The Sociobiology of Information Architecture :

"Long before anyone was looking for "godfathers" of information architecture, our fellow species were wrestling with some of the same problems we face today. The real godfathers of information architecture, as it turns out, emerged a very long time ago with the earliest origins of life on this planet."

a counter to the vast conspiracy theories surrounding the disappearing waste, ray ozzie posits a reasonable reason as to why aol might be a bit skittish - cryptographic export laws:

"When I downloaded it and looked at the license, I saw a bunch of GPL legalese but I didn't see anything about export restrictions. But last I checked, encryption software still requires an export license, as it has for as long as I've been in this business."

what stupendous timing. is ie dead as we know it?

"As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.

Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1. Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."

[ via webvoice ]

the oscom keynote fiasco makes me sad for all that it portends for everyone involved.

i'm a little surprised at the overwhelming 80% preference for e-mail over the phone for business communications. i know i usually prefer email and if synchronous communication is absolutely necessary then IM is the communication mode of choice. voice is overated:

"Findings also revealed that 74% of respondents believe being without e-mail would present more of a hardship than being without phone service. "

[ via webword ]

Male sweat relaxes women:

"Ladies! Looking for a way to relax? Then try sniffing a man's underarm. New research shows that armpit sweat calms female volunteers."

i still maintain the matrix reloaded sucked so bad it should be illegal, but the "the matrix reloaded explained" does a good job of explaining what they were trying to do. read the review and skip the movie.

business ignorance:

"But investors aren't handing out rewards for collecting a lot of data. It's just meaningless mountains of vacuous bits unless you're getting some good use out of it; and if what I'm seeing is the norm, a lot of people aren't."

dumber.

i definately want a wireless-ready tree house.

31 years old. it's feeling pretty good - me and the thirties are going to get along famously. i might feel differently a decade or two from now, but i'm o.k. with getting older. you can't do much about it and being young isn't all that it's cracked-up to be anyway.

it's a pagerank post! jeremy zawodny declares that pagerank is dead, which has tangentially related to some of the things i was rambling on about earlier in the week:

"With all the recent discussion of Google removing (or not removing) blogs from their index, people have been barking up the wrong tree. Google doesn't have to remove them. The simply need to identify them in a reliable way. Then they can be penalized (given a lower PageRank). And, believe it or not, that's not terribly difficult to do if you have a good web map and a few blogs to use as starting points.

It has already happened."

interesting that they seem to be favoring the "mass penalization" route, instead of the "differential display" option.

i was ready to suspend belief. i was ready to not think. and despite all that, the matrix reloaded sucked. bad. i'm sorry to have dragged kris to it. the k5 review was too kind:

"Furthermore, the Wachowskis commit Lucas's most egregious sin: the sin of excess."

adam kalsey writes a web-based front end to an existing buttom maker so you can easily make buttons that are all the rage these days, quickly finds himself in at the heart of memestorm and not quiet sure what to make of it. maybe there's a verb for this type of thing. "warchalked" perhaps?

tim bray has challenged the rdf community to come up with an rdf-based app that's begs to be used and is viral. while i haven't seen a winning example, i think that there are a few promising potential entrants from the foaf world. examples include spring desktop's innovative foaf support. it'll be intersting so see what typepad does beyond simly making it easy to produce a foaf file.

how does one imbue even more geek points on the world as a blog, which is a realtimeish geographic tracking of blog updates using weblogs.com, geocoding and rss? start mapping updates onto a dymaxion map. bucky would be proud.

it appears that google officially considers the blogclog a non-issue, ostensibly aggreeing with phil's analysis, which goes something along the lines of, if you get crappy results then there aren't any good results. i still think there are some interesting points about how searching through blogs represents a different "mode" of finding information, in the same way that i thing that searching usenet posting represents a different "mode". and this difference is heightened precisely when it's needed the most - when good results are ill-defined. hi. ho. at least according according to google, i'm full of crap and it's a non-issue. on to more interesting things...

well, even if it needs to be a qualified as a New York Times top ten business paperback bestseller, it's still quiet an accomplishment for a technical publication. congratulations to rael and tara.

steve jenson has whipped-up a simple little Jabber2Google rosterbot. requires java:

"After you start this jabber client, it will connect to the Jabber server you specify and wait for requests. Add it to your friends list and send it a message. In a few seconds, you'll be sent the top 10 google search results for that message."

there seem to be a crop of php developers discovering the value of xul. the intro is a little over the top, but it's a nice entry-level article:

"Here's a question: what if I was to tell you that you can write your own version of Word using something like HTML and JavaScript? What if I added that you could run on your hard disk or launch it directly from your Web server and use it to update your site's content? It sounds a little far fetched, I know, but it's right here, right now -- and it calls itself "Zool"."

all the necessary caveats apply about the quality of reporting on random studies, but i can't help linking to the bbc's fascinating report on what's going on when you sense ghosts or otherwise get a good case of the howling fantods . ignoring the very real possibility of methodological funniness, it appears that regular people can reliably detect "spookiness" in places that are claimed to be "spooky", even if they don't know that they are supposed to be in a "spooky" place:

"The results were striking: participants did record a higher number of unusual experiences in the most classically haunted places of Hampton Court, areas such as the Georgian rooms and the Haunted Gallery."

""Hauntings exist, in the sense that places exist where people reliably have unusual experiences," Dr Richard Wiseman told BBC News Online. "The existence of ghosts is a way of explaining these experiences.""

the scientists posit that there aren't really any ghosts, but rather that there some subtle perceptual cues that get consistantly interpreted as spooky. i'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that these cues are less obvious than standing in a dimly lit, cobwebbed crypt with organ music wafting in. it'd be interesting to see if they could reduce the perceptual cues to their constituent parts, so that you could more reliably manipulate the general level of "spookiness". until then, as one commenter aptly states, " To the believer no proof is required, to the sceptic, no proof is sufficient."

phil skillfully wields his rhetorical sword and asserts that i'm missing the blogclog point. olivier thinks i'm off target as well. before i fully paint myself into a corner, i want to make it clear that i'm not advocating removing blogs links from the general index, but rather i think it might be useful to remove or modify the display of the text of blogs from main page search results. fwiw, via olivier's post, i discovered that nick denton had already contemplated and dismissed this idea.

anyway, both olivier and phil make good points and phil is particularly adept at using my own example to weaken my argument:

"However, someone else (if they are at least half-bright), searching for that phrase because they have a broken window crank on their Galaxie, could go to Eric's weblog, track down the entry, see the magic words "i'm fortunate to have the original shop manual", track down his email address, and ask him if he'd be willing to trade copies of a few pages for some extra parts. That's quite a bit more useful than the other results, offering to sell one car with a missing window, a Galaxie, and yet another car with a particular crankshaft."

olivier generalizes the point and highlights a particular "mode" of searching in which blogs are extremely helpful:

"Well, Google has figured out that blogs are useful pre-surfing resources full of links and context. They don't necessarily think that your weblog is the best end destination for your query, but it's probably a good lead to find an actual page or site to answer it. Blogs and their brethren are good at digging the best of the web (where else do you find the kind of stuff there's on Boing Boing, Memepool or Muxway?) If your blog entry is just one degree of separation from a page that will fulfill a web query, that in itself is valuable."

of course, the weakness of making this argument is that it's dependent on the quality and appropriateness of blogs posts that you are "presifting" through. phil understands this, and it's why he's feeling a little bad about not doing his duty to provide any useful information after finding himself as the authoritative resource for "http error 500". it's a debatable point that as the number of active bloggers increase that the signal in the presifting will remain high. even more importantly - and i have nothing but anectode to support this claim - i don't think that most people want to engage in or "get" this presifting search behavior. it's confusing to them. and anything that is confusing to most users is A Bad Thing for google. evidence of the confusion can be found in andrew brown getting questions about car repair in his blog. and phil ulrich getting comments from pissed off "random searchers", demanding to know, "WHERE IS THE INFO ABOUT (X)? I GOT HERE THRU GOOGLE NOW WHERE IS IT?".

to my naive eye, this means something is broken and it's potentially more important to google than placating advertisers. obviously i could be making something out of nothing and artfully taking a few anectdotes out of context, but i suspect that these are early warning signs. maybe google can tweak the algorithm to just devalue blogs, which doesn't feel like The Right Thing To Do. or maybe they could just take blogs text out the general mix [ but not stop milking the pagerank value ] and put them in a separate tab. or maybe they could differentiate the results in a way that is similar to the way they display "traditional" news items when you use a search term that picks up news stories on the general search page. this feels natural to me. maybe jason can put together a smooth mockup.

or maybe i'm full of crap.

"the blog clog myth" makes some interesting points about the the blog clog problem and does a good job of pointing out the fallacy in the analogy between the blogosphere and usenet:

"The "precedent" quoted, when Google bought the Usenet archives of Deja.com and "removed the groups from the main index", is a red herring. Google has not removed newsgroups from the main Google index - you'll find web-based archives of newsgroups on there today. It simply built a far better, specialised search for the groups elsewhere after it acquired the Deja.com archive."

good point, but it doesn't address this issue that blogs are clogging the results of searches in a way that web-based archives of usenet postings never did. when i search for "galaxie 500 window crank" i don't want to find me as the number one hit. i don't think anyone else does either. and here's the main point - it's a disservice to the people who are doing the searching.

it might be fun for my ego, but most people - the vast preponderance of people - don't care about weblogs [ even if they might reap the benefits of finding what they are looking for through the wonders of pagerank ]. most people would consider google to be a better service if i, and a relatively small number of other people, didn't get in the way of the information they really want. i might soften my stance that blogs should be removed from the main index by default, but to maintain that google is a better service by biasing results towards information that most users aren't interested [ repeat after me, "most users aren't bloggers" ] in, isn't in keeping with google's historic stance as being obsessively focused on users. me dons abestos duds

"Broadband Growth Seen Slowing" versus "Connections to Broadband Increase 50%".

i've been taking a closer look at drupal with an eye towards using it as a foundation for a variety of facefive services. it has really come a long way since the last time i played around with it. and the fact that it has ldap support makes my life infinitely easier [ fingers crossed since i haven't tried the module yet ]. [ update: dang. it looks like the ldap module only authenticates against and existing ldap server, it doesn't actually provision new users to the resource. i guess i don't get our of doing no work :-) ] it takes a little bit of energy to get into the drupal lingo, but it certainly is looking like it's worth the effort.

i wish there was a module to ease integration with making payments via something like trustcommerce.

recently, in an move that might make lesser men feel less manly, my wife and sister-in-law went out and bought a stihl 250 chainsaw to share between us for those times when nothing but a chainsaw will do the job. however, reading the owner's manual freaked me out sufficiently that i required a tutorial from a brother-in-law who is much better trained in operating equipment that can kill or maim you. today was the first day that i got to walk around and decimate unsuspecting limbs and "trash trees" on our property. it was fun. i got a mean hankerin' to take down the fifty foot maple in the backyard, but i'll probably hold off.

i love the smell of chainsaw fumes in the morning. it smells like victory.

disproving the thesis that they only produce crap, some enterprising students at the mit media lab have produced the you're in control [ urine control ] system which has sensors that detect a the stream of urine, enabling one to play interactive games. throw in the ability to play multiplayer games in bathrooms around the world and you've got yourself an instant hit.

adam kalsey has whipped together a snazzy css tabs implementation with submenus that looks great and survives a first run through the browser gamut.

Photopal 1.0 Beta:

"PhotoPal is an image organization system featuring template driven layout, automatic thumbnail creation, RSS feeds, picture level EXIF date extraction, and picture level descriptions, all without the need for an SQL like database."

[ via inluminent ]

Instant messaging for e-business:

"In this article, Gerhard Poul shows how XML-based Jabber fits into today's e-business infrastructure, lighting instant messaging in a whole new way. You'll see that you can use Jabber to integrate your existing e-business into a more dynamic and personal environment. Your e-business site will be able to communicate with its users faster and integrate itself into their lives -- and you'll have fun learning and playing with what Jabber offers."

i have no time to digest if this is some kid of wierd ponzi scheme, but in the midst of wading through my emails tonight, i noticed a nice email from someone named john who bought every single last one of my snowdeal blogshares and is willing to give them to me. as soon as i get back from chicago, john, i'll take you up on the offer. thanks.

les has noticed the blognoise problem and coined the slighly-less-trippingly-off-the-tongue, "google blog clog". kellan posits that we're really talking about linguistic convergence, which sounds like a topic worthy of a dissertation:

"My thought is perhaps we're seeing the effect of Google having a language based interface. I search in English, and therefore I'm much more likely to get English results back. Most of the people I know speak English. On the Net however this doesn't proscribe the field much. I think perhaps it needs to be broken down beyond that, I don't just speak English, I speak a vernacular informed by age, class, education, social environment, etc. My word choices are a product of culture. For example Mako and Josiah from the above thread have both had significant impacts on the Linux culture I was raised in. Could even my 3 word query display a language bias?"

great. i'm going to chicago for a few days and i see that they are simulating terror. maybe i should add a few more minutes to the already horrendous drive times.

anyone who has beaten their heads against the css wall might want to go relax in the css zen garden. lots of purty stuff in there, although i haven't bothered to do any cross-browser testing yet.

wow. i think i know what i'll be making for a few people for christmas. The NoCat Night Light:

" What if you could house an AP in a package the size of a large lightbulb, and install it in an existing light socket? This seemed like a good idea, but how would you get network access to it without running CAT5 to the socket? Easy: Powerline Ethernet."

today looks like a fine day to irritate the neighbors by banging on the galaxie. i think i'll take a another stab at fixing the window crank and the fan belt. i should probably flush the radiator and change the oil as well, but that seems like far too much effort. hopefully i can get the window fixed, since the inside of the galaxie can get mighty stifling without some airflow. you don't look nearly as cool cruising around town if you're red-faced and sweaty. no sir.

[ meta: as if to prove the blognoise point, i just ran into myself while looking for "galaxie 500 window crank" resources. ]

while not really stating anything new, the timing of the latest orlowski piece on google fixing the "blognoise" problem is interesting because i've become increasingly aware of the once amusing and soon to aggravating problem:

""They didn't foresee a tightly-bound body of wirers," reckons Stock. "They presumed that technicians at USC would link to the best papers from MIT, to the best local sites from a land trust or a river study - rather than a clique, a small group of people writing about each other constantly. They obviously bump the rankings system in a way for which it wasn't prepared.""

what's wierder is that i've been finding myself quiet regularly in the top 20 of searches that i'm doing. i hardly think anyone looking for real information is amused. i think they should sequester blogs off into their own little space not unlike they did with usenet. why this would be controversial to anyone is beyond me. this is exactly why technorati is so useful.

with rumors that aol is putting 400 people on developing a blogging tool, one has to wonder if they're subscribing to the "one per pixel" development methodology:

"I once consulted for a company that had 50 developers working on a simple GUI. This GUI was a flat panel touch screen upon which several dozen dialog boxes could be made to appear. These 50 developers worked on this project for five years or more. That's 25 man-decades, 2.5 man-centuries! COME ON! Three guys could have done this in three months! My buddies and I used to joke that they had one developer per pixel and that each developer wrote the code for his pixel."

rob flickenger proves once again that he is too cool for school. he's whipped together a nifty-sounding streaming server and rendezvous services for his seattlewireless node:

"Wireless users at the cafe across the street (or anywhere within a block or so) can find my local services any time just by looking at available rendezvous sites. As if that weren't enough, my streamer is even advertising itself as a DAAP stream, so iTunes 4 users can see that it's available from inside iTunes itself."

the guardian takes a half-hearted whack at social software . although it's not entirely coherent, it does get bonus points for capturing the lack of consensus on what exactly social software is :

"Social software is the next big thing: everybody's talking about it. A lot of people are developing exciting new programs to aid social interaction. Social software is being massively overhyped. It's just a sideshow run by a few geeks with a tenuous grip on reality. Social software isn't new: we've been using it for decades. We already have email, Usenet newsgroups, chatrooms, instant messaging, bulletin boards, multi-user games and more. Social software isn't a new technology at all, it just reflects changes in society. Take your pick..."

beyond being a nifty umbrella to organize all the things that prove that "it's the communication, stupid" , i'm not sure how useful the phrase is. i hereby predict that it will die the horrible that awaits every bit of buzzword bingo that means all things to all people - meaninglessness.

salam pax is back and as eloquent as ever:

"Things are looking kind of OK, these days. Life has a way of moving on. Your senses are numbed, things stop shocking you. If there is one thing you should believe in, it is that life will find a way to push on, humans are adaptable, that is the only way to explain how such a foolish species has kept itself on this planet without wiping itself out. Humans are very adaptable, physically and emotionally."

having grown up in the northeast, lived just a hop skip and a jump from the old man while at dartmouth and hiked a good deal in the white mountains, i was sad to see that the ancient rock formation collapsed recently. it's hard to imagine that nathian hawthorne once waxed poetic about the curious collection of rocks:

"Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: ''It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice.'' We are titans of another sort these days. Hawthorne wrote that if a viewer of the Great Stone Face walked up too close to it, ''he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another.''"

into the annotated bookmark bin - XUL: rendering GUIs with PHP and XUL to PHP-GTK. it has been awhile since i've toyed with xul - while certainly not a panacea with some obvious downsides, it's surprising that it hasn't seen more uptake in the developer community. [ via blogzilla ]

i see that everyone and their sister is talking about beck's blog [ or, more precisely his journal ]. intrigued, i decide to check it out with the appropriate degree of skepticism. and despite my best attempt to view the journal through jaded and cynical lenses, i have to admit that i'm impressed. although it appears to be updated sporadically, entries like press junk and junket might just make me a regular reader:

"interviews range from chit chat about your favorite food to justifications for your actual existence. usually what interviewers do is find something that somebody said somewhere about you that wasn't particularly nice, then ask you "a lot of people think or say blabedy blah about you, what do you think about that?" its the tactic they're taught in school; to find the 'conflict', flesh it out and get their story. which is ok when you're doing a story about a kid who gets stuck in the bottom of a well, but with someone who's writing some silly little songs and prancing around a stage, its kind of overkill (unless you're mainlining drugs of mass destruction or you're locked in heated oasis battle). otherwise its just tedious--"a lot of people say you're unoriginal, a lot of people say you have no soul, a lot of people say your last album ended your career", ad nauseam. here's my view on this kind of thing, though its no justification or intended to change one's aesthetic sense; one could admire the actual physical feat of standing under 110 degree lights, 2 hours sleep, a scrutinizing audience, and trying to sing in tune without actually being able to hear anything, etc. I don't tend to rip on other bands in the press, cos I think its a waste of time and energy and I know what goes into making a record, touring, press, etc. I only have respect for people who go through the mill and down the gauntlet just to play a few tunes for people."

no rss feed, a restrictive legal statement on copying content and use of the word 'Cos' are all definite turn-offs, but hearing the faint sounds of a coherent, strong voice might just stop me from passing over beck the next time i go shopping for tunes.

i got my ibook back from the shop after latest round of repairs. here's to hoping it will last longer than a month before needing another massive overhaul.

it was the hardest thing i've ever done in my life, but i finished the marathon. i'll gradually get back into the swing of things over the next few days. hopefully i'll get around to writing about the whole experience in the next day or two. i'm not sure why people put their bodies through things like marathons, but at the same time, i can't say i won't run another one. now it seems it's time to dig through a mountain of email, which is the last thing i want to do right now.

Days of the Honeynet is a great vignette on all the Not Fun Things that can happen when you intentionally let your guard down in the wild, wild, web [ and internet ]:

:Among other benefits, running a honeynet makes one acutely aware about "what is going on" out there. While placing a network IDS outside one's firewall might also provide a similar flood of alerts, a honeypot provides a unique prospective on what will be going on when a related server is compromised used by the intruders.

As a result of our research, many gigabytes of network traffic dumps are piling up on the hard drives, databases are filling with alerts, rootkits and exploit-pack collections are growing."

kris and i are getting ready for the marathon, so things might be a little slow for a few days. the race isn't until sunday, but we're heading to cincinnati tommorrow for a little rest and relaxation before the run. i had big plans of moblogging the marathon, but it looks like we might just go low tech for this one. old school analog.

leave some ice in the freezer. i might need some when i get back.