• Geekcorps

    Not too long ago I wished for Designers Without Borders, a SWAT team-like organization that would drop designers into third world countries and give them help with technology no one else could offer. Brainheart magazine reports (albeit not online) on something close to this, Geekcorps: A US-based, non-profit organization, we place international technical volunteers in…

  • Ordination

    To the list of illustrious jobs I’m honored to have been offered I can now add ordination to be a minister. I have a friend who’s a civil celebrant and needs help with a wedding he can’t perform for scheduling reasons. Too bad I’ll be out of town that weekend :)

  • Wikified

    Just installed my own little wiki. Not sure why I hadn’t done that earlier, it’s so simple and easy. I’ll use it to keep notes at work, where capturing and linking them quickly is more important that pretty presentation or sophisticated organization. It’s always a struggle not to resort to paper which traps ideas in…

  • If you had to create an introduction to IA in a booklet small enough fit in your wallet, what would you say? Maybe: user-centered, looks beyond the party purchasing the design to the end user includes research and usability testing (which is not an attempt to trump these disciplines, just explaining IA to the completely…

  • email to wiki

    Interesting that summarizing emails was part of the original design of the UseMod wiki.

  • Brain: Full

    If you’re wondering why I’ve been so quiet it’s because I’m mind melding with Mike Lee.

  • 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.

  • Last night I had some NYC IAs over and we talked about what kind of persona- or scenario-like information could be culled from server logs (Tanya raised the idea in her Info Foraging paper) along with tangents into linguistics and semantic networks. Tanya brought along Visualization of Navigation Patterns on a Web Site using Model…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?’ “

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.