Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Ontario Ministry of Energy: very nice illustration of the use of accesskeys (use alt + the underlined letter to jump to a menu item, then click enter to select it).

Since you can Use basic HTML files to navigate notes on the iPod, hasn’t anyone found a way to synch their RSS aggregator stuff and send it to the iPod for reading on the train?

Joel on Software: “Here’s the thing: the very best candidates have come to realize that they have a choice of where to work, and when they apply for a job, they are applying because there’s something intriguing about that particular job, not because they’ll take any work that comes along. And you can see it in their cover letters. For example, if I were to see something like “I’m happy where I am, but I’ve always wanted to move to New York and if Fog Creek is anything like you describe it on your website, it sounds like a great place” you would sound a lot more desirable than someone who writes, “You will find that I am a very hard worker.”

Jesse on the Well: long page worth printing out.

PHP question: on my local server (poorbuthappy.localhost), I want a file to include “C:\somepath\includes.php”. On the live server, I want the same file to include “/home/www/includes.php”. This used to work fine when I used relative paths: include (”../../includes.php”) in the file doing the including. The includes file is OUTSIDE of the web accessible directory tree. Now my web server has set up path /home/www/” for the includes file and “/pedro/path/” for the file doing the including. This is a problem. I can’t use relative paths anymore.

One solution would be to detect which URL I am on before including, but isn’t there a better way?

I can’t seem to get Apache rewrite module working on my local Windows computer. Apache works, PHP works, MySQL works. Mod-rewrite doesn’t. My Apache config file has the following lines uncommented:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

and

AddModule mod_rewrite.c

and in the virtualhost directive in the config file I have

RewriteEngine on

But it doesn’t work! Help! I run Windows XP and Apache 1.3.27. Any tips appreciated.

Even Usability Net’s questionnaire is a joke: “Sorry, you haven’t filled in the entire questionnaire…. Please use your
browser’s BACK function to return to the questionnaire and complete it.” Say what?

Amazon.com is getting into the services business and is offering its technology and tools to retailers. Mmm…

Why don’t emails in mailing lists with public archives have a URL in the footer to the archived version of that particular email?

After reading Simon (in short: M$ is stopping development on IE as a standalone browser, we’ll be stuck with it for at least 5 more years), I have come to peace with what I felt was my falling behind on HTML development. Basic table layouts + CSS for styling will be with us for many more years, and I find that reassuring. There is too much other stuff to learn.

(Dutch) AIfIA in het Nederlands | Nieuws is naar mijn weten het enige Nederlandstalige blog over informatie architectuur. Stuur het rond!

Shareware Amateurs vs. Shareware Professionals by Steve Pavlina (via Joel)

IP to Country: “The IP-to-Country Database is about 98% accurate on country recognition.” Pretty darn good, with dynamic IPs and all. Free too.

Cover Pages: Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA XML): kindof a mix between topicmaps and the holy grail of technical writing: content reuse, “DITA is an architecture for creating topic-oriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways.” The FAQ is useful:
“Q: What is a topic?
A: A topic is a chunk of information organized around a single subject. Structurally, it is a title followed by text and images, optionally organized into sections. Topics can be of many different types, the most common being concepts, tasks, and reference.”

Note this is different from the definition of a topic in Topicmaps. This format is for technical writing and content reuse, not for ontology modeling and merging.

Sometimes Victor’s writing truly kicks ass. (I mean that in a good way.)

IndyJunior Flash Mapping Module: very cool: feed it an XML file and it will show your travels on a map. Too bad I don’t travel much these days.

Joi Ito’s Web: Attention Concentration and becoming a place

I fixed my RSS file, I took the RSS 0.91 spec and did the MT code myself.

I’m looking for a good PHP script that lets users upload images. Preferably something simple but solid so I can easily incorporate it in my code - a bunch of functions maybe.

Whiskey Bar: What a Tangled Web We Weave . . .

How Search Can Help You Understand Your Audience: “It seems to me that many of the metrics with which we measure user interaction with the web are deeply flawed, and provide ample evidence that the internet was invented by physicists and technologists, not marketing and advertising executives.”

I was explaining what a database is to my gf the other day (she got it in about 90 seconds), and I’ve been thinking about structured content a lot lately. Here are some thoughts (some extremely basic).

Unstructured content.
Anything you type in your word processor program is structured content, unless you are one of those thousand monkeys typing for a thousand years (and even then). It is structured because you write sentences, paragraphs, you draw relationships in your head between things you write and assign meaning. The problem is that the computer doesn’t know that - it doesn’t know what is the title of the piece for example - so it can’t do much with this structure in your (or the readers’) head. That’s why we call this unstructured content: it is unstructured for the computer. Most of the following structures are attempts to structure things for computers. None of these structures (even ontologies) can capture all the finesse and subtleties of the structures in our heads (most structure exists in our heads, not in the world out there).

Metadata.
Not just data about data, metadata is really defined by its use. If you use it like metadata, it is metadata. Sometimes data can be metadata in some circumstances, and plain data in other circumstances.

An ordered list
An ordered list consists of elements in a certain order. Separating things (into elements) is useful for the computer, because know it knows there are more than 1 thing, not just a big Word file, and it can start doing nice things for you, like sorting these elements alphabetically. The computer remembers the order you put things in even though it doesn’t understand that order (it’s not anything logical like an alphabetical ordering), because the order may have meaning to you (the most important things are at the top).

Databases.
A relational database is different from a list, not only in that you can manipulate (like sort alphabetically) things easier than if you were to just type a list in a word processor, but also in that things are related to each other (ie., a person is related to an address, or a product is related to a price, so you can list all products of a certain price for example).

XML
An XML document also has structure, but isn’t particularly relational. Imagine an article with a title, an author, a header, an introduction and the main body (divided in paragraphs). If you put tags (much like HTML tags) around all of those (and follow some rules), you have XML. XML is great at structuring content (and even better at exchanging stuff between applications), but not particularly good at relating content like a relational database does. Structure and relationships are the two basic elements we are discussing: they are different things. Get your head around them.

Ontologies
Ontologies really expand the relational model: not only are things related in complex ways, they are related in different ways: there is more than one type of relationship. You don’t just draw an arrow between Peter and information architecture, you say: “Peter has as profession information architecture”. Once you build a complex model like this, complex programs can take advantage of that information, and, for example, if you are looking for information architects, the program would know that Peter is the person you should talk to. The problem with ontologies is that they are so darn, well, complex. They are hard to get your head around, hard to create and especially hard to write programs for because they are so flexible. Many ontologies start by creating a limits: someone decides to only use these relationships and these types of elements. Often this is directly related to how this information will be used in the interface, although purists say that you should create an ontology without worrying how the information will be used (I disagree).

Topicmaps.
A topicmap is a structure in which you can build ontologies. A topicmap provides a standard structure (topics, relationships and occurrences) and a technical environment (an XML langauge to express your topicmaps, a query language, tools, …). So it is easier to build ontologies with topicmaps because a lot of the complex, hard work has been done already. A key advantage of topicmaps is that they have merging capabilities built in - a very useful feature. Topicmaps are cool, but haven’t taken off in a big way yet. I believe that will change within a year or two, although the fact that topicmaps decrease lock-in effects means that adoption by vendors of corporate technology will be problematic.

Taxonomy.
A taxonomy is a word that is used differently by people with different backgrounds, so in this discussion I will use it in a generic way. A taxonomy is a tree-ish structure in which you can put metadata. Not the nicest of definitions, I realize :)

Topics/terms/nodes.
In a taxonomy, you have terms/topics/nodes. A topic is something that exists, but can have different words to describe it. A term is a word (or more than one word). A node is a term used by programmers to describes leaves (another term used by programmers) on the tree.

A tree taxonomy.
A tree taxonomy is the structure most website are organized in. All nodes (or leaves) have one parent.

A polyhierarchical taxonomy.
A tree where nodes can have two parents. These structures are often nessecary when creating large trees in which to organize things - such is the nature of classification. (Yahoo is an example) Polyhierarchy means you can classify things better so it will be easier to find stuff for people, but is somewhat harder to implement (both in the backend code and in the interface).

A faceted taxonomy.
A faceted taxonomy consists simply of multiple tree taxonomies, used together, with the rule that the individual taxonomies should be exclusive, ie. that a topic/term in one facet cannot possibly belong to another facet. Faceted taxonomies happen to be one of the structures that are extremely useful on the web, because we have found ways to build interfaces around them that people find easy to use.

Classification.
The act of saying: “This thing belongs to this category (for example subject, or location)”. Classification is subtly different from assigning properties, where you say: “This thing has this property (for example creation date)”. There is some overlap between classification and assigning properties (you could say assigning an author is a giving something property or a classifying it as being written by the author).

Classification systems.
Most websites will have multiple taxonomies used for various purposes. The combination of all these is called a classification system.

A controlled vocabulary.
We are going to get subtle for a second: a controlled vocabulary isn’t so much about classifying things or assigning properties. It deals with the things within the system, called terms. Terms are words (or groups of words). That’s why it’s called a vocabulary. A CV controls the use of terms. There are various types of CV’s. A simple example is the synonym ring: Term A = Term B = Term C. You can see, a simple structure that controls the use of these terms. You can make this more complex by saying: Term A is preferred (you should use that instead of the other terms). CV’s are often used to improve search engines.

A thesaurus.
An even more complex CV. A classic thesarus has this structure: central is a preferred term, which can have a parent (a ‘broader term’), siblings (’variant terms’), children (’narrower terms’) and related terms. Some people think this type of thesaurus is the end-all of CV’s, but you can keep expanding the types of relationships: you could define what types of related terms existed. You could add types of variant terms (acronym, latin name (when doing species), …). At some point, you’d realize you need the ability to keep defining different types of relationships in your model, and you would have created an ontology.

Yeah baby.
If you read this far kudos to you. There are many types of structure and relationships that we can use to design websites. Which ones you choose depends on how you are going to use them. Most structures mentioned above have been found to be useful for web development (ontologies are still rare). There is still a lot of work to be done to identify the best structures for webdesign, to develop interfaces for them and to develop efficient ways of populating them.

By the way, after finishing this I realized I had been inspired by Victor’s excellent metadata glossary :)

Powerpoint criticism is easy, but what is powerpoint but a souped-up outliner? The main appeal of Powerpoint is as a presentation structuring tool - by making you think in outlines, it helps you design the structure of the presentation. Thus, Powerpoint really is an Information Architecture tool.

The fact that people then project those slides on a wall during the presentation is an unfortunate side effect, but we can’t reasonably expect most presentors to have information design skills as well, so I can live with that.

If I try to fix my MT template for my RSS feed with the templates on the MT site, it doesn’t work because I don’t have the latest version of MT. If I search Google, I find nothing. Arg! Where is a basic RSS template for MT version 2.21?

Digital Partners

Enabling Dimensions:Imagine… Using the computer blind-folded - Typing wearing a pair of oven mittens - Navigating a website with the mouse unplugged - Web surfing with tape over your spectacles. Strange but not so strange!”

Oracle is doing a hostile take-over on PeopleSoft. For those who don’t know, PeopleSoft sells things like Enterprise Portals (like SAP). It’s one of the few things companies are spending money on these days, and the move is towards selling complete enterprise solutions. Whoever wins in the enterprise portal market has a good handle to sell all the other enterprise systems as well (lock-in at work: integration nightmares mean IT departments are reluctant to buy products from too many different companies, even if the products from other companies are superior).

Motley Fool: “Just this past Monday, PeopleSoft announced that it would be buying smaller rival J.D. Edwards (Nasdaq: JDEC) for $1.7 billion in stock. The combination of the two companies would have catapulted them ahead of Oracle, to take over the No. 2 spot in the enterprise-applications software market. PeopleSoft had hoped to close the deal this fall. [..] Does Oracle really want PeopleSoft? Or does it just want to prevent the merger of two rivals that would surpass it once combined?”

InfoWorld: “If Oracle succeeds in its bid to acquire PeopleSoft, users are in for a rough transition, industry analysts said Friday.”

IT-Director: “The normally staid world of the ERP gorillas has been thrown into turmoil this week. First PeopleSoft announced plans to acquire JD Edwards. Then Baan announced its sale and subsequent alignment with SSA technologies. Now Oracle has stated that it will be making an offer on Monday to buy PeopleSoft entirely.The only one we haven’t heard from yet this week is SAP.
[...]
Instead, Oracle states that it will neither sell PeopleSoft applications to any new customers nor integrate the product lines of the two companies, thus reducing integration risks for customers trying to tie disparate systems together. Instead, the firm is pledging to offer streamlined, automated migration paths for PeopleSoft’s customers to move over to Oracle e-Business suite over time.” (Good analysis here)

“Intranet Focus Ltd provides consulting services on intranet and extranet deployment and management. We develop content management and intranet strategies based on information audits, advise on information architecture design and implementation, and the selection of content management and search software.”

Anyone know good places to look for internships/temp jobs for a beginning anthropologist (not me) in New York City? Professional organizations? Job postings of universities? Other ideas?

DaveNet : New York Times Archive and Weblogs: “As I undestand it, the Times wishes to encourage people with weblogs to point to and comment on New York Times articles, but it also must protect sources of revenue that are not related to weblogs.” So the Times online archives will now be free for links coming from weblogs with a specific querystring attached. Interesting. The question is: is there an agreement to keep these free (for x years at least)?

inflight correction: “Something little observed outside of engineering is that pre-globalization, machinery had cultural accents. You could tell if you were working on something that was American, British, French, or Japanese. Science is science, but where you have choices available for achieving an end, cultural intonations will come through.”

Joi Ito’s Web: No-Shop Agreements: “Basically, my point is that if you decide that you like each other and REALLY want to work together but that it will take a lot of work before the actual transaction happens, a no-shop allows both parties to focus on building the business. It’s like an agreement that after two people are engaged, you both don’t date anymore.”

Uzanto — customer research and interaction design: very cool.

I was having a drink with my gf in Williamsburg last Sunday when I was visiting a friend, and I saw a local magazine with an intriguing cover. Looking closer it looked darn much like a social network graph on that cover. Handdrawn. I checked the inside and all it said was “Mark Lombardi“. My friend came to the bar a bit later and I showed him, and he told me the Mark Lombardi story. Turns out the guy was doing lots of these diagrams in the 80s. Now they are considered art. He was doing a lot of them about politicians and arms dealers and such, so the CIA reportedly kept watch on him. Then one day, they found him hanging dead in his appartment in Williamsburg. Here’s some pictures: first one. Second one.

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