No blogging, I got a lot of life going on right now. Just got back from a france trip-- flickr can tell my tale for me. A picture is worth a thousand marching ants, I hear.

In other worlds, I'm reading a lot:
CodeName Ginger
Metaphors We Live By
Wisdom of Teams
Y! the last man.
(yeah, I can't seem to read one book at a time, some kind of weird ADD, I suppose)

All of these are, so far, excellent and recommended, especially Wisdom of Teams.

I'm also watching Deadwood
I couldn't find the article in New Yorker which prompted my hunting it down but I did find this interview . It's a great article, and a terrific show if you don't mind continual swearing and of course, rather bloody fights of the gun, fist, and occasionally, rock variety.

so... not dead, but gathering inputs and ruminating.

Air France lost my luggage, and offered this little kit as a overnight remedy. It's really a tiny cultural snapshot. Click through, it's heavily annotated.

from Online Extra: Commentary: Apple's Blueprint for Genius

"Designed in Cupertino."

The words are printed in such small type on the back of Apple's (AAPL ) tiny new iPod Shuffle MP3 player that you have to squint to read them. But they speak volumes about why Apple is standing so far out from the crowd these days. At a time when rivals are outsourcing as much design as possible to cut costs, Apple remains at its core a product company -- one that would never give up control of how those products are created.

At first I recoiled: I can't say american design is inherently superior. But that's not the point... keeping design close to home is.

Even more telling is this quote

"I've been thinking hard about the Apple product-development process since I left," says design guru Donald Norman, co-founder the design consultants Nielsen Norman Group, who left Apple in 1997. "If you follow my [guidelines], it will guarantee good design. But Steve Jobs doesn't want good design. He wants great design, and my method will never give you that. That takes a rare leader, who can bring both the cohesion and commitment and style.

It's not usability that makes great design but a complete approach to the product that spans approaches as well as components. from business strategy to physical design, from software to plastics, the gestault of th product is the secret-- and it's a secret most companies simply aren't willing to emulate. Outsourcing, waterfall development, overfunding a single approach -- anything that piecemeals the design process weakens it.

Its gone from the scent of information to the stench of information because there is so much information



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Sent from my Treo

I almost missed our annual miracle, the calla lily in front of the door. Each year it greets you as you leave the house; there is never more than one, and it is slow and stately in its appearance, and sad and terribly weak as it wilts. I cannot believe my luck to have it in full style here the one day I am here as well.

BJ Fogg "To increase the credibility impact of a website, find what elements your target audience interprets most favorably and make those elements most prominent."



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Sent from my Treo

At the global IA session, they talked about one of the troubles with translation, which is that single-word concepts in one language exist in others only in paragraph form. I have a good example in my room-- in French, the soup is a champignon veloute, in english it's cream of mushroom. Veloute is a pureed soup that is especially fine, which doesn't require cream necessarily. Cream soups often have chunks (in this case, likely of mushrooms) and smooth pureed nature is not needed. English has no word for the veloute, so you woudl have to describe the method to accurately translate it. On this menu, the two are not the same concepts, but simple "close enough" translations. Luckily this soup was both a cream soup and a veloute.

day two of preconferences. (this on one seamntic web practical applications, v. nifty)

Lots of interesting stuff in thsi series-- in particular the global IA session and its attendant implications I found facinating. The session was less about IA and more about understanding, interacting with and perhaps even shaping culture via translation & internationaliation activities.

If you realize that categorization is essentially a framing activity, a la lakoff, then taxonomy translation (as opposed to localization) is an imperialist activity.