My proposal has been accepted for a “birds of a feather” session at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference next week:

User-Experience Design and the Next Levels of the Web
Date: 05/14/2002
Time: 7:00pm – 8:00pm
Location: Bayshore

Moderated by: Matt Jones, BBC New Media

Web services, The Semantic Web, P2P, WiFi – the emerging technologies being discussed at this conference are being examined primarily within a business and technology context.

This BOF session will try and explore the user-experience, usability and design issues that they throw up.

We’ll try and have some informal talks about the technology – and get beyond the buzzphrases. Construct scenarios that look at the design opportunities they present, and also the challenges to the skillsets, mindsets and practices commonplace in the design community today.

If you’re attending the conference, please come along and contribute. Should be fun!

In an article on About.com:

“When you add it all up, BBCi Search certainly does provide a different user experience than Google’s own sites, even though the results are nearly identical. If you use Google for its combination of power, speed, relevance and detail, you won’t find anything of interest at BBCi Search. But if you like the idea of a powerful search engine so simple that the entire “how to search” instructions amount to six sentences and one graphic, this may be the one for you — especially if you have an interest in UK-specific material.”

Also has some links to stories in the British press about BBCi Search and the fuss it has caused.

» About.com: “BBC Joins the Search Engine Fray, Users Win”

as Le Corbusier put it, is further warned against here in a piece about Karl Popper. The emphasis given in the quote below is mine.

He criticised what came to be called solutioneering: the jumping to solutions – reorganisations, replanning – without spelling out what the problem was, or if there was one. At the back of this lay “holism”, the belief that problems must be tackled “as a whole”. He showed that the holistic method turns out to be impossible. The greater the changes attempted, the greater their unintended and unexpected repercussions, forcing upon the holistic engineer the expedient of piecemeal improvisation – the “notorious phenomenon of unplanned planning”

» The Guardian: “A legacy of swans left to science : Karl Popper”

The search engine I’ve been working on and talked about at The ASIS&T IA Summit has gone live on the homepage of BBCi

Go team!

… to my artifacts section. Let me know if it’s useful.

Don’t you love it when someone goes ahead and invents something you’ve been wishing existed?

“I dial a number on an ordinary mobile phone. There is a pause of 10 to 15 seconds, then a voice on the phone tells me it is the Cranberries’ Ode to My Family. A short while later, a text message arrives confirming it.

I’m impressed but not convinced. I ask him to put on the Radiohead CD – and the phone correctly comes up with The Bends followed by another text message. Later, I ask him to switch off his CD player and get the phone to identify the background music in the cafe. After a couple of failures (because the songs were not yet on his fast-growing database), it succeeds again (Finally by Kings of Tomorrow). By now I’m no longer impressed. I’m wishing I owned the company.”

» Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Heard it thru’ the mobile

Happened across this while feeling cranky about the hyperdull topic of arguing about whether keeping to underlined linkstyles constrains creativity on the London-IA mailing list.

Gah. So much energy used up in my lifetime arguing about that with people instead of much, much more interesting design challenges.

The quote by Matt Webb is about webservices, but hopefully you get the point.

“My favourite thing about Web services? I can get on with what I want to do (recombine things in interesting ways) without pissing around cleaning up malformed things to make them recombinable. It’s the same reason I don’t build my own computers, the same reason I use a Mac, the same reason I like science. Standing on shoulders.”

» interconnected weblog

“NEC researchers discovered that the degree of “rich get richer” or “winners take all” behavior varies in different categories and may be significantly less than previously thought. A new model has been developed which can be used to predict and analyze competition and diversity in different communities on the web. “

» Winners don’t take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web
[via iaSlash.org]

A fantastic read, really nailing some of the things discussed previously here as “wombling”.

“That’s innovation for you. If we could predict the future uses of new technology, they wouldn’t be innovative.

That’s innovation. It’s the force that drives our civilization. It’s the force that drives our culture. It’s the force that makes us human (“the tool-using animal”).

I’m not willing to give it up, even if I don’t know what it is.

The fact of the matter is that no group of engineers in a boardroom can ever anticipate what normal people will do with their inventions.”

Such a fantastic quote. Reminds me of Marc Rettig‘s “brains around a table are never enough” maxim.

» “The Street Finds its Own Use for the Law of Unintended Consequences” by Cory Doctorow : 04/16/2002

“A TextArc is a visual represention of a text—the entire text (twice!) on a single page. Some funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary, it uses the viewer’s eye to help uncover meaning.”

» Textarc.org [via Peter Van Dijck]

and while we’re with Peter… look what he’s suggesting:

Here’s the thing: I’ve been thinking about this and playing around with it, and I think I might make a simple XML format (it’s half done) to publish faceted metadata that will:

• let you build your faceted metadata
• let you publish that on the web if you like
• you can import other people’s taxonomies, or parts of them
• you can merge with other people’s taxonomies”

» Peter Van Dijck proposes a Faceted metadata XML format

aaaaand:

“Why would anyone want an XML-RPC interface to the covers project? Combined with FreeDB, your CD player could let you know if the song you are listening to had been covered by someone else. Or maybe when you put in your new Tiffany CD, you want to know who her influences are, or who she’s influenced. Maybe you’re bored and you want to write an Applescript interface to explore cover chains. Who knows. I’m sure that someone, somewhere will find some use for it (maybe).”

» The Covers Project [via BoingBoing]

What the *?@% are they putting in everyone’s cereal this week? It’s like the week WebServicePunk broke, or something. Whooooo!!!!!