Kids Health Galaxy

Yay!!! A site I worked on for over a year as Information Architect and Usability Coordinator has been graced with a Webby nomination in the Family/Parenting category:

http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=10

Kids Health Galaxy
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
http://www.kidshealthgalaxy.com

Makes me extremely happy and am very lucky to work with a great bunch of people on it.

By the way, do an erratic blogger a favor and vote for this puppy in the People's Voice Awards section?

http://peoplesvoice.webbyawards.com/

Much obliged!

Taxonomies and Folksonomies: an age-old debate

I just read a paper by Clay Shirky titled "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags."  It is a wonderfully clear paper explaining the fundamental difference between the creation/management of taxonomies and the organic growth of "folksonomies."

The paper motivated me to jot down thoughts that have been rattling in my head for the past few months. I have been trying to determine whether and to what extent aspects of a folksonomic approach could be used in the context of the hospital.

Consider two cases:

1. A hospital web site offering health information content, and
2. That hospital's intranet

Health Information Content:
Though I am excited by organic, individual tagging tools there are situations where introducing this can be problematic. Health information content, in particular, seems to be a strong candidate for more centralized, regulated classification and tagging for a few reasons:

(a) Allowing organic tagging could increase the probability of inaccurate tagging and, given the nature of the content, this could have truly harmful repercussions,

(b) Even though the existing classification / browsing schemes may not meet the widest range of user expectations, these are schemes that have been engrained in our consciousness (e.g., Body Location, disciplines). Altering these may cause more disruption than continuing with the imperfect classification.

I know this is not an either/or proposition. Both systems could co-exist with an appropriate level of oversight to prevent error and with a responsive adjustment of classifications.

My current opinion is to NOT introduce organic tagging and classification tools for health information content (other than, perhaps, offering users the ability to self-select "content bookmarks" for future recall). An analysis of search logs, user interviews and user observation can give us a pretty solid picture of possible tags and alternative terminology that we can fold into the system. "Folksonomy" occurs, but it is mediated.

Intranets:
It seems that internal systems can benefit from both methods as a result of two oh-so-entrenched properties in corporate organizations: hierarchies and the need for cost efficiencies.

Given that a company (and in particular, a hospital) may have fairly entrenched and solid hierarchies for their organization and documents, it would be best to faithfully present that as a browsing scheme. Employees are expected, as part of their jobs, to become familiar with this. Being nice to the user is not as pressing, it would seem, as in the consumer-facing side.

At the same time, these corporate hierarchies tend to bury related items in separate branches and are not sensitive to actual usage patterns. An employee may need access to multiple resources that are filed away in separate "locations." We could spend the time and resources to identify these inter-relationships and implement ways of making this explicit on the intranet.

However, given the compulsive need for "cost cutting and efficiency," creating a system that allows individual users to tag and associate as they see fit seems to decentralize and minimize the creation and management of such a system. This would allow for idiosyncratic associations and quick recall. Thus the move toward "personalized portals."

-----

Let me phrase the issue in a more philosophical way. In Shirky's paper, he notes that the different approaches to this issue tend to be informed by differing conceptions between:

1. Those who see the world as having clearly articulated entities independent of our ways of conceptualizing them, and
2. Those who see the nature of entities as resulting from our own process of sense-making.

See "Semantic Challenges to Realism" for more.

The table of elements may be ideal since its categorization scheme relies on the independent facts pertaining to the number of protons in the nucleus. However, categorizing massive amounts of photographs may not be served best by a rigid taxonomy.

Where does health information fall? Even if I believed that health information is also, to some degree, relative to the sense-making activities of individuals, I would still opt for a stable and regulated categorization of the content. We can monitor the terminological and categorization tendencies of our user base and adjust.

To do otherwise would simply be too risky a proposition -- risky in ways that are more tangible than most other content domains. The philosophical principles take a back seat when following them produces a significant risk of detrimental pragmatic consequences.

...and that's the truth, Ruth!

In one of those occasional cases of serendipity, D. Keith Robinson at Asterisk just published a rant that is a carbon copy of the rant that has been rattling in my mind today at work.

"Technological Excuses: A Rant"

Nothing more to say but "Amen!" (and this from an atheist).

What's cooking...

Here is a quick recap of some of the events and items capturing my attention these past few weeks:

Flickr
Opened an account in Flickr and placed a photo feed on Elliptic (see the right-sidebar). This will allow me to keep a frequent feed of photos rather than only creating albums every so often. Flickr is an interesting site for many reasons - I've already discussed one of them.

"Home"
My old college friends, Matt and Jen, have made a film that is curently touring the film festival circuit. In true independent (read: financially-strapped) spirit, I was an actor, cameraman, boom operator, lighting monkey and associate producer (among other things). Now if I could only get my act together and assemble a crew to do my own script.

Philadelphia Film Festival
Here is an initial list of films I am planning to view:

• 5 x 2: Five Times Two  dir. Francois Ozon
• Ma Mere  dir. Christophe Honore
• Lonesome Jim  dir. Steve Buscemi
• Clean  dir. Olivier Assayas
• Kings and Queen  dir. Arnaud Desplechin

Don't call it a comeback...

Well,

I have not followed through on my promise to revive this place, but it is time to make ammends. The blog has been a bit barren these past few months because I have been pulled in by some other interests -- some worthwhile, some not so much.

Information Architecture Summit 2005
I attended this summit in Montreal recently. The bulk of the presentations were, either, focused on covering some of the fundamentals that I already had a strong background in or served to confirm that some of my undertakings at the hospital are in the right path.  There were, however, three excellent sessions:

Sorting out Social Classification
A traditional task for people working in any mode of content cataloguing, indexing and retrieval involves creating a categorization scheme and labels designed to assist the task of finding the relevant content as quickly as possible. This involved the usage of controlled vocabularies and hierarchical structures that, either, relied on existing standards or were created to address internal needs (taxonomies).

As the amount and availability of content (especially digital content) has increased dramatically, the job of cataloguing, indexing and retrieving has increased in complexity. In addition to this, a wider range of people now have the tools to search for content readily available. This has spawned the creation of tools allowing anyone to tag, label and organize content they find with their own vocabulary and organization scheme. In essence, these tools allow people to create their own "folksonomies" in order to catalog, index and retrieve according to their own individual needs.

The current debate in the field has to do with the expected tension that ensues -- identifying what is gained when you allow organic classification and tagging of content and what is lost when you allow too much of this organic growth to occur without appropriate control. The field is trying to find the appropriate balance.

For an example of an application allowing its users to tag, index and categorize freely, take a look at Flickr.

Content Packaging and Metadata: A Change in the Approach to Content Production
This presentation by the BBC gave us a preview of how the application of metadata on digital television and radio programming will alter the ways we interact with such multimedia programming. In essence, the BBC is working to create a granular metadata system that would allow users greater control over the choice and access of programming.

If you are not too crazy about a certain television program that includes several narrative threads within it but are intrigued by one of those threads, you could, under this proposed system, search and isolate the characters and narrative threads you are interested in and simply access those. So, if you hate Saturday Night Live, for instance, but have a predilection for Will Ferrell characters, you could simply separate the wheat from the chaff and extract what you need, on-demand. TiVo on crack.

Traversing the Corporate Web: IA and Taxonomy at IBM
The rare thing: a presentation that demonstrates how the relatively academic concepts of a controlled vocabulary, taxonomy and metadata have been applied and produced tangible results for a sizeable group of users. The panel was not stingy or reticent showing details of their implementation -- a rare peek behind the curtain. You can find this presentation at Subway Love.

What does a gaggle of information architects look like? A sampling can be seen here.

World of Warcraft
It seems that there is one game every year that sticks its hooks into me and won't let go until it drains out of my system. This year's winner is World of Warcraft. If you play this game, why don't you drop by, say "hi" and try an intervention?

Character:  Morrissey
Race:  Night Elf
Class: Druid
Level: 57
Guild: Gnomeland Security
Server: Eonar

Help me....

Second Life economy

I had not logged in to Second Life in about six months or so and I recently came back to see what was going on. I ended up buying new land near the waterfront, building a home on it, being seduced by the recently opened "snowy sims" a week later, buying snowy land, building another house there and selling the initial waterfront land.

The interesting aspect of all this activity is that:

• Given the accumulation of a weekly stipend over six months,
• Given that I sold the land I bought for a 20% markup, and
• Given that the currency exchange rate for Lindens has been skyrocketing,

it looks as if I have made a real world profit from playing the game.

I did not intend to join this game with an eye toward real world profiteering, but it has happened that way. Well, at least until this point. As quarterly fees and monthly land-use fees kick in, I will probably break even within the next three months or so unless I engage in additional commercial / financial operations.

| New World Notes |
| Second Edition |
| "The Philosophy of Second Life: The Bodega Dialogues" |
| USA Today on Second Life |

Mac OS X v.10.4 - Tiger

So, the next version of Apple's operating system slated for release in the first 1/2 of 2005 has been previewed at the Worldwide Developer's Conference. OS X 10.4 Tiger will have a bevy of new features and will be optimized to enhance system performance (UNIX and 64-bit addressing enhancements) and improve system display (Core Image filters).

Here are some other highlights:

Spotlight: A system-wide search engine that will produce a results page as you type rather than waiting for the search engine to scan through pre-indexed results. It also seems to rely on a robust metadata system that developers can access via API's in order to customize the application. Very cool.

iChat: It will allow you to have video chats with up to three people at the same time (with an elegant user interface to manage the three streams) and to audio chat with up to nine people. In addition, it will rely on Quicktime's next video compression technology to improve video quality: H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding).

Dashboard: Hmmm, I wonder what Konfabulator thinks about this particular development. I had discussed Konfabulator's widgets in a previous post. It seems that Apple has decided to make a stable of widgets part of their OS. Like Konfabulator, Apple allows outside developers to create widgets for the OS: "Developers can build their own Widgets using the JavaScript language to take advantage of Core Image capabilities."

Safari RSS: Apple's Safari browser will include interfaces to view and organize RSS feeds within the browser itself. Many are used to third-party news aggregators (such as NetNewsWire) doing this or to websites (such as Bloglines) offering these services .

Oh, and let's not forget the new line of Apple Cinema Displays released today. Is it time to begin the debate asking whether there should be a dividing line between something being a computer monitor and something being a television?

2.0 Ghz Dual-Processor Apple G5

Following my unofficial policy of upgrading or getting a new computer every three years or so, I recently got a new dual-processor Apple G5. So far, so smooth, sleek and fast. It has been whisper quiet as promised -- the cats are confused. They like to sit next to the tower, staring at it as if it were the cryptic monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Since I am all excited about its arrival, I have been scouring the web for software and utilities for it. Since I tend to download many of these that then tend to accumulate digital dust, I have exercised some stricter judgment this time around. Here are some of the standouts so far:

Volume Logic by Octiv: This is a plug-in for iTunes that remasters the digital music on-the-fly as it plays. Apparently, tons of FM radio stations use this technology when broadcasting. The improvements are significant on my Creative Inspire speakers.

Konfabulator by Arlo Rose and Perry Clarke: This is a beautiful looking application that allows you to activate "widgets" on your screen that do tons of things depending on what developers build for it. Some examples include a weather indicator, retro clocks, news feeds, automatic CD cover art locators, etc. Take some time exploring the hundreds of widgets -- hours and hours of fun for the whole family.

Quicken 2004 for Mac by Intuit: This is a standout because this is the first time I will be doing banking, bill pay and stock portfolio management electronically. I am in the midst of migrating my funds away from a bank where notable discrepancies between my home-calculated balance and their own calculations happened every two months or so. Let's see if this helps figure things out.

Feel free to drop some comments letting me know about any cool and/or genuinely useful applications for the Mac.

By Eric, 01:00 PM in Apple, Design, Web/Tech

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May 14, 2004

Skyscrapers, Thesaurus and GWB

Alright, alright...

...I should be more diligent with my posting. In the meantime, here are some fresh links to some noteworthy places:

The Skyscraper Museum's Web Projects: Includes Flash interfaces mapping the Manhattan skyline and its transformations through time.

Visual Thesaurus: hours and hours of fun with language. A trial version of ThinkMap's spidery thesaurus.

Whitehouse.org: Just go and visit.

More writing and less link listings in the future, I promise (or is that, "threaten").

By Eric, 06:44 AM in Architecture, Cities, Politics, Web/Tech

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January 07, 2004

Second Life Addiction?

Perhaps it is part of the regular pattern of becoming acquainted with a new computer game, but I have been addicted recently to Second Life. This may explain the spotty blog entries this past week.

It is not exactly a "game" and it may not be a new concept (since "The Sims Online" was one of the originators). However, the execution of Second Life is, I believe, quite stunning and unique. In a nutshell, a company in San Francisco has created a digital world and allowed you to populate it with your avatar.

Once you have you alter ego online, you simply roam around, chat with people, play games, buy land, build homes, create objects you may want to sell for the local currency (Linden Dollars) and so on. What makes this unique -- there is no ultimate goal or quest; people simply form emerging social and dwelling systems and economies: a laissez-faire experiment in a digital petrie dish.

The objects you create can involve complex scripting -- for instance, you may create a doorbell on your Second Life home that triggers an e-mail and/or IM alert in your First Life. The world comes pre-populated with a roster of such objects but intrepid scripters and builders have been creating their own inventions and distributing them or selling them. This creativity has caused the company hosting the world to address intellectual/digital property rights -- good news: you make it, it's yours...digitally, at least.

In the past few days, my character has bought land, designed and built a home, had guests over, gone to a strip club, gone to a dance club, bid for new land in an auction, participated in movie trivia games for Linden Dollars, and much more.

Have a look -- don't get too addicted.

| PC Magazine review of Second Life  | 
|  Article on Second Life and legal issues from LawMeme @ Yale University  |
|  Wired Magazine article  |

By Eric, 01:00 PM in Games, Web/Tech

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December 30, 2003

Is WiFi / Bandwidth Property?

Mike Kuniavsky at Orange Cone has whipped up an interesting post on bandwidth, WiFi and the concepts of ownership and property.

People don't have a framework within which to evaluate the pros and cons of sharing bandwidth with strangers--what does it mean to me if someone uses some of the bits I'm paying for? So they retreat to a concept they understand, a mapping of their relationship to their property to their bandwidth. I'm not comfortable letting someone I don't know set up their lawn chair on my front lawn, even if it doesn't hurt me or my lawn, so why should I let them freeload on my bandwidth? Or, at least, that's how I feel the thinking goes.

Take a look, leave a comment -- I did.

By Eric, 07:19 AM in Media, Web/Tech, Weblogs

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December 11, 2003

What to do about links?

I've been debating what to do with the list of sites and blogs that I tend to visit often. Should I...

(a) add a sidebar element with a semi-permanent list that changes every so often, or
(b) post entries with links that I discover every so often?

Well, since none of you drop comments in here and offer your views, I have decided to opt for (b) and that's that. With that out of the way....

Gizmodo - Gizmodo is an online review dedicated to gadgets, gizmos, and cutting-edge consumer electronics.

purse lip square jaw - Blog written by a technology researcher, ethnographer & designer, inhabitant of Ottawa in the Land of Ice & Snow, lover of eggplant and asparagus, the music of Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Mogwai, strange places, brilliant & otherwise hardcore people.

IAMScruelty.com - Great. Now I have to wean Bogie and Squid to some other brand and once they get used to it and grow to tolerate it -- a new cruelty scandal will crop up with that brand...sigh.

Boxes and Arrows - Should give you a sense of the kinds of issues and projects I'm involved with as an Information Architect.

Until the next installment!

By Eric, 12:54 PM in Information Architecture, Web/Tech, Weblogs

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November 23, 2003

Disconnected Urbanism

"But the cell phone has changed our sense of place more than faxes and computers and e-mail because of its ability to intrude into every moment in every possible place. When you walk along the street and talk on a cell phone, you are not on the street sharing the communal experience of urban life. You are in some other place--someplace at the other end of your phone conversation. You are there, but you are not there."

Disconnected Urbanism; Paul Goldberger

By Eric, 05:17 AM in Urbanism, Web/Tech

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October 27, 2003

A Treat

For those of you not familiar with homestarrunner.com, here is a sampling of what to expect: Strong Bad's e-mail: Children's Book.

Danger: Gaining knowledge of the existence of this site exposes you to the risk of losing innumerable hours of productivity. Hmmmm....then again, go ahead!

By Eric, 01:14 PM in Web/Tech

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