Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

RidiculouslyEasyGroupForming

Simon goes with the blue RSS button instead of the classic orange XML one. Dave mentioned standardizing on buttons is good - I agree, but he shouldn’t have chosen “XML” for an RSS button.

Content Inventory Tip 1: If you have content on a wide variety of sites, order your URL column alphabetically to get an overview of which pages are on the same (sub)sites.
Content Inventory Tip 2: Take regular breaks.
Content Inventory Tip 3: before starting a detailed content inventory (bottom up), do an initial CI exercise and some top-down work: get a good overview of what is there and try to generalize some rules about ROT.

Hey, an article about metadata by Tanya!

Eric Miller on the Semantic Web

We need some sense in the naming of XML feed buttons. I have seen buttons called “XML” (a de facto standard, I guess it is too late to change this), “RDF” and “FOAF” (and “XFML”). Rule: the button should name the feed standard (”FOAF” or “XFML”), not the language it’s expressed in (”RDF” or “XML”).

Mark Pilgrim keeps them coming, the man is a machine, I don’t know how he gets so much done: Recommended Reading: http://poorbuthappy.com/ease

Inbox Buddy: surely a useful product but with the typical branding mistakes that come with products developed by techies only. Two taglines, neither of which makes much sense (one says “you hate email and now you’ll hate it less”, the other one says “this is such a cool product technology wise”), a confusing value proposition (and a badly defined target audience it feels like), stock images. As I said, I’m sure the product itself is good though.

The Benetech Initiative. Here’s a Stanford Talk (broadband only) by the founder.

Content inventory, 3828 pages, a lot of them PDF files. I am accessing them through a VPN and entering the categories for the CI in excell. Yesterday I spent the morning setting up the excell spreadsheet - deciding on the categories, I now have a dropdown in the “content comments” column with 13 items: “not applicable”, “could not access”, “ok”, title”, “outdated” and so on. There is a column next to that for written comments.

I spent the afternoon doing the first 123 items, with help from the person familiar with the content who explained me a lot about it. The content inventory is more detailed than what I understand people usually do. Today I am working from home and hoping to get a lot done. First problem: getting the VPN client to work.

Facetmap has a cool new feature. If you have an XFML export of your blog, you can now point facetmap to that and you will have an always up to date faceted browsing tool of your website. Travis also introduced a funky “link to an external facetmap” feature of which the implications are not clear to me yet but it has potential. My up to date facetmap.

Matt Jones: “The main thing, the only thing, really — was that we had a great team, that was allowed to work as a team.”

[Aquarionics] Meta - Metadata: “Data…. about data… is the happiest data….”. The way forward as XML feeds multiply: have a separate page with all your metadata, including descriptions of what to do with it.

Another XFML feed: Gotzeblogged: Facets of a blog. The amazing thing is people are playing around with this even though practical applications are still limited (Facetmap is the only one right now).

Please throw in ideas for an XFML browser

Bill Kearney explains XFML better than I do: “If they wanted to get an ‘overall picture’ they’d benefit from using something like XFML. With XFML it’s possible to deliver a pretty large file that contained the topic framework and associations of the items. This would, essentially, be ALL items from the site. Although, one could consider using a dynamic XFML generator that constrained the data to within certain ranges (like
by year) but that’s a side-issue. Rather than have the XFML contain content it just contains the topics, titles and URL of the actual items themselves. This way if someone wants to find out what items exist in within a topic they don’t
have to crawl the site looking for it. They can pull the XFML and THEN decide which items to read.

This blog takes up about 8% of the total amount of visits (36000 visits a month) to poorbuthappy.com (which contains other websites of mine like the Colombia website, of which the discussion pages take over 30% of the hits to this domain). Search engines bring about 15.000 referrers a month (mostly Google, October 2002 stats), news aggregators (RSS) bring about 1000 referrers a month (and growing). I removed all pictures from my Colombia site beginning this year and optimized my pages because I hit my bandwidth limit (3 gig a month), but now I am almost hitting it again. The ease blog is responsible for half a gig a month. I don’t want to make the page shorter because I think that reduces the value (I like long blogs). Some optimization should keep extra costs off for another few months, but then what? I will have to pay about $450 a year extra. I am looking for cheaper alternatives and bandwidth optimization techniques.

Googleshare it is

Burningbird: The White Shoes of Technology: (via Dave) “This week, the RDF Working Group released drafts of six working documents for the RDF specification. Six. That’s a whole lot of work. However, rather than getting a pat on the back with a quiet “Well done.”, the group has seen their effort catechised mercilessly.”

Opening discussion about your efforts seems to, again and again, invite some people to criticize it rather mercilessly, seemingly from a “I wasn’t invited to your party so now I’ll crash it” point of view. I luckily haven’t had that problem yet with XFML (knock wood), but it seems something I’ve been seeing a lot lately.

Bill Kearney: “Most data is currently not being shared with any sort of metadata applied, let alone smart stuff like XTM or XFML. Having a starting point will help make the value of metadata obvious. It’s that nasty chicken-and-egg sort of problem. And here we’re sort of arguing over what kind of chicken to use and we’ve got no eggs (and the users just want breakfast).
[...] the interim period of chaos really puts the technology to the test.”

Licenses Down, Services Up: One of the categories of software that is increasingly being commoditized by Open Source solutions is the area of Content Management. (via Simon)

Photoblogs.org (via Lucdesk) I feel a new artform coming up. I have been wondering for a long time how photography and the net can get happily married, online albums (”online albums”! The expression alone makes me feel bad) just don’t cut it. Maybe photoblogs will.

Apart from the usual amateur “look I can copy a professional” stuff, there are some good finds out there. Noah Grey has good pictures, I’m just not sure if he has found the optimal format, it feels like an exhibition, not a website.

Marc North is promising as well, I think he needs to evolve his style some more (witness these earlier first-year-in-photography-class pictures) but there is potential there. The actual pictures are hidden behind a tiny link at the bottom of the page though.

Way -> blue has got the format down pretty much. Small studies (6 pictures about a theme), and pictures first, navigation second. One tiny addition that could help: pre-load the next picture while watching the current one. Decent stuff, sometimes lacking relevance but also with a refreshing down-to-earthness in its choice of topics. Photography for the joy of it.

I just noticed photoblogs seem to limit the amount of pictures on a page (to 1). I think that’s good - focusses the attention and saves bandwidth. If you count the amount of pixels used for content versus navigation I believe photoblogs would come out as clear winners. That’s a good thing.

Life through a lens uses frames (no linkable URL’s) and ha a different approach: it posts little groups of pictures (5 to 8) on one page. The photographer is clearly experimenting with form, shape and colour, but seems to be lacking some voice. Feels like second-third year photography school. I like the presenting of lots of pictures on one page, but it does make you skip some.

Halftone experiments as well, but with content instead of form. It has some focus and has a few pictures per topic: complete strangers, don’t think.

Brandon’s photoblog shows groups of pictures per date, but more than one date on the homepage, more like a classic blog. I like this format less: it takes attention away from the pictures.

Shutterbabe has, apart from a great title, an approach based on the MT-format: a main picture, with additional pictures hidden behind a “more” link. Thematically: buildings and friends. Once you find the little arrows (Fits law!) it’s easy enough to browse. Lots of experimentation, the early beginnings of a personal style.

Using my back button a lot I notice I spend at least 15 pages on each of them - photoblogs invite browsing. (the fast line helps)

Slower.net: vibrant style that slips into 80s now and then, some personality. Simple blog format: latest on top.

There are many more. Let me know if you find a really good one, from this quick survey of photoblogs I feel a lot of them lack the personality lots of classic blogs display. Too much copying of commercial styles (”Look ma, I can take pictures just like the ones in National Geographic!”). Not enough rawness.

On a related note, I bought this Robert Frank book on the street in NYC last weekend ($35). Amazing stuff.

I have been looking a bit at the market for taxonomy software. It is a category that’s taking of fast and there is a lot of consolidation going on. No clear market leader has emerged yet, but once there is one they should make a lot of money. Most software (here’s an example:
Semio’s taxonomy browser) relies on three flawed ideas:

1. A focus on technology and overly relying on automatic creation of taxonomies and indexing.
2. Simple trees, no facets or systematic advanced types of relationships.
3. Taxonomies without user research.

The promise these companies sell their products with is (in varying degrees): “Automates the creation and maintenance of a taxonomy.” While I certainly agree automation has an important part to play in taxonomies (especially the keeping-up-to-date part of them), I am not sure this approach will bring large benefits. Maybe it will though, maybe some taxonomy (however flawed) is still a lot better than none? I am not sure.

New Architect: Bottoms Up: “I have been flabbergasted in recent months by taxonomy construction projects in Fortune 500 companies. Some completely lack user research, and there is often a fierce resistance to discussing how the taxonomy will be used. Let’s just focus on the taxonomy, they say. We don’t want to get distracted by implementation details.
[...]
Inspired by Yahoo and encouraged by portal software vendors, many Web and intranet managers have embarked on a long, painful, and doomed journey to build a single, all-purpose enterprise taxonomy. ”

To which Victor responds: “Interestingly, I’ve been experiencing the opposite scenario. Recently I’ve been meeting people, usually technologists toking at the XML pipe, who only want to do bottom up design. When I ask, ‘Who are the users? What are their intentions? What is the scope of your project?’ I find a lack of solid answers. Balance (of top-down and bottom-up) is my new rallying cry.”

So we have:
1. The visionary business dude: “We need a taxonomy. Everyone else is getting one and I read all the literature. It says ‘fuzzy matching technology’. It says ‘baysian logic’. It says ‘huge improvements in technology’. I feel the pain of documents unfound, will this save the day?”
2. The project manager: “I was told to do a taxonomy. Let’s get on with it, I have a deadline. We’ll do a usability test before launch.”
3. The XML technologist: “Ah, some good data analysis work coming up. I’m gonna enjoy this, I shall sit in my cube and do intelligent things.”

With all due respect to each of these difficult roles that I could never take on because of a lack of skills on my part.

Issues in Crosswalking Content Metadata Standards - National Information Standards Organization (NISO): “To reach the broadest community of information workers, metadata must be made available in accordance with a number of popular content metadata standards. As the number, size, and complexity of content metadata standards continues to grow, supplying the metadata for each standard becomes more and more repetitious, time consuming, and tedious. In order to minimize the amount of time needed to create and maintain the metadata and to maximize its usefulness to the widest community of users, there is a need for the metadata created and maintained in one standard to be accessible via related content metadata standards. ” Outlines the challenges with presenting your metadata in all the applicable formats, something I am thinking about with all the XFML work going on.

Stratify Buy-Back Program for Semio: a lot of grabbing marketshare going on in the taxonomy/search space: “The Stratify Buy-Back Program for Semio allows an easy migration path for Semio customers to upgrade their installation to Stratify software. Available through December 31, 2002, the program allows a customer to receive 100 percent credit, up to $100,000, for their Semio license towards the purchase of the Stratify Taxonomy Builder, Classification Server, or complete Dicovery [their error] System.”

The Weblog MetaData Initiative: Next Step: HTML [meta] Experiment

Asking information architecture questions is important, here’s one: I get asked Why do we need IA if we work on simple sites in the same industry that are always similar a lot. I’m working on the answer - any ideas? What are the elements of IA that can be reused in a situation like that?

Virtual Worlds: Lead Line: “an authored social environment.” Shelly Farnham, the social psychologist who set up the user tests, says the main idea behind Lead Line was that every situation in your day-to-day life is scripted. She says, “A lot of problems occur in online situations because people don’t have the same kind of social script. Our idea was that you could improve online interaction by providing people with a script towards that interaction.” See Scripting Business Social Interactions (PDF)

AIFIA | Taxonomy: “What is the IA Taxonomy?
AIfIA plans to establish a standard IA vocabulary for the field of information architecture.” I find this confusing use of language. The page goes on to describe this IA “vocabulary”. Even with all the confusion regarding these terms, a vocabulary isn’t a taxonomy. A taxonomy can be a type of controlled vocabulary, yes. I guess I’m nagging now.

Library Juice 5:33: “They are multiplying like rabbits. They have names that make us smile, as their humorous incongruity attests to the persistence of librarian stereotypes: Anarchist Librarians; Angrylibrarian; Barbarian Librarian; Bodybuilding Librarian; Bellydancing Librarian; The Leather Librarian; Gothique Librarian; Librarian Avengers; The Rabid Librarian; The Renegade Librarian; The Rockabilly Librarian; The Rogue Librarian;
Ska Librarian; The Stripping Librarian.

Section 215 (library cartoon)

We are defining standards, use cases and such for distributed metadata at Yahoo! Groups : xfml. I think it’s all kinda funky and revolutionary: why not join in!

I am reading up on the strategic side of technology (not that I want to be anything other than an IA -it’s just interesting). On the SIGIA-L list (thread 1, thread 2), I got some good recommendations for stuff to read:

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore, Regis McKenna - it’s lying on the shelf until I finish the next one.

Information rules by Hal Varian and Carl Shapiro is brilliant. It clearly describes how things like lock-in and economic network effects work, and how you can deal with them in your strategy. Required reading if you are into this stuff.

Dave Winer discusses Strategy Tax: when a product has to sacrifice some things for the greater good of the strategy of the company.

I was also pointed to the website of Mohanbir Sawhney: ok but not nearly as interesting as the above links.

More links/books appreciated!

I have a gut feeling Macromedia’s Contribute is going to kick some ** in CMSland. There is limited info on the MM site, so here goes:

Web Graphics: “[...] was excited to find what I was looking for: plenty of lockdown controls. For instance, you can allow only text to be edited, you can permit no styling, you can control how paragraphs and line breaks are rendered–so over zelous clients can’t inadvertanly ruin your layout design. Another well thought out feature, “key file” creation: elminates having to send complicated connectivity instructions–just create a key file (which can be directly emailed, or saved to disk) and they can double-click to gain access according to the rights you set up in the key”.

Think Secret: “Using Contribute and an encrypted key, a client can log in and change text and images on pages authorized by the web designer. The client could also be authorized to add new pages and make other modifications, as per the many different levels of access controls, all set by the webmaster.”

Aaron Swarz: “To the two-way Web!”

Jeffrey Zeldman: “[...] new $99 desktop application. [...] Users can grab content from non-standards-compliant apps like Microsoft Office; Contribute will clean up the code and can even convert presentational tags to CSS and generate accessibility elements and attributes. Version control is also included. We saw this product twice before it was released and plan to buy copies for selected clients. It is perfect for those who can’t afford or don’t need a full-blown Content Management System. ”

Update: More on the CMS list (archives not online): “Including a group editor, user management, fool-proof code stripping, review-by-email etc. No database, so no real CMS - just a $100 license and off you go. [...] MacroMedia Contribute definitely adds a new flavour to the CMS bouquet. [...] the product must “download” the HTML template from the server and then the end user edits it. [...] It is important to note that Contribute is NOT a CMS. It is a client side tool that you drop into your existing production workflow.”

Update: Evolt: gets the technical details down.

A new weblog on TopicMaps

Controlled vocabularies? Ha! Try controlled languages: AECMA Simplified English is a writing standard for aerospace maintenance documentation. This type of writing standard is also known as a controlled language because it restricts grammar, style and vocabulary to a subset of the English language. The goal is to minimize ambiguity and make translation easier, so for example repair crews for Boeing planes all over the world can easily read these docs. Boeing even sells a tool to check your language: Boeing: Simplified English Checker. More about controlled languages in industry.

Patterns for Personal Web Sites is nice, even though not all the patterns are good. At least now I have a name for my Secret Gardens (like here).

NBS: Day 2: Victor elaborates on the ideas behind Asilomar (I can’t write that ugly acronym, I’m just calling it Asilomar from now on. Not ‘the Asilomar’, just ‘Asilomar’. Like if it was a country, not an organisation (you say ‘the UN’, and ‘the US’, but not ‘the Belgium’. Gotta brush up on my linguistics.)

Re: [tm-pubsubj-comment] XTM vs. XFML and Facet Maps: yet another faceted classification explanation, highlighting the political aspects of classification: “it’s easier to describe a category by its characteristics than to devise a category name, eg., “that man has brown skin” rather than “that man is of the African race” (while must still define “brown” we aren’t caught in trying to define “African” or “race”). For many thorny problems, faceted classification (ie., describing things by their characteristics rather than assigning them a universal category) offers advantages over “standardized” taxonomies or ontologies.