April 2004

In the New York Times: A Queen Arrives, and Even in Jaded New York, Jaws Drop

IA/ moves to a faster server, upgrades Drupal, and sports a fresh new look.

Desperately seeking interesting business blogs to read, I came across Worthwhile, a group blog including authors David Weinberger and Tom Peters that strives to ‘put purpose and passion on the same plane as profit.‘ Amen. Also found An Entrepreneur’s Life with a sizable blogroll, and I’m off…

Ahhhh, content management applications, those wonderful places where “business users” author text and where content smacks right into presentation, with the results falling short of peanut butter and chocolate. Inserting a WYSIWYG tool into the CMA – like eWeb Edit Pro was often the way to make editing easier but at the expense of clean,…

The Asilomar Institute of Information Architecture today launched the IA Library. It’s a collection of faceted, searchable, juicy resources for your learning pleasure, 173 items strong and growing.

I want to find occurances of Hi! on the Internet, but the search engines’ syntax apparently don’t do that (they ignore the exclamation point, and you can’t force it like you can with plus signs on stop words). I’ll paypal you $1 if you can tell me within a day how to do this on…

Wow, a wonderful film. I had trouble imagining how a film from the point of view of the architect’s son would be interesting, but he intertwines the personal life and work of Louis Kahn remarkably well. If you go, bring tissues.

Saw Alastair Reid last night at 192 Books (a wonderful bookstore in my neighborhood that feels like a friend’s apartment with an amazing bookshelf). He spoke about his friendship with Pablo Neruda and read from the Chilean poet’s works. One story: Neruda: When I married Matilda I promised I would write her 100 love sonnets.…

Sippey pokes fun at Jakob for stating the obvious (mobile phones are annoying), with findings Peterme revealed a while ago. Just as the popular rags are now popularizing ideas that bloggers covered months and years ago, it seems like a person with Jakob’s noteriety could do the same just by mining the blogosphere.

Andrei Herasimchuk’s myth of navigation article nicely attacks the idea of navigation, and brings up some interesting points. I think he falls prey to the interaction-design-as-total-solution fallacy that Cooper has raised, but he’s essentially pointing out that navigation is more than just wayfinding, what Dillon has already shown.

Clay Shirky’s recent essay mentions my friend Alex’s project Dodgeball which just launched. Alex describes it as ‘Friendster for your mobile phone… It’s social software that you can use to meet up with friends while you’re out being social, not at your desk procrastinating.‘ The beta period is NYC only.

A couple of screenshots. And Sippey’s comments.

Started a new page on Security Vs. Usability on the IA Wiki since I’ve been thinking about this for years and finally decided to see what was out there already. I have a little continuum in my notebook that says what security to do when, I just need to clean it up.