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The personal web log of Mike Lee, a web information architect living "I surf as much as I eat." curiousLee in...   Hiptop Nation aiyaa! Technorati GeoURL Blogstreet Daypop Stats Photo Friday Mirror Project Google Images The City Paper UMBC TechPort email me past monthly... 2000: 10.11.12 2001: 01.02.03.04.05.06 07.08. 09.10.11.12 2002: 01.02.03.04.05.06 07.08.09.10.11.12 2003: 01.02.03.04.05.06 07
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Tuesday, August 05, 2003
Turning a new blog page
 Well I'm still a bit groggy from the early hop out of bed, but I'm signed up and running over at TypePad. The URL is http://curiouslee.typepad.com/weblog/. I haven't decided how I'll make the change to TypePad in relation to this blog, so don't leave this space or my Hiptop Nation blog yet. I think I've been through 95% of the TypePad sign-up and author's interface and the experience was fluid and flawless. Thank's so much Heidi (hope you're feeling better!) and Tim for offering the discount code. I'm off to New York City for a quick visit to the IA Salon, which is at Carolyn's place in Brooklyn this month. If I set up mobile posting on my new TypePad blog correctly, you'll see some thoughts and photos from on the run. Otherwise, I'll be posting from one of the WiFi parks in Manhattan, or from home again tomorrow night.
Sunday, August 03, 2003
Saturday, August 02, 2003
Anticipating TypePad
I've been eagerly following the daily dispatches at TypePad on the major features of their forthcoming hosted blogging service. The topics over the course of five days included: Template Builder, Moblogging, Photo Albums, TypeLists and Features and Pricing, which pretty much answered many of the questions I had. And on Monday at 11:59pm Pacific time, we (who weren't beta testers) get the chance to to test drive the system by signing up for the preview release. In the last year, I've toyed around with switching from the largely stagnant (and periodically flaky) Blogger Pro service to an open source package installed on my own host even got as far as installing Grey Matter. But my attempts at switching got sidetracked in favor of just keeping up with the blog content itself as I have had progressively less free time in the last year to fiddle with the techy details of server-side installations and maintenance. In these weeks before I become a manager of the AARP.org web site, and with the coinciding arrival of our baby in November, I have been mulling over how to get some desirable site enhancements such as integrated Hiptop Nation (moblog) posts, comments and an online photo gallery cobbled together. I was about ready to hire someone to help me through the mess, but TypePad is looking like a one-stop solution. If the TypePad launches relatively bug-free and withstands the onslaught of new signups, it should, in one fell swoop, consolidate and significantly enhance all my blogging activity with very little server-side fussing on my part. Here are a few thoughts on how I'll benefit from each of the features described last week:
So if all goes well with the preview and golden master releases of TypePad, I am going to be kicking up some construction in both my virtual and real houses this fall. And Paulo, I might still need you for some coding.
Thursday, July 31, 2003
Bad weather as good photo opportunity
 Waiting out a heavy rain storm in my car because I didn't have an umbrella. I continue to be inspired by Nitsa's ideas on street shooting with a philosophy of "deep simplicity"—or what she calls non-photography. Non-photography is simply her way of shooting experimentally without regard to formal rules and not using fancy equipment. Of the basic approaches described on her site, I especially enjoy her challenge to shoot in bad weather. In the past, I've found myself forgoing opportunities to make photographs because it was too cold, too wet, or the light was otherwise not ideal. My ideal had mostly been the National Geographic magic hour before sunset when the light is golden and low to the ground. This past spring, when there wasn't much sunshine anyway, I flushed the desire for ideal from my mind and consciously went out shoot in the rain. Just being out more, fussing with gear less, and looking harder, brought me to images such as my foggy clock in front of The Woolworth Building. These days, rain makes me happy.
Over on Boxes and Arrows, Peter and Scott rip Jakob a new one. More tearing sounds here and here.
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Architecting brand-consistent constellations of web sites
 A web site type relationship map by Lippincott Mercer. The celebrated brand consultancy Lippincott Mercer has published a well-written branding and information architecture case study in the Spring 2003 issue of The Design Management Journal. The case, titled "From chaos to constellation: Creating better brand alignment on the Web," can be downloaded (208 kb PDF) from their corporate web site for free, or when that link is moved or removed, you can buy the PDF for $5.00 directly from the DMJ. The nine-page illustrated case covers the last two years and work in progress for a global Fortune 500 financial services information provider referred to as "Nugent." The corporation's globally-dispersed collection of web properties, or "constellation," was in sore need of repair on all fronts and LM was called in to help define the brand strategy for the web sites. The discussion on the branding methodology is understandably light due to the need to disguise details, but I was pleased to see that the meat of the report included the typical IA activities such as defining the macro-model of the global sites, identifying and segmenting audiences, creating usage scenarios, developing concept diagrams (called mindset maps here), site blueprints, and content inventories. Curiously, the case makes no mention of user testing or focus groups, but I'd be shocked if those activities were truly absent in a large effort such as this. Too, the implementation of a global content management platform is only touched upon as I'm sure that phase warrants its own volumes of case material. Though this is a global multi-year effort that is undoubtedly moving budgets in the millions of dollars, many of the issues described in the case apply to the web sites of corporations operating in regional markets. And the diagrams are good eye candy too. A hat tip to friend Aaron for this tip.
Monday, July 28, 2003
Mars Day is my day
At about the time my years on this planet equals the answer to life, the universe, and everything, Mars will be the closest it's been to Earth in 50,000 years. Last time I considered the numerical significance of my birthday, big changes really did happen. Anyone up for a Mars Party?
Friday, July 25, 2003
More moblogging
Mike at Hiptop Nation is working on adding a paging mechanism to the personal Hiptop Nation moblogs so that when you click on the link at left, your browser won't explode from my
Hey, The Deb is back!
Angelinahhhhhh Thursday, July 24, 2003
More IAs in than out? Maybe so.
 I just caught up with Lou Rosenfeld's blog entry from a couple weeks ago where he asks "Where Have All The IAs Gone?" Lou says he's heard people remark at his recent Enterprise Information Architecture seminar series that there are fewer information architects working now than during the dot com peak. He doesn't see an easy way to discover how many IAs are really out there, but suggests that the 80/20 rule might apply with more staff IAs now working on the inside ("Innies") than IA consultants working on the outside ("Outies")—a change that might in part be explained by the fact that organizations are starting to recognize the intrinsic value of the role IAs play. Not only are the discipline and role of IA valuable, I've seen my sponsors in recent engagements come to the realization that user experience and information retrieval problems across multiple large web sites cannot be solved in the space of weeks or months by burning expensive hourly fees on consultants. Web sites are larger and more complex than ever, and require initiatives for change that require experts in IA and other web development disciplines to be actively engaged for years. Friend Victor, who recently left a legendary web firm to become an Innie, told me recently that his engagements never lasted more than a few months. I've found the same to be true. As IA consultants we're rarely around to see the long term effects of our work. And increasingly, the needs will be so great that both Innies and Outies will be required to work together. I believe that Innies will tend to act more like generalists who will go to outside IA consultants for specialized services such as usability testing and taxonomy development when the work is needed. When Innies are able to work with outsiders, they will manage internal politics and be the keepers of domain-specific knowledge. Outies will bring in best practices that are learned from or tested across many different types of engagements. Mangement gets teams custom tailored to projects. Beyond who's in or out, I think we need to redouble our efforts to increase our numbers. In the past six months, I've been privvy to the web operations of two Fortune 500 corporations that knew virtually nothing about IA as a role or discipline. One corporation went from zero to three IAs during my engagement, which made me happy to leave knowing that our ranks might have grown slightly. I'm convinced there are many more uncharted realms that need IAs but there are currently too few of us overall to fill the latent opportunities and fewer still who know how to make the opportunities real. More about creating new IA roles in future posts.
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Oh the blessed silence of my inbox!
Dutifully following the digerati, I signed up for the Knowspam.net e-mail filtering service. It was supposed to work right away with some minor configuration, but I am apparently an edge case with an overfilled inbox on the server, an ISP with non-standard mailhost configuration and using Eudora on the Mac. Founder Thomas Burns got back to me within the hour with suggestions and a realization of a bug on his end. I've been active on the service for a couple days now, and the Inbox for my personal e-mail address has been SPAM FREE! I can now proudly display my personal e-mail address here ( mike@visuallee.com ) without fear of e-mail address harvesting bots. Basically Knowspam serves as an intermediary between your desktop e-mail client and a POP e-mail account. All e-mails that arrive are challenged with a return e-mail that directs the sender to a temporary web page where a human must read a random number from an image and enter it into a form field to submit to Knowspam. The e-mail is then passed through Knowspam to your desktop client, and the sender is added to a list of known human sources. Since spam originates from an automated bulk mailing process, it can't answer the form. Spam is filtered out before you see it, and held for seven days (or whatever you set in the preferences) before being deleted. You can upload a list of pre-approved e-mail addresses and server domains into the Knowspam web interface, and there are a bunch of other nice features. I'm on a two-week trial, but when that's over, I will gladly pay the $20 for my first year of blessed e-mail bliss.
Sunday, July 20, 2003
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