vanderwal.net

Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 Goes Beta

Yahoo has launched Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 today. It has elements of Flickr but not the polish, nor the attention to detail. There are a lot of very rough edges, but there is a lot of potential also. I may spend some time playing around with it in the next few days and weeks. I surely will be sending a ton of feedback in. Hopefully MyWeb will iterate far more rapidly than their blogging software, which had rough edges and they still exist and no noticeable improvements have been made (I don't know many that will recommend it to nubies until the rough edges are fixed).

The tool from the very little I have looked at it seems like it has the broad folksonomy executed well. This seems to have many elements of del.icio.us integrated. I am curious is there is the capability to have community around tags (be same definition).

My curiosity is really piqued with the MyRank search engine. It seems to be a predictive engine of sorts, which really has my interest.

If you want to add me I can be found at tjvanderwal there in Yahoo! type places.

Join the Cause with Live8

In light of the G8Reboot, I would be remiss if I did not mention Live8 or the tracking the Live8 web conversations using Technorati. Twenty years ago Live Aid made a change, but today we have the opportunity to make an even bigger impact. Add your voice and your support, can you think of anything better to do?

One in a World of Many More

Ben Hammersly points out the doom and gloom around Grokster is missing one clause, which is in the U.S. Just because things are borked in the U.S. does not mean that the rest of the world is broken. The U.S. is one country, whose government lacks foresight, but there are many many more countries out there that have not mangled foresight.

G8 Summit Now has G8Reeboot

Within days the G8 Summit kicks off. This time around there is a little pressure to do things that really matter. Adam reminded me that it is well worth the effort to take an interest and to urge people to get involved with G8Reboot

Girl in the Cafe

We watched the new HBO film, Girl in the Cafe, last evening. It was a well acted, with painful social graces in the two main characters. The story revealed itself well with only slight hints where it may go. If you have any interest in G8Reboot, you may have an interest in this film as it revolves around the G8.

A Step Ahead

We went and saw Mad Hot Ballroom this evening. It was our first movie out in a long time. It was also a make-up father's day, so I got to choose the movie (somehow the latest Star Wars was not a viable option). Mad Hot was a wonderful documentary with a great heart and a glimpse into the lives of New York City 5th graders in ballroom dancing classes and their city-wide competition. A solid sense of The City and life across The City through the eyes of these 5th graders is shared.

Summer movies to me, mostly means independent and foreign movies. This started the summer of 1986 when I lived in Berkeley and started the theme. this movie fit right in. There are only a couple of movies I really want to see this summer that are in the mainstream, but I am not seeing the flush of wonderful independent and foreign movies coming out. I must dig a little deeper. I may have to watch the Angelika and plan a trip.

Back but swamped

Back in the saddle here digging though wonderful thoughts and regards. Thank you!

We have been in a land with out broadband, let alone wifi. A couple days living only on what I could get on my mobile reminds me how poor the U.S. is porting content to mobile devices let alone how badly it is executed. A 100kb download is not what should be consumed by a mobile.

I am buried in work, the work outside of work sort. I also need to follow-up with a bunch of you in the next few days. It has been nearly a week that I have been consumed with family matters, some of which was very good and healthy. The winds of change are blowing and we shall see what happens.

The 7:05

My father-in-law took the train into New York city everyday for work for 30 years. Many of those years he took this 7:05 train in. This morning he passed away at 7:05.

Things will be quiet here for a little bit.

Peace

Personal InfoCloud at WebVisions 2005

The last few years I have kicked myself for not going to WebVisions, well I finally am attending, actually I am presenting my Personal InfoCloud at 1pm. This is the latest refinement of the Personal InfoCloud that I have been working on for four years and sharing with those that are finding it quite useful.

The essential information you need is that you should be at WebVisions 2005 in Portland, Oregon. It is being held July 15th at the Oregon Convention Center.

What do you say? "Join the giants of the Web world to explore the future of design, content creation, technology and business strategy. From podcasting to universal usability, you'll discover how the Web is interacting with digital devices to change the way we communicate, access information and do business."

Design Issue for Non-Designers

After reading more than 4 paragraphs of the June 2005 Fast Comany issue I have found I like the whole issue. I have not really learned much new, but it is one issue that I could just hand to so many folks to help bring their understanding of design and design process up to functional use. The issue discusses subjects like iterating and "T-shaped" people and offers up many lists, which are scattered through out the magazine.

Designing with a Solution is the Problem

I finally put my finger on it. There has been growing frustration within me with where I work and as well with some of the leaders in the web design community of late. The problem and the solution has been known to me, but scattered in pieces and I did not pull all the pieces together until today. Why today? Well, it took a little doing, but I finally got my hands on this month's issue of Fast Company - June 2005, which I had been subscribed to until the May issue. It took a little bit of time to track down the issue as it was to the point in the month when the next months issues are getting put out. But, having that issue in hand (having read some on-line) I stumbled across my tipping point in the Be Cooler by Design column. I did not make it past the fouth paragraph when it hit.

It Begins with a Canyon

The paragraph has a header, "Show Them the Canyon" and discusses a designer at Ford, Giuseppe Delena, who would say, "Don't tell me you need a bridge, show me the canyon!" This was aimed at marketing people who would ask for specific design solutions, but not explain the problem.

That is my tipping point. Having to start with somebody's solution to design problems (most often solutions to the wrong problem). Not having the problems put forward, but an answer. An answer without anybody showing their work to how their arrived at the solution. For nearly four years I have been working, for the most part, with the end results of the work of others who started with a solution and worked that as a starting point, while never considering the problem (or in nearly all cases the multitude of problems they needed to solve). They did not understand the problems nor do they understand or know the standards and requirements that their end result must meet. Lastly they do not understand the medium in which they are working. In short it is a string of considerable messes that our team deals with continually. The sad complication is this is taxpayer money being spent (often quite nice sums) for end products that require incredible fixing to meet minimum standards and be usable on the web.

It is not my direct customer, who is in the same boat I am in as we support him (and he is one of the very few that really get what they are doing), but the "customer service" management and the management signing off on these projects that have become the problem. With the web, the business customer is not always right, the user is, as without the user their is no business customer. In our situation, by-and-large, the web being built is using what works for print and for multi-media, neither of which are solutions for text on the web. The business customer requires solutions for the wrong medium, which (as those who have sat through usability test find out) the tan text on brown background and all of the animated bits make using the information as is it is intended, nearly impossible.

Designers Must Explain Design Better

In part the design world is to blame as we have done a very poor job of educating the rest of the world as to what we do. We solve problems. We have spent an inordinate amount of time on learning everything we can about our medium, how people think, how people interact with our medium, how people interact with their devices (desktop, laptop, PDA, mobile, etc.) as they are all different, how to organize and structure for people interacting with what we design, how to build for people to give them freedom to choose the solution that is best for them, how to build for ease of use by people, and how to build for people to easily reuse what we provide (the list goes on). Yes, it is not a short list and I do not know a good designer who will truly claim they are done learning all of these aspects. We know what works best with everything we do know for the problems before us and we test everything we do and we iterate through our designs while always striving to make things better. Every designer I know loves to show how they got to their solution and document it for others to do, as their joy in designing is not repeating, but problem solving and innovating to better solutions. As designers we are always trying to learn what others do, so the good designers share in as much detail so others may learn what to follow and what to modify for even better solutions down the road.

In my current situation the lack of time to document and show our work is a major problem. The lack of documentation (or deliverables) is part of where the problem lies with the problems up the food chain (not that there are skilled designers or people that would understand up the food chain). If we had the time to show our work we could hand it to those at the beginning of the process so we could get better products with fewer problems when we receive them (although it is a very rare occasion that any of what we have produced for these purposes is ever followed). Many of the places up the food chain have sold a bridge with out ever seeing the canyon it is just a cookie cutter. It is rare when we get to solve the problems, either at the beginning or the end, we just get to fix it so it will just pass the minimum requirements, which are horribly low.

Understand and Explain the Problem First

This frustration has also flowed over to the web design community of late as there is excitement in the web community again. The excitement is not bad, actually it is great. But some of the new solutions are being framed as new wonder solutions without framing the problem they are solving. In the world of design (as it is with many other things) it is a realm where the answer to most every question is, "it depends". What is the solution? It all depends on many factors in the problem. Teaching how to understand problems and to walk through the decision process to get to the solution (or more correctly, one of many possible right solutions) is what raises the profession.

What has been happening of late in the web design/development community is looking at solutions that may be terrific implementations for a certain problem in a set environment, but proclaiming what is new is "the new way". For those that are not good designers or even designers at all, this approach reaches a problem point very quickly. It was not long after XMLHTTPRequest was coined AJAX that customers, and those I advise from farther away, started asking for their solutions to be AJAX. There are right places for AJAX, as it is just one of many solutions for problems where it may be one of the solutions. It is quite similar to aura around Flash as a solution, but AJAX has its benefits and detractors when compared to Flash.

Where the problem around the AJAX solution got tough was when AJAX was tied to a whole new exitement around the web. It was at this point the AJAX solution was being demanded from customers. I was hearing if from many corners, this great solution touted, was for customers the only way they would accept their final products. AJAX had quickly become the cure-all in customer's eyes, much like Flash had years before.

Our Responsibility

What we have to realize as designers, is people do listen and people want to believe there is one simple solution for all of their web problems, all of the information problems, etc. We know there is not a simple solution as of yet. In fact the digital information world is far more complex than it ever was, as Europe and Asia will attest, with the influx of mobile handheld use. (Europe and Asia have things a little better than the U.S. right now, as they have much less of a population that believes build for desktop (including laptop) solutions is the one way all design is heading.) Europe and Asia understand the world is far more complex and information far more useful when it can be used in context on a mobile device. The expanding of the devices and the realm of possibile solutions with their benefits and detractors across the many variables we monitor componded the problems we are solving. Simplicity is many designer's goal, but getting there is ever harder today and we must embrace the complexity (thank you Mike for turning that light on for me) and work through it. We also need to communicate the complexity to our customers so everybody understands it is not as simple as it seems.

It is this complexity of convergence around devices is also compounded by the flood of information people are experiencing, which is what has me loving the work I get to do around the Personal InfoCloud (and the Model of Attraction and folksonomy that are intertwined with it). This work is satisfying as it is not only defining the problems and working through possible solutions, but more importantly laying out frameworks to design and build solutions that others can use. There are increasingly people (who may become customers) that are coming and asking the right questions from the right perspective around the Personal InfoCloud, which may be another reason I really like working on it (we all love people asking smart questions). People are asking how to cross their canyon while describing the canyon and many times showing me the canyon they would like a solution designed for.

I think we all know what the next step is. It will not be happening tomorrow, but every day that passes makes the frustration that much worse. Knowing there is one point around which much of my frustration revolves may help me deal with it better.

On the Apple Front: Watching was Enjoyable

Last night I watched the Steve Jobs keynote to the 2005 WWDC where he announced the move to Intel based processors. While I still have questions (do we get 64bit computing on Intel anytime soon and will we get dual processing anytime soon (soon is relative as the transition is more than a year away and the PowerMacs will not be transitioned until 2008) I was very impressed with the OS development and code compiling tools Apple has put together to run applications on both processors. This seems to solve the Osborne computer paradox of announcing a new product too far out and the demand for the current product dries up (I should not the Osborne Executive was my first personal computer it was considered a portable).

But, the thing I was most impressed with last evening was the video itself. It was running on Quicktime 7 and the viewing window was larger than streamcasts in the past and the quality was extremely good. I was actually very impressed with the quality. I have thought the quality of Quicktime movies is the best of any digital video platform for the web, but this just knocked all others out of the water. Not only was it a wonderful picture, but it seemed to use half of the bandwidth of previous streamcasts.

Replacement RSS and XML Button

Mike just posted a killer international and language-free RSS logo button on his site. I really like it. Mainly is works for those of use who understand the RSS text version, but for those who are not as technically forward or in non-English/Western languages this could still work. The RSS and XML text on the buttons always need explanation to those not familiar with the terms. The end of many of the tutorials is often, "just click it, you do not really need to know what it means, just click". Something tells me Mike is on to something profound yet so wonderfully simple.

The Last Big Piece

I grew up in the early 1970s with the Watergate scandal and hearings on television in the background to my world. Yesterday the one big missing piece was revealed, Felt was Deepthroat.

Tall Stories of Architecture

Those of you interested in architecture the BBC's In Business has a MP3 (podcast if you want) for down load of its program, "Tall Stories". The download will be replaced on Thursday June 2nd so go grab it now.

The half hour radio segment looks at the current state of architecture, architects, and public design in general (largely in Britain, but it includes world examples and is relevant to just about anywhere. There are some good analogies and frameworks for anybody in the design professions.

Focussing on Personal InfoCloud More

Things have been too quiet over at my Personal InfoCloud site lately. It is not for lack of things to write about, but more of the too much going on syndrome. A few things are happening that made me realize that is one of the more important things I need to be doing for now. It will also help me focus on the WebVisions presentation. In the last six months there have been a lot of very positive things transpiring around the Personal InfoCloud work I have been doing, which has greatly helped more my ideas around it move forward.

Aside from my having more serious allergy problems this Spring than I have had in many years, trying to stay on top of all that is going on outside of work lately has been nuts. I am not at a point where I could give up my day-time job to get 10 hours of productive time back to move all of the other things forward far more quickly. Currently I am balancing four different camps, not including family and sleep for this "free time" and nearly all of these things drawing my attention revolve around the Personal InfoCloud.