Anders says

The first time I heard about designing with XHTML was in 2005 at an IA retreat in Asilomar, where Christina Wodtke bluntly proclaimed that we should "stop doing wireframes." I was both skeptical and enticed.

I knew if I stomped around complaining long enough someone would invent something new.

IMG_2302, originally uploaded by Box and Arrow.

Now it Italy, but had a brief stop for a birthday dinner in Paris.

Finally a sign of Information Architecture (IA) life in France! It's been a running joke in European IA circles that there were no IAs in France, since they didn't show up at European (or international) IA events.

Join me and prove it to yourself!

Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com

Except rules are tricky things with an operation like Flickr's. The ban on commerce seems simple enough, but as someone at the meeting points out, Brazil's secondhand economy is an integral part of life there, particularly among women. When does the enforcement of a righteous-seeming regulation become a quashing of someone's culture?

Doin't forget to check out Randy Farmer's talk in a couple weeks...

Community is hard, and so is pretty much all social stuff. But why is so darn hard? Why do strange, unexpected things keep happening, like the wikitorial and the Digg revolt and so on?

I hope you are familiar with Lewin's equation by now?
Behavior is a function of a person and his environment?
B=f(P,E)?

Well, on websites, we have always had partial control over our user's behavior. On a good day, 50%.

In these diagrams, red means we have no control. This person (P) was raised by parents that we have never had the pleasure to advice, and thus who knows what nonsense they were fed. But environment(E)! The beautiful blue under our control! Hey, now we're talking. We choose what content went on the site, what navigation, what got linked, what those links were named... and one day, then whammo! Suddenly someone started letting users have a bit of control.

Let's say it was user-generated content, let's say it was tagging... but suddenly more and more elements of the environment we not really under out control. The environment was directly created by the users. and then...

Social networks. Social media. Social everything! The users are the environment. We control so very little; a drop down, a form label... and yet, it's all important because that's our only hope for influence. You have to embrace a lack of control to realize this is what environments are supposed to be. A fully controlled environment is like a shopping mall, and Web 2.0 environments are more like national parks. Prone to forest fires, sure, but would you trade them for anything else?

We cannot dictate, because we have ceded control. We can influence, we can cajole, we can suggest. But Behavior is not ours to manage.

early draft of a section from 2nd edition of blueprints

We all would like to think there was an abstract, perfect design that we could find and then never change. But different sizes demand different design approaches, and as our websites grow we have to change the wise choices we made earlier that are now liabilities. This is true of both information spaces and social spaces.

For example, everyone has seen the almost psychic spellchecker most search engines sport, but do you know how it works? It parses the millions and millions of queries and correlates when a query is made, then no click on results is made, then a second query with a large number of similar characters is made, then a click on a result. To do this and end up with a comprehensive dictionary of potential misspellings and corrections, you need millions of searches so you can identify the millions of ways people get things wrong and the millions of ways they get it right. Adding spellcheck to a website may seem easy, but if you don't get high traffic, you can't get the same range of suggestions and you'll have to rely on what is likely to be a less effective approach (a discussion for elsewhere). There are many other types of websites that are changed and shaped depending on how much data they have and how many people are using it. Wikipedia is one.

Wikipedia is only interesting because of the huge numbers of people who use it. Exerts on every topic on earth join in in writing, editing, contributing citations... collectively creating the most complete entries on any topic. Because they have so much traffic, and because most people are nice, if the occasional idiot defaces a page it is repaired in under five minutes. And so goes the marketing speil, and many of the entries do indeed realize this promise. But some on each end of the spectrum of usage show their own set of problems.


The extremely popular entries or extremely controversial entries (often the same) can't be left open to be edited by everyone, no matter what the Wikipedia philosophy is, because the number of people vandalizing it is too high to guarantee a useful entry at any given time. Wikipedia is forced to lock this entries against open editing.

Here we see a typical Wikipedia article, illustrating the power of collaboration. Ciphergoth, mlcome, OliAtlanson, Aastrup and many others are discussing how to make the article more accurate, and complete.

And here we see a page that gets almost no traffic. In fact, it didn't exist until one day I started to wonder where the name (and the food) Jalapeno poppers came from. I searched everywhere, including Wikipedia, but all Icould find was a Chowhound discussion board article that thought they might be related to Chili Reneos. I posted what little she knew on Wikipedia in hopes that the miracles of five-minute-corrections would bring me the answer, and wandered off to ask the question on another discussion board.

People are so used to Wikipedia being extensive, complete and expert no one questioned this entry. Over the next ten months, a couple people did add to the entry, one restoring the tilde to jalapeno, another contributing a photo, and someone adding suspiciously marketing-esque information about John Neutizling's invention of the Chile Relleno (unless he's Mayan, I really really doubt it). That has been removed since this screenshot, but in the stub world updates are slow, and vandalism - especially subtle vandalism--remains up and the truth is arrived at with fewer miracles if it arrives at all.

Moreover, in the ten months since its creation, it is now the 4th result (5th if you could video best bets) in Google.

The LATimes tried to leverage the power of wikis with their wikitorial. On June 17th 2005 they launched it, and on June 19th they took it down. Users were posting obscene photos and comments at a pace that no one could manage. LATimes had the large numbers needed to create interesting content, but hadn't learned the lessons of Wikipedia's controversial entries. After all, if Wikipedia with its vibrant and committed community couldn't keep George Bush under control, how could a brand new newspaper section? It still hasn't returned, and maybe it represents a problem that can't be solved.

When you look at examples on the web to learn from, make sure you are dealing with similar problems of scale.

see also earlier size matters post

Thingology (LibraryThing's ideas blog):

Both LibraryThing and Amazon allow users to tag books. But with a tiny fraction of Amazon's traffic, LibraryThing appears to have accumulated *ten times* as many book tags as Amazon--13 million tags on LibraryThing to about 1.3 million on Amazon. (See below for the method I used to find this out.)

Something is going on here--something with broad implications for tagging, classification and "Web 2.0" commerce. There are a couple of lessons, but the most important is this: Tagging works well when people tag "their" stuff, but it fails when they're asked to do it to "someone else's" stuff. You can't get your customers to organize your products, unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton.

via Peter Morville

More rereading of Alexander: 129 Common Areas at the Heart

Conflict
No social group- whether a family, a work group, or a school group- can survive without constant informal contact among its members.
Resolution
Create a single common area for every social group. Locate it at the center of gravity of all the spaces the group occupies, and in such a way that the paths which go in and out of the building lie tangent to it.

This is why groups is so important to social networks. I question Facebook's radical de-emphasis on groups in their redesign. Gossip tells me they are trying to move away from groups, since it is on the old architecture. I doubt they will ever get people to give up their groups. LinkedIn is investing heavily in group functionality, with regular updates and additions supporting necessary social activity such as discussion. Yahoo groups, great grandfather of them all, continues unchallenged growing steadily. You need common areas at the heart of your system, because common areas are at the heart of your users.

I picked up A Pattern Language again and I had a bookmark on this pattern 36. Degrees of Publicness

Conflict
People are different, and the way they want to place their houses in a neighbourhood is one of the most basic kinds of difference.
Resolution
Make a clear distinction between three kinds of homes- those on quiet backwaters those on busy streets, and those that are more or less Inbetween. Make sure that those on quiet backwaters are on twisting paths, and that these houses are themselves physically secluded; make sure that the more public houses are on busy streets with many people passing by all day long and that the houses themselves are exposed to the passers-by. The inbetween houses may then be located on the paths halfway between the other two. Give every neighbourhood about an equal number of these three kinds of homes.

I have no idea why past-me found it interesting, but I know why present-me does. Working at LinkedIn (and anyone working on almost any consumer website these days) I have to consider degrees of publicness. Facebook was initially lambasted over what has become their most popular feature and now the model for their redesign: the newsfeed. The newsfeed is the equivalent of the town square where you can hear everything that's going on with everybody and chat about it. Some people want to live on the town square, so they don't miss a thing. Others would like to live at the edges of town, away from both prying eyes and overwhelming updates. Design of feeds tends to be one size fits all. A challenge will be figuring out intelligent and subtle ways to allow people degrees of publicness (including shelter from other people's publicness.)

|Morten Lund - It's all about luck

First of all I'm really really sorry to say that my Newspaper project did not survive - not sorry for me (I take all responsibilities) - I just hate myself for bringing other people (employees and partners) and service providers into trouble - it feels unfair and coward-like...

takes courage to tell a true story in which you are not the triumphant hero.