Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

“G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide”: “Designers who work with networks must face these tensions and design to take advantage of the global while not destroying the local.”

A must read.

Asia, Far East, news and analysis Times Online, The Times, Sunday Times: “The Ministry of Public Security has drawn up new rules and babies’ names must in future be drawn from a database that excludes thousands of rare Chinese characters. Out go indecipherable names. With the introduction of electronic identity cards, the authorities will register only names that they decide to include on their database.”

In other words: a new controlled vocabulary of characters (imposed by technology standardization) means you can’t call your kid what you want anymore.

When you need to localize and categorize — CMS Watch

Official Google Blog: Get News in Portuguese: “We’ve just launched two different editions of Google News: one for Brazil and one for Portugal.”

I need a plan for Unicode support in Mefeedia. Amazingly, PHP is rather bad in this regard. I’m using PHP and Mysql. Here’s a page that clearly shows the need for this.

So I have a question: what is the basic approach?

- Make sure stuff is stored in UTF-8 in MySQL?
- Make sure HTML uses UTF-8?
- What about the PHP part of the equation?

Any pointers to common sense around this are very welcome. Any good libraries?

Wired News: We’re a Hit in Manila! Now What?: “Friendster, which today has millions of Filipino members, is one of a number of advertising-supported internet sites grappling with the dilemma of how to take advantage of unforeseen overseas popularity. Such sites are finding that business models that work in large, developed countries need serious readjustment in nations with small populations or low internet-penetration rates.”

ACNielsen News Release - 19 October 2005 - One-Tenth of the World’s Population Shopping Online

Things should be easy to find - an information architect could agree with that.

The recent problems surrounding Google maps sound, from a distance, silly. That crazy Indian president! What is he talking about?

But culture is a funny thing. At the IA retreat a few weeks ago I showed a screenshot of the levis website. Totally offensive to me (from Belgium), none of the attendees noticed a particular problem. The thing with culture is, what makes 1 person from 1 culture angry, won’t mean a thing to someone from another culture.

I wrote about the Maori a while ago. A really important concept in Maori culture is “tapuâ€?. It means that certain knowledge shouldn’t be shown to just anyone.

I guess I’m trying to say: this idea that information should be freely available is a cultural one. And it’s not always necessarily (this is painful to say) right.

Yahoo! Search blog: Es Tu, Français? Yahoo is expaning its (frankly) groundbreaking work in I18N search.

Joho the Blog: Yahoo vs. Google: Who’s the Chinese government’s very best buddy?: “But someone in Yahoo got a list of search terms the Chinese want blocked. They looked down the list and saw “Tiananmen Massacre,” “Dalai Lama,” “Falun Gong,” and maybe “democracy.” “Yup,” this person thought, “Our product can do that. No problemo.” Thus Yahoo wrote into its code the repressive values of the Chinese government.”

When values get embedded in infrastructure (as they often are), they become almost invisible and hard to catch.

Article about the state of IA in Germany. In one word: not so great.

I wonder about this. IA in the US is doing good because there is a lot of demand. Companies understand they need us. Do companies in Germany don’t want IA? Don’t need IA? Doesn’t it fit in the culture of how websites are developed?

Bloug: World’s Oldest Information Architect? (check the great picture!): “Mariano Amartino’s abuelita, 89 years old, has a message for the folks at O’Reilly (which I’ve taken the liberty to translate): “Where the heck is the Spanish version of the second edition of the Polar Bear? Enough waiting already! You should be very, very ashamed of yourselves.”

This is why we set up the translations group at the IA Institute. Here’s the Spanish page, with a whole bunch of articles about IA in Spanish. But not enough.

Two cultures of fauxonomies collide… (via David)

Discusses, basically, how tag usage evolves and how different people tag differently.

“At a really grand level, if you can imagine a one hundred year tag-cloud around a gay novel, then it might start with lots of people using the tag invert, with this gradually giving way to homosexual, then gay and potentially after that, queer.”

That’s all pretty interesting, but things get much more exciting when we starting thinkig about other languages and really different cultures.

I wrote about tag namespaces before: “tag “namespacesâ€? will develop, somewhat mirroring languages, but also other social groups like interest groups, specialist communities.”

In other words, different communities develop their own categories and language, and this will be reflected in their tag use. We might even be able to infer communities from commonalities in tag use.

See also “Tagclouds and cultural changes“, which talks about the spreading of the ‘Ajax’ concept.

Yahoo! Search blog: Sprechen Sie Deutsch?: Yahoo is getting some brilliant cross-lingual search out there. Cross lingual search is when you retrieve documents in various languages. There are different ways of doing it: translate the query, or translate the documents. I think they’re translating the queries. But they go the extra step and provide machine translations for the returned results.

Congo Girl - Thoughts about Kinshasa: “It is coming up on a year now that I have lived here, and in talking to a colleague a week or two ago, I realized that adjusting to this environment has been difficult for one reason that I had overlooked. I am trying to adjust to two new cultures. The first is, of course, Congolese culture. Very different from the US, the South, New Orleans — though I’ve found more links between NOLA and Kin than I ever would have though possible. The second is Belgian/European culture. As a previously colonized country, there are a lot of holdovers in style and approach and work ethic and education methods, as well as food and drink and entertainment. When I am inclined to escape from Congolese culture and retreat back into what I know, I find it isn’t really there. ”

The unexpected culture adjustments are often the hardest ones :)

Naked translations: “If you click on your country on the site, the UK for example, a screen appears saying “Our guess: you are in United Kingdom and speak Englishâ€?. Fair enough. However, there was a problem with the localisation for people in Belgium; the screen said “A notre avis: vous êtes en Belgique et vous parlez français.â€? Belgians really, really didn’t like that and thought it showed ignorance bordering on contempt for their culture, as they speak Dutch in the North, French in the South and German in a small region in the East.
[...]
Levi’s issued an apology explaining that their website was only translated into five major languages (French, English, Spanish, Italian and German) and that they thought French was the most accurate guess for Belgium. Interestingly enough, if you now click on “Belgiumâ€? on their website, the language that you’re offered is… English.”

Javier: “In my last post, I mentioned that the course on UCD at UCV might be the first in Latin America. I’m glad to discover that there’s a slightly older course on IA. Universidad de La Habana, in Cuba, offers a course on Information Architecture as part of their Library Science program. They’ve already been through three terms, kudos to them. “

For a long time, there was a lack of IA discussion/practice in Italy. Emanuele (an IA from Italy) let me know that the Italian IA list suddenly become much more popular (or at least got revived) this week, after posting a call for Italian IA’s on various lists.

The list has about 400 subscribers now, and was created in september 2003 by Laura and Beatrice with the help of Luca Rosati (who runs http://www.trovabile.org, the Italian findability.org). Some other famous italian ias on the list are Umberto Fieno and Fabrizio Ulisse. The main themes of discussion have been the role of ia in Italy, the definition, facets, cms, … The usual stuff. See also the Italian IA translations at the IA Institute.

Google maps switched up Belgium and Holland. Belgium is where Holland (Netherlands) should be, and the other way round.

Joho the Blog: Linnaeus’ paper: David visits the Linnaeus society: “She draws our attention to the two page spread devoted to the Animal Kingdom. On the extreme right is the category “Vermes” (worms) which Linnaeus used as a catchall. If it wasn’t an insect, he put it into the Worms, as close as Linnaeus came to having a “Misc.” category.”

Emanuele (one of the few information architects in Italy) finished an overview paper on folksonomies. I am encouraging him to write an overview of the Italian IA scene.

I follow the delicious tag for taxonomy, and it’s interesting to see how different people discover the same things at different times. Different communities too. For example, the library scientists discovered facets in the 1930s, then, recently, the academics discovered their usefulness for the web with the experiments around Flamenco. The IA community discovered Flamenco around 2003-ish (if memory serves me), and epinions and there was a lot of discussion, blog writing, creating of mailing lists and xml formats and such. Now, the tagging community (which overlaps somewhat with the IA community, but not totally, at all) is rediscovering facets and figuring out if they can use it in their practices in some way.

It’d be interesting to have some kind of analysis of WHO is tagging in delicious, cluster that and through that analyse which community are discussing which concepts, and how concepts move between communities.

Sometimes I write up these ideas without all the links a good blogger would add. Oh well.

El Tiempo (a highly respected newspaper from Colombia) has an interesting new top-level category (it looks like it’s new from 2 days ago) called “Tierras y ganados” (”lands and cattle”). Colombia is partly an agricultural society in which the rich own most of the land.

El Diario NY (a NYC Spanish newspaper) has an interesting category in between “local”, “national” and “international” news. It is aimed at the immigrant population, and added a category called “nuestros paises” (”our countries”).

The New York Times, like most newspapers, has most of the generic categories, a few local ones (”Washington”, “New York/Region”) and the obligatory outlier (”Obituaries“). The NY Times obituaries page is a big thing in the social life of NYC - it indicates who is important. Comments on the relevance of this category are very welcome!

So it seems like newspaper categories follow a predictable pattern: a bunch of basic categories (”Business”, “Technology”, …), a few local geographical categories (”Bogota”, “New York/Region”, …), and a very specific outlier category for each newspaper, which is closely tied to the cultural makeup of the local audience. In Colombia it’s “Land and Cattle”. In NYC (rich white people) it’s “Obituaries” or (Latin immigrants) “Nuestros paises”.

I had only looked at these 3 websites when this pattern emerged. I expect it to hold for others, but no time right now to check :) Comments?

IA Institute Sponsors the First German IA Conference: “The first conference for information architecture (IA) in Germany took place in Frankfurt on Saturday and Sunday June 28-29, 2005 with just under 50 participants from around the country.”

The IA retreat in Germany sounds like it was a success.

A Visible City: How do anthropologists blink?: “Pat and others at ID have a project called Design for the Base of the Pyramid. Most of the research has been conducted remotely in India. The ID folks have set up templates and sent them to various researchers in India (social workers, architects, and MBAs, all new to observational research) with instructions to gather information in the slums of Mumbai.”

Can you distribute research? I heard that at least some user research for US companies is done by Indian companies. Outsourcing UX?

A Welsh View: British Isles Venn Diagram: the British empire finally explained. I was in Scotland not long ago, and in the airport I had to follow signs to either “UK” or “Ireland”. So I had to figure out Scotland is a part of the UK. Categories.

Korean schools learn a little cellphone etiquette - Engadget - www.engadget.com: “The Seoul Office of Education is distributing leaflets on cellphone etiquette to elementary, junior high, and high schools.”

LoicLeMeur Wiki - The european blogosphere

Fancy math takes on je ne sais quoi | csmonitor.com: will Google provide *reasonable* automated translation?

An attempt at an international logo for RSS feeds (via Thomas) I’m not crazy about it, but it might grow on me.

In the spirit of “look for the right question, not the right answer”, what are the big questions around global IA? Here are a few to get started.

• Which locales should we use?
• What content/functionality should we translate?
• What should be the balance between local control over content, presentation and structure, and central control?
• How can we find out if just translating a site into language X will be acceptable?
• What aspects of the IA should be different for local sites?
• Can we just translate a taxonomy?
• When should a taxonomy not just be translated, but adjusted to local circumstances?
• What are useful concepts to understand cultural differences between locales that matter for IA?
• Do different cultures have different information needs?
• Is IT the great cultural equalizer?
• Does work culture override local (national) culture in regards to information use?
• Do different cultures have different information preferences?
• How is information usage evolving worldwide? Are poorer countries “behind”, and going through evolution in internet/information use that’s simply a few years behind of richer countries?
• Are Hofstede’s dimensions useful for global IA?
• What do we know about multilingual information needs and preferences? Do people prefer access to the original, for example? In what cases?
• Culture is a subtle thing, often invisible. What are some good ways to research cultural differences related to IA?
• Apart from differences in information needs and preferences, what other cultural aspects might influence IA?
• Do we know enough about IA tout court to start worrying about global IA? In what areas don’t we?
• How does search behaviour differ between cultures, if at all?
• What are the big questions, and what are the small questions?
• Apart from their nationality, what other aspects determine someone’s culture in regards to global IA?
• What are cost-effective ways to do research, and what research should be done?
• What kind of local involvement in your IA research should you get?

And so on. Lou has more.

Joi Ito’s Web: Technorati.jp beta launched

Language Log: Pass the hat.: Google searches with accents. Mmm.

SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching: May 2005 Archives: “In a March 29 2005 paper, Ira Machefsky and John Fernandez of search engine Accoona, clue us in to some key differences between searchers in China and the US. The authors compared search terms used in the US and Chinese versions of Accoona. Whereas US searchers focus on news, gossip, and entertainment, Chinese searches show a strong focus on business information, particularly manufacturing.”

I’ve been interested in finding out differences in search habits in different cultures. Any other pointers?

Anthropology at work: “Brenda runs through the mundane minutiae of her daily life: how her three sons like her to iron their T-shirts and tracksuits, but hate it when she gets them mixed up - so she has created a labelling system to tell the identical, perfectly pressed T-shirts apart.”

The Dewey Decimal people are trying to figure out how to classify graphic novels (ie. comic books). Discussion here. The kinds of questions they’re trying to answer are:

- should graphic novels go in the 700s (arts) or the 800s (literature)? (Answer: like comic books, 700s)

- Should they be lumped together with comic books? (Answer: yes - “separating graphic novels would be difficult for classifiers to do consistently”)

- How do you distinguish between comics, graphic novels, …? Answer: we can’t. (”We have tentatively decided to treat everything from single-frame caricatures to three-frame newspaper comic strips to comic books to graphic novels all in the same way. Although this is a broad range of material, we have found no good places to break the continuum so as to separate the material usefully into different categories.”)

- How do we subdivide? Answer: by country of writer/artist. This makes sense, because in the world of comics, styles kind of follow geographical boundaries (the Belgian/French school, the US school, the Japanese school). How long this will last I’m not sure about. Meanwhile, the Dewey editors are considering subarranging by country of original publication, rather than country of artist or writer. The rationale is that artists and writers of different nationalities may collaborate on the same work, and a single artist or writer may contribute to works originally published in different countries, but the artists and writers will aim for the style of the country in which the work is to be published. Mmm…

Meanwhile, on the international front, Discussions are underway on a new Arabic translation of DDC 22. Right now, they are considering an additional optional arrangement in the famously biased 200 Religion schedule. This proposal will be discussed at the ALA Annual Conference in June 2005, and at the IFLA Conference in August 2005.

Broadband Wi-Fi Spreads in Latin America

local6.com - News - Ohio Wal-Mart Caters To Amish: “The store has an expanded parking lot that includes 37 hitching posts for horse-drawn carriages.

Also, the store is stocked with blocks of ice instead of crushed ice and fabrics for clothes to be made at home.”

An Argentinian reference to my IA talk in Madrid.

The French worry about Google writing the planet’s history. Yes, search is political.