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Wednesday, March 27, 2002
There's nothing nicer than a new desk chair at work.
peterme posted a link to Turntablist Transcription to SIGIA but it's cool enough to toss in here for later reference. It's a system of notation for turntable scratching and it's pretty cool.
Also worth bookmarking is this presentation about 3-dimensional site maps with lots of nice photos. I've only made 3-D site maps when I crumple up my site maps into balls of paper.
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
From an article in today's Post: "I realize that this bill basically says you can tap someone's phone for jaywalking, and normally I would say, 'No way,' " said Del. Dana Lee Dembrow (D-Montgomery). "But after what happened on September 11th, I say screw 'em."
Dembrow is a Democrat from the county I grew up in. What a fuckwit. Thanks, Maryland. And why don't I want to go back to the US?
Thursday, March 21, 2002
FYI, the Thesaurus Construction PDF I linked to yesterday is indeed a free download (here in three parts of about 4Megs each). It costs $55 for the printed version. You can also download another version of the same thing here; actually, that second version looks to me much nicer on screen, though it doesn't include an Acrobat table of contents.
Tuesday, March 19, 2002
Hey baby, where you been all my life? Guidelines for the Construction,
Format, and Management of Monolingual Thesauri (3MB .pdf) is an exhaustive, 81-page encyclopedia of Thesaurus construction. Why haven't I ever seen a link to this before?
Friday, March 15, 2002
Thrills! I've updated my resume which has been out of date for months. Don't all click that link at once....
An article in the NYT today, Piracy, or Innovation? is pretty interesting, even given the amount of coverage the issue of Hollywood's demands for built-in copy-protection has gotten. It's amazing the amount of ignorance that characterizes the whole thing: Senator Hollings says that without safegaurds, Hollywood won't have an incentive to make digital television and broadband content that will drive consumer interest in technology. Like all that Hollywood-funded broadband content that even people with broadband didn't want? The president of News Corporation says: "without copyright protection we will change our business models and the loser will be the public." What a damn whiner, threatening to take his toys and go home.
Thursday, March 14, 2002
Has anyone else noticed that Monster.com is getting more and more senile? I still have it email me job postings, but they're getting really off-base, like it's made some wrong assumption and has built a whole profile of me around it. I regularly get job listings for jobs requiring engineering degrees, or for insurance sales positions, or things in countries I don't live in. The latest one: "March 13: Phd Mathematical/ 3D Virtual Reality Researcher, Computer Futures, Amsterdam."
Back on February 20, I posted a note to SIGIA pointing out Nathan Shedroff's essay 'What Has Become of Experience Design.' Shedroff's essay has apparently migrated from his site to BoxesandArrows.com, with the new and awkward title of The making of a discipline: the making of a title." (Want instant academic credibility? Add a colon into every essay title.)
The essay's been substantially revised for the better, although since the original version's gone, you'll have to take my word for it. I thought it was pretty unformed when he put it on his site--he accurately calls it a rant. It's certainly been improved in its new form, probably by the editor who's given writing credit with Shedroff. Sheroff isn't IA "party line", and it's not bad to have a dissenting view in the first issue of B&A. Plus there's the design-rockstar thing that might attract readers.
In fact, lot of his comments are right on: the academics of CHI have no idea what to do with design issues, and most people who should understand the value of design don't.
And I do sort of agree with this, one of his more contentious statements that made it past the editors: "About two years ago, the slight schism between visual decoration and information design opened into a gulf between the information architects, who claimed the best, most strategic and most cognitive aspects of information design, and the information designers, who were relegated by these titans to follow tactical instructions, perform menial tasks, and, generally, make the least contributions to the structuring of information and experiences."
Although I disagree with the reason he identifies: "Make no mistake here, this was a political and strategic attempt to elevate a strata of people who would, hopefully, become the elite of the information designers: The architects were to designers as traditional architects were to interior designers." Please. Stragtegic? The IA community can't hardly get strategic now, two years on. I think anyone who had that kind of land-grab mentality has surely been filtered out of the gene pool, as it were.
I, for one, am glad that IAs have largely stopped behaving as if we could take control of business plans and market strategy as well as we could take hold of metadata or navigation structures. If there was any attempt at power-grabbing, it was surely there. Still, when any idea was seen as a good one, it was hard not to overreach one's abilities.
I guess the bottom line for me is that while Shedroff's work is good (for example the Herman Miller Red case study at DesignInteract.com), it's not as if he's doing anything special or even that different from what other IAs are doing. There's no magic experience design going on there, just decent web design (with some frankly glaring usability problems and even one or two production gaffes). 'Experience Design' offers me almost nothing to apply to the information architecture problems I have: how to control and collect metadata, how to build and maintain a thesaurus, how to decide whether my categorization scheme is good or bad, or how to incorporate usability principles in my form layouts. In the absence of Shedroff designing a Las Vegas casino or amusement park, I'll take his grand theories of experience design with a grain of salt, and look to people doing work like the work I'm doing for advice.
Friday, March 08, 2002
In contrast to the super-clear Epitonic.com that I linked to yesterday, neumu.net is a news, music, and culture site that's painfully hard to navigate, but with a lovely style. Lots of interesting content, though, especially some good music and movie reviews.
This was posted to SIGIA today. It's fascinating: a study to determine how to leave warning signs for future civilizations about dangerous radioactive zones. Not a military or government effort, this includes linguists, anthropologists, and designers, and tackles some fundamental issues about communication, language, and values. Some of the warning system ideas are really frightening. "We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture."
Thursday, March 07, 2002
via kottke: a safety training film, I guess. It's really just a collection of scenes of people doing stupid, stupid things, some of them on the job. There are some truly grim things in here, like the one where the guy's using a sander and his "pal" tosses him some goggles. Naturally, a hand is fed into that sander. shudder.
Nice information architecture of the week: Epitonic.com. It's a smart music site with some clever features, like the ability to "stream this page" and hear in sequence all the links to streaming audio on any page. Epitonic also has "music genre walkthroughs", short streamed intros to those obscure genres you can never quite tell apart. Music's categorized by genre, but most stuff fits into multiple categories, so Solex goes in "Pop, Neo-Dada, and Found Sounds". Lots of great browsing and searching options, too.
Wednesday, March 06, 2002
Music reccommendation: "Source Tags and Codes" by Austin's own ...and you will know us by the trail of dead. I never really listened to Trail of Dead before, although I think one of them works at Little City where I get coffee. "Source Tags and Codes" is damn good, pretty much an entire sound developed from Sonic Youth's "Teenage Riot," particularly evident on "Relative Ways." Earlier stuff has been sort of lo-fi in comparison, and the sound really benefits from a slightly glossier and more tuneful touch.
Tuesday, March 05, 2002
Flash 6, or "Flash MX" as they're calling it (I guess "XP" was taken by too many other products) is looking interesting. Flash is probably the only thing to rival Macintosh in terms of brand-fans who salivate over every rumor and leaked tidbit of information. Like Apple, they're on to something which really gets people going, and makes them want to learn and create new stuff.
In fact, I'll trade some potential damage to usability for a community which is excited about innovation. Remember being excited that new things were coming out?It really is remarkable the ways that Flash has grown up over the last few versions, each one seems like a huge leap from the previous one. Good ol' Director never really seemed to make such advances (although it was pretty cool when behaviors first came out).
