Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Art House Digital Cinema Is Here: “We%u2019re developing a national network of specialty screens, called EmergingCinemas, by entering into joint ventures with local cultural centers, such as museums, performing arts centers, and, perhaps the most exciting of all, restored %u201Cmovie palaces,%u201D via a strategic marketing alliance with the League of Historic American Theaters (LHAT). New digital technology can return %u201Cthe movies%u201D to these grand old venues, which in many cases have abandoned an ongoing cinema offering. We%u2019re providing the required hardware, the programming and the marketing expertise for them to have an ongoing quality cinema offering for their communities.”

The Rogue Librarian — notes from the Book Culture talk at SXSW: “Half of all the web sites created in 1998 are now gone. 320 Million websites exist, with a new one being added every 4 seconds.”

ongoing · Perfect Tool: Dandelion Killer: “So from time to time I’ll write up an example of a tool that comes close to the Platonic ideal: it does what it does as well as what it does can be done. I’ll use a very inclusive definition of %u201Ctool%u201D: hardware, software, you name it. Suggestions are welcome. Today we start with the humble Dandelion Killer.”

ongoing · On the Goodness of Unicode: excellent brief introduction to Unicode for developers, but useful for IA’s as well, even if you are not a techie.

Simon Willison: XmlWriter: Generating XML from PHP: Simon produced the extremely useful looking XML writer class.

Visual SourceSafe isn’t really great for versioning with documents (as opposed to code). When I create a new doc, I have to create the doc locally, close it, put it in sourcesafe, check it out and open it again locally. Annoying. When I want to edit a doc I have to close it if I have it open, open Sourcesafe, browse to the right directory, check it out, open the document again and then edit it. And then not forget to check it in again.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Where spam comes from: “e-mail addresses posted on websites or in newsgroups attract the most spam.”

Good news for IA’s.

Corporations seek better search results | CNET News.com: “Ford Motor got a crash course in the science of search analytics two years ago during a high-profile product recall.

When the carmaker announced that it was replacing Firestone tires on all of its vehicles, consumers stampeded the corporate Web site in search of information that went beyond the typical product sheet. Over the following days and months, Ford and search partner Ask Jeeves not only fielded thousands of searches a day; they recorded and analyzed the queries on the fly in hopes of improving the service, a practice that continues today.

“The Ask Jeeves reports are used in two ways,” according to Joyce Mueller, a consumer e-marketing manager at Ford. “First: to evaluate the site design and understand what content people are having trouble finding…Second: to learn what people are looking for. Currently, the majority of our searches are not for our main vehicles, but for other information such as the SVT (Special Vehicles Team). This helps us prioritize enhancements to the site.”

In the field of customer intelligence, search analytics is poised to become a star. Examining search queries is now the preferred way for corporations to analyze Web site activity, to make sites more responsive and profitable.”

talking meat sticks: public access tv rocks.

Steve Portigal

O’Reilly Network: Request for help from a Geek Volunteer [April 26, 2003]: “Over the years, we’ve donated books to many nonprofits and schools in developing countries. Last October, I received an email from Sudhakar Chandra, a self-described “geek volunteer,” that got me thinking about how O’Reilly and other companies could do a better job of supporting the good works of people like Sudhakar. His email was a compelling reminder that books are a rare and precious resource in many parts of the world.”

Judge: File-swapping tools are legal: “In an almost complete reversal of previous victories for the record labels and movie studios, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Streamcast–parent of the Morpheus software–and Grokster were not liable for copyright infringements that took place using their software. The ruling does not directly affect Kazaa, software distributed by Sharman Networks, which has also been targeted by the entertainment industry.”

BBC NEWS | Technology | Gadgets go back to basics: “As a backlash towards simplicity manifests itself throughout the electronics world, experts will call on designers to develop technology that works well in the real world.”

Greg Hill’s blog looks interesting.

Microsoft Research seeks better search | CNET News.com: “A prototype application called “Stuff I’ve Seen,” for instance, will store every screen that has popped up on a given computer monitor for a year. Another prototype called “Ask MSR” allows users to pose queries using the natural flow of language, asking “Where is Saddam Hussein?” for example.”

Dented Reality Australia: Information Architecture, Usability, Web Development by Beau Lebens.

SIGIA-L Mail Archives: Search vs. Browse - the debate continues. Good stuff from Jared Spool.

W3C :: remix winner looks good.

peterme.com: Who is Wired Magazine’s Audience? - Wired is Tired.

No time to blog this week…

“headshot” is a good query if you are looking for some images for personas - mind the rights issues of course.

If only I had had these Patterns for XML Documents when designing XFML.

This has been hovering on the border of my consciousness for months, and it sounds kinda stupid, but I just realized what’s wrong with Automatic Classification and the general approach to classification, and how to fix it. It is, ironically, because of the (largely unconscious) worldview inherent in the heritage of the library sciences. I’m gonna try to write it down clearly - or I’ll probably come to my senses later.

The dullest blog in the world

Easy News Topics - RSS2.0 Module: “This specification defines the Easy News Topics (ENT) Module for the RSS2.0 syndication format. ENT is intended to be a very simple standard for describing how topic information can be introduced into an RSS2.0 news feed.” (thanks Eric Scheid)

I was setting up Microsoft Money with the hope and expectation I would be able to import my bank statement details from my online (US) bank account. Turns out I need to actually type in every transaction! Did I miss something? I was using Money 2000 - maybe the new version does that? I’ll buy it if it does, but if I have to type in everything, forget about it. Anyone know how this works?

FacetMap: “FacetMap continues to bring you innovations in faceted classification. There’s a certain type of facet which almost everyone would like to use, but which no one has offered — until now. The new Spectrum facet type allows your users to navigate numerical data, by specifying their own range of numbers instead of picking from a list of arbitrarily predefined ranges.” Nifty.

Information Architecture: You Do It, You Just Don’t Know It (a reminder link for myself)

Tanya’s list of resources that argue for and suggest best practices in URI construction.

On Semantics and Markup: “When you get an ASN.1 message, you can unpack it and you get the data items and their types. So you know: This is a fraction with 2 digits of precision, this is a 17-character string, this is a non-negative integer, and so on. But, you don’t get labels.
XML, on the other hand, tells you: this is called price, this is called Bill-To, and this is called quantity-shipped, but (by default) tells you nothing about data types.
To oversimplify, XML is winning and ASN.1 is losing. There are a variety of reasons for this, but one of them is that it seems to be more important to know what something is called than what data type it is. This result is not obvious from first principles, and has to count as something of a surprise in the big picture.”

Interview: Lou Rosenfeld and Steve Krug on UX: “Lou: Well, I’ll admit that I have plenty of trepidation, because Steve seems like the kind of guy who snores.
Steve: How did you know? It’s true, as Melanie can tell you. But my real drawback as a roommate would be the fact that I tend to stay up all night watching old movies and infomercials. And since I suspect that Lou is fairly neat, I think we’d have the potential for a real Felix/Oscar thing. (I’d rather think of us as more like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in the old Road movies, like The Road to Morocco (”…like Web- ster’s Dic- tion- ary, we’re Moroc- co bounnnddddd.”)”

Search Workshop Submissions (CHI - via Lou) Happy printing!

I stayed away from eZ publish (PHP cms) because of the installation nightmares. With eZ publish 3 released those seem to have been addressed, so I am going to take another look.

Patterns vs. evolutionary design: stop overengineering (PDF): “When I first began learning patterns, they represented a flexible, sophisticated and even elegant way of doing object-oriented design that I very much wanted to master. After thoroughly studying the patterns, I used them to improve systems I’d already built and to formulate designs for systems I was about to build. Since the results of these efforts were promising, I was sure I was on the right path. But over time, the power of patterns led me to lose sight of simpler ways of writing code. After learning that there were two or three different ways to do a calculation, I’d immediately race toward implementing the Strategy pattern, when, in fact, a simple conditional expression would have been a perfectly sufficient solution.” (more goodies here)

EServer TC Library: “The EServer TC Library is a experiment into community-based libraries — part web portal, part library index — for professional, scientific and technical communicators.”

I will be speaking at the ‘Society for Technical Communication Belgian Chapter on metadata, topicmaps and such.

(via Catalogablog) AskDCMI: Q&A about Dublin Core.

I am adding directories to SourceSafe, and I have to doubleclick the directory (open it) in the dialog window to add it. If not, I add the parent directory, recursively. I have done this twice this morning and once yesterday, and everytime I only realize this after about 10 minutes of pumping unneeded stuff in there. Little interface glitch, pisses me off.

Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: Yahoo Gets Slashdotted: “Yahoo got slashdotted today. It was because of Michael Radwin’s PHPCon 2002 talk on Yahoo adopting PHP. The funny thing is that it held up just fine–served by a single FreeBSD server running Apache. [...] The fact that public.yahoo.com was serving static files, no PHP or anything fancy, meant that the CPU had time to spare. During the peak of traffic, the CPU was still over 50% idle much of the time.”

Feel free to join the beta testing for taxomita.