Project Management Qualifications

I was delighted yesterday to discover that I passed my PRINCE2 practitioner exam, and can now call myself a qualified PRINCE2 practitioner. At the moment, I am working on a project that uses a related (very very close cousin, I would say) simplification of PRINCE2 called PRIDE/PRIDElite, and am just trying to get to grips with the differences (mostly these are terminology and/or quantities of specific project documentation) between it and PRINCE2. This got me thinking about relationships between project management methodologies - there is an underlying philosophy or approach to each method, and - having come across a relatively close overlap relationship between two methodologies - I was wondering whether anyone has come up with a visual/written map/taxonomy of how the different methodologies relate to one another? I haven't come across anything yet, but I am sure that such a map might be useful to work out which methods are most appropriate for which type of project (based on duration; discipline; cost; organisation differences etc.). Just a thought...

More Ajax stuff just to stay in touch...

I think I got to this via Lane Becker and Adaptive Path, but I can't remember: LukeW writes the nicest, simplest Ajax piece for communicating to non-techies that I've seen so far, and the lovely little file upload progress monitor from Home Made. Go on, try it, you'll like it...

Video and KM - Trade Secrets

While watching Trade Secrets on BBC2 today (a 5 minute show of top tips from industry experts - in this case theatre dressers), I suddenly realised what a great piece of knowledge management it is. I think video is often under-used by companies, and this sort of top-tip format could work beautifully in companies either for induction training or broken out into clips (with nice descriptive metadata) via an intranet. The benefits include the fact that the tip is mediated by a person (closest value to face-to-face), can be demonstrated in context (as a demonstration), and obviously can be stored for later retrieval. With the advent of low-cost DV cameras and editing, budget also shouldn't be an issue. Has anyone used this sort of video-based, Lessons Learned format within a company before?

Editorial tone of voice and IA revisited

Something about this post from 37 signals resonates (and not just because I am having fun trying out backpack at the moment): "Getting Real: Copywriting is interface design". I said earlier on in posting called "Choice Theory" that I would have a think about how editorial voice informs information architecture and lo and behold, I haven't got around to it yet... Anyway, Jason's piece is a nice, brief starter for ten.

"Good writing is good design. It’s a rare exception where words don’t accompany design. Icons with names, form fields with examples, buttons with labels, step by step instructions in a process. Clearly explaining your refund policy is interface design."

And if you haven't read "Defensive Design for the Web" yet, then I suggest you do!

Ajax Blog

I've just had a read of a few postings on Ajaxian Blog, but there are some nice wee Ajax demos, including an Amazon diamond search with accuracy sliders. Worth a quick peek.

How Art Made the World and BBC Weather

As a callow undergraduate (I think that you only ever get to use the word "callow" in conjunction with "undergraduate"), I lived downstairs from Nigel Spivey, so it was with interest that I tuned into "How Art Made the World" on BBC2 last night. While I'm not sure I entirely agree with the very Platonic theory of Art having [entirely] stemmed from stone age hallucinations being cast onto grotto walls, it was interesting to think about Art in grammatical terms - very Hildegard of Bingen - lines, dots and shapes coming together to make meaning. I don't think I've really thought about this much since reading books by Ernst Gombrich, Oliver Sacks, and John Berger's excellent "Ways of Seeing" a number of years ago - but it's definitely nice to go back to first principles and think about what is happening when we represent objects as images.
Anyway, I found this highly interesting as the BBC has just launched advanced weather visualisations whereby its previous iconography is now being replaced by "realistic" graphics. Personally, while I relish the effort, I'm not quite used to the relegation of the Orkneys in terms of importance from the isometric projection of Scotland (the borders looking pretty big to my mind - funnily enough I have just noticed that I am not the only one to think so) instead of the top-to-bottom map used previously, nor am I sure about how easy it is not to be distracted by the different precipitation animations running at different speeds in the top corners of the screen. I wonder what caveman trancing out in Lascaux caves would have thought about it?

EU Citizen?

I'm on holiday in Dubrovnik, which GB Shaw apparently called a paradise on earth - we've come over from Budapest (Hungary) which is now part of the EU. Croatia is also looking to join the EU, and in the square in Old Dubrovnik today I picked up an ABC lexicon to the EU in Croatian (not that I can understand Croatian): it made me realise (looking through the entries) how little I actually know about the way the EU operates. I knew about Schengen and the EMU obviously, but had no concept of Eurostat or the EIB. I think I need to become a better European! Seriously though, my point is that - as an EU citizen - I've never seen anything as simple or as straightforward an introduction to what the EU actually does before. In the days of 500 page constitutions, perhaps this should be kept to the forefront of the EU's collective mind...

Choice Theory

I haven't posted anything in a while, and am mulling over a couple of issues before I add anything to the blog. I'm really thinking about two concepts and how they could relate to IA. The first is choice theory, which - I must confess - I did not realise was a branch of economics until I started to read about it (in fact if anyone is interested there is an interesting article about bounded choice/rationality in the University of Chicago Alumnus Magazine), the second is editorial tone of voice. I think the latter is interesting as this is often one of the key missing elements in a wireframe. I haven't really polished my thoughts on either of these subjects yet, but if anyone else either has considered, or is currently considering, either of these issues, I'd be interested in hearing your opinions...

Delphi Technique for Breadth and Consensus in Requirements

I have been using a slightly bastardised version of the Delphi technique recently for some rapid requirements gathering and prioritising. Rather than the usual standard version where disonnant views are retained and ranked and re-ranked until stability appears (fine if you have plenty of time to build consensus), I've gone for a quick fix - send out a focused, open-ended questionnaire, retain all significant points and opinions, and then send the results back out to the review group to be ranked - use the initial ranking to prioritise the issues to be addressed (you could use MOSCOW or a larger sliding rating scale than 1,2,3 if greater shades of importance need to be considered) and there you have a decent case to start to develop your requirements from. I suppose that cherry-picking the first round of feedback goes against the grain of the technique in a way - but this feels like guerrila-delphi, just a quick-and-dirty "what do you think", "now rank it" - I think it fits in with the pre-project/requirements gathering process very nicely.

Ajax and other stuff

I haven't posted for a while as I've been focusing on consultancy work (to keep the home fires burning now that I've left my job with my previous employer) and taking PRINCE2 project management training and exams, but I noticed this really nice video overview from CMSWatch (via StepTwo) showing some Ajax techniques in CMSs - sometimes IE does rule...

UPDATE - 12/04/2005
Just trawled through a few more links to Ajax-related information, and thought I'd publish them for reference. There's a Struts-view on Frank W. Zammetti's Ajax using XMLHttpRequest and Struts (which I've only half-read, but was interesting), the wikipedia definition for completists, a look at the controversy of names (familiar to all IAs!) in Quirksblog's Ajax, promise or hype?, and a detailed overview in Channel C's Ajax: The Next Generation of Web Interfaces. I think some of the criticism of JJG's piece is a bit misguided - I don't think Jesse was claiming this was new, or to be writing the definitive tech guide to the subject, I think he was just hanging a nice tag on an area of work (yes, DHTML work indeed) that is starting to blossom at the moment. Where Ajax as a concept is interesting is as part of the rich internet applications drive, but working within a framework that many webdevs can understand (where some might be struggling with new concepts with Flex or Laszlo perhaps) - it's nice to see some useful e.g.s out there anyway that break the age-old state issue.

Deliverables mania

I've been looking through a bunch of Information Architect job roles recently, and noticed that a number of the ads are placing a great deal of stress on the production of deliverables, and specifying experience in specific "IA" tools like Visio and Omnigraffle.

I know that job ads can be reductive, but I do worry about the emphasis being placed on deliverables rather than skillsets: some of this might be because the jobs are mostly for digital agencies, and there's an element of client seduction in there. Good deliverables do make a difference - a bad wireframe can add to client confusion rather than solve it, but these are not the end products of an IA's work: end product delivery is. It's a bit like the emphasis on MS Project skills for Project Managers, I suppose: confusing nice Gantt charts and PERT charts (just intermediary products on the path to successful project delivery) for decent project management.

Maybe it's when wireframes and site maps begin to look too smart, too professional, that designers begin to get annoyed at turf wars - maybe there should be a return to quick and dirty iterations of deliverables... long live the back of the envelope?

IA summit and Folksomomies

From brukaropplevingar.com a write-up of comments on Folksonomy from IA luminaries at the IA Summit. I agree with many of the reservations, but I reckon that in a controlled, corporate environment tagging could pay dividends:
1) it connects personal concepts with more social concepts (including organisational);
2) it offers a path for emergent terminology to be added to a more controlled vocabulary set;
3) it makes sure that some context is given to assets rather than leaving them free of metadata.
There are a number of other benefits, but I'm fairly sure that with a bit of work in extending folksonomies (such as mapping key tags to taxonomies, weighting of tag value by popularity for search, combining tags with boolean logic for context [like facetious's faceted approach] etc ...) they could offer a deal of value.
UPDATE
Aah! the IA Summit was clearly fertile ground - wish I could have been there, I've always fancied going to Montreal. Via the Community Engine Blog, news that IBM's taxonomy group is going to be doing pretty much what I'm talking about above. Although I don't see "folksonomies" as a silver bullet, I'm sure that they will have some impact on emerging terms and also on the ability of a company to keep tabs on the impact of its internal communication. For instance, assume that a company has launched an initiative called "BOB", tracking the emergence over time of the use of a BOB tag (and the items associated with it) could show the penetration of communication efforts as well as give an early warning of a waning in interest. All very interesting stuff - and let's hope IBM are successful.

Structured Searching with Mark Logic

Via Jon Udell, I have come across the very cool looking Mark Logic Content Interaction Server (CIS). From what I've gathered so far - without reading the white paper yet, so this might be not 100% on the ball - this acts as a repository for content of different formats, which it stores as XML and then, using a mix of XML querying and search logic, is able to deliver more targeted and granular search results and content for re-use (as this is now structured rather than unstructured information). Jon Udell has a screencast demo showing some of the functionality, which is very nice looking indeed, with the engine pulling out the most relevant paragraphs and chapters in a searched document rather than just pointing to the document itself. The rest of the demo is about outputting to XHTML/pdf via XSL/XSL-formatting objects transformations.

I really like the delivery of more granular content objects for search results in this fashion - for too long we have got too hooked up on the concept of "search": the information retrieval cycle is one of moving from a requirement, finding (or "discovering" as Donna Maurer would put it) information fitting that requirement, and then - critically - making use of that information.
I'm sure I've not even got close to understanding what the CIS can deliver, but I like what I've seen so far...It fits nicely into the equation that I came across in Oracle Magazine (Zen and the Art of Information, George Demarest, p79-80 March/April 2005):

"Information=quality (data + metadata)"

I quite like this neat equation which expresses the idea that information is data with applied quality and context. Structured access to document sections certainly hits the context side of this equation on the head...

IBM Screen-reading browser

IBM has just released Home Page Reader, a new, accessible "talking Web Browser", which is being targeted at the corporate environment from the looks of things:

"The latest version of Home Page Reader is particularly geared to companies and organizations whose employees use the Internet to gather information they need for their daily work, and to communicate with customers, suppliers and other businesses. It gives users who are blind or visually impaired equal access to content from the Internet, an increasingly important source of information and interaction in business and daily life."

Even More Folksonomy

Another good folksonomy overview on The Community Engine: Using mapped folksonomy to break corporate silos...very much my opinion as expressed in earlier posts, a viewpoint also taken up by Javier Velasco in his comment on Lou's Bloug post: Damned Addiction.

"Hybrid Classification …?
Wouldn't user tagging be a great way to fill a hierarchical classification… or many?
(...) Keyword-only systems allow for horizontal movements only (into terms that are not necessarily related). What I'm thinking about is the idea of matching keywords to categories, and then users could move randomly though tags as now, but also move into broader terms and thus find ‘brother' categories.
Of course, as we know, a hierarchical classification will never be unbiased: the way we organize the categories will reflect some of our values and priorities. But I'm sure we could find some means for tracking and incorporating hierarchies that emerge from the users.
I once had to build taxonomy for a company where we had a big team of journalists; all of them specialized in their field. The old manual archiving process involved a team of 20 archivists who would tag the hundreds of articles and photographs that came in every day. I remember they had a great model for tagging images, their descriptors would cover time, location, characters, background elements, character's facial expression, character's outfit, and more.
My approach was to have the journalists assign keywords to their articles (or pictures) under some given framework (based on their old archive), and this would allow us to assign the articles to relevant categories with considerable precision. (...)
So now I look at these folksonomy-powered systems and I wonder, why leave it up to there? Why so flat? These systems are offering thousands, probably millions, of volunteers for tagging content for subject matters that they have particular interest and knowledge on. Why not take this further?"

Social networks made easy by phone

Via Alex Gault of Collaboration Cafe comes this very cool sounding technology from BT, SWORD. BT is pushing small world social networking within corporate environments to boost company directories:

"SWORD works by putting the user at the centre of his or her own universe, updating their personal contacts profile according to the frequency and number of calls they make to colleagues. So as they contact people, SWORD builds up information that increases the chance of providing the right number at the top of the list next time around. The system also locates colleagues’ numbers more quickly, by grouping and ranking them according to various predefined criteria, such as their organisational unit within a large company, or their geographical location."

Computer-aided paper sorting (CAPS)

Another comment via Column Two: William Hudson - who I know from his usability work for the Intranet Benchmarking Forum - has come up with a neat idea to get around some of the difficulties surrounding card-sorting, those being:
1) analysis is repetitive and time-consuming for a human;
2) it's generally easier for people to sort with real cards than onscreen;
3) none of the existing tools seem to merge paper and computer-based approaches.
Read William's piece for an introduction to a neat merger of paper, software and barcode scanning that gets around a) having to do your cluster analysis by hand or b) feeding the results of a paper-based exercise into an analysis engine (NB: you can buy everything you need from Mr Hudson too!).

Distributed IA (Information Architecture)

Within our intranet - owing to lack of resource at present - we delegate the task of structuring sets of intranet pages lower down the hierarchy to our content authors. In some cases, this means the content authors come back to us and request IA help, in others it means they go ahead and architect the sites themselves, with results verging from the reasonably well ordered and user-focused to the slightly chaotic. The first section of our Content Management System user guide takes a couple of pages to carefully introduce the importance of structure, usefulness and usability (without necessarily using those terms), but the impact of this appears to be limited: a few content authors are genuinely interested and "get it", some of the others have just been tasked by a superior to "get on with" creating some intranet content, and therefore do not hold as closely to good practice.

With this in mind, I've been thinking of other ways to communicate the importance of IA to our CMS users without using IA terminology or getting super-complicated. I had a few ideas myself, but was really interested today to read a posting from James Robertson's Column Two on Information Architecture Exercises. James' succinct post also points to a great set of suggestions on Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease (with the identical title): I think I may be incorporating some of the suggestions into our core CMS user training...

Ajax - Not for Cleaning, But for Richer Internet Applications

Jesse James Garrett has an interesting article on what Adaptive Path are calling AJAX, essentially the model that uses DOM and standards to provide richer internet applications (think Gmail, Google maps, Google suggest - think Google, I suppose.) among other things through the retention of state. All I want to know is what's in the Ajax engine?

UPDATE 22/02/2005
A little more on this from Mr Veen: "Scrubbing Innovation into Interaction: Ajax"... with some useful looking links at the end. I feel like I want to ask someone at the Flex-end of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) what they think about this more in-depth use of existing techniques for a richer experience. Will add a post if I remember to do so.

More folksonomy

I've just been keeping my eyes on the folksonomy pros and cons discussions (there's a nice overview article on Burningbird) - obviously I'm in complete agreement with regard to flat social categorisation replacing classification systems, but think that it is all a question of value judgement: the folksonomy approach combines personal information retrieval (my tags) with social information retrieval (whereas formal classification will not account for a personal mental space), it connects what you know directly with what others know without you having to give up your worldview to do so. Secondly it allows for the rapid evaluation of a knowledge space - this may not be optimal classification, but it made me think of John Nash and the Nash Equilibrium (as seen in A Beautiful Mind): I know this is not the equilibrium per se: (so apologies for quoting scripture to the Devil's purpose) but the best strategy for a group as a whole may be a compromise solution that is not the optimal solution from a choice. Watch the bar scene in the film with the blonde, and you'll see what I am getting at. With a folksonomy, what we lose in precision, we may gain in rapidity and flexibility as well as connectivity - it's a simple trade-off, and therefore its applicability will depend upon circumstances.
So I've been pondering a little bit more as to how to move from the loose spontaneity of folksonomy to a more controlled vocabulary, and this Porter stemming tool from hackdiary presents one possibility, I suppose. Stemming could be run against a folksonomy (rather than just against a personal user's tagset) to give an initial suggestion as to how to consolidate the tags within - for instance by suggesting synonymous terms. How this information is then dealt with is another matter (consolidating the tags would have a negative impact on personal tagsets, whereas a controlled vocabulary would allow the personal tags to stay, but also be mapped as synonyms etc. to other, "standard" tag descriptors, is my assumption)...

Seeing where you are going...

I reckon some whiz-kid out there has probably implemented this somewhere already, but I was pondering multimap-style directions and google-map today, and thinking about the mental model that map-type views force us into. Personally, I look at the world with a horizon-point rather than from above, and find the easiest directions to follow are those which give me clear, visual reference points at each major change along my path:

"turn right at Junction 5 at the Red Lion pub onto the B112 heading towards Osmotherley".

In the day and age of Flickr, Keyhole, Mappr and the like, it would be quite nice to have a set of tags to give useful direction hints - particularly if these could be associated with geo-tags from GPS-enabled devices (or manually inputted) - when you use a service like multimap. I guess as well as having a valid latitude and longitude, you'd need to know which direction the photographer was pointing when he/she took the photo, but if it worked it would be very cool to be able to print off a map with photos to verify you were taking the right direction.
So, for the above example, on my hypothetical journey, along with my set of "after 1.5km, turn right onto the B112", I would also have a photo of the Red Lion to reference.
I'm sure there would be enough motivation from clueless, directionally challenged drivers like myself to map key junctions on principle routes.

Knowledge Gap Analysis?

I strongly suggest that you read the Wired article Scientific Method Man that I came across via a SIGIA discussion on expert systems and expert-level knowledge. The technique appears to be a form of knowledge gap analysis to try to find new, possibly untapped directions for research, and seems inherently common-sensical: define the known territory; analyse assumptions; find under-explored areas ( I am simplifying here). Fascinating.

Filtering news for reputation management

There's an interesting post from urlgreyhot on RSS newsfeeds, as I was contemplating the issue of a company knowledge aggregator in the context of intranet news feeds the other day. Apparently the MSN Search Beta and Yahoo News offer RSS feeds (which I must confess I didn't know about - note that there is no news available about me, surprise!) on specific search queries - which is particularly useful for KM workers who need to survey all mentions of a company or issue for feeding and re-distributing news or for reputation management (rather than paying big bucks to outsource this work).

Personal Information vs Group Information vs Organisational Information

Not a particularly scintillating title, I know, but I'm just trying to ponder the different information clouds, their interaction and utility from a knowledge management perspective. What sparked this line of thought was a) more thinking about "folksonomies" (or as Peter Merholz points out - collective categorizations/group taggings, as they are flat not taxonomical - i.e. define the relationships between elements) and b) remembering a comment on KM from James Robertson, where he (sensibly, I think) suggested avoiding the use of "knowledge sharing" as a business aim (instead pointing out that all "sharing" should be tied to a specific business task or activity that the audience is already aware of and engaged in). You'll have to excuse me, as this is likely to be a stream-of-consciousness posting rather than anything particularly structured...

Getting back to real basics, what appears to be key in KM is certainly not the individual as an individual, but tying the individual into groups and groups into organisational objectives, because, let's face it, KM is about making businesses work better. These three key areas: the individual, the group (informal or formal) and the "organization" (just another group, but one that acts as a definite entity) each have information or knowledge clouds which he/she/they need to create, manage and develop over time. As an organization is made up of groups, and these groups are made up of individuals, the activities of these specific groups, and the interactions between them (social networkers of the world unite) - the movement of activity, understanding and knowledge from each end of this line to the other is of key importance. I know this is all stating the obvious, but it is very important to keep this in mind with all KM-type activity: connectivity is key.

This all fits back into folksonomy via Peter M's post on self-centredness in group tagging:

"One of the key emerging trends we're seeing with things like del.icio.us and
Flickr is the merging of personal information architecture and
public/shared/group/emergent information architecture. And one of the things
we're seeing in the *use* of these systems is self-centeredness -- how else do
you explain the prevalence of "me" on Flickr?".

I find this a particularly important quote given a comment from John Udell that Google has proven that relevance is a collective issue. I tend to disagree, what delicious shows (as does frustration with returned search results) is that relevance is both a collective and a personal issue. To paraphrase the famous saying:

one man's meat is another man's poison (is everybody's dead animal)".

Delicious allows for a kind of personal reputation management (links I find useful) which has the added advantage of - via a large user base - revealing a collective categorisation of assets. Where this might fit into corporate KM initiatives might be in tying individual categorisation systems into the group and organisational classification structure - I posted about this a few days ago with Enterprise Distributed Categorisation. Surely this type of categorisation tool can be used to:

• help the individual in categorising and retrieving his/her artefacts;
  
• allow the individual to share his or her categorisation with others (via an rss feed e.g. .../username/tag/rss) ;
  
• aid the organisation in rapidly developing a classification (based on clustering of terms etc.) for the retrieval of organisational artefacts;
  
• allow the individual to link his/her tags to the classification via a mapping from the "folksonomy" to a controlled vocabulary;
  
• allow for a path for new terms to be suggested for the classification (continued log analysis of popular terms)
  

The nice thing about this is that it ties usage to both business goals and personal goals (in fact, they are both allied: personal KM is important to the business too) without necessarily imposing the business classification on the individual or the individual on the business. Likewise, as it is motivated by enlightened self-interest first, and collective interest second, it is less likely to become moribund owing to lack of usage - the burden of metadata is high, at least, perhaps, this approach may lighten the burden.

Search, for instance, could be optimised for both an individual's tags (personal relevance - a nice move down the line of trusted search) and the organisational classification (general/social relevance). This seems to be such an obvious benefit that I am convinced some bright spark out there must already have implemented this - any takers?

[NB: On a secondary note, the development of useful "social" meaning from self-motivated action is also evident in the New Scientist article, "Google's Search for Meaning", where searches on the Google index are used to define distances of meanings between concepts in order to develop an ontology - very cunning.]

Writing User Guides

I'm soon to attempt version three of our intranet CMS user guide - we have a good handle on what our users want and need to know, as they are pretty good at providing feedback, and I tend to act as the coalface for this. My issue is more in supporting the various different modes of learning that our users have (they range from the technically not knowledgeable to the technically very knowledgeable indeed!) and making sure that they move from passive reading to active learning.

With this in mind, I've been looking at various types of software training books to try to get a handle on as many different learning types as possible. So I've come up with the following ideas:

• use common-sense names as well as the technical names for all aspects of the system in the section title even if this makes it quite lengthy;
  
• use plenty of "What you need to know" call-outs - make these hands on demonstrations of key points of the system;
• use as many illustrations as possible - not just of the system, but some pictures/photos to make neophytes feel at ease (e.g. photo of a user using the system);
• keep the illustrations with the text they illustrate (not just "close to");
  
• repeat information over and over in as many ways as possible - for instance the "big picture" view, the "step-by-step" approach, the "case study" etc.;
  
• Have illustrative step-by-step instructions on the page, but back these up with animations of a user achieving these (ie. instructions backed up with a demo);
  
• run short end-of-section exercises to test the reader's knowledge;
  

Does anyone have any foolproof tips to add to this list? I'd really appreciate any input. As an NB: we do - of course - test the guide with users before releasing it, but are restricted to no more than three users, and not necessarily of all the types of user we would like to test against.

Enterprise Distributed Categorisation: I Get on the Folksonomy Bandwagon

I haven't posted for a while, but like many out there, I've been thinking about services like delicious which can offer the benefit of developing a folksonomy (a.k.a. free-tagging, ethno-classification, distributed tagging) within a corporate environment. On the wicky wacky world wide web, the benefits seem obvious - flat metadata categories which help you to easily identify useful information (power laws usually meaning that only a restricted set of tags become wholeheartedly utilitarian) from the vast quantity (and quality) that is available. Tags let you let others do your spadework for you.
I have been wondering whether in an enterprise environment, a similar folksonomy approach could be used for the rapid (and flexible) development of iterations of a classification system. Taxonomy projects always seem to be tagged as inflexible, long-winded and time-consuming - couldn't folksonomies get rid of some of these disbenefits?
Owing to my own priorities, I've been thinking about this for intranet metadata and search integration. It strikes me that the flat categorisation of a folksonomy could be clustered and analysed using the same techniques as are used for a card-sort, and that key, popular categories coming out of a distributed categorisation exercise could be used to form the structure of an intitial taxonomy.
I suppose my suggestion would be to allow a "tag this page" section in our CMS (which at present has very limited metadata functionality) which allows for multiple space delimited tags in the same fashion as delicious. This functionality would be explained to current content authors, who could tag new and existing content in an unrestricted manner for a set period of time. At the cut-off point, the tags would be analysed for popularity and similarity (synonyms, misspellings etc.), and a reduced set then used for an open (card) sort. The results of this could be analysed and transferred into a first iteration of a taxonomy, along set rules.
The taxonomy could then be exposed to the search engine and CMS - authors would now tag their content using the taxonomy, and, for ongoing maintenance would still have the option for creating a new tag. New tags could be processed by the taxonmomist and added/amended to the overall classification as necessary. I'm not sure whether this would work in practice, but it might be the outline of using rapid, distributed categorisation to move to a stable classification, and it would certainly reflect a consensus opinion...
[NB: Clay Shirky (I think) mentioned that delicious tags can be moved into hierarchies (xml>xslt, for instance or mammal>dog), although I can't find out how to do this, or any reference on delicious as to how to do so - otherwise, I might possibly suggest allowing users to set their own "corporate" hierarchies and then clustering them in this way rather than just going for the clustered approach.]
Has anyone implemented anything similar or looked at the pros and cons of such an approach? I know Adam Mathes Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata touches on some of the issues, as does Ulises Ali Mejias A del.icio.us study -
Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community, and the always helpful Lee Bryant at Headshift with Can social tagging overcome barriers to content classification?
[NB(2): check out extisp.icio.us while you are at it - if you haven't already - a nice visualisation of your own delicious personal information cloud.]
UPDATE:
Should have checked Louis Rosenfeld's bloug out first - some of this is discussed in a post there, makes for interesting reading.

Back from Thailand

Many thanks to everyone who emailed to see if we were OK after the Tsunami - your concern was greatly appreciated. Back in the UK in one piece, I suddenly remembered an inscription in our copy of "The Life of Pi" that Yann Martel wrote after spending the day with us in Glasgow: "May the ocean be merciful to you". I'm not a superstitious person, but this time I like to think of the inscription as having acted as a talisman, so thanks to Yann too.

Off to Thailand

No posts for a while - not that I've posted that much over the past fortnight, anyway - as my wife and I are off to Thailand for three weeks. Happy Christmas and Happy Hogmanay!

Management as making it difficult for people to get things done

This is a title from a post at Lilia's Mathamagenic site. I won't say anything other than that I feel an affinity for some of the ideas expressed within.

Entrepreneurs in Scotland

Many thanks to John McLeish of Equator, who invited me to the Entrepreneurial Exchange 10th anniversary awards ceremony in Glasgow this week. I must confess a) to never having heard of the exchange until John mentioned it b) having seen very many references to it over the last week - which shows that I was obviously being ignorant not to know about it c) being surprised at the reach and prestige of the Exchange. Certainly, with a lifetime achievement award for the Baxters (of soup fame), and recorded messages from Tony Blair (about which Fraser, one of the people at our table, was not too happy!), Gordon Brown and the Prince of Wales, it is hard not to picture a vibrant and entrepreneurial business community in Scotland.

Bloglines Self-reference

In the interests of transparency, I thought I'd publish the bloglines link of "People Subscribed to this Feed also Read" for Mark T's Info Blog. I'm not sure what view this gives into the reading habits of my few subscribers (thank you chaps/chapesses), and to be fair, I'm not sure what it says about me - but Tennyson did point out that mine is not to reason why... Do with this "information" what you will! Anyway Shirky I understand - but I find the other connections that are instantiated between my blog and other blogs by the efforts of collaborative filtering absolutely fascinating. ..

Rich Reach

Rich Internet (and Intranet) Applications (RIAs) have been on my mind recently, for a number of reasons (one being some really interesting posts by Jon Udell on "restful" RIAs), so it was with great interest that I headed along to the Scottish Usability Professionals' Association meeting at Microsoft, Edinburgh last night.

The main speaker was Steven Webster of iteration::two (and co-Author of "Developing Rich Clients with Macromedia Flex"). Steven's presentation was - in my opinion - pitched just right, and really gave a great overview of the fundamental concepts of well-developed RIAs and talked about some of the business benefits (obviously with a strong usability flavour). I've just been casting my eyes over Steven's weighty tome, and it looks pretty exhaustive. I'll try ad post a few highlights from the presentation as soon as I can get my hands on his PowerPoint presentation (which used Breeze, which also never fails to impress me in the right hands)... In the meantime, check out the Engineering Rich Internet applications site, and if you are in Scotland, head along to a SUPA meeting - as th upcoming events sound interesting!

Sweet - Veen and Venn

I almost feel like saying "Now and Venn" for Luke W's post on Venn diagrams in Information Architecture and User Experience. As a particular fan of the triangular equation (anyonoe for Physics revision?) and the pointed (mis-)use of the Venn, all I can say is enjoy...

What you cache is what you get

Hadn't ever come across wyciwyg until checking through my referrer logs - apparently it's mozilla caching. NB: how do you spell caching with or without the "e"?

Context, Enemy of the Blogosphere?

Some comments from Ian Mayes, readers' editor for the Guardian, have made me think that one "danger" of blogs is the diffusion of errors owing to quoting, commenting or linking either out of context or with no reference to context. I'll leave a precis quote of Mr Mayes article as an explanation (Open Door, Saturday November 6 2004), but it is food for thought - a kind of web-based chinese whispers. The article discussed (in part) a piece in the Guardian TV supplement which had resulted in a furore (it was about Bush's election victory) and had subsequently been commented upon by a number of American bloggers. Mr Mayes put forward as a mitigating factor that the TV supplement has a different editorial tone and target audience to the rest of the newspaper (as does the G2 supplement) - while also pointing out that there was no defence for the comments:

"(...) These distinctions begin to disappear when the material is put up on the website. They disappear almost entirely when linked from the home page. And there is no context whatsoever when they are picked up by bloggers, individuals conducting their own websites.

Blogs, particularly in the United States, played a big part in the dissemination of the comments in the (...) case. They do not usually want to give or even hint at context. They are often slow to pick up retractions or apologies. This "web effect" is something to which the Guardian, and other multi-section newspapers, need to give more thought."

(my bold)
I think Mr Mayes is tarring all bloggers with a rather large and ill-targeted brush on this point, as many bloggers are careful to set context with links out to background material. However, it would be fair to say that many are not so careful (and not everyone - and I include myself as a member of this group - is scrupulously careful 100% of the time), and this is a signal point for many news services and publishers to consider.

Intimacy Gradient

Via Claire Chaundy, I found myself back on Life with Alacrity for the second time this week, reading about the Intimacy Gradient [and Other Lessons from Architecture]. One addition that I have to add to the idea is that communication/collaboration methods also follow an intimacy gradient, from most removed to close proximity. Essentially this means that when initially estalishing trust, people follow a path from means of communication where they feel they are least exposed, moving down the gradient of intimacy toward the most exposed as trust builds. In practice, this means that there is a progression - in my experience - as follows: comments on blogs/postings to BBS; Instant Messaging/email exchanges; exchange of telephone numbers and/or conversation; meeting at an event/conference/organising to meet once(face-to-face); arranging additional meetings (face-to-face); shaking hands (individual space) and other physical contact. Forgetting about synchronous/asynchronous means of communicating, it is simply that levels of social confidence are built into the way we treat certain tools. The best social software, I reckon, both supports or integrates with these means of communcating and offers a path down the intimacy gradient (or is that "up"?).

On my bookshelf

Didn't the cranberries have an album called something like "Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We"? With this thought, I've noticed a few bloggers out there posting a "what I'm reading at the moment" story, so I thought I'd share mine:

Observing the User Experience - Mike Kuniavsky

Reads well so far, with decent practical advice: I agree with many of his working methods and points of advice.

Learning to Fly - Collison & Parcell

Thanks to David Gilmour for loaning me this. Haven't started it yet, but it's all about practical knowledge management.

Armadale - Wilkie Collins

This is a cracker of a 19th century potboiler, and I must get around to finishing it. If you can manage betrayal, poisoning, deceptive doubles, hidden secrets, back-street abortionists and the Norfolk Broads in one book, it's well worth a read.

Well, that's my catholic tastes up for display - any starters for ten?

Update in Basecamp

Bit of a geeky one this, but I love the [UPDATE] feature that has just been added to basecamp. Essentially you type "[UPDATE]" and your text is replaced by a wee green UPDATE icon. Simple but effective, like the rest of the application.

CRM and call centres

Having once worked in a call centre for a bank during its first e-banking forays (although very much in a "grunt" capacity to rip off the G.I. term), I feel quite sensitised to telephone-based customer contact: for this reason, I was initially delighted today when phoning Dell, I was given the opportunity to opt for a call-back (while retaining my place in the queue) instead of just holding. This reminded me of BA's callback confirmation for ticket amendments that they ran around 2000/2001 (haven't bothered to check if they still do).

Anyway, I said initially delighted, as Dell have yet to call me back, about 5 hours later for an estimated 5 minute queue. Obviously, I should have held on - my first two attempts to ring back were cut off, then I hit another queue. I'm not saying Dell have missed the opportunity of a purchase, but I can't say I'm impressed at the performance of functionality which gave me the initial "great" factor. I'm assuming it's just a glitch, but I might give it another go and see if it works...

Time Management Again

One thing I have worked out about my failures in time management is the work/home/not at work/not at home series of divides. I try to use a Palm Zire, a Nokia phone, Outlook (home and work) and scribbled lists in pads/calendars/diaries and on bits of paper to keep track of everything, but I cannot use anyone of these except the last to keep all my diary and task information together. I often wish that I could have one to-do list/diary that I could access and update from anywhere - pen and paper wouldn't work, I'd never manage it, and I wouldn't get nice ringing/vibrating reminders for things I had forgotten!

UPDATE - 30/10/2004

Funnily enough, here's John Udell chatting about much the same thing!

Middlespace

Via Lilia Efimova, this quote from Ross Mayfield:

"Where the bottom-up and top-down meet -- middlespace -- is the realm of policy, metrics, incentives, cooperation and sharing control."

I like this term, it's a nice way of looking at the messy area that is all about stimulating interactions (be they collaboration, co-operation or communication), but also about the governance and control issues that go with them. Having spent a portion of today writing a set of Terms & conditions for our intranet bulletin board system, I've had fun with just what messy territory it can be. Having checked with Legal and Information Security teams, I'm looking to engage what I call "controlled freedom" (oxymoronic, eh?) - which I now realise is middlespace, the hinterland (or is that tweenerland?) in between allowing more direct communication in the enterprise (making sure that initial enthusiasm is retained), and ensuring that this stays within boundaries acceptable to the enterprise itself...oh, and of course, delivers benefits to the enterprise, its formal departments and groups, the individual worker and any Communities of Practice. It's actually a neat representation of the conundrum posed by Jesse James Garrett's Venn diagram of Content, Context, Users (which I thought was in "The Elements of User Experience" but which appears not to be on a quick flick-through) - how do you satisfy this middlespace of competing needs, how do you hit the sweetspot?

Intranet Benchmarking Forum Live

Intranet Benchmarking Forum Live was a great success - and I'll try and put up some relevant notes and links over the next few days. Highlights for me included another excellent presentation from Adam Joinson of the Open University on online behaviours, an insight into tasks on the BBC intranet (they have a nice attitude toward user-centered design), and chats with some of the guys from search vendors, Endeca, Kevin Keohane of the IBF as usual and Dr Liz Daniels of Cranfield University's Information Systems department - and my presentation on intranets and crisis communications seemed to go down reasonably well... (I hope!).

Some of the other attendees were particularly taken with Gerry McGovern's presentations - personally, I felt that he was preaching to the converted (but that might be because I used to be an editor, and have read his book, Content Critical - but at the very least he was entertaining.

Perhaps the best thing about the day, however, was that the stated aim of being a more interactive conference pretty much succeeded - although as the day was very packed, everyone looked fairly bushed at the end. Personally, I felt that the table-topping exercise I ran at the end of my presentation (ably facilitated by Bridget Peake) ended up being more useful to attendees than my presentation itself. I was also happy to coin a catchphrase during Plumtree's portal presentation - "Take care, low-hanging fruit can sometimes be rotten" (surprisingly Gerry also made use of a rotten fruit metaphor in his presentation, but was referring to out-of-date content).

Slippery Words

I love the slippery nature of language - particularly what I like to call semantic wobbles (although I'm sure there's a technical linguistic term for them) where not enough attention has been paid to the rules of language, and a phrase "wobbles" away from its intended meaning. Take this example from my workplace, for instance:

"Soap Machine
Sometimes Jams
Press repeatedly"

Because the phrase misses out the definite article, and takes on a telegraphic style, I now think that our dispenser may occasionally bring forth a raspberry preserve or plum compote if I "press repeatedly". Pedantic I know, but it made me chuckle.

Relevanta - online reputation

I was meithering quite a few months ago for a while about online reputation particularly insofar as it could be leveraged to deliver either "personalised" results or results where it was easier to evaluate the relevance of results returned on a search query. With this in mind, I am intrigued by Relevanta - which I came across via the Social Software Weblog. At the moment, you can sign up and then post comments and ratings to a political area, thus building (I assume) both the content authors reputation, and your own reputation as reviewer and commenter using their experience system. I've not yet entirely grasped how best to use this, but it seems like an interesting implementation of some of the areas I was looking at in particular. Take a look, it could at least be fun...

JotSpot - interesting looking wiki

In looking at various online authoring tools along the stasis-flow line, I've just come across the interesting-looking Jotspot (via Jon Udell). It's a WYSIWYG interfaced wiki tool with additional application-type add-ons. Worth further investigation...there's a beta sign-on available if anyone is interested.

Information Foraging

I haven't seen anything on this for a while, but here's a good introduction to Information Foraging at InfoVis by Juan C. Dürsteler. I always think that the sorts of Web tools that add "good scent" are breadcrumb trails, faceted categories for search showing the number of results under each facet, recommendation metadata and search categories - including best bets.

Time Management

I have been really under the cosh over the past few weeks (nay, months) both in personal and professional terms (in fact, my blog reflects this with a dip in postings). What I'd really love to know is:

When you really have too much on your plate, how do you decide which important items may actually have to be dropped?

One of these days, I am sure I am going to get this sussed, but if anyone has any thoughts, let me know...

Collaborative / Social software strategy - help?

I have been taxed with putting together a "taster" document for my company to put out the feelers within the business for online collaborative working and communication tools - the document is supposed to cover Blogs, wikis (blikis), online project management, bulletin boards, RDF (including RSS) etc. What I want to hear are successful stories of the implementation of such tools on an intranet to support specific business aims - I'm not looking at outward facing blogs etc., purely inter-staff communications very much from a Personal Information space / Communities of Practice / Formal company groups perspective if that makes sense. I know that there have been a few comments on this sort of stuff, for instance on Lou Rosenfeld's bloug and Michael's urlgreyhot in the past few months, but I'm keen to hear specific stories that may help me in initiating such practices.

The sort of stuff I've been looking at is Basecamp (which I really like) and Web Collaborator (which is useful in a stripped-down-to-basics way), Ikonboard, and general wiki and blog bits and pieces...

UPDATE - 02/10/2004

Many thanks to Lee Bryant of Headshift who pointed me to his presentation on informal, joined-up knowledge sharing [...] - which at first glance looks a) useful, and b) very much in line with my thinking.

Speaking at IBF Live, London

I'm going to be speaking at IBF Live on the 20th of October in London about using an intranet in a time of rapid change or crisis (from a communications/governance perspective rather than a technical side, but I might touch on the odd techy aspect). Anyway, IBF Live looks like it is going to be a good opportunity to catch up on a number of interesting intranet aspects - I think the event is being partly sponsored by PlumTree and Endeca - don't know too much about PlumTree's CMS activities so I'm looking forward to speaking to them!

Readings on Web Credibility

Via the Stanford Captology Notebook, the references for an HCI encylopaedia chapter on web credibility and online trust: Readings on web credibility -- the best list ever compiled. This is a bit of a bookmark to myself to trawl through the list...

Learning Management

I'm looking at e-learning strategies at the moment, specifically the delivery of Authorware content over an intranet. The way I see it, a good strategy would be to have some form of XML based Learning Content Management System to produce and amend content, feeding into an AICC/SCORM-compliant Learning Management System for tracking and admin (then pumping it out via the intranet). Are there any LMS/LCMS combinations out there that fit tightly with Authorware (I'm assuming this must be a yes), and does anyone have any experience of them? All useful feedback appreciated.

Feeling a Bit Guilty About the Lack of Posts

I'm feeling more than a bit guilty that I haven't posted to my blog in almost a month. To be honest, however, I've been so busy with work and my wedding, that the blog has had to suffer.

I was intrigued yesterday to receive my company's "Human Performance" training (which was surprisingly good) which forms part of a wider company improvement initiative. One thing that stood out for me was the use of the idea of "human error" to mean any undesired human event, where both "human error" and "human mistake" should have been used. It's fine to cover unintentional, automatic events, but the more intentional should also be dealt with as well.

Accessibility and Intranets

I was told recently of a case in the UK where a woman who became blind, was subsequently unable to access applications on her PC, and litigated against her employers. I may have got the wrong end of the stick on this one, but if anybody knows the details, can they let me know? I'd be interested, as it could be an excellent stick for good practice, standards adherence, accessibility and treating your employees right (it always helps to have some convincing ammo).

Probably won't be posting over the next fortnight as I'm off to get married in France.

Sweets delivering results!

I had an email from Scott Berkun - who always writes such interesting pieces on www.uiweb.com - yesterday in response to my suggestion to him that small, unexpected treats (like a sweet) at the beginning of a training session lead to more creative training [NB: this was in response to an article of Scott's - I think it was The problems of training]. I'm sure it's ust a matter of relaxing people (and giving them a mild sugar rush), but it works for me - I hope Scott gets similar results!

Laziness

By dint of being a bit busy with other things, I haven't posted anything on the blog for a while. I would cite Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness", but I haven't been exactly idle... I've also been concentrating on writing on my other new blog, Semantic Wobble, which is mostly about cinema as I seem to have been spending a deal of time glued to the silver screen (and the smaller screen too with DVDs - Pirates of the Caribbean: what was the big hoo-hah about, I thoght it was a bit boring, myself). So this is an abject apology to myself for not putting the effort into the Info Blog!

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

This via nate's notes:

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!
This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).
The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) --- results and commentary will appear there in the future.
Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate -- the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.
The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst(this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google or other search engines for all blogs that participate in this experiment, once they have indexed the sites that participate). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)
INSTRUCTIONS
To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).
REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)
(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://natek.typepad.com/blog/
(2) I found it via "Newsreader Software" or "Browsing the Web" or "Searching the Web" or "An E-Mail Message": Newsreader Software
(3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://marktsinfoblog.blogspot.com
(4) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 05/08/2004
(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 09:37:00
(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):
(7) My blog is hosted by: Blogger
(8) My age is: 31
(9) My gender is: Male
(10) My occupation is: Online Strategist
(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Bloglines
(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: Blogger
(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 27/05/03
(14) My web browser is: IE 5.5
(15) My operating system is: Windows NT

Another helpful accessibility widget

Via the Ease of Use mailing list, I learned of an IBM addition to the accessibility checker/assistant tools list. This one, aDesigner, looks like it could be useful in combination with other tools, heuristic evaluation and user testing (probably at the early stages). As the description states:

"The aDesigner is a disability simulator that helps Web designers ensure that their pages are accessible and usable by the visually impaired.
Voice browsers and screen readers read aloud the text on Web pages and are used by visually impaired people. However, these devices are less effective with certain kinds of content, such as highly graphical material. Web developers can use aDesigner to test the accessibility and usability of Web pages for low-vision and blind people. "

Sounds interesting and potentially useful - one to download when I get 5 minutes.

User Feedback...Good to Receive?

Sometimes I have a good old grumble at the feedback I receive for the company intranet (and not so often at the website feedback), but today, I was elated to receive an email from one of our CMS users in response to an upgrade email I had sent around. There were four elements to the upgrade, and the response went:

"1. good idea, 2. better idea 3. this is good too 4. this will make things easier"

Now according to this emailer, all we need to add is a wysiwyg spell-checker (in the pipeline) and he'll be happy as Larry.

My question from all this is as follows: should we be honest and say that it is "constructive" feedback (read "negative") that the IA/ID/UX practitioner should pay attention to, or should we say that the odd pat on the back is good for morale, and shows our attention to our users? Given that as Schiller said "Du Kannst nicht allen gefallen" (I think he said this - "You can't please everyone!"), when do you draw the line with a piece of feedback and say it's just not helpful (because it is too laudatory or unnecessarily critical)?

Who needs permalinks?

So far as purple links and perma links are concerned, how's about the Bible for permanence. The Book, Chapter, Verse system has worked for a long time, and still does, as I discovered when guiding my friend Tom to a wedding reading in the Song of Songs (Chapter/Song 2, if you must know). Sometimes the oldies are the goodies, now where's my parchment?

Heuristics only take you so far

I've been at home nursing a fever the past three days, and apart from feeling sorry for myself, and watching the Peter Weir adaptation of Patrick O'Brien's "Master & Commander" (great Boys' Own stuff, and very good when you're down in the dumps), I've started reading "The World of Christopher Marlowe". The great thing about this book so far is that it puts Marlowe's writing into a very clear socio-historical context, including the virtues of a Cambridge education.

What interested me was the emphasis on heuristics for oratory and rhetoric: which reminded me very much of the advice drummed into me by a French lecteur at college - argument, counter-argument, synthesis and conclusion. Having a wayward mind, I found such linguistic corsetry a little frustrating at University, and I've always been of the opinion that rule-based learning only takes you so far. I think this lesson stretches into the world of the Web, and was summed up very nicely on Christina's Elegant Hack site with a posting on "Good Gut", where experience was highlighted over heuristics, heuristics are not enough...    

NB: not sure that I like the new HTML editor on Blogger - wasn't the previous instance sufficient without giving us all the virtues of a WYSIWYG editor? Did I really need to add colour to this post? I liked being able to add HTML in directly without an "edit HTML" option.

Amazon recommendations

I was checking out the IMDB the other day and noticed their Bayesian weighted ranking system

weighted rank=(votes cast/(votes cast+minimum votes to be in top 50)) x mean rating + (minimum votes to be in top 50 /(votes cast+minimum votes to be in top 50)) x mean vote across the vote population

I think I've got this right! Thinking about recommendations engines, I then thought I'd go and sort out my personal Amazon recommendations (as most of my Amazon purchases have been corporate) by ranking items that I own and/or have read/viewed/used. I was pretty surprised at how (simply)comparative the engine appears to be: most of my recommendations so far are for authors I have read before and/or other editions of books I have read/CDs/DVDs and just a little bit of "others who purchased this..." Maybe I'm mis-calling Amazon on this one, as I know other people who say that Amazon second-guesses their purchases, but I would have thought ranking a couple of hundred items would give slightly more interesting recommendations. Oh well, I shall continue ranking and see if I'm more satisfied. Anyway, I seem to remember that there is a recommendations engine expert at Glasgow University (I think he's involved with the Information Retrieval Group) - if I can remember his name, I might send him an email to find out a bit more about the nuts and bolts of recommendations (hopefully it will be comprehensible to someone without undergrad maths).

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!