February 2003

Lou Rosenfeld and Steve Krug are teaming up for a three city seminar tour, Lou covering Enterprise Information Architecture and Steve Usability. These guys are both highly experienced and a lot of fun, the events should be a good time.

I just discovered Appliance Studio, a company in Bristol UK dedicated to information appliance design. They have a straightfoward way of explaining what they call Applianceness summarized as ‘Successful appliances become everyday things, do one thing well, work well with other appliances, and reward their users with the sense of job done.’

Now we know what Tanya looks like.

We are now blessed with the presence of Shareholder Value magazine. This while Shift and New Architect cease publication (in the latter case one might be tempted to ask, will Adaptive Path be relegated to publishing on their own site only? ;-). At least there’s Tekka, which may be more likely to succeed with low…

Peter is a little tired of how U.S.-centric the information architecture field can be, so he’s starting an AIfIA-sponsored initiative to do something about it. Get on the mailing list at http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/aifia-translation. Hopefully we’ll see some translations of seminal IA texts and more come from it.

While I paid a whopping $49 for my Sidekick you can now get one for free. Actually, if you do the math, they are paying you a penny to get it. In any case, I’ve had mine for a few weeks now and I’m quite happy.

I think one of the little pleasures of running open source software is the non-corporate tone of code comments and documentation, which can sometimes sound like this cool SysAdmin sitting you next to you in the data center, smoking a cigarette and reading The Economist… Most of the features discussed in this article are only…

Redesigned: Cooper.com. Not sure how long this has been up, but it’s certainly worth a look to see what they think is a proper website.

From the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (das Heimatland!) comes Ready.gov which makes pretty good use of information graphics, but which also positions it for some damn funny parodies. Link courtesy of Charles, whose blog I haven’t located yet.

I just stayed up late to conduct an over-the-phone usability test with someone in India, and then discovered NewsMonster, an ‘advanced weblog manager, reputation system, micropayment economy, and semantic web application.‘ I’ll have to investigate it more after a bit of sleep, but it makes my Blog Reader proposal look rather timid, and beat Nick’s…

Some of my Swedish friends from Razorfish are getting some attention for their work at Ocean Observations. I like this bit on their contact page: ‘You will find us in the western parts of Södermalm in Stockholm. In a former car repair shop on Heleneborgsgatan we sweat for our clients, try to make them happy…