April 2006 Archives

I found something new today Crest Glide Threader Floss and I have to tell you, it's the best way to floss if you, like me, have a permanent retainer. I hate using those green loop threaders. It's uncomfortable, and difficult. What the smart folks at Crest have done is stiffened one end of a length of floss so that you can thread it under your retainer and floss like a normal person.

The only down side is that there is a lot of packaging for a single piece of floss, but I might actually start flossing again, and that's a good thing.

The SFGate has an essay by Special Guest blogger, Andrew Keen that gets my goat.

What Keen is critiquing has nothing to do with Web 2.0, but with the content created by the people that are using the web.

Web 2.0 is a group of technologies that allow people to work with hosted services in an interactive way they have grown accustomed to interacting with software installed on their computers.

This essay really doesn't talk about that at all. It talks about what people create using these, and other technologies.

As someone else said when commenting on the essay, a lot of the content that individuals put on the web is similar to Usenet content, only with pictures. Give people a forum to speak, and the majority of what they will say is crap. That's been true since long before the web existed. The web makes it easier to make the crap heard, and to find the crap, but it doesn't bring the crap into being.

I think what Keen is really critiquing can be found by examining his trust that "traditional" outlets can bring you the best entertainment and information. It's an indictment of non-"traditional" sources of information and entertainment. He's saying he'd never read the Guardian, trusting the Chronicle to give him everything he needs to stay informed; it's saying he'd never listen to independent music labels, trusting Sony to bring him all the good music possible; it's saying he'll never watch an independent movie, trusting the big Hollywood studios to bring him the best in cinematic content.

Fine. People have felt that way for as long as humans have been able to speak, write, and create images. It's foolish, though, to expect everyone to agree with him.

All artists know that everything they create is a collaboration between them and the person reading, viewing, or listening to what they have created. Thus a painting that I think is brilliant can appear without merit to you. The painting hasn't changed, but the viewer has. When Keen says that "writers should write and readers should read", he's writing nonsense. The reader evaluates what he is reading. As part of that, he brings to the work his own experiences and frame of reference. That collaboration between the writer and the reader is what leads to the value judgment.

His entire premise is based on the idea that what he likes, everyone will like; that there's an inherent value in every artistic creation - that's nonsense.

This belief doesn't have anything to do with Web 2.0, though. In truth, it's the same discussion that's been going on in modern art for nearly a century (or longer). Take a look at the discussion started by Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. If you don't see the parallels between that and the content created on the web today, you're not thinking clearly.

It's easy now for everyone to create content that people all over the world will see, hear, or read. What makes it good? Keen says it's good if it's a source he trusts. I say it's good if you like it.

First, a paper is released showing a credible "missing link" between fish and land animals. Then another showing evolutionary growth at the molecular level.

These two papers answer the objections that so many creationists have about evolution, namely, "Where's the missing link?" and "How can complex things evolve from simple changes?"

For a couple of overview articles, see, Two New Discoveries
Answer Big Questions
In Evolution Theory and Study, in a First, Explains Evolution's Molecular Advance.

Hopefully these papers will help us keep religion out of science classes.

I really like the MarkLogic product offering. Not just because it's fast and stable, but also because they offer a community license (other CMS and XML database vendors take note - if I can't try it, I probably won't recommend it to my company). So, I decided to install it on my Debian box today. Here's my story.

First off, I didn't have the alien or daemon package installed. You'll need those (among others), so make sure you have those installed. I'm not going to list every package you need. If you're using Debian, you can probably figure that out yourself.

1. Download it from MarkLogic. I'm running on a 32 bit processor, so I downloaded the RedHad 32 bit rpm.
2. Use alien to convert the rpm to a deb.
3. Use dpkg -i debfile
4. mkdir /var/lock/subsys
5. Edit /etc/init.d/MarkLogic and change the line
   . /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
   to
   #. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
6. Start the server - /etc/init.d/MarkLogic start
7. Follow the rest of the install guide

Day 2 and 3 at the content management strategies conference - quick hits.

The TEXTML team does a brilliant job of marketing their XML database as a CMS. It is, if you do a bunch of implementation work, but out of the box, it isn't a CMS.

DITA is starting to move to other communities, not just technical publication groups. Legal and other industries are just starting to move into it, but that's a great sign for the long term health of DITA.

Scott Wolff gave a very good presentation on the "5 Mistakes to Avoid when Buying a CMS". I won't steal his thunder (I'm sure he'll have the presentation on his web site), but here are the big things I took away from it

1. Buy a hosted CMS if it meets your needs, if it doesn't, buy on-site CMS, if one fits your needs. If neither of those are possible, then, and only then, build your own.
2. Start small, and build. Implement a CMS for one group in your company and then add other groups over time.
3. Not every group needs a CMS

IBM still thinks putting all information that is accessed via conrefs into a single (or multiple) shared files is a good plan. I disagree. It's no better than having a bunch of topics with a single element (the method I discussed in Conrefs and “Shared Content”) that are designed for sharing. Yes, you need to avoid a "spaghetti sharing model", but neither of these methods solves the problem.

Last, but not least - I can be a real loud-mouth when it comes to open forums.

This last Sunday, the Oakland Tribune (and several other Ang owned newspapers) had an article about Doulas - Mother's helper, Doulas make birth better for some Bay Area moms. My wife was part of the article, and her picture was on the front page of the Oakland Tribune. I'm really proud of her.

I'm attending the Content Management Strategies conference here in San Francisco (you can take a look at the agenda if you are interested in it).

Some quick comments on day 1.

Lots of people! Many more than last year's conference in Annapolis. The welcome presentation said it was 68% larger, and over 300 people were there.

The vendor area is too crowded. I wouldn't be very happy if I was a vendor.

The keynote presentation was slanted, and a bit dull. There was an assumption that using an enterprise CMS is the only way to fly, yet what a CMS is wasn't defined and the reasons why a CMS is required were not very detailed.

John Battelle came by to talk to a bunch of us folks at salesforce.com yesterday. He gave an interesting talk that combined points from his book (The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture ) and some other, related comments. One of the things he talked about is a search scenario he recently posted on his blog: Google Launches Biz Local AdWords: It's Just the Start..... Go read the scenario and then come back here (I know his blog is much more interesting than mine, but let's finish this dialog, then go read more there).

The scenario is interesting from my point of view as an information designer that wants to make information access more effective. The truth is, for most things, the problem isn't finding the information, it's finding the appropriate information. John's scenario is very similar to an existing search, but adds two contexts - location (the shopper is in a particular location) and interest (s/he wants to buy a bottle of wine, known from the location [in a grocery store's wine section] but also from the search engine choice).

The context is what makes the search results valuable. I can do this search now while at the grocery store using my Nokia 770. The information I want will be retrieved, but since the search engine won't know the context, I will have to filter it myself to gain the same value. I probably won't be very successful because there is too much information for me. People are amazing pattern matchers, but we cannot effectively handle the volume of content such a search would return.

Traditional documentation does the same thing. We put out there a bunch of information, and the users have to use the table of contents, index, or search to find the content they want, and then they have to filter it for their context. We need to add context if we're going to solve the information glut problem.

Context sensitive help is a step in the right direction. We link from a particular UI to a particular bit of information. That's good, but it's very rare that a UI is simple enough that one help topic can be sure to give the user exactly what they want. Usually the content is too broad, forcing the user to dig into it (which takes away most of the advantages you gain from the context sensitive link). Sometimes the content is too narrow, which is even worse.

Contextual embedded help is the next step. Some software products already do this. Tax software programs are a great example. They give you information on how to complete each task without forcing you to ask for help. They don't forget though, that users often need more help, and they include links to that as well.

One thing that I haven't seen in embedded contextual help is something I call "the onion" for lack of a better term.

Embedded context help needs to be specific enough to be useful, but if it's too specific, it might not help me put this current task in context of the user's goal (quick aside, a task is a specific action, and a goal is what you want to accomplish - for example, figuring out your gross income is a task, completing your taxes is a goal). Each embedded context help topic needs to include a weighted related topics list, that gets more general the further out you go. Depending on the topic, it may also have a related topics list that gets more specific.

Here's an example. My goal is to complete my taxes. My current task is to compute my gross income. When I get to the UI page for doing that, the embedded help topic is "Computing your gross income". It has two sets of links, one a list of more specific tasks ("Calculate earned interest income", "Calculate income from salary", etc.). The second set of links is more general and includes concepts about gross income, other types of income, and a link to the overview of the entire tax preparation process.

It's an onion rather than a ladder because you may move out to a more general layer, but it may be to a topic that isn't a direct hierarchical parent of the topic you are looking at. For example, from computing your gross income, you may move to a conceptual topic on the alternative minimum tax. Related topics, sure, but you wouldn't put them in the same information hierarchy.

There's a huge information design problem that needs to be solved to make this model work, but I think it's worth the effort.