‘Not four victories or five or even six,’ he said. ‘There’s never been a Tour de France victory by a cancer survivor before me. That’s what I’d like to be remembered for.‘
Armstrong Wins His Fourth Tour de France
Also see the New Yorker interview, link courtesy of Mr. Veen.
Only in the New York Times, in a story about Lance Armstrong and the Tour de France, would a sports article end with four paragraphs about wine…
‘…Leaving the red-wine district, the road headed toward Mâcon and its whites, including St. Véran, Pouilly-Fuissé, Mâcon itself and the deservedly little-known Beaujolais white…’
The global navigation at Peter Morville’s Semantic Studios:
Home, Consulting, Presentations, Publications, About
The global navigation at Lou Rosenfeld’s LouisRosenfeld.com:
Home, Consulting, Presentations, Publications, In the Media, Biography
Later…Jess points out they, as well as the Nielsen Norman Group (Home, People, Services, Publications, Events, About NN/g) share the same design consultant, Studio Mobius.
Peterme points to Philip Agre’s home page. Wow, there’s a ton of interesting material here on Internet culture, education, and design. Let the foraging begin.
Lou Rosenfeld posted his recent presentation to the AIGA Experience Design conference, titled Getting Established: ED for the Enterprise (Powerpoint).
He writes, setting our expectations of results, ‘Timing: 3-6 years, not months…Remember: You’re turning an aircraft carrier with your foot as the rudder.‘
Yes Yes Yes. This is half my job, sticking my feet in the water and kicking like crazy. Lou creates the most cogent summary of this situation I’ve yet seen. I think this is one of the two or three big challenges of our field: coordinating and syncronizing the publishing efforts of multi-layered organizations (I say organizations and not companies as this condition exists inside universities, governments, and large non-profits as well).
IA’s can sometimes grab other fields as our own, enveloping information design, interface design, interaction design, etc. But IA for the enterprise is a central IA issue, an issue no one else is addressing (notice the subtitle of the Polar Bear book: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites. It is the scale that makes IA what it is). The knowledge management folks are doing noble work, but with a mandate even more idealistic than that of IA, and for this reason I think they are less likely to achieve practical results. Besides, they tend to focus on collecting and filtering tacit knowledge, whereas our focus is on managing and publishing the core knowledge of the organization.
And yet there are other forces that must be brought to bear on this problem, organizational psychology, management, and IT are three that come immediately to mind. If we are to have a larger influence on projects outside our own, I have to think IAs must join with other disciplines to develop solutions as well as to gain credibility.
What is the forum for this work? A new kind of book, edited with vision, pulling together a flowing collection of chapters from disparate points of view, informed by sound research, grounded in practical results, full of successful and unsuccessful case studies? Something else?
I hear the new Polar Bear book includes some of these ideas. But if we are to spend 3-6 years on each system, if we are to find technical and management models that will work across organizations, if we are to influence those we don’t influence today, we may need more. This presentation starts down that path, don’t miss it.
And, there’s an actual chinese menu.
Later…this imaginary book probably couldn’t be published on the usual publishing model, there’s not enough enterprise people to justify it. Instead of a publishing house, a professional organization might sponsor something like this, and even if the price was high it could still be within the price range of this audience.
Dan Benjamin’s Win the SPAM Arms Race offers a clever way to create a clickable mailto: link on your web pages while greatly reducing the ability of spam harvesters to find it. Some people are so nice.
I’m combining that with some email filters, started with Heather’s list plus a few additions that are working well. So far I’m filtering on:
1618
opt out
ADV
[ a blank subject line ]
$$
!!
mortgage
loan
stock
click here
Section 301
FREE
I still find myself looking through the spam I’ve caught, like sorting through the odd creatures entrapped in the net before throwing them back.
‘I never said I want to be alone‘, on spam selling a stock. I still don’t understand why they think we’ll be in a buying mood after they trick us into looking at their unsolicited marketing message.
Malcolm Gladwell’s The Talent Myth story in the New Yorker is a surface analysis of McKinsey’s philosophy regarding hiring and promotion, but raises the important question whether companies like Enron misinterpreted the potential of individuals: ‘The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around…stability in a firm’s existing businesses might be a good thing…the self-fulfillment of Enron’s star employees might possibly be in conflict with the best interests of the firm as a whole.‘
Joel likes Listen.com. Sounds like a good deal, but so far it’s Windoze-only.
So I’m planning on moving away from Yahoo mail. It’s been wonderful to go many years without having to change my personal email address, but:
So I registered a shiny new vanity domain name. I just want to point it at an IMAP account. So I’m looking for a service. I started trying mac.com, which is mostly good except for
If you know of an inexpensive, reliable, personal IMAP provider let me know. I’ll post the results right [here].
Here is here: Christina mentioned both dreamhost and oddpost. Dreamhost seems like a great option if you also need hosting, but I’m all set with pair.com. Oddpost only works on IE/Win. I’m willing to switch out of Mozilla now and then, but Win only is a deal killer.
I ended up with myrealbox, a site set up by Novell to display the capabilities of their NetMail product. While that makes me feel a bit like a guinea pig, it seems OK, and the user base is pretty big. It’s free, there’s no ads, it does IMAP, and the web interface is pretty good, though not entirely Mozilla/Mac happy, but then that’s not too rare these days. If it collapses completely I can always bail and go back to mac.com without having to change my email address. It’s mine, all mine, I’m a greedy miser.
I saw helicopters, an aircraft carrier, and a woman on the trapeze.
An informal survey:
I don’t want to give the impression that by clicking that link the page will be printed, ’cause it won’t, so ‘Print…‘ doesn’t work for me. I’m leaning towards ‘Printing-Friendly Format”.
I’m gradually going around my site, cleaning each room, applying a template here, fixing a link there. In the process I’m finally getting around to reading Owen’s Validation, a persuasive argument for proper code, which could have been subtitled ‘Markup for the Long Now‘…
My view is validation is very important, and not because I’m a stickler for rules. I actually dislike rules…I don’t think it’s widely understood how unique the code is. This is an attempt to make a code that can go decades and centuries, getting broader in scope without ever shutting out it’s early versions. Because that’s what we need the code to do: this code is for recording what we think.
He also points to the handy Gazingus validation bookmarklets and, of course, the W3C validator.
Aside: A funny image in my head of people 50 years from now initializing their virtual museum to learn about early 21st Century Internet communication. The readable content consists almost entirely of CSS tutorials. The aural connection says, ‘Before the Great XML Convergence of 2023 humans actually used keyboards to type medium-specific display information, or used crude applications to generate non-standard display code…‘
Michael started a therapy thread to deal with the overload of passionate development our discipline current exhibits. While the straw on the camel’s back in this case is the latest flurry of basic semantic arguments saturating the SIGIA list, I recognize it as something many of us experience now and then. The thread offers some good advice.
I think learning to be a consultant has taught me a method for dealing with overload from another perspective. Because I need to learn a lot about a business and new skills quickly, I’ve developed a sense for what I don’t need to learn ahead of time. I have a sense of the scope of topics and what can be dealt with on a just-in-time basis. Then the question becomes whether I spend the extra time reading more or on the beach?