Færslur sunnudaginn 25. júlí 1999

At 04:00: What is Information Architecture? 

C-Net's Builder.com has an OK article called 10 Questions about Information Architecture.

The people on CHI-WEB mailing list had a heated discussion about the definition of the term recently. I found it too uninteresting to follow closely. I.A. has become one of those hot buzzwords like, 'community' and 'virtual-'. Everybody uses it and but knows exactly what it means.

Off-topic: Funny how everything at Builder.com somehow involves either '10 questions' or 'top 10 reasons'. Could it possibly have anything got to do with page-views and stupid banner ads? I wonder...

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At 03:00: Essay on UI design 

The Importance of Simplicity is a surprisingly good article at Microsoft's website. (Surprisingly because many of the Microsoft products, especially the early ones, have very badly designed UIs.)

The article/essay "Discusses how to design a simple user interface without sacrificing functionality". Much of it is stating the obvious of course, but it does it well.

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At 02:00: Good links about web-site development 

IBM has some great essays on web-site development. Seperating content and visuals for rapid results questions the traditional visual-prototype-first method for web-site design. They argue that involving the visual and graphic aspect too early can both slow down the development process and also (subconciously) take the focus off usability issues and limit UI development. IBM has some more essays that are worth reading, including Giving people what they want: How to involve users in site design (Thanks Lawrence Lee.)

Philosophe.com contains a collections of essays and articles about web site development and web site quality. Testing and quailty assurance of web sites is an issue that is way too often forgotten, or using Derek Sisson's own words: "Conceiving, designing, building, and publishing a web site is the easy part."

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At 01:00: The Problem with Web Annotations 

Red Herring's Attack of the viral Web notes briefly discusses the web's latest trend; Web Annotation software, how there is a growing number of "trendy" annotators on the market and how none of them is compatible with the others.

Also, My friend Bjarni and I recently discussed how badly current implementations of web-annotations scale. They all run into walls wrt usefulness when the number of users becomes too great. The noise level becomes too great.

Bjarni has written down some ideas over at his weblog, on how he thinks IRC-like channels and moderators might be needed.

The fundamental problem I see with all the new and trendy annotation apps so far is that they all lack focus. They all promise to turn the whole internet into one tidy discussion group. None of them take into account that too many users make too much noise. People work best in smaller groups that complement their views and purposes.

I believe we will see several different uses of annotations in the future. Some might be:

• Unfocused graffiti chat amongst friends. Sort of like an extension of the buddy list theme introduced by ICQ and AOL-Messanger. Possibly in the form of instant chat-messages that are "left behind" linked to the page they're refferring to.
• Semi-focused community based discussions Each using it's own Crit-like server and database for comments. For instance a site like Slashdot, could expand its discussion-boards by allowing logged-in members to read and write linked annotations. This could even include some level of moderating.
• Fine-grained linking betweeen published documents. This makes it possible for search engines to trawl for documents that address specific parts of other documents. The fact that the documents would have to be 'published' on the web first, should reduce the noise-level. This functionality is currently supported (optionally) by CritSuite.

This fine-grained linking thing is the core element of annotations. What We need is a standardized (html and http compatible) way to make fine-grained links to documents. Then we can make all sorts of different user-agents that store and search for those links and serve them to the user in a variety of ways. The linking mechanism used by Crit, may be a usable candidate.

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