I’m in a better mood today, and maybe regretting not going to the AIGA event with Steve Krug. However, the lazyweb [tm] lets me link to someone who did.

Lee (who I work with at the BBC) blogged it live using his Visor (Lee’s from the future)

• Martyn Perks’s talk
• Steve Krug’s response

From the sparse notes it doesn’t look like I missed much, apart from being a little infuriated. And drinking beer imagining with friends what The Empire’s powerpoint presentation templates would look like seems like a wise decision. So actually, no regrets.

The lazyweb [tm] even let’s me avoid ruminating further on the themes debated!! I heart the lazyweb [tm]. Lee is right-on it seems to me in his short-but-sweet summing-up:

“Innovation isn’t something you can incorporate in the design process, it’s a result you can notice afterwards.”

Yusssmate.

» evilcoffee.org / blog : thoughts on aiga, innovation.

Matt Webb’s playing with something potentially powerful. Leaving your “outboard brain” [cf. Cory’s O’Reilly piece] lying around in unreal-versions of real places [cf. Dan Hill’s take on NYCbloggers] as an “avatar” of sorts…

As I was describing the demo MattW gave me enthusiastically to someone last night, it occured to me to refer them to his earlier thinking on “The sameness of interfaces” so I’ll refer you all to it too… Interconnected, indeed…

» Interconnected.org: 11.6.2002: IMvironments

or don’t as the (upper or lower) case may be.

» Creativepro.com : “Type that’s Tight but not Touching”

Victor proves the first rule of the lazy-web (“if you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about”) by writing about why I haven’t read boxesandarrows properly since it launched, I’m avoiding things like tonight’s AIGA event as if they’re plague-pits and I’ve been reading clay, webb, rael, cory, stolarz and udell more than iaslash and xblog; and why I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a long time.

Victor’s piece is nice, polite and constructive; just like the man himself. I’m not in as concilatory a mood. Personally I’m finding the discussion in the user-experience design community at the moment deeply stultifying. The distance between Baltimore and Santa Clara (let alone Camden for that matter) feels a lot more than 2442 miles.

As Victor says:

“It’s a little disconcerting, embarrasing even, that no IAs are at the forefront of these discussions. Isn’t that what we do, find interesting patterns in information and present them to people?”

Alex Wright, Peter Van Dijck and Eric Scheid have been writing interesting things about “what’s going on”[tm] (who else should I be reading?) – how the craft we’re struggling to refine, if too narrowly viewed, might be as redundant shortly as hot-metal typesetters.

» Noise Between Stations: “Library Science + Computer Science”

As mentioned earlier, Haddock are staging a complementary event to XCOM2002, where some more webspecific topics are going to be chewed on in an informal manner over a sunday afternoon pint at the pub opposite the main event.

There are 3 panels/topics:

• 12.30pm – 2.00pm Online Communities: The real world, only worse?
• 3.00pm – 4.30pm Chatbot++: Bot to the Future
• 5.00pm – 6.30pm Towards a Common-Place Web: online writing and social memory

We’ll have people from london.pm, Chump, Cory Doctorow, B3ta, various haddocks and of course heated debate from the (former) audience [tm].

Should be fun, wander across if you’re heading to XCOM2002 – full details can be found at the site below:

» Haddock.org: TakeItOuside: XCOM2002

“Say… what’s occuring, what goes on?
[it’s the only choice]
IT’S XCOM#1
[It’s the only choice]
So get me some…”

(With apologies to Pop Will Eat Itself)

This Sunday in London sees the inaugural XCOM – a joint production of NTK and Mute magazine. It’s billed as a festival of inappropriate technology, with a stellar line-up of old-skool Spectrum games authors, and luminaries of sci-fi and just plain, uh, sci: George and Freeman Dyson!

The haddock crew are currently brewing up some break-out talks from the main hall, looking at inappropriate tech in practice – bots, blogs and the way-new community will get a thrashing at informal panels in the pub across the road. More as it breaks.

Multi-media “pundit” and big-girls blouse Dave Green gets featured in today’s Guardian talking about the event, and also appearing (and always worth a listen) will be Cory Doctorow and Tom Standage

Tom’s book, “The Victorian Internet” has been turned into a museum (and online) exhibit called “The Once and Future Web”

Anyway – this Sunday should be a blast. If you can make it to London, make sure you get along there.

“When it was possible to have a belief about God and heaven, it represented something we all desired. It had a profound meaning in human life.

“But when it no longer became possible to believe, a lot of people felt despair. What was the meaning of life? It seems that our nature is so formed that we need a feeling of connectedness with the universe. If there is no longer a king, or a kingdom of heaven, it will have to be a republic in which we are free citizens. We ourselves as citizens have to build the republic of heaven.”

» Guardian: Narnia books attacked as racist and sexist : Philip Pullman dismisses work of CS Lewis as blatant religious propaganda
[thanks linkmachinego]

» www.hayfestival.co.uk: Philip Pullman interview in Audio

Excellent. Excellent. My emboldening below.

XFML addresses the following issues:

• It is impractical to create a centralized metadata store for the web. However, we need shared metadata to make the web easier to get around in. XFML takes a distributed approach, yet allows individual authors to connect their metadata schemes by merging topics. Thus it allows for creation of a distributed, loosely connected metadata network that fulfills much of the same functions a centralized store would.
  Taxonomies are labour intensive to create. XFML allows taxonomies to be easily shared and published.

• Taxonomies are created by fallible humans and subject to change. XFML is based around imperfect and ever changing taxonomies: with its strict separation of metadata and content, the metadata in an XFML map can evolve more easily than in most current cms systems where metadata is intertwined with content definition, and where adjusting the structure of the metadata typically involves a lot of work.
• Faceted taxonomies are generally more powerful for websites than classic hierarchical taxonomies. XFML is based on facets.
  Most current content management systems implement a certain level of metadata already, yet there is no standard way of publishing this metadata, let alone make meaningful connections between metadata in different systems. Allowing meaningful metadata connections between separate systems is what makes XFML so powerful.

• Easy to implement standards get adopted faster. XFML is not perfect, neither does it try to be a comprehensive solution for all possible metadata needs. It is designed to be useful in the real world from day one, and easy to understand and implement.

» XFML: shared, faceted metadata format for the web.

Compare and contrast:

• NYCbloggers
• iSee*

[*via Paulpod]