Category: Articles
Plazes can make you famous
Well – sort of. Yesterday I received a surprise visit at the office from guerrilla vlog reporter Marie-Claire. She’s doing a piece on plazes and decided to visit some people who were online in a radius of 2 to 5 km. The interviews will be posted on the site of Bright – Netherlands’ own Wired-killer. Make sure you don’t miss my thoughtful comments on the many uses of everyone’s favourite geo-social service. ;-)
Reboot 8 announced
Mark Wubben’s Flickr photostream has a shot of his iCal with Reboot 8 in it. Last year’s Reboot 7 was a blast – excellent speakers, low entry fee, nice location and above all a very relaxed atmosphere. Jesse James Garrett and Bruce Sterling are confirmed speakers, worth the admission alone methinks. I’m already looking forward to attending this year’s “Roskilde of the internet” will you join me?
Construction continues – tag cloud in the archives
Now and then I get around to adding another feature to this blog. A few days ago I plugged hitormiss’ weighted list into the archives page. Now I know tag clouds are the new mullets, and usability of these things is contested, but I just had to have one. It’s my blog and I’ll tag if I want to!
NRC.Next
Een hele site in Flash optuigen, en deze vervolgens alleen gebruiken voor een slideshow met wat “prikkelende” foto’s? Kom op NRC — dat kunnen jullie beter.
Restaurant usability
I ran into this curious sign while out for lunch today. A small restaurant specialising in pie (vlaai) had these huge letters in the window, saying: “you can sit here as well”. Obviously, if they made it obvious to potential clients that they had seating, they wouldn’t need the sign – or is it a case of people not wanting to sit down and have a piece of pie?
To me, the sign was quite similar to those texts in web pages reading “click here to …” – always a clear sign of bad usability. Perhaps the pie shop is in need of some user experience consulting?
Next generation tag clouds
Joe Lamantia recently published a two–part essay on tag clouds. He’s managed to create a nice primer on tagging from an IA’s point of view. His tone of voice is a bit academic, which may turn you off, but his predictions of future directions for tagging and tag clouds are spot on quite interesting.
A while ago I tried to come to grips with the tagging phenomenon in a series of posts on open.info.nl (in Dutch). The last one was on facetted tagging. Lamantia briefly mentions this as a new direction, but doesn’t really describe how he imagines this would work.
I’m in the planning phase of a facetted tagging demo, and still not sure how to approach it: should content editors specify the facets within which content users can tag, or should the facets be tags as well. In other words – how far should we go in relinquishing control over metadata?
Gravatars are go!
Ondergrond.org – HKU-studenten aan de folksonomy
Via commentaar op een recent artikel op open.info.nl kwam ik op de site Ondergrond – een folksonomy voor / van street art. De site is een EMMA-afstudeerproject van een aantal HKU-studenten. De site daagt bezoekers met behulp van stellingen en vragen uit om bij foto’s van graffiti en stickers tags achter te laten. Een interessante manier om het dilemma “waarom zou een bezoeker taggen” te tackelen – het principe doet me in die zin denken aan Hot or Not. Het plezier zit hem in foto na foto hersenloos te voorzien van metadata. Het risico is natuurlijk dat hiermee het ontstaan van “metacrap” alleen maar in de hand wordt gewerkt! Aan de andere kant zijn de vragen soms wel wat moeilijk, dan moet je goed nadenken, en is het effect van de laagdrempeligheid weg.
Ik weet niet of Maarten en Sjors Interaction Design hebben gestudeerd, maar op dat vlak verdient de site wel nog wat aandacht. Het is flink zoeken geblazen in het ondergrondse, de navigatie is eigenlijk bijna niet aanwezig. Misschien dat dit niet de focus heeft in hun project, maar het zou toch mooi zijn als het de tagger makkelijk wordt gemaakt zijn weg te vinden naar interessante content!
Edgeio launches
Development of an open platform for listings continues with yesterday’s launch of Edgeio. This service picks up on blog post that are marked as a listing using a Microformat-like tag and collects them on a website for users to search through. They have some nifty interfaces in place to allow you to zoom in on listings that are close to you. One thing they haven’t addressed yet (but are aware of) is the problem of fake listings and spam.
Structured Blogging is working in the same field, but from a different angle (focussing on the bloggers, not the site that collects listings). I wrote about them earlier over here (in Dutch). The biggest challenge for the Edgeio crew is probably gaining critical mass to be able to compete with the likes of eBay.
Everyone was blogging about this yesterday, here are some of the posts: