Luckily found this by accident in my bookmarks…Tutorial on Thesaurus Construction. Once the appetite has been wet there’s the $65 book. Thanks to Peter for the book recommendation.
Author: Victor
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IA Job Board
The AIfIA Job Board serves as a clearinghouse for position postings relating to information architecture and more broadly to information design, interaction design, and HCI. The Job Board is a service for AIfIA members.
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IA Salary Survey
Do you practice IA? Want to see what the current spread of salary and benefits looks like? Take the survey now, bask in raw data later.
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Information Research
Lisa Chan surfaces a link to Information Research, a free, international, scholarly journal, dedicated to making freely accessible the results of research across a wide range of information-related disciplines. The reviews look like a great way to keep up with new books, and of course there’s a weblog.
This is wonderful. I’d love to see more journals become free and available online, perhaps supported by grants rather than by horrifically expensive subscriptions or association memberships. Otherwise they rot away on library shelves read only by those in academia.
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Olivetti Design
Olivetti: communication through design, a lovely little overview of the company’s design history.
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Note to Self
Note to Self: Hotels.com sucks. As a front end to many backends they have little control over the bookings they originate. As a company not directly in the hospitality industry they don’t have the same culture of hospitality. Their contact form requires a java applet that is buggy. Their phone hold times can be long. Go elsewhere, like Expedia.
Later…just met someone from the development team. Hmmmmm…at least I was able to give them direct feedback :)
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Floridian?
I’ve got two more weeks of working in Delray Beach, Florida, which is halfway between Ft. Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. Any IAs down here? Wanna hang? Mail me: victor (at) victorlombardi dot com.
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Need a Sys Admin in NJ?
A long-time friend of mine is a crack UNIX System Administrator in search of a job in the New Jersey, USA area. Resume (MS Word).
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Design & Emotions
Pieter Desmet is doing some great work in designing for and measuring emotions. I particularly like PrEmo, a visual scale of facial expressions for a user to specify an emotion they’re feeling.
James Kalbach, danke f�r den Hypertext-Link.
Keywords: marketing, brand, cartoon, face
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Java.com
Java.com is a sprightly little entry by Sun targeted at consumers. In the least we should all be thankful for a coherent way to download the software, which comes in a dizzying array of incomprehensible variations on Sun’s site.
And since the site emerged from my colleagues I feel OK poking fun at it’s obvious and stereotypical IA-then-design process roots. I can see the boxes sitting there in Visio…Download! Learn! Explore! :)
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Gothamist
Gothamist is a pretty good read for those, like me, that find Gawker a little too Daily News. Thanks Tanya.
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Mirra Chair
The new Mirra Chair from Herman Miller is said to be a better fit for more body sizes, easier to adjust, more colorful, more green, and less expensive (<$800) than the Aeron. Due in stores near the end of June.
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Mr. Nahzah
Mr. Nahzah comes in once a week for a pound, French Roast, Melitta grind. Occassionally he and his wife drop in for an espresso after dinner. He’s an electrician nearing retirement, she runs the stationary store on 3rd. They immigrated from Berlin together in 1950. He is always well-dressed, a charming man. He approaches me while I’m staring at the screen, "What is that?"
I look up, "Huh? Oh, I’m trying to improve my website."
"Our son bought us a computer. All our vacation plans we online planned. We’re going to Spain. Can I order coffee from this site?"
"Once it’s finished. In fact…" recognizing a victim when I see one, I swivel the monitor towards him, "would you like to try it?" You buy the French roast every week, right?"
"Ya."
"So how would you do that here?"
"Let me see." He squints his eyes and looks at everything on the screen, reading and re-reading to himself. One very long minute goes by.
"So, what’s your guess?"
"Ah, ah, I don’t know."
"You want the French Roast, right?"
"Ya."
"And that’s a type of coffee, right?"
"Ya, of course."
"So wouldn’t you click on ‘Beans’?"
"But I don’t want beans. I want it ground."
"Yes, yes, of course. But before they’re grounds they’re beans.”
“But I don’t want beans.”
“Yes, I know. But nothing else makes sense. So you’d click on ‘Beans,’ right?"
"Ahhhh, ahhhhh," still starting at the screen, his face turns red and his head starts to shake, finally blurting out, "Das kann ich doch nicht riechen!"
Ouch. We’re both silent for an uncomfortable moment. I realize I’ve reduced this poor old man to cursing at me in another language, "Ohmigod, I’m sorry. I totally stressed you out. I’m so sorry."
"No, no, I am sorry. I lost my temper. ‘Beans,’ you are right. It is my fault, I should have known it was ‘Beans.’"
I triy to recover by lightening the mood, "Ummmm, so, was that something in German you said before?"
"Oh, ya, that is a German saying. It means, ‘I cannot smell that.’ We say that when we don’t know what something is just by looking at it."
"Ah, got it. ‘Smell that,’ it’s a funny phrase though."
"But I think it works well. We can tell by the smell of something if it is good, like food. I wanted to know which was the good link, but couldn’t ‘smell’ it, you see."
"Kinda. So, I should make that link smell better."
"Yes, it should smell like what I’m looking for."
"So my little blue link here should give off a pungent, slightly burnt aroma, with chocolate overtones?"
"Yes! Yes!" he smiled widely and nodded yes.
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wikilogs.com
Bill Seitz has launched wikilogs, ‘a hosting service which lets you maintain a personal wikilog, or wiki-based weblog‘ and includes his trademark wit, ‘ I’ve done some things to make wikilogs.com a bit more reader-friendly than the average wiki, and I’ll be doing more, but you’ll probably never get that Jason Kotte feeling here. So, if you’re one of those people who asked “why the heck is Julia marrying Lyle?”, you’re probably more of a weblog person.’ While I can barely create a three color palatte, I’d still like to see a user-definable wiki CSS file option. Witness the design variation possibilities at Zen Garden.