peterme.com

You forgot "limp-wristed"

William Rohrbach wrote the following to Adaptive Path's general contact address. The "Q" and "A" part is a quote from the added material to Jesse's Ajax essay.

"Q. Did Adaptive Path invent Ajax? Did Google? Did Adaptive Path help build Google’s Ajax applications?

A. Neither Adaptive Path nor Google invented Ajax. Google’s recent products are simply the highest-profile examples of Ajax applications. Adaptive Path was not involved in the development of Google’s Ajax applications, but we have been doing Ajax work for some of our other clients."

Ahhh... maybe you should mention where Ajax had its genesis...specifically Microsoft. Or as assholes like you call them M$.

And the highest-profile example of Ajax and still the best is Outlook Web client.

Fucking open-source pansy loving shit fuck pricks.

That last line is become our new motto.

A Book that Changed My Life: The Design of the Everyday Things

A month or so back, I attended a book reading put together by Kevin Smokler for his edited work, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times. At the end of the event, he asks the audience to tell him about a book that changed your life.

I thought for a moment, but not much more than a moment. Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things emerged in my head as the obvious choice.

The year was 1994. I was one year out of getting my B.A. in anthropology at Cal. In June, I moved from San Francisco to New York to intern at The Voyager Company, a multimedia CD-ROM publisher. Voyager was expanding pretty rapidly. "Multimedia" was to 1994-95 what ".com" would be to 1998-99.

I was brought in to work on a series of CD-ROMs called Our Secret Century, a curated selection of films from the Prelinger Archives (much of which can be viewed at The Internet Archive). However, shortly after I began, that project was shelved.

There were CD-ROMs in production needing to get out the door, and so I was put on Quality Assurance duty. The first title I worked on was "First Person: Donald Norman - Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine." I had never heard of Don before. The CD-ROM consisted of the full text of his three books up to that point (The Design of the Everyday Things, Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles, and Things That Make Us Smart, all listed here), annotated with animations and videos of Don that further explained the concepts in the books. My job was to go, page by page, and click around, and make sure everything worked.

This is an odd way to read a book, but it also meant that I engaged with the text to a level of depth I probably wouldn't otherwise. And, as has happened with so many other people, when he criticizes thoughtless door design, or the lack of mapping between the controls of a stove and the burners themselves, I had that "Aha!" moment. And as I continued reading about conceptual models, system images, recognition versus recall, affordances (affordances! and in the CD-ROM, there's a little video of Don describing affordances using a book, talking about how a book, among other things, affords scratching), the power of forcing functions, the photo of beer keg handles used to distinguish controls in a nuclear power plant.

Don's book opened my eyes to a field I had never heard of. With this book, he essentially brought the notion of "user-centered design" to a wide audience. (He had earlier worked on "User-Centered System Design," but that was pretty much strictly for academics.) And though it would be a few years before I practiced user-centered design, it was this book that set me on that path.

Addendum

The Voyager Company, after disappearing in 2002, has re-emerged as a website, where, it looks like, Bob is selling whatever was left in the warehouse in Irvington. While the catalog contains copies of the other First Person titles (Marvin Minsky, Stephen Jay Gould, and Mumia Abu-Jamal), there are no copies of the Don Norman CD-ROM. Nor can I find one anywhere on the Web. If you have a copy, and would be willing to either sell it or copy it, I would much appreciate it. Thanks.

Web 2.0 - It's not about the technology

Last night I attended the BayCHI panel, "Are You Ready for Web 2.0?" Panelists were Stewart from Flickr, Dave from Technorati, Paul from HousingMaps, and Tom from the nether regions of the info cloud.

Each panelist had about 10 minutes for an initial statement, and they went pretty much according to plan. Stewart talked about Flickr (and tags, and clusters, and interestingness, and Ajax, and the read-write web), Dave talked about the blogosphere, Paul talked about his peerless mashup, and Tom discussed the come-to-me Web.

Descent into tech talk

That was all well and good. Where it broke down was in the Q&A. Even though this is a seminar nominally of interaction and interface designers, the topic most on everyone's mind was APIs. And the panelists were only too happy to oblige, because they think about APIs a lot, too. But APIs, while important, are hardly the interesting part of the discussion. And I found it frustrating how quickly the conversation sank into the depths of tools and technology.

The answer to the question, "Are you ready for Web 2.0?" cannot be, "Yes! I have APIs! I gave tags! I use Ajax!" Readiness requires a shift in mindset, not technological capabilities (as many panelists pointed out, the technologies at play have been available for 5 to 6 years by this point).

Come on everybody, get open

Web 2.0 is primarily interesting from a philosophical standpoint. It's about relinquishing control, it's about openness, it's about trust and authenticity. APIs, Tags, Ajax, mashups, and all that are symptoms, outputs, results of this philosophical bent.

I think about this, because I wonder how we spread the philosophical appreciation underlying Web 2.0. Particularly because it runs contrary to business as usual. How do we get old-line organizations to appreciate the value of this philosophy? Paul made a point about how the keepers of the MLS real estate listings system currently derive their value from maintaining the information as closed and proprietary. And that it has made them rich. And that openness would be a threat. I would argue that they could probably get even richer if they opened that data up... not only for all the unforeseen ways that others would be able to add value, but also because Craigslist is becoming an ad hoc, grassroots service that will route around MLS if it maintains its gates.

More from Gene on Shirky's "Overrated"

It seems my post has prompted Gene to dig up his technically-oriented notes on the problems with Shirky's thesis. Some excellent stuff in there.

Clay Shirky's Viewpoints are Overrated

So, I finally got around to reading Clay Shirky's Ontology is Overrated essay. I'd been avoiding it for months, knowing I was going to want to take some time with it, and that I was going to want to respond.

Clay has assumed the role of an ideologue. He says enough that is obviously true to keep you nodding, and then slips in bold statements predicated on no actual facts. He tells people what they want to hear, setting up a false dichotomy between some mythical group of elite ontologists and the rag-tag uprising of mass categorization.

Long ago, Gene did an admirable job of poking at Clay's ideological bent. He commented that he was not concerned with the technical errors and omissions, and thought he might get to them in later posts. He hasn't yet, so I'm going to take a stab. Because I think it's important to show that the emperor has no hair... er, I mean, clothes.

Tags as Identity, Tags as Attribute

Clay has a tendency to use examples of tags-as-identity. So, he dismisses the value of the thesaurus, saying that you don't want to connect terms like "cinema," "film," and "movie," because "The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people."

OK. But, let's say I'm a scientist. Doing research on Avian Flu. And I go to Connotea, "free online reference management service for scientists". If I look in "Avian Flu," I will actually miss a vast number of articles of potential interest. Because, as this list shows, people are using a variety of terms for what they undoubtedly would consider the same thing:

Tags are rarely a matter of identity. Of the "cinema" people against the "movie" people. Of the "queer", "gay", "homosexual". Yes, that does happen occasionally, and yes, in those few instances, you shouldn't assume synonymity. But if I'm trying to understand the breadth of issues around the avian flu, you *better* point me to all the pertinent resources.

Classification Comes In More Than One Flavor

One of Clay's greatest fallacies is his conflation of hierarchy, general classification, library classification, and the-book-on-the-shelf. In poking fun at the Library of Congress' outdated categorization schemes, he uses the following example:

D: History (general)
DA: Great Britain
DB: Austria
DC: France
DD: Germany
DE: Mediterranean
DF: Greece
DG: Italy
DH: Low Countries
DJ: Netherlands
DK: Former Soviet Union
DL: Scandinavia
DP: Iberian Peninsula
DQ: Switzerland
DR: Balkan Peninsula
DS: Asia
DT: Africa
DU: Oceania
DX: Gypsies

Isn't it funny that "Greece" is considered to be at the same level as all of "Asia" and "Africa"?! Ha ha!

The problem is, the top-level categorization scheme actually means very little in actual use of the Library of Congress' classifications. What does matter is something that Clay only gives a throwaway comment to much later on. When he discusses symbolic links on Yahoo (where they can place "Books and Literature" in Entertainment though it primarily "belongs" in Humanities), he gives this aside: "The Library of Congress has something similar in its second-order categorization -- "This book is mainly about the Balkans, but it's also about art, or it's mainly about art, but it's also about the Balkans." Most hierarchical attempts to subdivide the world use some system like this."

Actually, the "second-order categorization" he's referring to are the LOC's Subject Headings. Which, in our digital world, are actually what people *use* when trying to find books. So, if I'm doing research on the history of environmental degradation caused by the development of the city of San Francisco, I don't need to figure out some single primary concept ("history," "environment", "san francisco") and hope for the best. As this listing of Gray Brechin's "Imperial San Francisco" demonstrates, I could find this book through any number of subjects...

So, yes, while books have One True Call Number to determine where it is placed on the shelf, they're also rife with metadata (author, title, subject) that allows us to uncover the book through a variety of means.

And Clay does classifiers a big disservice by suggesting they all assume The Shelf, which in turn suggests they all assume hierarchy. In doing so, he neglects faceted classification, which recognized long ago that there is no shelf. ("There is no spoon.")

Okay, I *will* talk about ideology

Clay's whole argument predicates a black-and-white distinction between evil hierarchy on one side and good tags on the other... And while Clay is right to question hierarchy, and, particularly, Yahoo's less-than-optimal use of it, he neglects to distinguish truly useful forms of professionally-created classification and categorization, which undermines his argument. (He continues to set tags against folders-and-hierarchies, as if there are no other ways of classifying information. Sigh.)

Where Clay demonstrates that his is a cause of ideology, not reason, is here:

"The problem is, because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, and they overestimate the amount to which users will agree, either with one another or with the catalogers, about the best way to categorize. They also underestimate the loss from erasing difference of expression, and they overestimate loss from the lack of a thesaurus."

Has he ever talked to a cataloguer? This statement suggests not. He sets up cataloguers as some faceless elite trying to enforce their will on the world. And he then makes a series of claims ("underestimate" this, "overestimate" that) that have no evidence whatsoever. They are convenient hypotheses, but nothing more.

And this ideology leads to this utterly nonsensical claim:

"With a multiplicity of points of view the question isn't "Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?" As long as at least one other person tags something they way you would, you'll find it -- using a thesaurus to force everyone's tags into tighter synchrony would actually worsen the noise you'll get with your signal. If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organize things is an error.

If all I'm doing is trying to find people who tag things the way I do, my exposure to the world of information is going to be awfully awfully constrained. If I'm a scientist, and I tag an article "bird flu," well, yes, I might find all the other articles labelled "bird flu," but I won't find any labelled "avian flu." In this case, a thesaurus (well, a synonym ring, but no mind) will increase the quality of the signal. And, contrary to Clay's coda in that claim, you can utilize thesauri and not believe there is one right way to organize things. In fact, a strong, robust thesaurus works PRECISELY BECAUSE there is not one right way to organize things.

Where I compare Clay to Jakob Nielsen, and yes, irony intended

Clay has pretty much decided to be to tagging what Jakob Nielsen is to usability. Vocal, bombastic, attention-getting, and frequently specious. Read his words carefully, because while his rhetoric might induce a lot of head-nodding, his arguments have a tendency to fall apart.

Look. I love tags. I love classifications. (I pretty much loathe hierarchy). All of these things will be made better when they work in concert. Not when they're set apart.

But Wait, There's More!

And hey, just for reading this far, here are two other places where Clay is demonstrably, well, if not wrong, misguided. In his discussion of Dresden and East Germany, he states, "It is much easier for a country to disappear than for a city to disappear, so when you're saying that the small thing is contained by the large thing, you're actually mixing radically different kinds of entities." Um. The former cities of Venice, Malibu, Hollywood, Brooklyn and others that have been swallowed up by neighboring growing cities might beg to differ. Countries and cities are similarly fictions (or not). Frankly, I don't know why he brings up this "example" in the first place.

The other is in this passage: "Let's say I need every Web page with the word "obstreperous" and "Minnesota" in it. You can't ask a cataloguer in advance to say "Well, that's going to be a useful category, we should encode that in advance." Instead, what the cataloguer is going to say is, "Obstreperous plus Minnesota! Forget it, we're not going to optimize for one-offs like that."" First we have to set aside the fact that Clay is now talking about free-text search, and not tagging. But, let's say he is talking about tagging. The system he's discussing already exists. It's called "postcoordinate indexing," and I mentioned it in a prior folksonomy post of mine.

I guess that's another thing that's really bugging me. Clay acting as if he's discovered unchartered territory, when, really, it's been well-trod upon for awhile.

I leave you with this. When considering purchasing an alarm system for my house, I Googled "home security." The amount of noise in those results is startling, because "home" and "security" can mean so many different things. However, using Yahoo!s Directory, I can find all manner of highly relevant items.

Keeping Your Ship Afloat As The Tide Recedes

Today's Chronicle prints an in-depth interview with Chip Conley, the CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, proprietors of a bunch of boutique hotels in San Francisco and its environs.

Chip successfully navigated his company through the worst hotel market in San Francisco since World War II -- and did so without closures and layoffs. SF's hotel industry continues to struggle through... interesting times. Union walkouts at 14 hotels have given San Francisco a shaky rep in the conventions-and-conferences biz, internet consolidators cut deep into margins, and the difficulty for international travelers to visit the US after 9/11 continues to hurt the tourist economy.

A choice bit:

Q: How did you survive that downturn?

A: We were probably more vulnerable than any other hotel company in the Bay Area because all of our hotels, until four months ago, were just in the Bay Area, and I don't have deep pockets. We were pretty vulnerable also because our average hotel is a three-star hotel. As the four and five stars start to drop prices, the price umbrella drops, and what happens to those guys at the bottom whose competitive advantage is price?

Fortunately, our competitive advantage was not just price. Because each of our hotels is a boutique hotel that has a very distinct market. There's a statistic out there called the Star Report. The Star Report says if the average is 100, what are you generating on a per-room basis compared to your competitors? In 2001, our average hotel was doing 103. By 2004, we were doing 122. We had no hotel defaults, no bankruptcies. In fact, we have taken over hotels from other hotels in town that had defaults.

I think the main reason we succeeded is because we got exceptionally focused. Instead of doing some mass layoffs, I didn't take a salary for four years. Our top executives took a 10 percent pay cut for almost three years. We had a pay freeze for all salaried employees. It was what we needed to do because we didn't want to kill our culture in the process of suffering through what was our Great Depression.

He also mentions that the Joie de Vivre hotel which receives the highest customer satisfaction scores is a union hotel.

In terms of how not to get caught up in price wars:

But what we decided to do beyond that is we said, "Let's not just match price. Let's create value. And we should create a bunch of content on our Web site also about the Bay Area.'' So someone could just use our Web site as a portal. Plus we also created a fun idea called the Golden Gate Greeter Program.

Anybody who's staying in one of our hotels can choose to get a two- to four-hour free tour with one of our Golden Gate Greeters. We have 50 people who volunteered to actually take people on a tour of the city based upon their interests. And people love it because it creates a connection, an emotional connection.

And in terms of maintaining corporate culture when growing:

A: It is hard. Most companies lose their culture as they grow. But what Southwest Airlines taught us is that it's all about empowering employees at the lowest level of the company as much as possible.

Seven years ago, we bought the Kabuki Hot Springs and Spa in Japantown. Our employees get free communal bathing and 50 percent off on spa treatment. All of our employees get to stay in our hotels for free. Anyone who is a salaried employee gets one month paid sabbatical every three years. And we didn't walk away from it during the downturn.

I'm sure the "design thinking" crowd would love to claim Chip as one of theirs... He's daring, innovative, clever, and, clearly, has a design sensibility. But really, what he's doing, through and through, simply seems to be good business. Heaps of sweat equity. Good treatment of his most important resource -- his employees. Stick-to-it-iveness. And some bright ideas.

If you've made it this far in this post, you'll likely be interested in this PDF booklet that JDV makes available: "The Secrets to Boutique Success: How Boutique Hotels Are Revolutionizing the Hospitality Industry" It's actually a good read no matter what you're industry, discussing everything from finance to management to brand-building and beyond.