Web 2.0 Expo - Christina multi-tasking - which device will find wifi first, originally uploaded by erin_designr.

geeking in the streets

I love pandora because they admit when they are wrong, originally uploaded by Box and Arrow.

unlike some people in my life.

2009-03-28_1015, originally uploaded by Box and Arrow.

facebook in on my nerves.

Twitpoll: do you Yammer?, originally uploaded by Box and Arrow.

small sample size.... but resonates.

Anders says

The first time I heard about designing with XHTML was in 2005 at an IA retreat in Asilomar, where Christina Wodtke bluntly proclaimed that we should "stop doing wireframes." I was both skeptical and enticed.

I knew if I stomped around complaining long enough someone would invent something new.

IMG_2302, originally uploaded by Box and Arrow.

Now it Italy, but had a brief stop for a birthday dinner in Paris.

Finally a sign of Information Architecture (IA) life in France! It's been a running joke in European IA circles that there were no IAs in France, since they didn't show up at European (or international) IA events.

Join me and prove it to yourself!

Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com

Except rules are tricky things with an operation like Flickr's. The ban on commerce seems simple enough, but as someone at the meeting points out, Brazil's secondhand economy is an integral part of life there, particularly among women. When does the enforcement of a righteous-seeming regulation become a quashing of someone's culture?

Doin't forget to check out Randy Farmer's talk in a couple weeks...

Community is hard, and so is pretty much all social stuff. But why is so darn hard? Why do strange, unexpected things keep happening, like the wikitorial and the Digg revolt and so on?

I hope you are familiar with Lewin's equation by now?
Behavior is a function of a person and his environment?
B=f(P,E)?

Well, on websites, we have always had partial control over our user's behavior. On a good day, 50%.

In these diagrams, red means we have no control. This person (P) was raised by parents that we have never had the pleasure to advice, and thus who knows what nonsense they were fed. But environment(E)! The beautiful blue under our control! Hey, now we're talking. We choose what content went on the site, what navigation, what got linked, what those links were named... and one day, then whammo! Suddenly someone started letting users have a bit of control.

Let's say it was user-generated content, let's say it was tagging... but suddenly more and more elements of the environment we not really under out control. The environment was directly created by the users. and then...

Social networks. Social media. Social everything! The users are the environment. We control so very little; a drop down, a form label... and yet, it's all important because that's our only hope for influence. You have to embrace a lack of control to realize this is what environments are supposed to be. A fully controlled environment is like a shopping mall, and Web 2.0 environments are more like national parks. Prone to forest fires, sure, but would you trade them for anything else?

We cannot dictate, because we have ceded control. We can influence, we can cajole, we can suggest. But Behavior is not ours to manage.

early draft of a section from 2nd edition of blueprints

We all would like to think there was an abstract, perfect design that we could find and then never change. But different sizes demand different design approaches, and as our websites grow we have to change the wise choices we made earlier that are now liabilities. This is true of both information spaces and social spaces.

For example, everyone has seen the almost psychic spellchecker most search engines sport, but do you know how it works? It parses the millions and millions of queries and correlates when a query is made, then no click on results is made, then a second query with a large number of similar characters is made, then a click on a result. To do this and end up with a comprehensive dictionary of potential misspellings and corrections, you need millions of searches so you can identify the millions of ways people get things wrong and the millions of ways they get it right. Adding spellcheck to a website may seem easy, but if you don't get high traffic, you can't get the same range of suggestions and you'll have to rely on what is likely to be a less effective approach (a discussion for elsewhere). There are many other types of websites that are changed and shaped depending on how much data they have and how many people are using it. Wikipedia is one.

Wikipedia is only interesting because of the huge numbers of people who use it. Exerts on every topic on earth join in in writing, editing, contributing citations... collectively creating the most complete entries on any topic. Because they have so much traffic, and because most people are nice, if the occasional idiot defaces a page it is repaired in under five minutes. And so goes the marketing speil, and many of the entries do indeed realize this promise. But some on each end of the spectrum of usage show their own set of problems.


The extremely popular entries or extremely controversial entries (often the same) can't be left open to be edited by everyone, no matter what the Wikipedia philosophy is, because the number of people vandalizing it is too high to guarantee a useful entry at any given time. Wikipedia is forced to lock this entries against open editing.

Here we see a typical Wikipedia article, illustrating the power of collaboration. Ciphergoth, mlcome, OliAtlanson, Aastrup and many others are discussing how to make the article more accurate, and complete.

And here we see a page that gets almost no traffic. In fact, it didn't exist until one day I started to wonder where the name (and the food) Jalapeno poppers came from. I searched everywhere, including Wikipedia, but all Icould find was a Chowhound discussion board article that thought they might be related to Chili Reneos. I posted what little she knew on Wikipedia in hopes that the miracles of five-minute-corrections would bring me the answer, and wandered off to ask the question on another discussion board.

People are so used to Wikipedia being extensive, complete and expert no one questioned this entry. Over the next ten months, a couple people did add to the entry, one restoring the tilde to jalapeno, another contributing a photo, and someone adding suspiciously marketing-esque information about John Neutizling's invention of the Chile Relleno (unless he's Mayan, I really really doubt it). That has been removed since this screenshot, but in the stub world updates are slow, and vandalism - especially subtle vandalism--remains up and the truth is arrived at with fewer miracles if it arrives at all.

Moreover, in the ten months since its creation, it is now the 4th result (5th if you could video best bets) in Google.

The LATimes tried to leverage the power of wikis with their wikitorial. On June 17th 2005 they launched it, and on June 19th they took it down. Users were posting obscene photos and comments at a pace that no one could manage. LATimes had the large numbers needed to create interesting content, but hadn't learned the lessons of Wikipedia's controversial entries. After all, if Wikipedia with its vibrant and committed community couldn't keep George Bush under control, how could a brand new newspaper section? It still hasn't returned, and maybe it represents a problem that can't be solved.

When you look at examples on the web to learn from, make sure you are dealing with similar problems of scale.

see also earlier size matters post

Thingology (LibraryThing's ideas blog):

Both LibraryThing and Amazon allow users to tag books. But with a tiny fraction of Amazon's traffic, LibraryThing appears to have accumulated *ten times* as many book tags as Amazon--13 million tags on LibraryThing to about 1.3 million on Amazon. (See below for the method I used to find this out.)

Something is going on here--something with broad implications for tagging, classification and "Web 2.0" commerce. There are a couple of lessons, but the most important is this: Tagging works well when people tag "their" stuff, but it fails when they're asked to do it to "someone else's" stuff. You can't get your customers to organize your products, unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton.

via Peter Morville