Victor – Page 33 – Noise Between Stations

A Question

How will we create and access information in 10 years? In 20 years?

How do you wish we would?

Progress is so constant we rarely pause to acknowledge it. We have split the atom, put astronauts on the moon, and replaced unhealthy hearts in the living with healthy hearts from the dead. Computer technology leaves a record of faster, smaller, easier to use technology: We’ve come from mainframe computers the size of large rooms to microprocessors embedded in credit cards. From assembly language to Java. From command line interfaces to mouse-and-keyboard driven multimedia interfaces. From computers dialing each other at 1200 bits per second to constant communication at millions of bits per second.

We have so much potential.

With so much progress, it strikes me as odd that we devote so little time to planning for it. We have an understanding of what we need to do now when designing products (“make it usable”, “make it beautiful”, “increase brand equity”…). How helpful it would be to hold similar common understandings of what we should all have 10 years from now. This could then guide all our efforts towards our goals, rather than design products as a series of guesses about what should be next year.

How will we create and access information in 10 years? How do you wish we would?

Two or Three Degrees of Bloggers

Adam recently hooked me up with a friend of his that was tight with all the beatniks I used to hang out with at Rutgers University. We re-lived days of hosting bad radio shows, writing dubious poetry, and playing self-confessional folk music. And yesterday, Michael and I discover we’re from the same town and know people in common, one of which was a childhood friend of his and a high school buddy of mine. At one point Michael and I were living a couple blocks from each other.

The real life connections are still more exciting than the virtual ones.

Just Keep Trying

I’m confident we can solve all the hard technology problems we currently face. I’ve recently heard words like “never” and “too hard” rolling off tongues a bit too readily and it’s just not the kind of optimism I expect in this industry. Of categorization software I’ve heard, ‘we’ll never be able to automatically sense the author of a document,‘ or of topic maps ‘they’re too hard for the average person‘ and these just don’t jive with our track record. We’ve split the atom, we’ve put astronauts on the moon, and we’ve replaced unhealthy hearts in the living with healthy hearts from the dead, I think we can teach a computer to figure out how to detect the author of a document the same way we do. Sure it’s hard, but so is machine language or programming computers by flipping hardware switches, but we don’t even think about these things anymore; we don’t have to.

Technology advances and, amazingly, becomes less expensive. We figure out new ways to use it. We adapt to it and it to us as a matter of habit. If there’s a reason we don’t want to use it, fine, then we won’t. But if we want to, we’ll find a way to make it workable. Being too hard isn’t a reason to dismiss it.

Invent! Refine! Design!

Article: The Semantic Website

Get a pot of coffee or two in me and out pops another article, this time in Digital Web under the unwieldy title of Smarter Content Publishing, Building a semantic website to increase the efficiency and usability of publishing systems. Don’t bother reading it, I’ll sum it up for you:

Manually marking up HTML is lame, computers should automatically do that for us
The content management system trend is making publishing easier and less expensive (see Movable Type)
CMS still has a lot of inefficiencies, requiring business users to think about web design instead of business
Metadata to the rescue! Just keep layering the stuff until you’re talking business terms instead of design terms
It’s hard, but that never kept us from using technology before
It’s actually an application of the Semantic Web, but aren’t you glad I didn’t tell you that at the beginning?

If you do bother to read it, hopefully you won’t agree with this guy from the Web Ontology Working Group who wrote in to tell me it was great. ‘Cause that doesn’t help me improve. I need some constructive feedback. Did you like the topic but thought the level was too hard or too easy? Do you want more examples? More theory? Too long, too short? Tell me.

Iconic Search

James showed me this gorgeous visual search interface he and Designframe created for a company that makes ‘metal fabrics’ – sheets of flexible, woven metal designs. Aimed at architects, the results page is key too. First off, the color photos pop nicely on a black background. Second, instead of prominently showing the product that matches a query, it shows off a structure built with it, corresponding with the goals of the architect, not the goal of the manufacturer; the product is off to the side in a smaller way. It’s all about lusting after beautiful stuff, which architects like to do. It probably helps when the products are all shiny metal objects.

Undressed Typography

Pushing aside the cobwebs in the Razorfish archives I found a couple interesting specimens. They still hold up, all while reminding us of that period when frames helped us navigate and people took animated gifs seriously. Though they look old, you can simultaneously see how new they were when they were new.

Undressed – a Dutch catalog of underthings

typoGRAPHIC – self-explanatory

More on Design Books, Summer 2002

We’re publishing! This makes me happy. Perhaps post-bust we’re entering a phase of reflection and recording. We young geeks are still thriving, but now it’s in publishing, both on paper and in more ways than ever on the Web.

The emphasis now seems to be taking a breather and recording what we know, what we’ve been doing. I hope the next phase is pushing the envelope, exploring new methods that are at once practical and visionary. I think we needed to catch our breath first.

NBS RSS

Noise Between Stations is now available in Reedy Site Summary format.

Supports RSS autodiscovery

Hapax

Hapax‘s FindEngine is a search engine system somewhat like Autonomy, but better according to some accounts, due to its unique use of computational linguistic analysis. They have an interesting way of displaying results/answers:

Rather than delivering results in the form of links to documents that you then have to read to verify, FindEngine™ delivers answers in response to queries. The answers are returned in the form of sentences extracted from their original source…

There’s a feel-good profile of the founder in Brainheart magazine.

Real-Time Design

While trying to surf the Staples website with Mozilla:

The web browser you are using is incompatible. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Our site currently supports only Internet Explorer version 4.0 and 5.0. This is due to the advanced features used in the real-time designer.

Well heck, if I had a real-time designer with advanced features I wouldn’t give a hoot about Mozilla either.

Web Accessibility Outreach Coordinator

Could be a cool job:

The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science is seeking a Web Accessibility Outreach Coordinator to coordinate development of education and outreach materials promoting Web accessibility for people with disabilities.

Content Management Bible

I’ve realized I’m much too stingy about buying books. Most books I would ever consider buying easily bring me enough pleasure or save me enough time to justify their cost. Add in the fact that you can easily resell them or pass them on to grateful people and the whole thing just gives me the warm fuzzies.

Today’s Book Value of the Day is Bob Boiko’s Content Management Bible.

A massive volume full of solid knowledge expertly written. Many people would save hours, days, or weeks of work if only they read this book before embarking on building a content management system. Building a medium or large system well is often difficult because, unless you’re a consultant, it’s rare to have previous experience. Shelling out a mere $35 to learn from other’s mistakes will pay for itself in one hour of saved time.

Chimera UI Development

Chimera 0.4 is a browser for MacOS X built on top of Mozilla…

The cross-platform UI will be replaced with native Cocoa widgetry (such as customizable toolbars and a drawer for the sidebar). The plan is to produce only a browser (no other apps!), and to keep the UI as simple and as clean as possible.

I’ve always thought open source development doesn’t lend itself to quality UI design. But in this case they can draw from 1) years of web browser conventions, and 2) the MacOS X human interface guidelines. I’m looking forward to the results.

monoki

Some super shiny scaly fishy friends were cited for their Movable Type chops. Check ’em out: Monoki.

Organizational Design

I have a long-time friend who is an organizational design consultant. She has a masters degree from Columbia University, works for a boutigue org design firm, and studied with Warner Burke, the leader of the field. She taught me a lot over the years. If you don’t have someone like this in your life and you find yourself entangled in organizations (doing, for example, Enterprise IA) you should own the book she recommends: Warner Burke’s Organization Development: A Process of Learning and Changing.

It’s a small book, and not cheap, but probably available at your local academic library. It’s a primer, and a thorough one at that. It might help us stop whining about how organizations fail and instead learn how to fix them. It’s the first of my own little recommended book list that will hopefully unearth some different picks than what you’re used to seeing, the noise between bookshelves :) .