RSS feedI know, not another damn post about Google. Well, not really Google, but A9, Amazon‘s new search engine. I spent a few hours playing with it today, and was amused that of all my blog entries, Dancing with the Google, about how I’m starting to question whether I should place so much dependance on Google, is the highest ranked.
Well, looks like Googlebot’s been a bit sporadic lately. Only a dozen or so pages sucked up over the past few days, and definitely not the old favourite. It’s quite depressing actually, that I’m starting to judge the success of my site by how high I rank for she bangs richard, but you’ve got to have a benchmark right?
Hmm… I wonder how I rank for she bangs googlebot?
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
What a great idea. Blogs are in a way about self discovery, and what better way to discover yourself than to ponder over text taken completely out of context. I looked forward to the challenge.
I grabbed the nearest book I could find, and embarassingly Extreme Programming Installed only had three sentences on page 23. Caterina wasn’t too clear on what to do when there’s no fifth sentence, or even no fourth sentence, so I made an educated guess, and decided that books in this category are in fact anomalies and therefore invalid.
However, there was a diagram at the bottom of page 23, of a book with the title User Stories, which was an interesting coincidence, because the next nearest book was the classic Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn. Page 23, sentence 5 is…
Let’s first look at a use case purely in the way it captures interactions between actors with goals.
Uhuh… I was waiting for the penny to drop. Technically, sure, the classic definition of a use case, but I wasn’t picking up any particular personal insight. It seemed all pretty superficial to be honest.
So I figured perhaps the problem was that it was not a complete digression from the original book which didn’t have a 5th sentence, which means that it was, in a relational and perhaps philosphical kind of way, the same book. I tossed aside Cockburn.
At this stage I started to wonder whether relevency, or in fact irrelevancy if you like, was important. I mean the nearest and next nearest books would most likely be related in some way, certainly if they weren’t on the shelf at the time. So, seeking randomness, perhaps somewhat ironically reflecting life, I skipped the next 14 books, and grabbed the 17th nearest, which was actually the first on this particular bookshelf. I figured that this would accurately reflect Caterina’s original intention, and quickly thumbed through to page 23.
Page 23, sentence 5 of the classic Unified Modeling Language User Guide, by Booch, Rumbaugh and Jacobson says… well that’s where I started to have problems. Not only was the first sentence actually the end of a sentence from the previous page, but I wasn’t sure whether bullet lists and headings actually counted as sentences. I decided that this was an extremely rare case, and that I’d be best off ignoring the problem for now, and grabbing the next book instead.
The 18th nearest book, page 23, sentence 5 says…
For more details, see the subsequent chapters that outline the UML semantic views, as well as the detailed reference material in the encyclopedia chapter.
About the only insight that gave me, was that for The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual, Rumbaugh must have done much of the work, because the authors are now listed as Rumbaugh, Jacobson and Booch. Interesting, perhaps even amusing, but not in the least particularly relevant to the metaphorical road to self discovery. I mean, it’s not even a closed off culdesac hidden at the back of the self discovery street directory. It took me a few minutes to realise that my bookshelf was sorted by technology, with a subhierarchy of author surname. Again, a logical ordering would seem to contradict Caterina’s original intention.
I left what I effectionately call “the work room”, and went to the lounge bookcase. Although Caterina’s requirements weren’t exactly clear, I grabbed the nearest book to my right hand, assuming that distance would in this particular case be the appropriate objective measure of nearness, and would probably be measured between the two points of contact between me and the book.
Rough Magic, A Biography of Sylvia Plath, while not technically a novel, isn’t exactly a reference book either, so I turned to page 23, and found that old classic sentence breaking across a page again. I knew I should have clarified that the first time, because then I wouldn’t have had to choose between the two classics:
Still, Sylvia cried on the day Aurelia left.
…and…
On April 27, 1935, Aurelia traveled back across the harbor into Boston, checked into Jamaica Plain’s Faulkner Hospital, and, after going into labor, gave birth — again three weeks early — to a boy, whom she and Otto named Warren Joseph.
I put Sylvia back on the shelf, and decided that by sentence, while the technical, and most useful in this context, definition would be a complete sentence with a beginning middle and end, that a spanning sentence is in some way still in fact a sentence. I instead grabbed Dibs: In Search of Self, by Virginia Axline, and turned to page 23. Counting the spanning sentence, which by the fact that it is called a sentence, is still considered a sentence, I read out sentence number 5.
Life, for him, was a grim business.
Indeed.
Due to the fabulous technology available to us in this modern age, I regularly synchronise information between home and work via the habitat that is email (I’d hyperlink link the research paper, but I’ve lost it). I just love trawling through those extra emails I get from myself each day, letting them clog my inbox, and forcing me to disconnect and reconnect my thought patterns while in a completely disparate environment and usage context. Well, I don’t really, but an ex-girlfriend once told me that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit, supposedly paraphrasing Shakespeare, so who am I to deprive her of a degree of satisfaction. Although, I couldn’t find any trace of him ever saying it, and she’s the one with a masters in English lit. It would be ironic if irony weren’t supposedly the highest form of wit, which would of course render her claim rather useless. I prefer witless, but I digress…
So I’m trawling through my emails, and get to this one from a few days ago titled: BITCH ABOUT U.S. ENGLISH IN WORD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1. Not sure where the “1” came from, but considering the mood I was in, I probably have a good idea.
OK, so all that just so that I can bitch about U.S. English in Word. Well, U.S. based readers wouldn’t have the problem that we have, in that Australian English is different to U.S. English. Not only is our spelling correct different, like colour, analyse and arsewipe, but so is the use and interpretation of the language.
In Word 2003, at least in the Windows version anyway as the Mac version doesn’t seem to have a problem, any document you write, will have “English (U.S.)” in the status bar. You can click this to change it to the default “English (Aus)” but it typically changes back to U.S. when you least expect it. Sure, you can set it in the Options… dialog, but again, intermittently it will revert back while editing a document. The closest you can get is by selecting all in the current document, and then changing the default to Australian. This will give you at least 15 minutes of writing before Word again starts suggesting U.S. spellings for words.
Now typically we’d write this off as a simple bug, but it has been in every version of Word that I can remember since different language dictionaries were available. You’d think their test team would have picked it up by now.
But not only does Word think that U.S. English is the only English, but I’ve posted here before about how our only Australian dictionary, the Macquarie (which I’m so frustrated with that I refuse to inline hyperlink it), is now pay only.
I guess with Microsoft having analyzed the situation, and the Macquarie sniffing the color of our money, we’re all destined to end up speaking U.S. English. Asswipes.
Updated 17th June 2004: Due to guilt and high Google traffic, I’ve now provided a solution. Enjoy.
I’m reposting the following (slightly edited) internal blog entry from a few years back. We’ve recently been doing quite a lot of information architecture work, and I felt perhaps the outside world would find it useful as well. While our models have developed a lot since then, the basic concepts are still the same. Recently adapting them to the blogging world has also been interesting.
[…] Most people seem to define Information Architecture as something to do with “arranging information into useful categories”. But this is still very vague when you start considering what “useful” and “category” mean. Few seem to have an answer on this.
Information architecture is actually a generic term used to describe anything even remotely relevant to the “arrangement of information into a structure”. Some groups have shanghaied the term for their own use, but I still prefer this generic definition.
Now let’s get a little more specific, in particular web based information architectures. There’s slightly more information out there on this, and there are several popular books now available on it. In the web space, there are several types of information architecture, all layered over a single web site.
The first major layer is at the browser level, where we have the visual architecture, or the site map.
Under that, we have the user perceived information architecture. The web, by its nature, implies a notion of location within a site (thus unfortunately validating the web page as location metaphor), and so this implies a user perception of where information is located. This may map directly to the site map, but through the use of user interface and graphic design, this may not be the case, intended or otherwise.
Supporting this is what most people see as the information architecture. Again, this may map directly to the other layers, but does not need to. The smaller the site, the more direct the mapping.
Finally, we have several layers of the technical implementation of the architecture. This may be database tables or static files in directories. Like the other layers, it may map directly, or it may not.
This layering of information architectures is intertwined with several other layers of abstraction when delaminating a web site, these being the site objectives, the user requirements, the actual information content, functional specifications and a range of other influential data.
So how do we design information architectures which conform to this layering model?
Here’s a fairly rough step by step guide to designing web site information architectures. Good luck finding it on the web, because from what I can tell, nobody’s actually fully documented it. Several have come close, but they tend to focus on their main areas of expertise instead of building the full picture.
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Catalogue the current content, so you know what’s available. If you don’t yet have any content, then plan what this content will consist of.
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Define your typical web usage patterns. These are like mini-use cases, and define a bunch of patterns for the standard interactions users will have for the site, triggers, goals and the priority for consideration on the site.
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From each pattern will come a range of recommendations for navigation and information achitecture. e.g. a low priority usage pattern is for users to research domain specific terms used elsewhere in a site. The entry point for this pattern could be anywhere on the site, because of the nature of the content. Thus, a recommendation that term definitions be available from every page within the site, but the full list of terms is not available until the user is at the terms page.
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Create a skeleton information architecture and site map from the recommendations. For small sites, a site map may be all that is required, but for larger sites, a defined information hierarchy may also be required. Site maps are typically best represented by a data flow diagram. Information hierarchies are best represented by some type of tree diagram. A common mistake is to assume that these are different representations of the same thing.
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Populate the information architecture with the content.
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Design a wire frame for the user interface. This will come almost directly from the site map for technical purposes, and the visual design for aesthetic and usability purposes. There will be give and take, because there’s no such thing as a perfect world or an infinitely long project time line. Such influences include financial, political, forward planning, psychological and moral reasons.
The thing I like about this process, is the objective steps which lead to the final architecture, particularly steps 2, 3 and 4. […] We often discuss web site usability and navigability with clients, and by having an objective process, we find that web site review/analysis is not only supported by objective criteria, but the process is actually a lot easier to peform, and the results much more detailed and useul. This makes both us and our customers happy.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)
Another collection of bits and pieces from my favourite sites. Starting with of all places the Sydney Morning Herald article saying that extending copyright protection for another 20 years, like in the U.S. and Europe, will stifle creativity (via Lessig), the Iraqi people may not have freedom, sanitation, running water, hospitals, schools or electricity, but the U.S. have designed them a new Olympic logo (via GLOBALIZE THIS!), an interesting user pattern analysis of file sharers, not so much the Grand Unified Theory claimed, but certainly a starting point in differentiating types of users, which has typically been the blocker to representing the positive side of file sharing (via Copyfight). Some amusing IKEA product names (via BoingBoing). And finally another from BoingBoing, a Bush photomosaic of American dead in Iraq. Bring them home, and end Bush’s empirialistic folly!
I’ve been fascinated recently with the opinion and perspectives of certain weblog celebrities, and where they think “syndication” is headed. This interesting teleconference brings six of them together to discuss syndication’s future, and while they can all pretty much see the future of weblogging and low bandwidth mobile devices and their inherent push-publish nature, several of them can’t see very far past it. A brief tangent into scanning vs. reading seems to be the litmus test, and whether you see feeds as simple lossy summaries (the traditional content publisher’s fairly blinkered view of the future), or whether you see, as we do, feeds as the beginning of something much more significant.
It reminds me of the pre-bubble days, when you never really knew who got it, who didn’t get it, and who just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
These days, when Crossing the Chasm should be a mantra for all technology companies in the personal publishing space, there are surprisingly very few people talking about what they think will really happen next. An interesting catch-22 perhaps, and a test of technological faith for all of us, on the the eve of the next big information revolution.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)
And away we go! Highlight of the weekend is the Google crawler coming to town. I can taste those rankings already. Crawl away baby, crrrraaawwwl away!
This site is pretty dependant upon Google, with it bringing in around 40% of the traffic. Another 40% is from other people linking to it, and about 15% is from blogging search/monitoring engines. Google seems to crawl this site every few days, which means quality and stability, not always in that order, are more important than ever before.
I usually make most changes to the site here on the live version, which means it breaks every now and then, as you’d expect from doing live development. Big refactors I do offline, but it is still fairly habitual to make most on the live site.
Last week, while making some changes, I broke the CGI, which pretty much drives everything. After looking at the log, I found out that it happened while Google was crawling the site, which means I’ve lost much of my Google ranking, including my favourite she bangs richard.
So what do you know, when Google finally gets around to crawling the site again, this time I have a bug in my dynamic robot rules, and it only indexes the home page and the blog index. So much for the actual blog items, noindex,follow all the way. So I now have the best of both worlds, several hundred Google page views in my log, and nothing to show for it.
Recently, one of our customers at work thought they had a similar problem, in that Google wasn’t crawling their site correctly, which could have meant a massive decrease in traffic, and possibly an end to their funding if true (it wasn’t). To live and die by Google. This isn’t such an uncommon situation to be in.
Ultimately, I don’t really care if I’m missing 40% of my old traffic. While I love new visitors, that’s not really why I have a personal web site. But it is scary to think that Google has so much control over so much of the industry’s, or more significantly the Internet VC’s cash.
Throw in the current concerns about the privacy of Google’s GMail, in that they preserve and index every single email you’ll ever send through them, and their power suddenly comes into perspective. If Microsoft was in this position, the industry wouldn’t stand for it. Google’s only saving grace, is that it hasn’t yet done anything wrong. We’re all infallible, especially big companies, and especially those who must answer to investors and shareholders. This may not be Google, but for how long?
Don’t get me wrong, I love Google, but I’m starting to be wary of the idea of them having so much control over my virtual presence.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to fixing my damn code so I can get my high rankings back.
I was speaking with my sister this evening, who wanted to check out my beetroots (yes, we’re a strange family), and she seemed surprised that not only did I have a web site, but putting “kashum zipworld” (my account and ISP names) into Google brought up a whole list of sites, and she wondered how other people could have sites so close to such obscure names. I was flattered she’d even tried to look me up through Google.
Well, I checked out the first page of results, and aside from one that linked to an old version of my wife’s radio show, they’re all either my sites, or pages that link to me. She was stunned when I explained this, and then just happened to mention that I’ve had a personal web site in one form or another since about 1993. (See Old home pages on the left side of this page, for the ones preserved by the ever wonderful archive.org)
Well, she told our folks, and now they’re all wanting to see my site. It’s not like I actually kept it from them, it’s just that back then nobody cared, so I just never mentioned it. I assumed they would have guessed already, considering the work I do.
But what it did remind me of, was that for the majority of the population, a personal web site is still a pretty big deal, and weblogs even bigger again. Sure, millions have them, but we’re still “deep linked” into the IT world, and much of the mainstream population is oblivious to it. Like, who would want a personal web site, right?
Recently, I talked about RSS vs. Atom on my work weblog, and how the personal publishing revolution is about to begin. But to be honest, that’s a blinkered view when it comes to the person on the street who is not into computers or information technology. The big challenge for the revolution, is to provide the world’s population, especially those not at the bleeding edge, access to all the information (opinion, journalism, humour, fiction etc.) they’re interested in, without having to be a geek, or understand what a computer is. Or more specifically, without their brother having to tell them what is possible.
My sister now tells me she’d like to have a go at weblogging, so stay tuned for the lady who makes FNQ news editors weak at the knees, and who has a rather low tolerance, unfortunately much like me, for ineptitude.
Perhaps my own family revolution is about to begin.