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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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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
Saturday, July 19, 2003
Notes on Human Computer Interaction
A little GoogleFind: Dr. William Edmonson's web site has a nice 53 page, 3MB PDF on topics related to Human Computer Interaction. Apparently, the notes are part of the course "Computers as Tools" at The University of Birmingham in the UK. In addition to the expected discussion on theories of cognition, usability and the G.O.M.S. model, the text delves into some material on anthropolgy and ontologies. And when I scrolled to page 36 in the chapter on distributed cognition, I was pleasantly surprised to find a photo from the curiousLee archives of an information architecture project board I used to keep my deliverables visible to our internal production team and sales people. Sadly, I retired the board this week.
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
End of an era
Yesterday was my last full day at e.magination, but today feels more like the appropriate last day as I was on site with a client all day helping to facilitate a user feedback forum. I'm taking it easy on work for a couple months to complete a massive "honey do" list in preparation for the arrival of the baby. I have also restored my June 16th post which describes my future plans. I'm sleeping in tomorrow. Next week I will slurp my first chai milkshake.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
America 24/7, T+20 minutes
 I learned today that my photo of an antique-style clock in front of Manhattan's Woolworth Building—shown in thumbnail form above—will definitely be in the hardcover book America 24/7: A One-Week Digital Time Capsule of American Life as a two-page spread. The book is a selection of the best images taken by professional, student and amateur photographers in all 50 states during the week of May 12-18, 2003 for the America 24/7 project. The ambitious effort was conceived by the same team who produced the Day in the Life series of coffee table books. I get a free copy of the book and some software. They say some or all of the images will be in a traveling show and there's a TV documentary in the works. When I heard about the project, I inwardly lamented the fact that I'd be pretty busy the week of the shoot finalizing the time-boxed visioning exercise for the next AIG.com gateway. I fantasized about arranging with a local street vendor or fish market merchant to do an intimate documentary session early one morning, or even follow the subject throughout a day. I ended up being so tired from the intensive project sessions at work that I just randomly walked the city at night a few times with my camera and tripod. The winning shot was made without much physical effort and no plan. I had arrived at NY Penn Station the night of the 11th; just a couple hours before the official midnight start of the project. The city was shrouded in heavy fog which always surrounds the brightly-lit skyscrapers in a dreamy orange-white glow. After the taxi dropped me off at the hotel, I assembled my tripod and camera to go out for some long exposures. Walking northwest, I passed on Ground Zero and ended up near City Hall Park with a desire to make an image of my PocketPC accessing the free WiFi there. The fog-topped Woolworth Building caught my eye, but to add some interest to the shot, I positioned my tripod so that a street clock on the corner of Park Row and Broadway would occupy the lower half of the image. I knew the contrast range between the clock face and the glow of the fog was too great, so I bracketed a series of exposures. The next day, I ended up masking the the properly-exposed clock face in Photoshop and lightening the background to arrive at a rendition of the scene that matched my memory. I finished the late night expedition with the shots of my PocketPC at City Hall Park. The night shift cop at the park kicked me out at 12:45am, and I headed back to the hotel with some nice images and my spirit charged for the next work day.
Monday, July 14, 2003
Truncation titillates
This bit from Everything Burns made me giggle today: You know you have too many windows open when the tabs in the Windows Toolbar start to get truncated in interesting ways. One of my favorites is "Visual Sour..." (what is omitted, as the french say, is: ce sa fe!). The same phenomenon happens with tabbed browsing under Mozilla, with such gems as Boing Boi, Everlasting Blo, dangero, and Open Bra. (this latter offered with my profuse apologies to Gail). Sunday, July 13, 2003
Picturing Yan
 Reminder to self: spend more than five minutes photographing Yan next time you're in Jersey City. Friday, July 11, 2003
High on New York
By design, I knew this week was going to be a storied conclusion to my successful consulting assignment at AIG Corporate eBusiness. I had planned a busy week of meetings for Victor and I to launch him into all the parallel tracks of information architecture activity I started. By the end of today, we had met with most of senior management in Corporate R&D (parent to eBusiness), touched all the functional groups across the web property operations, visited some of the business units with active eBusiness projects, and received status briefings on the RUP and CMM initiatives. Victor's notebook is already half full and I think I've set him up for some interesting nights of REM sleep.  Yesterday's schedule changed from purposeful to monumental when I got permission to visit the 66th floor observation gallery at the top of the AIG Headquarters building at 70 Pine. Post 9/11, the building became the highest vantage point in Lower Manhattan, but the gallery is only used by senior executives to entertain clients. My interest in 70 Pine was fueled by reading Skyscraper Rivals, a history of the pre-World War II buildings in the financial district with an emphasis on The AIG Building. This photo of the gothic peak of the tower framed by an American flag was made earlier this year while looking up from Chase Manhattan Plaza.  We cleared security checks in the lobby and were ready to meet "Vinnie" for an elevator ride up to the 60th floor executive dining room. From there we transferred to a small elevator that took us to 66th floor. The elevator car comes up out of a trap door in the floor (!!!), which you can see closed on the left side of the photo above. Before being electrified by the views of the skyline, we were captivated by the art deco interior of the deck. An ornate globe rests on the marble floor of the octagonal room and covers up the old Citgo logo. In the direction of each of the main compass points, there are one of eight balconies edged with ornate aluminum metalwork. Vinnie graciously opened up most of the balconies for us despite his concern about high winds.  Here we are on the north balcony minus Frank, the creative director, who is afraid of high places. Jonathan (left) and Kei (right) are from Corporate R&D, and Victor is the tall one in the middle. I'm slightly distracted from holding my Coolpix camera and fisheye lens. In the near background are City Hall and the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. On the far horizon is midtown and The Empire State Building. Standing on top of the headquarters of this global corporation to take in one of the greatest cities in the world was a magical way for me to end my tenure and for Victor to start his. I told Victor to look at this photo when he's having a bad day at work.  Near the end of our 15 minutes at the top, I remembered to take a shot of Chase Plaza and the spot where I stood to take the photo that opens this post. The red brick building at lower left is my hotel, and just right of top center in the gap between buildings is Ground Zero. In the plaza you can see the round sunken water sculpture garden and the white Jean Dubuffet sculpture. We came down to the lobby only to head back up to various floors to meet senior executives.  The work day ended with a happy hour I set up at the nearby watering hole. I'm pictured here with Frank Williams, who is the Creative Director in eBusiness and Victor's new boss. That's Manali on the right, who is a business analyst and my first IA convert.  Next table over, I mugged with buddies Sheryl, Marie, Liz, and Rekha. I'll work on posting a fuller gallery of this week's photos soon.  The sensory stimulation didn't end after happy hour. I got an e-mail on my Sidekick from May Woo, the proprietress of aiyaa!, who just happened to be in New York this week from SanFrancisco. We had animated conversation over fancy pizza at Otto. That's May's friend Robyn at left, and May in the middle. Just an amazing day. Today wasn't as big a bang, but the glow continued with excellent exit interviews with the SVP and CIO of eBusiness. To catch me for the final return home, Amy took the train up from DC, and we had a quiet dinner at Bull Run. Tomorrow, we're taking in the Artbots show and then taking the train home together.
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
Thoughts from 1imc
A great quote from Mike Popovic's excellent thoughts on the First International Moblogging Conference:
Piles of working knowledge
I sat down with friend Victor today to hand over seven months of consulting and project knowledge which was mostly in form of several big piles of papers. We talked about how we both prefer to work with piles of paper around us. The talk of piles remembered to me this passage from the Malcom Gladwell article The Social Life of Paper: Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. Chances are that you have a keyboard and a computer screen off to one side, and a clear space roughly eighteen inches square in front of your chair. What covers the rest of the desktop is probably piles -- piles of papers, journals, magazines, binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artifacts of the knowledge economy. The piles look like a mess, but they aren't. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. The pile closest to the cleared, eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives. Over time, they get broken down and resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically and sometimes chronologically and thematically; clues about certain documents may be physically embedded in the file by, say, stacking a certain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack. Victor will take my pile of papers into a new world of complex and unresolved ideas, but despite his tentative expression in the photo above, he's been quite relaxed and upbeat about the massive injection of information.
Monday, July 07, 2003
iChat AV untethered
 Success! With a willing conspirator back in Baltimore—friend Tim Windsor who runs Sunspot—I was able to do a two-way video chat using iChat AV and an iSight camera from the 3rd floor balcony of South Street Seaport. The view is of the East River and The Brooklyn Bridge. Not knowing where exactly the Cornercast free WiFi was broadcasting, I had to walk around with my open laptop and MacStumbler to find the signal. Ofcourse it was in the place I thought of last: right by the food court. I connected with Tim easily; he was using a firewire camcorder and Though this wasn't really a massive technological achievement, it was astonishingly easy to set up two-way video with basic hardware such as the PowerBook and iSight camera. This is more unwired experiential brain food. Now I have to work on improving my roving journalism skills, but I think Edison Carter would already be proud. NOTE: This was originally posted to Hiptop Nation from South Street Seaport last night, and I've mirrored the text with a better photos and minor edits here. Friday, July 04, 2003
Happy 4th!
 We (Amy, Kate and I) hadn't really planned on watching the fireworks, but arrived at the I-95/395 ramp into Baltimore just as the fireworks started. Amy pulled over and I popped my head through the open sun roof and started snapping. Here you see cars and trucks whizing by as fireworks light behind the exhaust tower of Baltimore refuse incineration plant. Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Many mobile faces of me
I have a few photos up on aiyaa! now. Silly, fun, and just because. Doh! My iSight shipped to my home address where no one was around to sign for it, so I'm going to the FedEx warehouse tonight to pick it up. I normally wouldn't have jumped on the purchase of this camera since I have a firewire palmcorder, but I want to try broadcasting completely untethered from my PowerBook from South Street Seaport in Manhattan next week. I will hopefully be able to have The Brooklyn Bridge as a backdrop. I'll feel kinda like the roving reporter character Edison Carter in the old Max Headroom series. E-mail me for details if you haven't already. Update: Got it, and have it up and running here at work.
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