This has been linked to quite a lot lately, but I don’t want you to miss it. So, if you haven’t already, check out this podcast of Clay Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated talk at ETech this year.

If you haven’t read Shirky or just want to listen to someone thinking way ahead of almost everyone, take a listen. It’s well worth it, and deserves its 4+ rating.

That’s funny. I don’t feel emergent. Or slimy. Or moldy. How people on the Web are just like slime molds…

Continue Reading: Thoughts on Emergence

Simply put, there are technological innovations all the time, but they are not valuable in and of themselves. Only when we put an interface to them can we tell how valuable they are.

Continue Reading: The Interface is Where Innovations Find Value

Over at Functioning Form, Luke Wroblewski has written a post called The Impact of Interface Design Markup which deals with interface design technologies, certain to be a major topic in the future. He includes a quote from Bob Baxley suggesting that future visual designers might lay out more of their design in production code, rather than in some visual-editing application like Fireworks or Photoshop. A prime example of this, of course, is SVG, or scalable vector graphics. If browsers get support for these, then graphic designers can start laying out complete pages in code, with nary an HTML tag in sight.

Jeff Veen has an interesting post about when/how design happens. He suggests that often the solutions to design problems come after he’s stewed on them for a while. This sounds right, but the usability side of me cringes a bit, knowing how the most inspired solutions, which work great for designers during their time on the project, sometimes end up working not at all when real users get their hands on them. Probably not in Jeff’s case, but users are the ultimate arbiters of any project.

Finally, if you haven’t already, go read Camels and Rubber Duckies by Joel Spolsky. And obviously, don’t just think in terms of software…

Mental models are often used to express what’s going on inside the head of users. The question is, what do they look like? I think that, if anything, they would be task-oriented. What do you think?

Continue Reading: Do you believe in Mental Models?

Big news out of bloglines. They announced an update yesterday that allows users to track packages (yes, UPS, Fedex, etc.) through their service. They also hint at future additions: “Bloglines readers can look forward to collecting more kinds of unique-to-me information on Bloglines in the near future, such as neighborhood weather updates and stock portfolio tracking.”

So, what does “unique-to-me” mean? I think it means more granular RSS feeds in the form of things that only matter to you. In other words, these feeds have a single purpose only, to update you on something that you’re interested in, most presumably personal content. For packages, you’ll only need them for a short period of time and you’ll throw them away. For stocks, you’ll probably always keep an eye on it.

Talk about aggregation! This is the future: watch it.

Also, I’ve been interested in Eric Meyer’s Emergent Semantics presentation at SXSW, where he talks about microformats as a way to bring together bottoms-up semantics. Here’s a good microformats intro page at technorati. As I mentioned the other day, Bud Gibson is working on xFolk, a folksonomies microformat.

What I’m not sold on yet is the usefulness of microformats. I don’t have any use for them yet, and as far as I can see there has been a lot of pushback on the “nofollow” microformat. But what about the others? I know of rubhub.com, but what use is it? Any ideas out there? I’m new to this stuff…

In other news, Del.icio.us gets funding. Excellent! Now we’ll have more things to investigate as Joshua S. beefs up his already great system.

Also, I haven’t said anything about Ajax yet because I’m still amazed at how simply naming something could be such a big deal. Take a gander at the Q&A of Jesse James Garrett’s Ajax article in which he basically severs all ties between him and the technology, presumably as the result of all the press he received.

But the lesson here is clear. Naming is hugely important, because it allows people to communicate more concretely about something they, in some cases, couldn’t talk about before.

Answer: the User Interface 10 Conference, whose web site I just helped produce:

Cool features of the conference:

1. One word: iPod
2. You can learn great stuff from cool people and excellent speakers like the unequalled Molly & Eric
3. You can see proof that I do actually have a day job, and that I’m not an independently wealthy freelance designer with no contracts (like some of you seem to believe)

Before you go check it out, let me make a disclaimer to all those code jockeys out there…just don’t look at the code: it is in a functional state only, not a presentable one. You’ve been warned.

User Interface 10 Sneak Preview

A summary of the interesting answers to the question I asked last week: When designing, do you create hierarchical information architectures? The comments led to many more questions…

Continue Reading: Follow-up: Designing Hierarchical IAs

Sometimes all we need is a little confidence booster. When we’re down, feeling a little like we’re heading down the wrong path despite our gut feeling, we need someone or something to remind us just what the hell it is we’re doing and why we’re doing it. In other words, we need to glimpse the forest through the trees.

That came, for me, this morning, in the form of a blog post by Adam Bosworth. I’ve been following his blog ever since I listened to the January 14th Gillmor Gang podcast with him as guest. Bosworth is Google’s VP of Engineering, and is one of those folks who is very well-known within his community but hardly-known outside of it. Anyway, his schtick is databases: the man is a database guru.

But it wasn’t Bosworth’s credentials that impressed me. It was his way of explaining things. He talks about things in an interesting, very straightforward way. For example, this is an excerpt of the blog post that I read this morning, where Bosworth tidily explains the nature of communication as it now appears on the Web:

“Then the promise should be that anyone can connect to any information or application or anyone else and that any application can connect to anyone or any application or any information. We got anyone to anyone early in the form of email and more recently in the form of IM and of Blogs. IM adds real time communication and presence and Blogs add broadcasting to the world along with a dialog with the world. We got anyone to any application from the esteemed Tim Berners Lee in the form of HTML, HTTP, and URL’s which changed our world. I say applications because there wasn’t any standard way to ask for information. We got, unfortunately, any application talking to anyone (we call this spam). Web services in one form or another are letting applications access other application although, as I’ve said elsewhere, I think that the standards are too prolix and that a lot of the action will come out of REST and RSS.”

But that wasn’t the most exciting part. The exciting part was his views on folksonomies, which he had heard a ton about at two recent conferences: ETech and PCForum. This is a sliver of what he had to say about folksonomies:

“And the web is now rapidly becoming the place for people to collaborate. Wiki’s are growing like wildfire. Folksonomies(tagging) are causing people to quickly and in an emergent bottoms up way, come together to build taxonomies that work for them and surprisingly rapidly become stable…”

Read the entire, most interesting post here. If you’ve been reading my stuff for more than a couple weeks, you’ll notice that Bosworth echoes some of my thoughts on folksonomies and taxonomies: namely, my suspicion of top-down taxonomies and my belief in people to classify their own stuff how they see fit.

And now you might be saying: But why are you excited by this? Well, I’m excited by this because I truly believe that we’re figuring out how to build a democratic world, here: the tools of democracy.

Bosworth’s bullishness on folksonomies, wikis, and collaboration in particular and his optimism in general gave me confidence that my recent musings on folksonomies have not been all-for-nought. Surely, us pro-folks people are optimistic about emergent…well, emergent everything…but it sure is nice to know that this big thinker is digging this stuff, too.

On other fronts, Bud Gibson has more on his xFolk microformat that I pointed to yesterday.

Also, for those del.icio.us users out there, check out Del.icio.us Linkbacks.

Happy Spring!

Danny Sullivan over at SearchEngineWatch.com is skeptical of the benefits of tagging. After all, he points out, we’ve had the meta keywords element in HTML for years and most Search Engines started ignoring it after so many people abused it. He sees tags as no different, suggesting that they’ll be abused before long.

I agree with this to some extent. I remember when I first heard of tagging, I wanted to know, “how is that different than meta tags?”. I think we’ll see in the coming months…and we’ll also see some interesting things on the kind-of-related “microformat” front. Microformats are basically an “extension” of XHTML that leverages a standard format so that aggregators can understand them (and people thought the semantic web was bunk). For example, Bud Gibson is proposing a new XFolk microformat for folksonomies. Interesting stuff!

Over at Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion (a blog I’ve been reading recently), there’s a raging debate about Google’s new Autolink feature. In the post Steve suggests that because of Google’s size and apparent willingness to tread on unclear ground (by overwriting or rewriting links within a web page), that there should be serious cause for concern. He doesn’t see it very different than when Microsoft tried a similar thing not too long ago.

This is a tough one. I think the answer will lie somewhere in the middle of the two warring camps. I think that user choice is correct (of course), but I don’t see a tool that rewrites links as the answer. I would OK with a tool that allows users to overwrite say, on a site-to-site basis or even more granular than that, but only with direct user control.

What I’m afraid of is users seeing changed content without realizing it (kind of like users thinking that Windows = computers without realizing that there are many more choices out there). This serves to make all of our content less valuable because users will make associations that just aren’t there: in an extreme case it will serve to dilute our content to the point of no value. So, at the very least, the Google Autolink should be turned off by default…and now I’m just reading this very good overview of the situation at kuro5hin.com which elucidates my argument (and others) more comprehensively than I was going to. Go read that.

Back to Rubel’s site: I was interested to see David Sims takes my notes from yesterday concerning Google and apply them to his argument(scroll down a ways). He even points out that I wasn’t talking about Autolink, but I was talking about where value comes from, and that’s through user choice.