When worlds collide: The words that work online
This week has been very weird for me. I'm just hitting 39 weeks. my belly is huge. A little while back, she changed from feeling like a big waterballoon to feeling like a sack of rocks-- I can feel her back, knees and feet fairly easily if either of us moves.
Mostly I feel well, compared to most of this pregnancy. Sure, I'm tired and achy and sleep involves a minimum of 6 pillows, but otherwise well. I continue Yoga which is a godsend and I do sleep. Which I understand is rare. But this week I feel myself idling. It's hard to work on anything, except bustling around the house, putting away things, washing things. I understand it's typical of the last week of pregnanacy to do nesting, but I feel unnatural at it while enjoying it, as if I've become a stepford robot. I roast chicken for my husband, make homemade soup, bake bread. I do laundry, and waddle around picking things up around the house. I sit at the computer and try to work on the sekrit project which I love more than anything I've done for some time, yet my mind just rolls around to the hospital bag in the hallway, or to a way to improve the leek tart recipe.
And now, there seems to be some excitement with UX Matters and B&A and I just feel well. I feel happy UX Matters joins the universe of magazines about our profession, from A List Apart, Digital-Web, Usability News, and many others. I am discomforted that the B&A redesign/CMS is still not live, but considering the changes that have happened this year, it can't really be so shocking. Erin stepping down, Liz stepping up, establishign a new company and now this, bigger than everything that has gone before. Maybe I shoudln't be shocked that it is slowly taking over every moment of my waking life (and much of my dreams as well). In a week or two, a little girl will come and she will take over every minute of my day and night for some time.
Maybe we are coded, deep inside our genes, to care about nothing else except the little lives we make. I've always been a feminist, always savored my independence so much that the deliciousness of domisticity surprises me.
And if I disappear for more than a handful of days, watch flickr for signs of the little one....
BTW, if anyone out here is just pregnant, here the most useful things I learned
First trimester: preggy pops. You can get them online or at some stores, and they really work on morning sickness, which really does come all day long.
Second trimester: Motherhood, M&M and Old Navy maternity. You will buy more clothes than you wish to. Might as well make them as cheap as possible.
Third trimester: Try to stop working early if you can. Or work at home. Being able to nap, rest, take a bath for aching bones is invaluable.
All trimesters. Yoga. Prenatal yoga helps you avoid the vast bulk of ailments pregnanacy brings on. Plus you meet other women going through what you are... which is great.
And Babycenter. Invaluable resource. Just remember that the forums are not the most trustworthy advice.
Scroll down on the page and look at the cloud-display.
(if gone, try the Widgetopia screenshot)
I think the future of metadata is not how it lets you retrieve things (which is all well and good) but how it lets you perceive things.
For some time I've thought tag clouds like those on del.ico.us & flickr's are far more useful for understanding the mind of a group, as opposed to retrieval (I think they are stinky at directed search, and just okay at undirected). This particular instance is a good example of telling you about the nature of the book. Not just the prominence of "people" over "users" but the size of the word "should" which I first thought to be useless-- it is, if you want to know what the book about, but not so much if you want to understand the tone of the book.
It would be interesting to compare, say, Jakob Nielson's first and last book to see how his language changes as he goes from scholarly to didactic.
Now image if it wasn't just the author's language, but the tags as well-- you could compare intent with effect.