Info architecture work that sometimes makes my head hurt

• Most info architects agree - planning for reuse is harder than conditional text. But even conditional text can be difficult, especially if there are multiple conditions that overlap. The winner of the “most conditional text” contest was this commenter on my talk.bmc post with 64 conditions in a FrameMaker document.

• Author-it has this to say about the business case that would make you think you need conditional text. Apparently you don’t need conditional text, with enough content chunking and reuse. I’m not sure I buy it so it makes my head hurt.

• I still struggle with topic authoring - but I’m finally “over” separating content from format. Whew! That only took a couple of years. This week I’m chunking of information using the rule of “seven plus or minus two.” That doesn’t usually make my head hurt, until I start coming up with all sorts of scenarios (maybe the user wants to set up their web site pricing for a DVD sale in the month of March!) and then I find myself writing too many topics.

• I also read Jon Udell’s great post about potential reasons why del.icio.us hasn’t really gone mainstream, Discovering versus teaching social information management.  I think my own tag merging and pruning best practices need work.  My favorite lines are from the comments, such as “people need to both realize that they can do that database query, and that they can refer to the results using a stable URL. I’m coming to believe that both those operations are still way beyond the capabilities of mainstream web users.”

• And finally, inline linking versus grouping links together. Usability studies and experts disagree on the correct way to link. I’m not sure I have the answers yet either. Better keep studying and linking.

What are some aspects of information architecture that are making your head hurt lately?

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The anti-social folksonomist

I’m finding that in del.icio.us I’m using keywords that no one else uses. Does this mean I’m an anti-social folksonomist?

This discovery reminds me that it’s important for findability to have tags that others will use too. On sites where popularity counts, it might be better to match others’ tags depending on what your end goal is - is your goal to categorize for your own easy retrieval later, or to tag so that others can see what you’ve tagged as being similar to their own findings?

For example, I use a tag called “blogthis” for items that have caught and held my interest but I don’t have time to immediately write a blog post about the item. Apparently no one else uses this tag! Or if they are using a “blogthis” tag, it’s those items aren’t shared.

Tagging is so easy, especially the way it’s implemented on sites like flickr and del.icio.us. But what conscious decisions are you making when you select a tag? This article has a good cognitive analysis of the act of tagging. To me, the lovely and freeing part about folksonomies for taxonomy is the decoupling of concerns about “matching” others tags and the ability to have multiple categories with similar meanings.

What does easy tagging mean for indexing professionals? Is it the crowdsourcing of indexing? Or is the printed book still a strong enough meme that a professional index is a requirement for certain media? Or is it a third, hybrid being, with identity and authority tied up in the tag selection?

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Watching web goings-on live with visualizations

I have a fascination with the “live” sites where you can visualize what’s going on across an entire site such as Twitter, Flickr, Digg, or Del.icio.us. It appears to be mostly for entertainment value, although I’m sure that researchers and journalists have these toolkits in their toolbelt when they need a fresh take on a story. I find it also sparks creative ideas or sends you along paths you never would have found otherwise.

Here are some of my favorites to watch. Check out the screenshots for a preview of what awaits behind the link. The map-based visualizations are enabled by Google Maps geo-developers, and they recently had a conferenced named “Where 2.0″ (great name).

• Twittervision - I managed to capture one from Austin, TX, while I too was hiding from the thunderstorms that were coming through. Since there’s often a rate of over 20 Twitters in the time period that this algorithm uses, I only tried a few times to capture one of my own twits. This is the 3D version with a glowing globe that spins around and then marks each twit. Very cool.
  
• Flickrvision - This is the classic view of the flat world map. This particular picture is of a chipmunk and I apologize for the poor screenshot quality but the layout that I’m confined to won’t like even this size of graphics, so I encourage you to click the Flickrvision link and see it for yourself.
  
• LiveMarks - This visualization lets you watch the bookmarks as they’re being added by all users of del.icio.us. One of the neatest visualizations that I believe was popularized by del.icio.us is tag clouds.
  
• Digg’s API contest winners for visualizations - This screen shows Digg Charts, which isn’t nearly as fun as the winner, Digg City, but it looks so much like a dashboard I had to include it. BSM Dashboard offers views not of popular stories but of high priority
  
• These aren’t “live” viewers, but TouchGraph offers neat visualizations of connections between objects, such as books or movies on Amazon, or connections between “web 2.0″ or major retailer’s websites via Google’s related links database.
  

Wow, I think we need these types of visualizations for all the connections that BMC’s products have because we have done so many integrations to get the BSM story just right. I suppose Topology Discovery has the closest match to these types of visualizations.

I’d better tear my eyes off of TwitterVision long enough to post this entry… what visualizations help you with your job lately?

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Using the del.icio.us bookmarklet button

IE 7 is installed on my home computer (but not my work computer) and I recently wanted to add the del.icio.us bookmarklet button using del.icio.us’s instructions. However, in IE7, there is no View Toolbar as the nice tutorial shows (http://del.icio.us/help/video/ielinks) (which was made using Wink, which I have used in the past to make tutorials as well!)

So, instead, I used Google Toolbar to add it to my Google Toolbar, which strikes me as slightly odd, but IE7’s Settings dialog box led me to the Google Toolbar easier than an IE method of adding a button on their toolbar. Here are the steps I used.

1. In IE 7, click Settings, and then click Options.
2. Click the Buttons tab on the Toolbar Options dialog box.
3. Click the Button Gallery Custom button and then click Add.
4. You’ll go to this website: http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/gallery?hl=en and then do a search for del.icio.us.

There were two available buttons when I looked. Choose one of the buttons and Hey Presto, add it to your Google Toolbar so that a little square button appears.

Now, next time you’re on a page that you want to add to your del.icio.us bookmarks, you click the button in the toolbar and fill out the webform with notes, a description, and tags. Neato.

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