Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Joho the Blog: [pcf] User-created content. I’ve recently become interested in users creating and sharing content. I’m especially interested in the sharing of pictures.

I’ve been experimenting with various consumer packages. The most successfull one I’ve seen is Microsoft’s Photo Story. It is not perfect, but it definitely points the way. It makes it very easy to pick a set of pictures (say, baby pictures, or a holiday), put them in a sequence and then talk over them. It then creates an AVI file that can be played in an average media player that shows the pictures (slowly moving and zooming, which adds enormously to the emotional impact).

Sharing pictures will be a huge market, and the first company to figure out the easiest to use hardware/software combination should make a decent buck. Now if only thos digital picture frames would drop in price soon!

A Pattern Language for Living Communication: “The Pattern Language for Living Communication project is a long-term, participatory project to create a useful, compelling and comprehensive collection of knowledge which reflects the wisdom of people from all over the world who are developing information and communication systems that support humankind’s deepest core values.”

India Still Waits: Rural Poor Not Yet Ready For the Promise of Radio: “They’re ready and raring to go. But for development workers wanting to launch their own micro-powered community radio stations, it’s like a case of shouting with their mouths gagged.

Since the mid-nineties, community groups have expected permissions to come for them to set up non-profit ultra low-powered FM radio stations. But till date, this has not come, leading to some protagonists to try everything short of pirate radio to get themselves heard.”

How many pixels are there in a frame of 35mm film?: a really good explanation.

Musings: Review of SchemaLogic: “The primary use for SchemaServer right now seems to focus on Controlled Vocabulary Management. [...] Changes to a vocabulary can be made through an automated voting process.”

Has anyone used voting in a real life environment to manage changes to a controlled vocabulary?

Better Living Through Software - Normalization == good?: “I’ve debugged scalability problems in a wide range of systems, and one of the most frequent causes of scalability and manageability bottlenecks in the state management tier is excessive normalization. These are fun problems to solve, because the DBAs have been conditioned with normalization religion and often don’t see any way out of their problems. When they come to realize that normalization is just a technique meant to serve a particular purpose, and not a universal law, it can be liberating.”

Most valuable asset [dive into mark]: “It’s like when I smoked, and all my friends were smokers. If someone quits smoking, you stop socializing with them, not because you hate them for quitting or they’re actively avoiding you (although both are probably true), but simply because all your socialization happens around cigarettes. It’s not even something you necessarily notice, until you quit, and you realize you have no friends to hang out with because all your hanging out happened at smoke breaks.”

Six Apart is the first company I know of that understands the power of creating open standards. Microsoft creates standards and then tries to keep them proprietary and exert full control. Six Apart seems to understand that you can create a totally open standard (like TrackBack), and still profit substantially from it. You profit because you are the first one to implement it, and you (at least partly) control its evolution. Others are continually playing keep-up, not only in their development departments, but also in the minds of the public.

When I created XFML, I felt some of those possibilities. XFML is a totally open standard, but its evolution is controlled, mostly, by me. (Even though anyone can develop a new version of XFML.) Not because I want to, but because, of the few people that truly, entirely understand it and its purpose, I’m probably the only one interested in evolving it. If I were to start creating tools using that standard, others would continually have to play keep-up. The more I were to make it open and promote it as a standard, the more others would be forced to stay at least compatible.

I need to think this through a bit more, but these were my initial thoughts after seeing TypeKey: “TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites.” From Six Apart, Typekey is kinda what Microsoft was trying to do with Passport, but without the money. I wonder how it compares with SharedID (I haven’t looked into that too much).

Ah - a business model! “We’ll be providing documentation on how to integrate TypeKey authentication into your own applications shortly after the service launches. At that point, there will also be information about what is required to make use of TypeKey services in commercial applications.”

I had missed many of the discussions (summary, questions by Dave Winer, Shelley’s comments) already going on about TypeKey. In short, people are naturally suspicious of any centralized identity technology.

Fast Company | How Google Grows…and Grows…and Grows: “But Google is also a case study in savvy management — a company filled with cutting-edge ideas, rigorous accountability, and relentless attention to detail.”

XML.com: The Library of Congress Comes Home [Mar. 17, 2004]: “Let’s assume that I’ve convinced you to consider implementing a classification scheme at home. Which one should you use? There are several possibilities: Library of Congress Classification (LCC), Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), Colon Classification (CC), Bliss Classification (BC).
[...]
The problem with only arranging your collection physically by alphabetical order is that, without a computerized index of the collection, you can’t form queries like, “show me all the resources that are about Spanish anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism” or “show me all the resources that are about Buddhist folk magic”.”

This does not make sense to me. If you’re going to organize your books, make your own scheme. Don’t re-use a library scheme that was created for different purposes alltogether. Will it let you look up books by your favourites? By the ones signed by authors? By the ones you’re using for you rennovation project?

Kendall also doesn’t mention Amazon’s book search. Why classify your books for retrieval if you can already search them using Amazon, and then just use a simple scheme (alphabetical, …) to retrieve the book?

XML.com: Hacking the Library: “Kendall Clark tries to figure out if he can make the librarians and the geeks happy at the same time.”

The first Release Candidate of PHP 5 is finally here! The move from Beta stage to RC stage means that PHP 5 is now feature complete, and is quite stable - stable enough for everyone to start playing with.”

Time to start playing.

MSN Personas! (via InfoDesign)

Who knew there were experts in mouthfeel (The way that a food product feels inside a person’s mouth.) You really don’t want to get into food product design (this site seems to be the B&A of the food design discipline). (I hereby promise this will be my last post about mouthfeel ever to see the light of your monitor.)

Second International Conference on Trust Management 2004: “A trust management conference looking at trust from multidisciplinary pespectives: legal, pyschology, philosophy, economic, sociology as well as information technology. The Second International Conference on Trust Management will take place at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, UK, from 29th March to 1st April 2004.”

Ask Joel - Is Microsoft leaving the small business market?: “The best way to avoid competing with Microsoft is to stick to verticals. Microsoft always does horizontal applications, never verticals. You’ll never see Microsoft Tire Warehouse 1.0.”

Experimenting with BitTorrent and RSS 2.0. So that’s how that works.

You include enclosures in your RSS feed. An enclosure is not text, but a small-ish (25k) file that contains all the information needed for BitTorrent to download a big file. So you don’t download a huge file within your RSS, just a pointer to a huge file.

Now, you can distribute large files by including small pointers to them in your RSS feed. The users who have the right stuff on their computers will then automatically download, P2P, your large files overnight to the users computer.

Your computer isn’t hit too hard because of the way Bittorrent works (it’s P2P). And you can distribute (push, almost) large audio or video files.

Very nice. I’m impressed.

Yesterday riding home on the train in NJ, USA, there were lots of police on the tracks and in the train.

Lazyweb: a spider that spiders any weblog against a master list of comment spam. So:

- I go to http://despam.org
- I enter my weblog’s URL and click “Despam me”
- It tells me if I have any comment spam, and tells me what to do next.
- I can ask it to despam me weekly and email me the results.

If you’re using MT-Blacklist to stop comment spams, feel free to copy my blacklist.txt file in your list. I searched for blacklist files and copied about 20 of them into my master file. Each had at least 10 domains the previous ones didn’t have. Afterwards, I ran the despam, and it found a bunch of spam my manual efforts had missed.

(via Jon) Oracle is now providing licensing seminars. They don’t teach you how to use Oracle, but how to pay for it!

This site graphically compares the sites Yahoo returns vs. the ones Google returns for a given query, like yahoo! vs. google: colombia travel. Kinda cool.

Martin Röll pointed out an small error in my Themes and metaphors article - I put one wrong face on a quote. Fixed now. Thanks Martin!

Jorge started BootStudio | Consultoría, Outsourcing, y Diseño Web en Centroamérica y Panamá. A good web studio for central America and Panama.

AIfIA - Español | Arquitectura de Información: Una disciplina “de lujo” en Chile: an article about the state of IA in Chile. The translation project of AIfIA now also is starting to publish original content in other languages (that, in turn, can be translated back into English!).

Audio and Video from IA Summit 2004. You can now see some of the presentations, filmed by Bob Doyle.

Simon Willison: SXSW on a shoe-string: “Anyone going and want to share a hotel room?” Many Hilton-class hotel rooms have 2 beds, so come on guys. Share the wealth.

Dina landed an ethnography job through her blogging contacts. Congrats!

WorldChanging: cool idea of child exploitation?: “South Africa’s Roundabout has devised a way to harness the energy generated by kids playing (ingenious in itself), as they spin on an outdoor merry-go-round.”

We just came home from going for some food, and my girlfriend had a message on her cellphone answering machine. The message contained the entire conversation we just had in the restaurant! Scary.

A good case for a default locking mechanism on cell-phones. Guess what happened.

PeopleAggregator lets you define more than 1 type of relationship with others:

- know of
- don’t know but want to
- know of in passing
- know by reputation
- acquaintance
- friend
- close friend
- relative

Assuming the purpose of this is to provide different functionality depending on the type of relationship, here’s my critique:

- know of
- don’t know but want to (how can you not know who someone is, yet want to? Is a subset of Know by reputation?)
- know of in passing
- know by reputation
- acquaintance
- friend
- close friend
- relative (good category - it’s a yes or no one.)

Question: can you select more than 1? Here’s my take:

(categories exclusive: you can choose only 1)
- relative
- friend (non-relative)
(subcategories exclusive: you can choose only 1)
– grade of friendship: acquaintance
– grade of friendship: friend
– grade of friendship: close friend
- know of (non-relative, non-friend)
(subcategories non exclusive: you can choose more than 1)
– by reputation
– in passing

These probably need a lot more thinking. A relative can be a friend after all.

One and a half year after creating XFML, I think the main value of the language has been to introduce people to concepts such as facets and topics.

It has become the de-facto standard for exchanging faceted metadata, but on the other hand, very few applications are actually exchanging that kind of information. I think that’ll change, but that’s a separate story.

It’s simplicity has held up well, both conceptually as implementation-wise. Most people understand the spec easily, and it’s easy to implement.

When creating the spec, I spend months removing elements and attributes that I thought weren’t absolutely necessary. There are a few in there that nobody’s using, like the connect element, but I do have some hope they may still be used and become important one day. Then again, maybe I should have made the langauge even simpler. Extreme standard creation: don’t include elements you’re not entirely sure you’ll need.

Another element I’m not sure about is MapInfo. I’m curious to see wether that one will be really used one day.

BlogPulse [BETA]: Automated Trend Discovery for Weblogs: “BlogPulse mines for bursty phrases and person names instead of for the most popular ones. The most popular phrases and names change very slowly over time.”

subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale. Very cool.

Boxes and Arrows now have a search box (via Donna). Let’s try it out.

A search for Visio on the B&A site gets this top 3:
- Planning your future
- The Book of Probes
- Value-Driven Intranet Design

In short: total irrelevancy.

Google’s Search This Site, on the other hand, returns this top 3:

- practical applications: visio or html for wireframes
- three visio tips - special deliverables 4
- automating diagrams with visio

Total relevancy. Either switch to Google, or fix that MT search guys.

I love Firefox’s tabs.

One improvement I’d like to see: to close a tab (a very common operation), you have to right-click it and then select close tab. Two clicks for a common interaction. To make matters worse, there’s a big red button next to it that closes all tabs, not a common action, inviting mistakes.

What would work better: bring the close-tab functionality to the surface, and hide the close-all-tabs functionality under a right-click. Something like the image below.

If I find some time I’ll open an account, read the FAQs and do a Bugzilla report. Meanwhile, if someone else wants to do that, feel free.

At the IA Summit, I saw an impressive demo of UsersFirst. It’s a portable usability lab, and the slickest one I’ve seen. It consists of a Mac laptop, the software and an iCam camera. The software lets you connect to any other laptop (say, a Windows laptop that runs a prototype), and records pixel perfect what’s going on there. It also records the user (with the iCam). And it includes logging software that’s timestamped. Expect this to make some waves when it comes out of beta in a few months.

The guy who’s creating the software has been working on it for years. I talked to him for a while about pricing models, and requirements.

There is a huge market for this if it is done right. I’m surprised nobody else has gone for this. And I’m waiting for a Windows version. Who’s going to make one?

Joseph Reagle, referring to my summary, identifies another theme in the semantic web discussion: “People originally resisted the Web and said it was stupid, but now look at it!”

I replaced some code in the individual archive template to not link to people’s URL’s anymore. The site is getting spammed to death by comment spammers, and I can’t keep up, even with using the MT blacklist plugin.

I changed this tag

MTCommentAuthorLink spam_protect=”1″

to

MTCommentAuthorLink spam_protect=”1″ show_url=”0″

So the name now links to the email, not the URL. I am wondering if I should show a non-clickable version of the URL? If it doesn’t increase pagerank of the spammers I’d do it.

New blog (for me): Thijs van der Vossen (The name means ‘Tom of the foxes’. Make of that what you will.)