Yearly Archives: 2003

Weblogs for corporate knowledge sharing and management

I’m still giving considerable thought to weblogs as so much has changed since
I first was so excited about this concept. For me weblogs comprise a large part of my interaction with the Internet and it has become an indespensible tool for research, learning, sharing and convenient means for self expression.
Weblogs use the web for what it is good for – connecting and interacting.
For the longest time weblogs have been a closely held secret of mine on how to find information on the web. Google is great and very effective but imagine for a moment that you have this network of people who you share common interests with all looking for information on these same topics, all sharing what they found, all adding there own perspective and you see that the possibilities for research and learning are far more promising than simply relying on Googles search algorythms. All these human editors and researchers networked together actively, whether they know it or not, working towards the same goal – acquiring knowledge. Witnessing these sites connect together
into a singled threaded conversation, across cultures, across experiences, and across continents is absolutely amazing.
I could have really used this ability when I was a student of music. Instead I had to travel to conferences, competitions, and hang out in smokey bars all to acquire a minuteamount of information as compared to what is available to me now.

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RSS simplifies the reading of large numbers of weblogs

The amount of information avaliable from weblogs is incredible. How can a user keep track of it all? If you rely on an increasingly large number of weblogs it seems impossible to stay in touch with more than a hand full each day. Fortunately, a solution exists to simplify the process of reading large numbers of blogs: RSS (rich (or RDF) site summary).
Some articles detailing RSS/syndication and aggregators:
“Content developers make their RSS files available by placing them on their web server. In this way, RSS

Moblogging

I’m pretty much interested in any device that allows for interaction with or creation of information in a usable way. This is especially true if it in anyway can intersect with the web. So it’s unfortunate that of late my schedule at work and school hasn’t allowed me to keep up with all the latest cool info. artifacts that have been appearing.
I was involved with weblogs very early – now it has exploded and has become mainstream (even in Taiwan); I love my wap account and sms but that is old news for kids here; I tried mobile pdas but never could use them for more than reading news – who wants to read news on a pda?; my house in Hsinchu has become a public wireless access point – but it’s a secret; and now I am convinced that mobile “blogging” is going to a great great thing – but I am late to this party as well. Well I am anxious to catch up with this new trend.
So what is mobile blogging or “moblogging’? From the IMC website, “Moblogging is a blanket term that covers a variety of related practices. At its simplest, moblogging (from “mobile web logging”) is merely the use of a phone or other mobile device to publish content to the World Wide Web, whether that content be text, images, media files, or some combination of the above.
Location-specific content goes one step further – it relates and connects to the specific physical place where it was created and published. This permits any particular set of real-world coordinated to be “tagged” with relevant information, from instant restaurant reviews to ski-slope hazard warnings to contextual jokes.”
Apparently the term moblogging was first termed by Adam Greenfield back in November of 2002.
Unfortunately, despite being in existence for sometime there are not an abundance of tools that allow for easy interfacing with my chosen content management system, MoveableType. In fact there do not seem to be a great deal of tools at all. Most of the tools available use email as the posting mechanism. Here are the tools that I have identified to have the greatest chance of success with my set-up and needs:
“Wapblogger is a WAP interface to popular weblog tools Blogger ,LiveJournal and any other weblog-style tool supporting the XML-RPC Blogger API. Post to your weblogs with a WAP enabled cell phone!”
“Pop2blog was created specifically out of a desire to take the jpeg images which the Danger Hiptop (aka T-Mobile Sidekick ) is able to capture and email and post them as entries in a MovableType weblog. It can be seen in use on this site’s main blog page . Because it makes use of MovableType’s XML-RPC, it should be easy to adapt this script to work with any weblog backend that uses the Blogger API. ”
“Mfop2 allows you to moblog without setting up any special scripts on your own mail server. To use Mfop2, all you have to do is register some of your blog details and you will be able to post to your blog from your mobile by emailing your blog entry with images attached to mfop2@bastish.net.”
I much prefer to install something on my own server instead of using a “free” or trial service. The scripts themselves that are available are quite easy to configure and install but unfortunately all require which extra CPAN modules which seem to be causing me some problems. It may require a more technical mind than mine to get this up and running.
All this makes for a great new product — software accessible from a mobile device and installable on your own server with a minimum of fuss. Either as a compliment to or a replacement for moveabletype.

Automated music critic

Looking for a second opinion on my previous recommendation of The Bad Plus? Look no further than the Automated Music Critic for a review of this band and of your favourites. Here is the review I got for The Bad Plus:
“What do I think about These Are The Vistas by The Bad Plus? I don’t think you are going to like this…
The chorus of Smells Like Teen Spirit will haunt me for years to come, sounding as it does like a drunk, urine soaked, pus stained tramp’s idea of a catchy tune that people will donate all their spare change to stop hearing. If you’ve just bought These Are The Vistas, take my advice and get a big black marker and scrawl all over track five, 1972 Bronze Medalist *before* you play it. If you’ve already played it, you no doubt know all about the gentle sound of a boil on backside of Black Lace’s back catalogue it produces from your speakers. The sound of the little ticking noise that maggots make as they feed is nothing compared to the dire Heart Of Glass.
Silence Is The Question reminds me of a coked-up Andrew Lloyd-Webber writing a never-ending stream of musical obscenities dribbling through my ears and out onto the carpet. I wish it wouldn’t.
In fact, I’m scared The Bad Plus will reproduce and foist a new generation of crud on us.”
Link: Automated Music Critic

The Bad Plus

You really must check these guys out. Their style certainly isn’t timeless but their inventiveness will leave a smile on your face.
“The Bad Plus is comprised of bassist Reid Anderson, pianist Ethan Iverson, and drummer David King, three post-modern jazz iconoclasts who combine keen wit, dynamic musical contrasts, and an original sensibility in what’s been called “the loudest piano trio ever.” Drawing inspiration from the worlds of dance, pop, and rock, The Bad Plus gracefully avoid the stigma of “fusion,” instead deconstructing their influences in a steadfastly pure jazz idiom all their own.
Link: The Bad Plus
Buy: These are the Vistas
Buy: Motel

Weblogs as a good example of information design

“We are being pummeled by a deluge of data and unless we create time and spaces in which to reflect, we will be left with only our reactions. I strongly believe in the power of weblogs to transform both writers and readers from “audience” to “public” and from “consumer” to “creator.” Weblogs are no panacea for the crippling effects of a media-saturated culture, but I believe they are one antidote.”
rebecca blood
september 2000

Are you a workaholic?

“If you are spending a lot of hours working, is it passion or workaholism that’s driving you? Chang, author of The Passion Plan, says that if your work is motivated by guilt, other’s people’s messages, or the desire to avoid doing something else, then it’s workaholism. Other signs include feeling emotionally and physically drained at the end of the day and not having a good work/personal life balance.
“Passion leads to pleasure. Workaholism leads to burnout,” says Lisa Stone, President of Fit for 2, Inc. When you discover the work that fuels your passions, the resulting energy and fulfillment will tell you you’ve hit the mark.” Accredited to Jugglezine.
Link: Passionate or Work Addicted?

On Men

From Daring Fireball. “Less markup. Less scripting. Fewer navigation elements. Fewer colors. Fewer graphics. Omit needless words. This is how you make a good web site. I know this for a fact.
Such design goals, however worthy, are notoriously difficult to sell to clients. A good web site costs a lot of money, and for a lot of money, most clients want a lot of web site. Lots of scripts. Lots of graphics. Lots of needless words.”
“The web is where independents shine. Independent web sites tend to look better and are better produced. Their URLs are even more readable. This isn

Teams within an IT department

Whenever I finish a project (certainly large ones) I usually spend some time analysing my own failures and successes, and any problems I may have encountered within the team I might be working with. In the past we would take this personal analysis and share it within the team in the hope that the next project could improve upon the last.
Having just finished a rather long agonizing project I have been going through this same process, albeit unfortunately alone.
One of the things I have been doing is reviewing some basic literature about IT teams. They don’t directly relate to the type of people I work with on a day to day basis but they provide some interesting fundamental lessons.
“The team needs a dedicated project room to conduct all meetings and display all project artifacts. The room should have several large whiteboards and be equipped with a high quality conference phone. It must be dedicated for the duration of the project, including its retrospective. The room should openly display any artifact that is needed by the team. Over the years I

Technology Intoxication

A quote sourced from Richard Saul Wurman’s, Information Anxiety 2.
The symptoms of a Technologically Intoxicated Zone are:
1. We favor the quick fix, from religion to nitrition.
2. We fear and worship technology.
3. We blur the distinction between real and fake.
4. We accept violence as normal.
5. We love technology as a toy.
We Live our lives distanced and distracted.
-John Naisbitt, High Tech High Touch: Technology and Our Search for Meaning

Ten Commandments of Interactivity

  1. Interfaces and Content Should Encourage and Reward Movement
  2. Participant’s Actions Elicit an Immediate and Identifiable Response
    No participant should ever wonder. ” Am I controlling this, or not?”
  3. No Instructions Allowed
    Learning to “work” the interactive zones must be intuitive and simple. There should be adequate feedback for the participants to intuit if they are interacting “correctly” or “incorrectly”.
  4. People Do Not Need To Be Experts to Participate
  5. No Thinking Allowed
    Euphoria occurs when participants get lost in the moment, focusing on their intuitive natures.
  6. Actions Receive Aesthetically Coherent Responses
    Participants should navigate through and affect several “good” choices – choices that are visually pleasing and sound musical to the average ear.
  7. Keep it Simple, Immediate, and Fun
  8. Responsiveness is More Important then Resolution
    In computer graphics, this translates to “greater speed is better than polygons.” A simple visual object that reacts quickly to participants’ input is better than a complex visual object that reacts too slowly.
  9. Think Modularly
    Everything is a component.
  10. Observe and Learn
    Let people try it and watch what they do. They will almost always interact in ways one never expected.

Quoted from: “The Interactive Dance Club: Avoiding Chaos in a Multi-Participant Environment” by Ryan Ulyate and David Bianciardi which appeared in the Computer Music Journal Vol. 26, No. 3.

Get a clue

Some quotes from the Cluetrain Manifesto a book made popular during those heady dot com days. It now seems so cliche but in Taiwan it’s probably still quite new.
“Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.
But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf. ”
Some which appear particularly relevant here:
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.
Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.
Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
Paranoia kills conversation. That’s its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies
Link to the 95 thesis: the cluetrain manifesto

Pandora’s Portal

“It begins with a seductive whisper into the ear of an IT manager.
Wouldn’t you like to control the chaos that is your intranet? Haven’t you dreamed of providing unified access to all corporate knowledge? Come with me. I have the answer. Right here in this tiny box.
Power. Knowledge. Groovy Gadgets. How could any mortal resist this techno-utopia? Maybe just a peek. A pilot project. What harm could it possibly do?
In the true spirit of vicarious curiosity, let’s focus on the three most interesting evils befalling the portal-peeking IT manager.
1. Definition
2. Knowledge Management
3. Information Architecture”
Link: Pandora’s Portal

Life in Taiwan 10

Taiwan Culture
Terrie Brown has wonderully positive outlook on life in Taiwan and shares it through her web site. She lists some of the fun things her and her husband have learned since they have been in Taipei. Some of my favourites:
#7. If you hear a truck coming down the street playing music, don’t run out expecting ice cream…it’s the garbage truck…one of our friends said you know you’ve lived in taiwan too long when you hear the music and no longer think of ice cream”
#14. Summer in Taiwan…even you can experience it…go into your bathroom and turn on the hot water in the shower full blast with the door closed…keep all your clothes on so that they can get damp and stick to you. Now, turn on your hairdryer and blow it in your face. Next, run in place really fast until you’ve broken a good sweat. There, now you can feel like you’ve taken a quick trip to Taipei in the summer.
#15. Winter in Taiwan…go sit outside on the sidewalk when the temperature is just about 40 degrees or a little lower. But you must be wearing slightly damp clothes…remember, it is humid here and rains a lot. Now, sleep there. That is what it is like…we have no heaters in our houses! And we have cement walls and tile floors. Of course, if you bundle up, it is quite comfortable. We also added two space heaters to our house to make it bearable.
link: Culture in Taiwan As We See It

Information Design For A Better World?

An interesting question and response:
“As the ‘Information Revolution’ gathers momentum*, information designers are increasingly being cast as the ‘midwives’ who can deliver the ‘humanized’ products of a systems culture. On the one hand, we develop the instruments that coax our neighbours to part with the information needed to feed the machine. On the other hand, we dress up its output to look as if it were addressed to individuals and to suggest authorship by some concerned and caring person. And, of course, some of us also sweeten the somewhat bitter pill of automatization with thoughtful, if not cute, interfaces.”
“How then does this square with the perception we have of ourselves, that we (alone of graphic designers, and in marked contrast to the ‘stylists’) are somehow making the world a better place? Even in my memory, designers have repeatedly been the instruments for dramatic social changes for the worse. In the sixties and seventies, it was architects and town planners who devastated our urban areas with concrete monstrosities – machines a l’habiter – that have now broken down and are uninhabitable. In the eighties, retail designers ensured that whatever romantic locations our towns and cities were twinned with – they were inevitably ‘cloned with Milton Keynes’. Will it be information designers who are responsible for the millenial mess-up – delivering Baudrillard’s prediction of a time when signs would be used to hide the absence of reality?”
Found while researching artcles on Information Design Ethics – a possible but dropped research topic. I’ll share what I found at a later time.
Link: Information Design For A Better World?

Cabinets of Curiosity

Having started but put on hold the design of my new soho workspace this seems like a timely article. I’m not sure whether I am a collector or a minimalist. I like my workspace to be sparten and clean but this aim conflicts with my real tendency to srround myself with mountains of artifacts and paper. The fact that I never throw anything out contributes to this conflict.
From the article: “Each workspace reproduces its designer’s world in miniature, through both the items it contains and the way they are organized. Objects often relate to each other in an intuitive way rather than following any strict principles of reason: Kalman displays a pair of Comme des Gar

The Proof is in the Process

“Having a creative job has its ups and downs. When you’re able to patiently nurture your creativity with mood lighting and inspirational trinkets, taking all the time you need to carefully refine your ideas before presenting them to your client, you should consider yourself very lucky. But when it’s 3 a.m. and you need to finish a set of comps before the start of business in six hours and the only ideas you’re having are colorful excuses to explain your total lack of creative thought, the frustration can bring you to your knees. These are the times when having a concise, clear creative process will save you, allowing hard work, experience and intelligence to get you through the job.”
Link: The Proof is in the Process and the Creative Process a slide I created for a presentation on creativity.

sampling, memory, and the semantic web

“free content fuels innovation”
– Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas
“I get asked what I think about sampling a lot, and I’ve always wanted to have a short term to describe the process. Stuff like “collective ownership”, “systems of memory”, and “database logics” never really seem to cut it on the lecture circuit, so I guess you can think of this essay as a soundbite for the sonically-perplexed. This is an essay about memory as a vast playhouse where any sound can be you.”
Link: loops of perception: sampling, memory, and the semantic web

Escaping Flatland: Towards Better Documentation for Information Architects

One of the hottest topics these days in Information Architecture circles is documentation. This is probably partly because the IA’s role is so ill defined. This presentation is representative of my first attempts on the use of visualization to communicate information architecture concepts to clients.
Presentation Link (Chinese) Original English language presentation is available in .pdf format

Topic Maps

“Topic maps are a standard for storing metadata (similar to thesauri, or RDF). They can be used to generate navigation for a website, and lots of other metadata tasks. Topic maps are a new standard (since + 2000) and are slowly starting to be discovered.”
Mmmmm… but what ARE they? A topic map consists of a bunch of topics, and is often written in XTM. Or it can be kept in a database. Or written on paper. Or carved in stone, you get the idea. Apart from topics (like: “the play Hamlet”), it also contains associations (like: “the play Hamlet was written by the author Shakespeare.”) And a topic map also contains occurrences. (Like: “At this URL: http://hamlet.com you can find a description of the play hamlet.”)
Link: Easy Topic Maps

Life in Taiwan 9

SARS Wars
Allot of people are speaking out about Taiwan’s seeming inability to handle the SARS outbreak. The scene here is utterly surreal. I have my temperature checked no less than 4 times a day, everyone wears masks, and everyone stays home. Personally I am concerned but am trying to avoid the hysteria and put it into perspective. This despite a government and a system that seems completely unable to managment a situation such as this. It’s amazing to me that a country full of so many intelligent and well educated people with so much money can be so inept. My God, Vietnam got it under control – have you seen their public hospitals?
Currently the crisis is more a crisis of confidence and the Taiwanese appear to have utterly failed this test. I hope I am wrong. Time will tell.
There is a rather heated discussion about the whole issue on a local community site called Forumosa.

More Powerpoint madness

Presentations.com recent review of Apples keynote reinforces my perception of how Powerpoint has created a legacy of poor visual communication. The author of the review gives Keynote 3 out of 5 stars and states that it is worth it for beginning presenters but pros will not be satisfied. Obviously the review is uninformed but it is interesting to note what these people think “pros” need. The most glaring of which were no gradient-coloring features for text, the ability to edit multimedia within the program, and the amount of the control over transitions. What is with this perception that “pro’s” want products with enormous feature sets. I thought we would assume that people don’t have time for this type of complexity.
I have been using Keynote for a couple months and it’s fairly impressive. It’s simple, displays text very well and has cut ‘n’ paste import of all my media (vector graphics and pdf look superb). It helps reinforce the point of a presentation program – to support the speaker. The downside is a natural one. No one uses keynote and as such no one can read your file. Distribution via .pdf is impractical because of the horrendous file sizes and sharing it in Powerpoint’s file format seems painful as you loose all of the reasons you use Keynote in the first place.
I certainly don’t mean to imply that I create presentations that would make Edward Tufte proud – I don’t. But I am under different constraints. The constraints of language, and lack of paper, force me to put copious amounts of text on the screen. That’s my excuse.
Link: Presentations.com – Apple Keynote review

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

Edward Tufte has published a essay called “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.”
“In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now “slideware” computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations? ”
Link:Edward Tufte: Books – Essay: The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

Six Tips for Improving Your Design Documentation

“If you are a designer or product planner, you probably create documents of some kind to capture your design decisions and solutions. Documentation is a crucial component of successful product planning and implementation, so it’s important that it communicates as effectively as possible. Good organization, complete information, and clear writing are, of course, key to the success of any design document, but there are some other, less-obvious techniques you can use to make your documents more readable and understandable.”