vanderwal.net

Micro-trip to the Bay Area

I have an incredibly short trip to the Bay Area beginning tomorrow. I will be on the ground there less than 24 hours and nearly all of it will be either sleeping, prepping, in meetings or transit to and from the airport. I was hoping for a trip of three days at least, but that will come. Should you see me, say hi and I may have time for a quick coffee or something.

Opening Old Zips and Finding Missing Passion

Tonight I finally got my old USB Zip drive to work with my laptop (I have not tried in a couple years) and it worked like a charm. I decided to pull most of the contents of my old Zips into my hard drive, as it is backed-up.

I started opening old documents from a project from four and five years ago and the documentation is so much better and detailed that what I have these days. The difference? Focus and resources. On that project I was researching, defining, iterating, and testing one project full-time. I was working with some fantastic developers that were building their parts and a designer that could pulled everything together visually. We each had our areas of expertise and were allowed to do what we enjoyed and excelled at to the fullest. Our passions could just flow. The project was torn apart by budgets and politics with the real meat of it never going live. A small piece of it went live, but nothing like we had up and running. But, this is the story of so many killer projects and such is life.

What is different between now and then? Today there is no focus and no resources to develop and design. I am in an environment overseeing 2,000 projects a year across 15 funding areas (most of the work done centrally is done on 5 funding areas), it is project traffic management, not design, not research design, not iterating, just balancing high priority projects (mostly it is 9 of us cleaning up others poor work). The team I work with is fantastic, but we have few resources (mostly time is missing) to do incredible work.

The looking back at the volumes of documents I wrote laying out steps, outlines of design elements, content assessments, schematics, data flows, wireframes, and Flash animations demonstrating how the finished tools would function I realize I miss that, deeply. I miss the passion and drive to make something great. I miss being permitted to dream big and solve problems that were untouchable, and best of all, go execute on those dreams. When I see members that made up that old team we reminisce, much like guys do about high school sports champion teams they were on. We had a great team with each of us doing what we loved and changing our part of the world, the digital world.

It was in that project that the seeds were planted for everything I love working on now. Looking at old diagrams I see hints of the Model of Attraction. I was using scenarios around people using and reusing information, which became the Personal InfoCloud. These elements were used to let others in on our dreams for that project and it was not until my time on the project was winding down (or there was no desire to move more of the whole product live and therefore no need for my skills) that I could pull out what worked well on project that made it special. Now others are getting to understand the Personal InfoCloud and other frameworks and models I have been sharing.

State is the Web

The use and apparent mis-use of state on the web has bugged me for some time, but now that AJAX, or whatever one wants to call "XMLHttpRequests", is opening the door to non-Flash developers to ignore state. The latest Adaptive Path essay, It's A Whole New Internet, quotes Michael Buffington, "The idea of the webpage itself is nearing its useful end. With the way Ajax allows you to build nearly stateless applications that happen to be web accessible, everything changes." And states, "Where will our bookmarks go when the idea of the 'webpage' becomes obsolete?"

I agree with much of the article, but these statements are wholly naive in my perspective. Not are they naive, but they hold up examples of the web going in the wrong direction. Yes, the web has the ability to build application that are more seemless thanks to the that vast majority of people using web browsers that can support these dynamic HTML techniques (the techniques are nothing new, in fact on intranets many of us were employing them four or five years ago in single browser environments).

That is not the web for many, as the web has been moving toward adding more granular information chunks that can be served up and are addressible. RESTful interfaces and "share this page" links are solutions. The better developers in the Flash community has been working to build state into their Flash presentations to people can link to information that is important, rather than instructing others to click through a series of buttons or wait through a few movies to get to desired/needed information. The day of one stateless interface for all information was behind us, I hope to hell it is not enticing a whole new generation of web developers to lack understanding of state.

Who are providing best examples? Flickr and Google Maps are two that jump to mind. Flickr does one of the best jobs with fluid interfaces, while keeping links to state that is important (the object that the information surrounds, in this case a photograph). Google Maps are stunning in their fluidity, but during the whole of one's zooming and scrolling to new locations the URL remains the same. Google Map's solution is to provide a "Link to this page" hyperlink (in my opinion needs to be brought to the visual forefront a little better as I have problems getting people to recognize the link when they have sent me a link to maps.google.com rather than their intended page).

Current examples of a poor grasp of state is found on the DUX 2005 conference site. Every page has the same URL, from the home page, to submission page, to about page. You can not bookmark the information that is important to yourself, nor can you send a link to the page your friend is having problems locating. The site is stateless in all of its failing glory. The designer is most likely not clueless, just thoughtless. They have left out the person using the site (not users, as I am sure their friends whom looked at the design thought it was cool and brilliant). We have to design with people using and resusing our site's information in mind. This requires state.

When is State Helpful?

If you have important information that the people using your site may want to directly link to, state is important as these people will need a URL. If you have large datasets that change over time and you have people using the data for research and reports, the data must have state (in this case it is the state of the data at some point in time). Data that change that does not have state will only be use for people that enjoy being selected as a fool. Results over time will change and all good academic research or professional researchers note the state of the data with time and date. All recommendations made on the data are only wholly relevant to that state of the data.

Nearly all blogging tools have "permalinks", or links that link directly to an unchanging URL for distinct articles or postings, built into the default settings. These permalinks are the state function, as the main page of a blog is fluid and ever changing. The individual posts are the usual granular elements that have value to those linking to them (some sites provide links down to the paragraph level, which is even more helpful for holding a conversation with one's readers).

State is important for distinct chunks of information found on a site. Actions do not seem state-worthy for things like uploading files, "loading screens", select your location screens (the pages prior and following should have state relative to the locations being shown on those pages), etc.

The back button should be a guide to state. If the back button takes the user to the same page they left, that page should be addressable. If the back button does not provide the same information, it most likely should present the same information if the person using the site is clicking on "next" or "previous". When filling out an application one should be able to save the state of the application progress and get a means to come back to that state of progress, as people are often extremely aggravated when filling out longs forms and have to get information that is not in reach, only to find the application times out while they are gone and they have to start at step one after being many steps into the process.

State requires a lot of thought and consideration. If we are going to build the web for amateurization or personal information architectures that ease how people build and structure their use of the web, we must provide state.

Blower Blows

Our air conditioning/heater blower went out yesterday evening. Today we had a new one put in (we have spent two-thirds the cost of a whole new unit in two years in repairs). It just kicked on and, man does the new blower blow. This could make for a more comfortable summer, or at least it is one option.

Annotated New York Times

The Annotated New York Times is the best interface for blog coverage out there. Feedster and Technorati are leagues behind in their presentation compared to this. I had not been to BlogRunner in a while, but it has grow-up too. The interface, interaction, and presentation are dead-on for an intuitive tool. Bravo.

I do wish it were easier to find book review annotations more easily, such as by author or book title.

O'Reilly Radar

I am adding the new O'Reilly Radar to my RSS aggregator to follow for a while to see if it is worth adding to my regular links page, which needs some pruning and planting. The Radar is a blog focussing on what four people at O'Reilly believe is new and interesting to them.

I found the link through a folksonomy feed, but found the developer mistook categories and general tagging for folksonomy and weighted tag use visualization for folksonomy. Both categories and tagging are very helpful tools, while weighted visualizations are already seeming passé due to over and improper use (sparklines are far more useful as are just having a numeric value). Folksonomy is not a tag applied by the content generator is is applied by the content consumer so the consumer can come back to find the information more easily. I like the irony that O'Reilly did not think a book on folksonomy would be needed, but they can not get it right on their own site (or their developer liked the buzz word and nobody knew any better).

What the do have is worth watching.

Adobe Buys Macromedia

Adobe buys Macromedia was not the news I wanted to wake up to this morning. My sole issue is competition, as with out these two competing there is little push to advance. This is not a huge surprise, as many rumors the last few years that Macromedia was on the block (most were expecting Microsoft to buy it and then spin out ColdFusion and the application tools to an outside buyer).

If this goes through, we have Dreamweaver/HomeSite as the dominant web development tool (it is making great strides towards standards compliant development and GoLive needs much more work), desktop publishing is Adobe only, market share of image editing and creation (Photoshop and Illustrator) go to Adobe, application development goes to Macromedia with ColdFusion, then we have the tough call with Flash and SVG. Flash is dominant, but SVG is open and Flash lite (for mobile) has really upset many developers as the player is up to the carrier and phone maker to deploy, not the content creator. This last step has really pushed many Flash developers away from Macromedia as they work to focus on mobile. Rumors that Adobe was working on a SVG mobile tool with open deployment had many developers for mobile really excited.

My hope would be for Macromedia customer service and pricing and Adobe Premium Suite with Dreamweaver and Flash thrown in for a well rounded package.

Breeding not Easy

I loathe allergies. For some reason my allergies started in full drive a little early this year (only by a week or two). This past week, starting last weekend, the annoyance began its progression. Yes, I take things for them (I have done shots too, but the lost time out of one's schedule is greater than the week or two of misery, at least for now), but the effectiveness diminishes each year.

The two things that get to me are lack of good sleep and the cloudy mind. This really is not the time for this as I have a ton of things to get out the door that require focus of a clear mind (focus is a little difficult at the moment, but more on that at another time).

Two new Entries at Personal InfoCloud

Over at Personal InfoCloud there are some new postings. Good Bye to the User and Focus of Startups were both posted this week.

Presenting at Social Software in the Academy Workshop at the Annenberg Center for Communication

Add to my list of events where I will be presenting, Social Software in the Academy Workshop at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication. This will be May 14-15th. The focus my involvement will be around folksonomy and tagging. I will post more info as the time nears and I know more.

Entering the Bubble

Today my copy of John Thackara's In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World arrived. I have read through 10 pages so far and it seems like it may live up to what I had hoped it would, my next book I obsess over. The last book was Digital Ground. Digital Ground took rough edges off many of the ideas I had been working through for a few years. It also extended me limited view to a much broader horizon. It is with this expectation that I read In the Bubble.

I will keep you apprised of my adventure through the pages.

Simplicity Through Granular Complexity

We must understand and embrace the granular and complex to make things simple for the person.

Personal InfoCloud at WebVisions 2005

I, Thomas Vander Wal, will be presenting the Personal InfoCloud at the WebVisions 2005 in Portland, Oregon on July 15th. In all it looks to be a killer conference, just as it has been in the past. This year's focus is convergence (it is about time).

WebVisions is one of the best values in the web conference industry these days, as the early bird pricing is just $85 (US). You don't need an excuse, you just go. You spend a Friday bettering yourself and then Saturday in Powell's Books the evenings are spent talking the talk over some of the world's best beers served up fresh.

Crunch Time, as Usual

We are quite busy with articles, summaries, presentations, and e-mail these days. We have ideas and projects that need to get out of our heads on in to some functional space. Again we are looking for about 6 more hours in each day, that would do it. The other option would be to rearrange things we already have to put better focus on the stuff that will help the people who get it design and build for those that don't get it and shouldn't need to get it. What are we talking about time spent on the wrong things and working to spend time on the right things. What are the right things? We will tell you once we have time to knock some of them out.

Cryptic? It will not be once we have the key to set all of this free.

Tech Expo Fose was Ho Hum

I made it to Fose (the government-centric tech trade show) today. I was impressed nor intrigued by extremely little. There was mobile and a very good showing from the Open Source community, old old news to non-government folks. I was completely blown away by many booth's lack of understanding of their own products, particularly the Microsoft booth, I was interested in the One Note as it seemed similar to Entourage's Project (they were unfamiliar with any of the Microsoft Mac products and did not know they made products for the Mac - although they did laugh at my Keynote is PowerPoint with out swearing quip). The MS booth was pushing the product, but nobody seemed to have a clue about it. I was also interested in Groove (I was a fan from when I was using the beta of it many years ago) and wanted to see its current state. Microsoft really needs to hire people who not only care about their products but know about their products and what the company is doing. (This is truly not a Microsoft slam as I am getting some long long lost respect for them on some small fronts.)

I was quite impressed with three booths, Apple, Adobe, and Fig Leaf Software as they were extremely knowledgeable and were showcasing their wares and skills and not goofy side-shows. They had the skills and wares to show off (Blackberry also had a good booth, but I did not have a great interest there).

Apple was showcasing their professional line of hardware, including their servers and SAN, which blew all other server solutions out of the water on price and capability (including Dell and HP). Apple was also showcasing their new OS Tiger, which they were able to show me does search, using Spotlight, in the files comments in the metadata (now labeled Spotlight comments just to make it clear), which will make my life so much wonderfully better, but that is an other post all together. Tiger's Dashboard was also very impressive as it has an Expose-like fade-in ability. I tried asking the same questions to a few different people at the Apple booth and they were all extremely knowledgeable and across the board may have been the most impressive for this.

I hounded Adobe about their InDesign CS2, GoLive CS2 (standards compliance), and Acrobat (tag creation and editing). Not every person could answer every question, but they were able to bring over the right person who had deep knowledge of the product. Adobe has products I like, but there has always been one or two tripping points for me that keep me from fully loving their products and from using their products exclusively in Web development workflow.

The guy at the Fig Leaf booth (a Macromedia training and development shop in Washington, DC. I asked why no Macromedia and was told they pulled out at the last minute, but I had to thank the folks at Fig Leaf as they have the best Macromedia training anywhere in the area (nobody else comes remotely close and most others are a complete waste of time and money). I was really looking for Macromedia to talk about ColdFusion as their last product was so poorly supported by Macromedia it has been strongly considered to drop the product from the workflow. Fig Leaf, not Macromedia was the firm that posted the work arounds to ColdFusion server flaws when you run the CF MX product in a secure Microsoft environment. There is a lot about the Macromedia site that is really difficult to use and it is nearly impossible to find the information you want as well as get back to that same information. Macromedia does make some very good products and they have been very receptive to web standards for quite some time, but there are things that make embracing them so very difficult.

Overall, I got a lot from the show, if only from a very small number of vendors. I think I am finally going to switch up to the Adobe CS2 Premium Suite as it seems like a very good suite, and it has been difficult getting the cross-platform upgrade for the Windows to Mac switch from my PhotoShop 6 license (thanks to help from people in the booth that may be less painful than the two or three hour calls I have previously endured). Also thanks to the faux doctor who handed me a bottle of mint candy pills from the Blackberry booth (chili dog with onions was not good fair prior to going to Fose).

The Touch of Pope John Paul II

It is with sadness that I pause at the passing of Pope John Paul II. I am not Roman Catholic, but the Pope did have an impact on how I view the world. Actually he gave me a look into a world I would have never seen.

In 1987 the Pope was making his trip to the U.S. and traveling across the states, stopping in many places. One of the places he was stopping was San Francisco. I was in my last semester at St. Mary's College and had been contacted over the summer to see if I had an interest in helping the San Francisco Diocese Catholic Communications work locally on the Pope visit. Since I was a communication major, I though this would be a great experience.

There were preliminary meetings over Summer, but most of the work started a few days before the Pope was to arrive in the U.S. I was going to be helping in a communication center that was going to be tracking the Pope by satellite feed, providing tape to local media, as well as subject experts explaining the Pope's points. As Pope arrived in the U.S. our satellite center was busy, I was spending most waking hours outside class at the center flipping tapes, running cameras of the expert press conferences. It was a lot of fun seeing behind the scenes and getting good hands on experience.

As the Pope was nearing San Francisco on his trip our communication center was getting moved to another place as the space was needed for other purposes on the day of his visit. The night before his arrival we moved all the equipment to an annex of the Cathedral. I had class early the day of his arrival, but was back in San Francisco to help out the last minute changes.

When I got to the Cathedral one of the technicians who had been a lead was needed back at the NBC affiliate. This left an extra spot for a person inside the Cathedral and I was asked if I wanted to go in as I had put in a lot of hours. The event was a religious only event between the Pope and Roman Catholic ordained priests, brothers, nuns, sisters, bishops, and cardinals. It was them, security, and a few press. I had to go fill out some paperwork for security and go help with some final preparations inside for the network cameras. Then it was back outside for the bomb searches.

We were finally let back in and went to our spots before the religious were let in the Cathedral. I was up on top one of the kiosks in the back with one of the camera crews and had a perfect view of the whole Cathederal, including a look down on the Pope's entry way. Things were orderly as everybody in their vestments came in and took their seat. We watched as the Pope landed in San Francisco and drove to the San Francisco Mission, where he held the boy with AIDS, which changed the view of many in the whole of the Church with that one action. He then was on his way to the Cathedral along a route that had more security than any other event prior.

As the Pope neared the Cathedral everybody was getting excited. There was getting to be a lot of commotion from the truly devoted, many of whom had never seen any Pope in person. As the Pope was a block away it was near bedlam in the Cathedral. The nuns, priests, brothers and sisters were up on the pews stomping their feet. It was like a rock concert. Not any rock concert, but a huge rock concert, like Elvis would have been, only bigger. I was on the headset that had media, security, and police on it. The police added more forces inside the Cathedral before the Pope would come in. They had metal barricades up and there were many police pushing back at the barricades, it was a scene I never would have imagined and one very few would ever see. Here was a man who represented to nearly every person in the Cathedral the embodiment of their connection to their God. For many it was a once in a life time event for these people who had given up everything and taken vows of poverty for their God.

As the Pope entered the Cathedral things really let loose. The barricades nearly came over as the Pope walked in and shook as many hands as he could. He put his hands deep into the crowds beyond the barricade that were thrust with the weight of thousands of pounds of the adoring. As the Pope walked down the main aisle he stepped into the pews to shake many many hands. He knew the sacrifices of these people as he was one of them. He made many feel like he was one with them.

After many minutes he finally was seated on the alter and a few minutes later order was largely restored. The meeting was one that presented the U.S. Church views to the Pope, female ordination and other relatively contentious subjects were broached. As the Pope gave his blessing I was asked if I wanted to go down near the exit to hang out to get a closer look. After the blessing I went down to an empty spot near the door with another who was helping. The exit was quite boisterous as well. As the Pope neared I was pushed toward the barricade, but as those around me urged, I put my hand out. As the Pope went by he shook my hand (it was very different from a politician handshake as it was more caring). As I turned around there were three or four nuns standing, a little shocked, and they asked timidly if I shook the Pope's hand. I said I had and the asked with which hand and I said my right, "the Pope it was right", I remembered saying. They asked if they could touch that hand. Two of them became faint, but they did not go down, as they touched my hand. They were so excited to touch the hand that touched the Pope. I was stunned and deeply saddened by this, as I was not expecting this response, but I felt very badly that I shook the hand when it should have been one of these nuns, who had given so much.

Since that time I have been in utter awe of the man who was Pope John Paul II, he did far more for the Church and making it come to life for many. Peace.

Folksonomy Sold

As of today I am no longer the person who coined the word folksonomy. After getting asked over and over how I was going to make money off coining a word, I had the answer. Today I sold the rights to claim the coining of the word folksonomy to another party. I had thought about selling the rights off of eBay, but the offer came to me and it was above anything I imagined. I can not say the amount this was sold for, but it was very generous and also provides a six figure payment for each of the next 12 years and payment over the following 8 years based on revenues generated from that word.

I am letting the group that bought the rights and word to make their annoucement later today. They are weaving the history of the term into their own marketing materials, packaging materials, and blog.

[We now return you to reality beyond April 1st and no we are not aware that a word can be sold either, well as of today at least. Posted April 2, 2005]