It’s nearly impossible to find the contact info for my local bikeshop on the ‘net, a situation not improved by my inability to spell renaissance, so I made them a webpage. Nothing special, just something for people to find when they’re looking.
Author: Victor
Crosswalk
Once we build all these taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, etc. we’ll run into situations where we’ll have applications that need to access more than one of these simultaneously. Throw in organizational issues like different departments ‘owning’ their favorite organization scheme and it all gets rather messy. We’ll either need to combine them or ‘crosswalk’ them, that is, mapping them so we know how they interrelate. I started a crosswalk page on the IAWiki to start tracking the issue.
Blog Prototype
Female Voices
Finding wonderful female vocalists surfacing on my playlist these days. Here’s some mp3 snippets (all under 400K):
Pink A talent for syncopation (just try and sing along)
Patty Larkin Quirky and surprisingly addictive
PJ Harvey Dark, and surprisingly addictive
Amanda Ghost Imagine songwriting and production that mirror Natalie Imbruglia but with vocal chords soaked in single malt scotch
Audra McDonald One of the best voices in the world, my desert island choice
Library Internet Porn Law Struck Down
A federal judicial panel on Friday overturned a U.S. law that sought to protect children from Internet pornography by withholding government subsidies from public libraries that fail to install filtering software on personal computers. – Yahoo news
This is the third time this kind of law was struck down. Would it be unthinkable for Congress to simply bring in lawyers from the ACLU to get the law right the first time and stop wasting our time and money? I’m actually not opposed to our American litigious ways, I think on a macro level we’re evolving our system of law faster because of it. But in this case the government should have learned years ago the ACLU lawyers are too damn good and are going to have their way.
Politics
Mark Twain on the German Language
I’m currently experiencing this pain, a sort of sadomasachism…
There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech — not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary — six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam — that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it — after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about…You observe how far that verb is from the reader’s base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state…
Fear in Advertising
XFML
‘An open XML format to publish and share faceted metadata for websites.’ Could allow us to link among sites with more than just links, we could link by way of categories for example.
But the low barrier of entry to blogging is what has made it so popular, so I hope tools for using XFML make publishing and receiving easy.
NYC Bloggers
Nice presentation, I like seeing who’s blogging in my neighborhood (and so I wonder if navigating by zip code wouldn’t been better than subway line. The subway line joins us across neighborhoods in an egalitarian way, but no one talks to each other on the subway). That there are almost as many bloggers in Brooklyn as in Manhattan is an indication of who’s moving out to Brooklyn these days.
Things that act differently should look differently
Speaking of ripping off Don Norman, I’m reminded of this faucet I saw recently:
Instead of hot on the left and cold on the right, the knob on the left controls the temperature and the knob on the right controls the pressure. I noticed the temperature markings on the left knob, so I understood this. U. pointed out to me that this could be handy over time, just set the temperature to your favorite setting instead of having to balance the hot/cold mix every time. But this faucet looks like other faucets, and situations that could involve scolding hot water aren’t times to play with conventions. Especially in this case, which was in a public restroom.
In my kitchen I have a faucet like this, which accomplishes the temperature setting feature while retaining the left and right convention and does so using only one control. But something about how the lever floats in two dimensions feels clumsy to me.
Heuristics
Writing
Copywriting
When I worked in advertising, I witnessed the magic of great copywriting. Copy can make an ad or ruin it. I was reminded of this on a recent SAS flight where the sugar packets read only, ‘As sugar dissolves, it spreads happiness,’ and the salt, ‘The color of snow, the taste of tears, the enormity of oceans.’
In our haste to dis the (correctly perceived) superficial and purely-commercial advertising industry, we miss the opportunity to learn from its decades of experience. Sites powered by great copy, in the right situation, can be wonderful.
