Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Amazon.com: Books: Ambient Findability: Peter’s book is out, go get it while it’s hot.

I noticed that Amazon changed the shape of their book page: they finally got rid of those side navs that nobody cares about. Page shape is one of my “things”, the default for many designers is to do a top and sidebar, and then use that on every single page of the website, whether it makes sense or not.

But different types of pages need different overall shapes, going as far as even getting rid of the global nav if needed. It makes the site much more focused and usable. Here’s 1 example: the instant archive page at mefeedia. It chucks the whole global nav altogether, and that’s not always a bad thing. I still have to test that particular one, by the way :)

BBC NEWS | Health | Words ‘can change what we smell’: “labelling an unpleasant smell with a more appealing name can improve its aroma.”

Who said labels didn’t matter? Eh? Who was that? Stand up you crazy fool!

If I ws in London I’d be heading here: World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures

peterme.com: Final Thoughts - AIGA Boston: “Form-makers, while valuable, are being passed by those who are attempting to use design to serve more strategic ends. And these form-makers, it is clear, have no idea.”

I hope IA’s can escape becoming commoditized. The good thing is that what we do (play with categories is as good a definition as any) is inherently strategic, because categories are so powerful. If only IA’s would realize the power they hold.

I also do feel that usability people have let themselves fall into the same trap. I know this isn’t fair to a lot of people who are doing good work, but as a profession they don’t seem to have advanced much beyond just fixing existing problems.

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.

The new Yahoo mail interface looks (and supposedly feels) exactly like my desktop mail app.

Technorati Weblog: Welcome to the Blogosphere, Google!: “I welcome the competition. We’ve got some tricks up our sleeves too.”

You have to admire a company that is brave enough to take on Google in search, of all things.

I wonder though, Google’s big advantage is the server infrastructure they’ve built up. They know scaling better than almost anyone on the planet.

There is no doubt in my mind that Technorati’s search is superior to Google, but they are having serious scaling problems. Google doesn’t have to be better, in fact they can be worse than Technorati and still win, if they’re just Good Enough and Fast. Technorati is better than good enough, but not fast. Which is a problem.

This reminds of of Bloglines. The weird thing with Bloglines is that they have lots of crazy features (have your own blog, a great API, …) but I bet that 90% of their users use them only for one thing: reading blogs. They got that right.

I have the same problem speccing the next release of Mefeedia. Coming up with lots and lots of cool features is easy. Way easy. But finding the real value in a video aggregator and nailing that is much harder. Perhaps sites have to just develop stuff and some of it will stick? Flickr started as something quite different from what it is now, the photosharing sticked so they went with that.

A lot of my friends are information architects and designers with great ideas, about strategy, usability, business, you name it. Itching to make some cool shit after years of consulting. But when I talk to them, they often lack the ability to efficiently bootstrap stuff, because they’re used to working with teams of coders who implement for them. They are reluctant to build stuff themselves. (With “they” I mean “me”.)

A startup with a bright idea doesn’t have teams of coders though. You gotta build stuff yourself. At least the first prototype. Bootstrap it.

Which is why I’ve decided to learn how to program. Again. I’ve been using the same skills I had 5 years ago to build my cool shit, and it’s not enough anymore. That, and the idea that programming is as important a skill in the ability to roll out cool stuff as strategy/usability/… are.

So I’m trying to convince my designer/IA friends. Learn how to program. It’s scary, if you’re 30-something. But sit down for a month and just do it.

Intel’s anthropological army - ZDNet UK Insight: “And we looked at cultural groupings in London, Tokyo and Los Angeles, because we wanted to know whether there were greater similarities between people in those environments than differences. So we looked at 22 to 34 year old women, and there were great similarities. But then we checked women in Brazil, and there was a huge difference. Technology is a matter of life and death in big cities in Brazil, literally. Mobile phones were given to children, so they could be kept track of. But you don’t take out a laptop in public, because you risked bodily harm from someone willing to steal it. Yet home computers were fantastic, because they kept the kids inside and engaged instead of being at risk outside.”

God, this stuff always fascinates. My girlfriend is doing ethnographic research (the real stuff) in NYC these days - amazing.

start.com is a good idea (letting me create my own startpage was always a good idea), executed better than, say, my yahoo and such. It’s got lots of nifty ajaxy interaction, and some nice ideas. But still.. not quite there yet. It just doesn’t let me create the page I really want easily. If someone can crack this problem (I’m not sure it can be done), I’m sure they’d be very popular. Let me create my own homepage ridicilously easy. We’ll see where they go with this. It’s good to see innovation coming out of MSN again.

Businessweek is doing a poll on the best sites of the web, and in the video category you can vote for Mefeedia.

Right. I need you now.

Vote here for whatever your heart tells you to. (Stare at this for a while first: Mefeedia)

I’d really appreciate a vote. It’s a big deal. Thanks so much!

The mefeedia usability center is a hit! It took like an hour to program together (a table and some code), and I’ve started collecting a great list of users willing to be usability testees. Many companies find usability testees by paying a marketing company 100$ a head, and the quality of people you get is often low. OK, I shouldn’t say that. But if you want your own users to be testees, why not simply ask them? I can’t believe everyone (Typepad? 37sigs?) isn’t doing this. I’ll start testing soon, and report back on that too.

I’m still taking more people in the program, so sign up now.

Todd asks what happened to topicmaps. They’re just overkill for any project I (and probably you) have ever worked on.

Most people find usability testing to be a lot of fun (when else in your life do you get someone’s total attention to whatever you have to say?) I’m starting a bunch of low budget usability tests for Mefeedia - sign up as a Mefeedia usability tester! You can be anywhere in the world for this.

The Real Problem. Developers love to talk about complex problems and elegant solutions, but the easy stuff is too boring. One click subscriptions are one example.

37 signals have a post today showing a video explaining features of some product. Ruby on Rails has been using video to show off the product pretty well. Since I’m working on Mefeedia, a website for videobloggers, I’ve given a lot of thought to the use of video.

There are various ways in which to use video. You can make videos showing off features. Great. You can be lucky enough to have users making videos to show off features (like here for Mefeedia). Even better - sometimes at least. And you can use video for more “soft” purposes, like to tell stories about your site.

For example, I made an Instant Archive feature for Mefeedia, where vloggers can put an archive of their videos with thumbnails on their site. I did it while talking to my users, and Michael shot a video when we came up with this. That’s the advantage of having videobloggers as users.

The video is brilliant, really showing the foundation story of this one feature, and the enthusiasm we felt. It comes straight from the heart. It is linked from the Instant Archive page.

Shelley: Snapshot in Semantic Time: “I also wish more folk would take the time to pull together the threads in a meaningful way like Peter Van Dijck did with the early semantic web discussions.”

We have a long way to go in enabling better conversations with our blogging tools. And better story telling. A blog post now is text and links. That’s good - especially the links. But there are many more structures that we should support, like the semantic web one I did. I had to do that manually. Or like what I was trying to support with XFML: mini structured directories that can link together. There is so much, and microformats are leading some of the way.

Of course, with video it becomes even more urgent. You can’t quote a part of a video right now, except in an experimental tool at Mefeedia. It’s hard to link to videos you like, because you don’t have a thumbnail available, or size information, and you really want to indicate size, type and such when you link. Except at Mefeedia, where I try to make that easier. It’s hard to link videos together in conversations. I’m working on that.

It’s all about mixing the ideas the social research people have about helping people to structure stories and conversations, with the ideas the web people have about web 2.0, you own your data, distribution and such. That mix will make some damn powerful stuff possible. I really hope we can break the wall of big binary video files, and make them more webby. We need that in order to have the kind of conversations blogging has enabled for text.

Openvision.tv are launching a new desktop video aggregator. It has an option in it to search videos, and you can select various sources to search - Yahoo, the internet archive, blogdigger and Mefeedia. If you search Mefeedia, you will get a lot of videoblogger results - as opposed to just the “funny videos” floating around on the internet.

I had an insight the other day when looking at AOL’s new video portal. They are aggregating television programs, movie trailers and news clips and such - which I guess makes sense for AOL to do. You’re a media company or not. And their search gets to the millions of “funny” videos floating around on the web. But look at what’s on their portal and it’s just sad. A whole bunch of boring video. Great job!

Go to Mefeedia instead, and you’ll find a tiny, tiny group of people starting to produce and syndicate original long tail video content. Real stuff. And this is the content that is going to change things, at least a bit. Message to AOL/bigmedia: it’s not about putting television on the web. That’s where they go (predictably) wrong.

But I digress - what’s cool about Opentv’s Mefeedia search isn’t just that it finds you videobloggers (which is why I call Mefeedia the “the best place to find videobloggers”), it’s that it’s based on just RSS. All I have right now on Mefeedia is RSS everywhere, no API, no nothing, and that’s enough for them to create a useful search. So I thought that’s kinda pretty fucking cool.

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?

Wired News: What’s This? A New Planet. IBut is it a “planet”? Let the classification wars begin!

relPamyment is like syndicating your tipjar.

RelPayment: how to get paid. An overview page we wrote for videobloggers on how to use relPayment.

I am not sure if this will take off, but at least now there is a possibility. If videobloggers want to use it, they will, and if aggregators start to support it, it will be another babystep towards videoblogging viability.

The important thing to note here is that watching video through an aggregator is, in terms of cost, fundamentally different from watching text. The text is already contained in the RSS feed, so it has already been downloaded. The video isn’t. It’s an enclosure link, so for every viewer that watches it, the videobloggers’ bandwidth gets hit. The same applies to podcasting.

RelPayment is an attempt to make this “stealing of bandwidth” a little bit fairer videobloggers.

Again, I’m not sure it’ll take off. I’m not sure videobloggers are all that concerned about money. But if there’s demand from the vloggers, it might.

Russell Beattie Notebook - What’s Wrong with All The “My RSS” Portals. Some good points: the standard “a-box-per-feed” won’t cut it.

The Long Tail: Filters 101: an interesting taxonomy of filters.

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.

Today I’m reviewing (and perhaps testing) a location aware mobile media app. Fun!

Yahoo’s new cross-lingual (not multi-lingual) video search is wicked cool, but they have this weird use of a checkbox. There are 2 radio buttons and one checkbox. If you click the checkbox, the two radio buttons grey out. The only explanation I can think of is that it’s a hack in the code - somehow it was easier to implement this than to just have the checkbox as a third radiobutton (which would be the correct way). Strange though, to see such a beta UI hack on Yahoo.

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.

LexisNexis is starting to license it’s taxonomies to enterprises.

tagbert.com - tag you’re it: another tag aggregator.

Library Journal - Googlizers vs. Resistors: “Googlization sends our users a dangerous message. It suggests that we no longer believe in the advantages provided by traditional techniques like field search, or in the power of controlled vocabularies. If it all works like Google, why would these powerful search tools be necessary?”

I think many librarians still miss the point: Googlization (ugh!) does NOT mean throwing out CV’s, field search and such. You can build all that in. Making it easy to use doesn’t mean having simplistic functionality! Making powerful functions easy to use is hard, and training your users isn’t the only answer. That’s what the librarians have always missed.

By the way, Google trains its users of adsense: I have a little (hardcopy) booklet from Google (free) that explains adsense functionality. I’ve developed similar booklets for portal clients to hand out to their users on launch. A lot of websites don’t consider hardcopy help systems to be worth it. Big mistake.

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?