Yes, I’ve been neglecting this blog, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t been productive. My employer (which has changed it’s name back to Razorfish) has published another book, which contains an article by me about semantic web and user-generated data. You can see the whole, beautifully designed document online. My article is on page 60. Congratulations to my colleagues who also contributed to the book.
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Archived Posts from this Category
October 29, 2008
FEED: The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report 2008
Posted by Rachel under article, content strategy, semantic webLeave a Comment
August 26, 2008
This doesn’t really have anything to do with central themes of this blog, but I was quoted in a Times article today, about the new walking and seating area that runs along 8 blocks of Broadway (including an area directly in front of my office): Front-Row Seats on Broadway, if You Dare.
My quote is actually the closing comment in the article. I’m not going to spoil it, though, you’ll have to read the article.
October 5, 2007
My company, Avenue A | Razorfish, has published a Digital Design Outlook book, and an accompanying blog. I contributed an article providing a user experience perspective on the Semantic Web. I’m excited about the potential for bridging the gap between really powerful semantic technologies and elegant and effective user experiences. I think this is one of the major digital design challenges of the next few years.
For more details, read my article, The Semantic Web We Weave, on the Digital Design Blog.
May 29, 2007
One of the things I heard a lot of people buzzing about at the Semantic Technology Conference last week was whether or not the Semantic Web would be more accessible to people (as a concept) if it were called something else. Apparently people don’t like the word “semantic.” I sometimes forget that, and then I read something like this (admittedly fairly old) article about Tim Berners-Lee in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The framing metaphor – Berners-Lee as Tolkien – is nonsensical. You could swap out any author who invented a culture with its own language and the metaphor would work just as well (or just as poorly). And, it’s ridiculous to imply that the significant factor of the WWW is that it’s based on an invented language; computer programming languages and markup languages have a long history that predates the WWW. In the end, this metaphor does nothing to illuminate the social, economic, and cultural impact of the Web. (It does have a handy subtext, though – apparently people who are interested in the underlying workings of the Web are nerds, just like people who are passionate about Lord of the Rings.)
With frequent references to “futuristc” and “magic” and “special codes,” the Chronicle article starts out by oversimplifying the concepts of Semantic Web and quickly shifts to steeping them in acronyms and dense technical jargon. If this really is the view of the Semantic Web that’s out there, then perhaps it does need a more consumer-friendly name.
May 14, 2007
Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data
Posted by Rachel under article, content strategyLeave a Comment
What better way to start this blog than with a link to an article I recently wrote for Boxes and Arrows? The article is called Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data. I’ve gotten a lot of response from this article, which leads me to believe that there’s a growing interest in this field and the professional roles associated with it.
