The Joy of ...User Focus

After months of resource constraints getting in the way, myslef and a colleague have been working on some minor UI and functionality upgrades to our in-house intranet content management system. Small the changes may be, but I'm confident that they will bring fairly major user benefits (including the time I will save from not having to answer repetitive queries caused by the vagaries of the CMS). Hopefully we will continue to tweak our WYSIWYG editor until it writes beautifully compliant xhtml instead of the dog-eared HTML it spits out at the moment, but we'll have to wait and see on that one.

Murphy's Law Revisited

Humph! Having borrowed a power supply to test whether my PC is still alive (it's own power supply being dead to the world as of a few days), Murphy's law struck again. As soon as the replacement power supply was plugged in and switched on, the transformer coil started belching acrid smoke. I'm thinking I may have an inverse Midas touch when it comes to power supplies...

Murphy's Law

Isn't the extended version of this law not just that what will go wrong has to go wrong, but also that it will choose the most inopportune moment to do so? How's about starting work to get rid of a (human) single point of failure in a process, and then the same having to stay off work for two weeks with chickenpox (at his age!). How's about networking some standalone PCs so that they can be backed up to ensure (personal) important data is not lost - then the PC going kaputt before it can be networked. I can think of other things, but I do not want to conjurer le mauvais sort as the french say.

Diff'rent Strokes in Community Building

Reading Nancy White on Many to Many's posting on practical knowledge of social software technologies, and user's of one type (e.g. blogs) dissing other options of which they may have no practical knowledge, I am drawn to add the following: all these social software technologies can support one another, it's a question of horses for courses. Blogs are better for some aims, as are wikis, as are forums (or is that fora?), as are P2P shared workspaces, as are the Grooves, Sharepoints et al of the world. These can be combined to produce different results, and to offer full and enriching online community experience (much as I dislike the phrase "online community" - the community is offline, the glue holding it together is online). People prefer different tyes of technologies depending on their own boases for personal information control and communication - the phrase "one man's meat is another man's poison" springs to mind...

Bakerman, Bakerman, Bake Me a Cake

I wouldn't normally be flagrant in advertising a service, but if you are ever in Garforth (Leeds) or on the King's Road in Harrogate (both places in Yorkshire in England, and a very fine county indeed!), you could do worse than buy a piece of patisserie from one of M. Dumouchel's shops.

The reason this master baker has come to mind was in reading Metro (a free British newspaper for commuters) this morning. One of the stories referred to a Japanese girl who had paid £2,000 for a trip to Garforth in order to take an interview for a job with M. Dumouchel. Needless to say, such dedication beyond the call of duty landed the lady the job, and, if she learns to make a buche de noel (chocolate log) as tasty as those made by her patron, then it is money well spent.

"The Youth of Today" - Seven and Blogging!

Via Business Blog Consulting, I came across The seven-year-old-bloggers, a fascinating piece from the BBC on how early, early adoption of the blogging concept can take hold. I think that logs are pretty ludic in nature, which is one reason why they are appealing to individuals, and probably have taken a hold in the young mind more readily than say the concept of business blogging has. Anyway, you can generally be assured that children will learn how to do anything more quickly and more successfully than an adult if they are given the opportunity.

Community (and not much to do with "The Fall Guy" at all)

Colt Severs sang that he wasn't "the kind to kiss and tell", and personally I prefer not to just stick up a link to a resource on my blog - it smacks of laziness: "I'm not the kind to slap up links", but never say never...

Anyway, this is a very roundaabout way of saying that while trawling a few pages on the wicky wacky web recently, I came across the Online Community Toolkit from Full Circle, which looks chokka with useful links (not that I've had much of a chance to look at any of them yet).

Managing Expectations

Can anyone think of an effective technique to manage expectations for an unexpected 'blip' in the level of service which can be provided to end-customers (regardless of the type of service being provided) - especially when the likely length of the blip cannot be determined. I have some thoughts, but would be interested in hearing the opinion's of others... (more to the point - what about when two unexpected blips coincide?)

Topic Exchange - Topics for the Masses

Not a post about a chocolate bar, so much as one about Topic Exchange, a repository for links/rss feeds with "topics" attached. It means you can attach a blog posting to a topic/topics, and anyone interested in/subscribed to that topic can pick up on it. Nice idea for those without categorisation/in search of topic standardisation/the first steps on the semantic web.

Anyway, I've popped a couple of posts up and will add more, I think, shame it doesn't appear to integrate with blogger...

Moving Beyond a Honeycomb Centre

There have been a few comments and postings about Peter Morville's User Experience Design "Honeycomb", and I must admit - with a couple of reservations - that I like the diagram. My gripes with it - which are not large - are that the hexagons appear as independent facets, where in actual fact there is significant overlap and hierarchy within the terms used. To my mind, and many may disagree strongly, "accessible" and "findable" are just children of "usable" (i.e. to use something, you need to find it and or access it); useful is a subset of valuable, and valuable is the mother of all of the terms - they are all "values".

Criticism aside, like Jesse's Pillar diagram, the benefit of these diagrams is in the simplification. While they may be reductive, they are also seductive: messy explanations while often being more accurate, just aren't so convincing. So to my mind, if I can slap this type of diagram in front of a client and gain buy-in, all the better, even if the reality is slightly less distinct.

I'd kind of like to overlay the content/context/users venn diagram over the honeycomb, as I feel that some of the layers feed one into another to build up a clear 3-D picture of how it all connects.

Yet More Strange Search Referrals

Returning from a cracking break in Provence at the marriage of Romain and Florence - friends of my wife and I - I checked out my web referrals, and was delighted to se yet more weirdness in the search terms being used. How's about "network attached storage iran" and "'small world' +'naomi campbell'" for pulling traffic to my blog. Fantastic.

Strange search referrals

Looking through my search engine referrals for this blog, I saw that the last search directing a user to my blog was "Big T's Wales". I thought this sounded mildly pornographic or at the very least blatantly weird, until I realised that on page 2 of the Google results for the search term, there was a very relevant hit for a posting on new uses for mobile camera phones. Funny old world of search, really.

"Mark T's information blog
Anyway, reading through the venerable Big Issue recently, I ... clipping explaining that Junior Doctors in Wales have been ... beetled over to you "

On which note, I am going to go away and watch the England vs Switzerland match, and hope that there will be no more crowing from the Welsh and Scots. Fingers crossed.

Gold chip social networking

Via The Sunday Times June 13, 2004: "Well connected: the jet set", an article on an upscale social networking service with 2,800 members, called A Small World. Apparently members - including such luminaries as Naomi Campbell and Petrina Kahashoggi - have been using the BBS to discuss such posers as finding a private jet service for one's pets. This is great, as it really puts the "social" and "peers" to the forefront, emphasising what the French call piston, and we colonial types term the Old School network.

Although I read this article with my tongue firmly in cheek, it does highlight the fact that online social networking tools are as useful for communication within closed network groups, as they might be at broadening one's social circle. Alumnus services for universities are like this, and damned useful at putting you back in touch with people from the past (Friends Reunited is like this too!).

Tweaking search

Since there was a "spanner" in our intranet search, we have finally got around to tweaking some of the configuration options, improving the UI and are now looking to start gaming the results based on what we can garner of the algorithms that are used. Luckily, while running through the config, I discovered that we could reveal the actual document scores returned by the engine as opposed to simple matches. In an effort to "improve" our results, we have set up an intricate series of "Lorem Ipsum" documents (so as not to skew search terms for any other intranet searches) with the word "Conundrum" (which returns 0 results at present) secreted in various combinations of location within the document (title, meta etc...). Fingers crossed, when we compare our current results with any tweaks that we make, we should be able to instantly see the effect on our "Lorem Ipsum" search documents. Fun, fun, fun! (hmmm)

Update 14/06/2004

The plan was highly successful, and exposed some of the workings of the weighting process of which we were not 100% aware - for the record, it looks like we are over-skewing results with keyword occurrences in the title (among other things). We have adjusted the configuration files, and will see what results we get back with the same search term tomorrow. At the very least the two sets of results will be cross-comparable.

Accessibility Developments

Via Tim Bray, a link to Peter Korn's weblog, where there is a post on new developements in accessibility - including Adobe Acrobat 6 accessibility features and an Apple Sceen Reader. When I get 10 minutes I might even get the chance to follow one or two of the many interesting links.

Spanner in my search

Our intranet search has blown a gasket - and intensive digging by the team has uncovered that our inability to complete indexing is being caused by one corrupt Excel file. The annoying factor is that we can read some of the contents of the file in the core dump - including the fact that it has teal, gray and aqua formatting and Times New Roman! - but nothing that will help us to identify the file. My love for Excelnow knows no bounds...

It's a Breeze

If you get the chance to register your interest and participate in a Macromedia Breeze web seminar, it's well worth it. I'd already been impressed with Breeze's "PowerPoint with wings" online presentational capabilities, but it really comes into its own as a virtual meetingplace/training tool, as I discovered last Friday. I'm not going to list what it can do - you can go to the macromedia site for that - but I'm now dreaming of a mating of Breeze with 37Signal's Basecamp (and a side-order of wiki) for good general purpose collaborative tool.

Search Ranking Factors

I'm trying to footle about with some fairly rudimentary factors to improve relevant results in our intranet search engine. What I want to know is - assuming that a matching word in a document can have a weighting of between 1000 and one depending upon its location within a document (with 1000 being instances that occur very early in the document) - this is set, I cannot alter it - what should be the related weighting for instances in a) titles b) subheadings (h1, h2 etc - which are not, unfortunately very widespread on the intranet) c) link text.

At the moment, I am reckoning that a) and c) should be fairly meaty, and should be the same as document titles are generally used for link text on our intranet, but what should the exact figure be? 150? 500? 1500? There must be a heuristic out there that says a word in a tilte is worth X in the body text! I feel like this might be a trial and error situation... Any suggestions?

Trying Photoblogging With Hello

Gleneagles Hotel, Scotland

I've just been fooling around with "Hello", the photoblogging tool, which has kindly been offered to current webloggers.
Now I wouldn't say it is the most intuitive tool I've ever used, but I've managed to post a photo of the lovely Gleneagles hotel...
so it obviously works!
It has a neat re-sizing tool as well. I think I may be adding photos to my blog more regularly now! In fact, thinking about it, this may mean that I actually get around to updating the personal photo catalogue that is several months out of date.

"Bunch of RSS"

Apologies for the title, which probably only 'works' if your from the UK. That's enough bad jokes for today. Via Object Learning, I found Brian's long list of RSS links called "The Fuss", an excellent storehouse of RSS-related information, albeit - not surprisingly - focused on Learning Objects and educational uses.

Social Software Overview

Matt Webb's overview of Social Software is pretty useful - particularly as it is a n=hub of useful links out to specifics - for instance, this fascinating article on Life With Alacrity (and Comments!) on optimal group size and "The Dunbar Number", which I for one had never heard of.

UPDATE: Via Many to Many, I came across the Online Community Toolkit, which looks like an excellent set of resources.

UPDATE 2: an excellent matrix of social software facets (not orthogonal!) - could help in deciding on a particular tool, or in gap analysis to work out how to make a 360⁰ networking tool.

Annoyances: Easyjet and Blogger

I'm not one to get annoyed over much, but two things this evening have got on my nerves
First of all, I had a message from my mother-in-law explaining (2 hours after her expected arrival) that my wife had not arrived from her flight to Geneva. My wife was travelling via Easy Jet (EJ), so I went on the easyjet.co.uk site to get contact details. Instead of a number, EJ tries to answer a set of common questions. Typing "telephone number" into the search, I arrived at a UK number, which, when dialled only presented you with directions to "visit our website for more information". EJ: people phone you for a reason. Efficiency is all very well, but people may at times need to speak to a human for more personal information. Communications channels should support one another, not replace one another - the chase for increased profit margins can be detrimental to a customer's experience, you realise...Anyway end of rant one.
Annoyance two was blogger's re-design, handled by the (should I say "usually"?) excellent Adaptive Path. However, trying to amend my profile photo, I typed in a lengthy path to a photo of myself. There were no written indications to suggest that my path would be a problem, and the form field accepted my path, only for me to realise post-submission that there is a 68 character limit for images. Chaps, read "Defensive Design for the Web" - let me know before I fill it in. Grrrrr!

More Searching

I read the New Frontier of Search a bit ago, and had meant to post something as to the fact that it is a neat overview. It also highlights something that I mentioned at an intranet benchmarking meeting with a group of peers - we were bemoaning intranet search performance, when I asked what sort of searches employees at each company were interested in. No-one seemed to know, yet everyone was keen to criticise the search performance. Are you looking for the occurence of a phrase or of a concept? Are you looking for results that you can trust? Different engines will perform better for different types of search - I think we've all got slightly over-sensitised to Google.

"The Enemy of My Enemy"...

"...is my friend" according to the saying. I seem to remember a humourous extension of FOAF aiming for this territory a while ago, which sparked my interest. The problem with the above-saying is that it is a paradox in certain critical situations where trust is involved. I don't want to be overly political in sensitive times, but the relation of the USA to Iraq and Iran (implementing this strategy) over the past three decades is a case in point.

Map out the relationships - Iran and Iraq have been reciprocal "enemies" during this time, so let's assume the US takes up an antagonistic approach to Iraq, then the eneny of its enemy is Iran, its "friend". If the US then gets fed up with Iran and takes up an antagonistic stance towards it, by this strategy, it is honour-bound to do a volte-face and make the enemy of its new enemy its "friend" i.e. in this case Iraq. I don't think it takes a genius to work out the drawbacks of this strategy - there are numerous instances of this happening with the foreign policy of various governments, and the Iran/Iraq issues are still rattling on.

Anyway, getting back to my sheep, my point was that it is a risky strategy to suggest anything other than predisposition towards a relationship in a social network unless that relationship is directly stated. I know that my above example does not map directly to the virtual world, but I still think it's an interesting bone of contention.

Endeca Again (and Facets to Support "Searching")

As I've said before, I'm not sure anyone is ever interested in searching for anything - it's the retrieval (and usage) part of information that the end-user is concerned with. Treasure hunters might, at a push, enjoy the search, but it's the booty they're really after! With this in mind, I thought I'd mention Endeca again, as - via Lou Rosenfeld - I came across an interesting overview not only of Endeca, but also of facets supporting information retrieval in "search", in Volume 1, Issue 1 of "The Barrington Report on Advanced Knowledge Organization and Retrieval" on the KM Connection site. I've yet to read the entirety of the Journal, but it's good stuff with a focus in this issue on metadata (particularly faceted).

Now that I've written "booty" I'm concerned about raising false expectations for this post in search results...

Trust and intranets

I'll write a little bit more about this later on, but I recently met Dr James Backhouse and John Baptista of the London Schoool of Economics Information Systems Integrity Group. James and John were presenting on "Do People Trust Your Intranet?", and were proposing measuring "trust" to be benchmarked and compared across a number of intranets. The aim, it appears, is to measure five key "trust" factors displayed by an "institutional device", including governance and policy (although I can't remember the other three off the top of my head!!!). I'm going to take a second look at their presentation when it becomes available online, as - in spite of my concerns at the vague nature of "trust" in an institutional sense - it could be a useful metric in the armoury of the intranet/portal manager.

Social Searching (aka Trusted Results)

I've banged on about this for a long time - about how recall and precision are not enough to move a user from a searching action to a "doing" action, and that being able to trust your search results may be a missing link - anyway, it seems like one search engine is actually applying this model: Eurekster. I must sign up to this and get some "trusted" sources to do so as well, and see how well the system actually works in practice.

PageRank Revisited

So I'm still not 100% convinced that I understand the baseline in a comparative sense, but this article by Harjot Kaleka did at least make me realise that PR is exponential

Note: The scale of 1-10 on Google is not linear. It is exponential in nature, believed to be a base of 6 to 7, that is, PR 7 website is 6 times more important than PR 6 website.

I am therefore assuming that PR6 is 6x more important to PR5 and so on. i.e. PR1 (1), PR2 (2), PR3 (6), PR4(24), PR5 (120), PR7 (720) etc... Someone stop me if I'm wrong!

Blogger Redesign

Like most reactionaries, my initial instinct is to run from change...where are my comfortable slippers? So, I'm a tad shocked at the blogger changes. I'm not sure that they are super radical, but I am quite averse to beige, or is that camel or taupe?
I seem to be getting the odd screwy css ie6 reaction on the sliding doors tabs at the top of the screen as well, but I'm sure this will get sorted. The bit that shocked me was seeing all those posts lined up in the dashboard - I quite like the fact that I only see a small number of posts at a time (so I immediately reset to five), but seeing 50 posts in one go has probably sent me over the edge. I shall compose myself and have a fiddle with the new additions shortly. I wonder if I can export comments from Squawkbox into blogger?

PageRank?

I found - and forgot to bookmark - a PageRank calculator yesterday, and was making some - I thought - intriguing comparisons. This site has a page rank of 5, which I guess is OK, but the funny thing is this is better than a few of my company's sites. Now, I know I haven't had time to get any SEO work done, but I think it's about time I wrote a strategy paper for this. On the laziness front, the other baseline indicators I ran were quite intriguing. Lou Rosenfeld, for instance - who was complaining about my laziness in getting an RSS feed up the other day, that was my butt kicked - has a PageRank of 6. Anyway, while doing this baseline comparison, I realised I had no idea really what a decent baseline is. While I understand the theroretical idea behind the PageRank algorithm, I'm now realising that I have no idea what the end figure means. Can somebody fill me in as I'm feeling a bit stupid?

Relevance

Via Tom's (OTHERblog) more human efforts, I came across Lisa Galarneau's Relevancy blog. What Lisa calls relevancy is what I've generally termed "making stuff useful" previously - i.e. focusing on value-centered design for all stakeholders, business and user community, so her blog looks like it might be an interesting read. Anyway, I was interested to see that Lisa is a fan of Endeca's faceted browse/search interface as well, having used it at Tower Records. Once again, I feel the small world syndrome closing in on me!

Intranet Governance Policies

It strikes me that when intranet governance is mentioned by intranet professionals, they are generally discussing overall governance structures - i.e. intranet boards and committees, however, I'm interested in finding out some more detail on more granular detail on intranet governance and auditing issues.

For instance, I need to provide an auditable structure of user access both to our content management system and to the folder permissions on our network attached storage which acts as a document repository. If I roll out any collaborative tools such as a blog, wiki, bbs/discussion board, project management comment tool, instant messaging client etc. I will also need a clear governance structure for this also i.e. a set of defined behavioural norms and guidelines, as well as moderators/discussion facilitators.

Anyway, my conscience on these matters was piqued when reading through Mike Gotta's piece that I blogged about on 5 May 2004, which was very focused on the business implications of social software. So, I'm hoping for some responses - what governance issues have you come across related to intranets, and how have you solved them? I'd be interested to hear everyone's comments.

Yet More Corporate Blogging Details

Judith Meskill posted an interesting bunch of links in and around corporate blogging (k-logging now seems to be motus non grata for some reason - NB: my Latin is a bit pokey). Mike Gotta is worth a read, and I just scanned the intro of the zdnet piece, Social Computing: Getting Ahead of the Blog, which looks interesting.

Straightforward Wiki Explanation

A very nice description of what wikis are and what they do by Lee Lefever on his Common Craft blog. Not a lot more to say other than succinct!

Basecamp - Collaborative Web-based Project Management

I seem to be very 37signals-focused at the moment: I've been reading Defensive Design for the Web on my way to work, and enjoying it's no-nonsense advice in the same way that I enjoyed Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think!. In fact, while delivering training yesterday on our intranet content management system, I realised that some of our error messaging is not really contingent enough, and will be implementing some of 37Signal's thumbs-up good practices.

Anyway, the real reason behind the posting was to express my general delight so far at Basecamp, 37Signal's web-based, hosted, project management application. This is no MS Project with Gantt charts, resource costings and the like, but is instead a very sweet, functional tool for collaboration on smaller topics. As I've only got one project at the moment, I'll admit that I've signed up for the free version, which does not offer file-uploading, for instance, but having set up a bunch of messages, a milestone, and a to-do list the other evening, I've been generally impressed at the focus on simple project management tasks. My clients haven't logged in yet, but I'm hoping that they'll see it as a useful tool. So thumbs up to 37Signals for this one - I've used "thumbs-up" twice, haven't I: repetition is a virtue among the lazy.

JavaScript and Accessibility

I feel rather shame-faced that this is the first time that I have noticed the Trace Center, as I just came across the pages on JavaScript and
Dynamic HTML Accessibility while writing a briefing document for the Strategy and Architecture team in my company on general accessibility issues and the law. But from the looks of the section entitled Designing a More Usable World - for All there is a great deal of interesting reading here.

Tree Structures and Overlap

I'm sure that this one will be bouncing around as a more popular meme, as this comes via Clay Shirky, but in terms of too neat organisational structures, this article by Christopher Alexander called A City is Not a Tree resonates with information architecture and the need for cross-linking and related items in a tree structure. I know that there is a great deal of debate about the navigation metaphor and the concept of cyberspace in terms of IA at present, but it is sometimes nice to take a hint from the real physical world. In this case, the real world shows itself to be hyperlinked in a way, not neatly bundled into patterns and single classifications...but we knew that anyway. I'm rambling, so I'll stop.

Memo to self: read - European KM Standards

Via Column Two, publications on knowledge Management from the European Committee for Standardisation.

Gmail ads

Not sure what this means so far as I've only had two emails into my gmail account, but the ads have so far been for obscure Scottish museums and country houses. I hope this isn't down to GeoURL! I think gmail needs some more content to work with.

More on Storytelling (a Xerox!) in the Business World

I've only skim-read John Seely Brown's talk so far, but this series of talks on storytelling from Xerox PARC looks pretty interesting.

On another note, Karl picked up on my mention of our shared recent reading lists, and discovered by dint of this that he too is on Lou Rosenfeld's Favourite blog list. I think this reinforces my small world feeling.

Stories in the Business World

Personally, I think that story-telling should be more heavily promoted in the business world, particularly as a means of summing up project successes and failures in an easily digestible form. For this reason, I'm going to nudge the "Knowledge Management is Nonsense" article that I was going to read this evening off my inbox and flick through this story-telling site instead. Nonetheless, a story is only as good as its teller...

Leveraging Faceted Browsing to Improve Search

I always think that the term "search" is a bit of a misnomer in the information retrieval field, for, as the "retrieval" hints, users are generally only interested in "find". To this end, I was really impressed by a demonstration (but unfortunately not by the price!) of endeca's search tool today (you would have thought that I'd remember the exact name, but you can find it for yourselves). Among other things that I liked was the combined keyword search box with metadata facets displayed beneath, and the fact that you could search within your results as you filtered down among the facets. Filters could be removed and deleted at will to modify your search, which was excellent feedback, and worked very neatly. Very neat.

Update 23 April 2004

And on that sort of a note, here's an article on Metadata based search and browse (for the NSW Office of Fair Trading intranet) via Column Two.

Gmail

So I've taken Blogger/Google up on the test-drive Gmail offer, as I want to check out if all the anti-accessibility comments are true or not, and it'll be nice to see how the concept differs from the hotmails of this world. I'm also pretty keen to see what sort of personal advertising will come through based on the content of my emails - I'm sure that'll be an interesting experience. The ads that come through from blogspot on the top of my blog appear to key in quite nicely on a usability/search/ia front, but the content of my emails tends to be a bit more jumbled than my blog postings, so we'll see! - my gmail will be my name at gmail.com, send me a message.

Overlapping Readers and Subscription Lists

I am always fascinated by the small world phenomenon, and was interested to see that it affects reading patterns as well - it's obvious when you think about it, in that bloggers with similar interests will have similar blogrolls and rss subsciptions/opml files, but fascinating nonetheless to find someone else (Karl Nelson) has been reading almost exactly the same articles as yourself. Pretty much 90% of the articles I have read over the past couple of weeks, which suggests to me very strongly that blogs support communities of practice, no matter how loosely/weakly tied they may be.

"Bigging Up" Myself - Reputation

Having ya'd on about reputation and trust for a while, I thought I'd give myself some kudos. I don't bother tracking my traffic or referrers, as I use blogger (blogspot) - being that I am cheap and too lazy to install MT, greymatter, drupal or the like. I'd been noticing the sparsity of comments recently and assumed that I was blogging in the hinterland of visibility, so imagine my delight to find that Lou Rosenfeld of Polar Bear fame has my blog listed in his list of favourite weblogs. So, a quick doff of the hat to Lou, who I previously thought I was being presumptuous to describe as "colleague" in my xfn links, and a quick boost in my self-perception (is this in Maslow's hierarchy of needs? "a need for blatant self-promotion"?).

On a sadder note, the intranet benchmarking forum presentation on 26 April in Glasgow - at which I was going to extoll the virtues of bencmarking and knowledge sharing for enterprise-level intranet managers to the land of Scots - has been cancelled, and I still haven't managed to hook up with the Glasgow IA/UX community (if it exists), having abortively tried to meet up with its (seeming) sole representative, Duich McKay, twice now! Oh well, you live and learn...anybody out there in Dundee or Edinburgh (he says plaintively)?

Excellent Web Standards Build Presentation

It's short, it's sweet (mind you, it's a Flash presentation), and an excellent "How to..." for a web standards approach to building a site - from Maxdesign, it's deathonline.

More Corporate Blogging Links

A bit of repetition on some points here (cf Wed April 7 posting on NASA and Knowledge Management), but via Tom at theOTHERblog, here's a bunch of links to corporate blogging stuff on contentious. Haven't had a chance to read them all yet, but there will doubtless be the odd golden nugget or two within.

More on the Page Paradigm

Link to Design by Fire posting - on Peter and Mark page paradigm "dispute". I like the fact that this is now getting quite philosophical.

And more on FOAF...

Clay Shirky comments on weinberger's comments on centralisation and decentralisation in "artificial" social networks on JOHO.

NASA and Knowledge Management

Via David Gilmour at Work, a very interesting addition to the KM world: KM a la NASA.

Also via David, then via David Gurteen, a link to Martin Roell's blog with an elevator pitch for senior managenent on the value of K-logs. Then, via social software, a whole bunch of links to corporate blogging ideas and stories through the perfect elevator pitch competition. I like Internal Corporate blogging because this need for a bottom-up percolation of knowledge within organisations (mine thinks it's flat, but is hugely hierarchical in an inconsistent, mixed-up way) hits the right tone. Also came across w4 k-collector, and another nice rss, k-log justification.

Case Studies and Collaboration (It's a Breeze)

Just a couple of links really - one from James at Column Two refers to case studies, a subject close to my heart when discussing intranet issues with other companies and professionals. I agree with him that it's the meat and two veg that really counts in case studies, people want to know how you did it and why you did it that way, as well as what went right and what went wrong. Yes, some of this can be on the edge of confidential/sensitive information, but who as a KM worker wants to hold onto his/her knowledge silo? It would be sheer hypocrisy!

The second link is to a presentation on Macromedia Breeze. I've only seen one presentation on Breeze (weblogs, rss, trackback discussion) so far, but I was really impressed.

Very Cool News Visualisation

Too cool: this infoviz tool for showing the density of news stories across the world. I think I got it via InfoDesign, but can't be sure...

Online Beginning Perl Book

Via Tanya at Pixelcharmer, via Kasei, a link to a beginners' Perl book (online pdfs). I've never really fully revved up my Perl learning experience, although I know bits and pieces, so this might help...

Topic Maps Blog

From Bond University, a blog on Topic Maps.

UPDATE - via Peter Van Dijck on a SIGIA posting, TMTab, a topic map plug-in for Protege is available. Must get around to downloading them both and having a play at some ontological/taxonomical mapping.

UPDATE - 14/04/2004

Via Peter again (via scale|free), here's TM4JScript, a JavaScript topic maps tool for browsers (I think you can ontologise your favourites with it???). Sounds nice, must play with it when I get the chance.

Two interesting bits & pieces - email social networking/trust and online rss newsreader

Via Clay on Many-to-Many, the introduction of LOAF, which uses a bloom filter (some whizzy algorithm) to essentially give you an overview of your email social network. It compares the details of contacts that you have sent one or more emails to against your incoming mail and against the contacts of your contacts - (sort of a -1, 0, +1 scale) - the result: contacts you don't know even via others, contacts you only know via others and contacts you know yourself (and via others). I can see this being useful - although the level of detail that you get through probably isn't anywhere near enough to base any major decision upon.

The most excellent bloglines, I have just discovered - an online rss newsreader. hotmail for rss.

I'm not feeling too hot, so apologies for the Yoda-like grammar

Community Article

Via Tom Smith, here's an interesting looking book (from the first flick through) on online community building by NAIMA.

Atom Autodiscovery

I'm hoping I've used the correct format for Atom autodiscovery:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom feed" href="http://marktsinfoblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml" />

How much does my weblog own me?

Luckily not too much

18.75 %

My weblog owns 18.75 % of me.
Does your weblog own you?

Vade Mecum: FOAF/trust/reputation

Just using my blog as an aide-memoire, here's a bunch of FOAF stuff to look at in the light of my More Trust Links posting on 09/02/2004.

• FOAF-A-MATIC - excellent wee FOAF rdf file generator


• IBM XML Watch - decent intro to FOAF


• FOAF Vocabulary specification


• Trust and Reputation in Web-based Networks - one way of doing it!

As well: a weighty academic piece that I've scanned very quickly: Rational Decision Making Using Social Information (Google HTML of a Word Doc). Noted the use of the term "Polyanna Effect" in this document, which is something that strikes me with early adopters of these kinds of models: ask users to "rate" someone and they usually will rate them highly (even, perhaps if they don't think that much of them!). I get the feeling that this might be exacerbated on the Web by the lack of "identity" of users within a defined social context.

Also came across Paolo Massa's Blog, which has some very interesting related stuff on it.

More trust links

A couple of FOAF/RDF links from Eric Vitiello:

• A module for defining relationships in FOAF
• A module for defining trust relationships in FOAF

I'll have a closer look at these later. I'm just pondering things at the moment from an object, subject, attributes and connections perspective in the light of my golden rules...

XFN - representing human relationships in links

Very interesting this XFN stuff - the non-symetrical relationships are particularly interesting. XFN appears to be an instance of the small world semantic web - tiny, personal ontologies as opposed to the grandiose, joined-up vision of everything espoused by some. I might bung some if this up on my blog roll. Other wee bits of the semantic web (small "S", small "W") on here include the Atom feed for subscribing to my bosts, as well as the GeoURL details which allow me to see other bloggers nearby.

Social Network Analysis in a Business Context

Much like Valdis Krebs' stuff, this SNA stuff from Rob Crosslooks interesting - like so many other pieces I have just browse-read it so far. What I'd like to see are some arguments for selling this sort of insight through a business.

Metadata

Via InfoDesign, must remember to read these two: User-Centred Information Retrieval and Living with Topic Maps and RDF.

The Golden Rules of Trust

I've just been thinking some more about trust and reputation - and have a list of articles to read and re-read, but sitting on the train on Friday - on the way to the beautiful West Coast of Scotland (blue skies, blue sea, and the top of Goatfell on Arran overlooking me) - I scribbled down some thoughts which maybe online trust should address. Maybe I'm wrong on some of this (I'm still working through it), but here are my initial golden rules:

1. Trust is not a constant - it can (and does change...over time, according to relationships etc.);


2. Trust can be, but is not necessarily, reciprocal;


3. There is a categorisation of trust: you can trust an individual on one plane, and completely distrust him/her on another;


4. Trust can be misplaced, so it needs to be adjustable/amendable (see rule 1.);


5. Trust (in the real world) can be transmitted through group interaction: A knows B, and introduces B to his trusted group, which decides to trust B (although individuals in the group may reserve trusting judgement!);


6. Trust (in the real world) is not just a psychological construct, it appears to be physical too (oxytocin, body language, group dynamics);


7. Trust is not dependent upon face-to-face communication. Phone and internet relationship building demonstrates this;


8. Trust is usually a 1-to-1 relationship, but it can be 1-to-many or many-to-1 (see rule 5.);


9. People appear to develop strategies of trust; (see rule 1. also in that strategies can develop over time);


10. Trust can deteriorate over time if its "ties" are not renewed (frequency and currency of trust);


11. Trust appears to be a generalised concept ("trustworthiness") and may reach a point of critical mass where "trustworthiness" more easily creates more trust;



There's quite a lot of cross-over in this list, and it needs a lot more thought, but I'll have a think, a re-read, a re-think, and work on this list some more, as I think a number of these points can be leveraged for online trust/reputation models.

Pareto Principle, 80/20 Rule

Via iaslash, a nice explanation of the Pareto Principle.

Scotland and Glasgow - Forums (or is that Fora?) Galore!

I have had a number of calls recently from forum organisers (some that I know, other who are new to me) looking to start up benchmarking forums for intranet- and internet-related issues as well as knowledge management at the enterprise level. One of the forums starting up soon in Glasgow is a smaller scale offshoot of the intranet benchmarking forum (IBF): Paul Miller of TEG (which runs the intranet benchmarking forum) is looking to kick off a scaled-down version of the full forum in Scotland for medium sized companies with - I believe (although I might be wrong on this point) - approx 2,000 staff. This new initiative is called IBF World. The IBF focuses on intranet good practive, covering accessibility, usability, governance and administration, content management and many of the other day-to-day issues of running a successful intranet. If anyone's interested, a taster session is taking place in April - send me an email, and I can put you in touch with Paul.

Content Management - Avoiding the bloat

I've seen a few bits and pieces recently from people grumbling that CMS don't solve any problems, just create new ones, and I reckon this is because a lot of companies buy in the excellent top-of-the-range Documentum/Broadvision-style systems. People often refer to these products as "solutions", but what is the problem they are trying to solve? In the case of most CMS implementations, I think that the problem is usually - at the beginning at least - the simple one of making sure that the right people publish relevant and timely content that is similarly formatted. If this is the case, do you really need all the bells and whistles? Maybe it is better to invest in/build a simple extensible framework that can be added to in an iterative fashion as CMS needs develop. Keep it simple, start stripped-down and then develop plug-ins and add-ons according to need.

Very good RSS presentation - weblogs, rss, trackback

I love this. Number one, to my shame, I've never come across Macromedia Breeze before (after already marvelling at Flash Paper and Contribute), sort of a more multimedia PowerPoint with wings, which - at least in this presentation - gets rid of repetitive bullet points that just reiterate the speaker's notes. Number two, it's a genuinely interesting exploration of how RSS can help with the discovery of useful objects (in this case for learning). So read Connecting Learning Objects..., which I found via Tom Smith at the Other Blog (or maybe it was his new Drupal-fired Other Other Blog.
Note to self: must explain some of this to our Training department so that we can think of internal RSS uses rather than just external ones.

Accessibility: It's not about ticking off boxes

I've been explaining to a number of people recently that even though their sites may meet w3c guidelines and bobby tests, they are still not "accessible". You have to:

• see users in action;
• understand their demands;
• then work out to which areas you need to pay specific attention.

An article on guuui.com called Accessibility Humanized covers most of the main points admirably.

Ia Meetup

Arranged an Information Architecture meet-up to speak to a couple of guys in Glasgow that do IA-related stuff, and we stupidly neglected to make any effort to identify ourselves to one another. Result? Crowded pub, me asking a bunch of people who look vaguely like one of the chaps' (saw his photo on his website) if they were him. Blank looks and strange glances for me in the Horseshoe Bar. Not much architecting of information there, eh?

Glasgow Information Architecture

In the hope that this will get picked up by any search engine robots crawling these pages: is there anybody out there? I'm trying to set up irregular meetings for information architects, web-based information designers, usability / human factors types and anyone else interested in the general concepts of useful, user-focused design who lives or works in the vicinity of Glasgow. That's Glasgow, Scotland in case there's another Glasgow out there in Canada or Patagonia. Cheers.

Paper prototyping

Via Vanderwal, Blackbelt Jones post on paper prototyping and UX issues. The Marc Rettig stuff looks interesting at a first glance.

Update

Silly me - I've read most of the Rettig stuff before. I'd love to use some of the wall-based communication methods at my place of work, but I don't think we've broken into collaborative working wholly yet.

Accessible forms

I've not tested this yet, but I managed to put some of the background reading I have done on accessibility issues into action today. Accessible forms appear to me to be one of the easiest things going - forms are already logically structured, so the use of fieldsets and legends makes sense, a little attention to writing, order, information design and user experience means an online form can look the same, but be many times more compliant with the needs of your user base.

Attractive Things Work Better

Can't remember where I found it, but have been reading a sample chapter of a Don Norman book called "Emotional Design". Most of the chapter called Attractive Things Work Better is interesting, if relatively obvious background stuff. I was, however, enchanted to read the following:

"The psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues have shown that being happy broadens the thought processes and facilitates creative thinking. Isen discovered that when people were asked to solve difficult problems, ones that required unusual 'out of the box' thinking, they did much better when they had just been givena small gift..."

That's me handing out lollipops at the next meeting or training session I host!

How consumers trust

Haven't read this in its entirety yet, but it looks interesting. From the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, How Do People Evaluate a Website's Credibility?. Happy New Year!

More people stirred up by Shirky

Further to my posting on Shirky's Semantic Web article, here are a couple more interesting postings:

• Lou Rosenfeld's thoughts


• Peter Van Dijck's thoughts - an excellent summation of the main arguments.


• Comments on both from Headshift


• Comments from Matt "Blackbelt" Jones on both

And via Blackbelt Jones, a cool rejoinder to anti-semantic arguments from Paul Ford: Harper's Magazine.

Latent Semantic Indexing and search

Via Tom's theOTHERblog, a very interesting link to Patterns in Unstructured Data
Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization. Well worth a read.

More of interest with social networks

Via iaslash, here are a couple of articles by Stowe Boyd on social networks: The Promise and Pitfalls of Social Networking and Cracking the Social Code. I especially appreciate this opinion in the light of my previous thoughts:

"It is perhaps true that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but it is not clear that the friend of my friend is a friend of mine. Trust and regard attenuates rapidly in human relationships: a friend of a friend of a friend is unlikely to bring much social juice to bear. Except in narrowly defined and strongly affiliated groups (like religious sects, fraternities or within corporations), this transitivity of social capital does not really work."

I think I'll have to think this through in a more socio-mathematical way - what aspects of online trust that are of value can be tracked and transmitted and how can these be usefullly exploited?

It's not who you know in social networks

Via the New Scientist (15 November 2003) some detail of research by Cornell University into algorithms to track the most influential members of a network (as opposed to the best connected). Interesting...hmmm.

Making stuff useful...again

I've already ranted about this multiple times. Here's a back up quote via an interesting article called Design by or for the people? (via Infodesign) from Robert Brunner:

“it really doesn’t matter if something is usable. What matters is that it is in fact, useful. And even better if it is desirable."

. Let's make stuff useful - usability is a part, not the whole of this equation.

Blogging, memes, value

Was reading Knows and Memes from Many to Many - reminded me of the piece I was writing a while ago called Weblogs: dynamics and value. Strikes me that the transmission of memes "themes" could usefully expand some of my thoughts...

Wallop - Microsoft and the social network

Maybe this is the sort of hook that trust-based search could leverage: Microsoft is apparently developing wallop, which leverages Instant Messaging groups and contacts for "social software" purposes. Not much detail available yet.
Read the following:

• Wallop homepage


• Will Microsoft Wallop Friendster - Wired article

Peter M's opinions about epinions have sparked my interest, I must check it out a bit.

Photographs of me (and others, natch)!

In entirely solipsistic and self-absorbed fashion, here are links to photos of me, my beautiful girlfriend Severine (to whom I'm getting married in a fortnight!) and Eric who came to pay us a visit in Glasgow a couple of weeks back

• Photos of me and Severine - not updated for a while, sorry.


• Eric's site and the photos of us all from Glasgow

Just a bunch of interesting stuff: information visualisation, search...

• Google Holes from Raman Rao


• Information Visualisation from Raman Rao


• Steven Johnson explaining about his Google Holes "criticism"


• Steven Johnson Google Holes article

Shirky, the Semantic Web, and even more on recommendations

I was reading Clay Shirky's The Semantic Web, Syllogism and Worldview, and found it a very interesting and challenging article. I do have a couple of thoughts on his ideas, however, and am not in total agreement.

1. The semantic web is (initially) probably likely to be most useful for simple logic statements as opposed to more complex combinations.


2. Examples of syllogisms are syllogistic in their nature: if insufficient or contrary information is given, then wrong conclusions will always be jumped to - garbage in, garbage out. The Brooklyn accent example, for instance, could be resolved by removing the generalisation.


3. I agree that deductive reasoning alone is unlikely to create artificial intelligence, but a basic set of rules about the nature of things could form the basis for more complex probablilistic reasoning, I reckon. (Not that I'm claiming to know much about AI)


4. Of course ontology creation is political and has a social context: all ordering and classification is. We comprehend the world through arbitrary symbols - why write an article if you don't trust the arbitrary rules of words and grammar? This is why I reckon that the semantic web isn't going to bea coherent whole (if it happens), but a series of smaller, overlapping (rather than co-incident) ontologies.

Anyway, I'd recommend the scepticism of the article: healthy, intelligent stuff. On another note, I noticed the following with interest toward the article's close:

"Social networking services [...] assume that people will treat links to one another as external signals of deep association, so that the social mesh as represented by the software will be an accurate model of the real world [...] and as a result, links between people on Friendster have been drained of much of their intended meaning. Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it."

my italics
I don't 100 per cent agree with this. Yes, you cannot express the "true" value of a social network in this way, but if you are honest about precisely what you are attempting to achieve and the fact that the attempt is not going to be a perfect representation, then what's the problem? In my trust model, saying I trust B's opinion on everything is far from close to saying I really trust B's opinion on ice cream, trust him slightly less on sorbet, and don't trust him at all on frozen yoghurt, but I can gain value from expressing this relationship of "general" trust, and it is a far more maintainable (and therefore valuable) network for this.

Here are some comments from others more worthy of commenting than myself (care of Blogdex):

• Tim Bray


• agwright.com


• Danny Ayers

Yet more recommendations

The paper from Macedo et al isn’t a million miles away from my idea. Essentially, it appears that their WebMemex system (apologies to Mr V. Bush? He’s in the references!) is made up of a tool to track a users web activity (ie. a record of page requests), a tool to link documents together by commonality of terminology (using Latent Semantic Indexing theory), and a system to recommend documents via the web activity of other people in an identified group.

There are a few things I found interesting and useful in this approach (other than Latent Semantic Indexing, which I read about, but didn’t understand, in another paper on a different issue):

1. no recommendations are made per se – this is a tool that shares browsing activity;


2. the yahoo chat buddies system is used to identify the social networks;


3. trust is considered to be a reciprocated buddy, and you must have two or more reciprocated buddies for the system to work in order to protect the privacy of an individuals browsing path (with recommendations from only one buddy, you would know exactly which pages your buddy had visited).

I really like the fact that the social network is established outside of the application itself. The ties of trust should be able to work for other non-overlapping applications (in the same way that Sainsbury’s, BP, Barclaycard and Debenhams and share the Nectar Loyalty card): say for instance that Google, Amazon and Lastminute all used the same outsourced “trust” recommender system. This would reduce the burden on the user of duplicating information (single sign-on and then opting in to which companies can use your information), make it easier to maintain and much more likely that people would sign up to it (I reckon).

Equally, I appreciate the touch of protecting privacy through the use of a trust network only being valuable with anonymised input. I trust my friends’ opinions, but I don’t necessarily want to know which friend has made the recommendation (online trust being different in many ways to face-to-face trust).

It’s also made me think a little bit more about the trust network: where does the value come into play? I don’t really agree that reciprocation is necessary for trust – it’s more a case of mutual trust, so I don’t think it should affect any “trust values”. Additionally, I feel that mutual trust networks are more likely to be closed: closed networks in being less expansionist are less likely to be of use in covering a large dataset. I think that stronger and weaker trust links may overcome this: if I trust person A who in turn trusts person B, I may have some implicit trust in person B’s opinion, albeit at a lower level than that which I have with person A. As a rule of thumb, I would have thought that the small world six degrees of separation could express the outer boundary of trust value.

On another point, the principle of “it can be assumed that friends have common understandings and interests” expressed in the paper is an important one for trust. We cannot be 100% sure that I always trust A’s opinion on every matter, but it will be too time-consuming a task to filter out the unnecessary information. However, if the above assumption is true, value should come from the fact that A makes his recommendations in generally similar spheres to your interests, and that you are likely to be searching for recommendations within these spheres – which is the whole principle behind the pattern-matching side of recommendation engines anyway.

Overall, I have returned to my original idea, that, rather than seek to augment the quality of overall search results with a “trust weighting”, which I have been informed may be mathematically muddled in principle, a “search trusted sources” advanced option is the best bet. Essentially this could mean that a search engine could use keyword matching and popularity for a general trawl search where you’re just looking for as much information as you can find on a particular subject, and offer a “trusted sources” search where you really need to believe in the quality of the found artefacts (and then other searches for particular, known items etc.)

Anyway, this all bears a lot more structured thought than 15 minutes bashing it all out on a keyboard – I might return to this subject later. All comments appreciated, particularly those that may point out the errors in my logic!

Recommendations again

I haven't had a chance to read the full study yet, but the following from Automatically sharing web experiences through a hyperdocument recommender system
sounds very close to my idea:

"As an approach that applies not only to support user navigation on the Web, recommender systems have been built to assist and augment the natural social process of asking for recommendations from other people. In a typical recommender system, people provide suggestions as inputs, which the system aggregates and directs to appropriate recipients. In some cases, the primary computation is in the aggregation; in others, the value of the system lies in its ability to make good matches between the recommenders and those seeking recommendations.In this paper, we discuss the architectural and design features of WebMemex, a system that (a) provides recommended information based on the captured history of navigation from a list of people well-known to the users --- including the users themselves, (b) allows users to have access from any networked machine, (c) demands user authentication to access the repository of recommendations and (d) allows users to specify when the capture of their history should be performed. "

More once I've read it.

Recommendations updated

If it's worth saying...then someone's already said most of it in a better fashion already! Check out this detail on search from Autonomy (obviously). Although it doesn't touch on my trust issue, it does cover the pros and cons of the other bits and bobs, and talk about Bayes much more authoritatively.

Recommendations

I was idly leafing through a book on probabilistic theory and the Web this evening - it was more than a bit beyond my maths, to be honest - and it set me thinking a little bit about recommendation and trust. [NB: I wrote a related piece about search a while ago, trust to my mind being the missing factor (after precision - i.e. accuracy of match between search query and returned results - and recall - i.e. number of references returned related to search query, whether full or partial matches) in search.]

From what I understand - and I might be miles out here - recommendation systems work on probability and/or pattern-matching. The probability side of it appears to key in to Bayes Theorem, which I seem to remember was a British reverend's realisation that you can make accurate forecasts by starting with a proposition and then amending that proposition as you receive a greater amount of information on that proposition. In the case of a recommender system for purchases, the more purchases the user makes, the greater certainty with which the system can predict accurate recommendations.

The other approach is pattern matching, where you have a matrix of users against purchasers and you can essentially say: ah, this user A bought X item and Y item and this user B bought X item, Y item and Z item, let's recommend item Z to user A (grossly oversimplified explanation, I know). Obviously this approach can be boosted by an ontological approach where the items are also related in an ontological scheme: this is really the approach with those books where you look up the title of an item that you liked and you get a "if you like this, you'll like these other books related by genre, theme, author etc. I don't know if the recommender systems use this, but I guess they do.

(Of course there's the self-evaluation method whereby you rate items you have bought or might buy, but that's a lot of items to rate. Trust networks would let a relatively small number of people rate a broad range of items for you with less effort)

My theory is that a far greater response to the accuracy of recommender systems would again come if you could associate trust in another's purchases via these systems. In this case, user A might thus far have purchased items X and Y, but he trusts his friend C's opinion, who has bought items X, Xa and Xb. In this case, if A could initiate a "bond of trust" between himself and C, the system could give a greater rating to C's purchases. If A trusted C and D (where D had bought items Xa, and Z, the recommender would have a great deal of information to go on.

Make recommendations to A: user B has a similar purchase pattern, but is not "trusted", weight his recommendation of Z as 1. A has bought items X and Y in a series (Bayesian approach), so is likely to buy Z, Bayesian rating 0.5. A trusts C and D who have each bought Xa, rating 3. A trusts C, who bought Xb, rating 1.5. A trusts D, who bought Z, rating 1.5.

Result: Z - 3; Xa - 3; Xb - 1.5 : strongly recommend items Z and Xa, recommend Xb if it is related in the ontology or if further purchasing evidence boosts its rating!

I know weightings are not usually additive, but I think it's a nice argument. The difficulties come in in displaying and storing the trust information (and for users to identify those they trust) - plus would people "trust" a store that asked them to give up relatively important (and, to an extent, confidential information: data protection laws spring to mind).

Just a thought anyway.

Geo-genius

Via Tom Smith, here's an interesting use of mobile photos: extracting longitude and latitude information from jpegs! I reckon that this is another use for the emergency services (see my earlier posting from July) - swift pinpointing of a road accident victim's position, or also even criminal evidence during a court case (proof that someone was in a particular location at a partiular time)...interesting.

Content, Context and Use

Care of Unraveled, a little Don Norman wisdom:

• Sometimes it’s not enough to make things work well. They also have to be fun.


• Sometimes it’s more important to make things fun than to makes things work well.


• We’re selling HCI wrong. It’s shouldn’t be about usability as much as user experience. If we’re going to make a difference, we need to talk the language of business. Consequently, it doesn’t matter if you have wonderful [usable] products if you’re not making money.

I pretty much agree with most of this - although I'm not sure it's the "whole truth" with regard to UX and usability. However, I do like the second point, as we should never forget the serendipity of people using tools for a purpose for which they were not designed, but which they achieve better than any designed tool for the purpose. I reckon that to an extent usabilty could lead to an over-engineered fit-for-purpose on the odd occasion: like anything else, all this emphasis on user-focused design is a single blind alleyway. Design should take into account all parties, materials and budgets. I seem to remember Don Norman making a quote about not designing for [either] budget OR usability OR aesthetics, but for budget AND usability AND aesthetics at the same time.

Information Architecture - How much to teach?

Because we are nice chaps, authors in our intranet CMS can create their own "subsite" menus. My problem with this is that they often make a cack-handed job of labelling and grouping. I've written an IA introduction in the CMS how-to guide, but I'm convinced that few - if any - actually read it. How do I get some basic IA knowledge into their heads, and how much do I give them?

Brrr! Coldfusion

Nothing to do with my company, this one. Just the joy of Macromedia. I started learning Baby Perl a short while ago, got so far, and sort of let it slide. In my search for an easy introduction to dynamic site programming, I dinked into Coldfusion Express (erstwhile product of Allaire, now swallowed and re-jigged as Coldfusion MX by Macromedia). An absolute joy so far - not done much with it, but it's relatively sweet & being tag-based easy to get to grips with (so far). I'll post some more when I get more proficient with it. Maybe time to write my own blogging software?

People are the Problem!

Via a Many to Many posting, the idea that People are the problem is one that resonates particularly strongly today.

Even the most usable tool has its problematic users who just do not appear to grasp the concept even when training is reinforced by follow-up sessions, support, feedback mechanisms etc etc. I'm irritable today because a user has blamed his/her likely loss of data on our CMS. Now our CMS has its faults, and may be to blame, but experience suggests with this indvidual that it is user error. This isn't a usability issue, because users are warned at every step to save, delete etc. which I feel this chap might not have done. The thing that got my goat is that he automatically blamed the system: this despite the fact that all usability textbooks say that users blame themselves for system errors - obviously the inverse case also applies! Nil desperandum...

Coffee and social networks

Watching the Open University Cooking Programme on Saturday morning (lying in bed, natch), I discovered the following fascinating fact: both the London Stock Exchange and Lloyd's shipping brokerage developed on the sites of coffee houses. Coffee houses in the 18^th Century were renowned for bringing together diverse groups of people and for being places where "anything goes" conversations were accepted. I suppose this neatly ties up the anti-capitalist demonstrators' targeting of Starbucks - but then the French Revolution was fomented in coffee shops too.

Classify that!

A while back I wrote a short posting about the opening of a Dewey Decimal Classified Hotel. Via the pernickety SIGIA poster, Ziya, comes the gem that the Dewey Decimal Classification is not in the public domain, and in true septic fashion, the hotel is being sued. Read the story.

More facets

I've seen a lot of descriptions of facets, but never found a great layman's definition. Last night, I had a flash of inspiration: Top Trumps, the childrens' game, used facets for its comparison categories. If children can get it, surely everyone else can!

Social patterns

Haven't read this in any detail, but on a quick scan through, the PoInter: Patterns of Co-operative Interaction looks like an interesting point of reference for social/collaborative software knowledge. The pros and cons of ethno- methodologies was quite well put.

Facets, get your luver-ly facets

I've been pondering faceted metadata for a while, reading about Ranganathan, bits and bobs on boxes and arrows about implementing it on a site and so on and so forth, and I've reached the stage where I'm a tad blocked on the subject.

Faceted metadata is based around the fact that items share similar facets .i.e.
Diamonds might have an item, Gopal diamond whose facets are

• colour (value - pink)


• clarity (value - twinkly)


• carat (value - 12)

All diamonds will share these facets and can be defined (and therefore organised, browsed and searched) by them.

Maybe it's just me, but - because of this very fact - facets only seem to be useful where there is a great degree of homogeneity between items - i.e. where every item on a site shares pretty much the same facets. This seems to be great for ecommerce sites where an item has a name, price, and other similar attributes ("facets") to it that are reasonably rigid, but not so useful for, say, a corporate site where items might be more heterogenous.

For this reason, certainly for documents, I just wonder whether a more rigid metadata set is better for this sort of site, Dublin Core for instance. I'm just not sure if I'm being short-sighted and have missed a trick somewhere with facets... Maybe I should try and read about topic maps now to cover all the bases.

UPDATE 11 September 2003

Well as an update, it's worth reading Tanya's implementation of facets with Movable Type at her site Pixelcharmer - the only drawback I can see (as with all facets) is that an item can only belong to one topic. This is because facets should be mutually exclusive - but I can think of instances where an article could belong to both "XML" and "CSS" at the same time. Still, it's a very nice job indeed (and partly answers my question)...

I'll be back...

Not a reference to Mr. Schwarzenegger's recent "egging", just a comment that I'm back from a relaxing holiday in the Highlands of Scotland and the Mountain of France. Information-wise, it is interesting to note that France is still a couple of web steps behind the UK in some respects despite (or perhaps because of) its headstart in online information with Minitel (although to be fair, the British did have a dive forward with Teletext/Ceefax as well). Nevertheless, the only time I have worked on a French-based project, I found the Parisian team I worked with to be very switched on. Note to self: I'll try and remember the name of the company and add it on later.