Sigia-L vs. CHI-WEB.

El Mercurio.com: this may well be the first mention of an “information architect” in a mainstream Spanish newspaper ever: “Pocos entienden más de usabilidad que Javier Velasco, quien en 1999 se convirtió en el primer arquitecto de información chileno y hoy trabaja en MSM-Nurun. Dice que la usabilidad es el grado de facilidad de uso de un sitio web. “Cuando un sistema no es usable, el cliente se confunde, se frustra y nunca más vuelve al sitio. Cuando es usable, se siente cómodo, y abandona el lugar dispuesto a volver”.”

Factiva uses a standard set of facets: Company, Geography, Industry and Subject.

Companies that do weblogs:

Lotus: Ed Brill
Macromedia: John Dowdell, Mike Chambers, Matt Brown, Vernon Viehe, and Bob Tartar .
Groove: Ray Ozzie.
Microsoft: Joshua, Andrew Conrad, Benjamin Voigt, Chris Anderson, Chris Hollander, Dare Obasanjo, David Weller, Don Box, Douglas Purdy, Harry Pierson, Jimmy Grewal, Joe Beda, Joe Bork, John Lambert, Keith Ballinger, Matt Williams, Michael Winser, Peter Drayton, Rob Fahrni, Sascha Corti, Tantek Çelik, Tim Ewald, Wolfgang Manousek, Ziv Caspi
Radio Userland: Dave Winer
Moveabletype: Mena G. Trott
Jupiter Research: David Card, Michael Gartenberg, Joseph Laszlo, Robert Leathern, Lydia Loizides, David Schatsky, Gary Stein, Robert Sterling.

I’m sure I have only scratched the surface – please add in the comments and I’ll add them here.

Textpattern: web writing tools. The first selling point mentioned is ease of use. The second is categorization: “for a start: all the elements that make up a site published with Textpattern – code, layout, and content – are subject to a rich system of cross-categorization”

The categorizing capabilities offer a fixed set of facets: Category, Section and Linkcategory, in which you can create your own topics/categories. Weak points: no hierarchy, no self defined facets. Tip: if you are building linkcategories yourself, use Claire Harrison’s link classification as a starting point. Here’s another review, and another one.

Textpatterns has a host of clever features (other than the somewhat dissapointing categorization – better than anything out there right now, but still dissappointing): easy widgets for creating templates (I could see myself doing a good template in Textpatterns, as opposed to one in this site), the very clever See All Comments In One Place per writer, built in Visitor Logs and so on.

I won’t be switching soon because there seems to be no overriding reason for me to do so (the categorization capabilities aren’t that much better than MT, the ease of use isn’t that much better, and it’s unproven) I would recommend Dean to focus on one underserved area (Hm, categorization?) and make that really irresistable (while matching all the general functionality we have come to expect from tools like this – including search).

Dive Into Premium [dive into mark]: “A new and better way to experience the “Dive Into” empire!” Too bad about the note at the bottom, or it could have been really funny.

Cities of Text: Some Notes On Some Notes on Intranets, Knowledge Management And Urban Planning: “As scattered, disjunctively organized Web servers become unnavigable, search engine technology is purchased to pave over the islands of Webformation with search engine results. As search engine results themselves become unnavigable, meta-search engine technology, or “intelligent agent technology” is purchased, to make sense of the search engine output. And when these fail, other technologies appear, to remedy the shortcomings of the previous technology generation and introduce new dysfunctions into the environment. Layer upon layer of software: a stratigraphy of the failure of information technology.”

Another stupid patent?: “Our website, http://www.museumtour.com has recently received an patent infrin gement notice from SBC Intellectual Property.The letter suggests that any website which has static, linked information (top banners, menus, bottom banners) which are displayed while other sections of the page are displayed as non-static (the area where products appear on most websites) infringes upon the patents they hold.” (From the CHI-web list)

XML.com: Parsing RSS At All Costs

Hey, that’s me: XML.com: Introduction to XFML : “XFML is a simple XML format for exchanging metadata in the form of faceted hierarchies, sometimes called taxonomies. Its basic building blocks are topics, also called categories. XFML won’t solve all your metadata needs. It’s focused on interchanging faceted classification and indexing data.”

ITU Internet Country Case Studies – Country Photos A brilliant collection of pictures of Telecommunications in a wide variety of countries – lots of pictures of internet usage. What a find.

Ease: RFP Available XML: Eric identifies why this idea wouldn’t work: “the RSS generator probably doesn’t know anything about the lastmodified data for the other linked resources (eg. FOAF and XFML).” Gets too complex when all tools generating feeds need to tie in with the system. Didn’t think about that – too bad.

iVia Open Source Virtual Library System: “iVia is an open source Internet subject portal or virtual library system. As a hybrid expert and machine built collection creation and management system, it supports a primary, expert-created, first-tier collection that is augmented by a large, second-tier collection of significant Internet resources that are automatically gathered and described. iVia has been developed by and is the platform for INFOMINE, a scholarly virtual library collection of over 26,000 librarian-created and 80,000 plus machine-created records describing and linking to academic Internet resources. […] iVia is designed to help virtual library systems scale as the number of high quality resources on the Internet continues to rapidly grow. “

Jupiter Research Analyst Weblogs. Let’s see what these guys have to say.

PCWorld.com – Credit Card-Size Hard Drive Can Hold 5GB: “StorCard can contain from 100MB to more than 5GB of data on a plastic card. At first glance, it looks like a credit card, and even has a magnetic strip like a credit card, for potential use in standard credit card readers.”

Hiptop Nation: “Ok…now the bag is filling with blood, I don’t know why but the whole thing freaks me out. She’s so cool about it. I guess some people are better at this sort of thing than others.” (Before you freak out, it’s about giving blood)

Image Gate is The New York Public Library’s first full working version of its new digital image database.

This may be daft, but how about a simple format that indicates which feeds and XML metadata files and such are available on a site. Most sites are getting to have lots of stuff available, with RSS and FOAF and XFML and what not. A simple file with Available Xml and other formats would mean that:
– you only need to link to 1 file from every page
– if it has a last updated date a lot of bandwidth can be saved.

Something like this:

<avx>
<file url="http://urloffile.com/metadata/file.xml&quot; homepage="http://urlofhomepage.com&quot;
type="RSS 1.0" typeurl="http://urloftypespec.com/rss1.htm&quot;
latestupdate="10.30.00 10-04-2003">
<name>Frogs feed</name>
<description>Latest content in the frog category</description>
</file>
</avx>

AVX stands for Available XML. (but it could also point to RDF files and such) In the file element, the url attribute points to the file in question, the homepage url to the homepage of the site that file refers to (this is the only attribute I’m not sure about), type is a string indicating the type of feed, typeurl points to the spec of the type. We need both for human readability and for specs that don’t have a homepage. If anyone has a better solution for the type/typeurl combination for identifying a type of feed (maybe namespace?) please comment. The lastupdate field needs a better way of indicating time, but is crucial: it means a lot of bandwidth can be saved by checking this (presumably shortish) file instead of downloading large RSS 2.0 or XFML files.

0xDECAFBAD: I second that sacrilege: “She was shocked that I, alpha geek and info freako, didn’t have some intricate taxonomy of folders into which mail was sorted by carefully crafted filters.” The filesystem is dying – Microsoft is working on it. Most geeks have limited taxonomies for personal use – maybe because they know how to conduct a search. Six degrees was a good attempt but everyone who tried it (including me) that I spoke with has given up on it. I will try it again though.

For years now, I’ve been tempted to replace my hown-grown discussion board with a decent system. It’s just never quite right. A few things make me hesitate:

– My system will look and work like all these others.
– Even though I am less and less inclined to program, giving up control is hard. It means I won’t be able to implement all the nifty features I have in mind…

The build vs. buy problem seems neverending.

Taxonomist, BBC New Media, News: “Library or information science background… …with ideally 3 years experience as an indexer, cataloguer or information architect with specialist knowledge of faceted taxonomies.”

3600 Research Essays about the Net. Auch. I feel demand for a Matrix-style plug in our brains rising.

Presenting design research: “For every minute you propose to present, allow one hour of preparation. For a ten minute presentation, in other words, you need to plan in ten hours of preparation before the Big Day.”

The NATURE OF ORDER, by Christopher Alexander.

Simon Willison: “two way blogging technologies […] are totally invaluable for the vast majority of bloggers – they help with exposure and generally make the blogosphere a more interesting and interactive place.” (about Trackback and such, stuff I’ve been slow to turn on here.)

Jakob Nielsen: (uses no permalinks!) “In investor relations we now know so much that we can provide a recommended standard information architecture to support investors’ information needs on any publicly traded company’s website.” I agree – fairly standardized IA becomes possible for many subsections of websites once we learn enough – this is happening now.

IWIPS 2003, 17-19 of July in Berlin. If only I was in Europe. But then I would probably have to miss ASIST 2003 (who’se website is almost up – about time, my budget needs approving!).

AIFIA | Future of Information Architecture: survery results. Read if you’re interested in the evolution of an emerging profession.

Ben Hammersley.com: On censorship, borders and translation: “There’s a big world out there. Let’s go and say hello.” Indeed.

Ben posted this movie of his (and my) newyear: movie (1450K)