Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Christina: “I think beginner designers are the ones who should be kept away from guidelines, as far as possible.”

Classification is political.

I can’t seem to find a friendly (no hacking required, simple installation, simple admin area) PHP script that:

- lets me gather a variety of RSS feeds
- lets me (optionally) organize them in categories
- displays them in an HTML page by category groups, entries mixed within a category by date
- let’s me adjust the template easily

How hard can it be? All I see is hundreds of script kiddie scripts in various stages of completion. Arg. Any tips?

Semantic Blogging

Data Discussions - a Wilshire Conferences Interview with R.Todd Stephens: “R. Todd Stephens is the Director of the Metadata Services Group for the BellSouth Corporation, a role he established in 1999. One of the things that makes Todd particularly interesting as the subject of this discussion is that his laid-back personality and easy sense of humor disguise the driven man within - he’s a guy with both business acumen and serious technical smarts. AND he understands how to make himself and his department indispensable - he’s constantly increasing the value of his department by taking on new responsibilities and new technologies. At this stage his group is involved in architectural efforts that effect the development and implementation of database metadata, data transformation, components, XML, content, documentation, web services, messaging, metrics, interfaces, and the Enterprise Information Portal. Todd is setting an example for the next generation of corporate metadata management - he’s business-driven, financially accountable, technically savvy and most of all he’s wildly enthusiastic about what metadata can do for the organization.”

Old-school theory is a new force | CNET News.com: “Search giant Google and Autonomy, a company that sells information retrieval tools, both employ Bayesian principles to provide likely (but technically never exact) results to data searches. Researchers are also using Bayesian models to determine correlations between specific symptoms and diseases, create personal robots, and develop artificially intelligent devices that “think” by doing what data and experience tell them to do.

One of the more vocal Bayesian advocates is Microsoft. The company is employing ideas based on probability–or “probabilistic” principles–in its Notification Platform. The technology will be embedded in future Microsoft software and is intended to let computers and cell phones automatically filter messages, schedule meetings without their owners’ help and derive strategies for getting in touch with other people.

If successful, the technology will give rise to “context servers”–electronic butlers that will interpret people’s daily habits and organize their lives under constantly shifting circumstances. “

Cooper redesigned their website (Victor noticed). A quick look at it: I like it except for the homepage. Darn. The old one was a lot nicer - I preferred to get a feel for the projects they’ve done straight up. Of course, the 1996 version is interesting as well :) One thing I notices about the new site is the very crips IA: everything is clearly divided into categories. However, that is a problem: often users need more than one type of information on a page (especially a homepage) - I feel there isn’t enough cross promotion going on on the site. For example, it takes a few clicks into the WHY COOPER section to learn about their experience. If you didn’t know them you could be excused for thinking they were the new kids on the block. And the dropdown menus suck. Jump around all over the place - at least on my machine. Enough complaining now!

Scientific American: Word ‘Bursts’ Could Help Refine Web Searches: “To test his approach, Kleinberg used the algorithm to scrutinize the full text of all the State of the Union addresses given since 1790. The “bursts” that the program identified matched important events occurring at the time certain speeches were delivered. For instance, in the aftermath of the American Revolution, “militia” and “British” were among the flagged words, whereas “atomic” displayed substantial “burst” between 1947 and 1959. Such trends are intuitive to people, Kleinberg notes, but a computer, which lacks historical context, still successfully identified them solely by scanning raw text. He posits that the new approach could help narrow web searches by better recognizing the time context of a query.”

“Contentology blends disciplines such as information architecture, information design, knowledge management, communications and media theory, usability engineering, Web design, “Webitorial” writing and Internet marketing.”

VHG HOME: Virtual Hyper Glossary provides standards to create glossaries and such over the web.

Check the copyright notice at the bottom of this page.

livlab.com: Livia asks: “IA and WU researches and practices seem to be very US-centric; What are people in Latin America doing then? There are loads of businesses online in the rest of America. Do they work? Could they be better? Are there cultural differences in the way Web projects are developed? Why is scientific production on these topics close to zero in Portuguese or Spanish?”

As a member of AIFIA, I started an initiative to discuss information architecture in an international context. (the link goes to the mailing list). Especially if you have a blog or website that is not in English, feel free to link to it. A permanent link (like the one on the top of this page) would be even better, of course :) We are planning to discuss IA in an international context, and how AIFIA can help. What are the problems IA’s in face in places like South America, Eastern Europe, Asia, … What are the unique contributions they can make to the field? Let’s talk!

Things like this are why I stick with tables. I’ll switch at some point, but don’t tell me it will be painless.

Web of Culture - Global Update: February 2003: “The potential growth in offshore Web projects might present opportunities for a niche industry in the U.S. and Europe: Companies could establish usability labs that have no observation rooms or test facilitators, but are capable of projecting test sessions to offshore locations.”

LexisNexis Products and Services: a simple interface to a faceted classification, plus and index. Doesn’t allow you to combine facets, but that’s ok in this case.

Disregarding its political implications for a moment, Ready.gov is actually a pretty good site. Accessible as well.

Rashmi asks: “Would two designers creating personas for same product, with access to the same background research create somewhat similar personas? Or are the personas mostly a figment of the designer’s imagination?” That would make a nice experiment. I would expect it’s probably a bit of both.

Rashmi’s Teaching: Cognitive Course Proposal. Yum!

Mike reports the Sidekick is now, like, free. Plus they are releasing a developers kit. Wow.

Joy joy - Victor seems to be blogging again, and asks: “It seems to me one of the big holes in our knowledge of information architecture, one of the main holes in fact, is how taxonomies become navigation. We’re starting to develop very good methods for arriving at taxonomies for modern websites, and we’re also getting better at determining what characteristics are apparent in successful navigation. But that junction of taxonomy and navigation still seems to be part of the black art of IA, the challenge of marrying the bottom-up to the top-down.”

Here’s my take: the disconnect between a taxonomy and a navigation on a site happens when taxonomies are designed without thinking through how they will be used. This ties in with the myth that you can design a taxonomy for something that is not influenced by its use (or its audience). Or even sillier: that there would be a taxonomy without bias. The idea of the objective taxonomy. It’s wrong. There is no such thing. So if you are designing a taxonomy without imagining how you will use it in the navigation, yes, it will be hard to turn it into navigation.

Another take: if you look at taxonomies as organization schemes (for example: Geographical, or By Product, or by Task), a general rule when turning taxonomies into navigation is: one navigation section per taxonomy. Avoid mixing them, except in the global navigation, where mixing navigation schemes is often a good thing. If you visually separate organization schemes it will be easier for the user to find the right one for them.
If you look at the structure of taxonomies (ontology vs. topicmap vs. simple hierarchy vs. facets vs. controlled vocab vs. …), you are thinking about how to design the actual navigation widgets. We know how to best navigate a simple hierarchy. Yahoo. We are learning how to best navigate a faceted structure. Flamenco. The more complex/rich the structure of the taxonomy gets, the more possibilities for creating complex navigation structures.

Adam about the Asilomar interview feels the AIFIA hasn’t done a good job in communicating with their (potential) members: “Maybe they’re too close. From their perspective, the merits of such an institution may be so obvious that they admit to no further elucidation.” I agree (disclosure: I am on their leadership council). We haven’t done a great job.

Many people question the value of an organization like AIFIA. I did too, but I changed my mind. (Or maybe I just got assimilated) I am starting up a project to discuss and promote IA in an international context. I happen to think IA is too US focussed right now. Anyway, for a project like that to succeed, having an organisation like AIFIA to support it is very useful. Other projects that are in the works will benefit as well - people are working on ideas to promote IA, a job board, and more. It is getting interesting. If you have ideas for projects that can benefit IA in general, and you want AIFIA support, contact us and discuss it. Maybe we can help with something.

Added some clarifications to the XFML spec.

Don Norman: “You don’t do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator.”

Sandstrom (via Tanya): “Picture yourself a successful hunter-gatherer foraging in an uncertain environment, exploiting certain food resources and simply passing by others, all the while wary to avoid becoming prey yourself. In your daily forays you might sometimes forage like a generalist, consuming a wide array of resources. In other times and settings, you become more a specialist, ignoring plentiful foodstuffs in favor of some preferred prey type that, however rare, you invariably pursue and consume once you encounter it. What rules of thumb do human and animal subsistence foragers apply in choosing one resource and ignoring others? Why forage in one place and not another? How long should foragers remain in a particular microhabitat, and should they forage alone or in groups? What are the fitness consequences of different strategies?”

We are not Extinct: Caribbean Indigeneity and the Internet: “The revival of Carib and Taino identities, the internet, and the transformation of offline indigenes into online ‘N-digenes’”

Social Science Information Gateway

A Simplified Model for Facet Analysis made available by AIFIA: “It is often necessary to read such sentences several times before they can be understood, and even then, one may not be certain that full comprehension has occurred.”.

Michael: “After two years of operating this site, I am stepping down from daily blogging and moderating because of personal commitments. I have donated the site to AIfIA and will be migrating from my host to the AIfIA servers in the coming weeks.”

Weird: I haven’t updated Liga1 since, oh, last year August, but traffic to it has stayed pretty constant, mostly thanks to various crawlers (Google is darn active), referrer spam from sex sites and a post I wrote that mentions japanese love icons, for which the site is nr 1 on Google.

Ben Hammersley.com: CNN is my shepherd, I shall not question: “CNN is doing a bang up job. As Dan Hon investigates, their online transcript of Hans Blix’s report to the UN is missing 866 words. The bits Blix said about Iraq complying with the UN resolution, and the bit where he refutes Colin Powell’s evidence from the week before. Nice and subtle, boys.
Meanwhile, guess the headline from their report on the worldwide anti-war marches…World antiwar rallies delight Iraq.” Arg.

Since living here, I have been rally impressed with the one sideness and sensationalism of American media. I didn’t realize it was this bad.

Scary

Simon is taking an interesting aproach to the old I-wanna-do-a-cms-because-nothing-fits thing.

James is getting deeper into mapping territory and is moving to PHP to get the job done. Beautiful.

I knew I could rely on Mike for pictures and info on this amazing snowstorm that’s going on here in NYC.

I’m sure this is on every blog out there, but Google Buys Pyra

Controlled Vocabulary: your site for information on Keyword, Hierarchical Classification, Thesauri, Taxonomy and Subject Heading systems used to describe images in databases (Thesaurus, facet classification, hierarchy)

New Features in Movable Type 2.6

Victor is writing again.

Scripting News: “Last year on this day I asked if tables are really evil. Now one year later, I long for the simplicity of tables, as I long for the balmy spring weather of February in California. Sometimes things are so confusing you can’t tell if something new will complicate or simplify. I’m going to remember this famous homily, no matter how great the pressure, in the future — If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Using tables for layout (and not just for laying out tabular information) is completely acceptable and in line with the spirit of HTML. At least, I remember reading and believing that but I can’t find the reference. Anyone?