Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

I just had really bad fries from a Belgian fry (or ‘frie’?) place in NYC called “Frietkot”. Avoid - they give Belgian fries a bad name.

An XFML feed generated by Bill Kearney’s XFML tool for Radio of my play-around PeterV’s Radio Weblog.

Creative Commons: “On 16 December, Creative Commons machine-readable licenses will be available to the public free of charge.”

Darn! I bought GAP!

US-only link: today is Buy Nothing Day. I comply.

Happy turkey digestion day!

Charles Nadeau: “Imagine a workgroup using Taxomita on their local server. As they browse the web, they can assign metadata to pages linked to their work and compare/aggregate the metadata they assign to the pages. Given a finite vocabulary of words, one can imagine a “democratic” metadata model: If everybody independently assign words from this vocabulary as metadata to pages, one could look at the words assigned to each page and decide that the word that come the more often is the group official metadata word for this given page.”

oreilly.com: Content Syndication with RSS.

BlogStreet: Who’s in your Neighbourhood? Nice.

Bill Kearney has written an XFML tool for Radio.

It exports a complete XFML map of your posted items. It automatically pulls out the category data as well as month, year and day info. Bill writes: “I’ve a few options on it that aren’t enabled pending some further testing. I’m more than willing to listen to feedback on it.”

To install, just close Radio, drop the file in your radio>tools folder and restart.

XFML mailing list: “The “linksTo” facet is a little frivolous, but I was interested to see what kind of facets could be built from a weblog and what they might end up being useful for.”

I like it. Extracting meaningful information from weblog posts and presenting it in easy-to-parse XFML.

Matt Mower is thinking out of the box: combining XFML with RSS 2.0.

Aeiwi is a search engine that uses a controlled vocabulary and a somewhat similar interface to the new breed of faceted classification interfaces.

Christina Wodtke: “When IA is limited to controlled vocabularies and labels, I’m done being an IA. [...] Personally, I think we’ve specialized too fast.”

A rare thing in the language battles: an intelligent and short comparison between Java and C# (via small values of cool)

Syndication News from Bill Kearney: Do your part: Bandwidth problems with RSS: “[...] As in, stop hammering it by using it during an HTML page load. Or, don’t default to an hourly interval for reading the feed. And by all means, don’t default to something more frequent that hourly!”

National Geographic: Roper Geographic Survey 2002 Highlights: 20/20 :) Some of the answers are too easy though - I got the numbe for Sweden wrong but the one I picked wasn’t with the options, so I picked another one.

Blog Browsers: actually cool. Find the screenshot - I always find screenshots a lot easier when trying to understand why something may be cool.

Surf*Mind*Musings reports positively on InboxBuddy. I still think it needs better branding.

Joshua Kaufman does another iteration of the FOAF button (and it looks like a button this time).

Via Dave: Microsoft OneNote.

Simon Willison: XFML has been cropping up all over the place even despite the current lack of software. Inside scope: some really interesting XFML related scripts are about to become available, and I’m not just talking about Taxomita.

Via Simon Willison (whose blog I gravitate to again and again): PHPPatterns: programming patterns in PHP.

I renamed XFMLManager to Taxomita. I hope I can fix some small bugs this weekend.

I give in: Foaf button rocks.

A new syndication/xml/feed (metadata) button: FOAF. I am not sure about this one: it doesn’t look like a metadata button to me. Should we have Jakob-like rules for metadata buttons or not?

1. Metadata buttons indicate the name of the standard on the button (not the name of the format like XML or RDF).
2. Provide a link to a metadata page where you explain your different metadata feeds, what they include and wether they are stable or experimental implementations.
3. Metadata feeds live forever.
4. Metadata buttons have a title attribute explaining the button and link to the feed directly, not to an intermediate page.

Another in my list of poorbuthappy projects: StructuredSocialInteractionTool.

a n t e n n a: Tinderbox the Visio of note taking software.

Video blogging: interesting.

The Snewp searches blogs, news sources and forums, and the nice thing about it is: you can get search results as an RSS feed. Yum.

Discussion about the International Children’s Digital Library on the Sigia-L list: Alfred Werner: “I engaged an expert - my nine year old son. He thought it was interesting enough that he asked me to install it on his computer. There are a few problems with the interface … the loopy back arrow isn’t obvious, moving your selection to the box up top, which you then click to get it to move back to the main ‘action pane’ - also non-intuitive. When my son got lost, he just clicked on the house and drilled back in… Once you play with it - it’s pretty straight forward. I do like the spiral view of the book - it’s just cool. I think for the audience they should add more sound effects - subtle but present. I would like to see the thumbnails slightly larger or clearer - it’s hard to tell what you’re getting without committing to opening a book. ”

Candy Schwartz wrote (not archived yet I believe): “The Suffolk Law Library catalog lets you search and limit by binding colour for many reference books, and the idea of size and colour as book search attributes for catalogues was actually discussed in the mid to late 60s. This is the way people remember books. Also, at least one library catalog (not easily accessible over the Web) has used a completely graphical interface (not as elegant as the newest, but this
was a decade ahead of its time). Want to look for books on romance? Pick the two lovers picture. There are also several catalogues which let you
search for books by attributes other than normal (check out Book Forager)”

Book Forager is indeed another fascinating approach to browsing faceted classification systems where the facets don’t contain topics but values within a range (from “very scary” to “very safe” for example). If the topics where set up to mirror that structure (very to not at all for a certain characteristic), this info could be easily expressed in XFML, although that would mean imposing a semantic limitation that isn’t inherent in XMFL.

Good Experience has an excellent interview with Maryam Mohit of Amazon.com - the first peek inside their user experience approach I have ever seen.

Syndication News from Bill Kearney has an XFML feed (not sure I blogged this before).

Crude faceted browsing interface (using search not browse except for the colours): you can find books by colour as well as a bunch of other attributes.

This bears repeating: The Information Awareness Office. What is “truth maintenance” anyway? Scarily, this is not a joke. I live in this country.

What lies beneath: excellent article by Adam Greenfield shedding some light on that thing called “business requirements”. (You know, the one we need to make play nice with user requirements). An important article in the struggle to cross boundaries between disciplines. IA has been doing well in understanding other disciplines, except for branding (making headway there) and business. Many IA’s lack an understanding of branding and business issues like positioning, business strategy or lock-in. We need this: business strategy has a direct and observable influence on the design of products (including websites). When IA’s lack understanding of business issues, that direct link between business goals and design gets severed. The business guy won’t understand design in depth. The designer won’t understand business in depth. IA’s should be able to ask good questions in both domains, thus helping making design accountable .

Vanderwal points to Structured Content: What’s in it for Writers?. Key insight: “Very few people are willing to change the way they work in order to make somebody else’s life easier.”

A similar question for metadata: what’s in it for writers/indexers? I believe this is one of the unsolved issues in the whole metadata field. The answer tool-vendors give is: “The machines will do the work”. I don’t think so. The machines can assist the work of humans, but there is a deep reason why people should do metadata work: without actually working with categories (ie. if you have them generated), you won’t understand/internalize them. The best categories are the ones you create yourself - they are structured the way you work/think. People do index stuff for themselves, but you can only impose limited structure upon that indexing because everyone sees the world differently. So the challenge becomes: how do we use people’s personal indexing so that it becomes usable by others as well? How do we tie in bottom up structuring with top down? The distributed metadata approach has potential there. Unproven potential, but as the saying goes, there’s hoping.

Webgraphics points to ONContent, which provides free syndication feeds. The difference with Newsisfree seems to lie in that ONContent focusses on feeds for web people, including design, techies, IA’s and such, and offers some categorization of these feeds. Also, they don’t search out feeds, rather you sign up to get greater exposure. Their FAQ explains some more. Their sign-up form sucks though - no indication of required fields and when you don’t fill one in on the next page all your entries are erased. Stopped me dead in my tracks.
They display a small text ad with each feed, a clever business idea that I hope will take off (in a respectful way). Related: I find myself browsing a few sites in the morning and then switching to my newsreader.

The content inventory we are doing uses more categories than the usual ones (ROT and title). I am realising Excell is not a structured dataformat - it lets you enter bad data and generally mess things up, especially if things are to be imported into a database later. I did set up some dropdowns to structure the categories (so you don’t type “redundant” once and “redundent” the next time) but that was it. There is replication of rows and other evil things.

Content Inventory Tip 4: When doing complex categorization, use structured data entry as much as possible. More specific: be careful when ordering columns in Excell. If you order a column alphabetically, the other columns don’t order with it. If you assume they do (as me and others I have talked to did), and order a few columns, you will have messed up your spreadsheet beyond recognition and will need to spend a lot of time fixing it. (Yes I did.) In order to order all the columns, select them all and then select data>sort.

“You can click on as many of the category buttons as you would like. Clicking on more of these buttons will give you a smaller number of books to look at.”

This is fucking brilliant. Thanks to Ian Bruk for the pointer. The International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) is a 5-year research project to develop innovative software and a collection of books that specifically address the needs of children as readers. The interface uses a Faceted Classification combined with a Zoomable Interface (looks like it uses the same engine as Photomesa), and you know what: it works. For kids! I am in awe.

You can try it out (it is a Java app) right here: you’ll need Java installed on your machine (it’s probably there). What I want now is for them to import XFML. Imagine the possibilities.

They have a video (link to download page - video is 24Megs) about the making of ICDL. A must see if you have the bandwidth - it’s really good: “I actually like the French one, because if it was in French and English it could teach you some words in French.” - “Sometimes I read the book over again - sometimes I figure: this has to be a happy or a sad book”. What a great team! Participatory design example: (member of the kids team) “Bug Bug, I found a Bug!”.