This study, now a few years old doesnâ€t really come to any overwhelming conclusion that would persuade me to abandon underscores (or dashes) for CamelCase but is worth noting.

From the Abstract:

An empirical study to determine if identifier-naming conventions (i.e., camelCase and under_score) affect code comprehension is presented. An eye tracker is used to capture quantitative data from human subjects during an experiment. The intent of this study is to replicate a previous study published at ICPC 2009 (Binkley et al.) that used a timed response test method to acquire data. The use of eye-tracking equipment gives additional insight and overcomes some limitations of traditional data gathering techniques. Similarities and differences between the two studies are discussed. One main difference is that subjects were trained mainly in the underscore style and were all programmers. While results indicate no difference in accuracy between the two styles, subjects recognize identifiers in the underscore style more quickly.

via IEEE Xplore Abstract – An Eye Tracking Study on camelCase and under_score Identifier Styles.

Also available via the author’s web site.

Here’s a word cloud of the text from the fine people at Wordle:

It seems that as of today, the Apple iTunes Preview Web servers are not playing well with the googlebot. Take a look at the top three SERP descriptions for Angry Birds, one of the most popular iOS apps.

Maybe the Apple Webmasters need to get a plucky action hero to improve snippets with a meta description makeover.

These results may also imply something about how much data has been gathered and is used for my personalized versions of both searches too. However, I don’t remember searching for any of these as either a "what is" search or for any of the other search terms.

Parliament? Gout? Gluten? The Illuminati? Strange indeed, but perhaps the makings of a great mystery-thriller novel!

Chun Wei Choo, Brian Detlor and Don Turnbull

Keywords

world wide web, information seeking, information retrieval, browsing, web browser, searching, finding, behavioral model, user behavior, log analysis, quantitative, qualitative

Cite As

Chun Wei Choo, Brian Detlor and Don Turnbull (2000) Information Seeking on the Web: An Integrated Model of Browsing and Searching. First Monday, volume 5, number 2 (February 2000).

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a study of how knowledge workers use the Web to seek external information as part of their daily work. Thirty-four users from seven companies took part in the study. Participants were mainly IT specialists, managers, and research/marketing/consulting staff working in organizations that included a large utility company, a major bank, and a consulting firm. Participants answered a detailed questionnaire and were interviewed individually in order to understand their information needs and information seeking preferences. A custom-developed WebTracker software application was installed on each of their work place PCs, and participants’ Web-use activities were then recorded continuously during two-week periods. The WebTracker recorded how participants used the browser to seek information on the Web: it logged menu choices, button bar selections, and keystroke actions, allowing browsing and searching sequences to be reconstructed. In a second round of personal interviews, participants recalled critical incidents of using information from the Web.

Data from the two interviews and the WebTracker logs constituted the database for analysis. Sixty-one significant episodes of information seeking were identified. A model was developed to describe the common repertoires of information seeking that were observed. On one axis of the model, episodes were plotted according to the four scanning modes identified by Aguilar (1967), Weick and Daft (1983): undirected viewing, conditioned viewing, informal search, and formal search. Each mode is characterized by its own information needs and information seeking strategies. On the other axis of the model, episodes were plotted according to the occurrence of one or more of the six categories of information seeking behaviors identified by Ellis (1989, 1990): starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, and extracting. The study suggests that a behavioral framework that relates motivations (Aguilar) and moves (Ellis) may be helpful in analyzing patterns of Web-based information seeking.

Excerpt

Towards a Behavioral Model of Information Seeking on the Web

Aguilar’s modes of scanning and Ellis’ seeking behaviors may be combined and extended in a new behavioral model of information seeking on the Web. The figure below identifies four main modes of information seeking on the Web: undirected viewing, conditioned viewing, informal search, and formal search. For each mode, the figure indicates which information seeking activities or moves are likely to occur frequently, as suggested by theory.

Figure 3: Behavioral Modes and Moves of Information Seeking on the Web

	Starting	Chaining	Browsing	Differentiating	Monitoring	Extracting
Undirected Viewing	Identifying, selecting, starting pages and sites	Following links on initial pages
Conditioned Viewing			Browsing entry pages, headings, site maps	Bookmarking, printing, copying; Going directly to known site	Revisiting ‘favorite’ or bookmarked sites for new information
Informal Search				Bookmarking, printing, copying; Going directly to known site	Revisiting ‘favorite’ or bookmarked sites for new information	Using (local) search engines to extract information
Formal Search					Revisiting ‘favorite’ or bookmarked sites for new information	Using search engines to extract information

Undirected Viewing

In the undirected viewing mode on the Web, we expect to see many instances of starting and chaining. Starting occurs when viewers begin their Web use on pre-selected default home pages, or when they visit a favorite page or site to begin their viewing (such as news, newspaper, or magazine sites). Chaining occurs when viewers notice items of interest (often by chance), and then follow hypertext links to more information on those items. Forward chaining of the sort just described is the most typical during undirected viewing. Backward chaining is also possible, since search engines can be used to locate other Web pages that point to the site that the user is currently at.

Conditioned Viewing

In the conditioned viewing mode on the Web, we expect browsing, differentiating, and monitoring to be common. Differentiating occurs as viewers select Web sites or pages that they expect to provide relevant information. Sites may be differentiated based on prior personal visits, or recommendations by others (such as word-of-mouth or published reviews). Differentiated sites are often bookmarked. When visiting differentiated sites, viewers browse the content by looking through tables of contents, site maps, or list of items and categories. Viewers may also monitor highly differentiated sites by returning regularly to browse, or by keeping abreast of new content (through, for example subscribing to newsletters that report new material on the site).

Informal Search

During informal search on the Web, we expect differentiating, extracting, and monitoring to be typical. Again, informal search is likely to be attempted at a small number of Web sites that have been differentiated by the individual, based on the individual’s knowledge about these sites’ information relevance, quality, affiliation, dependability, and so on. Extracting is relatively “informal” in the sense that searching would be localized to looking for information within the selected site(s). Extracting is also likely to make use of the basic, ‘simple’ search features or commands of the local search engine, in order to get at the most important or most recent information, without attempting to be comprehensive. Monitoring becomes more proactive if the individual sets up push channels or software agents that automatically find and deliver information based on keywords or subject headings.

Formal Search

During formal search on the Web, we expect primarily extracting operations, with some complementary monitoring activity. Formal search makes use of search engines that cover the Web relatively comprehensively, and that provide a powerful set of search features that can focus retrieval. Because the individual wishes not to miss any important information, there is a willingness to spend more time in the search, to learn and use complex search features, and to evaluate the sources that are found in terms of quality or accuracy. Formal search may be two-staged: multi-site searching that identifies significant sources is then followed by within-site searching. Within-site searching may involve fairly intensive foraging. Extracting may be supported by monitoring activity, again through services such as Web site alerts, push channels/agents, and e-mail announcements, in order to keep up with late-breaking information.

References in this publication

• Francis J. Aguilar, 1967. Scanning the Business Environment. New York: Macmillan.
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• Shan-Ju Chang and Ronald E. Rice, 1993. “Browsing: A Multidimensional Framework,” In: Martha E. Williams (editor). Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. Medford, N.J.: Learned Information.
• Chun Wei Choo, 1998. Information Management for the Intelligent Organization: The Art of Scanning the Environment. Second edition. Medford, N.J.: Information Today.
• Chun Wei Choo, Brian Detlor, and Don Turnbull, 1998. “A Behavioral Model of Information Seeking on the Web: Preliminary Results of a Study of How Managers and IT Specialists Use the Web,” In: Proceedingsof 61st ASIS Annual Meeting held in Pittsburgh, Pa., edited by Cecilia M. Preston, volume 35, pp. 290-302. Medford, N.J.: Information Today.
• Richard L. Daft and Karl E. Weick, 1984. “Toward a Model of Organizations as Interpretation Systems,” Academy of Management Review,volume 9, number 2, pp. 284-295.
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K. Andrew Edmonds, James Blustein and Don Turnbull

Keywords

information management, personal information management, pim, hypertext, wiki, personalization, information organization, blogging, computer-supported cooperative work

Cite As

K. Andrew Edmonds, James Blustein and Don Turnbull (2006). A Personal Information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator. Journal of Digital Information, 5(1).

Abstract

The Next Big Thing is being grown organically, cultivated by software developers and pruned by personal Weblog publishers. The rising Weblogging space of the Internet is looking more like traditional hypertext than the Web of the 1990s. The ways in which Weblogging has evolved beyond the previous limitations of the Web as hypertext, and the ways Weblogging is evolving towards common-use hypertext destined to play a critical role in everyday life, will be explored. We have a vision of a universal information management system built on extending the traditional hypertext framework. In our utopian future, everyone will use tools descended from today’s blogs to structure, search and share personal information, as well as to participate in shared discussion. We begin by expressing a vision of common-use hypertext for information management and interpersonal communication.

This vision is grounded in the rapid evolution of Weblogs and known issues in information systems and hypertext. The practical implications of who will use these systems, and how, is expanded as usage scenarios for Weblogs now and in the future. After recapping the current issues facing the Weblogging community, we look to the long-range implementation issues with optimism. Our system is forward-looking yet realistic. The activities the system will support are extrapolated from recent developments in the online community, and most of the sketches of implementation are based on current approaches. It is of more than passing interest that the features we extrapolate were all described by Nelson as early hypertext ideals. Of particular interest is that the features are now being implemented because of perceived immediate need by communities of interest.

Excerpt

Looking Ahead
An enriched personal history of interaction with any networked information, organized by time, location or activity will add much-needed context to ubiquitous computing and its potential for always-on history collection. This history will be available in the universal information manager for user controlled contributions to a spectrum of distributed access, from private to public and dynamic to archival. Already the practice of moblogging (i.e. the use of digital camera-equipped cell phones to take and share photographs taken anywhere [8]) is expanding the abilities of personal information collections. Moreover, this expansion of digital information collection leads to a multimedia-rich world of individual history, shareable with family, friends and others as permitted. Flexible recombinations of media will allow the easy assemblage of interlinked hypermedia scrapbooks in the PIKII: to catalog the interactions of subsets of people, places and activities enabled by automatically created metadata at the time of media creation, through subsequent interaction and by explicit tagging.

Systems that generate and use implicit tagging and information classification are also key elements of the PIKII. Just as Google uses popularity and relevance measures to sort and rank Web information, authoring tools will enable the use of information annotation in appropriate metadata dimensions to add information about a link or node of information. Such link type information might be, at its simplest, an affective score or a value along a more sophisticated dimension such as typing the rhetorical relationship. This information, when combined with personal history, information content, the interaction with a peer’s data (expressed in any number of ways from a blog post, shared access to personal information or popularity measures), will be key factors that help make information searching more personally relevant.
Beyond singular units of information, the PIKII will provide interfaces for mapping discussions distributed across the Internet and could be the catalyst for widescale adoption of link types in more traditional discussion systems. Affective components of link types may dominate the social aspects of Weblog communication due to simplicity in authoring and dynamic typing through the explicit and implicit methods previously noted. While transclusion and annotation have formed the basis for widespread adoption of hypertext for Weblog communication, the proposed link and node type additions, as well as more general metadata improvements, will facilitate the intertwingling of information, but with an intelligence to help manage attention and provenance

In many ways, this article aligns with a subset of the goals of the semantic Web space (Berners-Lee et al. 2001), which also promises utility for metadata-enriched information about everyday events. In an ideal world, service providers and vendors, software tools and agencies would offer information in standardized, metadata-enriched, machine readable formats suitable for semantic Web intentions. Many chores might be automated, as in the arrangement of health care for example.
Expanding from the semantic Web, a system of successful micropayment schemes may arise, whether they be karmic and barter schemes or involve actual funds transfer that may drive the received value of both preparing and accessing this semantically-enriched information. Information exchanges with knowledgeable experts and the distribution of favors through a Friend-of-a-Friend network may prove to be more valuable and more popular than micropayments. As we have seen, a key to the widespread adoption of Web information to date is the ability to connect openly with individuals and groups who share common interests, a trend that should continue.

This combination of personal, aggregate and networked contextualizing of information nodes and their linking methods has wide-ranging potential for many dimensions of personal knowledge management efforts. The critical need for personal information management and publishing is to bring the fluency that Weblogging software has created for publishing to the process of connecting and integrating information, leading to a storehouse of personal knowledge.

Conclusion
We have a vision of a universal information management system built on a hypertext framework. In our utopian future, everyone will use tools descended from today’s blogs to structure, search and share personal information as well as to participate in shared discussion. Just as Nelson (1990) envisioned a network where everything is deeply intertwingled, we propose that not only everything, but everyone can belong to several, possibly overlapping and discordant, intertwingled communities of interest. These communities will form dense networks of information linkage, allowing many types of structured and unstructured content to continually expand and weave even more interconnected webs of relationships.
People are motivated to communicate many aspects of their lives to many different audiences. The rapid growth of Weblogging has affirmed the appeal of hypertext and validated the notion of individuals as content producers. The availability of personal hypertext systems, with support for granular control over sharing nodes, will increase this adoption for both Weblog authors and readers.
The growth in the amount of digitally captured and hypertextualized information in the coming years will be even more astounding than the growth of the Web over the past ten years. There are significant technical challenges to overcome, but the standards-based organic growth of Weblogs and the Internet shows methods by which these challenges might be overcome. Rejecting the Web as not-hypertext is missing the point. The Web is an incubator for a continuously evolving system of content, user interests and supporting technologies.

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Andrew Dillon and Don Turnbull

Keywords

information architecture, web design, world-wide web, interaction design, user experience, information design

Cite As

Andrew Dillon & Don Turnbull (2006). Information Architecture. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 2006 Edition. Taylor & Francis.

Introduction

Information architecture has become one of the latest areas of excitement within the library and information science (LIS) community, largely resulting from the recognition it garners from those outside of the field for the methods and practices of information design and management long seen as core to information science.

The term, information architecture (IA), was coined by Richard Wurman in 1975 to describe the need to transform data into meaningful information for people to use, a not entirely original idea, but cer- tainly a first-time conjunction of the terms into the now common IA label. Building on concepts in archi- tecture, information design, typography, and graphic design, Wurmanâ€s vision of a new field lay dormant for the most part until the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, when interest in information organization and structures became widespread. The term came into vogue among the broad web design community as a result of the need to find a way of communicating shared interests in the underlying organization of digitally accessed information.

Excerpt

Research Issues in IA

Pure research in IA is rare, the field borrowing more from outside as needed than tackling research ques- tions directly. However, as the process of IA has become structured and recognized, dedicated research for IA is beginning to take form, driven largely by practitioners seeking answers to design questions.
The major theme in IA research is the study of navigation and how people find what they are looking for in an information space. From concerns with labeling and menu structures to the development of models of navigation behavior there are now significant research publications dealing with topics of direct relevance to IA.[10,11] True, most of this work is still borrowed from outside, but this is subject to change as more academic researchers become involved in the field.

There is also significant work that extends examina- tions of navigation into areas such as the perception of information shape or the emergence of web genres and their exploitation for design.[7,12] This research aims to uncover the interaction between various structural forms of information space and the user, employing a socio-cognitive based analytical approach to explain- ing and predicting use.

Another central theme for IA research is search behavior and the underlying design of efficient search mechanisms. Again, this research not only draws on the history of such work for information retrieval but also contains new contributions dealing with faceted metadata and image databases.[13–15]

Indeed, it is difficult to bound work exclusively as the province of IA because concerns with organization of information and user search and navigation of information spaces have such a long history. It is likely that for the foreseeable future, IA will remain a net borrower of intellectual research from other disciplines until such time as dedicated venues for IA research publications emerge. That said, the need to understand how best to design and implement IAs will remain an important driver of research work.

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[PDF]

Don Turnbull

Abstract

This paper describes possible approaches of data collection and analysis methods that can be used to understand Web use via logging. First, a method devised by Choo, Detlor, & Turnbull (1998, 1999 & 2000) that can be used to offer a comprehensive, empirical foundation for understanding Web logs in context by gaining insight into Web use from three diverse sources: an initial survey questionnaire, usage logs gathered with a custom-developed Web tracking application and follow-up interviews with study participants. Second, a method of validating different types of Web use logs is proposed that involves client browser trace logs, intranet server and firewall or proxy logs. Third and finally, a system is proposed to collected and analyze Web use via proxy logs that classify Web pages by content.

Excerpt

It is often thought that in some configurations, client browsing application local caching settings may influence server-based logging accuracy. If it is not efficient to modify each study participantâ€s browser settings (or that temporarily modifying participants browser settings for the study period affects true Web use) a method of factoring in what may be lost due to local cache may be applied. … By tuning intranet server logging settings and collecting and analyzing these logs, some initial measurement of the differences that client browser caching makes in accurate firewall logs can be made. Comparisons to access on the organizations intranet Web server logs such as total page requests per page, time to load, use of REST or AJAX interaction and consistent user identification can be made to the more raw logging from the firewall logs collected

Update

What’s novel about this paper is the introduction of using different datasets to validate or triangulate the veracity and accuracy of log data. Often, logs are collected and processed without context to explain subtle interaction patterns, especially in relation to user behavior. By coordinating a set of quantitative resources, often with accompanying qualitative data, a much richer view of Web use is achieved. This is worth remembering when relying on Web Analytics tools to form a picture of a Web site’s use or set of Web user interactions: you need to go beyond the basic statistical measures (often far beyond what typical log analysis software provides, certainly by their default reports) and design new analysis techniques to gain understanding.

Keywords

browser history, firewall logs, intranet server logs, web use, survey, questionnaire, client application, webtracker, interview, methodology, logs, server logs, proxy, firewall, analytics, content classification, client trace, transaction log analysis, www

Cite As

Turnbull, D. (2006). Methodologies for Understanding Web Use with Logging in Context. Paper presented at the The 15th International World Wide Web Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland.

References in this publication

• Auster, E., & Choo, C. W. (1993). Environmental scanning by CEOs in two Canadian industries. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 44(4), 194-203.
• Catledge, L. D., & Pitkow, J. E. (1995). Characterizing Browsing Strategies in the World-Wide Web. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 27, 1065-1073.
• Choo, C.W., Detlor, B. & Turnbull, D. (1998). A Behavioral Model of Information Seeking on the Web — Preliminary Results of a Study of How Managers and IT Specialists Use the Web. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the American Society of Information Science, 290-302.
• Choo, C.W., Detlor, B. & Turnbull, D. (1999). Information Seeking on the Web – An Integrated Model of Browsing and Searching. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Society of Information Science, Washington, D.C.
• Choo, C.W., Detlor, B. & Turnbull, D. (2000). Web Work: Information Seeking and Knowledge Work on the World Wide Web. Dordrecht, The Netherlands, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Cuhna, C.R., Bestavros, A. & Crovella, M.E. (1995). Characteristics of WWW Client-Based Traces. Technical Report #1995-010. Boston University, Boston MA.
• Flanagan, J. C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin 51(4), 327-358.
• Jansen, B. J., Spink, A. & Saracevic, T. (2000) Real life, real users, and real needs: a study and analysis of user queries on the Web. Information Processing & Management, Volume 36, Issue 2, pp 207-227.
• Jansen, B. J. (2005) Evaluating Success in Search Systems. Proceedings of the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology. Charlotte, North Carolina. 28 October – 2 November.
• Kehoe, C., Pitkow, J. & Rogers, J. (1998). GVU’s Ninth WWW User Survey Report. http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/survey-1998-04.
• Pitkow, J. and Recker, M. (1994). Results from the first World-Wide Web survey. Special issue of Journal of Computer Networks and ISDN systems, 27, 2.
• Pitkow, J. (1997, April 7-11). In Search of Reliable Usage Data on the WWW. Sixth International World Wide Web Conference Proceedings, Santa Clara, CA.
• Rousskov, A. & Soloviev, V. (1999) A performance study of the Squid proxy on HTTP/1.0. World Wide Web., 2, 1-2, pp 47 – 67.

Publications that cite this publication

• Rivolli, A., Marinho, D. & Pansanato, L. (2008).Uma abordagem para o rastreamento da interaçao do usuário com aplicações interativas web. Proceedings of the 14th Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web table of contents. Vila Velha, Brazil, pp 28-35.
  

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Jansen, B.J. and Ramadoss, R. and Zhang, M. and Zang, N. (2006). Wrapper: An application for evaluating exploratory searching outside of the lab. EESS, p 14.

[PDF]

Don Turnbull

Abstract

The OpenChoice system, currently in development, is an open source, open access community rating and filtering service that would improve upon the utility of currently available Web content filters. The goal of OpenChoice is to encourage community involvement in making filtering classification more accurate and to increase awareness in the current approaches to content filtering. The design challenge for OpenChoice is to find the best interfaces for encouraging easy participation amongst a community of users, be it for voting, rating or discussing Web page content. This work in progress reviews some initial designs while reviewing best practices and designs from popular Web portals and community sites.

Excerpt

…Tim Oâ€Reilly proposed the phrase “architecture of participation” to describe participatory Web sites and applications that encourage user-driven content, open source contribution models and simple access via APIs. So why are so many of these sites and applications under-designed at the interface and interaction level, not to mention having vaguely architected overall structure? Many of these sites are relying on the (initial) enthusiasm of users or their compelling features to keep and encourage participation. However more attractive and functional interfaces with clear labels, (usability) tested interfaces, finely crafted workflows and consistent interaction models would both keep early adopters involved and allow for easy bootstrapping for late-comers. When designing participatory, community-oriented sites, designers shouldnâ€t have to re-invent everything from scratch.

…popular community sites feature common interface elements and functionality:

• Overall voting and rank status easy to read
• Dynamically updated interaction
• Thumbnail, abstract or actual content of item on same page as voting interface
• Rating information for community at large for the item
• Suggestions or lists for additional items to rate
• Textual description of (proposed) item category with link to category
• Links to related and relevant discussions about item (or item category)
• Standard interface objects (where appropriate) to leverage existing Web interaction (e.g. purple & blue links colors, tabbed navigation metaphor, drop-down lists)
• Show history of ratings or queue of items to vote on
• Aggregate main page or display element that shows overall community ratings (to encourage virtuous competition for most ratings)
• Task flow for voting or rating clear with additional interactions not required (e.g. following links)

…In addition to dynamic voting status, there is some consideration of simplifying the voting to include “allow” vs. “block” ratings only. Design issues such as the colors of the buttons may also overly influence certain votes.

As part of each userâ€s own customized portal page, a history of recent votes is prototyped to give users the ability to remember their past votes and see the status of pending items in consideration.

Keywords

information interfaces: Graphical User Interfaces, user interfaces, reputation systems, social computing

Cite As

Turnbull, D. (2007). Rating, Voting & Ranking: Designing for Collaboration & Consensus. Paper presented at the Association of Computing Machinery Computer Human Interface Conference (SIGCHI), San Jose, CA.

References in this publication

• Goldstein, A. (2002). Like a sieve: The Child Internet Protection Act and ineffective filters in libraries. Fordham Intellectual Property, Media, and Entertainment Law Journal, 12, 1187.1202.
• Kaiser Family Foundation. (2002). See no evil: How Internet filters affect the search for online health information. http://www.kff.org (10/25/2004)
• http://www.youtube.com
• http://www.digg.com
• http://www.imdb.com
• http://www.netflix.com
• Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Perseus Publishing, 2002
  

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• Galway, D. (2008) Real-life Rating Algorithm [PDF].

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Building Web Reputation Systems by Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass at Building Web Reputation Systems: The Blog.

Many of these books are non-fiction favorites. I’ve used them in courses I’ve taught, relied on them for research ideas and used them to convey how quantitative innovation is pursued.

1. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society by James Beniger. Nearly encyclopedic in its coverage of the Industrial Revolution’s impact on creating the Information Age, where economic forces accelerated collecting, storing and capitalizing on data. Particularly interesting (truly!) are insights about the railroad industry and information technology (e.g the telegraph).
2. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein. Just thinking about this book makes me want to read it again. It’s a swashbuckler of a story of the history of people using mathematics to tame the world. (Well, at least to me.) Bernstein’s style is surprisingly readable with narratives that keep you engaged.
3. Excel Scientific and Engineering Cookbook by David M Bourg. A great (but aging) overview of doing statistics in spreadsheets, including regression and time series analysis. Not for beginners, but a good reference and reminder of the power of Excel for almost all manner of analysis. (The only downside to Excel is its limit for working with very large datasets.)
4. The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg. Another fun read, a glance through the history of some of the more famous statisticians (my favorite being Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov and a partial history of Soviet science).
5. Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart by Ian Ayres. The most readable (and current), with some basic introductory ideas presented in the context of how organizations such as Netflix, Southwest Airlines – and of course Google use numbers and industries including baseball and wine-making are impacted by quantitative work.
6. The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 by Theodore M. Porter. This book is mostly thematic, covering the rise of statistics and their influence in the social sciences. A bit dry (and poorly typeset) but a foundational study. (Feel free to rely on the Index to jump around to people or topics you might be more interested in.)
7. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850 by Daniel R. Headrick. This book was a quick read, suggesting a number of common themes such as the rise of the Age of Reason and the parallel development of scientific instrumentation. As empirical sciences progressed, a resulting increase in collected data brought forth the origins, expansion and professionalization of many kinds of information systems including graphs, maps, encyclopedias, the post office and insights of key scientists of the age (e.g. Carl Linnaeus). Not as grand in scope as other recommended books, but focuses more clearly on types of information that are often the focus of IA efforts.
8. Men of Mathematics by E.T. Bell. A somewhat stilted (written in the 1930’s) biographical walk-through of many storied mathematicians (i.e the people’s names you hated to hear in 10th grade Geometry), that reveals the history of quantitative analysis and the intellectual vigor (did I just say that?) of those like Gauss or Lagrange. Even if the math itself is not your normal interest, this book is an index of obsession, diligence and ingenuity.
9. The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 by Stephen M. Stigler (not shown). I have not finished this book, and there is a lot in it that I do not have much interest in, and have put it down several times (it is a bit dry). However, the integration of how different statistical measures were built progressively is interesting. Also, one of the better sets of discussion about Karl Pearson.

Two books illustrate the downfall of quantitative hubris (among other things) and both are fun to read.
1. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein. This book narrates the catastrophic failure of Long-Term Capital Management, the fabled sure-bet genius-powered hedge fund that boasted two Nobel laureates among its partners and how they nearly crashed the entire world financial system with this overconfidence in 1998.
2. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin. A detailed (600 page plus) report of the nearly minute to minute recent financial crisis and an indictment of over-reliance on trusting abstract mathematics without (any?) explanation or validation. Worth remembering when confronted with abundant or seemingly infallible data-driven results that we should not be intimidated and remember to ask Why? and How?.

[PDF]

James Pitkow, Hinrich Schuetze, Todd A. Cass, Rob Cooley, Don Turnbull, Andy Edmonds, Eytan Adar, et al.

Abstract

A contextual computing approach may prove a breakthrough in personalized search efficiency.

Excerpt

Don Turnbull and Laura F. Bright

Abstract

An exploratory study conducted in late autumn and early winter 2006-2007 investigates the purchasing of sponsored search advertising for a major US university’s academic department. The ad campaign used Google’s AdWord service with the goal of increasing awareness of the academic department and encouraging potential graduate admissions or admissions inquiries. A behavioral model of information seeking is suggested that could be applied for selecting appropriate types of online advertising for awareness and other advertising goals. The study found little overlap between traditional, commerce-oriented online advertising methods and a general awareness campaign, as evidenced by a low click-through rate to the targeted site. Insights for future studies include increased integration with server logs, targeted site query terms and alternative awareness strategies.

Keywords

sponsored search; online advertising; search engines; behavioral model; information seeking; electronic business; Google.

Cite As

Turnbull, D. and Bright, L.F. (2008) Advertising academia with sponsored search: an exploratory study examining the effectiveness of Google AdWords at the local and global level, Int. J. Electronic Business, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp.149-171.

References in this publication

• Ad Age Search Marketing Fact Pack (2006) Published by eMarketer on 6th November, Retrieved online on 01/19/07.
• Allen, T.J. (1977) Information needs and uses, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 4, pp.3-29.
• Chang, S. and Rice, R. (1993) Browsing: a multidimensional framework, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 23, p.242.
• Cho, C. (2003) Factors influencing the clicking of banner ads on the World Wide Web, Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp.201-215.
• Cho, C–H. and Cheon, H.J. (2004) Why do people avoid advertising on the internet?, Journal of Advertising, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp.89-97.
• Choo, C.W., Detlor, B. and Turnbull, D. (1998) A behavioral model of information seeking on the web – preliminary results of a study of how managers and IT specialists use the web, Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the American Society of Information Science, Published for the American Society for Information Science by Information Today Inc., Pittsburgh, PA.
• Choo, C.W., Detlor, B. and Turnbull, D. (2000a) Web Work: Information Seeking and Knowledge Work on the World Wide Web, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

• Choo, C.W., Detlor, B. and Turnbull, D. (2000b) Working the web: an empirical model of web use, 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS), Maui, HI.
• Coulter, R.A., Zaltman, G. and Coulter, K.S. (2001) Interpreting consumer perceptions of advertising: an application of the Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique, Journal of Advertising, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp.1-21.
• Coyle, J.R. and Thorson, E. (2001) The effects of progressive levels of interactivity and vividness in web marketing sites, Journal of Advertising, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp.277-289.
• Ellis, D. and Cox, D. (1993) A comparison of the information seeking patterns of research scientists in an industrial environment, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 49, No. 4, pp.356-369.
• Ellis, D. (1989) A behavioural approach to information retrieval systems design, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 45, No. 3, pp.171-212.
• Ellis, D. (1997) Modelling the information seeking patterns of engineers and research scientists in an industrial environment, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 53, No. 4, pp.384-403.
• Fain, D.C. and Pederson, J.O. (2006) Sponsored search: a brief history, American Society for Information Science and Technology Bulletin, Retrieved on 11/15/06 from http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Dec-05/pedersen.html, January, Special Issue.
• Feng, J., Bhargava, H.K. and Pennock, D.M. (2005) Implementing sponsored search in web search engines: computational evaluation of alternative mechanisms, Journal of Computing, Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2007, pp.137-148.
• Friestad, M. and Wright, P. (1994) The persuasion knowledge model: how people cope with persuasion attempts, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 21, pp.1-31.
• Godin, S. (1999) Permission Marketing, Simon and Schuster, New York. Goral, T. (2003) Intelligent admission, University Business, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp.38-41. Holahan, C. (2006) Click Fraud: Google Comes Clean, Sort Of, BusinessWeek, 27 July. Jansen, B.J. (2007) Click fraud, IEEE Computer, Vol. 40, No. 7, pp.85-86.
• Jansen, B.J. and Resnick, M. (2006) An examination of searchers perceptions of non-sponsored and sponsored links during e-commerce web searching, Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 57, pp.1949-1961.
• Li, H., Edwards, S. and Lee, J-H. (2002) Measuring the intrusiveness of advertisements: scale development and validaton, Journal of Advertising, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp.37-47.
• Marchionini, G. (1995) Information Seeking in Electronic Environments, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Moore, R.S., Stammerjohan, C.A. and Coulter, R.A. (2005) Banner advertiser-website context congruity and color effects on attention and attitudes, Journal of Advertising, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp.71-84.
• Shamdasani, P.N., Stanaland, A.J.S. and Tan, J. (2001) Location, location, location: insights for advertising placement on the web, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 41, No. 4, pp.7-21.
• Stone, B. (2007) Dont like dancing cowboys? Results say you do, New York Times, Media and Advertising Section, 18th January.
• Sutton, S.A. (1994) The role of attorney mental models of law in case relevance determinations: an exploratory analysis, Journal of the American Society of Information Science, Vol. 45, No. 3, pp.186-200.
• Taylor, R.S. (1986) Value Added Processes in Information Systems, Ablex Publishing Corp., Norwood, NJ.
• Xing, B. and Lin, Z. (2004) The impact of search engine optimization on online advertising market, ACM Conference Proceedings, Winter, pp.519-530.

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Metropolitan Information Architecture – Don Turnbull and John Tolva

2:00 – 2:45PM on Sunday, April 11 in the Phoenix Room

If the future of the world is cities, how can we design user experiences at
city-sized scales? With digital interaction, are we all living in facets of the
same virtual city or does location still constrain us?

This panel will review and discuss recent research and some upcoming designs
that are only beginning to unveil how our interactions with both digital and
physical environments are changing including:

• How does the actual architecture of information & design synchronize
  with urban architecture?
• What city constraints including urban decay, congestion & energy
  consumption affect design and how can design improve them?
• How does mobile communication and web culture impact the streetscape?
• What can designers leverage from virtual worlds, augmented reality, MMO
  games and urban design?
• Who are the people and cities that have embraced data/networks as
  matters of physical design (rather than value-add services to residents)?
• Is geography fate? What does location mean for UX?
• When does social media start to change digital & physical social spaces
  of the urban network?
• What will metropolitan experiences be like in 10 years? 20?

The twitter hashtag for this talk is #metroia. Feel free to send me questions directly via twitter/donturn too.

Originally, I wanted to call this talk Cosmopolitan Information Architecture, inspired by Wynton Marsalis’ definition of cosmopolitan as meaning “you fit in wherever you go”, which should be a goal for anyone shaping experiences for living in a community.

The first talk is a set of ideas related to the work I’ve been doing recently, building data structures, crafting algorithms and designing user experiences that are powered by quantitative data.

Quantitative Information Architecture – Don Turnbull, Ph.D.

10:30 – 11:15AM on Saturday, April 10 in Ellis

Why quantitative information architecture? Why now?

You don’t have to be RainMan or Stephen Hawking to use numbers to get things
done. Quantitative methods are applicable for IA thinking be it for hypothesis
generation, instrumentation, data collection and analysis of information at
scales never before possible with insights that are comparable over time,
generalizable and extensible.

Quantitative skills can allow IAs to interpret and analyze others’ designs and
research more readily, as well as combine methods and models for meta-analysis
to help IAs move from description to prediction in designing and developing
future interfaces and architectures.

This presentation will review why you should use quantitative methods and
discuss both foundational and emerging ideas that are applicable for content
analysis, behavioral modeling, social media usage, informetrics and other
IA-related issues.

The twitter hashtag for this talk is #quantia. Feel free to send me questions directly via twitter/donturn too.

Quantiative Information Architecture slide deck from the 2010 IA Summit

Matthew Weiner presents…Mad Men

Former Sopranos writer Matthew Wiener has created a masterful tale about one of New Yorks most prestigious ad agencies at the beginning of the 1960s. Focusing on one of the firms most talented and extremely mysterious executives Donald Draper. Weiner will be on hand for a special cocktail hour screening of one of his personal favorite episodes of the beloved TV show.

Weiner’s talk was the highlight of the festival for me. Why there was a TV-guy at the film festival I don’t know but I certainly enjoyed his talk about making Mad Men. We watched a recent episode: Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency, which Weiner said was originally titled Nothing Runs Like a Deere. He said this episode was all about expectations and their anticipation. After watching it again with the audience, I saw many other ideas based on that theme. Most enjoyable was seeing the episode with a theater full of people. You forget how great the dialogue is, especially John Slattery as Roger Sterling. His timing is perfect and with a spirited, enthusiastic audience – had us roaring. Mad Men has been renewed for a fourth season too, so lots to look forward to.

American Cowslip

Ethan Inglebrink an eccentric agoraphobic heroin addict w ho is obsessed with his garden is searching for the perfect moment in a life that is running out of time. And the odds are against him. This darkly comedic tale set in small town California follows the last days of Ethan’s life as he struggles to find love and purpose – at a time when it might be too late to even matter.

This movie was interesting, especially for the cast of actors (Diane Ladd, Rip Torn, Cloris Leachman, Val Kilmer, Peter Falk, Bruce Dern). The plot is odd, and meanders a little in the middle (ok, a lot) but it was fun. I ran into the star and co-writer Ronnie Gene Blevins, the next night in line and he implied it was quite an experience. I commented that they should have featured the donkey more in the trailer, as a donkey always equals comedy gold.

Harmony And Me

The sharp-witted Byington returns with the Austin-shot story of Harmony a prototype nightmare dumpee – the sort of heartbroken friend you take out for consolatory drinks two or three times before resorting to any excuse to avoid hearing yet again the play-by-play rehash of what went wrong with his relationship. Never self-indulgent Byington creates a memorable modern comedy with subtle and sharp performance from his cast.

Locally made here in Austin and starring lots of local talent. Nice to see some Austin locations, but once you know Austin, you realize some strange liberties are taken with the driving about town. The audience was really behind this film, which made it fun to watch. Good dialogue and a few strong scenes, but I couldn’t tell if most of the movie was improvised or not. Not that it matters.

The Vicious Kind

A dramatic comedy set in small town Rhode Island brings tog ether elements of depression romance and self exploration among a dysfunctional family of men. Lonely and frustrated after a bitter break up Caleb warns his younger brother against women especially the pretty young thing he’s bringing home for the holidays. His indifferent opinion and steely resolve is put to the test as his attraction to Peter’s girlfriend begins to grow. The Vicious Kind features a very well written script and inspired performances by Simmons Scott and Frost.

Hard to classify, but interesting characters. I also didn’t know they had McMansions in Connecticut.

Houston We Have A Problem

With Houston We Have a Problem filmmaker Nicole Torre steps inside the world of Texas oil culture to understand just how the United States developed its large appetite for crude. Wildcatters independent oilmen and even the president of Shell Oil examine some hard truth s while discussing the history and the future of this limited commodity upon which we have become so dependent and weigh in on the future of this country’s energy supply.

A talky documentary about the history of oil, mostly in Texas, and what we’ve got to look forward to next. A surprising range of opinions (some unintentionally humorous). My big takeaway was to invest in energy stocks, which might not quite be the point.

Earthwork

In 1994 real-life crop artist Stan Herd traveled from Kansas to Manhattan’s Upper West Side to create a massive environmental artwork on land owned by Donald Trump. The multi-acre artwork was made from soil rock plants and vegetation near an underground railway tunnel. Stan recruited a number of homeless individuals living in the tunnel to become his crew. Over the months it took to complete the earthwork Stan dealt with a number of difficulties in bringing his unique rural art form to an urban canvas. In the process he unexpectedly encountered the true meaning of his art and it’s ultimate lasting rewards.

Nicely cast and acted movie. The most surprising thing about it was that the director, Chris Ordal, mentioned in the post-screening chat that it was shot on location in Kansas instead of somewhere in New York. Also, a supporting role by the great Zach Grenier.

Love the Beast

What if you were a Hollywood movie star with an obsession for cars and racing? You would probably read every script with even the tiniest link to the subject matter in hopes that you could tell a great car story the likes of Grand Prix Le Mans or Mad Max. Then one day you open your garage door and sitting there right in front of you is the inspiration that gets you thinking about that old saying If you want something done right Eric Bana has now unwillingly cast himself in his own real life drama and it is a love story between Eric and the car he has owned since he was fifteen. We follow him from inside the race car to the surreal world of the red carpet. The personal and social pressures mount up in the face of re-building a car that means so much to him.

Finely directed and edited movie. This surely had a larger budget behind it over most at the festival and it showed. Nice driving cinematography and some candid moments for Bana and his group of friends.

Floored

A world that’s more riot than profession, the trading floors of Chicago are a place where gambling your family’s mortgage is all in a day’s work. Floored, at a time when markets are unhinged, offers a unique window to this lesser-known world of finance. These men may not have degrees, but they’ve got guts, and penchant for excess that solicits simultaneous feelings of revulsion and admiration. But like many aspects of our economy, technology is changing the way these traders do business, and these eccentric pit denizens aren’t the type to take kindly to new tricks.

An interesting insight into some computer-phobic people. Very candid (and amusing) commentary by several interviewees.

The Donner Party

During the winter of 1846, a group of westward bound settler s is stranded in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They must reach California for salvation, but without food and a guide, the group becomes disillusioned and decisions must be made so that others can stay alive. Inspired by the infamous Donner Party tragedy, the film is a harrowing look at survival and how far some will go to achieve it.

This movie looked beautiful, and the performances were on target. I was reminded a lot of Deadwood. However, I felt that with the casting (Glover) I was expecting something a bit more divergent (quirkier). I left this movie about half-way through because of the disrespectful behavior of others in the audience. People on both sides of me had their phones out throughout the movie and the festival staff let others in late with some clamor. One late-arriving couple sat near me and chatted/mumbled amongst themselves continuously.

Up in the Air

The timely odyssey of Ryan Bingham, a corporate downsizer and consummate modern business traveler who, after years of staying happily airborne, suddenly finds himself ready to make a real connection. Ryan has long been contented with his unencumbered lifestyle lived out across America in airports, hotels and rental cars. He can carry all he needs in one wheel-away case; he’s a pampered, elite member of every travel loyalty program in existence; and he’s close to attaining his lifetime goal of 10 million frequent flier miles and yet . . . Ryan has nothing real to hold onto. When he falls for a simpatico fellow traveler, Ryan’s boss, inspired by a young, upstart efficiency expert, threatens to permanently call him in from the road. Faced with the prospect, at once terrifying and exhilarating, of being grounded, Ryan begins to contemplate what it might actually mean to have a home.

In some ways it is unfair to compare this movie to the others. Obviously working with a much larger budget gives you a different kind of film. I’ll summarize that I liked it and remember hearing the book is interesting too. Reitman did a post-screening Q&A and was highly entertaining and talked a lot about his process writing (and re-writing) and directing.

Gerty, from the Moon (the movie).

Gerty

And in comparison, Microsoft Bob – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Microsoft Bob, the most expensive HCI failure of its era

If you’re getting to Austin for SXSW Interactive just a little early, come on by and get your SXSW started with some others in town a day early too, not to mention meet some of us lucky enough to live in Austin. Feel free to forward this to others you know coming to Austin for SXSWi too.

Those of you in Austin, tell your Web/IA/Designer/Startup/SWSXi-like friends to meet us there. (Look for the geekiest crowd at the Cedar Door, trust me, that’ll be us. Probably on the East patio.)

Here’s an upcoming link for the event, if you’re into that kind of RSVPing.

Note that now you can pick your SXSW interactive badge on at the Austin Convention Center the same evening, come to the meetup, then pick up your badge!

‘Indie Fever†is the first result of a multi-year human geography research program to investigate the social and economical world of so-called ‘Indie†developers on the Macintosh platform. ‘Indie†is the self-chosen nickname of software developers that serve worldwide markets from the Internet, hold their artistic values in high esteem and celebrate their ability to make high quality software as small companies. Indies form a major part of the pool of developers of third party software for the iPhone that is currently available in Appleâ€s App Store.

It is a Bachelor’s thesis (108 pp) and covers a lot of ground, some obvious to Mac users or Mac decvlopers, but worth looking through.

• ABC News – Politics
• Comedy Central Indecision 2008 – Live Blog
• CBS News Election Coverage
• CNN Election Center
• Drudge Report
• FiveThirtyEight.com Electoral Projections Done Right
• Google Maps – 200 Elections Gallery
• Huffington Post – Politics
• New York Times – Politics
• PBS Vote 2008 Election Map

ReadWriteWeb also has a great list of sites:
Your Election Day Web Toolkit – ReadWriteWeb

Strauss Center :: Science 2.0: Globalized Innovation in Electronics by Dan Hutcheson, CEO, VLSI Research

Dan Hutcheson, of VLSI Research, Inc., is a recognized authority and well-known visionary for the semiconductor industry. He advises companies in strategic and tactical marketing, business management and manufacturing trends, productivity and strategy. Mr. Hutcheson developed the industryâ€s first cost-of-ownership model and the first factory cost-optimization model in the 1980s.

This presentation is part of the Strauss Centerâ€s Technology, Innovation and Global Security Speaker Series, which brings world-renowned experts to campus to discuss how to sustain innovation and better utilize modern technology to benefit an increasingly global economic and social system.

This is the abstract for the talk:

This talk reviews an exploratory study of sponsored search advertising for a major US universityâ€s academic department. The ad campaign used Googleâ€s AdWord service with the goal of increasing awareness – not eCommerce – as part of the search process.  A behavioral model of information seeking is suggested that could be applied for selecting appropriate types of online advertising for awareness and other advertising goals. Insights into the study methodology will also be discussed including the use of increased integration with server logs, targeted site query terms and alternative awareness strategies. 

The talk is part of the panel AM08 2008 – The Google Online Marketing Challenge: A Multi-disciplinary Global Teaching and Learning Initiative Using Sponsored Search with Bernard Jansen, Mark A. Rosso, Dan Russell, Brian Detlor and Don Turnbull.

This is a summary of the panel:

Sponsored search is an innovative information searching paradigm. This panel will discuss a vehicle to explore this unique medium as an educational opportunity for students and professors. From February to May 2008, Google will run its first ever student competition in sponsored search, The Google Online Marketing Challenge http://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/. Similar to other Google initiatives, the extent seems huge. Based on pre-registrations, more than two hundred professors and nearly nine thousand students from approximately 50 countries will compete. This may be the largest, worldwide educational course ever done. It is certainly on a large scale.

The Google Online Marketing Challenge is a real-life, problem-based, and multidisciplinary educational endeavor of the kind that many educators say is needed to relate teaching to outside the classroom. However, such endeavors are not without risks. The session should appeal to professors that competed in the 2008 Challenge, any professors considering the 2009 Challenge, as well as other educators who might consider the inclusion of Google AdWords as a pedagogical tool in their curricula. The panel will also be of great interest to those information professionals and educators as a possible model for use in other domains besides sponsored search.

This idea suddenly occurred to me the other day. Instead of building marshmallow “people” from scratch, these halloween marshmallow peeps seemed to be a perfect fit.

I used blue food coloring to make a “blue collar” on the very white (Delaware?) ghost for Joe Binden.

The jack-o-lanterns with a little dark food coloring for square eyeglasses seemed a natural fit for Palin with the rumors of her tanning bed, and perhaps a little empty-headed.

This course surveys Knowledge Management systems that enable the access and coordination of knowledge assets. Technologies reviewed will include intranets, groupware, weblogs, instant messaging, content management systems and email in both individual and organizational contexts. Students will use these KM technologies, review case studies, research methods of knowledge organization and analyze and design KM processes and systems.

The course is chock full of fun topics including:

• Knowledge Management
• Collaborative Work
• Email
• Personal Information Management
• Personal Knowledge Management (if there is such a thing)
• Intranets, Portals and Organizational Knowledge
• Networked, Dynamic Collaboration
• Collaborative Filtering & Recommender Systems
• WiFi, UbiComp & Smart Mobs

Of course, we have a class blog too: Knowledge Management Systems @UTexas

This course approaches understanding Semantic Web technologies from three perspectives:

• Top-down, theoretical approaches to organizing semantic information including ontologies, taxonomies, knowledge representation and software agents.
• Bottom-up approaches, sometimes called “emergent semantics” or “the lower case ‘S’ semantic web”, for understanding and creating networked information including XML-based solutions including RDF, XPath and RSS. Also included are smaller, informal systems for organizing Web information including tagging (social bookmarking), microformats and other specific markup and distribution systems.
• Application approaches focusing on Web Services or “Web 2.0” functionality including distributed (client and server) application design, syndication, Application Programming Interfaces, remote databases and “mash-ups”.

Of course, we have a class blog too: Semantic Web Technologies Blog.

Crayon Physics Deluxe
Crayon Physics Deluxe is a sequel to the popular freeware game Crayon Physics. Or you can think of it as the game I would have created if I would have had more than 7 days to do it. Way more than 7 days. More like 7 months or 17 months.

Anyway Crayon Physics Deluxe is a 2D physics puzzle game, in which you get to experience what it would be like if your drawings would be magically transformed into real physical objects. Solve puzzles with your artistic vision and creative use of physics.

Watch the video:

xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe

(Ah, SQL92, you’ve been so good to us with your dynamic query execs.)

The Information Architecture Summit is the premier gathering place for those interested in information architecture. The 2007 IA Summit attracted over 570 attendees, including beginners, experienced IAs, and people from a range of related fields.

The 2008 theme of “Experiencing Information” shifts the focus back to users. A user experience exists only to allow people to “do things” (in the broadest sense … buying books, sharing photos with friends, looking something up on wikipedia, etc).

Call for Proposals

The summit is a great opportunity to share your experience and thoughts on a topic you feel passionate about – and for the first time – presenters will receive complimentary registration! (to keep costs manageable one complimentary registration will be given to each regular session slot and panel moderator/organizer).

Proposals for the following are due October 31, 2007:

• Presentations
• Panels
• Posters
• Management Track
• Pre-conference workshops

Submissions of peer-reviewed Research Papers are due November 30, 2007.

(Note that I’m a member of the IAI Advisory Board and will be a reviewer for Proposal and Research Papers. If you have any questions about the proposal process, the IA Summit or the Information Architecture Institute just ask.)

PowerPoint prototypes are a great way to show someone how the flow of an interaction might work and even better, you can send them the .ppt file to view before or after your demo, not to mention ensuring that almost everyone you work with could (if you want them to) contribute to the PowerPoint deck since the application is nearly ubiquitous.

As an aside, I’m always a bit impressed with the ingenuity of people who live in one application for everything, and PP certainly can let you do that. I’ve known many people that use PP for note taking, article reviewing (guilty!) and of course outlining (it’s better than Microsoft Word). However, this is nothing compared to the people who used to live in Lotus 123 including writing memos and even formatting floppies. (Ah, floppy disks.)

Weird bit: some of the antennas are still analog. Oh my.

Well, to me.

Here’s the abstract for the paper:

The OpenChoice system, currently in development, is an open source, open access community rating and filtering service that would improve upon the utility of currently available Web content filters. The goal of OpenChoice is to encourage community involvement in making filtering classification more accurate and to increase awareness in the current approaches to content filtering. The design challenge for OpenChoice is to find the best interfaces for encouraging easy participation amongst a community of users, be it for voting, rating or discussing Web page content. This work in progress reviews some initial designs while reviewing best practices and designs from popular Web portals and community sites.

I’m also making it available to download: Turnbull, Don (2007) Rating, Voting & Ranking: Designing for Collaboration & Consensus. Works-in-Progress Paper presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference. San Jose, CA. May 2, 2007.

What’s your guess?

Update: Since there are 7,704 photos with the chi2006 tag, I may be underestimating.

Update on the Update: As of May 29, there are 3,341 photos with the chi2007 tag.

Here’s the blurb from the project’s Web page:

“What would 100,000 people chatting on the Internet sound and look like?”… Listening Post analyzes all the text—typed just moments ago—by tens of thousands of people in Internet chat rooms around the world. It presents them as six different “movements,” combining musical tones, sound effects, synthesized voice, and scrolling text. For example, in the first movement, Listening Post monitors and displays a randomly typed text beginning with “I am.” It then searches the Internet for related phrases, creating a simultaneously funny, sad, nonsensical, pathetic, yearning, quotidian, and ultimately mesmerizing tonal poem of identity in the Internet age.

For centuries, the soaring buttresses, vaulted ceilings, and luminous stained glass of cathedrals, along with hymns and chants, have transmitted that which is beyond expression. Using algorithms, software, and data mining, Listening Post generates a similar experience around what sometimes seems beyond comprehension.

It’s quite an experience with seven “movements” that range from ideas like Wave Cycle, Topic Cluster and I Am (I Like/I Love) where text from the messages floats, drifts or cycles across the many small LED screens in sync with some Philip Glass-like music.

The exhibit runs Saturday, June 3, 2006 through Sunday, May 20, 2007, so hurry up and take a look while it’s still there.

All those questions (and more) can now be (mostly) answered by the man himself, Red Wassenich, who did in fact come up with the saying as an offhand remark when he called in to a local radio station.

Now Red has a book chock full of Austin and Weirdness: Keep Austin Weird: A Guide to the Odd Side of Town, by Schiffer Publishing.

Some friends had a signing party for Red’s book and I got to attend. Here’s a picture of Red in action:

Carl Linnaeus introduced the systematic classification upon which all subsequent natural history has been built. This Nature web focus brings together a range of material celebrating the tercentenary of his birth in 1707, including features on how the explosion of genetic data changes the way we look at taxonomy, and the conflict between professionals and amateurs when naming species. There are also commentaries by leading taxonomists on the future of their field, articles on Linnaeus’s global network of contacts and even his lost and lamented pet raccoon, original research on the origin of flowering plants and a review on speciation – the first of several such articles to be published this year, which will be added to the web focus over time along with other coverage.

The issue is behind a paywall. How would Linnaeus classify that?

As you may remember, I was at the kick-off reception for the video game archive a while back and think it holds great promise for insights into the history of video game development, design methods for future designers and possibly some fun too.

SI MSI Degree: Social Computing Graduate Program:

Social Computing (SC) Specialization

Social computing, including online communities, social networking, and user contributed content, has been the darling of Silicon Valley for the past several years. It has also gained currency in library circles, as venues such as library Web sites incorporate blogging features and sites such as LibraryThing bring recommender technologies to personal book collections.

SI faculty have been leaders in inventing and analyzing many of the underlying techniques that have powered the rise of social computing:

• Recommender systems
• Reputation systems
• Prediction markets
• Social network analysis
• Online communities
• Computer-supported cooperative work

Students pursuing a specialization in Social Computing learn to analyze online social interactions, both in online communities and in more diffuse social networks. They learn about features of social computing technologies so they can recognize opportunities to put them to use in new settings and make good choices about alternative implementations.

Technorati Tags: internet

Goodbye Spotlight?

Don is a favorite writer-director-actor from Toronto. You’re a fool if you don’t watch some his work including:

• The Red Violin: tracking a violin’s path through history with Samuel L. Jackson (but no snakes or planes), a child prodigy, a Chinese musician in the era of Cultural Revolution and a love-triangle including the violin itself.
• Last Night: an unusual “end of the world” movie with a small role by David Cronenberg as a dedicated power company employee dealing with the destruction of the planet in the only way he knows how – by thanking all of his customers (how Canadian)
• Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould : wonderful and insightful and you get to learn what Glenn Gould might eat for lunch.
• Twitch City: which recently came out on DVD and captures slacker Toronto, in the Kingston Market area perfectly. Watch this now.

• South by SouthWest Interactive (sxswi) = Velma
• South by SouthWest Film = Fred
• South by SouthWest Music = Shaggy

You’re welcome.

Sell SBUX now?

Well, it’s that time of year again, the annual Austin area Information Architects and UT ASIS&T chapter pre-pre-SXSWi Meetup and Happy Hour(s) tonight, Thursday March 8th. If you’re a Web geek, blogger, designer or just about anything else you’re welcome to join us.

We’ll be there tonight from 5-7 at the Cedar Door, which is at 201 Brazos Street. (Map to the Cedar Door ) Lots of Austinites will be there to happily advise out-of-towners on all things SXSWi, Austin, BBQ and so on. (Lots of Austinites will be arguing amongst themselves about SXSWi, Austin and BBQ too.)

Come on by!

http://upcoming.org/event/157945/

Put two fingers on your trackpad, keep them there and click the trackpad button. This emulates a “right-click” and opens the contextual menu in most applications that have one.

Technorati Tags: mac

As you might imagine, getting about 50 freewheeling game designers together can be pretty entertaining but Bill Bottorff (from Austin Business Computers, Inc.) and Don Carleton (from the Center for American History) kept the event going.

One issue discussed was the preservation of video game ephemera and digital assets related to the history of the game industry. Richard Garriott (pictured below) talked about his history in video games and even brought a few items for show and tell.

Among some of the items for show and tell are one of Garriott’s original Apple computers that he used to develop many games (he has a running one in his office to this day) and the roll of paper tape on top of the Apple is a working copy of his first game Dungeons and Dragons I.

George Sanger also spoke, played some recorded music and was very entertaining, if not a bit surreal.

George passed around some his personal keepsakes, including this test cartridge from the Son of M.U.L.E. game. (I fondly remember M.U.L.E. myself, it’s probably one of the best games I ever played.)

It’s hoped that this is the first of many initiatives between UT Austin and the the video game community, look for more information in the future.

Can the Internet Save Democracy?

Here’s his blurb:

We’ve been through a few election cycles in which the Internet played an important part. What have we learned? Beyond being a fund-raising tool, has the Internet changed anything important about elections, politics or governance? Will it? Does the connectedness of the Net promise an invigorated democracy? Or more of the same? Or a polarized electorate? David Weinberger of the Berkman Center will present a discussion opener on this topic, to be followed by an invigorating—or polarizing?—discussion.

David says: “ I’ll probably open the discussion trying to stay as far away from facts and reality as I can”, so with that in mind I’ll provide my quip:

The internet IS democracy.

The internet is an open-ended discussion, where anyone (with access) can participate on almost equal footing and the best ideas (usually) win out. (You vote with your clicks?) Sure, it’s not perfect, but to paraphrase Winston Churchill said “the internet is the worst form of government except for all the others”.

Technorati Tags: internet

Almost everyone I know in Austin is logged on to AOL Instant Messenger, GoogleTalk and Microsoft Messenger.

Ah, internet people, weather does affect us.

(I predict a winter-related rise in Austin blogging today.)

Technorati Tags: austin, blogging

From the Austinist: Scenes from a Snuff(leupagus) Film

Oh, please – someone develop a special strain of Ebola for Elmo only next.

I looked over dozens of recipes and ended up taking ideas from several, but the core recipe was from (of all places) Martha Stewart Living web site. (Keep your “jail house cookies” comments to yourselves.)

Here’s what I came up with for a final recipe, including some post-facto edits that I would do next time:

• 6 cups sifted all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
• 1 cup dark-brown sugar, packed
• 6 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 6 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon finely ground black pepper
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 2 large eggs
• 1 cup unsulfured molasses.

Supposedly, this makes 16 large cookies, but we did a double batch and made cookies of various sizes so I can’t verify that. I edited the recipe to add nutmeg, more cinnamon and ginger as I wanted even more flavor in the cookies. I also changed to a smaller amount of black pepper (it gives a nice after taste to each cookie bite). The dough turned out to be very dry so I think we cheated and added about two tablespoons of milk near the end of the mixing.

I whipped up (literally) some standard buttercream-like icing:

• 1 stick of unstalted butter
• one small box of powdered sugar
• vanilla to taste.

As you can see, we also divided up the icing and added food coloring. With some hastily-fashioned wax paper icing bags we were in business. Here are the results:

Not pictured was the favorite, literature-themed cookie. The white whale. As you can see, creativity reigned, but we also kept the original goal in mind: get as much icing as possible on many cookies. (Mmmm, icing.)

What am I doing with a whale, bunny, elephant and zebra cookie cutter? Like you don’t have some?

Some cookies had a personality of their own and these three jumped out at me. Note the resemblances to Zoidberg at the Beach, a funky, hypnotized Santa and Sluggo (respectively).

Don’t bother asking, they’re all gone.

Technorati Tags: baking, cookies, photos

The dough was courtesy of the now famous “no knead” bread recipe:

No-Knead Bread
Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1 1/2 hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons salt

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.
2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.
3. Apply your pizza shaping skills to lay out the dough.

We used two kinds of pizza stones, a store-made pizza stone and some unglazed tiles from your favorite home supply store. (Yes, we went to your favorite home supply store, where were you?) Even better – I used my new, wooden pizza peel to drop the pies right onto the hot, waiting stones. (Lessons learned: it’s quite possible that the metal peel would be better, certainly less likely to warp after cleaning. I’m going to get one and try it out. Also, be sure and have some cornmeal handy to put on the peel before placing the dough on it to enable easy sliding into the oven.)

As you can see, they turned out great. We went for mozzarella and fresh tomatoes and basil on the first one. The second pie was thinly sliced parmesan, more fresh roma tomatoes, red onions and some spices (pepper flakes next time too).

Delicious.

If you have purchased anything from Amazon.com in the last 30 days (Amazon themselves, not an affiliated merchant) and the price is now lower, they’ll refund that amount to you. Call Amazon at 1-800-201-7575 and dial 7 right away to get to an operator. Ask her about Amazon’s 30-day price guarantee. Have your Amazon order number handy too. If you get an uncooperative (or hard to understand) operator, just hang up and call right back.

It’s worthwhile to think about how the interfaces, features and even the incentives (“it’s the user stupid”) can influence a tagging system’s design and use.

Do they cancel each other out?

Technorati Tags: photos

Maybe that’s why this week the two most interesting (which means “best” by my own definition) TV shows have been Daybreak and The Lost Room.

In Daybreak, the main character is a police detective, who much like the movie Groundhog Day, is repeating the same day over and over – presumably until he gets it “right”. There are a number of contingencies and clues the detective must solve to make progress. Each week, the plot changes as some issues get “solved” and the detective isn’t plagued by them on the next version of his day. We gradually learn more about the detective’s world, his past and how everything fits into place.

In The Lost Room, the main character is also a police detective and needs to unravel a mystery based around understanding, collecting and using a set of magical objects. He must discover objects, negotiate with their owners and determine the object’s proper uses. In an attempt to go meta about the issues in the plot, several of the characters are written to seem very much like I’d assume people that are deeply involved in a social game (MMORPG or the like) might be as to forming clubs (even cults in show) around studying, finding and advancing skills in the use of the objects and making alliances. It seems like they’re truly playing a game about the objects within the episodes as independent characters, but overlapping with the main detective’s role in the show/game.

Obviously, these concepts: working through a game level, a quest, negotiating with characters and finding objects of power are common to many video games of the last few decades. Adding in the social interaction and high quality rendered environment (studio sets with actual actors) and it’s a bit like watching a someone work their way through a game. Is this a new trend in scriptwriting that will bring in the gamer demographic? (Am I only noticing this because these examples are more obvious than past shows?)

(Note: do people really say “video games” anymore? I’d think the people that design all the audio would start feeling left out.)

(Double extra bonus note: I just bought a Nintendo DS Lite – got any game or gear recommendations?)

Technorati Tags: games

We’ll be at Opal Divine’s on 6th Street from 6:30-8 PM this Thursday, Dec 14th 2006.

From the invitation:

We had such a great time at the last one, we thought we’d do it again.

Come join us for an informal creative technologist mixer. This time we
can look forward to a presentation from a fellow creative technologist
right here in Austin.

We are looking for energetic, passionate people from any discipline
who want to talk about making stuff with the Internet and other
networked technologies.

We welcome designers and developers, students and entrepreneurs,
futurists, pixelists, and pointillists, user researchers, product
designers, Web publishers, podcasters, video bloggers, graphic
designers, people interested in UX, IA, HCI, PHP, and MySQL, and any
other acronyms out there.

Come on out to talk shop or just meet people with similar interests.
Please pass this invitation to others who might be interested.

Direct any questions to creativetechnologists@gmail.com

I’ll see you there.

Technorati Tags: austin, blogging

This is really just a test to see if Ecto is uploading photos now into WordPress. As you can see, it is – with sprinkly goodness! Thanks to all who made suggestions. The winning tip was to change the image upload settings in WordPress>Options>Miscellaneous for the Store uploads in this folder setting to leave it as it’s default of wp-content/uploads and to uncheck the Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders option.

Anyone know what I’m missing here? (And while I appreciate any answer that includes linking in pictures via Flickr instead, that’s not what I’m asking, but thanks.)

Technorati Tags: blogging, ecto, photos

I had not been to Home Slice before, and this was a great excuse to get there and try out some pie. For some reason, in the last year or so Austin seems to be getting serious about pizza. This is good news for all of us.

The Carnival was a charity event for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Texas, with tickets for the booths that included a few games of skill, a dunking booth, cotton candy, beer (but not beer-flavored cotton candy), and a fortune teller called the Great Calzoni. In the back of Home Slice there is a patio, which was a surprise and they were featuring a team of dough-tossing acrobats called the World Pizza Champions.

What would a carnival be without feats of skill? Well, they had them here too. The most interesting activities were the largest pizza dough contest where local pizzerias could send their greatest dough tossers and shapers to see who could make the largest (in diameter) pizzas.

Next, was the contest for making five pizzas (dough only) the fastest. It was amazing to see them at work.

Oh, we ate some pizza too. Our pizza karma was waxing and we got a booth inside (from the outside you’d never know it’s so roomy) and proceeded to order. I started with the greek salad, which was served on a room-temp tin pie plate. It has small, diced bits of cheese in it, with the usual leafy add-ons such as peppers and just a few very tasty Kalamata olives. A few garlic knots were included with the salad, just the thing to help with eating the salad and to sate my wait for the pizza. I went with my benchmark pizza, the margherita. Here’s what this beauty looked like:

The pizza was wonderful. The dough was hot, fresh and crisp but also chewy with some singed spots and just the right amount of bubbling in the dough. The tomatoes were very fresh and diced with generous amounts of garlic and basil.
Also at the table was the traditional pepperoni pie:

While I didn’t try the pepperoni, it was going fast and the look of meat-eating bliss was apparent. There was more cheese on this pie, which looked just gooey enough to be sinfully good. (I also put my life in danger as it took me a few shots to get this picture just right and at least someone at the table wanted pizza NOW and didn’t want to wait on my untouched pizza pic.)

Would I go back to Home Slice? You bet – let’s go right now.

Canadian Secret Service agent (yes, they have one too) on a mission: he’s out to get some respect. Caught between working with top US Intelligence officials and his budget-conscious boss back in Canada, Darryl finds himself solving world-threatening conspiracies on a small-time budget.

The trailer has gags on the agent having to ride the bus and still using dialup to access the internet. The show is related to some of the writers and producers for Monk, a show I quite like (and also set in another city I used to live – San Francisco).

(Yes, it comes in a little, commemorative gasoline can.)
Included are:

• Select Scene Audio Commentary
• Pulp Factoids Viewer
• Playing it Fast and Loose: A Documentary
• Profiling Reservoir Dogs – Featurette
• Tipping Guide
• Deleted Scenes
• Classic Interviews with Quentin Tarantino and others
• K-Billy Sounds of the ’70s

So when Bill does a whole show on an issue that affects us like Net Neutrality we pay attention. We like it even better when there’s a great overview of the issue including the entire show online for you to watch: Moyers on America . The Net @ Risk.

If you’re reading this, Net Neutrality issues should concern you.

No, I’m not sure why I wrote this with the royal “we” perspective.

1. Garrett Dimon’s Visio IA Stencil
2. Jesse James Garret’s "visual vocabulary"
3. Henrik Olsen’s prototyping tools
4. Michael Angeles’s wireframe stencil
5. Peter Van Dijck’s Templates
6. Peter Van Dijck’s IA shapes

• Omnigraffle Palettes
1. Michael Angeles’s Wireframe Palette
2. Robert Silverman’s GUI Design Palette
3. Paper Plane’s IA Stencils
4. Jason Sutter’s Wireframe Stencil
• Microsoft Office Templates: Visio
• Visio Cafe
• Visio Download Sites
• Graffletopia – Stencils for OmniGraffle

Pay attention to the subtitles while you’re watching the flash (ugh) cartoon.

Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open — you had to swing a latch, align two bits of handle, that sort of thing. But it turns out it’s actually quite tricky to get the design of these cans just right. Make it too complex and people can’t get them open to put away their garbage in the first place. Said one park ranger, “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”

Take a look at the comments on the post where all manner of clever and cynical comments add to the post.

This brings to mind all of the Macintoshes I’ve owned (or used for work):

• (Fat) Mac 512k
• Macintosh SE (with 20MB HD – woohoo!)
• Macintosh SE/30
• Mac IIx (with the Texas Instrument LISP chip in it)
• Mac Classic (color)
• Duo 280 (where I installed my own internal modem, the Mac equivalent of neurosurgery at the time)
• NeXT slab (that counts now, doesn’t it?)
• Powerbook 540 (Blackbird?)
• Mac IIsi
• Quadra and Performas (many different ones, all similar)
• A large, Macintosh-less gap that could be called the dark ages.
• Powerbook G4
• G5 tower
• MacBookPro

And there are probably at least a few more I’m forgetting.

From the conference blog:

IDEA 2006 brings together a diverse set of designers, creators, and researchers addressing a fundamental challenge we’re facing today – how to let everyday people take true advantage of the overwhelming mass of information that floods their lives.

There are currently many different kinds of folks working in this space, but they typically don’t talk with one another. For this event, we’ve made an effort to invite presenters across a stunning array of disciplines – museum design, information visualization, librarians, environmental design, user research, engineering, interaction design, product strategy, and more.

It’s important to recognize that this is not airy-fairy theoretical stuff. These presenters are practitioners, people actually doing this cross-channel, cross-media work with complex information. A primary goal of this conference is to give you the confidence to cross boundaries and engage with a wide range of problems.

So if you want to find out where the world of design and information is heading, and how you can prepare, come join us October 23-24 in Seattle.

Just because I can’t make it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go. What are you waiting for? Register for IDEA 2006 right now!

People are now using the World Wide Web (Web) to seek, gather, and share information in increasingly complex ways. In order to develop the next generation of Web information systems, we must have an understanding of peopleâ€s goals, their context, and their situational aspects. These aspects are difficult, if not impossible, to investigate in laboratory settings. Therefore, researchers must turn to naturalistic studies involving large number of users who may be separated geographically. In these settings, many researchers require logs of user behaviour on the Web to study the interactions of Web users, both with respect to general behaviour and in order to develop and evaluate new tools and techniques. Traces of Web activity are used for a wide variety of research and commercial purposes including user interface usability and evaluations of user behaviour and patterns on the Web. Unfortunately, current tools and processes do not support consistent and detailed studies using logs of user behaviour. As such, there is a duplication of effort, which hampers progress in the field.

This special issue is inspired by the Logging Traces of Web Activity: The Mechanics of Data Collection workshop at the WWW 2006 Conference this May in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Relevant research themes include, but are not limited to:

• Methodologies for data collection (client-side, server-side, proxy-based)
• Collection of browser data (e.g. events, bookmarks, history, and caches)
• Collection of data from users across different browsers
• AJAX-compatible logging systems
• Using mixed data sources for data validation
• Cleaning Web data
• Web data warehousing
• Using Web data for proactive user functionality
• Methods for matching user behaviour to task models
• Qualitative annotation of Web data

Submissions

Submissions should be full length articles. All submissions will be peer reviewed and should describe original research that is not under consideration in any other forum. Please follow the formatting guidelines of the journal. Submissions should be emailed to melanie@cs.dal.ca in PDF format. All questions regarding submissions should be directed to Melanie Kellar (melanie@cs.dal.ca).

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: January 8, 2007
Reviews Due: February 8, 2007
Notification to Authors: February 19, 2007
Final Papers Due: March 19, 2007

I’ll be there late, if at all, as I’ll be coming in from Portland.

Here are two possible captions that come to mind:

• Yes, please do pass the salt.
• OK then. Queen to Knight 6. Checkmate.

Post your caption as a comment.

I have already been in town a day and half. I’ve been enjoying the nice weather (no, that’s not a Seattle rain joke) and the downtown area. Yesterday I hit Dilettante Chocolates and walked down to the Pike Place Market for some fresh crab cocktail and hot french bread (a tasty sandwich indeed) at the waterfront park. Then a trip over to the Space Needle and the Experience Music Project (museum) and ran smack dab into a Star Trek convention (no, that’s not a Seattle geek joke). Then somehow I ended up at REI, which seems inevitable here in town (yes, that is a Seattle treehugger joke).

Later in the week, I’m driving down to Portland and will plan on at least one Lewis & Clark related stop, but am open to any road trip recommendations or must-sees in Portland. (I’ve never been to Oregon and I’m happy to correct that error. Also, that’s one more state I can say I’ve been to.)

With Labor Day freeing up a little more time, I tried out two batches of pizza dough. This time I pitted two different flours against each other, with the constant of the bread machine as the dough prep system. (If it is possible to get passable dough from a home machine is a bigger test indeed.)

The first batch came out pretty good, but was perhaps a little heavier than expected, perhaps from the fresh basil and dried oregano I minced and mixed in with the dough. Here’s what I came up with (I forgot to get a picture before I started to cut up the pie):

While this pie was quite tasty, the key wasn’t the dough, it was the roasted red and yellow peppers (not hatch chiles, just peppers this time). If it looks a bit odd, note that I forgot to buy some cheese, but the majority of the time I don’t like most cheeses on pizza anyway.

The second dough batch was with a “bread flour” that I also partly sifted. I also tweaked my recipe by adding about 1/4 tsp. more EVOO. This time I added just a bit of dried oregano and some rosemary to the dough, but much less overall than the spices from the previous batch.

Here’s what I came up with, forgive the oddlly-shaped final form:

The key to this one? Chopped jalepenos and more fresh rosemary with slightly over-ripe roma tomatoes. Tasty. I also have to improve my abilities to evenly distribute toppings. The dough was definitely better, lighter and cooked just a bit better on this other pizza stone.

As you go through the migration process, you boot your old machine in target disk mode (hold down the “T” key when booting the system) and with a firewire cable connected to both machines, the data transfer begins after a few questions about what accounts and files you want to move over (just a few choices, for files mostly everything on the disk or just those related to the account you want to migrate). Then the transfer begins. I started this once and when the estimate was more than 3 hours for the transfer, I deferred until later in the evening. Sure enough, about 3 hours later (much later), it seemed to be done.

Easily enough, I just rebooted the MBP (maybe I just need a great name for the new machine – any ideas? “Bender”? too obvious?) and logged on with the account name (and password) from the G4 powerbook. Simple as that. I knew things were looking good right away as the boot screen changed color to the background I had on the G4. Everything loaded from my startup items, with one exception, Textspander (yes, I know there is a newer version out). Nice job Apple software developers.

Mail.app snapped open quickly (after being selected my old customized dock – great!), but crashed in just a few minutes when I went to clearing out my junk mailbox. (It might have something to do with getting junk mail in odd character sets I don’t have the related fonts for. Just a theory.) I started mail.app right back up and it’s still going strong now. After working around in mail, I don’t feel a neck-snapping performance improvement, this is a bit disappointing.

Next was Firefox 1.5.06 and it seems fine too, including extensions. I checked and it is a universal binary. This is disappointing in a way, because Ffox still seems slow. (Oh, if there were all the right extensions in Safari versions.)

I like the increased screen resolution and the keyboard feels fine, a little mushy but with good bounce on the keys. Also, not as noisy as the G4. The addition of a camera is nice, but I don’t think I’ll make much use of it. There is not Firewire 800 slot anymore, I would have wished that Apple would have put another USB port in its place. As has been commented on before by many others, there is no internal modem included. I hope I don’t have cause to regret that. The PC Card slot is replaced with a smaller add-on slot that has some name I won’t remember because I’ll probably never need a device for it. The new magnetic plug power supply seems fine, but the box is actually LARGER than the old one. Also, I had three G4 powerbook power supplies, now that investment is lost (except that the extension cords seem to fit with the new power supplies).

The next, system-wide step seems to be making sure I have (intel) universal binaries for all of the applications on my system. I assume all the Apple applications are ready (and they were kept from deletion when I transferred the account over from the G4 with its potentially non-universal binary app versions).

The big question: Does anyone know of a utility that could scan my disk and make a list? (even better, give me links for the apps? even better, auto-download those possible?) Comments or emails are most welcome.

The best thing I have found so far to help with this is the MacUpdate: Universal Binary (Macintosh Intel) page (with an RSS feed).

There are no exact amounts, almost everything is adjustable for your tastes and what you have available, so let’s be algebraic with ratios:

• 2x Organic Plum Tomatoes – diced
• Kosher Salt – 1 pinch/tomato used
• Oregano, Cumin or fresh Basil to taste (or not)
• 0.5x Garlic Clove – finely minced

Stir these first four ingredients together well and let sit while prepping the remaining ingredients

• 0.75x Yellow Hatch Onions – diced
• 1x Roasted Green Hatch Chiles -diced (assume 6″ long peppers with seeds removed)
• Roasted Yellow Corn (not pictured)

And this is what you get.

Excellent with some corn tortillas.

“I’ve launched a campaign to rid the world of the caps lock key. Sure, there are more serious problems to solve but please, think of the children! How am I going to explain to my kids why some of the most valuable keyboard real estate is squatted by a large, useless key that above all you must not press! Our campaign mission is simple: to send a message to the computer industry to force it (by any means necessary) to retire the CAPS key. It’s going to be a hard, long, and possibly very embarassing war on uppercase, but some things just need to be done. ”

Of course, there is a (Google) group called CAPSoff to discuss the woes and strategies (and some humorous nonsense) about getting rid of the keyboard’s least popular key.

Allow me to point out that I have two other keyboard pet peeves too:

1. The num(ber) pad on the right of most full keyboards, that rarely gets used and requires a Kent Tekulve side-arm mousing style. I want those 4 inches back on my desktop!
2. Keyboard real estate I’d like to have is a BACKSPACE key on my powerbook keyboard.

A trivia question: do you know how “upper case” got its name?

Update: Of course, there is a blog about the CAPS LOCK key fight.

From the BarCamp Web site:

What is BarCampTexas? Well, the organizers of BarCampAustin, BarCampDallas, and BarCampHouston have decided to join forces and create BarCampTexas! The goal is to get over 1000 campers to join together August 26th-27th. We will be updating this site often so sign up, check back, and participate!

So what is BarCamp you say? What should you expect at a BarCamp? What are the rules of BarCamp? Click and learn.

Note: BarCamp in no way resembles this, since I am able to tell you about BarCamp.

As it has been, this event was a benefit for Center for Child Protection, who also has a Happy Birthday Buck tribute CD by many of the artists performing in the past year’s bashes. I picked one up last night and it’s great. Highly recommended.

You missed it? There’s always next year.

Of course, as readership grows and authorship becomes more finely tuned there is great potential for advertising or sponsorship revenue. There’s nothing particularly new about all this, except we may be seeing mainsteam publishing getting re-invented (again). These group blogs have the potential to invert the pyramid, if not abolishing it altogether, of providing certain types of news targetting the same demographics as the bloggers themselves.

The most useful aspect (for me) is that the authors are many and can therefore collect a wider range of news and events than one single person (and their blog) can, if anything, point out links to other blogs or Web sites that have local content or appeal. With the informal and often humorous writing style, these blogs are fun to read. Having access to them via RSS feeds makes getting local information quite easy.

And of course, there’s the obligatory quote from me in the Statesman’s article about bloggers telling us about what they had for lunch and how eventually (hopefully, oh please) we will see this kind of blogging evolve into a more cogent kind of restaurant review.

The (unintentionally?) ironic part of the article has a quote from Ben Brown, who was the initial Austin Austinist: “It is the greatest city in the world in which to live, and we will hear no arguments to the contrary. We fight with tooth and nail to stay here, even when our real job asks us to travel for cash.” I’m told Ben has since moved away from Austin for a job out in the Bay Area.

Here’s the original post. Wonder what the back yard looks like. Stripes?

With Blanks on a Blank, the film making challenge here in Austin at the Alamo Drafthouse. Check out the contest trailer too, it’s hilarious.

Note: the newest Snakes on a Plane theatrical trailer takes itself awfully seriously. I guess you can only run a joke so far, but seeing the joke played out (at length), in action, is all this movie may have going for it. It would be nice to see if they could push it even further.

What is dorkbot you ask?

From David Nunez (one of the organizers):

It’s a celebration of tinkering – people doing strange thing with electricity. Fringe finding at its finest.

There are three main presenters for this inaugural event:

* Bob Sabiston, the programmer/animator behind the trippy animation technology for Richard Linklaterâ€s films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly will debut his latest invention: an art/animation homebrew application for the Nintendo DS game system;

* Phil Mancutt demonstrates his homemade Theremin thatâ€s encased in a vintage 1984 Macintosh computer case; and

* Craig Newswanger fires off his Tesla Coil and Jacobâ€s Ladder (think of the electrified gizmos in Frankenstein movies).

There will also be the much-anticipated “Open Dork,” a rapid-fire open mic kind of thing. Between all this, DJ KDH spins.

Some highlight quotes from the panel you really shouldn’t miss:

• “Explicit refactoring affordances” – Adina Levin
• “Razor-sharp, small pieces of metadata” – Thomas Vander Wal
• “What happens in the brain… in your cortical areas” – Rashmi Sinha
• “Dual-folksonomy triad” – Thomas Vander Wal
• “What we need is Tagginess” – Prentiss Riddle
• “More math is always the answer” – Don Turnbull

How can you pass up quips like that?

The Tagging 2.0 panel was one of the “highly-rated panels” this year, tied for first place with a number of other entertaining and informative panels, so check out their podcasts as they become available as well.

All of the papers, presentations and statements of interest provided a number of insight into different methods for collecting data about Web use including using both server and client based tools including the issues faced when trying to decide what to log about users’ interactions and what the log formats should look like too. A number of revealing studies also reviewed some current views of how Web users do interact with the Web as well as a number of applications, plug-ins and scripting methods for getting data, distributing it and what users’ perceptions of their data might mean to them.

We were just one of the many excellent workshops at WWW2006.

The entire day went well thanks to my excellent co-organizers for the panel: Kirstie Hawkey, Melanie Kellar, and Andy Edmonds.

• Ricardo Baeza-Yates of the book Modern Information Retrieval
• Andrei Broder (who co-authored two of my favorite papers – A Comparison of Techniques to Find Mirrored Hosts on the WWW and A Taxonomy of Web Search
• Prabhakar Raghavan, who has his own book (with Hinrich Schütze and Chris Manning) coming out that I’m looking forward to as well.

Here’s the blurb for the tutorial:

Web advertising spans Web technology, sociology, law and economics. It has already surpassed some traditional media like radio and is the economic engine that drives Web development. The transformation touches the way content is created, shared and disseminated – all the way from static html pages to more dynamic forms of expression such as blogs and podcasts, to social media such as discussion boards and tags on shared photographs. This revolution promises to fundamentally change both the media and the advertising businesses over the next few years, altering a $300 billion economic landscape. The technical underpinnings of web advertising are based on a plethora of scientific disciplines, including Information Retrieval, Microeconomics, Auction Theory, On-line Algorithms, Security, User Interface design, Data Mining, and more. The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce the audience to the many technology issues behind the curtains of web advertising.

A lot of what Andrei is discussing so far is basic, but it is worth attending to hear how his mind works through these issues, and his jokes aren’t bad either.

Sadly, we’re packed in yet another horrible venue, these workshop rooms are the size of a double (American-sized) office but they’re packing up to 40 people in them with the projector smack dab in the middle of the room that has the usual problems of being noisy and near the audience as well as the frequent shadow on the screen of the back of someone’s head. It goes without saying that the network connectivity is still lousy too. This has not proved to be a good physical venue for the conference.

Lots of excellent presentations and papers (see the link) with a lot of focus on enterprise or private tagging systems and some working demonstrations of products in progress. It will be amazing to see what this same workshop would be like next year, with lots of these ideas brought out into the wider world.

Check out some more pictures.

Fortunately, before the conference I will be doing some touring throughout Scotland including Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. If you have some recommendations, on “must see” experiences, I’m happy to hear about it. I’ve already added a few events to my trip from excellent suggestions including the Isle of Skye and a whisky distillery or two. Feel free to comment on this post or send me an email.

“A guy goes into a bar and orders ten shots of brandy.
The barman asks him ‘Ten, sir?’
‘Give them to me,’ the guy says.
The barman pours the ten shots and lines them up on the counter.
The guy takes the first and the tenth one, picks them up and pours them out
on the floor. He drinks the remaining eight, one after the other.
The barman asks with surprise, ‘Why did you pour those two shots out on the floor?’
The guy says ‘Look, sonny, the first one always tastes horrible and the last
one always makes me sick.’

From 101 Reykjavík (2000) (also a novel):

Why do Marlboro cigarettes have white filters in America, and yellow filters in Europe?
So Keith Richards can tell which continent he’s on.

I am both a (partial) organizer and speaker at this workshop. If you’re there, do stop by and say hello or introduce yourself.
For more information including directions and registration, please see the Open Source Workshop Web site

Thanks to Tolva for pointing this out and making me feel so lucky because I don’t punch a clock, get to work (mostly) on only what is interesting to me and can wear shorts + Hawaiian shirts on days when the weather permits. Plus I’m in Austin!

You can start hating me now.

Check it out.

Let a thousand orange smileys bloom!

What I hope to find upon reading it is that a business can be more competitive by being more data driven than their competitors, be it from extending Knowledge Management ideas to fully forming a company around leveraging knowledge or from using data to help establish a conversation with customers about expectations and higher levels of service.

Come one, come all to the Annual pre-SXSW get together for anyone doing Web design, development, Information Architecture, and anything else SXSW “Interactive-y”.

Whether you live in Austin or are in town early for SXSW, do join us on this Thursday, March 9th from 6-8 at the Cedar Door at 201 Brazos Street in downtown Austin.

As always, this event is sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin School of Information, the UTASIS&T Student Chapter and the Information Architecture Institute.

Take a look and tell me what you like or what I’ve missed.

From the Web page:

TiVo Desktop for Mac v1.9.2 Updated February 14, 2006. This update provides compatability with Mac OS X 10.4: Tiger.

Download it now.

There has got to be a better way.

I’m sure there are all manner of utilities that will clear the text formatting or an OSX Service that will do the same. What I’m asking is for is a way to make the system default not use the formatting information when I either use the Cut, Copy or Paste from the Edit menu, or more truly, when my long-trained muscle memory uses the keyboard for such a task.

I will be wonderfully happy if someone can point me to an application that can help. Even better, if there is some system setting that I can tweak that has been hidden from me all these years.

I think this is a good set of tags, especially the huge list of band names and their tags even if I don’t know and never will know all but a few of the bands that are possible to see during the music part of SXSW. I suspect it is possible that if I actually did learn of the band via the tags, I’d be more likely to still remember them by their tag instead of their complete name. I wonder what that says about the primacy in learned vocabularies. What I do like is that many of the tags I clicked on already have more than a few links to the band’s own Web sites, fan sites and even some (hopefully legal) downloads. That seems to be a great way to bootstrap both getting people to use the offered tags and also to discover some new bands to go and see while they’re here in Austin.

In terms of (ha!) what I call “tag grammar” it is also interesting to debate the use of date information like “2006” or “06” on the end of the main sxsw conference tags as in sxsw2006 vs. sxsw . Thankfully, the year as part of a tag might not be supremely important as most tagging systems show links with the newest first, making it pretty easy to see all the tagged items from the current year first. (Note to all tagging system UI designers – how about some real time sorting options for tags lists and tag clouds? Sorting by date, type and kind could truly transform tagging from a backstop for retrieval to something more essential to the overall information seeking process.) The good thing to help achieve some consensus is that on most pages (within shadows.com at least) you can see related tags or drill down into combinations of tags (a “narrow results” option).

Since my all-time favorite O’Reilly book is Mastering Regular Expressions, this has got to be my kind of conference.

Now why not a program for academic research access to the data stores?

We invite position papers for the WWW 2006 workshop “Logging Traces of Web Activity: The Mechanics of Data Collection”. Many WWW researchers require logs of user behaviour on the Web. Researchers study the interactions of web users, both with respect to general behaviour and in order to develop and evaluate new tools and techniques.

Traces of web activity are used for a wide variety of research and commercial purposes including user interface usability and evaluations of user behaviour and patterns on the web. Currently, there is a lack of available logging tools to assist researchers with data collection and it can be difficult to choose an appropriate technique. There are several tradeoffs associated with different methods of capturing log-based data. There are also challenges associated with processing, analyzing and utilizing the collected data.

This one day workshop will examine the trade-offs and challenges inherent to the different logging approaches and provide workshop attendees the opportunity to discuss both previous data collection experiences and upcoming challenges. The goal of this workshop is to establish a community of researchers and practitioners to contribute to a shared repository of logging knowledge and tools. The workshop will consist of a panel discussion, participant presentations, demonstrations of logging tools and prototypes, and a discussion of the next steps for the group. Participation is open to researchers, practitioners, and students in the field.

The deadline for workshop proposals is January 10, 2006. I hope to see you there.

• Maureen L. Mackenzie
• Bill Edgar
• Brian Detlor

about Knowledge Management Practices in Organizations Undergoing Fundamental Change at the American Society of Information Science & Technology’s Annual Meeting.

Here is the requisite blurb about the panel:

This session combines individual presentations with a group discussion. The focus of this session and the expertise of this panel bring together the information-related issues of organizational change, managing knowledge, enabling technology and the role of senior management. This session reflects the interests of SIG-MGT membership and aligns with the ASIST 2005 theme of “Bringing Research and Practice Together.”

Of course, there is a Wiki page too.

From the blurb:

This unique book presents authoritative overviews of more than 70 conceptual frameworks for understanding how people seek, manage, share, and use information in different contexts. A practical and readable reference to both wellestablished and newly proposed theories of information behavior, the book includes contributions from 85 scholars from 10 countries. Each theory description covers origins, propositions, methodological implications, usage, links to related conceptual frameworks, and listings of authoritative primary and secondary references. The introductory chapters explain key concepts, theory, method connections, and the process of theory development.

Check out the Table of Contents (pdf file). (I’m the last chapter in the book, it’s funny that the chapters are organized alphabetically by the title of each chapter.)

Amazon.com link to Theories of Information Behavior. American Society for Information Science & Technology Member Price is 20% off now.

SIGIR is one of the best academic conferences to keep up with what’s new and what’s possible for Web search and increasingly, in Desktop search and mobile device search. For 2006 I expect we will see more about vertical search and even blog search too as well as some new insights into user behavior for IR.

From Rebecca McKinnon’s blog, RConversation:

After Katrina many friends and family members have been separated and left with no clear way to find each other. Hundreds of internet web sites are gathering hundreds, and probably thousands, of entries about missing persons or persons who want to let others know they’re okay.

The problem is: the data on these sites has no particular form or structure. So it’s almost impossible for people to search or match things up. Plus there are dozens of sites – making it hard for a person seeking lost loved ones to search them all.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project NEEDS YOUR HELP to enter data about missing and found people from various online sources. We’re requesting as little as an hour of your time. All you need to do is help read unstructured posts about missing or found persons, and then add the relevant data to a database through a simple online form.

START HELPING NOW

Thanks to Jon Lebkowsky for letting me know about this effort.

Of course, regular RSS feeds are available as well. (Please, just put the link for both media player formats on the page for each broadcast, do we really need to go to another page just to select which streaming format? Thanks NPR!)

For the record, I still think “podcast” is a bad name for this media distribution method. Media RSS seems to be more descriptive (because eventually people will also have to say “video podcast” or somesuch and so on…).

I will be a reviewer again this year in the Browsers and User Interface track, where there are usually a number of amazing systems and interfaces. Here’s some text describing the track:

The Browsers and User Interfaces track at WWW’2006 focuses on promoting novel research directions and providing a forum where researchers, theoreticians, and practitioners can introduce new approaches, paradigms, applications, share their knowledge and opinions about problems and solutions related to accessing and interacting with data , services, and other humans over the Web. We invite original papers describing both theoretical and experimental research including (but not limited to) the following topics:

Hope to see you there.

Tuesday and Wednesday I will be participating in the Seattle Innovation Symposium, a wonky kind of academic thinkfest tasked with building an agenda for innovation in information technology research.

I have purposefully built some free time into this trip, so if you’re in the Seattle area and we know each other or you just think it might be interesting to get together and talk, I will try and coordinate a group meetup on demand. Just send me an email or post a comment right here.

(Forgive the aliteration in my post title, but at least I’m not an anxious anchor in a powerful post.) And of course, my trip will be guilt-free since I will have just verified my backups.

So if you get an invite from me, now you know why… Well maybe not actually why, but at least you know how.

If I didn’t send you an invite, try me. I’ll give you just one guess at my Google Talk ID.

I am certain that many of us are sporadically dutiful in using backup software, compressing a bunch of files and copying them to a CD or syncing with a backup server. All too often this labor is lost when we can’t actually recover or make sense of what we recover when we need to (and there will always be a time when you need to recover some data). Why not spend a few minutes making sure that all of that effort isn’t in vain? Try and recover some of your old files and make sure they’re file-liciously fresh and usable!

Yes, for some of you, this means that September 8th will be International Backup Day – but that’s OK, at least you’re backing up your valuable data.

How do I backup? I work on three different systems (with four different operating systems between them, sigh) and try to keep most of my working files in one main directory that’s the same on each. I routinely compress and back up this directory into one large file and make the date of the backup part of the file name (as in 08-08-2005-Docs.zip). Then, I copy this file to another hard disk as well as burn this file to a CD, label it with a Sharpie marker and store it in my home or office (alternating between the two). I also have specific configuration files for each system I work on and I back those up too with a combination of small scripts (to run a copy, merge and compress sequence) and then either keep the backup on the particular system in a directory called “backup”, SFTP to a server or burn those to CD less frequently. I usually do not worry about backing up whole applications since in most cases it’s easier to re-installl an application than manage a huge backup file. Much less frequently, I use a full disk backup application (like Retrospect, which I really don’t care for so much) and keep the giant backup file on an external 250GB hard disk.

For other content like all my music files, I just do a full copy to an external drive (I have three external drives, all at least 250GB in size) and rotate among them.

I have tried many other systems, like using version control, automated .Mac-like backup services, and any number of personal or large-scale sync applications (more on them in a later post), but none seem to have the simplicity of what I’m using now.
How often do you backup your data? How do you do it?

Professor Becker is known for many years as a columnist in BusinessWeek magazine on how economics affects our everyday life and how those same routine life decisions have large-scale economics implications. These works are collected for the most part in his enjoyable book The Economics of Life: From Baseball to Affirmative Action to Immigration, How Real-World Issues Affect Our Everyday Life. I’ve also wanted to take a look at his probably brainy read: The Essence of Becker, a compilation of some of more widely read articles. While I may not wholly agree with many of his conclusions and also regret that many of his hypotheses didn’t have ideal or far-ranging datasets, I find the approach to studying typical problems in an economics sensibility very appealing.

If I remember correctly, Becker was also recently mentioned by Steven D. Levitt, one of the authors of Freakonomics (a rather scattered and tepid book that was more of a general read on applying statistics) as a colleague and mentor.

I wonder how many other Nobel laureates have blogs?

I am pretty certain that all the people at netbunch are nice, hard working people but they have a series of problems in their systems that are not very customer-centric. No live phone support (you can call and leave a message), nor will they call you back. There is a live chat feature on their web site (which is a great idea), but doesn’t seem to be open during the times of day they claim it will be. Also, despite getting a ticket number when you send in an email, the feedback loop is either slow or a null op (which I’ll give them the benefit of my doubt in that they aren’t responding because they’re trying to hurry up and fix my problem?).

To make a multi-paragraph story short(er) – I think it would be wise to look around for another hosting provider in case I have more trouble. Do you have a recommendation? Ideally, it would be someone that makes hosting WordPress easy, uses something like the cPanel interface to coordinate things, provides log analysis support (like urchin), lets me coordinate multiple domains (and their blogs) from one account name (and purchase order) and has phone support (I’d even pay a fee if I really needed real-time feedback in a pinch). In my dream world, they’d also provide VPN or maybe just SSL POP and SSL IMAP too.

Much thanks.

Like, Cory – I’ve been an on-off Macintosh user for a long time (1985 for me, but Cory since 1979? you must have been 6 year old hacking on that Apple II!). If Apple Computer Inc. adds “trusted” computing, even in iTunes (wait, it’s not already in iTunes?), or in any other part of the OS, it would push me away from from the Macintosh as a computing platform I would use or recommend. I have been running GNU/Linux (but I usually just say “Linux” or in this case Ubuntu) on a PC/Intel machine now and it is pretty respectable and easy to use. I suspect many people are moving towards Linux-based systems and this would surely push them (or their companies) over the edge.

I would miss a few applications on the Mac, such as Salling Clicker, NetNewsWire and Quicksilver, but that’s a sacrifice I’d make to know that I can use my data whenever and in whatever application I like. I encourage these software developers to make their case known to Apple that choosing to enable a DRM system inside the OS (at the kernel level even) would impact the sales of their applications.

I also happen to work for a place that buys a huge number of Macs (let’s say 10,000 a year as a guess) and I would do my best to persuade them to stop purchasing all Apple equipment. I encourage anyone else with a dog in this fight to make a declaration about this too.

If I were the rabble-rousing, organizing type – I would recommend someone start an online petition to communicate mine (and your) opinions on trusted computing to Apple. Steve Jobs has managed to reinvograte Apple in the past few years, but I can think of nothing that would kill the Macintosh buzz and cachet quicker than locking owners out of their own data.

Update: It looks like myself and others didn’t have the whole story (but who does?) in that there do not seem to be any current plans to enable this technology into the core of the Mac OS. Some have mentioned that it could be used to ensure that the intel-flavored OS will only run on Apple hardware. As an Apple Computer, Inc. shareholder I can understand this, as a Macintosh user I do not want this as an extra thing to have to worry about when using the system, as a OS X developer I do not want this as an extra set of functions or libraries to have to work with or be concerned in conflicting with.

I do have to ask myself, is there any situation or clever use of “Trusted” Computing or DRM that is actually useful for a user? One comes to mind – version control – but there are a number of non-restrictive ways to solve that problem as we know. Let’s discuss it.

I thought it would be a quick way to look up just one thing when I don’t have the book at hand, but amazon.com has missed scanning and OCR-ing this one. Even more strangeness – a google search reveals a product search result (i.e. an ad) for the book at Wal-mart.com.

Am I the only person who cares about this book any longer?

Just install Feed Your Reader and select the “Feed Protocol” option in the extension’s one and only configuration option. Then right click (or hold-click) and select “Subscribe to This Page”. You’ll be prompted by Firefox to choose an application to work with the “feed://” protocol. Just find NetNewsWire and you’re all set.

I’ll be hopefully doing some flickr posts too.

I know you can’t wait.

Update: Thanks for the recommendations for the trip, I wasn’t checking email frequently enough, but I’ll be sure to check them out *next time*.

Don’t forget to pair it up with Daring Fireball’s Markdown for easy, markup goodness.

I can make the claim that I’m one of many who have read all 1.5 million words of his Civil War, a Narrative three volume set. Not only are they essential to getting an understanding of how the South and North (note the capitalization) are similar and different from each other even today, it’s also a great read into the management styles of the various military leaders as well as one of the best (threaded throughout the set) Lincoln biographies in context of this series of battles.

I also enjoyed a series of letters between Foote and his friend Walker Percy (author of most famously The Moviegoer).

I remember savoring an interview with Mr. Foote in September 2001 where we got to hear him talk about his work and life, as well as tour his home office and get a look at his favorite books. Memorably, he was a devotee of Proust and had read his Remembrance of Things Past many times, from the same set and each time and wrote the dates of his readings in the back of one volume. That is something we all might want to do with our favorites. Perhaps I’ll do that with my own editions of Mr. Foote’s works.

Note: the phrase “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” is said to be Civil War general Stonewall Jackson’s final words before dying in 1863, which some say was a major turning point in the Civil War.

It’s a survey of the various characteristics and methods of studying people’s information behavior. Of course, my chapter focuses on Web-based information use behavior with a quantitative spin.

OK, while we’re at it, don’t forget the best extension ever – adblock.

Throw in Bloglines with its easy to use, Web-based interface for any number of RSS feeds and very soon, a few personal tweaks with greasemonkey, not to mention integrating your own personal blogosphere view using Technorati tags or even more personally oriented, pluck with its client interface/information dashboard++ and you can kiss your portal application providers goodbye.

ORACLE’s recent buyout of Peoplesoft may not be so smart in the long, long run when every business unit, not to mention employee, can crank out structured data feeds, tweak simple logic to act on other’s sources and keep up to date with everything in the organiztion with just a few clicks on everyone’s favorite orange button: .

Note that these are classified as free, but that’s not explained in depth. While some are open source, the provenance of many of them are either unknown or not stated by the list makers.

Trivia note: originally Zipf’s work was based on some ideas from Condon (which GKZ acknowledged), way back in 1928, but Zipf’s name won out over time.

It’s all about micro-content (& servers for them).

Sharing micro-content interconnected together with People, Media, Events, Reviews, Tags, Recipes, Lists and Items. These are “islands of functionality” that should be inter-connected. (Canter)

(Martino)
Open Source standards – “nothing makes us happier” than people using data elsewhere. Craigslist doesn’t have full feed so you have to go back and visit the site (I must not be looking enough on craigslist, because I’m pretty sure I’m seeing the full feed.).

Tribecast – do we need another branded verb?

Uses FOAF, and let’s you edit the XML to expose its functionality and for re-purposing. You can migrate profiles from one site to another. Further steps for Canter’s digital-lifestyle-aggregator with OpenProfile on tribe.net.

Matt just asked if anyone is building something using open source infrastructures. Several people are talking about their ideas (which I can’t hear from the back row).

Here’s the blurb:

Room 18A on Sunday, March 13th from 11:30 am – 12:30 pm

Monolithic, overarching imposed systems rarely provide full support for the range of use and users that these systems are intended to serve. Networked software should be smarter, taking advantage of users’ behaviors to evolve a system keenly adapted to actual use, not just intent. We are currently in a special moment, witnessing the development of systems that are beginning to demonstrate the power of this approach. Whether it is through passive tracking, such as purchase histories on Amazon, or explicit tagging of content, such as bookmarks on del.icio.us and photos on Flickr, websites are increasingly taking advantage of the aggregation of individual behavior to improve the utility, usability and desirability of their systems. Drawing on a range of perspectives, this session will address the intersection of the personal and global, the tensions that exist and the opportunities they afford.

• There is no marking of which signup fields are required. Why do you need to know my birthday? It’s shown as not optional (as opp to zip code being optional), but I didn’t put my birthday in and things seem to work fine.
• The first name and last name fields are what your id will be generated from – why not let people either use their email address for an id or choose their own id for consistency of names in the online world. Also, it’s not too flattering to be called “don 3”.
• What will zip code be used for? Give us a hint in a few words.
• What is the “cool products newsletter”? A link to a sample issue would give us context for making getting even more email worthwhile or not.
• The link to wists.com/everyone might as welll be a clickable link to show what wists can do.

Thanks for all the good work wist!

Check it out now, even if you aren’t going to SXSW.

This brings two thoughts to mind:

• The use of the word “modern” to describe Google now, when HHGG is (as far as I can tell) isn’t set in the past, but perhaps grounded in its original publication date. Either way, Google is better than when the book(s) were written, but certainly not as great as the Guide described in the books.
• I don’t know if that’s Google’s goal, but I think that Wikipedia is more in the spirit of the Guide.
  
  See:
  • Austin, Texas
  • H2G2
  • Project Galactic Guide

Try the Office 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data in Excel and Powerpoint files.

Lots of alliteration from anxious anchors placed in powerful posts!

Look for the links to the competition too: Ad-Aware and SpyBot Search & Desrtoy.

Disclaimer: I work with one of the companies mentioned, Pluck.com.

Anyone using either?

Here’s what events look good to me:

• Saturday
  1. 11:45 – 12:30: H.W. Brands, Lone Star Nation
     Reading and Q&A introduced by Greg Curtis
     Location: Auditorium

  2. 12:30 – 1:30:
     James Ellroy: Destination: Morgue!
     Jessee Sublett: Never the Same Again
     Reading and Q&A introduced by Kip Stratton
     Location: Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum Main Hall

  3. 12:45 – 1:30: Dayton Duncan, Lewis and Clark
     Reading and Q&A introduced by Regan Gammon
     Location: Capitol Extension Room E2.028

  4. 2:00 – 3:00: What’s So Funny About Politics?
     Jim Hightower, Let’s Stop Beating Around the Bush
     Andy Borowitz, The Borowitz Report
     Panel discussion by Evan Smith
     Location: House Chamber

  5. 2:15 – 3:00: Men Behaving Badly:
     Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us
     Kyle Smith, Love Monkey
     Jonathan Ames, Wake Up, Sir
     Reading and panel discussion moderated by Neal Pollack
     Location: Capitol Extension Room E2.010

  6. 7:00 – 9:45: Texas Book Festival After Hours: Movies
     Location: Alamo Drafthouse–Downtown –
     Oscar-winner Peter Bogdanovich will introduce two of his favorite films: 7 p.m.: Targets & 9:45 p.m.: Saint Jack.
• Sunday
  1. What’s Cooking in Texas
     John DeMers, Houston: Culinary Capital
     Fernando Saralegui, Our Latin Table
     Linda Bauer, Historic Recipes from Texas and American Sampler Cookbook
     Panel discussion moderated by Virginia Wood
     Location: Capitol Extension Room E2.014

  2. 12:30 – 1:15: Meghan Daum, The Quality of Life Report
     Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams
     Reading and Q&A introduced by Mary Margaret Farabee
     Location: Senate Chamber

  3. 2:00 – 2:45: Mind of a Killer
     Michael McGarrity, Slow Kill
     David Lindsey, The Face of the Assassin
     Reading and panel discussion moderated by Gary Lavergne
     Location: House Chamber

Why do I now have this sudden, uncomfortable urge to play online poker now?

Why would I want to HEAR posts from someone when I can skim them in seconds in my RSS reader? There are so many other interesting things to listen to and it’s not like most of our voices are sonorous enough for lengthy attention.

Some excerpts (taken totally out of context):

• Bionic Minnow
• Mookie (Wilson)
• Dr. Dreidel
• Love is not really blind, but involved in an elaborate insurance scam.
• Burberry reversible dog jacket: $195
• European Journal of Pain
• The Island of Dr. Huxtable

Learn, be amazed, and tell your friends. RealAudio format.

Aside from this, I suspect non-native English speakers are often at a disadvantage in live interviews. However, who would wholly trust a translator? I’ve never heard a translator be corrected by the speaker they’re translating. Sure because it’s not a language they’re fascile with, but is there a checksum translator for the original translator?

Also, client software seems less likely to be taken up by the open source community, as you’ve got to master either operating systems APIs and have a OS developer’s kit or IDE to work. In this case (AFAIK) we’re talking MacOS and Windows, both which do have a learning curve. I’m also assuming since Frontier has been around a long time – I played with it in 1995 – that it’s not so groovy with Mac OS X Panther, etc.

As I’m advocating “a server on every desktop, a chicken in every pot” (ok, or a palatable vegetarian substitute), Frontier might be one of the ways that individuals, but more interestingly enterprises might take some of the technology and make a run with it. Done the right way, it might bump up against Groove or even Lotus Notes.