Ethnoclassification and vernacular vocabularies

The latest meme to catch fire in the IA community deals with the folk classification tools found on systems like del.icio.us and Flickr. Users are able to freely tag content with whatever metadata comes to mind. Headshift provides a good overview of the issues at hand, and Alex does his thing when making sure we [...]

Organizational Lessons from Burning Man – Spreading Memes

Chatting with some friends who have been going to Burning Man for years, we marveled at how, even with it’s astonishing growth, the event has been able to retain it’s essence year after year. It’s remarkable that, while the experience necessarily changed (25,000 people is just too different from 250), the spirit, and what draws [...]

People Are The Same The World Over

I’ve just completed the first section of Lawrence Weschler’s delightful collection of essays, Vermeer in Bosnia. One essay, “Aristotle in Belgrade”, follows protests in the face of rigged elections. He describes the Serbian political mindset as being able to support seeming opposites — “they could simultaneously feel that their neighbors were affording them no threat [...]

Jumping through hoops

A while back I posted about how product designs are getting too difficult, and how the greater the number of steps it takes for someone to set up a product, or to use a service, the less successful they will be. In it, I mentioned the Six Sigma concept of Rolled Throughput Yield: “the probability [...]

I’ve Got The United States Ranked 30th In Olympics Medal Count

Typically, we see medal counts ranking countries by raw medal numbers. Something like this, where the total score is derived by having the Gold worth 3, Silver worth 2, and Bronze worth 1. (This isn’t a complete count — I got sick of cleaning tabular data.) Country Gold Silver Bronze "Total" 1 United States 20 [...]

Pour Some Concrete On Me

When in D.C., I always make an attempt to visit the National Building Museum. I got the chance to do so today (wrapping up our workshop here), and the NBM has done it again with their fantastic Liquid Stone exhibit, all about concrete, its history, its engineering, contemporary uses, and where its headed.

Soccer doesn’t really explain much more than soccer

When I was in Europe, I found myself swept up in Euro 2004 fever. I found it odd that a sport I never before followed took so much of my attention. When I saw reviews of Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explain the World, I got a copy of it from my local library. I just [...]

Search, And Ye Shall Maybe Find

A little bit o’ company promotion here. Jeff and Darcy recently published “Site Content Search: A User Experience Analysis”, an in-depth review of search engine interfaces, what works, what doesn’t. Boatloads of examples, screenshots, etc. Use the coupon code SEARCHDEAL to get 15% off your whole order, as long as the search report is in [...]

Seeing Through the Mists of Marketing

In today’s Chronicle, an article on Humboldt Fog cheese begins with this passage: Few American artisan cheeses created in recent years have penetrated the national market like Humboldt Fog. Whether because of its striking appearance or superior flavor, consumers have embraced this unusual goat cheese with ash in the middle. In supermarkets that make no [...]

Design is Easy; Organizational Politics is Hard

[This is a draft (and an early one at that) of an essay I'm working on for the Adaptive Path site. Wanted to get some thoughts out there while still raw.] At the DIS2004 Conference, I attended a panel on how innovation seems to be on the wane, with the potential culprit being user-centered design [...]

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Links, thoughts, and essays from Peter Merholz