How does this work? I can’t figure it out. At first I thought doing the math always gives the same number, but it doesn’t.
It’s scary. No matter how many times you try it, it really does seem to read your mind. Anyone has the solution?
Adam interviews some of the founders of AIFIA and asks some hard questions: “The usual manifest of highly dramatic and important events happened in the world in 2002 - you know, wars, rumors of wars, Dee Dee Ramone so soon after Joey, stuff like that - so I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if you had never heard tell of it. But for a working information architect, the message that an organisation calling itself the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture had decloaked and announced its existence to the world came as nothing short of a grenade in the Inbox.”
Indexing marked up documents: “For a self-contained body of text, a good indexer beats dumb - or even smart - search technology hollow. That’s just the way it is. I recommend Nancy Mulvany - excellent Indexing Books for those ignorant of the issues.”
Dr Mils Hills, The Cabinet Office, Ministry of Defence: “Social Anthropology is not a conventional qualification for those seeking to conduct research in the defence and security community.”
Comparing complex product specifications is one of the unsolved problems for web interfaces. Here’s an interesting approach (using Flash): PowerShot.
Independent.co.uk :Tony Blair and George Bush are encountering an unexpected obstacle in their campaign for war against Iraq - their own intelligence agencies.
Britain and America’s spies believe that they are being politicised: that the intelligence they provide is being selectively applied to lead to the opposite conclusion from the one they have drawn, which is that Iraq is much less of a threat than their political masters claim. Worse, when the intelligence agencies fail to do the job, the politicians will not stop at plagiarism to make their case, even “tweaking” the plagiarised material to ensure a better fit.
“You cannot just cherry-pick evidence that suits your case and ignore the rest. It is a cardinal rule of intelligence,” said one aggrieved officer.”
CyberJournalist.net: Online News Space Shuttle Columbia Crash Coverage: interesting lesson from the newspapers: “Several chose layouts they rarely use, to create additional dramatic impact.” A lot of web work assumes there is one best homepage for a news site. Having a number of alternative layouts available may be really valuable, this is a lesson from the newspaper world that is lost on a lot of sites. If you have a news site, people will visit it often. Designing a variety of homepages feels like the right thing to do. Interesting.
Jared Spool: User Interface Engineering — “The Customer Sieve” Article: “Users can easily search uniquely identified content because they know what they are looking for.” Wherein Jared concludes that search engines are useful only for known item searching (when you know what you’re looking for).
I don’t agree with his conclusion (don’t use search when your users don’t look for known items) though. Instead, look at search as an interface. If you have a known item, the results page should just show the items. If people are looking for categories and such (unknown items), the search results page should use controlled vocabularies and present itself as a browsing environment (which supports unknown item searching) instead of a list of items.
IBM gets patent for ‘user assistants’. Bah. Meanwhile, Dave is annoyed with a Microsoft filing a patent application for an API using .NET.
You gotta love the beeb.
Tales of Drudgery and Boredom: (in Dutch) “Yow! Stijn! Iets voor u: XFML, eXchangeable Faceted Metadata Language. Enfin, denk ik toch. Korte introductie tot het dinges te vinden op xml.com.”
Lutin’s blog: (in French) “Ah ben voilà un truc qui me plait, mais je ne sais pas quoi en faire. Ou plutôt, j’ai tellement d’usages en tête que je ne saurais pas par où commencer si j’en avais les moyens. Je vais vous confier un secret: j’adore classer les informations. C’est pour ça que la référence de A frog in the valley me fait froncer les sourcils.” (He’s saying he doesn’t know what to do with XFML because there are too many things you can do with it. I sympathize :)
David Galbraith: “I am less sure about XFML led by Peter Van Dijk, where the serialization of topics and facets seems to only allow 2 levels of hierarchy i.e. don’t see how you can have subfacets of facets or subtopics of topics. Now it is true that you don’t stricly need hierarchy beyond facet -> topics, but you get bloat, rather like flat file databases. Someone correct me if I am wrong.” (he is wrong - XFML allows for unlimied depth in the hierarchies)
Hey, Yahoo has an XFML category. Cool.
Looking at these architecture models, I wondered, in real life architecture, about the role models play, and how that tranlates to information architecture models. The architecture models are beautiful. Sitemaps are inadequate as models, although they can be beautiful. Mmm…
RCCS: Who We Are: “The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies is an online, not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to research, teach, support, and create diverse and dynamic elements of cyberculture.”
So I found myself asking: why does hardly anyone use LABEL tags? They are useful, accessible and well enough supported. Even HotBot, with it’s advanced CSS and javascript and what not doesn’t use them - and they could really add value to those radio buttons.
Wired News: The U.S. Military Needs Its Speed: (ues - the drug) “The Air Force claims amphetamine use is strictly voluntary. To substantiate this, Air Force spokespeople note that the “informed consent” form signed by pilots who receive Dexedrine mentions the voluntary nature of the program no fewer than seven times. However, the form also notes that the pilot can be grounded for exercising his right not to imbibe.”
Amazon Tries Word of Mouth (NYT, password): “Now Amazon has turned its quantitative prowess on one of the most vexing questions in marketing: Is television advertising worth the expense? Amazon’s answer is no. And it has canceled plans for any television or general-purpose print advertising this year. The company is so sure of its decision that it has dismantled its five-member advertising department, assigning the employees to other roles.
[...]
Mr. Bezos said canceling all advertising is much more efficient than scaling it back. “By eliminating the whole activity of doing broad-scale television advertising it simplifies things,” Mr. Bezos said. “We don’t need anyone to figure out what type of TV campaign to do.”
Benetech - The Martus Project: “Martus, which is the Greek word for witness, brings new technology into the service of the field of human rights work.”
I’m looking for people to test drive Taxomita.
Jeremy Shantz: An Introduction to the Cardinal XFML Parser: “Although it is possible to create and process XFML documents using standard XML parsers, Cardinal XFML Parser provides a convenient abstraction that simplifies working with XFML. It models the XFML specification and its concepts and provides built-in ways to traverse a document’s network cloud, import occurrences, and work with occurrence strength. For example, the XFMLDocument’s ImportOccurrences method downloads the remote XFML files indicated by each
Not sure if this is supposed to be released yet, but brilliant.
Shipping the prototype: “Years ago, when the paint was barely dry on Visual Basic 3.0, a developer showed me a CD-ROM-burning application he’d written using that toolkit. The idea was to prototype the UI in Visual Basic, then rewrite in C for performance. But in the end, he admitted somewhat sheepishly, “we shipped the prototype.” I saw nothing to be ashamed of. It was — and is — a brilliant strategy. My only regret is that it hasn’t been adopted more widely.”
Nucleus Support: XFML theme & template: “Users of Nucleus 1.99 (the dev version) can just download the zip file, import the skin/template and upload xmfl.php to their website root directory and get started.”
ivan’s-blog: “The language structure of XFML is pretty cool in that you can further break down the information for better defined searches.”
Gotzeblogged: “XMLifying my site, Take 2. Another day, another feed :-)”
Nuts and bolts: “Muito interessante as considerações, observações e testes de Mark Pilgrim a respeito de um novo formato de XML, o XFML (eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language). Essa nova tecnologia pode interessar ao pessoal aqui do Instituto que está discutindo exaustivamente a criação de um vocabulário controlado para a enciclopédia de artes visuais. Sim, pois o XFML categoriza de forma cruzada os assuntos de um website e cria uma área de cross-sections. As facetas são assuntos gerais de primeiro nível, que devem ser mutuamente excludentes e não ambígüos (os arquitetos devem evitar a criação de facetas com atributos do tipo “Lugares para ir” e “Cidades”, por exemplo). Em seguida, são criados os tópicos das facetas, ou seja, o segundo grau hierárquico da taxonomia. Desta forma, o XFML permite que um tópico faça parte de duas ou mais facetas ao mesmo tempo, sem subverter as regras de entradas e a padronização de informação. Funciona muito como nosso cérbero, que trabalha por associações.”
Meltsner: “And this is a relatively straightforward example. RSS, and all of its variations, is worse. I may just switch to XFML, since it’s strictly defined, but I’m sure someone will decide that it just needs a few changes to be perfect…”
Amazon.com Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering: “By comparing similar items rather than similar customers, item-to-item collaborative filtering scales to very large data sets and produces high-quality recommendations.
[...]
The click-through and conversion rates [of recommendations based on collabirative filtering] —two important measures of Web-based and email advertising effectiveness—vastly exceed those of untargeted content such as banner advertisements and top-seller lists.
[...]
Unlike traditional collaborative filtering, our algorithm’s online computation scales independently of the number of customers and number of items in the product catalog. Our algorithm produces recommendations in realtime, scales to massive data sets, and generates high-quality recommendations.
[...]
Rather than matching the user to similar customers, item-to-item collaborative filtering matches each of the user’s purchased and rated items to similar items, then combines those similar items into a recommendation list.”
Term Tree 2000 Thesaurus Software Home Page is reportedly working on XML export.
design4results.com: Damn good sales copy for a small web company.
Buying documentaries: “In the light of this situation, it is obvious that we are looking for more unique, original and ultimately more sellable films, films of high quality and edgy, contemporary and important content.”
Intuitive Ranking - drop.org: “Base the ratings on normal selfish use of the content.” Like it.
Nuclear Warheads, Cocaine, and Polo shirts: “I just want to hang out and explore and meet people.” My buddy Jay wants to go to Iran and started a blog. Give him pointers :)
WSJ.com - First Impressions: “The New York Times’ Web site will begin displaying half-page magazine-style ads adjacent to its articles, making its online pages appear more similar to their print counterparts. [...] The navigational links that typically appear on the far left side of the page will move to the top of the screen, making room for the text of the article to the left of the ad.”
News! A corporate blurb that makes sense! Wordmap: “Wordmap’s Taxonomy Management System allows an organisation to use consistent terminology in all of its applications, assets and activities. Wordmap was designed from the ground up for enterprise deployment, and
has been proven in use by leaders such as Factiva, DaimlerChrysler and SchlumbergerSema.”
Bloug: “The Halstead Principle: 80% of untested business generalizations are made up by 20% of management consultants.”
Fine Print in Electronic Arts’ Results: (NYT) “The company’s president, John S. Riccitiello [...] disclosed that some seasoned video game players were giving very low ratings to the Sims Online.”
Competitors Shape Strategy to Gain Edge in Web Services: (NYT, requires login blabla) “Web services are among the few bright spots for the industry amid the slump in technology spending. Corporate customers speak optimistically of the promise of cost savings and productivity gains from Web services.”
Markup gurus: how should you correctly markup a post with multiple languages in it like this? “Someday I would like to go to Buga a la Iglesia de los Milagros creo que se llama.”
If you have a website and feel like spreading the word, even if you’re not going yourself you should consider add a link to United for Peace on your site. I’m not a political person but this is just silly.
Coding from Scratch: A Conversation with Virtual Reality Pioneer Jaron Lanier, Part One (via Victor): “I think the whole way we write and think about software is wrong. If you look at how things work right now, it’s strange — nobody — and I mean nobody — can really create big programs in a reliable way. If we don’t find a different way of thinking about and creating software, we will not be writing programs bigger than about 10 million lines of code, no matter how fast our processors become.”
A lot more yummie stuff in there.