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March 29, 2006
Bill DeRouchey is trying to find out when and who introduced the use of two vertical bars to mean “pause.”
Now there‘s a question I’d never thought of!
If you happen to know, could you leave a comment? Thanks. [Tags: bill+derouchey]
March 28, 2006
Amazing closeups of insects. (Found at Reddit.com) [Tags: photos insects]
Last night I cleared US Immigration in the Montreal airport. I was the only traveler in the hall. The immigration officer was about thirty-five.
IO: What’s that button on your jacket?
Me: It’s for OneWebDay
IO: What’s that?
Me: It’s like Earth Day for the Web. It celebrates the value of the Web.
IO: Like free speech?
Me: (Getting nervous about where this is going) Yes, that’s one important value of the Web.
IO: The Internet is great for free speech.
Me: Absolutely. But now there are threats that might limit it.
IO: Limit free speech on the Net?
Me: Well, track and identify people by what they write, which, especially in other countries, could be used to crack down on dissidents.
IO: (stamping my papers) Ok, you’re all set. Keep the Internet free.
Me: A whole bunch of people are working on it. Thanks.
This was a charming conversation, and it’s great to have a face emerge from a bureaucratic process. But I have to wonder: If my button had said “Out of Iraq!” or “Legalize pot!” or “Impeach Bush!,” would the conversation have felt so innocent? [Tags: OneWebDay]
I’m belatedly looking into hotels for my trip to Freedom 2 Connect outside of DC and have decided to go for the Hilton’s Romance Package because not only is it the lowest priced room they offer, it comes with breakfast. Besides, don’t I deserve a night of one-person romance, a chance to rekindle my love affair with myself?
I was mildly amused to read the description:
A romance package with two beds?? That’s either a lot less or a lot more intimacy than I think most couples would be comfortable with. [Tags: romance kinkiness]
KiJiJi is like CraigsList with sites in various cities in the northern hemisphere (+ Australia and New Zealnad), but, conspicuously, none in the US. (“Kijiji means “village” in Swahili. Plus, it has five dotted letters in a row.)
Competition is almost always a good thing. But CraigsList is so good, and so good-hearted, that I’m not filled with joy at the thought of the fragmentation competition brings. My feelings, they are mixed. (One of the threads at the Toronto site asks if anyone has actually made a sale on it yet. Not a lot of yes responses yet. But give it time.)
[Tags: craigslist kijiji]
March 27, 2006
Yesyterday as I sat in the audience at a session at the IA Summit, I was unable to connect to the wifi system in order to send an email to a friend about meeting him for dinner. I tried every way I could to connect, but to no avail. I started thrashing through the options for getting him a message. IM? No connectivity. Skype? Nope. Phone call? My cell phone doesn’t work in Canada. Text message? Did I mention my cell phone doesn’t work? So, I slipped out of the session, thinking maybe I’d ask one of the staff if I could borrow a cell phone for a quick local call.
And then, on the way to the staff desk, it hit me. The perfect solution. Simple. Cheap. Fiendishly clever.
Did you know that in many public places there are coin-operated devices that enable you to enter an arbitrarily assigned GUID, creating a VPN optimized for voice signals? One Canadian quarter later, I reached my friend.
D’oh.[Tags: i_am_an_idiot payphones]
March 26, 2006
Andrew Hinton asks what we can learn about the future by looking at what the kids are doing. [I came in a few minutes late.]
71% of all teens are playing games online, he says. [I missed the scope — US teens?] . He goes through the impressive financial stats: We’re spending lots of money on these games. Wells Fargo built an island in Second Life.
Designing a game overlaps heavily with designing information spaces, Andrew says, and thus there is much IAs can learn from game design. E.g., game sites assume multitasking and are ok with complex interfaces. Games assume you will learn by doing.
We need to give people not just maps but navigational tools because the environment is constantly changing. He points to Microsoft’s Wallop.
“Kids are going to be kings of all media,” he says. “Broadcasting is dying; it’s not going away but it’ll be a specialized thing…It’s a peer-to-peer world. And, please only give me authentic voices.” And community is important, he says, pointing to Warcraft as an example. Why doesn’t Photoshop’s help system send us to the communities of Photoshop experts, he asks.
MySpace takes all the stuff about high school — how many friends you have, for example — and makes it explicit.
Being able to make multiple selves — e.g., multiple profiles at Yahoo — is relationship diversification.
The virtual environment is spilling out into the real world. He talks about TATUS, a simulated virtual ubiquitous computing environment. “This is freaky. This is Postmodern to the nth degree. we’re studying virtual reality to study reality.” He also refers to the “I love Bees” marketing campaign to launch Halo 2 that engrossed the user community.
Andrew calls “the game layer” the merging of the physical and digital realities. “This is going to make our real lives more like game lives, because we’re going to be immersed in data.”
[Great talk. I haven’t done justice to it or its playfulness.] [Tags: iasummit andrew_hinton games]
Donna Maurer of Maadmob Interaction Design has a session explaining to IA’s why they ought to take seriously George Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, a book basically about Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory. (I’m about to start writing about this in my book.) It’s a difficult book to read, despite its great title.
Categories, she says, have been taken as being existing/natural divisions that can be expressed in clear definitions. But, Lakoff says (says Donna), categories have prototypical examples. We can organize by similarities to the prototypes without having to define the category.
Donna talks about the concept of basic level categories— you generalize up from them and down to the specifics. BLCs are the level you learn first and usually has a short name, e.g., “dog.” It is the “highest level at which a single mental image can reflect the category.” [In English we can’t form an image of furniture but we can of chair.] BLCs depend on the culture. E.g., city dwellers will say “a tree” while a country dweller might say “a maple tree.”
Donna looked for a web site that organized information by laying out BLCs, but she couldn’t find one. E.g., the eBay site’s category list mixes BLCs with more specific categories.
Prototype theory is important to IAs because the classical theory of categories is built into much software. She says this is her most important point: “Recognize that categories occur and you’ll be less stressed about categorization that is not neat.” Messiness is ok. No scheme is going to include everything and be perfect. (Someone from the audience points out that Sotheby’s “Other” category has an “Other” sub-category.)
Other implications for IAs. Donna suggests using less prototypical items to describe edge cases. And, she says, you can derive BLC names by doing research to see what they are for your users. “Basic level items are easily recognized and likely to have good scent.” Card sort, she suggests, with basic level items rather than more granular content elements. “Get people to the basic level of the hierarchy as soon as possible.”
She wonders whether tags are often BLCs, accounting for their popularity. (Livia from the audience says that they probably are basic level if the taggers are typical of the group.)
Q: Does Lakoff deal with the cultural differences?
A: Definitely. That’s what the title is about.
Q: Folksonomies can help us get away from us imposing a taxonomy on a system.
Q: The same category may be basic level for one group and high level for another…
Q: (Christian Crumlish) When you focus on basic level categories for navigation, where should they be on the site, typically?
A: On the home page, if possible.
Q: (me) How stable are BLCs and what size group do they vary over?
A: They’re pretty stable over time, and the size of the group depens on the domain.
[Excellent talk. Exciting to me to see IA’s taking this stuff up.] [Tags: iasummit donna_urer george_lakoff prototype taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous eleanor_rosch]
Luke Wroblewski has done an impressive job blogging an outline of my talk at the IA Summit. Thank you, Luke! (Wriggle Room Note: There are a couple of things I’d tweak or quibble with.) [Tags: iasummit everything_is_miscellaneous luke_wroblewski]
March 25, 2006
I should keep in mind that messiness is a virtue in the miscellaneous world because the value of the miscellaneous comes from its implicit and potential relationships/connections …and the implicit is messy, resonant, echoic, full of sort-of-like’s and in-one-respect’s. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous]
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