Experiencing Information

Larry Lessig’s great talk at TED called How creativity is being strangled by the law is now available as video on the TED site. His points and his presentation are really compelling. The bottom line is that law and culture are out of synch so that on the Internet we are violating the law as a rule of thumb. This is corrosive, he says. It’s only 19 minutes long, so see it for yourself.

In retrospect, I can’t figure out for the life in me why I didn’t mention Facetag during my talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. I had plenty of time, and it’s something I cover in Designing Web Navigation. That and maybe some other more forward-looking ideas would have rounded out an otherwise (perhaps too?) practical talk.

Facetag is a working prototype of an application that mixes normal tagging with the power of facets. My friends from Italy developed it: Andrea Resmini, Emanuele Quintarelli, and Luca Rosati. With a little bit of additional effort, tags can be aligned with facets while tagging a web resource. Later, these facets allow you to filter the resources in different ways. It’s pretty straightforward, but very powerful at the same time.

The interesting thing for me is that I proposed a similar idea at the first German IA Conference in Frankfurt in 2005 refering to del.icio.us, which at the time had a sinlge flat list of tags. Not that I want to downplay Andrea, Emanuele, and Luca’s achievment–I’m far too incapable of actually getting such a project going–, but it does show the potential universal appeal of Facetag. I’ve heard of others who had similar ideas. The Lazy Web at work!

One thing that I called for back then were facets of intrinsic metadata: primarily date saved and domain name, but also things like domain extension. Facetag doesn’t have this (yet–or at least it didn’t when I asked them about it in Berlin in 2006). The thought is that you could potentially get a lot of mileage out of intrinsic metadata because users wouldn’t have to do anything extra while entering tags. So, if you bookmark lots of things from, say, Boxes and Arrows you could then zoom in on just links from www.boxesandarrows.com, and then potentially pick a certain date range or filter by another tag.

Ciao!

Just back from a small whirlwind of conferences and events. Though I’m tired of travelling this year, it was a good way to pack a lot into a short period of time. Here’s a really really brief rundown. I’ll try to focus on a few more specifics in future posts.

Web 2.0 Expo
First was the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, which was the most disappointing of the three events I recently attended. Maybe because expectations were higher? Not sure.

Of course, the conference was complete with all the guru-ness, hype, and Web 2.0 kids you’d expect. But it was a weird community feeling to me. Actually I didn’t really get a community feeling at all, in part because I’m not in the Web 2.0 blogging scene and also because there were so many different backgrounds in one room. For instance, during the plenary on Wednesday, the speaker (Felix Petersen, I think) tried to do a ‘how-many-of-you-are-x?’-type of audience involvement. He mentioned developers and business people, but realized that was only a small percentage of the crowd. He then asked ‘what the heck are the rest of you?’ The list would have be long and varied, and it demonstrated how ‘Web 2.0′ means just about anything to anyone. But the conference didn’t really bring things together, in my opinion.

Second, the location and organization was a catastrophe. Zero atmosphere and positive vibes. The place had all the charm and comfort of a parking garage. It was a sterile, impersonal, money-making event, right down to having the organizers not even saying ‘hello’ to me when we first met, though we had emailed many times in the past.

The presentations were also really mixed, but overall good. There were some outliers, like “Better Typography” from Mark Boulton, which I liked. I also liked Jesse James Garret’s talk. He started off by mentioned Ajax and then chucked it out the window. Instead, he focused on much broader user experience issues. He is a good speaker and made excellent points, but there wasn’t really anything new at the core of the talk. I’m really glad he gave it that Expo to that crowd, though: it was sobering in an otherwise intoxicated (but not intoxicating) atmosphere.

My own presentation on Designing Tag Navigation got mixed reviews–both positive and negative. Based on the comments and questions I heard at the event and online later, it seems that those with immediate and concrete design problems found it helpful, while developers or those looking for future vision found it far too basic. That’s fair, I guess; and in retrospect I probably should have provided more about the future. But as I say in in Designing Web Navigation, the basic principles of good design don’t go away with all the Web 2.0 features.

World Usability Day in Hamburg
This was the opposite of the Web 2.0 Expo: a self-organized, bottom-up event with a lot of community feel and good old heart and soul. And completely free. Amazing that there were over 150 people who came out in Hamburg alone. With 15 events across Germany, that means there were thousands of people interested in usability at these events that afternoon.

Though there was a common theme and interest, there were different levels of knowledge amongst the participants: some veterans, but also students, newcomers, and business people. Such a mix is a Very Good Thing, even if it means that I have to sit through a presentation describing what a usability test is (which I did). Reaching new people or people outside the field is incredibly important for the profession. As Tim Bosenick of SirValUse reminded me: the usability and UX market in Germany is still very fresh, and there are more people new to the field than there are experienced professionals.

Frank Jacob from Human Interface gave a great opening talk about multi-touch interfaces, which gave a good look at our potential future in usability and interface design. I didn’t to stick around to hear Mitch Hatscher talk about UX at Google because I had to get to the airport to catch a flight to Stuttgart.

IA Konferenz 2007 in Stuttgart
This exceeded my expectations. Again, a grass-roots-type of organization, but not for free (though a fraction of what Web 2.0 Expo charged). A real stellar line-up with excellent presentations and ideas:

• Victor Lombardi gave a thoughtful keynote on where IA tools and processes are going in the future.
• Joannes Vandermeulen inspired us with his analogies of interaction design to other disciplines, concluding that we are like cinematographers on a movie set.
• Thomas Vander Wal reviewed tags and tagging, starting with a history of tagging and moving up to present and beyond.
• Hans-Christian Jetter, from the University of Konstanz, showed off some fantastic info viz interfaces, including HyperGrid.
• Klaus Ulrich Werner presented a cross-over wayfinding system (offline and online) for the Philosophische Bibliothek at the FU Berlin.
• Jess McMullin shared his approaches to overcoming barriers to speaking with business people.
• Jan Halatsch unveiled a futuristic collaboration room with touch-screen desks and walls, called Value Lab.

All in all, good mix if practical talks, case studies, and visionary thoughts.

My ex-LexisNexis colleague Kevin Simons tipped me off to a new news service. David Winer created a way to browse the New York Times by topic. See his announcement of this serivce and the topic tree (i.e., an outline) for the NYT.

This outline isn’t really a taxonomy, but rather a list of keywords. I’m not sure where the keywords come from, however. Are they extracted for the stories algorithmically, or did Mr Winer set up queries behind each keyword ahead of time? Looks more like the former to me.

There are three things interesting with this that point to where I think online news content is going in the future:

1. Merely aggregating content will become less and less important as more and more of it becomes available on the web. The FT recently announced they will be making some its content available for free. This, on the heals of similar announcements from the NYT and even the WSJ.

2. With access to content essential equal, being alerted and making sense of information will both become more and more important. Different forms of text analytics will proliferate, as well as alerting services. And things like categories, taxonomy, and other IA artefacts help in both respects. Post-coordinated (pre-determined) structures will help make sense of it all. And you’ll pick a topic–perhaps a hand-crafted topic–within a meta-RSS feed mashup to be alerted on.

3. News for mobile devices makes a lot of sense. People read the morning news on the go. Executives get more information from their Blackberrys than from their laptops. And the NYT outline works great on normal cell phones.

Not sure if anyone has ever made this connection before, but I’m going to give a try. Let me know if you’ve heard this already. Here goes:

If we consider all published information in the world, we can assume it takes on a long tail curve. The most people sources are read by only a small percentage of people. Librarianship is really about organizing information in the head of the long tail curve. Sure, there are special libraries, like science libraries and music libraries, but even those are concerned with organizing the hits.

After the advent of the web, IA arose out the need to organize information in the long tail. At some point the long tail of information spaces got so fat, someone realized that we need special, dedicated people to take care of our informatoin problems. IA is about finding custom solutions in a niche market for a particular business or client.

My point is that attacks on things like the Dewey Decimal System by people like Clay Shirky and David Weinberger are irrelevant to IA. IAs aren’t concerned about organizing all of human knowledge. We tend to work in niche markets. And it’s in niche markets that things like taxonomy and controlled vocabularies make most sense because they are bounded domains. Even Mr Shirky admits that himself in his polemic article on ontology:

“Ontological classification works well in some places, of course. You need a card catalog if you are managing a physical library. You need a hierarchy to manage a file system. So what you want to know, when thinking about how to organize anything, is whether that kind of classification is a good strategy.”

Of course.

On the other side of the coin, things like tagging might be better when organizing the hits. There you’ll get a critical mass of tags to make them worthwhile. But tagging in niche markets might have holes. You might not even get all of your content tag if the user population is too small. And users in a niche market tend to have a common terminology and structure of the inforamtion space, so a controlled vocabularly could actually help them find, use, and make sense of information.

OK, the above is really a half baked idea and had lots of problems. But blogs let anybody say anything they want anytime, so there you have it.