Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

My order for a laptop (Win) firewire card (to use with the iPod) was cancelled at Amazon. Anyone know where to find one for a reasonable price (60$ or something)?

I’m getting ready for new years eve festivities and I have an hour to kill - what better time to do an overview of 2002 as I remember it.

What I did in 2002:
- Quit my job in February
- Moved to NYC
- Wrote XFML in the summer
- Got together with my lovely girlfriend
- Got a new job, and appartment and a visa in NYC

It’s been a fantastic year.

The rest of the world watched as the USA prepared for the first unprovoked war started by a western country since, and my history may be failing me here, WW2. That’s despite signing a bunch of treaties that should prevent this stuff. Within the US, there has been a very strong swing to the right. The country keeps up its efforts to destabilize the middle east (effectively creating the next generation of anti-US terrorists). People here seem clueless or don’t care. Fairly, dare I say it, fascist acts like the Homeland Security Bill are accepted without much comment or protest.

Again, I’m not much of a political person, but if you’ve had even a little but of European history, this is scary stuff. If you’ve read 1984, it’s even scarier. Newspeak abounds.

Let me tell you about my aunties in Belgium. They are conservative, non political at all. In Europe, we have always respected the US because they bailed us out in WW2, and got us going economically in the decades after that. Respect. When I visited Belgium, I saw four of my aunts. Each and every one of them commented on the direction the U.S. is taking as being a really fucked up (my words) thing. That is a dramatic swing in what they think of the US. Americans don’t realize their leaders are antagonizing moderate, conservative people like my aunties all over the world. Europe. Asia.

Don’t mess with my aunties, USA. Let me assure you, you can’t handle them.

Lawrence Lessig: “Where is the political party that demands respect for principles that I thought were fundamental.”

Outboard brain: documentary filmmakers:
Fred Wiseman (my favourite so far), Nick Broomfield (my second favourite), Jon Alpert, Errol Morris

The keyboard of my laptop is fucked. I plugged in a keyboard, and now when I type on the plugged in keyboard things work fine, but when I type on my laptop keyboard I get numbers for certain letters. Here goes: ” get n40bers f6r certa5n 3etters.”

I’m running Win XP on a Compaq Presario 700. I have 2 accounts on my laptop, the problem doesn’t occur on the other account (in Win XP you can have multiple logins, each with its own desktop preferences and such). I couldn’t find any tips on the compaq site… anyone has an idea?

A bit of humor in these dark times: Stop Jobs.

White Xmas! We went to see Frida (the movie) yesterday and afterwards went to Lincoln center (New York City, USA) in the middle of a snowstorm. It was fantastic - the spectacle of the snow flying around between the tops of the building, illuminated by the lights was even better than the tree. White Christmas indeed - the whitest in NYC since 1909.

Happy Xmas. We have a snowstorm in NYC. It’s cool.

My cable internet company is screwing me (charging things I didn’t order) but since they’re a monopoly I can’t change. If I get this wireless router, can I then let everyone in the building know they can use my wireless access point? And how much is a wireless card for my laptop (Compaq)?

AIFIA | AIfIA Finishes its First Month with 200 Members, International Flavor: “The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture, which launched in early November, already sports a membership of over 200 people from five continents engaged in the emerging field of information architecture. Recent additions to AIfIA’s leadership council are similarly global, hailing from Australia, Belgium (that’s me), Chile, Denmark, and the US.”

CityDesk: Desktop Content Management: why do they have this, like, really blurry screenshot?

Digital Web Magazine - Features: The Psychology of Navigation: “A typical user, faced with a typical, freshly loaded Web page - her eyes bouncing around the page - takes in all the options available.” No they don’t. At least not when they’re looking for something - they’ll click the first likely link.

destinationKM.com: Building ”I” Schools: “Pioneering university programs in information science.” Information architecture should be thaught there. Is it?

Babes in an R&D Toyland

The Register: “Microsoft Corp is believed to have trained its acquisition crosshairs on Macromedia Inc.”

Faceted Classification Schemes / By B. C. Vickery. (thanks Michael): reprint (sounds like photocopy) of this hard to find book.

A comment on Christina’s blog made me think: “And for metadata to be useful, it has to be honest.” After reading lots of Lakoff, that just didn’t sound right. Thinking about it some more, I think bias is:
1. unavoidable with ambigious metadata (unambigious metadata are things like publication date, author. Ambigious metadata are things like topics or ratings, and can be a lot more useful.) There is always bias. Unbiased categorization is not possible.
2. a value-add. I find it more valuable if a friend that I know (whose biases I am familiar with) recommends me something than if a stranger does the same. Bias ads value to metadata. Or maybe that should be: Known bias increases the value of ambigious metadata.

That’s not really what I wanted to say though. More known bias means more valuable ambigious metadata. That’s more like it, although I feel I’m still missing something. It’s not just that knowing bias is good in a we-can’t-avoid-it-so-lets-know-it kind of way, it’s that bias in itself is good - it ads personality and flavour to metadata.

Is this something librarians have known all along?

Better Living Through Software: “It became a mission of mine to discover why only Germans seemed to be able to crack the Chinese auto market, but I only found more mysteries.”

It fits!

(picture by Mike Lee - thanks!)

Metacrap: there are indeed real and often unrecognized reasons why metadata hasn’t taken off.

People are lazy and stupid are bad analysis (is that a plural?) of these reasons: people aren’t lazy, they are just not interested in tagging metadata to stuff if they don’t see an advantage to it: what’s in it for the authors?.

People lie is an obvious one. Know thyself is where it gets good, another good one that isn’t understood by many people starting out in the metadata world is that schemas aren’t neutral. The conclusion (implicit metadata, like Google’s analysis of links, is more useful) surely has some truth to it. Interesting. Maybe the whole idea of having people tag their stuff with metadata is deeply flawed?

I’m growing somewhat dissatisfied with MT’s rebuild times… :(

I’m compiling a list of small independent software developers who actually live of their product. I would really appreciate any pointers to more.

- movabletype.org (I’m not sure they live of their software)
- Fogcreek
- Userland

Luca Rosati | Information Design in Italian.

Peter Van Dijck - Userati: seems I have connections to these people?

workspaces.

Another clever post by Tanya on Power Law Distributions.

Three days in, the faceted classification mailing list has 80 high quality members and is rocking! I think we found a niche.

WThRemix - Design and Code Challenge: redesign the W3C site!

I joined the “Leadership council” of the AIFIA. I will be leading (which means I will basically start it up and keep it going) an initiative to provide translation services for IA related content. Could be cool. More later.

Meanwhile, let me reassure you about Aifia. It is set up by a bunch of really good people who are trying hard to build a good non profit organisation for information architects. They made some public relations mistakes, but they’re information architects, not branding experts. (I’m writing about this Cluetrain style). The first thing I proposed after accepting the invitation to join (people get elected) was to change that name: “Leadership council”. It has all the wrong undertones. Really. The majority didn’t feel so, so we move on. It’s all about getting good stuff done for information architecture as a field. So I’m gonna focus on that.

If you have questions/feedback about the Aifia, feel free to contact me personally.

Now get involved if you have ideas and time to spare. Good people are doing good things. It’s kind of exciting.

azeem.azhar.co.uk: Auto trackback and categorising blogs (via Ben): “When I author a blog post to be able to submit it to a categorisation server. This server to perform analysis on the content, analysis on my context (what it already knows about me), analysis on the context of the blog post (what URLs am I quoting, what am I tracking back to, and analyses of those posts) to provide suggested categories which I can select.
The categories would need to come from an agreed set of taxonomies.”

Repeat after me: centralized agreed-upon taxonomies don’t scale. Centralized agreed-upon taxonomies don’t scale. What’s worse: they don’t fulfil our varying classification needs, so even if they would scale it wouldn’t help.

Ben Hammersley.com: More on Emergent Taxonomies: “So, with an Emergent Taxonomy you start off with the entry itself, and relate other entries to it - and you *don’t*give*the*category*a*name*that*influences*it. How you relate the entries can be anything - from linking to it, to referencing it with a trackback to encoding an xlink or rdf data that adds additional flavours of relationship. But either way, it’s just a one-on-one relationship between entries. And then, you just treat it like a social network, where the clusters are where the topics get more dense, and more defined. ”

Good thinking. Names (terms) are indeed limiting, that’s why we need so many controlled vocabularies and such. However, categories are how we think (see anything by Lakoff), which is why the topic approach makes sense: a topic can have many names (or terms), but it still is the same topic. I think the whole XTM topic concept (as copied in XFML) is still limited (in that it assumes topics as the atomic unit, where categories might be better), but they aren’t limited by names so much.

The new HotBot can be skinned with CSS.

Snark Hunting : America’s Favorite : Naming and Branding in Popular Culture: “Brands don’t have to conduct surveys to find out if they are America’s favorite, they can just trademark the name.”

Catalogablog: “There are several projects to add metadata to Web logs to provide better access to them. However, everybody seems to be working in isolation.”

heyblog: Adaptive Design and modular code: we live in a new world: hundreds of thousands of people are technology literate and have coding skills. Sony’s move towards wireless devices should recognise that and add in easy programmability - that may well be the killer app, not downloading Time Warner or Sony broadband content.

Phil Murray of the Knowledge Management Connection and me are starting a discussion list for practicioners of faceted classification: the FCD mailing list.

xSiteable 0.5 released: A CMS built around topic maps: “It has a simple Notation language for content called xSiteable Notation, utilizing for structure, binding and other assorted cleverness and the Sablotron XSLT parser for quick, reliable and powerful processing. Just run the xSiteable script, and you get a complete site out the other end, ready for deployment. Topics, associations and occurences, together with a mini-content management system and notation system, all wrapped up in one.”

heyblog: Faceted Classification, almost right: Andrew describes a project where he used faceted classification that turned out almost all right.

Content inventory tip 6: reduce strain on wrists by using keyboard shortcuts. On Windows,
- alt-Tab switches between windows
- ctrl-Tab selects url bar in browser
- ctrl-c is copy
- ctrl-v is paste

Boxes and Arrows: Our Favorite Books: Recommendations from the Staff of Boxes and Arrows. A great list, but a disclaimer of what the associate fees are used for would have been useful for community building.