More excellent blogs: McGee’s Musings.

Digital Dashboards, Dirty Dishes, Messy Desk, Workspaces and Web Logs: how we interact with information in the real world.

Column Two: How to teach IA

a klog apart: bad name, excellent blog.

a klog apart: “The library service I want: an Amazon alternative.”.

Guide to Search Tools: Why Searches Fail. Another nice overview article at searchtools.com

Classification Tools – SearchTools.com Listing. Interesting site.

Clever concept I hadn’t heard of: pre click confidence.

Sopranos Family Tree: a pretty cool visual representation of some metadata (via highcontext)

Questions Information Architects Ask (Part I) (Bloug)

[Aquarionics] Journal – Mindless Coding.: “Adding the namespace suddenly made RSS a scary thing because I, as a developer that has to try to understand this crap, now have a potentially infinite number of tags, all of which somebody, /somewhere/ will want me to support. It also means that RSS, far from doing one thing well (which it did), can now do an infinite number of things, many of them identical, at the whim of some tinpot developer. Or, because I don’t trust single people to come up with perfect standards alone, Badly.”

I very much agree with this sentiment. RSS development definitely got out of hand. Then again, it’s been a great, public try out of what to do and what not to do when writing specs or defining formats. Simplicity still rules. Or let me restate that: focus rules.

On a related note: I just dropped some more non-essential elements from the XFML spec. Release is, as they say, imminent.

Jonathon Delacour: “I noticed that Phil Ringnalda had added the (blue and white) RDF button to his weblog, presumably to differentiate his RDF feed from his RSS feed (which uses the traditional orange and white XML button). Once I’d created the ESF button for Nicholas Avenell, I made an RSS2 button. However, Dave Winer stated quite definitely that RSS feeds (including RSS 2.0) should use the XML button. Since he hasn’t, as far as I’m aware, objected to Phil’s RDF button, it seems clear that Dave’s concern is that any RSS feed uses the XML button. […] *all* RSS feeds are supposed to use the XML button and other XML-based feeds can have a separate button with the name of the format.”

Thanks Jonathon!

The Morning News – Roundtable: Writing on the Web. Somewhat older but intelligent talk on writing for the web, and that’s hard to find.

Paolo Valdemarin Weblog “The main reason I like it is that I’m not much a big topics fan. I mean, I think that having to organize everything I post is additional work and I didn’t think it was worth the effort. With LiveTopic it’s so easy that you get a topics-based organization of your work almost without efforts.”

Livetopics (for Radio) looks interesting.

Score Brownie Points: “Give us $47 once every two months. We mail something to you. You take it home to your woman. You take all the credit. What do we mail? All you really need to know is that it’s girly stuff you wouldn’t be caught dead buying.” Gotta be kidding…

I finally added a bit of a picture to the bookblog.

If anyone wants to design a nicer XFML Core compatible” icon, feel free. My Design Powers have Failed me Again!

And who tought geeks and pretty girls didn’t mix?

The Google Appliance has the ability to augment the search with a thesaurus to offer the user the option of adding “personal safety restraint devices” when they searched for “seatbelt”. This functionality works similarly to Google’s spelling corrections.

curiousLee: an IA weblog I hadn’t seen.

Game Studies 0102: Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata, God and Go. By Celia Pearce: “So the actual process of playing SimCity is really closer to gardening. In either case, your mental model of the simulation is constantly evolving.”

Checkershadow Illusion: an optical illustion I hadn’t seen (and I thought I’d seen them all).

Discussion on standards for distributed information architecture at ia/.

Social Design Notes. Ah!

DonnaM: When is card sorting useful. I like how Donna publishes her real-life IA experiences. I’ll try to do the same.

The book is finished. My editor went on her honeymoon – now it’s just waiting for the designers to do their crazy job.

The whole distributed information architecture meme seems to be taking off. Sharing categories! But also, and even more powerful, sharing indexing efforts!

Future XFML news will be posted on the XFML.org site.

Cloudmark has reduced my incoming spam from about 20-40 a day to almost 0. Zero spam! Easy setup, no funny rules to enter, it just works. Spam gets filtered automatically to a special spam folder, and it’s a lot more reliable than the spam filters Yahoo! or Hotmail use. Recommended, especially because you can still sign up for the beta for free.

I’m trying to find a good and free XML/DTD editor that can validate XML against a DTD?