The Mu

My career has been about creating and conveying information.  Whether it was in data processing, radio, television, newspapers, marketing collateral, or online help… I have been a willing operative in the evil plot to drown the universe in words.

Lately I feel I have switched sides.  Every day I now work on ways to search, filter, slice, dice, and otherwise make the vast smorgasbord of information palatable — or at least digestible.

There are some very cool technologies that people are developing: weapons in this war. I have previously outlined some ontological developments that will support the Semantic Web: RDF and OWL specifically.  But there are other ways to categorize and navigate the sum of human knowledge.  Many of these are built upon RDF itself, like the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS).

Perhaps most interesting to me are the ways we can merge the formal ontological endeavors with group-driven organizations represented by things like folksonomies and collaborative filtering.  I believe this blitzkrieg approach, using more than one technique at once, is how we’ll emerge from our battles triumphant!

Depending on how you slice or dice the numbers, London (UK) or Toronto is the capital of the Facebook world.  In raw numbers, London wins.  But taken on a per capita basis, Toronto wins.  As reported today, there are over 700,000 Facebook users in Toronto.  With a populations of 2.5 million, that is an impressive percentage indeed.

What’s demographically fascinating is that the adults over 25 are flocking to Facebook and things may never be the same.  To be honest, I believe this happenstance will be one of the drivers towards Web 3.0 technology.  The kids are going to need new safe havens — and a new way to create it could easily be pursued by a whip-smart teen seeking such a refuge.

Gratifyingly, my daughter seemed honestly okay with me being on Facebook.  She even added me as a friend and I am very happy about that.

In the famous line from Ghostbusters, Bill Murray’s character warns about dire consequences of biblical proportions.

But I hear that line echo in my head every time someone describes a set of products that are supposed to work seamlessly together.  Big software companies are especially guilty of this: throwing collections of products into a burlap sack and calling it a “suite”.

It seems to take years before the simplest user interface features of the various products even resemble one another.  Human interaction is indeed the first thing to be sacrificed.  Inconsistent ways of doing simple things like saving a file can cause disastrous results.  The lengthy ”acclimatization” period is just like kittens and puppies getting used to each other: it takes a long time before the user interfaces start to become seamlessly intertwined — and then only after focus and hard work by a dedicated team of developers.

I believe the Web 2.0 experience, including recent examples where Facebook applications show better user interaction than their full Web site counterparts, proves that up-front design can prevent the “tools in a bag” experience — even when there was never any intention for the tools to work together.  Mass hysteria averted!