vanderwal.net

Success lost in the translation

Problems of information use are high-lighted in NY Times Op/Ed "Lost in Translation at the F.B.I.", which to me is a horrifying look at the lack of understanding of what information gathering and analysing skill are needed to do the job.

Standard Data Vocabularies Unquestionably Harmful

Must come back to this when my mind is fresh, Standard Data Vocabularies Unquestionably Harmful over at O'Reilly Net. This seems right up the alley for an IA.

Social life of paper

The Social Life of Paper has been linked by nearly everybody, but yet I could not find it. Ergo...

Metaphor of Attraction

Beginning with a discussion with Stewart on Peterme and the encouragement of Lane in another discussion to look for a metaphor other than navigation that could better explain what we do on the Web. Seeing Stewart walk by at SXSW after I had seen some of Josh Davis visual plays I combined the discussion with Stewart with the magnetic attraction Josh showed, which began my thinking about a metaphor of attraction. Magnetism seems like what happens when we put a search term in Google, it attracts information that is draw to the term on to your screen.

Come see where else this metaphor can go in this poorly written for draft of the metaphor of attraction. This is posted to begin a collaboration to dig back and move forward, if that is where this is to go. The writing will improve and the ideas will jell into a better presentation over the next few weeks.

I have very intrigued with understanding where metaphors break. At some point they all break, but a metaphor that lasts would be nice. We may get to play with one in the near future. I would like you to play with it, but to make it useful for all of us, it would be good to have comments to share thoughts. The comments are coming and may be posted in a not a perfectly usable state as getting the info out and commenting running is my goal.

I am back, well physically, from the Information Architecture Summit. I am experiencing near information and intellectual saturation. Over the past two weeks I have been surrounded with very bright and creative people discussing our passions and beliefs. This weekend really was amazing as the theoretical and intellectual pursuits of information theory, information structure, and information architecture was the focus of topic. I got to meet and discuss ideas with a people I have revered over time and found the interplay of conversation riveting. The mental stimulation was stellar and I look forward to the future even more, given the more refined frame of reference.

Based on descussions begun with Stewart, Peter, Lane, and others in, beginning in discussions about navigation as a poor metaphor for the interaction of humans and information on the Web (which really breaks down further when looking at other types of Internet information interaction), I am working on another metaphor that struck me while in Austin. Lane asked in another conversation for alternatives to the navigation metaphor. I will be posting a series on this site that will open the idea for discussion and help finding holes or coming to the conclusion the idea sucks. The postings will most likely begin next week sometime. I am going to put the idea past a few friends at the IA Summit and see how hard they laugh or like it. For me the concept is working so far and seems to have a decent reach into Web and non-Web Internet interactions with information. No I am not going to state it now, but I will soon.

Peter discusses Social Network Analysis and includes a bevy of links to great resources. This is a great way to learn the interaction of people and the movement and sharing of information.

Foundations of Hypertext Navigation, Part 1.1

Another resource for getting to the foundation of the navigation metaphor, Navigating Hypertext: Visualising Knowledge on the Net. It has a poor interface, as the words on the left are links, but missing any interactive component to let one know they are links.

Foundations of Hypertext Navigation, Part 1

Another discussion on Peterme that has fallen into the discussion of spatial metaphors and the Web. The general feeling is that the spatial metaphor provides a poor descriptive language and metaphorical base to discuss the Web. Finding a replacement seems to be the focus, but there is an embedded base in the population of users that have adopted these analogies. I agree to a great degree that the spatial metaphor is not the best (agreeing with the negative of a positive superlative is the easy way out as there is very little room to be wrong so it is a false method of looking smart).

There is a chapter on "NAVIGATION THROUGH COMPLEX INFORMATION SPACES" from Hypertext in Context by Cliff McKnight, Andrew Dillon, John Richardson, which provides a solid understanding of some of the history of the navigational metaphor in hypertext services.

Lucas Gonze points out Caching Trust in his O'Reilly weblog. The idea is rather intriguing in that if you find a set of data that is has not been validated, a substitute for a copy of the data is stored locally so you may verify the data. The author of the document pointed to in Gonze' log is, M. Satyanarayanan of CMU, who spends his time working on mobile computing and file sharing research and experiments (like Coda (with its associated papers and Odyssey).

One of the reasons that I love the Internet is its ability to be a conduit for exchanging ideas and discussion of topics. Not that this is not is new, it isn't. The comment tools in use on Web pages provides the ability to not only share ideas, but capture them for further use. Discussions are not lost in the ether as they can be at conferences, but they are stored for later reference.

This has been going on the past few days at Peter's site in a discussion about the term of use, Information Architect. The discussion has somewhat turned to the use of spatial metaphors to describe the Web and its use. None of the participants are really with in a short drive of each other. We are all sharpening our knowledge and ideas and changing perspectives to some degree. The Internet provides an amazing resource for life learners and bringing people of similar mind together to interact.

The following is an overview of the ASIS&T lively debate between two leaders in the field of human-computer interaction -- Dr. James Hendler and Dr. Ben Shneiderman. I have heard Schneiderman a couple times before and agree with much of his approach. I had not heard or read Hendler, but I have a feeling I will be digging out some of his works. There is a lot of common ground between the two speakers. Again these are rough notes. The future of web use: visual, social, universal (Ben Schneiderman)

• Getting the cognitively comprehensible right your users get feeling of mastery
• Effective visual display is key
• Community has become central to Internet use
• Central to Internet use is trust
• Key element is building trust
• Universal usability is essential
• Online help does not go far enough to helping the user
• Human interaction over intelligent agents
• Ontology is very important

Creating Ben's Web (James Hendler)

• Agents interact in conversational interaction: user asks question agent replies w/ options
• Shared communications extends knowledge & gives context & depth
• Agents work on your preferences
• Web does not have central ontological organization principle
• Schema to schema translators needed
• Semantic web

IBM's Ease of Use Center offers articles, links, and resources that cover a wide gamut of offerings to help development for the user's benefit. The resource is full of wonderful offerings.

The feature story in October was The Purpose of the Machine is to Augment Us, which focusses on Franco Vitaliano of VXM Technologies in Boston, MA. "Maybe the intelligence of a system is not in the computer sitting inside a war room or on a desktop," he says, "but in what we call the communications cloud."

Lawrence Lessig has a new book, The Future of Ideas, in which he discusses the freedom of information flow that drive innovation and commerce. He also discusses the hinderance that some industries try to place on this flow of information and the direct and indirect effects this has on growth of ideas and expanding markets.