All posts from
January 2006

Online Information Folksonomy Presentation

Added on 17 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“The main focus of this presentation is not that folksonomies should be seen as a replacement to taxonomy, but as a means to augment taxonomies (if there is one in place). As was resoundingly echoed by others on the panel, taxonomies are hard work and expensive to build and maintain. The cost and effort are often reasons why taxonomies are not exhaustive nor emergent, as budgets and time constraints provide limits. Most often we follow the Pareto Principle (also know as the 80/20 rule) where we focus on 80 percent of the use with 20 percent of the resources (in reality we aim toward something more like a 90/40 rule), but we do have limitations. Taxonomies are also authoritative, but this is problematic for the people who have a vocabulary that is different than the authoritative vocabulary(or more correctly vocabularies). This means a taxonomy will most often have a limited view, which is not a reason to stop taxonomies, but a reason to augment them.” (Thomas Vander Wal – Personal InfoCloud)

The Attention Economy and the Net

Added on 16 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as “the information age” suggest. What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions – stars vs. fans – and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality.” (Michael H. Goldhaber – First Monday 2.4)

Lou Rosenfeld Eats his own Dog Food

Added on 16 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Louis Rosenfeld, one of the founding fathers of information architecture, has a new project up his sleeve. Growing restless after co-founding one of the most renowned information architecture firms of all time, co-authoring one of the best-known IA books, helping to start both the Information Architecture Institute and the User Experience Network, and running his own IA consulting practice, Lou is setting his sights on a new endeavor. He’s using his knowledge of user experience methods to launch a UX publishing house.” (Liz Danzico – Boxes and Arrows)

A Summary of My Ideas about National Culture Differences

Added on 16 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“(…) there has been much discussion about cultural differences in the web design, especially in reference to animation and flashy elements. It looks right to offer Professor Hofstede’s ideas to readers here. These ideas were first based on a large research project into national culture differences across subsidiaries of a multinational corporation (IBM) in 64 countries.” (Geert Hofstede – uiGarden.net)

Defining the User Experience

Added on 12 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“The definition I came up with is that, in a nutshell, the user experience of a product is everything that’s not human-computer interaction. It’s everything that affects how someone interacts with a tool–whether it’s software, hardware, a service, or whatever. To me, this meant that I had to deal with all of the squishy, abstract things that good cognitive psychology and computer science-trained designers like me try not to deal with: business goals, emotions, relationships, branding, etc.” (Mike Kuniavsky – Orange Cone) – courtesy of vuk

MIT Libraries: DSpace Digital Repository Visualization

Added on 11 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“The information age is now an electronic age. Books, magazines and newspapers, business and government records, music, movies, email — all are stored as electronic files that can only be read, played, or watched by people with the right hardware and software. Over time, changes in technology can make digital information simply incapable of being accessed. Furthermore, without separate authentication standards, digital information becomes untrustworthy. On both legal and historical grounds, people need to be able to verify a document’s provenance and data integrity.” (Dynamic Diagrams)

Designing User Experiences for Applications Versus Information Resources on the Web

Added on 10 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“The relatively recent adoption of user-focused design practices by the Web design and development community—including personas, participatory design, paper prototyping, and the like—highlights important distinctions between the user experiences of desktop applications and those of information spaces. With the growing desire for usable Web applications, these distinctions become more topical and important to understand. Though the process of designing and creating application and information space user experiences for the Web is virtually the same—even if the deliverable design documents may differ—their user experiences are fundamentally and profoundly different. For designers, business analysts, marketing consultants, and others who are sincerely interested in delivering the best user experiences online, understanding these distinctions can reduce the cost of design and improve the likelihood of user acceptance.” (Leo Frishberg – UXmatters)

Evolutionary information seeking: A case study of personal development and Internet searching

Added on 9 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“This article explores one question: what does Internet searching have to do with personal development? Personal development means that individuals improve their own abilities, skills, knowledge or other qualities by working on them. The paper reports on a qualitative case study, in which a single participant was interviewed and her Web searches observed. Information search strategies seemed to form a spectrum of developmental sophistication. Four major types of relationship were found: a) the Internet in the context of development; b) development in the context of the Internet; c) development affecting Internet use; and, d) Internet use affecting development. There were some informational phenomena which exhibited regression, the converse of development.” (Jarkko Kari – First Monday 11.1)

Co-creating unique value with customers

Added on 8 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“The traditional system of company-centric value creation (that has served us so well over the past 100 years) is becoming obsolete. Leaders now need a new frame of reference for value creation. In the emergent economy, competition will center on personalized co-creation experiences, resulting in value that is truly unique to each individual. The authors see a new frontier in value creation emerging, replete with fresh opportunities. In this new frontier, the role of the consumer has changed from isolated to connected, from unaware to informed, from passive to active. As a result, companies can no longer act autonomously, designing products, developing production processes, crafting marketing messages, and controlling sales channels with little or no interference from consumers. Armed with new tools and dissatisfied with available choices, consumers want to interact with firms and thereby co-create value. The use of interaction as a basis for co-creation is at the crux of our emerging reality. The co-creation experience of the consumer becomes the very basis of value. The authors offer a DART model for managing co-creation of value processes.” (C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy)

Information architecture as a means of assessing and creating organisational information coherence 

Added on 7 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
Paper from the Euro IA Summit 2005 – “This paper will explore how IA projects can be constructed and undertaken to achieve coherence. It will review how elements such as metadata creation, document creation flows, permissions, version control, change and update management and usage patterns can be used to create a global picture of an organisation’s information creation, distribution and use, and thereby to derive the optimum patterns.” (Barry Mahon and Alan Gilchrist – TFPL)

Ambient Findability Slashdotted

Added on 3 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
Read the Comments – “Read ‘Ambient Findability’ if: you are interested in expanding your business or nonprofit through its presence on the Internet; you are a librarian and want to grow into the nontraditional environment of the Web; you are a Web designer and want to optimize the findability of your sites on the Internet; you are a user and want to enhance your searching experience. Read this book if you are a teacher, a student, a writer, a parent… in short, if you use a computer or a handheld or a GPS or a smartphone or any type of technology that connects you to the world, then you should read this book. Peter Morville’s ‘Ambient Findability’ will amaze and delight you. It will give you new insight into how ubiquitous computing is affecting how we find and use information and how we, as users, can and will shape the future of how data is stored and retrieved.” (Slashdot.org)