Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Boxes and Arrows. Great articles, but I really dislike their new design. Star ratings everywhere? Apart from the fact that they are fairly meaningless (so 3 people rated this article 4 stars on average. What the hell does that mean? Nothing at all is the correct answer.), they really throw the visual design of the page out of balance. And then the cropping of text. Why is the sidebar full of text like “Wireframes f…” or “How to: ment…”? Come on!

Enough bitching - I’m lazy too. But these are all things IA’s would care about, so I’m surprised B&A would get them so wrong.

I *do* really like the fact that they don’t only indicate who wrote an article, but also who edited it. That’s good.

A social analysis of tagging: “After being on many mailing lists for many years, let me say, conversation is often overrated. Often, I like to be in the company of others, without needing to follow threads and participate. It is the same reason that I like working in a cafe - enjoying the presence of others without the burden of active interaction. Similarly, tags provide a companionable social hum that I enjoy.”

In the continuing rise of information architects coming up with online tools and services, Rashmi and Uzanto present MindCanvas. Rashmi is one of the most thorough researchers I know, so if she stands behind these methods I’d believe her. Fascinating.

I just registered for this years’ Information Architecture Summit - it looks like it’s gonna rock. A LOT of people will talk about folksonomies (including me), so let’s see if the IA profession has come up with an answer to bottom-up classification after having taken some time to think about the whole thing. IA’s tend to be balanced, careful people. Some of us at least. Not me. Anyway, last year there was a lot of confusion about folksonomies, perhaps this year we’ll have actually something interesting to say. Something like: “Sure, they’re cool, but here are a few ideas of taking them to the next level.” Perhaps.

Conference schedule - ASIS&T 2006 Information Architecture Summit.

Oh man! Day 3 looks fantastic. If only I could clone myself in 3 people and thus attend all 3 tracks. Damn!

Revlogging is blogging about other videobloggers.

I’ve always felt that videobloggers don’t link enough to each other’s blogs and videos. It’s normal: with text blogs, you have a bookmarklet that makes it 1-step to quote someone and post your thoughts to your blog. For videoblogs, we don’t have a mechanism like that.

My first attempt to make revlogging easier was the QuoteThis tool in Mefeedia. It would let you create a SMIL movie that contains a quote of another movie, and post that to your blog by copying and pasting the HTML to your blog. I still think it’s a good idea, but the tool had 2 problems: the SMIL movies would often play very slowly (a limit of the technology), and there was no 1-click sending to your blog.

So my second attempt at encouraging revlogging is the new BlogThis tool in Mefeedia. This time it posts directly to your blog, and you can even drag and drop thumbnails of the video in your post (it’s a wysiwyg editor). I think this time it works. It becomes very easy to browse through Mefeedia, and the nice thing about Mefeedia is that it has pretty much complete archives of all videobloggers, and pretty good tags. You can BlogThis from anywhere on Mefeedia. The experience is a memory trip: your browse through tags and feeds you know, re-dsicover old videos, and blog them to your site, like I’ve been doing on this site for the past days. The whole thing just works.

The BlogThis still needs improvements, but the basic experience I think is solid. Browse around. Blog movies you find. What revlogging does is creating a web of links between videoblogs and videos, making videoblogs much easier to discover. Videoblogging needs revlogs.

What are users searching for on your site?

My personal favourite new feature in Mefeedia is a tiny one that I decided to program in in a few hours. I’d been thinking about it for months. I call it WikiTags.

You can now write a wiki-like description for each tag. See screencasts for an example.

The thing I realized is that many tags are not really descriptive words, and could use a explanation. It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it goes. If you click the edit link you can find an RSS feed of all edits, which might be interesting.

This is cute, I am trying out Yahoo’s adsense clone (in beta), and I get an ad for… Google adsense! The text reads:

“Free Google Search Script
Apply to Google AdSense - get free Google site search script and extra revenue. Learn more.
www.google.com”

What is Lightnet
?

I’m getting sick of the “Ooops! The system was unable to perform the operation. Try again in a few minutes.” error messages at Gmail.

Don’t be cute, guys. There’s too much cuteness in these web apps these days. A useful message would be: “Couldn’t send this email right now. Try again in a few seconds.” The “system”? What is this, Big brother? (perhaps..)

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

The problem I have with Yahoo! 360° is that.. somehow, it seems to lack some kind of focus. I go there now and then, and as an IA, I can see the underlying structure, beautifully structured, it’s like a work of art almost. But I look at the first page I land on, and I see.. nothing. Some people I’ve added.. but nothing to grab onto. Nothing of substance. Then I click on some things, and I just see more empty pages. Sure, there are blogs, My Page, you name it, but it all feels like a bit of a wasteland. It’s just not satisfying, and I don’t find myself returning there often. Whenever I go it’s just professional curiosity.

XML Developer Center: Frequently Asked Questions for Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE). M$’s new RSS synchronisation system looks kind of hot. CC licensed and everything. I can think of a few revolutionary applications already.. synchronizing stuff without central service in between, in a simple and open way. That just rocks.

Sifry’s Alerts: Technorati Performance Improvement Update: look at the bottom of that post: “Technorati Tags: blogosphere, blogs, blogsearch, competition, feedback, givingthanks, google, gratitude, scaling, search, search engine, statistics, stats, technorati, wow, yahoo”

Those are not tags David uses for himself to find his own post back. Those are tags to make sure this post shows up high in Technorati tags. And they feel like the old keyword stuffing to me. Does the way Technorati handles tags encourage tag spam? I’ve always felt that with tags, it’s not about having a lot of them. It’s about having a small amount within a social circle that’s useful. When I see tag stuffing like in this post, sometimes I wonder: are tags going the way of the meta keyword html tag?

(Do I watch too many sex in the city reruns?)

TechCrunch » First Screen Shots of Riya: “Riya’s ability to know who’s in a photo is largely based on who you are and the people you are connected to.”

Fascinating.

Before I started this development effort on Mefeedia (we launched R1 last week, and we’ll be launching a lot more stuff soon), I made a list of priorities. What makes for the ability to roll out cool stuff fast?

• Short development cycles. I didn’t get this at first, but mike from Blip.tv told me they use 2-week development cycles. So I started doing that, and it works. Two week development cycles rock. They really focus the mind, set deadlines. Two weeks I can handle.
• Few specs. 32 signals is famous for saying specs are bad (no functional specs!), but I disagree. The truth is, it depends on your developers, and the relationship you have with them. I have 2 developers in India, and every 2 weeks I write a 2-4 page spec with the new functionality. I also give them page mockups, already integrated in the site (ie. non-working pages). That seems to work so far. The trick is: I don’t make a big spec in advance, I only spec things that we’re implementing in that 2 week cycle.
• Take the time to remove functionality. The hardest part with innovating is: you have to find the functionality that rocks. Especially in a new field like videoblogging, where none of this has been done before, it is very easy to develop functionality that doesn’t, well, rock. There are 100s of functions I could develop. It’s not a lack of cool ideas. But some work, others don’t. And you need to be lean. So what I do is rather ruthlessly remove functionality. It does take some work to remove a function, but in the future you’ve gained less testing, less maintenance, and more focus. So spend the time to remove stuff.

This is what’s working for me right now. It’s a struggle, keep trying to find new methods to increase the ability roll out cool stuff fast. When you’re competing in a hot space where everyone and their dog has lots of VC money to throw around, focus is the only answer. I’m lucky to have my focus: a directory for all independent videoblogs. That’s plenty to bite off for now :)

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?

I just had an insight. Metadata is determined by its usage, not its definition. That is, what people *do* with tags determines what they *are*, not how you define them. Same for lots of types of metadata.

I’ve started to experiment with tags and facets.

Here’s the live site: mefeedia video tags.

I’ll report back more later, for now it’s just a superbasic implementation, but it already helps break those tagclouds that tend to block the sun of findability (stretching the metaphor, I know) into little fluffy clouds.

Tagging tags to make synonyms / Atomiq. Gene Smith posts a way to use synonyms in tag systems.

Emanuele Quintarelli seems to single-handedly have stamped out the first Italian IA Summit out of the ground. I’ll be there.

IA Summit - Architettura dell’Informazione: “It’s here. It’s arrived! http://www.iasummit.t

The first ever Italian Information Architecture Summit it’s ready to accept new speakers, excellent presentations and a lot of listeners for an unforgetable learning and networking experience.

With the help of some wishful friends I’ve managed a meeting to collate the italian IA community.

The conference will be held here in Rome in the Marconi room inside the CNR (National Council for the Research) central site. An online registration is needed but the cost is 0 Euro!!

Spread the word!

The suggested topics are:

* IA Principles, Methodologies, Deliverables
* Classification Schemes, Taxonomies, Controlled Vocabularies, Thesauri, Findability, Knowledge Management
* IA, Business and Project Management
* IA Research and Studies (user research, personas, scenarios, etc..)
* IA and Education (courses, masters, workshops)
* Success Stories and Real Cases Explained (Deliverables, Best Practices, Case Studies)
* Interaction with related disciplines
”

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Oh my god. What a a mind-blowing concept.

the weblog of Lucas Gonze: “I am surprised to find that there isn’t much community will to work with Apple to fix the one-click spec, but there isn’t, and given that it doesn’t make sense for me to pursue it on my own. On top of that, it turns out that others’ attempts to get Apple to clean up their RSS have made much difference.

My guess is that the addition of podcasting to iTunes knocked the wind out of the first generation of podcasting software developers. They’re working like mad to carve out a niche, and feel like this is a minor issue at best.”

Lucas is a pioneer. He’s right, I think most developers feel they have better things to do than to get Apple to clean up their act. Me included.

We’re wrong though.

Apple is contaminating the ecology of RSS with its implementation, and that spells bad news for everyone.

They’re like a 1,000,000 pound oil tanker, leaking oil all the way, drifting slowly into the beautiful natural coral reef that is RSS.

Fixing 1-click subscriptions (not just Apple’s, but everyone’s) should be a priority of everyone in this space, but I personally can’t be bothered to fight this fight. Fighting for standards is tiring. Been there done that.

It worries me that Lucas can’t be bothered either though. He’s a crusader. He fights the good fight. When he gives up, it’s like the Greenpeace guys saying: “You know what, whatever. I got better things to do.”

A VC: The Looming Attention Crisis: “I have been using a lot of new web services lately. It’s part of my job to do that. New companies submit business plans for us to evaluate. The first thing we usually do is use their service. Most of what is getting built today requires a fair amount of user participation and thus a lot of attention.”

Boxes and Arrows: Ambient Findability: Talking with Peter Morville: “Unfortunately, Tim is suffering from apophenia. I think he caught it from Clay Shirky. I hope they both get well soon. People have been predicting the end of hierarchy since the beginning of hierarchy. But it’s not going away.”

RashmiSinhaSaturday10AM - TagCamp: Rashmi’s notes - good reading.

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.”

braintag: Mark Napier @ Eyebeam 10/27/2005: “In order to preserve his work beyond the “life” of his pieces, he’s archiving his source code to microfilm.”

That’s an idea.

braintag: MySpace vs. My Space: “Jay raised a fantastic question Saturday that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since:

Do the benefits of MySpace outweigh the benefits of My Space?

Rendered unclever: Which is better? To publish and participate in a closed social networking environment or to publish a blog/videoblog/podcast on your own server with your own blog installation?”

An insightful post, check it out.

Google Base Was Sort of Live. So Google is doing a simplified kind of database.

Why would they do that? I heard a talk with a Google engineer addressing the SQL crowd a while back, saying that a massively distributed, simplified database (no complex queries), using RSS as a data transport mechanism is the wave of the future.

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

socialight launches. It’s a mobile location aware app, I did some user testing for them earlier this year. Check it out. Basically, it lets you annotate your environment with photos, text and such, and then your friends can pick up those annotations later.

I am blogging some stuff from the iainstitute mailing list, whose archive is currently not public, which is kinda ironic for an organization that focuses on findability.

Anyways. Peter Morville (with a new book on findability) and Thomas Vanderwal (who coined the term folksonomy) sparring over folksonomies:

Thomas, refering to an article Peter wrote:

“I really like most of the article. I agree with the Wikipedia section, but have more scepticism as the *folksonomy* entry is nearly always wrong these days with the definition and examples it gives.

I do start running into problems with your article in the folksonomy area. I agree that early on the Technorati folks coopted the folksonomy term, but they have shied away from its use of late as they realize it is not what it is doing with their tagging effort.

What Technorati is doing is what Cory Doctorow labelled Metacrap.

Technorati tagging is a gory mess, it adds little value, it captures a variety of tagging (and decidedly non-tagging — commercial weblog tools have their categories counted as tags by Technorati) practices with various points of view and gumbles them up. It could even be worse than Metacrap. I have talked with them a fair amount about how to approach fixing it and time will show if they have an interest.

It seems you have had blinders on with the folksonomy tools since the IA Summit in Montreal Peter. As the serendipity tools like http://del.icio.us have been growing up into fairly decent findability tools as their corpus of materials grows. The creator of del.icio.us has left his day job and has been focussing on the tool as a full-time job and has five other developers now making the product better. They built their own search engine which has just gone live and is permitting their corpus, which is based on their contributors’ point of view, to be used more easily.

Having just returned from Europe from the Euro IA Summit, I had a lot of discussions with people there about folksonomy. Many wished I had presented on that subject or were writing a book on the subject (hmm…). There is a problem in Europe and with the rest of the world
that folksonomies help resolve, it is a cross-cultural tool. It easily leverages the language of those tagging from one culture and uses the object being tagged as a pivot to find other cultures vocabulary for similar objects. Folksonomies are quite a popular tool in non-parochial Amerian eyes. They help greatly with findability.

The key piece is that the folksonomy tools are broad folksonomies so people can pivot.

[...]

Peter answers:

I’m glad you enjoyed (most of) the authority article, and I appreciate your thoughtful response. I do think folksonomies as an experimental subject are very interesting, and I don’t dispute that tagging can improve findability and refindability. I’m just not sure that most people most of the time will find it worth the investment in the long-run. I forced myself to try del.icio.us before the IA summit panel so I’d have something useful to say about it. I haven’t used it since. In any case, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on some (but not all) of these issues.

Thomas:

You really should try del.icio.us again, particularly since most of what you stated is has not been the case for many months and you are a voice of authority. You should also try Yahoo’s My Web. Yes, they do take a little time, but the pay off is quite grand.

[...]

Peter:

When I get a chance, I will revisit del.icio.us and explore Yahoo’s My Web.
Then I will be much better prepared to criticize them :-) In the meantime, I
will maintain my skepticism, based purely on my problem with the following
proposition:

“Yes, they do take a little time, but the pay off is quite grand.”

Google Desktop takes no time and the refindability payoff is arguably much
better.

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.

Yes! That’s me!

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : Saddle Up to the MiniBar: “We also know there are “selection readers” out there. (I’m one of them.) Selection readers are just what they sound like: people who select text in a document as they read it. Maybe it’s a kind of nervous habit. For me, I think I do it to kind of help me keep my place in the document.”

Authority
“But then, authority was appropriated by the Technorati mob, where it swiftly lost definition in a tangled tag soup of popularity, power, trust, credibility, and relevance. These words were tossed around indiscriminately in a Bacchanalian festival of semantic anarchy.”

Don’t try to take on Peter Morville with metaphors, or he’ll bust your chops (kick your ass) like he did with David Weinberger’s Tree and Leave metaphor. Here’s another great one:

“Fortunately, before the tag clouds could totally eclipse the sun, a new entity emerged as a source of authority and illumination.”

Tag clouds that eclipse the sun! There’s a metaphor that really expresses how the library science crowd feels! And he goes on:

“Though folksonomy was born on an information architecture list, it was quickly hijacked by the Technorati.”

Go Peter! He’s single-handedly (the rest of the IA community isn’t doing much) taking back pride for information architects around the world.

Read the article. It goes on like this. Great stuff.

(Oh, and yeah, web 2.0 and all that!)

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

I’m at the IA retreat in NY, and it’s great. A few things I’ve learnt so far:

• Nobody in the US knows the British TV show “Allo Allo”.
• Making wireframes is too slow. But then again, wireframes are the perfect inperfect tool. A boundary object.
• Our tools are getting old: can’t easily spec Ajaxy apps, portals, …
• We need affordable methods (says Olga, and I believe her)
• When God said ‘Name these animals’, Adam (from the biblical story) got the first IA job (and God was the first client).
• “Tagging” can’t really be translated very well into Spanish.
• “Usability” in Swedish is a real word (not a neologism like in English): Anvandbarhet” (sorry, no crazy Swedish accents).

And a lot more, so many more blogposts to come. This year, everything is being recorded as well, and podcasts will be available.

Wired News: Tips From Top Taggers.

When taggers start to share best practices you know this whole folksonomy thing is starting to work. I was waiting for this!