Dopplr: Discovering ‘the Net’

On By RachelIn social networkingLeave a comment

Dopplr Badge Recently I joined Dopplr, a new travel-oriented social networking site. Or social networking for frequent travelers. Or something like that. To be honest, I’m still not really sure what it’s for.

I’ll admit, I joined it because it has a straightforward, clean design, and the tone is light, fun, and polite in a very British way. It doesn’t seem like the kind of social networking site that’s going to pressure (or trick) me into inviting everyone I’ve ever sent an email or instant message. It doesn’t seem like the type that’s going to give me the hard sell, or pimp out my personal info.

Ok, no major barriers to entry. So I tried it. But, as I said, I’m still not quite sure I get the point. I connected to some people I know. I added information about some trips I’m going to take. I discovered that a Europe-based conference buddy will be going to SXSW, where our paths will cross again. Kinda cool, I guess. And…now what?

I’ve read some posts (including this one by creator, Matt Biddulph) which say it’s designed to increase serendipity. Well, I guess I can invest some time in pursuing a goal like that.

Digital Design Outlook

On By RachelIn article, design, semantic webLeave a comment

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.

Earn it, social websites!

On By RachelIn content strategy, disinformation architecture, social networkingLeave a comment

Recently a couple of my friends joined Shelfari and I received email from them, inviting me to join. The messages were friendly, but generic. The only variation was the user name and email address of each friend. This seemed particularly weird because the folks at Shelfari clearly wrote the email very carefully to sound casual and personal, but really, what are the chances that both of these friends would say:

I just joined Shelfari to connect with other book lovers. Come see the books I love and see if we have any in common. Then pick my next book so I can keep on reading.

Click below to join my group of friends on Shelfari!

Next came the part that really bugged me…

Continue reading “Earn it, social websites!” →

Disinformation Architecture

On By RachelIn design, disinformation architecture, social networking2 Comments

I enjoy Facebook, but I find some of the available apps increasingly annoying. Aside from the fact that many of them are pointless, I’m really disturbed by the tactics they frequently employ to make themselves ubiquitous.

One of the apps that, in a general sense, I actually like is an app that lets me rate and review movies, share my opinions on films, and read about the opinions of others. It includes a “Movie Compatibility Test” which tells me how close my taste is to my buddies’, based on comparing our ratings for some 50-odd movies. It alerts me every time one of my friends has taken the quiz, so I can go check how well we matched up. I love movies, and all this sounds pretty cool. The problem is… Continue reading “Disinformation Architecture” →

Typographical Debate

On By RachelIn design, disinformation architectureLeave a comment

This evening I went to see a documentary called Helvetica with some friends from work. Normally I wouldn’t write about films here, but this one seemed appropriate. Positioning itself as a documentary about a font, it was actually a broader exploration of the evolution of typography and what a font communicates. 

Helvetica logo

Helvetica was created in the late ’50s. At the time it solved many graphic design problems and it sort of took the modern world by storm. Later, there was some post-modern backlash, but the font was already so ubiquitous, there was no going back. The film depicted the views and feelings of many prominent designers, and offered a wide range of perspectives on the font.

Continue reading “Typographical Debate” →

SXSW 2008: Panel Picker open for business!

On By RachelIn conference, folksonomy, semantic web, taxonomyLeave a comment

SXSW Interactive lets the public decide what they want to see at the conference. All you have to do is go to the Panel Picker, sign up for an account, and then start rating your interest in the 683 proposed topics. Vote before midnight on Friday, September 21st.

These are the proposals I submitted:

Semantic Web for UX

On By RachelIn semantic web1 Comment

This morning I did a presentation on the Semantic Web for my fellow User Experience colleagues. I’m really pleased with how it went. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to frame this issue from the perspective of User Experience Design and I think I succeed in getting some people intrigued. Hopefully this will be the start of a long discussion on how to begin creating elegant, effective user-centered applications of semantic technologies.

Tom Coates is doing a talk on Designing for a Web of Data at dconstruct. I wish I could go, because we all need more thoughtful discussions about practice in this area and I think Coates has a great point of view for this kind of thing. Unfortunately, the conference is already sold out (plus, it’s in Brighton, UK). Hopefully, as his thought evolves on this subject, Tom will continue to speak and write about these emerging design challenges, and I’ll get to hear him another time.

Also, as I was preparing for this presentation, I read and skimmed a lot of blogs, articles, and other musings about Semantic Web (or semantic web, or even semantic Web, if you prefer). I thought I’d share some of them, starting with:

More about Hack Day: Coming Soon

On By RachelIn conferenceLeave a comment

I definitely have more to say about my experiences at Hack Day London. Between a busy new project at work, an elbow injury that makes my typing less than half as efficient as normal, and all the usual summer things going on, I’ve been finding it hard to find the time (and the will) to fire up the computer in my (brief) free moments to write down my thoughts. I will do it soon, though, I promise.

I plan to write about the session I went to on Geo mobile apps, the hypothetical hacking I did with my friend Chris, and some of the cool hacks that were on display at the end. Check back soon.

Hack Day: Machine Tags

On By RachelIn conference, folksonomy5 Comments

The first talk I was able to attend at Hack Day was by Flickr’s Aaron Straup Cope and Dan Catt, about Machine Tags. I’m really interested in this because it adds another layer of metadata to tags, allowing them to be read by machines. I’ve heard them described as triples, and in a way I suppose that’s true, but these are not like RDF triples. Basically, a machine tag consists of a namepace, a predicate, and a value organized in a certain syntax. It’s pretty simple, but should allow services to make use of the additional data pretty easily. I scribbled a note on my paper that says:

  • folksonomy :: taxonomy
  • machine tags :: RDF

That’s a simplification, of course, but it seemed to be a good way to describe the relationship. The two main issues that will affect the adaption of machine tags are:

  1. What can you do with them? I think the answer to this one is pretty wide open. You can make apps that will use machine tags to express relationships between content, people, etc, and trigger all kinds of behaviors. Flickr’s API lets you query machine tags, and basically what you do with it is just limited by your imagination.
  2. Where is the data coming from? The question is, though, will anyone aside from you, be adding the kind of machine tags that will make your application work? This is really two questions.
    1. What’s going to make me go back into nearly 1500 photos and add more tags to them? Something needs to be done to make this a little easier or people will never do it. I’m a pretty dedicated information geek. I’ve spent an hour disambiguating two names on Wikipedia. But I’m already dragging my feet adding my backlog of Flickr photos to the map, I can’t see sift through all of them again.
    2. Even if I do, what’s to say my machine tags will be compatible with your application? Do we need some kind of standards? Or are we expecting people to add new machine tags to their content for each application they want to contribute to?

Clearly, what’s needed is something that will assist users by automatically generating suggested machine tags that they can then revise, approve, or decline. Interesting things to think about at Hack Day…

One of the big winners of the day was a hack that used machine tags – Flickr Tunes by Steffan Jones. Basically, it was a Mac OX widget that used the BBC Muiscbrain database (I think) and the Flickr API to match machine tagged photos with a song. So, if a person took a photo that they felt illustrated a particular song, and they used the appropriate machine tags to capture the song name (and even a time code), then the images would display while the song played, as a sort of slide show, even keying to the specific moment in the song, if indicated.

Pretty cool, but as I mentioned, how much data would need to be entered to make it a valuable experience for fans of all different kinds of music?