Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

GlobalGiving: a better way to give.

1. Six days with the Akshaya project: day 1: overview
2. Day 2: technology
3. Day 3: entrepreneurs
4. Day 4: promotion
5. Day 5: training
6. Day 6: conclusions

The Akshaya project uses an interesting business model: local entrepreneurs run individual Aksaya centers, and are expected to become profitable by themselves. This way the project won’t die of lack of funds once the initial interest or funding dries out. Sustainability.
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HubLog: TouchGraph browser for Google Scholar

heyblog: Design Engaged retrospect: small conferences away from commerce seem to be the future. Organize your own!

1. Six days with the Akshaya project: day 1: overview
2. Day 2: technology
3. Day 3: entrepreneurs
4. Day 4: promotion
5. Day 5: training
6. Day 6: conclusions

The Akshaya project uses a combination of various wireless technologies to provide internet access to 3,500 square kilometers of rural areas in the rugged terrains of Malappuram, a hilly district in the Kerala state of India.
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Any recommendations/tips around using CVS on Windows? The situation is this: I prefer an easy gui tool over command line because I won’t be using it that much. The CVS server is hosted somewhere else, I just need a tool to work locally with it on Win XP.

Dan Gillmor: “I worship librarians as a rule, but I’m going to make an exception in this case.”

The “paraphrase problem” is when a user adopts terms different than the terms used in the document they are looking for.

For example, a user might search for “laptop” but on your website these things are always called “notebooks”, so neither through the search nor through browsing can the user find it.

Who is Linnar Viik (the “father of the Estonian internet”).

How Far Have We Traveled? Magic, Science and Religion Revisited: an anthropologic way of looking at the missile defense system.

The Cavalier Daily: Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans in all academic fields, especially anthropology.

I thought I’d blog some responses on the mailing lists (sigia-l and aifia-members) on my research agenda for information architecture post. Good stuff, from many people much more clever than me.

By the way, for my Belgian readers and others: the AIFIA mailing list is members only, and in and by itself a great reason to become member of AIFIA. So sign up. At 20US$ for students and 40US$ for professionals, it’s great value. If you are from a third world country you can even sign up for free. Belgian readers: a company-wide signup is 200US$ a year.

Anne Miller: “HCI, human factors, anthropology, ethnography and so on are coming to and perhaps usurping AI because the problem spaces we investigate lead us to questions that involve categorisation (IA) issues. Thus we come to IA with an understanding about where IA fits in a broader problem space; what we don’t have but are in many ways developing are methods and orientations for dealing with categorisation problems. What does this say about AI? First is says that IA has a place. Second it says that IA would benefit from looking at broader problem spaces so that it can take charge of the development of techniques development. Third, it may say that IA needs to better define itself as a contributor in a multi-disciplinary research context so that IA researchers can claim their seat at the research table.

By engaging with other disciplines (sharing disciplinary secrets!!!) does IA risk loosing it’s identify? Quite probably but then this is the nature of scientific (r)evolution (Kuhn’s Paradigm). It’s not so much that IA will loose its identity as much as that it will morph into something else through the integration of its methods with other methods and approaches. This is exactly what has happened to HCI.”

Peter Morville: ”
I’m not sure PeterMe deserves or claims credit for first bringing facets to IA. A bunch of librarians at a company called Argus did some of the earliest work in this area
[...]
I’ve always seen IA as an applied field
[...]
I agree that it would be great to see more research that’s specific and useful to the practice of IA, but practitioners have limited influence over the research agendas of academic institutions.”

Sarah Brodwall writes in to say she is investigating prototype theory and how it might apply to IA. Great! Go Sarah go!

Keith Instone: “So like Mr. Morville, I am not so pessimistic. To me the first step is getting the practitioners to explain the problems they are facing so that the researchers can study something that has value outside the ivory tower.”

Tessa: “Irrelevant is still a category and even the act of categorization dispels my fears - it must be the logic of it. My nightmare is that no one will want to put a label on our field…as long as there is a label for it, it still has some merit to some one, yes?!!”

Amanda Cossham: “But since I am trying to come to grips with this fascinating field all at once, I’ve been fairly ruthless and thorough in reading the literature and seeing how IA has developed. Have to say that I agree with Peter Van Dijck’s blog entry - there is a dearth of stuff at the moment.
[...]
It takes motivation from those working in the field to document and evaluate and then *disseminate* this information. ”

Thomas Vander Wal: “I agree with the seemingly stale nature of IA. I think there are a lot of innovative things going on, but few are bubbling up in research. ”

Grant Campbell: “The suggestions for future research you’ve presented are cool. They look like fun. Cognitive science, social anthropology, business theory–a truly fascinating range of ways to explore the field and to push its boundaries outward. But do people do research because it’s fun? Sometimes they do, I suppose. But usually they do research because they have to: either because they’re driven to it by inner demons, or driven to it by outer pressures. ”

Andrew Boyd: ”
I have a pet hypothesis, based on no real-world data whatsoever, that IA has evolved past the initial ‘new love’ phase of research. There has been sufficient research done such that IA can survive as a viable useful profession - to provide a set of tools for use in the field.”

Dmitri Nekrasovski: “I don’t think the problem is that HCI is usurping IA, more that HCI is (mostly) unaware of IA:

- The most recent CHI conference had six entries containing IA as a keyword, but most of them came from the design expo, a practitioner-oriented track. None were full-length research papers.
- Search the CHI archive for “findability”, and you will get no results that are even remotely related to IA.
- Ask your average HCI researcher (well, at least my colleagues :)) if they are familiar with IA, and you’re likely to get either a blank stare or a response to the effect of “isn’t that something web developers do?”

With respect to the original post, I definitely agree with the statement “there is a lack of deep IA research” within the research fields I am familiar with. Some of the reasons for this have already
been pointed out: the fact that the vast majority of IA’s are practitioners who have no time or inclination for research, the fact that IA has no research forum of its own. I would also add to these a general lack of awareness in the research community of what IA is,
what value it brings, and what interesting research problems can be found within it.”

And some more talk about IA’s role within the UX universe, and about how clients get confused with what we do.

urlgreyhot : Derrick’s rewrite of the alphabetical index module for Drupal

Smart Mobs: SMS rumor about free live U2 show in NYC: “Just got this text message on my phone:

*strong rumor* Free live U2 show: Empire Fulton Ferry State Park (between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges). F train 2 York St.
2:30 pm.

If you’re around or have time to spare this afternoon take the chance and go for it.”

That’s like, now. Is it happening?

Audioblog.com (bad branding - never choose a descriptive name!) now lets you videoblog supereasily: it uses Flash and your webcam. Click record and go.

How to videoblog or free

1. Six days with the Akshaya project: day 1: overview
2. Day 2: technology
3. Day 3: entrepreneurs
4. Day 4: promotion
5. Day 5: training
6. Day 6: conclusions

The Akshaya project, launched in December 2002, has rolled out complete internet access in all of the villages of one of the more backward areas of India using a mix of wireless technologies, and successfully trained one member in each of the region’s 750,000 households to use the computer. The team is now creating an innovative business model to ensure sustainability. Even though it is still only starting, it is widely considered a success story of using technology for rural development.

Over the following week, each day I will write about a different aspect of the project.
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Finally! Jay’s writeup and video of BloggerCon3 (in little pieces).

From the comments of this talk: identity is constructed differently in different cultures, for example, in many Asian cultures the “group” part of identity is more important, more recognized. So what effect does that have on blogs, who are an expression of identity? I wrote something about this on liga1.com a while ago but I let the site die. Dumb Peter, dumb!

Reference: Ethan Zuckerman is interested especially in African blogs.

Anyways, listen to the mp3 with comments. It has some great ideas, and isn’t included in the video.

Information architecture is a fascinating field, but for some reason, it lacks research, and now it seems to lack innovation.

Now I’m not sure why. IA’s are pretty open to input from other fields, at least, they used to be. But it seems that lately IA’s are starting to miss out on interesting experiments around categorization. At the same time, IA’s aren’t coming up with any new ideas. Name one. Faceted classification, sure. A useful idea, that has been out for a few years now, was presented to the IA world by a semi-outsider (Peter Merholz), and is pretty old. And IA’s were catching up with that one, not innovating. Experiments with faceted classification didn’t come from IA’s, and faceted classifications were already commercially implemented when IA’s started catching up. Was that the best we could do?

The most recent “new” IA idea was folk classification, or folksonomy. But IA’s are just observing what’s going on, what sites like Delicious are experimenting with, they are not innovating. Not adding much value, imho. Sorry. We’re not even doing the basic research: a lot has been written around folk classification in the social sciences, but has any IA taken the time to look at that experience and write about it, try to incorporate it into IA practice and knowledge. Don’t think so.

It get worse. IA lives in the professional realm, it is practiced by in-house IA’s and consultants, but is almost non-existant in the academic realm. Books are being written, and some new ideas are being formed, but there is a lack of deep IA research.

So in short: we, as IA’s, are not coming up with the new ideas. We seem to have stopped taking ideas from other fields and adapting them. We’re just observing experimentation with classification on the web, not participating. Are we becoming irrelevant?

In the past, IA has been clever to build on knowledge generated in other fields: information science, HCI, you name it we took it. In this post I am going to try to give some ideas for an IA specific research agenda.

Without research that lets us build our body of knowledge and answer the increasingly complex questions that are asked of us, IA as a practice might wither and fade away. I think that’s conceivable.

First, Peter Morville wrote a good overview of research related or relevant to IA.

So here are some questions, to get us thinking. Please improve on this. This is not an article, it’s a braindump blog entry.

Cognitive science.
Cognitive science looks at how we think. The field has build a strong body of work around how people classify or categorize the world.

For example, consider basic level categories. A fascinating concept. Surely, there is relevance to the IA world there. Who will investigate that?

“Compound categories”: why are top level categories like “Home & Garden” so popular? And what exactly makes them work? What are the trade-offs? (I made that term up by the way.)

And there is much, much more. The structure of cognitive categories, for example. How does that relate to our categorization effort on the web?

Who will do a linguistic analysis of search terms? There is surprisingly little work being done on what people actually search for. (This BBC analysis is a good one, but we should see dozens like this, not just one, with source data so plentily available.)

Reading:
George Lakoff at Amazon

Business theory.
There are some fields of business theory that are directly relevant to an IA’s work. Business processes are one. Tony (?) from CMSWatch asked last year at the IA summit when IA’s would start working with business processes and develop a model that incorporates them into the IA body of knowledge (surely business processes should somehow help structure a website). When indeed? I know some work is being done in certain firms, but it’s not being shared.

Recently IA discovered the KANO model.

I’m sure there’s more I’m not aware of.

Social Science & Anthropology.
Anthropologists have long been interested in how we classify the world, and have developed a large body of work. IA’s have mostly ignored this. So which parts of this body of knowledge can be useful for us? Anyone?

How is information sharing social, for example? Where does trust fit? Identity?

Reading:
“Sorting Things Out - classification and its consequences.”

And more.
There is a sorry-for-shouting-HUGE amount of experimenting being done with classification, social classification and so on. Most outside of the IA disourse. Let’s get with the program. Maybe we should let go of this idea that we know a lot, that we have a lot of value to bring, and start admitting we stand nowhere yet, and we need to experiment, be open to new ideas, and embrace the web. I’ll shut up now.

Oh, wait. Finally, we should listen to outsiders. Don’t dismiss them because we know stuff they don’t.

Please add to the comments what you think someone should research. And if I have missed the point, let me know as well!

[Follow up from the mailing lists]

Joho the Blog: Library of Congress mp3s: interesting thinking on categorization is going pretty much on OUTSIDE of IA circles. A lot of experimenting is going on and IA’s are closer to it than the library people (where this talk was), but still looking on, not inventing. So: good talk. Read Joho’s blog, a lot of good stuff on categorization. And don’t dismiss him out of hand because he doesn’t know the geeky information science stuff we do. He’s an outsider, but we should listen to this. I plan to write a little bit more about the state of research and invention in IA later.

I went to the Belgium IA cocktail hour last Thursday in the cafe Monk in Brussels. Fun was had by all, and many beers. And of course (as always) Paul Otlet was discussed.

Paul Otlet is Belgium’s claim to fame in the information management world: amongst many other feats on which Geert plans to report in depth in an upcoming Paul Otlet blog, he invented the index card. Here’s proof in the form of pictures Geert Allegaert (Photoblog) took from a documentary ;)

Pictures of the event, by Geert as well:

I also visited the guys from iCogs, an upcoming Belgium content management system. I didn’t have my own camera with me or I would have taken some pictures of their workplace, which is in a beautiful old house in Brussels. Namahn, where I gave a talk on Tuesday, is also in a beautiful, art deco location in Brussels. No pictures there either. Damn. The talk was very well organized, with fantastic food afterwards.

There is a distinct Belgium-like quality to the IA scene in Belgium, and I’m trying to put my finger on it. Beer has something to do with it.

ongoing � Warm Antwerp Glow: my home town on the blogger map!

Joi Ito’s Web: Video of French soldiers shooting civilians: “There is an interesting discussion going on on MetaFilter about a very graphic video of what appears to be French soldiers shooting at civilians in Cote d’Ivoire. The discussion starts with understandable outrage, but some people begin to question the authenticity of the video and question whether it might be propaganda from the Gbagbo government. There is more and more political video on the Internet and it clearly is more emotional than text. Well respected groups such as Witness have been using video to expose human rights issues for awhile now. It will be interesting to see if/when/how not so respectable groups begin using video on the Internet for political issues or to spin the truth.”

A discussion on the SIGIA-L mailing list introduced me to the KANO model. It is something business analysts use to prioritize features, among other things. It’s a way to make decisions about requirements. Interesting to UX folks, KANO analysis has a big focus on user satisfaction and even user delight.

A good writeup of the basic approach

KANO analysis in IT: “I was working for a startup company where they provided free lunch ordered in for all the employees every day (remember Dot com times?). Yet employees just grumbled at the sight of food every afternoon. Counter-Intuitive? Not so.”

A presentation on KANO for UPA people by Anthony.

iSixSigma writeup

Center for Quality Management’s special issue on Kano Methods

I haven’t seen much in there that’s way new to us, but if our colleagues use it it’s good to be at least aware of the method.

Catalogablog: “A new version - 0.2(beta)- of Dublin Core Services/Describethis has been published. This new version, as main feature, brings us an automatic generator of keywords: DCS incorporates now a dictionary of 5300 words in 11 different languages, included Catalan, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Italian, among others, that permits to recognize and generate keywords automatically.”

The service is nice, and I especially like its multilingual features. You enter the URL of a resource and it returns Dublin-Core friendly specific information about the resource, ex.: submitting dates, keywords, creators, extension and more. It pulls out the RSS feed of a website if it can find one as a reference, for example.

EffectiveBrand - Create your branded toolbar: let users of your site download your own branded toolbar.

cubicgarden.com: the BBC is changing it’s historical fear of letting out plans of projects to embrace the web and create BBC backstage, something like Google Labs, hopefully mixed with webservice access to much of their data.

Dave: “Smoking is an aid to creativity. I don’t do the intense multi-day programming jags anymore, I can’t without the cigarettes. The reason why, I think, is that the drug helps you tune out distractions. The smoke keeps interruptions away. Work that requires intense concentration is aided by things that push away distractions. But at our age, Zeldman and I are roughly the same age, after thirty years of smoking, to keep doing it would be suicide, and not far-in-the-future suicide, like it is for people in their twenties and thirties, but suicide in the near future. A few people get to smoke into old age, but it seems that most don’t.”

I agree that smoking can help concentration. I quit many years ago, and I’m pretty happy I did. Who needs concentration anyway? (By the way, I believe one of the the best ways to train your concentration skills is mediation.)

Public dial on GigaDial.net: “GigaDial.net is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters.”

A browser based XUL File Manager (use Firefox to access it) I couldn’t access it (the launch window showed but that was it), maybe I need to upgrade to the latest Firefox?

Interesting idea

A friend asked me yesterday: why haven’t journalists in the US asked the question: “Is the war on terror going to turn out like the war on drugs”?

Long Copy vs. Short Copy (Signal vs. Noise): “MarketingExperiments.com recently set out to see what impact the length of sales copy has on a website%u2019s conversion rate. The results: long copy clearly outperformed short copy in all three of their tests.

This is something we’ve wrestled with at BasecampHQ.com. We like to be as descriptive and informative as possible. But there’s a downside to this approach. Many visitors are intimidated by large blocks of text and just tune out the site and the tool when they see long copy. We’ve heard from some visitors that a large amount of copy can make the tool itself seem complex (i.e. if it takes this much text to explain it, can it really be simple?).”

This is the kind of thing you should be able to test side by side - deliver half of your audience a long version, half a short one and see which one performs better.

Apologies for the plug, but I started a newsletter for my own professional activities - so if you want to know when I do workshops, launch new projects or put presentations online and such, feel free to sign up. No spam - promise!

I know AdaptivePath and other similar companies do one, so I figured: why not? If there is nothing interesting happening I just won’t send out anything that month.

I may be a sucker, but this is one of the better product demos I’ve seen online.

Anil Dash: i’m the guy who loves clippy

Come Together, Right Now: The Internet’s Unlit Fuse | Personal Democracy Forum: “Basically, the collective action problem arises when a great number of people are willing to do something, but only if they think it will be worthwhile because enough other people will also do it. Imagine you look out your window to see two large men beating up a poor child on your street. If you go out alone, you%u2019re afraid you too will be beat up. But if you knew that all your neighbors were also watching, and would also be willing to take on the men, you’d get out in the street in an instant, knowing that collectively you can overpower them.”

I click on a link on this page and Firefox (not the latest version) tells me “rtsp is not a registered protocol”. Easy fixes? Doesn’t work in IE either.

vogbrowser 0.1: still an experiment: it pulls in videos through the RSS feeds of the videobloggers, and then lets you browse them. Videoblogging becomes more tv and less clicking around to see all of them. I have hopes for this - I think it will become an important element of the videoblogging ecology. Podcasting (pulling in audio files through enclosures) became the tipping point for audioblogging. RSS readers were not a tipping point but an important element of the textblogging thing. Maybe vbrowsers will turn out to be an important element of the videoblogging revolution. (Darn! I said the revolution word. Sorry.)