The Rake – Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes: must read.

Global Voices Online – Tagging for Chinese-Japanese dialogue.: chinese bloggers tagging.

Curs de l’Arquitectura de la Informacion: I am giving a workshop on information architecture in Barcelona next week. There are still a few places, don’t miss it. Price is 500 euros, which includes handouts and food. For practical information, contact Raquel at teléfono 93 542 26 12 o correo raquel dot navarro at upf dot edu.

Running your company on web apps. Still figuring out this one myself. Backup is a big thing as well. Any recommendations there?

More crazy Lakoff stuff: Dan talks about Motivated Categories

Dina writes about visual ethnography with Flickr, but how about visual ethnography with Mefeedia? In other words, with movies?

Javier announced www.aichile.org: Arquitectura de Informacion Chile: “The Information Architects group of Chile has been an all-volunteer effort to promote the field in our country and region.”

Open Source Usability: The birth of a movement

Continuing to reverse-engineer Google by screenshot: what does this mean exactly?

Inforworld (a techie magazine) is starting to use folksonomies: “The downside is that we’re probably going to phase out or at least simplify the robust taxonomy that we spent so much time and energy building and refining over the years. It’s hard to look back on that effort and to think of walking away from all that valuable code and history of manhours.”

Donna and Lou point out Knowspam, my favourite spam filter, is shutting down. Now I, like them, am looking for another one.

Also: what’s the story behind them shutting down? Lack of cash? Lack of interest from the developers, who might prefer to spend their time on other projects? Maybe someone wants to take over the service?

Skype launched SkypeIn, which means you get a phone number people can call (before you could call ‘real’ phones but they couldn’t call you), and more. This is brilliant for traveling. I use Skype regularly, and now I’ll probably even use them more.

Jason Hobbs from South Africa wrote me:

“I’m trying to create a network of information architects in south africa since they are near to impossible to find. Do you know of any or could you point me in the direction of people or institutions that could help me?

My interest is in increasing
+ awareness of IA
+ debate around IA
+ use of IA in commercial projects
+ research into IA

…in the context of south africa. There are real and unique challenges which we face in Africa with regards to the use of the internet and IA offers many solutions. I recently published this article in a marketing publication in south africa – you may find it interesting…”

So get in touch with Jason if you’re interested in IA in South Africa.

The discussion on European IA continues, also on Lou’s blog. If you post a comment on my blog, it won’t show up immediatly (due to spam), but I will approve it. Sorry for that!

I’m doing a workshop here in Spain in 2 weeks, so I’ll report back about the Spanish scene later :)

I am giving a workshop in Barcelona on Information Architecture on April 26: Curs de l’Arquitectura de la Informaci

Peter Bogaards has some more comments on the state of European IA.

A year ago, we were worrying about running out of bandwidth to host the videos we’d create as videobloggers. Today, there are TWO free and relatively reliable solutions for hosting free video: Google Video (Beta) – Video Upload Program and the Internet archive. That’s pretty amazing, and we’re not even talking Bittorrent yet.

Koranteng’s Toli: Cultural Sensitivity in Technology. Fascinating stuff. (And some good comments on it.)

Page Description Diagrams, an interesting alternative to wireframes. I can see these work in certain environments.

Lou writes about how IA in Germany isn’t really taking off.

I did an IA workshop in Brussels yesterday, and after talking with some of the people here I got the feeling that (please feel free to disagree with me here), in Europe, it depends on the country. In France, IA will probably never take off, at least the current style of US-centered IA. In Belgium, there are a few companies doing interesting IA/UX work, mostly for large clients like J&J and such. But as a field it’s pretty unknown. I blame Belgian’s lack of self-promotion :) In Holland, there is a bit more awareness (and historically more ‘design’ awareness) around IA, but also some confusion about what IA really is (there’s another Dutch ‘IA’ organization with a very different take on what it means). I’ll report back on Spain later, but I have noticed there is a bit of a UX scene there.

I am giving a full day Information Architecture Workshop next week Wednesday in Brussels (April 13, 2005).

Joho the Blog: Advice to young terrorists: “I have been pulled aside for special searches four out of the previous four times I’ve flown. Yesterday I asked the supervisor at the US Air desk at Logan Airport about it. He said that if you test positive for any two of the following three tests, the computer marks you for searching: A one way ticket, a ticket purchased in the past 24 hours, or paying by cash. On this particular trip, I met the first two criteria. Thus, I am a likely terrorist.

So, here’s a word of advice to today’s would-be terrorist: Splurge on the round-trip. Sure, it’s going to cost an extra couple of hundred, but at the end of the trip, you’re not going to care. Also, try to plan your murderous attack well in advance.”

Ah, so that’s what that is about :)

jarango.com | Thoughts on Global Information Architecture

If IA and organization and classification are all around us, shouldn’t you be able to learn something about international IA by closely looking around you at the world, especially when traveling?

I’m leaving for Spain today, expect a month of little blogging. Siesta. Yeah.