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.

Holiday!

I'm off on my hols & will probably not have access to blogger for a couple of weeks - so no new postings for a while.

Blog Qualities

Just a quick note, I'll get back to this later. I was reading "On the bursty evolution of Blogspace" (Kumar, Raghaven, Novak, Tomkins) and pondering what the defining qualities of a blog are. So a very brief starter for ten is:

• it's closely linked to time - date stamping, date ordering
• usually to a single person - which ties it in closely to trust and reputation
• highly linked (whether cross-blog postings, blogrolls or intra-blog linking in terms of Comments etc.) - this then means (along with point 2) that they form a tight sense of community

Anyone else have any particular "defining" thoughts...

I feel clairvoyant...

I was mightlily chuffed to see via Metro that Firefighters in Fife, Scotland, are being equipped with Nokia photo mobiles to take pictures at fires and road accidents to send on to consultants at hospitals in Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy. I mentioned a short while ago that I thought this was a great opportunity for photo mobiles, and I'm glad to see it actually happening.

Six Degrees of Speed

My girlfriend was delighted today when, within three hours of sending an email (or courriel in this case) to a long-lost friend (whose email she discovered via a google search) she had a response from said-friend who was having drinks in 10 minutes with a girl whose wedding they are both about to go to in a few weeks. It might easily be put down to networks and the small world theory, but all the same, it's always surprising when it happens so swiftly.

My colleague, Jeremy, also had a dose of the same medicine when sending around a fun email getting people to compose film, book and song titles which might use the comedy haircut term, Mullet, in them. Jeremy was stunned that within two hours of pinging this message to no more than a half-dozen people, he was getting responses from across the UK, Switzerland and the Middle East.

Photo Mobiles

Here in the UK, we are currently being bombarded with ads from mobile phone players like T-Mobile (in its distinctive pink livery - not a Germanic colour in my book) to pick up on 2.5G/3G picture messaging services.

Most of the ads are trying to get people into "mob" activities - suncream fights, pillow fights, frisbee throwing etc. All well and good, but not really a world changing benefit.

Anyway, reading through the venerable Big Issue recently, I came across a small clipping explaining that Junior Doctors in Wales have been using photo mobiles to take pictures of X-Rays and forward them to consultants for assistance in diagnosis. It strikes me that this is a great use of the service - it could be extended maybe to teh general public with a 999-PHOTO number where, say, if you were at the scene of a traffic accident you could post a message to this service and receive a text of instructions from a trained medical professional while the emergency services beetled over to you ("Don't take off the motorcyclist's helmet, check his/her airways are clear...")

So, I reckon a big push for the medical services industry could be on its way.

Trust/Reputation in Search

I've been wondering whether reputation can be conveyed in any other way in search algorithms than Google's PageLink algorithm (which seems to me to be a measure of popularity - albeit in a network sense - rather than of reputation). I was reading an article in the ASIST Journal called "When Documents Deceive" by Clifford A. Lynch on the bus home, and came across the phrase:

"The question of formalizing and recording expectations...[of] trust in behavior [is] very poorly explored. There are a number of avanues: certification or rating services that might be consulted, or webs of individuals vouching for behaviour of others"

I'd been pondering whether it might be possible (particularly in an intranet) to modify a search engine so that when a user rates a page, he or she can also see in his/her search results how people like him/herself have rated the pages and/or how people he or she trusts rated the pages. This might seem a bit daft, but I was wondering whether, a bit like FOAF, a search engine could have a "who do you trust?" section, where you log-in, and then identify other people on a database whose opinion you trust. Search results might gain extra weighting within the overall results based on their "reputation" rating 9where the results would be specific to your trust network). I suppose the problem is placing the burden on users of registering and keeping their "trust networks" up to date, and the fact that it would become a very large database, but that detail could be ironed out by brains greater than my own.

Bah! Humbug

A section of the company intranet needed some serious IA attention. Because,perhaps more than any other section of the intranet, it focuses on end user needs and tasks, I ran a 20-person card-sort to get some idea of end-user ideas on groupings and labelling of these groups. Got some useful results, turned them into a decent wireframe with our CMS, then my boss presented the results to the "section" working group.

The working group said they didn't care for a lot of the user-focused stuff and wanted to stick to a fairly "departmental" viewpoint. Although I accepted this with gritted teeth, it was still fine as we had manged to make some significant progress on the section structure. So I re-worked the wireframe (not a small job) and we re-presented the findings for the working group's approval.

Lo and behold, some of them said - "I thought the purpose of this exercise was to focus on tasks and users". This from the every people who had rejected the initial user- and task-focused structure. Sometimes I despair! Send me valium.

Blog geography

via Tom at the OTHERmedia's blog, I've posted this blog to Blizg - it shows the closest blogs to mine geographically (that have been entered on Blizg) and the closest to mine topically (by analysing meta tags). Check out my listings: very nice.

Baby Perl

Because I haven't done any programming to speak of since I was nine or ten, and dabbling with BASIC on a BBC B Micro, I've decided to start to learn Perl. I've got my SAMS book and a couple of O'Reilly guides, and am ready to go.

Hierarchical labels

There have been a lot of postings on SIGIA with regard to Jakob Nielsen's kind of bland article on information foraging recently - but the article itself did send me off in search of some information retrieval articles. One I found called "Web Page Design: Implications of Memory, Structure and Scent for Information Retrieval" by Kevin Larson and Mary Czerwinski at Microsoft research had some interesting conclusions (and I'll be honest, I was naughty, and skim-read the body, jumping to the conclusions). The conclusions are great because they suggest that if you ensure that the "information scent" (to use the in "meme" du jour) at each classification level is strong - i.e. label things clearly such that they give you a clear idea of what they are, and what else you'll find if you follow the link; and aim for a middle-path between a broad and shallow in terms of your site structure.

Not rocket science, but it's nice to have a justification for what seems like good practice.

The Web for the blind

I read a posting on Accessify about the RNIB supporting individuals in the UK in accessibilty cases. It looks as though we are moving toward a situation, as in the States, where W3C-type guidelines might have a basis in law. It's worth keeping an eye out on this one

UPDATE

Check out this interview with Julie Howell of the RNIB on Made for All.

Making "stuff" useful

Postings on Peter Merholz’ blog and Idblog that I’ve commented on have sparked off a train of thought in my head: the art of making stuff useful (as semantically neutral a statement as I can make it).

I’ve been pondering this for a bit: my thoughts are partially related to Lou Rosenfeld’s attempt at an all-encompassing image of how different fields relate to one another (I'll link to this when I can remember where on his site it is), but much more to my own position where I do a bit of Information Architecture and design, a bit of editorial work, some graphic design, some usability (and very amateur psychology and ethnography) along with business strategy etc.

Sometimes it’s difficult to relate each discipline to the other, but I feel that the common denominator is “usefulness”. I’m not trying to set this out as a new discipline, more as a connector, a way of thinking about the other things. It might seem like a reduction ad absurdum (and maybe it is – commonality is often reductive as menu items often show), but I like to think of it as a mantra in the back of my head: is this useful to the end-user, is it useful to the business, is it useful full stop (what’s the use of it?)?

Richard Buchanan kind of hit a similar note in his essay “Good Design in the Digital Age” in the book Used – Browser 3.0: The Internet Design Project when he stated:

”Qualities of usefulness, usability and desirability play a central role in good design for websites and all digital products. But there is one final step to turn them into useful tools of product development: discovering the proper balance of all three qualities for a particular product and the people who use the product.”

I’d extend this beyond “three qualities” and user/product demands, but it’s essentially my point. I could extend the analogy further, as I was considering an essay-length posting, but brevity is king, so I’ll stop here.

Reputation and Trust (an update)

While reading an O'Reilly piece on captology, I came across a URL that I'd completely forgotten about, and meant to mention in an earlier piece on online trust and reputations: the Stanford Web Credibility Research pages. Anyway, it's very interesting reading - even if you have read it before. I suppose this is a bit of a "note to self"

Annual Report - hooray

I was co-opted into the company's annual reporting this year owing to my editorial experience - I suppose it's nice to do some print work for a change. I've just got advance copies of the report in, and I'm really chuffed with the results given that I was responsible for design and production (as well as a whole heap of proofing). I've really enjoyed working with the design agency and printers that I selected for us to work with, so want to say thanks to them also. They are:

Emperor Design

Pillans & Waddies

All I can say is it's clean, austere and feels...well, a bit Swiss. Just what I was after.