connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by Gymkata)

Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King

For the back story, hit up Tuttle SVC.

UPDATE: It seems as though Google has closed the GoogleBomb loophole in their algorithm. What now?

I guess Lance Dutson shouldn’t have challenged the Maine Office of Tourism’s strategy to overbid for the top “Maine” queries in their search optimization campaign, even though it drove up prices for both his and other local businesses attempting to bid on similar keywords. The state’s advertising firm sued him (pdf) for his public display of discontent for how tax-payer’s money was being spent.

Oh yeah, they’re also suing because he took this (taxpayer-paid) ad off their site to make a point about the number provided (hint: call it if you’re lonely).

If the State of Maine had any clue, they’d do themselves a favor and pause to learn about the nature of the web and the power of conversations across state lines before backing an agency over one of their own residents. But then again, this is reality.

So much for Northeast intellectuals.

Back to the campaign at hand; Increasing the visibility of the Maine Office of Tourism to Maine residents must be good for the state, right? Why exclude Maine web browsers from their optimization campaign to help residents find Maine businesses first and foremost? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking to come across tourist attractions within my own home state.

Unbelievably dumb. If this was happening in my neck of the woods, I’d be equally upset.

(via BuzzMachine)

Peter Morville, Information Architect.

Morville classic quote: “Information Architecture: A balance of art and science.” Risk taking, creativity, listening, trial and error. Designers, writers, developers, etc. are all practicing information architecture techniques (i.e. Microformats)

Different types of domain and users need different types of information architectures.

Search is a System

• User query ->
• Search Interface (Query language, builders) ->
• Search engine ->
• Content (metadata, CV) ->
• Results (Ranking and Clustering Algorithms, Interface Design

Searching is not only finding, but learning (discovery)

Findability
Can people find your web site, find content in your web site and find content despite your web site.

Shifting Gears: “One foot in the past and one foot in the future” What are the longer term trends?

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” - Herbert Simon

You know what? Peter is too eloquent for this live-blogging crap. Go buy the book; it truly is a great read.

Now *this* is the internet I imagined when I left the cd-rom gaming industry in ‘97.

It’s only a preview, but it’s so_much_fun. If the experience continues to evolve along its current path… wow. Great job, Microsoft!

The A9 Yellow Pages team has to view this as steep competition, as it directly challenges their Block View feature (which they invested a lot of time and resources into capturing and developing).

Maybe now focus can shift to improving search precision, allowing us to tap into store inventories to help us find *exactly* what we’re looking for; the rest of the results equation — proximity and recognition — is now officially covered.

(via Techcrunch)

We’re now a month away from the public launch of Krugle; a service that has positioned itself as the one-stop shop for developers to find open source code. If they can pull this off — provide an organized and retrievable library of structured code snippets — they’re bound to fast-track open source development, both within traditionally closed domains and innovative, freelance environments alike.

A snippet from Dylan Tweney’s Wired article:

Krugle, which launches officially next month, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network. The index will cover around 100 million pages of what company founder Ken Krugler terms the “technical web” — high-quality technical pages for professional programmers. (By contrast, Google’s index covers about 11 billion pages.)

“This winds up being a window on all the open-source code in the world,” said Krugler, who estimates the Krugle index will contain between 3 and 5 terabytes of code by the time the engine launches in March.

The new service joins other source-code search engines like Koders and Codefetch, but Krugle intends to differentiate itself by allowing developers to annotate code and documentation, create bookmarks and save collections of search results in a tabbed workspace. Saved workspaces have unique URLs, so developers can send an entire collection of annotated code to a co-worker just by e-mailing a link.

Krugle also contains intelligence to help it parse code and to differentiate programming languages, so a PHP developer could search for a website-registration system written in PHP simply by typing “PHP registration system.”

If Krugle can be as intelligent as they claim, providing the capability to reduce gloms of source code into retrievable objects, not only by language, but by micro-functions as well, this could be the beginning of something huge.

The Contract And The Ammunition

No, I’m not talking about a professional hit. Well, kinda. Let me explain.

For the past three months, I’ve been volunteering part-time with the Participatory Culture Foundation, managing their Bounty County blog. In essence, I post submissions from organizations or funded individuals who are looking to pay individuals from the development community to complete specific open source bounty projects. I also cull the web for existing bounties, posting them within the Bounty County realm for one stop shopping.

One-stop shopping is becoming a theme in this post.

With the percept of open source evolving beyond the realm of specific code or pure ideology into an actual infrastructure for developers to find usable code and then smartly reshare structured, organized code snippets (Krugle), opportunities are beginning to reveal themselves; opportunities beyond just increased productivity within corporate or home offices.

Bounty County is a centralized location for developers to find open source bounties — a much more forward thinking concept than it’s current static execution. If Krugle can harness the energy of the open source development community, it only makes sense to develop a dynamic marketplace for sponsors to:

• post project bounties
• provide pointers to source material
• update project status

Well, I’ll be damned. That short list just happens to be the core features of the static Bounty County site.

Hey, Chris! Getting Nick and Ken together might not be a bad idea, no?

I’m currently working to prep the project environment of one of my clients — a domain that relies on ad sales for survival. The stakeholders have hired me to lead the redesign of their site, which includes the information architecture. Knowing the degree of “get it” in the domain, I need to provide easily digestible “IA” education before I can move forward with my design methodology to improve the tactical findability of their most valuable content.

Yes, it’s a typical IA consulting gig, but I’d like to establish a reusable approach; not for creating explicit architectural solutions across different project types, but with a presentation of explicit, findability techniques.

I’m looking for feedback of my current progress, so if you’d like to participate, feel free to comment on this post or contact me at spcoon [at] seancoon [dot] org. Please feel free to point me to any existing work available online as well. Once I’ve pulled together my findings, I’ll iterate my work and release it into the ’sphere for anyone to use.

The Baseline

Humor me for a moment and try to forget everything you know about classification, structure and order. Instead, imagine that the only element of a web site (we care about) is the most holistic/granular information object:

• On flickr, it would be the image page
• On Amazon, it would be the product page
• On Wired, it would be the article page

Now imagine that your goal is to increase stickiness across this entire object level. Remember, the revenue model is ad sales, so the more content explored, the better for my client.

Each of the previously mentioned domains have crafted specific information architectures to accomplish this goal of “stickiness.” They also have extremely different revenue models, so the “value” of findability is relative to the nature of the product, the domain’s degree of advertising/marketing and the bottom line.

For example, flickr image pages aren’t weighed down with contextual recommendations of similar images from other users (similar to how products are displayed on an Amazon product page) but the inclusion of a simple globe icon next to an image’s tag does expose index pages of similarly tagged photos from other users. This increases discovery, which both entertains me (the user) and increases page views for potential ad clickthroughs.

Different context; similar goals. Expose avenues of findability in the interface to increase domain stickiness.

I’m currently illustrating technique similarities (that are not domain specific) for optimizing information architectures to expose valuable content. Again, consider this exercise an effort to describe a baseline standard, or best practices for findability that can be reused in one way or another across project types.

Along these lines, I’m clarifying techniques by using non-specific terminology (i.e. contextual and relational are generic terms, as compared to collaborative filtering). Secondly, I plan on augmenting the illustration for this particular client by labeling specific values (a 1 to 10 scale, possibly) to the various avenues of findability, distinguishing the value proposition (ROI) between focusing on, say, relational discovery compared to categorical browsing. I won’t be able to complete this second part until user research has been finalized.

Here’s my current list of best practices:

• Object level contextual discovery: Hyperlinks to contextual content, embeded within the primary object of the page (i.e. hyperlinks within an article to other articles, linked notes on a flickr image, etc.)
• Object level relational discovery: Accessible related objects, determined via appropriateness (i.e. as simple as “Related Articles” or as complex as “Other shoppers purchased…”)
• Object to index level relational discovery: Using tags to move from the object level to the index level (i.e. flickr globe icons, del.icio.us tags, etc.)
• Index level relational discovery: Related tags presented from a mass sample of tagged objects (i.e. a tag search on Technorati creates a list of related tags to the original query on the index page)
• Tag/Meta-data search: Optimizing tagging to improve the results when searching objects that have been explicitly tagged (i.e. Gmail labels, Technorati tags, flickr tags, etc.)
• Full-text search: Optimizing objects and result pages to increase precision and to manage recall into precise, secondary, relational options in the presentation layer
• Categorical navigation: Traditional top-down navigation, with a focus on keeping categories both shallow and non-cascading, while keeping the breadth of topical choices as narrow as possible

The diagram (177kb .pdf) displays another element — Third party relational discovery, which is specific to partner deals with external domains.

Ideas, feedback, critique; all appreciated.

The presentation is close to 30 minutes long, but if you have any interest in the future of our society through the lens of culture, knowledge, creativity, politics, hell, if you have any interest in being an informed and participating citizen with this world, grab some chips and a brew, get comfortable and digest this presentation.

IP-extremism… so true.

(via Lessig Blog)

As social tagging begins to catch on beyond the early adopters, content and commerce domains are opening up their information architectures to empower their consumers to tag, creating exponentially greater degrees of faceted, semantic relationships between their information objects.

Amazon is already in the lead to extend this open paradigm into the commerce space with object tagging and Mechanical Turk (a program which could seriously disrupt peasant-class wage pay around the world). Amazon’s past innovation isn’t a guarantee for future success, but their recent moves prove to be a good sign.

How Social Tagging Works

Folksonomies change the dynamics of generating useful index pages by centralizing human perspectives expressed through single or compound descriptive terms into navigable indexes. It’s the equivalent of a dynamic, open-ended thesaurus, eliminating the need to manage the static creation of valued relationships, as co-occurance stitches together threads of information like newly created and evolving synapses in the brain.

The usefulness of these visible, semantic relationships to the person searching for specific content or products is quite possibly the most sticky form of extended discovery not generated through database algorithms.

I mean, forget dropping out of my mental model to browse topical navigation or stopping to search for an explicit term or phrase; when I engage with a domain such as flickr or del.icio.us, my desire to stay within the domain is increased simply because the language I use to define my world through tagging simultaneously allows me to peer into the world of like-minded folk (ergo: folksonomies).

Tagging creates community through the overlap of perspective.

While this extends conversation, it can also impact the sales potential of commerce sites by adding another layer to collaborative filtering, which Amazon has already acknowledged through their advancements in tagging. Now, extend this concept further into the realm of consumer contributions with industry and one can envision the incentive for business to slightly open their gated approach of mass manufacturing in this age of personalization, allowing customers to participate in defining what a company produces by simply tagging their existing objects.

• Tagging builds community
• Tagging increases the findability
• Tagging can give customers a transparent stake in the process of creating services/products/content

Back To The Interface

Try thinking about tagging interfaces on a few distinct levels:

• Interfaces which display common tags from across a particular domain need to be designed to maximize their semantic relationships.
• Object-level interfaces need to be re-crafted to both accommodate the display of previously applied personal tags and tags applied by the community.
• Management screens, which can give ownership of personally applied tags to the people that spend their time generating them, need to be compiled from contributing domains across the web for individuals to manage and, potentially, collect residual dividends related to sales generated from exposed tags.

I recently stumbled across an interesting site that leverages the API of del.icio.us tags. Kevan Davis created extisp.icio.us to scrape user tags and visually represent them using only words or images:

My good friend, DeWitt Clinton, created Delancy, which leverages the open nature of del.icio.us, providing an enhancement with the ability to manage tagged objects by personal click-through popularity:

Kevan’s enhancement focuses on re-presenting information in a way that presents our constantly evolving association with the world outside, while DeWitt’s enhancement focuses on adding feature value, assisting us to quickly find our most used bookmarks.

This type of innovative, open source development reflects the same type of creative energy that non-developers posses — people that are becoming hooked on tagging, hooked on participation.

Sharing Interfaces, Creating A Usable Web 2.0

Now that Silicon Valley is reaping the rewards of innovative open source development—observing hundreds of prototypes across numerous types of applications—how long will it be until these companies begin to act in a similar fashion? Yes, I’m talking about open collaboration.

TypePad enables me to tag my posts by assigning categories, but the management screen is a simple list, one that doesn’t allow me to easily create more manageable sub-categories (I’d probably group my tags by proper names, places, titles, descriptors, etc.). Mena, it’s becoming painful for me to manage my 200+ tags; how about TypePad teaming up with del.icio.us to use their management screen?

del.icio.us does many thing well, including their flexible interface for managing tags by give user created groups of tags nicknames. So simple, but so powerful. Why aren’t domains like TypePad, flickr, Flock, etc. bartering with del.icio.us to leverage this successful interface—one that thousands of early adopters are already using and loving — while providing their own best practice proprietary interfaces or code in return?

This level of collaboration amongst businesses is an example of what would allow companies to focus on developing more focused innovation, enhancing development cycles, reducing resource allocation and most importantly, providing best practice consistency across applications where possible. Toyota recently leased the technology of its Hybrid engines to Ford and other automakers.

How much quicker would a usable and useful Web 2.0 network be created if companies operated in such a manner?

The collective intelligence of humanity seems to be amped to contribute. Are we ready for them?

For the past three weeks I’ve been using Measure Map pretty religiously, trying to get a feel for its depth to see if it’ll be useful as a tool for me to use moving forward. My first review touched upon the usefulness of the features, but admittedly, it was much more of a review of the presentation. After pounding on it some more, I’ve a few more thoughts on the service (remember, this is still an alpha release):

Searching For Search
Measure Map presents the search terms that led visitors to my site from three major search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Below are the terms the were used between 11/05 and 11/20:

68
boondocks
bo peabody
bush crony appointments
bush lies
"contextual column"
"courtney bolton" new york
"David Reid" Baghdad
Dick Chaney and FBI Leak
DOTs
download ofoto
DUMB AND DUMBER
efrat yardeni
evangelic green card
"farrakhan"
farrakhan syracuse university
"Free Flow of Information Act"
Greensboro Troublemaker
Hadj guestbook 2005   
haiku George Bush
impeach Bush Now
javol
"jon stewart" + crossfire
Louis Farrakhan Rosa parks funeral
measure map
"organ failure and death" bush torture "new york times"
"navy seal"
newsbusters
revolution america
"Rosa Parks childhood"
"solo journalism"
sony apology 2005 for compromising PC
Visual map of shield law placement

While this feature is a common stat in an analytic tool, the data display isn’t complete:

• Technorati, Icerocket, A9, etc. query hits are listed elsewhere as links
• Image query hits don’t even show up

MM has a cleanly designed interface for displaying terms which originate from specific search engines, but it doesn’t include terms that originate across all search engines. If Technorati, Icerocket, A9, etc. can be presented on the link page, they can just as easily be presented on the Search Engine and Search Terms pages.

MM also differentiates text queries from image queries for no apparent reason. When I pause to see where visitors are coming from and formulate my understanding of why people are coming to my blog, images queries round out the story. Unless there are technical reasons for not presenting all search terms in one section, this should be a no-brainer enhancement.

My Blog Is More Than Just Posts
The number presented in the Posts icon on the homepage doesn’t equate with total page views (a common data point across all analytic services). I understand that Adaptive is trying to keep this simple—reducing page views to post views is one way to do it—but I’m losing visualization of a bunch of data. Here’s the problem:

• When a search result or link to my homepage is followed, MM doesn’t present it alongside my post pages (it’s buried on the most granular Link section interface)
• When a search result or link to a category/tag index page is followed, the same happens as above

Here’s a possible solution for keeping this simple and presenting the most data as possible:

1. Re-label the Posts section to become "Page Views" This basic nomenclature and data point isn’t represented anywhere in MM
2. On the first interface in the new Page View section, present the stats in one table and clearly mark each type of page view with a text or iconic descriptor. Then add a simple widget for choosing: All, Homepage, Categories or Posts.
3. Of course, make it smart to remember which view the user last used
4. Back on the homepage, bubble up the number of posts and categories viewed (out of how many exist) within the large icon, directly under the total number of page views.

Now, at a glance, I’d be able to see my total page views, while also being able to dig deeper and get a sense of which pages are being hit. Simple and powerful.

The United States Of America
I fully realize that the Country section is icing on the average analytic cake, but it is so much more than that within the context of a global perspective. So I’m thrilled to have a tool that visualizes for me where my visitors reside around the globe, while providing a fun geography refresher course. But now I want sweeter icing; I want to know where my visitors are coming from within America.

ESPN.com generates this very view when they present poll returns from around the nation. Yes, this is US-centric, and doesn’t provide a peek into granular levels elsewhere around the world, but if the data is available (which it is) expose it. The zoom feature practically begs for it to be implemented, as I’m dying to see if a rancher in Montana is connecting*the*dots.

I’m really looking forward to the beta release.

I tag like a 15 year-old kid in the South Bronx with a box full of Krylons and a yard full of freshly sandblasted cars.

I tag like I just got jumped by a handful of punks who made the mistake of letting me follow them to their trailer park homes adorned with freshly cleaned aluminum siding.

I tag like I get told who I am, what I’m supposed to believe and how I’m supposed to act on a daily basis.

I go all city, hoping that one day, the vehicles I’ve touched get stitched together to form a complete sentence.

I tag because I saw you leave your mark and it was dope.

I tag because I know how to freeze, watch TV and (kinda) avoid the kissing bugs.

I tag because the words I drop in time will find a way to form a cohesive rhyme.

I tag because the world may be getting smaller, but it’s damn sure not coming together.

I tag your name, your spot, your position, your mood, your frame of mind when it’s too hard for you to see it for yourself.

I tag the expected terms of modern constructs.

I tag the post-modern undercurrents of miscellaneous descriptors.

I tag my tags so that when structure is forged out of chaos, you’ll know how to find me.

I tag so that it’s me you won’t be looking for.

When I tag, I’m regurgitating the meal I’ve caught for the chicks in my roost.

When I tag, I feel one with the universe of the collective unconscious.

When I tag, I can see the pillars of control quaking in their foundation.

When I tag, I experience therefore I understand.

When we tag, anything is possible.

————

Tag! We’re It! Part II
Tag! We’re It!

Indy films definitely hit a substantial delay in finding their way to my new home in Greensboro, NC, so after a month or so of waiting, I finally had a chance to see Good Night, And Good Luck this past weekend.

Classic.

Heading into the film, I had already regarded Edward R. Murrow a warrior for exposing the truth and championing the rights of the common man and woman, but if GNAGL enlightened me to anything it was to his absolute dedication to a pure journalistic method and a deeply, refined and realistic business acumen.

The Prototypical Newsman

With his classic, stoic, "just the facts ma’am" delivery, Murrow captivated his audience. He came across as an authority figure to the less media savvy audience of the 1950’s, but he also played the role of friend and confidant in the daily struggle to keep on keeping on. Murrow knew very well that if he didn’t consistently frame the paradoxes and contradictions of reality (in this case, Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt), he’d be fair game for criticism and his career would head south quicker than a goose caught up in an October jet stream. That recognition of ethical behavior and accountability was too refreshing to view on film, because in our modern day, mass media world, those self-applied standards of journalistic integrity have all but flown the coop.

Understanding Power

If the film was even close to truly representing the relationship between Murrow and William Paley (the head of CBS), they provided an amazing service by exposing the foundation which drives decisions within the media ecosystem: advertising.

While Murrow bartered with Paley at every turn in order to continue exposing the world around him, Paley seemed forever caught between a rock and a hard place; he needed to keep Murrow happy with his role at CBS by providing the latitude necessary to fuel his journalistic passion while somehow balancing the finicky palette of his paid advertisers. The character development of Paley was rich and multidimensional, as I truly felt his angst in the midst of his paradoxical role within such a Darwinesque ecosystem.

And to see Edward R. Murrow, champion of the people, interviewing Liberace, well, it spoke volumes about the character of the man. He didn’t play the role of prima donna, refusing to lower his standards to run chatty interviews. He didn’t use an agent to threaten litigation. He recognized his role in adding value to the network by spreading his good name across programming that would return a dollar for Paley and the executive team. Though, the look on his face while he ran a fluff interview reminded me of a look and a feeling I’ve seen and heard hundreds of times over.

Modern Day Murrows

The majority of present day citizen journalists—Murrow molded bloggers—have day jobs. We design websites, write code, run businesses, multi-task like madmen, etc. Do we all wish we could blog for a living? I’d venture to say that most of us would say yes, as long as we wouldn’t have a strict editorial edict with advertising pressures. You see, we’re a bit spoiled like that.

Murrow had to navigate closed, controlled environments with a high degree of grace in order to shed light through one window of opportunity, one night a week. Bloggers? Well, we’ve become accustom to firing from the hip, espousing our opinions, perspectives and, yes, researched journalism on a intra-day basis, with no editor or advertising revenues to be concerned with. Has this new paradigm created irresponsible reporting? No more than the closed venue of the mainstream media. The difference is that we’re now empowered to network common visions and dreams, driving the potential of a new day into an actual sunrise, and the power of that freedom is upsetting the status quo.

Corporate media and industries are absolutely petrified by the potential of ordinary people gaining broadcast reach. And as much as I plan on assisting corporate America through this transition into the fast track of iterative development and customer accountability, until they can recognize that everything has changed and that we, the people, are now empowered, I won’t lose one wink of sleep over their concerns.

Can There Be Flat Hierarchy?

It’s true that if it weren’t for the relentless corporate push to rapidly develop and monetize the web in the mid-90’s, blogging technology might not have come about as quickly. Just as true was that VC investment in the potential of the web greatly contributed to the explosion of the infrastructure of information retrieval — collaborative filtering, search algorithms and now folksonomies.

So yes, we are all in this together. The talent needs the funding, but not as much as the funding needs the talent. Remember the last time we danced to this tune: capitalist power players funded the development of the internet on the shoulders of false stickiness, returning large dividends of ad revenue while the innovators focused on innovation. Many of those same capitalists continued to overinvest by underwriting ridiculous IPO’s until the bubble burst. Was it coincidence that a majority of them could reinvest in the internet at a basement entry price, while the talent scrambled about just to retain paid gigs?

Now the power players are scrambling to monetize our blood, sweat and tears at every turn, on every feed, on every page, while we continue to blaze paths two steps ahead of them with our eyes focused on the greater good. We’ll keep doing our thing, they’ll keep doing theirs.

In the end, what else can we say to them but “Good Night, and Good Luck?”

We’ve all had those 20 minutes pillow conversations with our significant other about naming our first born. No matter how serious the relationship is at the time, we’ll argue to the point of breaking up over the sanctity of an unborn baby’s name. For some reason, it seems that celebrities don’t have the same problems.

Earlier this year, Gweneth Paltrow and that Coldplay dude had a baby and named her Apple. How sweet (and so very chic). Not to be outdone, Nick Cage and his other half named their newborn Kal-El; the Krypton name of Superman. The funny thing is that the first thing my mind raced to wasn’t an image of Kal-El’s future lunchroom fist fights (oh, there will be fights), but that Nick Cage always wanted to be the father of Superman.

Who doesn’t?

Well now the celebrity name machine has taken a backseat to a regular Joe (actually, a regular Walid). Walid Elias Kai, a big time fan of the products and services that Google produces, has named his newborn son, yep you guessed it, Google. For some reason his wife Carol, the one who suffered 9 months and God knows how many hours to deliver this kid, didn’t object. Now Google Kai has his very own website, one that has already been spidered by Google. I’m sorry, but that list sentence kinda creeped me out.

But there is a downside to Google’s incarnation as a child:

• What happens if Google (the company) turns out like Lycos?
• You just know the other kids aren’t going to let him play Hide and Seek.
• His mom will probably pimp him out on the gameshow circuit (can you imagine the results on Jeopardy!?)
• Future intimate relationships are bound to result as a bunch of clusterfucks.

Okay, that last one was too geeky and cruel. I mean, one day the kid is bound to Google himself… Google himself? Eh.

I wish Google all the best. He doesn’t realize it right now, but his name has raised the hopes and dreams of men all around this nation and the world. I mean, there’s now an actual chance that some guy in Ohio will be able to
name his kid Tivo, while a lad in Ireland is now hopped up on naming his kid Guinness. They’re not alone. I’m praying that Google raised my chances to name my firstborn
after my biggest role model from my childhood: Freeman McNeil.

C’mon, don’t even try to tell me that Freeman Coon doesn’t have a sweet ring to it!

UPDATE: Since I posted this, it has been brought to my attention that "Freeman Coon" might be a bit messed up due to the slanderous connotations of my last name in the deep south. My response? Well, I guess that depends on your perspective.

By simply enabling blog search results from a search query in the Yahoo! News interface, Yahoo! has moved leaps and bounds into the world of Web 2.0. And they didn’t even have to implement a "shiny" Ajax application.

Yahoo! exposed the common man’s opinion and perspective to the common man. How much more people-centric could this move be? First Technorati gets into the article level of closed environments like Newsweek and bubbles up the voice of bloggers. Now Yahoo! jumps up a level in a person’s mental model for searching and brings blog results back before getting to the article level.

I feel like I’m watching one of those amazing scenes in the Godfather, where a bunch of hits are carried out to a violin solo, while yet another Corleone is being baptized.

Chills down my spine good.

As an aside, I do think I need to call up my friends over in Sunnyvale. I got pretty righteous about the need for this feature while I was conversing with the Yahoo! design and product teams this past June… In any event, I just hope the community keeps this type of forward-thinking user experience design in motion, specifically as it relates to the needs of people (not users).

Man, online discourse is about to get really interesting.

Newsweek and Technorati are in bed together and I’m really hoping it isn’t a monogamous relationship.

I’m not sure when this started, but Newsweek is now citing "Blog Talk," creating a contextual column from the Newsweek article page (first image, click for larger image) that links to a full Blog Talk page (second image) which presents the last 10 blogs posts that have linked to the Newsweek article. This is being done automatically, sans any editorial review.

I’m currently working on a project for which I presented this exact context scenario for our blogger design persona. I couldn’t believe the serendipity. So to ensure the API and execution would support our needs, I ran a quick test and posted a response to the "I’m So Sorry" article, linking back to the story URL. Within 10 minutes of pinging Technorati, my post appeared on the Newsweek page. Okay, that’s very progressive. Sure, it’s only a glorified trackback system, but the underlying philosophy has huge implications.

We’re quickly moving to a sustainable model for presenting the individual perspective on the same level as mainstream media’s editorial-driven journalism. It’s a win-win; a site like Newsweek gets an increased blogger readership and bloggers have the opportunity to share their perspectives with people that tend to stay away from the scattered blogosphere.

From my perspective, this is the first step to truly legitimizing the blogosphere. What’s next? Well, if Google, Yahoo! and other mainstream news aggregators began to index blogs for their search queries, we’d be one step closer to breaking through the mainstream media stranglehold on information for the average American that receives their news on-line. All of this is what the promise of Community TV was supposed to provide twenty years ago, but ran into the obvious production challenges.

This is really good. It’s good for business, good for bloggers, and most importantly, good for bubbling the truth of a story to the surface. This is discourse.

A few months back, I finally stepped out of my dead bolted existence within Ameritrade and began to digest the current state of this Web 2.0 explosion, and as soon as I did, the Semantic Web seemed so much closer to fruition than it did just a few years prior.

Much of the renewed push and entrepreneurial spirit that has driven this industry-wide rebirth seems to have been driven simply by our economic recovery from the dot-com crash. On the surface, that answer is sufficient, but something deeper is at at play. So, with my newly created free-time, I headed down a 2.0 rabbit hole to take me on a journey for clarity.

What I’ve come to realize isn’t anything particularly shocking (unless you’ve been a corporate slave for the past three years).

We’re living in tumultuous times. The air we breathe is being compromised more and more every day. Poverty around the world is increasing exponentially. Our country is knee deep in another Vietnam, another occupation, another struggle for gaining natural resources at any cost. People are becoming polarized by important and moral, personal and social issues, seemingly on a daily basis. All of this is occurring during the reign of an administration that has even the staunchest of conservatives questioning whether we, the people, are living within the midst of a dictatorial democracy, rather than a thriving Republic, built on the principles of political discourse, government checks and balances, fiscal responsibility, the separation of church and state and the power of the individual voter.

So where does this leave us as a people?

Personally speaking, I’ve decided to refocus my effort to publish my views, opinions, perspectives, experiences, etc., in an effort to make even the slightest dent in the discourse surrounding our roles as American citizens.

What motivates me? Pick your poison: the War on Terror; the Rove/Plame/Wilson scandal; the Bolton push-through appointment; the Cindy Sheehan vigil. It seems that every day a new flow of bullshit only fuels the righteous indignation I’ve come to hold regarding this administration.

Is it even possible to imagine a more visceral description of an Aristocracy at play?

For me, the complete disregard of the intelligence and voice of the American citizen begins to explain the groundswell of blogging that has occurred over the past four years, specifically the political blogs and mainstream media watchdog sites.

Sure, the potential for capital gains plays a large role in the motivation to advance technology or any other industry. The web, though, is a bit different due to it’s low cost of entry, so I believe that moral conviction plays a role in both driving the evolution of technology and the passion to leverage it to it’s fullest degree.

So what’s the connection between geo-political events, blogging and the tactical fervor of Web 2.0? (social bookmarking, tagging, open source, open content, etc.)

In a nutshell: everything.

Without a true social democracy in the real, we’ve evolved to create one on-line — where boundaries can be broken down, hierarchies can be dissolved, control can be minimized, etc.

I blog in order to get my voice out into the ether of this new social construct; I tag my blog posts to provide context and semantic relationships on numerous levels, yet with a similar purpose:

1. On the base object level to provide a succinct description of how I perceive this content from a conceptual perspective, perhaps creating a) a greater connection with the reader on a discernible level and b) connections on associative & relational levels with other objects (within my domain and elsewhere)
2. On the categorization level to establish context within a particularly defined category or across a faceted classification scheme. If I were an actual brand, this would be how I’d ensure my position was reflected within my editorial construct and navigation scheme.
3. On the retrievable object level to allow for more avenues of findability (four, well-thought descriptive tags exponentially increase the odds of object retrieval rather than none or even one, either in straight queries or in contextual presentation on the base object level)

These are tactical strategies in the information revolution.

The same principles apply to tagging even more granular object such as photographs, video and sound files, as well as the macro-level social bookmarking of URLs. The effort, I believe, is based on the desire of individual voices to be heard amidst the shelling of the mainstream media. While technically speaking, Web 2.0 is about the creation of richly defined object models and attributes — the more good data we entrench within our objects (be it content, files or URLs themselves), the better the chance for a semantic web experience — the movement behind it is much more compelling, much more philosophical in nature.

After leaving Ameritrade in April, I spent a month digesting Noam Chomsky’s Understanding Power, which introduced me to the specifics of his propaganda model thesis, which I fully digested by watching the documentary Manufacturing Consent. Recently, Dave Sifry (CEO, Technorati) posted a graph on the Technorati Blog displaying the impact that blogs are making within the once dominated realm of entrenched, funded, mainstream media.

I’m only guessing that if Chomsky has studied the progression of the web, he’s smiling up in Cambridge right about now.

The legitimization of the individual (creative and political) perspective is being sustained in the 21st century by the conviction of the blogosphere, passionate focus on the possibilities of 2.0 revenue models and domains, such as Technorati, taking a leadership position. The concept of social dialog, networking and organization and the elemental foundation of capitalism are beginning to shift in exciting ways.

Imagine a near future where:

• Individual perspectives can be made more readily sustainable through a common revenue model, reversing the big money/power structure of publication and media saturation? How would that impact the politics of our nation? Our wage labor practices?
• Algorithms and interfaces allow for rich, precise retrievals of topical queries, with just as precisely retrieved contextual objects presented within a usable format, based on better clustering techniques and taking richer and more valuable attributes into account? How would this impact the way we learn and connect to one another?
• Information domains allow topically defined objects to be rolled up into navigable concepts by users (through customization) instead of predefined categories by information architects? How could this seamlessly raise the bar for common folk in their efforts to research online? To manage information across numerous domains?
• Mainstream media articles and blog posts are presented on the same level (query or article), ensuring checks and balances of mis/disinformation, without a partisan bias? How important is it for check and balances to be rooted within the last bastion of traditional governmental checks and balances — the media?

And the great thing is that we’re not too far away from this revolutionary existence.

Blogs are beginning to bridge the social and communication gaps between nations. My peers are thinking differently when developing this medium, even in traditional business development circumstances. The tactical approach to producing, managing, sharing, finding and using information objects — defined from the bottom up — is finally getting it’s due.

Yes, these are tumultuous times, but they’re exciting as well.

Alright, I admit it. I didn’t get out (or online) much while I worked for Ameritrade. 60 hour work weeks for two straight years while building a design practice and a forward-thinking trading platform will do that to your peripheral vision. Well, I’m making up for lost time, slowing down to explore the web… big time.

• Flickr is sooo good
• My teeth are stuck in del.icio.us
• I’m blown away by the approach and possibilities of Technorati

The IA in me is smiling. No, not for the sheer joy of seeing community indexing, the IA in me is smiling because it’s becoming clear to me where the web is heading, and it’s not following a topical, structured, media-filtered path.

Take Technorati. The approach is like a Bizarro perspective of the mainstream media.

Now, Technorati isn’t dumb, ugly or inhumane as in the illustration below, but it is backwards when looking at it through the typical political/news media lens of corporate America.

I mean, the mainstream media reports news by using explicit filters to ensure that what is published or broadcasted supports the primary objectives of capitalism. In the past, I’ve ranted about the much needed expansion of the Google and Yahoo! news model to place blogs into the mix when drawing from indexed sources. Well, Technorati flipped the model entirely with an approach to sharing information that spits in the eye of mainstream media constructs, creating a communal approach to digesting information. There are no "vanilla" labels of a topical navigation, splitting the world into simplified categories and driving a pre-conceived notion of "valuable" content into the skulls of society.

Technorati leverages tagging to present contextual concepts of information back to the user based on our desires.

Run a tag search on "free speech" and you get a descriptive page of the latest blog entries, Flickr images and a contextual list of social bookmarks which include mainstream media articles (based on del.icio.us and Furl tagging). It took me a few returns to stumble upon the revolutionary aspect of this approach. I mean, three months ago, I would’ve been happy if Google News simply added a column of contextual links of blog post that corresponded to a search query. Technorati has flipped the script and placed the hierarchy crown on the head of bloggers, reducing the "real" media to a column of "see also’s."

I love it.

So where can this go? Can this approach sustain a movement towards fundamentally altering how American society is exposed to, finds and digests information? Man, "it depends" is such an understatement.

• If Technorati can reach a tipping point, similar to Google a few years back, where, say, Tony Soprano is shown "Technorating" waste management on his computer, the impact on society could be huge. People will start to look for information from other people (sans an editorial slant)
• If Technorati partners with a Google or a Yahoo! to provide user-generated content within their results pages, society will begin to experience contextual alternatives to mainstream reporting, entertainment, et al without being forced to have to go search for it through RSS and other technical means.
• If Technorati is bought by a Google or a Yahoo!, all bets are off. Only time would tell if Chomsky’s "propaganda model" proves itself to be a truism or if new media and it’s superstars are exceptions to the rule.

No matter what, it’s obvious that the web’s semantic synapses are continuing to form. This is only the beginning.

I’m really liking where the Amazon UI is heading.

Not to say that their interface has been devoid of good design decisions over the past 9 years. I mean, they were the first e-commerce company to truly leverage collaborative filtering, essentially taking advantage of The Long Tail of online consumerism, long before the terminology was officially anointed within the context of new media. Just getting those features into the interface — placing more eyes on more products — drove the business model and the promise of the New Economy circa 1998.

But crafting the balance between user search, participatory and discovery scenarios within the interface was definitely an afterthought. As a matter of fact, at one point in time, it seemed that Amazon had little concern for any interaction design considerations within the interface at all, satisfied to add features within a scroll-driven, hierarchical construct to no end.

Well, that has seemingly changed. Check out a new test version of the product page:

Am I the only one standing up and applauding? The interface now completely supports the common needs of all users at a point-of-purchase.

1. Clearly display the product price & savings
2. Show the product itself
3. Provide the ability to purchase it or add it to a Wish List
4. Then provide the ability to move into search, participatory or discovery scenarios

Amazon reduced the cognitive friction of the previous interface
by removing the bookend columns of contextual navigation and by moving only the highest priority scenario features (reading reviews and looking inside/searching the book) under the primary sales window. The affordance for the DHTML window on the product image needs to be increased, as it is currently one of purely learned behavior, but the simplicity of the new interface does wonders in focusing my attention.

Take a look at the old interface in comparrison:

For someone that has reached the conclusion of their search or discovery scenario, the shopping experience is now set up for the user to determine price feasibility, drop the product into their cart and either head for checkout or continue to discover.

For someone who’s in the midst of a discovery process, the interface hasn’t changed for the worse, as an anchor link still drops the user down to user reviews. It’s now just better placed. The interface continues to present other collaborative filtering information below the fold. With these smart design decisions, Amazon now finds itself in a position to add elegant customization, because elegant design parameters have been established.

The Amazon jungle is evolving, and in very smart fashion. In my book, that’s pretty cool.

A few years ago I ranted about my fear of a society where the media is absolutely controlled by corporate interests.

Now, my head wasn’t in the sand. I obviously realized that we were already living in a particular version of such a world, as money and power drives practically everything in this country. I was just a little concerned with the audacity of the FCC to even consider the type of deregulation it ended up approving. Sure, it happens every day; legislation lobbyed for by people in power turns around to increase the empowerment of those same people. I mean, this is how the free market works. But this legislation goes beyond just making money for the upper class.

If you view media reach as ephemeral noise in the ether, then the concerns of this post won’t bother you. Feel free to hop over to Amazon and consume away.

The fact is that Americans are glued to the tube and this type of conglomerate legislation — spanning all media (television, print, radio and the internet) — has now allowed for a greater possiblity to create a lasting, singular, corporate perspective in the psychology of the moment and beyond. Consume messaging has been given even more proximity to our children’s brains.

They Live shades are looking pretty good right about now.

So without the prospects of landing a pair of magic sunglasses, what exactly can be done to defend ourselves from this destructive approach to creating a consumer culture at all costs? As a contributor to public discourse, I’ve always believed that the ‘net (in 1997), and specifically, blogs (over the last five years) were a key development in the fight to present a perspective to battle corporate or government disinformation. Why?

• With blogging, there’s no managing editor around with advertising pressures to censor (or generate) a particular perspective. (Well, that is until the corporate structure tries to jack the nomenclature of blogging to dilute it’s effectiveness outside the reach of capitalism)
• Blogs are also a time permitting endeavor; you can publish many times a day or once a year. There isn’t a revenue figure to drive towards, which allows for individual perspectives to be expressed at will

This break from the days of publishing via the standard print revenue generation model is something akin to the advent of the printing press, yet with the merchant nation-state taking the place of the previously empowered Church. Okay, maybe that’s a little pre-mature, but the possibilities are there. And what are the possibilities?

Over the past few years, the blogging revolution has become more and more accessible and mainstream with the advent of RSS and aggregate readers. With Yahoo! adding access to RSS feeds to their My Yahoo! content modules, blogs are one step closer to being mainstream. But this last step is a big one, steeped in moral conviction… a belief in the common man. Why?

Until blogs are automatically indexed as viable, alternative feeds when running, say, a news query at Google or Yahoo!, they are going to, at best, sit on the periphery of the conscious of the world’s inhabitants. The average person does not have the time, nor the patience, to sift through the pedagogy of managing RSS. Bookmarks are about as much as they can handle. Blogs do return in general search queries, but this “general return only” pre-supposes a value level to the quality of the information being retrieved. You know, a perspective or opinion or even investigative research presented by a blogger has less value than a feed from the New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.

That’s why this information retrieval concept would have to be one generated out of moral conviction. By keeping news sources limited strictly to incorporated, staffed and vested (in the economic structure of society) newspapers, a Google (or any other news search engine) is basically saying that only these sources can report and editorialize news. Even though Google has gone a long way in presenting perspectives from small and foreign sources, providing the chance opportunity for conflicting perspective, it’s still not enough.

It seems to me that with a search capability, news aggregator and a blogging tool, Google and Yahoo! are best poised to create convergence between the “professional” news organizations and blogging communities, within the boundaries of their individual interfaces. How accessible blogs become in the presentation, will be a litmus test of their commitment to providing contextual channels within the information age, while creating usable interfaces for digesting a world of information overload and disinformation.

It’s completely doable and their historical commitment to data mining and information presentation doesn’t seem to indicate that they’ll shy away from heading in this direction. Well, as long as blogs don’t impact their institutional investors or advertisers in a negative light, that is.

I noticed something the other day about my online shopping pattern: I don’t browse and I hardly ever buy on a whim.

After contemplating such startling, introspective findings for awhile (uhm… finished), I started to wonder whether this could be the case with most people that shop online? That got me to thinking more, so I mosied on over to Amazon.com to perform an off the cuff user interview/usability study of myself and my tendencies, comparing them to the holistic user experience of the site.

I admit it wasn’t very scientific, but what I discovered was interesting.

• When I shop at Amazon, 99 times of 100 (I multiplied this session by 99) go directly to the search field and enter a product attribute.
• After landing on a results page, I choose a product description page.
• 4 out of 10 times (ballpark figures folks), I’ll review a few user comment reviews on the product as a the final check before deciding to make a purchase or not.
• If it’s a go, then WHAM! I’m in the cart experience and out the virtual door.

What I just described is the Amazon shopping experience from 1996-97. It’s a utilitarian approach and it fits me when it comes to shopping, especially in the real world (but that’s a whole other conversation.)

Online shopping, for me, is about keeping your recommendations to yourself, don’t clutter the page with collaborative filtered data such as ‘purchase circles’ or ‘listmania,’ and just let me find what I’m looking for and get me out of the store… fast.

My assumption is that this is how most people use Amazon. I could be wrong. I’ve been known to be… often. But if that were the case, even if the numbers were only 30% that followed my shopping pattern, wouldn’t the overall user experience be a bit too much? Wouldn’t Amazon be relying too much on quirky collaborative filtering techniques to become the next generation shopping experience?

I mean, first there’s a welcome page, then the Sean store, then a trailing history of what I’ve viewed, then recommendations built dynamically based on those views and presented throughout the UI. On top of all of this there is untargeted and targeted marketing messaging (hmm, sometimes in the form of recommendations?) presented to me at each turn…

Who’s handling the UXdesign here? How many marketing MBA’s are in a room with a cornered IA or DBA hatching plots to create cross-pollination of product silos? Come on, do I really care that people who bought my book also wear clean underwear from Target? Is this the smartest Amazon can be?

Amazon deserves credit for recently removing some of the superfluous features of the site from the main experience and placing them into the well hidden ‘explore’ category on a secret page somewhere in their navigation scheme. But the powerful information that this site could provide the customer should be generated at the customer’s whim.

Please, Mr. Bezos, we’re living in the realm of customization. Allow us to create our own product page. Let us choose if we want these extra features and how we want to view them. I understand there’s a fine line between satisfying the needs of your retail partners and pushing product, but when in doubt, bite the bullet and go with the us, the people, the customers.

Amazon is now six years old, the ancient mother of e-commerce sites. Now would be the time to design an experience for individual shoppers. Create a completely personalized shopping experience through customizable interaction design. It’s the next step in online shopping, and you know how the saying goes in the retail world: the customer is always right.

My career as an IA started with a lecture from Moses himself.

Richard Saul Wurman came to the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1998 to give a presentation on the past, present and future of information architecture. After the lecture, me and my newly acquainted crew from Organic-NY headed back to the office with a passionate drive to better our work in the interactive space.

I mention this because I find it extremely interesting to see Wurman’s vision of IA evolving before our very eyes. Yes, Wurman did proclaim that (paraphrasing):

"A new breed of workers called information architects would take on the challenge of handling the tsunami of information crashing upon our shores."

But Wurman himself was, and still is, much more than what our community has tried so desperately to establish over the past few years as the definition of ‘information architect’ proper (i.e. one who improves search/findability, through labeling, categorization, thesauri development; a librarian extraordinaire).

Wurman envisioned information architecture as a design solution in the information age; an intrinsic quality of the design process itself. Sure, that can be translated into the library science model of IA that we accept now, but is that definition due to the evolution of the work or to the ‘leadership’ of our community?

It’s not an easy question to answer, but a valid one to ask none the less.

So what will be the agenda of AIfIA moving forward concerning the role/responsibilities of IA’s in the workplace? How will IA be positioned regarding return on investment? Where will the line be drawn in reference to IA’s estranged cousins (UX and the ID’s)? Should there really be one professional stance as IA/ID graduate programs come to fruition?

If Wurman really is the father of IA, as Christina suggested by quoting him, let’s respect his vision (pre-internet/hyperlink), build upon our evolution and seriously think about the future of our profession. I do hope AIfIA provides an open and collaborative think tank and doesn’t turn into Derek’s worst nightmare.