Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

a 3mb file with supposedly ALL the worlds cities & towns with geolocation.

I’m old. I mostly understand Myspace, but that’s because I asked friends who are still young to explain it to me, and I still think I only get it 80 or 90%. My site doesn’t have a picture of me. Hey, if I was young, I’d have a Myspace page, not a site. I’ve always felt kids should have blogs, when they seem to prefer to do IM and hang out on the social networks.

This NYT article explains why I’m old. It compares the new generation, with their lack of privacy concerns, and the *old* generation’s reaction to them to what happened with rock&roll int he 50s.

I’m quite happy actually, a good old fashioned culture shock between young and old! The world has been way too boring for the last 40 years.

via Simon Willison: AOL supports OpenID. Incredible and clearly smart.

An interesting article that compares Yahoo Pipes with the invention of relational databases.

I love the “Everything Else” category, so I love the idea of “Everything is Miscelaneous”, which now has a blog, which is in “beta”.

A smart post by Jorge on his new culture blog: “One method I’m exploring for studying other cultures more objectively
is to focus on a single “alien� element that the other cultures (and my
own) share in common, and then try to understand the ways in which they
engage with this element. I call this alien element a “bogie�.

Was reading this thoughtful post on gift giving in Bloglines, and I thought, Hey, that could have been written by Danah Boyd! Turns out it was, I just didn’t know I was reading her feed.

A UK think tank has reports on where innovation will come from in the future, you can download the PDF’s on Asian innovators. Interesting stuff.

Michael started a Flickr group for design patterns. I love them, but some more text would be useful with each.

OK this is weird: I am getting 100 results on 1 page for this Google query. Are you getting the same?

Google has alway (afaik) had their 10 results, perhaps they are testing what listing more does? Or perhaps it’s a bug, because 100? That’s just too many results to comfortably use.

This web 2.0 video is being hyped a lot - don’t worry. Watch it. It’s truly amazing.

Using Amazon’s Mechanic Turk service, this job is to look through lots of satlite imagery to find the boat of a famous scientist who went missing at sea.

A good chance to see how Turk works for “workers”, and perhaps you’ll find him too.

Another note on editing interviews: with English interviews, I can increase the playback speed to 1.5, in Spanish interviews (my Spanish isn’t as good), I can’t, I need to play things at speed 1.0 to understand everything.

The 5 smallest countries in the world. Vatican City is the size of a golf course. I always felt one of the reasons the Catolics became so powerful is that they pulled off starting their own country (in 1929, in a deal with Mussolini). What other religion can say that?

Of course, their first pull to power was to act as a multinational and own property worldwide. That tends to make organizations long-lasting (I have this plan for a whole book on why organizations/ideas become long-lasting or not, and the catholic church would be a great case study). But then they pulled of the country. Pay yourself taxes. Make your own laws. Plus, all power in the country is centralized in a dictator (the pope has legislative, executive and judiciary power). It’s brilliant.

the weblog of Lucas Gonze: “I remember times in my life where I had a strictly limited music collection, and I kept things fresh by listening at finer and finer levels of detail. Those days should be over for most of us, though. It’s important for individuals to grow their collections past the “enough” marker, whether that’s 50,000 songs or even just 500, because at that point you stop listening in the old way.

The new way is to treat music more like a newspaper than a book, so that a continuous stream of fresh content is intrinsic to the media. If you hear a good hook somewhere, the next day you should find that hook remixed into another song. You should never again, post 20th century, post the era when music and manufactured goods were synonomous, think of music as something so static that 500 songs could encompass it.”

Interesting. I always have fun with calling stuff “the X of Y”. So this is the psychology of abundance? :)

The Dilbert Blog: Good News Day. Need some happy thoughts? Read this.

And on a related note: that page is an example of the Joy of Scrolling Long Pages. Don’t break that page up and destroy the magic. Don’t commit informationarchitecturitis. :) Sometimes, a really long page should just be a really long page.

swipr.com: “swipr is basically a plug-in toolset for Microsoft Visio. It allows you to create a set of HTML pages that integrate screenflows or sitemaps and wireframes. Anyone can navigate thorugh your sitemap and see the wireframes of the pages in the sitemap just by clicking through it. You can also create links on your wireframes, effectively turning your basic wireframe deliverable into a low-fi prototype.”

I am trying Rashmi’s new slideshare product. I really think she’s on to something here. Below are my slides from a talk I gave at the IA Summit 2006.

At vloggercon last year I talked about values and technology, and how we need to tell companies what the values are and how to stay in line, and how technology evolves together with values and how that makes it even more important.

Anyways :)

In the past few days we had a nice example. I stumbled accross an audio feed that was being republished by Odeo, which is not a good thing. Replublishing feeds without permission means stealing subscribers.

So Jay contacted Odeo, and after some emails back and forth clarifying the issue, they said they would fix the problem, no longer republish feeds and basically be good net citizens.

Yey!

So speaking up works. And this stuff is important - we’re still setting examples here.

For reference, below is my email to Odeo. After some confusion at first they got the point and promised that in the next rollout things will be fixed.

I don’t know, this is good stuff. I know how it is to develop, sometimes you don’t even realize that what you’re doing is wrong, or sometimes you’re focussed a little bit more on your company and a little bit less on the user, and what you’re doing doesn’t seem so evil. So it’s good when users speak up.

——
Hi Crystal,
thanks for the clarifications. Unfortunately, Odeo *does* republish
feeds, let me explain.

http://odeo.com/channel/4442/view is the channel page.

It has indeed a link to the original RSS feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/diaryofafauxjournalist

*However*, and this is what I am complaining about, that page *also*
republishes the rss feed here:
http://odeo.com/channel/rss/4442

The channel page also points to the republished feed in its
feed-discovery html, which means that anyone who uses Bloglines or
mostly any other reader on that page will subscribe to the Odeo feed,
*not* to the original feed.

At this point the original producer looses out on stats and subscribers.

What’s worse, in that republished feed, Odeo uses all links to their
own channel pages and audio pages. It’s ok for Odeo to have pages for
the channel and the audio, after all, you do provide links back. But
it’s not kosher to republish RSS feeds with those links in it.

As a good net citizen, Odeo should send traffic *to* the podcasters,
not take it away.

So yes, Odeo is republishing feeds without the author’s permission.
And through the feed-discovery mechanism, Odeo is spreading those
feeds wide and far.

You might be familiar with the podshow debacle and others. This is not
acceptable.

Please let me know if you have questions about this, and please let us
know what you plan to do about this.

Cheers,
Peter Van Dijck

How’s that for a title?

We went to bring in Maria’s Apple laptop for fixing the other day, and they had to reformat the harddrive, and they wanted *us* to physically press the “delete” button, to make sure we were agreeing to it :)

In this case, it wasn’t about legal responsability, as it is when they make you sign a paper, it was about emotional responsability, as few people would complain after pressing the button *themselves*.

Amazon is doing some incredible stuff lately.

Amazon Business Solutions - Fulfillment by Amazon - An Amazon Fulfillment Services Group:
“You send us your inventory - Label, pack and ship your items to Amazon.
We store your inventory - When we receive your items, we’ll store them until an order is placed.
We fulfill your order - When an order is placed, we’ll pick, pack and ship the item, and may combine it with other items in the same order.
We manage all post-order customer service - We’ll manage post-order customer service and handle returns as needed.”

Pixelsoup—jaded Pixel weblog: interesting approach to translation: let the crowd do it.

InfoSpaces » Blog Archive » Tagging Ecologies: “Mefeedia (from Peter Van Dijck) is chronologically the first example of structured tagging. Editors create mutually exclusive facets and users assign tags to facets. The strenght of editors and users together to make large tagclouds more browsable and tags meaning more understandable.”

Rosenfeld Media - Search Analytics for your Site: Needed: policies on retention and use of search logs: “The premise of our book is that search analytics, or search log analysis, yields tremendous benefits. We think just about everyone ought to analyze searches their customers perform. If we succeed in our mission, then a lot more organizations will start analyzing their search logs. But the recent AOL disclosure of log information vividly demonstrated the risk to privacy if you let your logs out into the wild. So Lou and I are mulling what an ideal search log retention and use policy would look like.”

google - Yahoo! Search Results: if you search for “google” on Yahoo, the first result is a Yahoo search box. :)

Ajaxio Demo: proof-of-concept to make something Visio-like in ajax: you can add boxes, drag them around, resize them and draw connector lines between them that adjust as you move them around. Pretty much all I use Visio for ;)

P.O.V. - The Tailenders . Behind the Lens. Filmmaker Interview | PBS: “The Tailenders” documents Global Recordings Network, which is an organization that has the goal of translating Bible stories into every language in the world. The organization use low-tech hand-wind players to distribute those recordings. And the film follows them going to the Solomon Islands, India and Mexico as they make translations and distribute them.”

Just saw this movie, very interesting.

MySQL AB :: Unicode and Other Funny Characters: “Sorting strings is a common action to take, but on top of not everyone using the same characters, not everyone even sorts the same characters the same way! A collation is a defined way of sorting strings, and it is often language-dependent. “

peterme.com: Fujita-san: “A couple days ago she came to me with a print out of this database record. It turns out the subject of that record, Santaro Fujita, lived in our house in 1942 (though we don’t know if he rented or owned.)

What will sadly not surprise you, if you connect a Japanese name and the year 1942, is that the record is evidence of his relocation that year to the Central Utah Relocation Center, but not before being housed at the race track in Tanforan (San Bruno, California). As in, horse stalls converted to barracks. (You can download a Powerpoint presentation featuring photos of Tanforan.)

Look again at that record. That such a reductive, factual presentation of data can stir up such sadness is a bit shocking. Fujita-san was no recent emigre. At the time of his relocation, he was nearly 60 years old, having lived in the United States over 40 years. The idea that our government considered him in any way a threat is dismaying to a remarkable degree.”

Do you work with search logs? Go leave a sample at Search Analytics for your Site

Flickr: The Everyday Information Architecture Pool

The Google Filesystem (pdf):

“First, component failures are the norm rather than the exception. The file system consists of hundreds or even thousands of storage machines

Second, files are huge by traditional standards. Multi-GB files are common. Each file typically contains many application objects such as web documents. When we are regularly working with fast growing data sets of many TBs comprising billions of objects, it is unwieldy to manage billions of approximately KB-sized files even when the file system could support it. As a result, design assumptions and parameters such as I/O operation and blocksizes have to be revisited.

Third, most files are mutated by appending new data rather than overwriting existing data. Random writes within
a file are practically non-existent.”

Fascinating stuff.

snarkout: tubular bells: “Technologies (and language is a technology as sure as any other) require ecosystems, and it’s not evident to me that Kelly’s “heritage-based minorities” are enough to keep them alive.”

I usually don’t care about these debates, but this is fun:

UIE Brain Sparks » Blog Archive » Do Links Need Underlines?: “But users are trained to click on underlined things. (Did you move your mouse over the underlined text in the previous sentence to see if it was a link? Don’t be concerned — so did I and I knew it wasn’t a link.)”

Apple - Support - Discussions - New Categories: “Most of the old categories and subcategories are now automatically mapped to corresponding ones within the new system. For example, if your podcast was listed under “Arts & Entertainment > Photography”, it will now appear under “Arts > Visual Arts.”

Robert Rodriguez: Hollywood hacker - WebJillion: “Robert Rodriguez. Dude made an award-winning movie for $7,000, bucked Hollywood in favor of his own one-man studio at his home in Austin, Texas and overall just really embodies the start-up, bootstrap, whatever-you-want-to-call-it work ethic that I try my best to stay true to.
[...]
“… you have to learn how to be technical, because if you can be creative and technical, you’ll be onstoppable … That’s why I started being my own film crew … When you’re self-sufficient, you’re scary. You don’t need anybody.�

Even though information architecture is what I’m really good at, I’m spending a lot of time becoming a much better coder these days. And the quote above shows why. If you are can build stuff, without having to hire people, you’re way ahead already. Years of possibilities!

Interesting use of small tagclouds for comparing: Topics | Dries Buytaert

WorldNetDaily: Arab airline hijacks kids of ‘South Park’

Whenever I blog like 5 posts of another blog in a row, it means I’ve discovered an interesting new one: “I met a guy last Saturday night and he asked for my phone number and, like, things were going well at the bar, so I give him my phone number and he puts me right into his phone and was like, hey, that’s ,that’s, that’s pretty quick and then he asked me if I wanted his number and I was like yeah do you want to put it down on a business card or something. I mean I’m a lady! Who thinks of jumping right into my phone. I got to take this as a process. If we call, if we have some sort of thing going.”

[The ad shows the Nokia 8801 and the line:] Nokia: It’s your life in there

“It’s like my cell phone is precious, it’s precious territory.”

I was having a conversation with a startup around social software the other day, and those conversations almost always end up being around issues of control. I was trying to explain them that mechanisms of control don’t necessarily need to be mechanisms of all-out restriction, but are often social mechanisms of setting examples, social control, deciding what content to surface and such.

So today I am happy to find this excellent blog: Architectures of Control in Design