More interesting would be ethnographic-style research of how users really use email newsletters, how it fits in their general information-usage patterns and what it means to them. It seems like the NNGroups is stretching the classic usability test beyond its capabilities instead of adapting other, more appropriate techniques.

Interesting interface for browsing hierarchical faceted metadata: Knowledge Processors (Bad site - you need to dig through a bit to get to the good stuff)

The iaslash FacetMap is lovely: combine format and topic to find information on IASlash (viewed through Facetmap using the Iaslash XFML export)