April 23, 2009

NYC IA Summit Redux

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An even next week that should be interesting. From Karen McGrane:

This year marked the 10th anniversary of the IA Summit. If you didn’t make it to Memphis (or even if you did) come see New York locals give abbreviated versions of their talks. This event is free!

 

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS

  •  Cindy Chastain: Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design
  • Anders Ramsay: Agile For The Rest of Us 
  • Christine Boese: Are Human Beings Becoming Dumb Terminals?
  • Karen McGrane: Designing For, With, and Around Advertising 
  • Elena Melendy + Rachel Lovinger: Content Strategy Consortium Highlights
  • Nasir Barday: Professional IA/UX Organizations – How to start and run a successful local group or chapter 
  • Chris Fahey + Whitney Hess: The Courage to Quit: Starting, Growing and Maintaining Your Own UX Business 
  • Whitney Hess: Evangelizing Yourself: You can’t change the world if no one knows your name

 

WHEN

Tuesday, April 28

6:30 PM Doors Open

7:00 PM Presentations Start

9:30 PM  Discussion + Networking

 

WHERE

White Rabbit, 145 E Houston Street btw 1st and 2nd Avenues

 

March 31, 2009

Semantic Web takes root at the IA Summit

Posted by Rachel under conference, semantic web
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At the recent IA Summit, I was surprised and delighted to see how many talks there were about the Semantic Web. Before this emerging technology can really catch on, we will need more Information Architects and Interaction Designers who understand the potential and can design elegant solutions to real problems (both user problems and business problems). In some ways, I wish the conversation were further along, but I realize that it has to start somewhere. The fact that the subject exploded onto the scene in such a big way is a good indication that Web 3.0 is on a lot of people’s minds. 

These are the talks I saw: (more…)

 

March 25, 2009

Content Strategy Consortium

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Over on scatter/gather I wrote a post summing up my experience of last week’s Content Strategy Consortium at the IA Summit. It was a very inspiring experience and there’s a lot more to say about it. This event is bound to inspire many posts – here, on scatter/gather, and on the blogs of my cohorts. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here’s some additional coverage of the event:

 

March 24, 2009

Semantic Web for Dummies

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Jeff Pollock has just released a book called Semantic Web for Dummies. Over at Semantic Universe you can download a free chapter (registration required), order the book, or read Jeff’s blog posts. I haven’t read the book yet, but Jeff is a really smart person with the ability to speak plainly and compellingly. This book is bound to be useful for people who are trying to understand the Semantic Web, or are still struggling with how to explain it to others. I just put my copy on order.

 

March 13, 2009

Scatter/Gather goes live

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My department at Razorfish launched a blog today called Scatter/Gather. All of the contributors are Content Strategists (or Information Architects with some experience and interest in content strategy), and we’ll be covering a wide range of subjects relating to the use of content and language in the digital realms. 

My first post is called “Don’t Shoot the Messager” and it’s about a conversation I had about the discrepency between the words message and messenger. It even features a celebrity appearance! Go check it out, and then read all the posts by my brilliant coworkers.

 

February 25, 2009

Creative Commons and common acts of creativity

Posted by Rachel under digital rights, social networking
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Today I was tagged in one of those Facebook things that ask you to make up an album cover based on grabbing a couple random bits of text from wikimedia and wikiquotes, and a random photo from flickr’s Explore page. I immediately wondered about the licensing issues involved, since most of the photos on flickr’s Explore page are set to “(c) all rights reserved”. 

Sure, this is just a fun bit of remixing, and no one is profiting from it, but isn’t this exactly the kind of thing that Creative Commons was invented to support? Why not make use of it? First I looked around on flickr and discovered that they allow you to find random images, interesting images, or CC-licensed images, but they don’t offer a way to use all three of these criteria at once. 

But I’m sure that it’s possible with the flickr API. A quick search led me to this blog post by Eszter Hargittai about this very same issue. She points to this handy tool by Mike Lietz, who used the flickr API to do this very thing – show a random photo from the Explore page that has a CC license. 

With more and more people using flickr as a source for reusable, remixable images, maybe they will start to provide more robust options for exploring and searching CC-licensed content.

 

February 17, 2009

Misconceiving the Mainstream Media

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When things that are just under the cultural radar get covered in the “mainstream media” – like a doctor using Twitter during surgery (CNN), the uproar over the new Facebook terms of service (MSNBC), or the “25 random things” meme (NYTimes) – reactions tend to range from “Oh wow, they covered this thing I like” to “Yeah, what took them so long to catch on?”

Both of these reactions are misguided. Having worked in mainstream media for many years, I can tell you that there’s no concerted effort to cover certain things, or hold off on covering things. The “media” is made up of individual people who have a lot of space to fill, whether in print, on TV or online.

Sure, some of their stories are pitched by publicists, and some news is so important it demands to be covered. But the rest of the space is going to be filled with content about things that individual writers or editors are interested in. And these things will be covered at the time when the person happens to find out about them. That might be 6 months after you’ve already gotten sick of it, but to that journalist it’s new. 

Plus, once a subculture has been covered by some mainstream news outlets, it becomes legitimate fodder for everyone else. Here’s a meta-article on NBC LA about coverage of the “25 things” meme: 25 Things Articles Arriving as Fast as 25 Things Lists.

All I’m saying is that people should neither be insulted nor impressed when their pet activity is covered in the mainstream media. It just means that the right person discovered your niche at the right moment, and there was space to fill on the page. Enjoy the moment, but keep it in perspective.

 

February 11, 2009

ROFLthing in the City

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ROFLconA couple weeks ago I went to a one-day event called ROFLthing-NYC, put on by the same people that brought you ROFLcon last spring. 

There’s been tons of coverage of it. It was blogged by the New York Times. There are excellent interviews on Rocketboom (and video of one of the presentations). Laughing Squid posted some great photos. There’s even a ROFLcon channel on Vimeo, which has more videos. I think more of the presentation videos will be showing up there eventually. 

I loved all the talks I saw:

Lots of other interesting people were there, like MC Frontalot, Moot, and Tron Guy. There was an annoying contingent of Anonymous, who had the impression that the conference was about them, but they settled down a bit after Jason Scott invited one of them onstage to give him the opportunity to say his bit and be done. 

The whole thing went by way too fast. I hope these guys do another event soon.

 

December 20, 2008

The Content Strategy Conversation

Posted by Rachel under content strategy
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Kristina Halvorson has written a very thought provoking article called The Discipline of Content Strategy over on A List Apart. The reader comments after the article are equally interesting and engaging, so I’d call it a smashing success! I agree with those that say that the discussion of this discipline is in roughly the same place that the discussion of IA was about 10-15 years ago, and I’m so happy to see people actively taking part in advancing the conversation. Halvorson makes several really good points, but there remains a need to connect the dots. This is not a criticism of the article, I think it’s just where the discipline is at this point in time. (more…)

 

November 12, 2008

Open Science, Open World

Posted by Rachel under content strategy, digital rights
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I was recently browsing a British blog called Science in the open, by Cameron Neylon, which is described as “An openwetware blog on the challenges of open and connected science.” I wasn’t sure how relevant this would be to me, but I quickly discovered that many of the openness issues facing the scientific community are similar to (or deeply related to) issues in the rest of the world of information. (more…)

 

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