Interesting that summarizing emails was part of the original design of the UseMod wiki.
Category: Unfiled
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Behr Color Tools
Behr.com has some great Flash-based color selection tools. Intended for choosing paints, they could be used to choose any kind of color palette.
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The Global IAs We Need
The results to the recent 2003 AIfIA Information Architecture Salary Survey are out, and the response was mostly from Americans. We know others are out there and we want to reach them. To that end, a group of hard working volunteers are translating seminal IA writings into multiple languages.
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The Jamaica House Party Riff We Need
Could listen to this riff pretty much all night. Also on the playlist is Black Eyed Pea’s Where is the Love? and Lumidee’s Never Leave You.
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Deborah Barber is another interface-designing, information-architecting, Astoria-residing, New York University music technology-majoring blogger. How wonderful are the wonders of this InterNet that she found me.
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Quote of the day: Rabbi Zusya: “In the world to come I shall not be asked, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I’ll be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’ “
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A Content Law We Need
The more generic the system the more generic – and therefore less usable and more bland – the content will be.
For example, text that needs to be used across several websites intended for different purposes and different people will most likely need to be more generic to serve all those needs. Since it’s not customized to any one context or type of reader, it loses it’s voice and specificity. (Yuck)
I need Matt to come up with a name for this.
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The Metadata Book We Need
Besides the thesaurus book below, we need a book that addresses metadata design from the LIS, IT, UCD and knowledge representation points of view together: the IA metadata book. I think LIS knowledge is well-established, UCD and usability practice have evolved pretty well in this respect, and knowledge representation is being wrenched from AI circles into practical use, but I don’t see them brought together in a useful way yet.
For example, I’ve realized that there are multiple ways to model the same information, e.g. more or less faceted vs. hierarchical, or level of richness of semantic relationships. The kind of issues that need to be addressed (and I’m just jotting these down quickly for myself you understand) are how to distribute attributes across a hierarchy in a way that both makes for an efficient admin UI and efficient use of inheritance in the system while serving the presentation layer. Also, basic ROI guidelines that guide the sophistication of the modeling, such as when it’s worth the extra work of an ontology’s features vs. accomplishing similar results in simpler ways in the presentation layer using another modeling method.
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Tutorial on Thesaurus Construction
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.
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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 :)