Here's some news from the IIID front. First, there's a call for entries for a forthcoming information design sourcebook:

Graphic-Sha, a distinguished Japanese publisher in the field of design, and IIDj, the Institute for Information Design Japan, are cooperating in the publication of the [Information Design Source Book].

Asking experts in the field for outstanding examples of realized projects; we expect this book to become an internationally recognized reference not only for designers and design students, but also clients and all those who look for inspiration and help. The [Information Design Source Book] will be bi-lingual in English and Japanese, and distributed worldwide.

Following the very successful publication of the Japanese only [Information Design Reader] in March 2002, this will be the 2nd publication project of IIDj.

We will start accepting submissions at this site on May 15th; the deadline is June 15th.

Check www.iidj.net/IDSB for details. They also write:

You may also be interested to know about the international Information Design Summer Academy 2003, which IIDj is organizing in August/September for young professionals and graduate students in Japan.

See www.iidj.net/SA03 for details. Note that this server is a bit on the fickle side. I couldn't actually view either page, since my Mozilla browser is apparently not welcome: "This site can only be accessed by browsers which conform to the W3C Document Object Model." Hopefully you will have better luck!

10:22 PM | | linkme | home

Tomorrow is the last day to sign up for STC's 50th annual conference, which is being held May 18th to 21st in Dallas. If you've been meaning to register and are a procrastinator like me, then hurry up and register!

But if Dallas isn't your thing, by all means do consider submitting a proposal to present at next year's conference in fabulous Baltimore, Maryland, May 9-12, 2004. The stem manager for the usability and design stem is Caroline Jarrett, who some of you may know from her stint on the first NNgroup world tour. Yours truly is going to be managing the post-conference stem. The PC sessions are half- or full-day tutorials for which a moderate stipend is paid (assuming registrations warrant).

I'd love to see more IA and ED/UX stuff presented next year. The folks at the University of Baltimore's IDIA program are already in the loop, as are fun folks like Mike Lee and wife Amy.

Proposals must be postmarked by August 1, 2003 to be considered (as described in the (PDF; 241K). Drop me an if you have any questions.

05:38 PM | | linkme | home

I'm not sure what to make about vogging, or video blogging. Adrian Miles writes about this on vog blog. On the one hand, I'm very interested in the application of multimedia to information design products. But...cool tools like iMovie aside, there seems to be a gap between benefit and cost of use that is related to what Nielson wrote about last week on Useit.

I dunno, but I found the instructions provided for the desktop vogging demo to be way more than I wanted to go thru (never mind the first was buying QuickTime Pro 6).

I think there's absolutely a place for media-rich weblogs. I regularly check out Mike Lee's moblog (more on moblogs) because even cruddy little low-res Sidekick photos can be compelling in the hands of someone who's got an eye for interesting visuals.

But I guess what Sidekick does is make the cost low. It's relatively painless for Mike to create and for me to read. It seems we've got a ways to go to get there for video blogging!

07:26 PM | | linkme | home

Hey, I thought I was done for the night, but this one caught my eye. The good news is that guru Zeldman is now doing an RSS feed. But the following caught me by surprise. The image on the left is the default button for this feed. The image on the right is the button for the mouseover.

   

Yee gads! I know I'm close to bifocals, but am I the only one who thinks that these two are so close to each other as to be, umm, less than entirely useful as far as cueing behavior goes?

Here's the main site if you want to check it out on your browser/platform. It occurs to me that the subtle change is more useful in the nav entries above the XML button, since this slight color change is at least more obvious against the standard color (which is what you see on the main nav items).

10:45 PM | | linkme | home

I'm fond of telling people that I have two interests related to communication and technology. One is access and the other is access :).

One access is related to issues of design that make information products usable. The other access is the one that is more political and social. There are obviously interesting ways to tie them together, but on the other hand, it seems impossible to become as facile in both as I'd like.

Anyways, all this is a prequel to say that the reading assignment I mentioned yesterday has finally compelled me to get off my butt and give some funds to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I have some issues with Lessig's arguments, but there's one that I'm particularly interested in--his call for open spectrum (or the wireless commons). I find the implications wrt the Digital Divide very compelling. I'm intrigued by the story of Dewayne Hendricks and his experiment to provide broadband via wireless to less-than-enfranchised populations...in areas (Tonga and Native American tribal lands) where the FCC's jurisdiction isn't (apparently) an issue.

Now I should probably go give Richard Stallman some money too!

10:06 PM | | linkme | home

As a relatively recent RSS fan, I found this entry by Dave Winer somewhat curious:

Aggregators should not organize news by where items came from, just present the news in reverse chronologic order.

(Emphasis his; picture here.) I use AmphetaDesk simply to make it easy to see when weblogs have been updated; I do all my reading on the weblog itself. This way I get the benefit of both worlds...the nice layout and design that most weblog owners work on with the efficiency of only going when there's new stuff.

Because of that, frankly it doesn't matter to me whether or not the feed is in chronological order or not; I'm simply scrolling thru the list to see what's new since the last time I checked news. I can see why showing this by time might be useful (get the freshest stuff first?), but maybe I'm weird...I'm just using aggregators to be the equivalent of the defunct SpyOnIt (or the variants).

BTW, if you're wondering what all the fuss about RSS is about, check out this article, which provides a pretty good consumer viewpoint and link to the best free readers. There may be better resources out there (feel free to add them via a comment!), but searching for RSS leads to far more resources for creating RSS files than reading 'em!

09:29 PM | | linkme | home

If you're not the type to pay attention to the comments, I encourage you to make an exception. Dirk Knemeyer has provided two very interesting responses to my What's in a name? post of a few days ago and my subsequent response to him.

I don't have time to do an in-depth response (trying to finish Lessig's "the future of ideas" for my Digital Economy class tomorrow). But I found this line in Dirk's response particularly interesting:

The Information Design "thesis" is one that places the discipline as the director of other disciplines.

Now you're talking :). The concept of information designer as director is one I've found compelling for a while. The jury is still out on whether that role is really ID or IA or UX, but hey, I'm certainly happy to have someone else who's arguing that it's ID!

That said, when Dirk has some free time, I'd love to hear his two cents on another comment Jesse made in his what's in a name response:

When Richard Saul Wurman refers to "information architecture," he's usually talking about what most of us know as information design; whereas when Nathan Shedroff talks about "information design," he's probably referring to what is commonly called information architecture.

I agree with Jesse re Wurman; I'll have to re-read A Unified Field Theory of Design (when's the semester over??) wrt Shedroff.

07:38 PM | | linkme | home

Okay, twice in one day: an entry for the World as a Blog:

Like Joshua says in this comment, this is hypnotizing to watch! And it may provide some new fodder for both the blogroll and the words can't describe lists on the right.

Tonight's entry from (far) eastern Canada: aMMusing. That's their red dot above the "o" in IDblog.

10:41 PM | | linkme | home

Oy, I really hate to pick fights with Gerry McGovern...as someone with tech writing inclinations, how can't you like a guy who's putting the focus on content? But his column, Fast-downloading websites are still important, has struck a false chord with me. Gerry writes:

So, what size should your webpage be? King and others believe that if you want to guarantee your pages download in less than 10 seconds, you should set a limit of 30 KB. My experience is that a 50 KB limit is reasonable. Aim for 30 KB but don't go over 50 KB if possible.

Now here's my petty, picayune, pedantic self. The page that says you shouldn't go over 50K (if possible) weighs 57K. Oops! Then again, his home page only weighs 43K and looks pretty decent.

Here are some other page weights (as computed by BBEdit after a save complete from Mozilla):

• Washington Post - 200K
• New York Times - 186K
• - 131K
• CNN - 119K
• eBay - 101K
• Yahoo - 73K

Is it just me? Or is it very hard to buy this under 50K limit when so many mainstream sites exceed it by a lot?

Here's my theory. First, even Jakob Nielsen (Mr. Tiny Page) notes that:

It matters less if it takes longer to load the full page and all its illustrations if the user can start acting on some information fast.

In other words, as long as HEIGHT and WIDTH tags are provided, HTML pages will render quickly and many people (apparently) will quite happily navigate before all the graphics are loaded. It sounds like Jared Spool and the folks at UIE have figured out the same thing. They write:

Testing shows no correlation between page download time and users giving up.

All this said, it isn't the greatest of design strategies to provide the majority of your users skeleton pages (text with holes where graphics should be) if you're trying to maximize user experience for all users. Reducing page size still seems to be a worthy goal, and usually means moving to CSS and optimizing graphics.

But...as I like to say, all generalizations are false. You want to do a page that weighs more than 50K? Go right ahead! You're in pretty good company. Just don't skip the tags that'll make the pages render fast even without the graphics.

08:53 PM | | linkme | home

I've got some stuff to log later once I'm home, but just had to get a quick lunch-time blog in. While doing some weblog surfing, I came across Megnut's From the Margins of the Writable Web powerpoint for her presentation at ETCon. These handouts obviously pale in comparison to the presentation (look like they were more speaker aids than audience), but there were a few meaty bits in there.

In particular, I'm intrigued by the World as a Blog, which provides a nearly real-time display of geo-coded weblogs. Wow! I've got IDblog geourl-enabled, so I'm going to submit this and see how long it take me to pop up :).

BTW, this other entry from Meg, Searching the BlogSphere, looks pretty interesting too.

12:34 PM | | linkme | home

Hmmm, maybe there are three things in life that are certain: death, taxes, and a periodic re-hashing of the "what's the difference between information design and information architecture?" question. I hosted one such discussion a couple years back in a feature called What's In A Name? for the ID SIG newsletter. I had some great responses from some great IA and ID luminaries (and I still like, in a perverse way, that Richard Saul Wurman called this question "academic and pointless" ... hell, he responded, didn't he :).

So, the 2003 version comes from Clark MacLeod on his weblog, Kelake (courtesy InfoDesign).

Here's my commentary. One, I do happen to like Jesse James Garrett's focus on cognition (IA) and perception (ID) which he happened to make here. I used to refer to that as focus on structure versus presentation. Yep, there's overlap, but I also liked the idea that the IA helped you find a page and the ID helped you make use of the page.

Two, I disagree with Clark about where IA and IDs come from. He writes:

Information architects come from a variety of backgrounds, but I sense that a majority of them display an orientation toward language. Information designers, on the other hand, tend to be oriented toward the visual arts. As a result, the majority of information designers come from exactly one discipline: graphic design.

For me, both of these statements are a bit awkward. My major issue is with the categorization of IDs. That's certainly true historically, especially since for many folks, information graphics are the only products of information designers. (Tho I think the jury is still out on whether Richard Saul Wurman is "really" an IA or an ID. Here are some of his comments related to the subject: here and here.)

But if you talk about the web (isn't that what today's IA is really interested in?), the page is as much if not more about text as it is about graphics, and thus explains the interest of those of us who come out of a language focus. Part of the problem is that some text-oriented folks spent a lot of time doing this kind of work except they called it document design. Karen Schriver (who wrote and Ginny Redish (who founded the Document Design Center at the American Institutes for Research in 1979...alas, no longer in business) are both examples of people out of a writing/language field who looked at the issues of usable design. Their work included considerations of color, type size, hierarchy (on the page and in the document), line length, and so forth.

What Tufte and Wurman talk about is fine when you're talking a one page graph or poster. But hello? Do we think that there's no need for paying attention to issues of design once the content starts spanning multiple pages? I think not! For me, information design is what happens when you take the visual world of the graphic designer and integrate it with the textual world of the tech writer. Go figure. Like Wurman says, you make the complex clear.

So, yes Virginia, I happen to think that there's a difference between IA and ID. And for now, I like the idea of cognition/perception as a differentiator...unless, of course, you are talking about big IA or ID or UX which tends to have far more overlap due to its strategic (rather than tactical) focus. But I guess that's a whole other can o' worms :)

06:27 PM | | linkme | home

The folks at Digital Web Magazine have pointed to an article on cnet which celebrates Mosaic's 10th birthday. For you young whippersnappers, Mosaic was the precursor to Netscape. More importantly, as cnet writes, "Mosaic was the first to be widely adopted and introduce the masses to the Internet." Read the article if you like, but you should probably download cnet's four day (registration required) to get the bigger picture.

As those of us who were around (some just from the sidelines) for the Netscape IPO know, life was certainly different in the early days, as this chart from cnet shows:

Alas (she says, kicking herself), I don't have any screen captures of the work I was doing in those early days (I did my first web page in early '94...I can find a link to it, but since the company's been taken over four times and the product retired, it's gone). The earliest I can find is from a presentation that Nick Sabadosh and I did for an STC conference in 1996 to brief technical writers about the visual interface in web page design (amazing how much of this stands up 7 years later). But for fun, check out an example page rendered in early Netscape compared to the same page rendered on Mosaic 2.4. And the CSS folks complain today :).

08:43 PM | | linkme | home

If you are at all interested in issues of visual literacy, you'll probably want to take a look at Conrad Taylor's But I can't draw!

I agree with Conrad's assertions that this is a valuable skill that is underdeveloped because our educational system "prizes literacy and numeracy, but not visual thinking." And in fact, when I get a free moment, I'm going to follow up on the intro drawing class I took last summer.

07:28 PM | | linkme | home

Since it has been many years since I've formally done technical writing, I tend to not get involved in "we don't get no respect" conversations (which seem as common in the IA, graphic design, and usability communities as they are in the tech writing community). This often leads to calls for certification as a panacea...which I'm not fond of either (and is something that neither STC nor UPA are actively pursuing). But I digress.

After having been very encouraged by outreach to the STC community (particularly from the ASIS&T and DUX2003 communities) it was a bit depressing to twice this week have a Tina (see right) moment. Once was on a list whose privacy is extremely valued, so I'll say no more (and may have been an over-reaction on my part). The other was in the weblog space. The fine folk of Tomalak's Realm have apparently decided that STC's annual conference is not worthy of their conference listing. Bummer.

That's unfortunate, as STC is not just a conference for tech writers anymore. Technical communicators are very interested in issues related to online design, usability, and content management, among others. And at $560 for three days, it's also a pretty good buy. So...it'd be great to see you there! And boy, the airfares aren't bad (I got $244 round-trip from National today).

If Dallas this May isn't your thing, then perhaps you might be interested in next year's conference, which will be held May 9-12, 2004 in the very fun city of Baltimore, Maryland. The call for proposals has gone out, and speaking as a member of next year's program committee, I'd love to see some more proposals in the IA, interaction design, and user experience space (we're doing well with usability, so they don't need the nudge :).

As the locals say, c'mon hon! We'd love to see you there!

Update: 4/18. We've been listed! Not sure what happened. It probably has something to do with the difference between being a hub or a node.

06:39 PM | | linkme | home

Yet another entry in the "hmmm, isn't that curious?" category. On the left, below, the standard Maryland license plate. And on the right, the new plate, which is meant to honor Maryland's farmers.

I'm sorry, but I find the new plate just a bit odd. Here in DC, the transient population is a given, so seeing out-of-state plates is not uncommon. So when I started seeing the plates on the right, I just assumed they were plates for New Mexico or Arizona. When I got a closer look, I was just a bit perplexed. I guess what really got me was the realistic farmscape on the bottom of the plate that just didn't seem to go with this Hawaiian sunrise thing they have going.

I wonder if the designer figured out that he/she needed to be considerably different from the other Maryland specialty plate (which I prefer to Virginia's Chesapeake Bay plate):

Maybe he or she thought that putting in a realistic blue sky for the farm plates might have been too similar to the Chesapeake Bay plates? Maybe. And it's not so much that there's anything wrong with the sunrise picture. But is it terrible to admit that when I think Maryland and red sky, the current political climate comes to mind in a not-so-pretty way?

09:05 PM | | linkme | home

If the idea of design as a bigger concept appeals to you, you may be interested in the resources on the design for future needs site. As is not untypical of one of these global design initiatives, there is an emphasis on environmental/industrial/product design that may not seem too useful to your average information or document designer. But in my brief skim (when is the semester over?) of the overview, I found the following interesting:

A plethora of Foresight-based design visualizations of the future is better than one. This encourages all to treat the visions casually, to add to them, reject some, pick and mix and so on, because not too much is riding on any one future concept.

This is equivalent to the idea that paper prototypes are deemed more subject to criticism and change than are mocks done in HTML or Visual Basic or other realistic tool. But maybe if your environment is like mine, it is so much easier to present one design concept, even if you have all the intention in the world to get useful feedback. There are difficult deadlines and not-so-savvy clients and so on. And maybe there's not really a need to be redefining anyways.

I just wish I was always sure that the decision to present one design was from a good place rather than a convenient place.

08:40 PM | | linkme | home

Ya gotta love smart people with extra time on their hands. You get cool tools like this one...GeoURL:

I find the above (a slice of an image on the GeoURL site) really compelling...it's cool to see websites organized geographically. There are also higher res maps too. Now I can find all IDblog's neighbors! And you can see that I'm 8 blocks east of the White House.

Thanks to Brainstorms and Raves for the pointer.

07:36 PM | | linkme | home

I love the Internet. But if there is anything that is metaphorically a double-edged sword, it's the Internet. What's really cool is that you can go online to some place like Amazon and order a used copy of an information design classic, like . At the time, the thought of saving 40 or 50% off the cover price of a new book made sense (and some times you can't even find it new). And when you're dealing with Amazon, where's the risk?

So...then you receive the book, in good shape, with all the trappings of a library book. Sigh. I paid for it, so I want to keep it, but now some person who checks out my collection some day will probably figure I stole it.

I don't know that this book was stolen. Maybe it was never checked out and so sold in some sale to raise funds for other books. But this seems to be a situation that is fraught with peril for libraries. How hard is it to rip off a library of a rare or classic book and then make a serious profit on E-bay or Amazon or Half.com? I don't think it is nearly hard enough.

07:16 PM | | linkme | home

You know, I've been doing online shopping for several years. But stuff like this is depressing. I go online to review pizza menus and see this:

:

I've blurred the first part of the email address, but the company is Teknowiz, a design firm in Chicago, Illinois. I'm in the Washington, DC area. Why am I seeing the email address for someone in Chicago on my home computer?

10:12 PM | | linkme | home

First of all, let me say that I've long held that it is far easier to critique than create. I know...duh. But hey, isn't that part of user experience? Knowing that the great unwashed may not even remotely appreciate the stuff the masters create?

This is just a prequel to point out that the folks at Digital Web Magazine are feeling a bit of heat as a result of their recent change in logo.

I think it's fab that DWM provided this case study in logo design. It's a useful glimpse into the process, and they deserve lots of credit for making themselves a bit of a target by going public. But I wonder if this where they might have zigged when they should have zagged:

The concepts we picked along the way were strongly influenced by the personal flavor and suggestions of the reviewers and my style of design.

Interesting comment. Doesn't this suggest that you might wind up with a logo that is the equivalent of the company org chart on the home page? The folks who paid for it like it, but what about everyone else?

And to comment on a comment from the WebWord discussion, I didn't see the arrow in FedEx until Jared Spool pointed it out in a session he did at an STC conference years back. My recollection is that he said they spent just about 7 figures to get that white space the way they wanted it. (And then I recall he commented about the fact that the arrow points the wrong way--backwards--half the time :).

I probably shouldn't be the one to point out problems with logos. The logo/nameplate I've used for the ID SIG's newsletter, Design Matters, is one of those goofy "well, the red exclamation-like thing is like an idea, and the black circle is the team that hatches it" or something like that. The logo was designed by a CMU grad student, who it turns out was more text-based than graphic-based. The logo was designed in Quark, so I wound up re-doing half of it in Illustrator and the other half in Photoshop so I could give my printer the separations.

So that makes me just like the DWM folks...'cause I actually like our little nameplate. Tho I'm not too attached to it...I've offered to let folks redesign the sucker over the years, and haven't had a taker (what am I saying...we're nearly all tech writers...who would take on this task :).

Is it me, or is this something that is *really* well suited for focus groups? And isn't this what other media (particularly the film and television industry) have been doing for decades? I wonder how many "real" people got to comment about Burger King's new bun before they switched?

09:18 PM | | linkme | home

Conrad Taylor just let ID-Cafe list members know about a report he's published related to a discussion of information literacy. The participants included a dozen or so of interesting folks, many from the British Computer Society, who were interested in the forthcoming World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva in December.

Conrad is my go-to ID guy in the UK. He was very helpful in late 1996 when I was trying to get the ID SIG off the ground. He also gave me invaluable feedback back in when I was drafting my chapter for book. Having seen Conrad in action at the Vision Plus 4 conference (with recording equipment), I have no doubt that this report will be a great read. And since he's a hard-core information designer, it will also be a nice read.

In his email to the list, he noted that:

One of the interesting tensions in the meeting was between the people (such as librarians and "information scientists") whose major concern is how "users" can be better trained to access and use sources of information, and those other folks (such as information designers and publishers) who are concerned with trying to make information products as easy to understand as possible.

IA versus ID? Where have I heard that before :).

07:50 PM | | linkme | home

STC has made their cover story for the April issue of Intercom, Mir Haynes' IA: You do it, you just don't know it, available to the general public on their website. I'm not sure the title is a good one for the article, which actually doesn't imply that tech writers are doing IA work and they don't know it. Rather, it's that tech writers and others in the tech comm field have the focus on the user and their needs that make for good IAs. The closing sentence is more apt: "You already have a strong foundation on which to build" -- but I guess that'd be a lousy title :).

As Lou notes, the more awareness of IA (and related disciplines), the better. I think the article is a nice intro to IA (and UX) for a group which has a lot to offer the field. It won't end the perpetual "what is IA?" discussion over on SIGIA, but heck, what would?

Finally, I didn't think to ask, but I suspect the "face" in the article (see the ) is stock art. Not sure if he's supposed to be more polar bear or west coast IA :).

12:50 PM | | linkme | home

Gee, if it wasn't hard enough to choose from the many great conferences (see right column, below the fold), now there's the option of summer school. The three I've come across recently are Oxford Internet Institute's Summer Doctoral Programme, UMaryland's Graduate Webshop, and the IIID's Information Design Summer Academies (one in Austria, one in Japan).

12:40 PM | | linkme | home

D*mn! My plans for my degree project are now toast. Rune Pettersson has published the polar bear equivalent for information design. Its title is Information Design: An Introduction (at Amazon). It was supposedly published in September 2002, but I managed to miss it until now.

I had the pleasure of meeting Rune at the Vision Plus 4 conference in Pittsburgh back in 1998, and his book is an expansion of the paper he presented there. What's nice is that this is a great information design book for folks who come to ID from traditions other than graphic design, as it discusses text and message design (and cognition) as well as visual design. In this respect it has a lot in common with Karen Schriver's .

Two caveats. One, Rune's book is more academic than either Lou and Peter's or Karen's books (Rune teaches at Mälardalen University in Sweden). In other words, lots more text than graphics and heavy duty referencing. (Interesting...Tufte is there, but Wurman is not.)

The other caveat is that this is really one man's model of information design, which means that he lays out a map that hasn't been universally (or even widely) adopted by the international information design community. For example, he notes that:

As a discipline and an academic subject matter, information design has three main areas of knowledge: infography, infology, and infodidactics. ... Infography is the actual, practical formation and execution of structured combinations of text, pictures, and graphic design. ... Infology is the science of verbo-visual presentation and interpretation of information. ... Infodidactics is the [method] used for teaching the various aspects of information design.

This is some kind of line to draw in the sand (particularly as Sweden has not exactly been the cornerstone of early information design...the UK and the Netherlands would have to hold that honor). But at least someone has written something down. And this is the kind of text that really does need to exist--most other ID works are collections such as , or .

I'm sure I'll have more to say once I've can find the time to read it through. When is the spring semester over?

07:56 PM | | linkme | home

Well, both Mike and his lovely wife (my co-worker Amy) were great PR for the Sidekick, but I (finally) decided that $300 off (from Amazon) and easy Outlook syncing were too hard to pass up. I'm now a happy owner of a Treo 270. If my boss is reading, yes Mark, I know I owe you some hours for yesterday :). But it was just too hard to pass up the chance to get everything working, including email and instant messaging.

And, can I just say, yikes, what documentation there is (and there isn't much that's useful) really bites. I'm not one of those folks who is convinced that convergence is a myth, but boy, we've got a long way to go before these kinds of things are general consumer products. The hardest part was figuring out the d*mn plans and what's included and what's not. T-mobile (and their bazillion plans and names for things) was probably the biggest pain of all.

Don't look for me to be mo-blogging the way Mike does so well. But this may cause designing for tiny screens to bump up a little on my priority list!

06:00 PM | | linkme | home

A wrrl from DCWW alerted list members to UPS's recent change in logo:

old: new:

Some were sorry to see an icon (the original UPS logo was designed in 1961 by Paul Rand) go. Others made comments to support why logo design is such a tricky business. One thought that adding the new logo to the front of redesigned UPS logos might suggest the impression of superheroes. Another thought the new logo reminded her of a fingernail. Oops!

This kind of comment reminds me of my first reaction to the revised Lucent logo (of a few years back) which reminded me of a soggy Cheerio. At the time, I'd heard that the cost for this logo was in the seven figures. In more recent times, I've heard the story that this logo was inspired by Carly Fiorina's mother.

Now if only someone could explain why USAir went to all the expense and trouble to become USAirways?

10:25 PM | | linkme | home

Cool...IDblog is now on the map :).

Well, on Maureen and Don's weblog-enhanced DC Metro Map that is. I'm there at ground zero (heard today that they'll be providing us with face masks...the joys of being in downtown DC a block away from the FBI).

Hmmm...so many blogs, so little time. Well, I may have to check out why DC Blows and why the heck there are so many weblogs near Vienna/Fairfax.

Thanks to mgk for the pointer.

And alas, I missed April Fools by a day, but this was way funny: Google Acquisitions Create Movable Bloggerland:

Asked whether this was a shot across Microsoft's bow, VP of Microsoft's Platform Group Jim Allnose said "Absolutely not. People are already blogging with Microsoft software. You just download the .NET framework, install some service packs, grab a few things from MSDN, install Sharepoint Team Services, and upgrade everything to Office 2003. Once you do that and upgrade to Windows Server 2003 which ships in the next few weeks, you're ready to go. It's simple, and we think it represents the future of consumer-based blogs."

Thanks...I needed the yucks :). If you are so inclined, be sure to check the links too!

07:33 PM | | linkme | home

The conference weblog wasn't what it might have been (despite some valiant efforts), but the following are worth checking out: the speakers page, which the nice folks at ASIS have been updating with speaker presentations, and the conference summaries at Boxes and Arrows (see part 1 and part 2).

Speaking of IA, if you're into the subject of IA and education, you may want to sign up for the . What's a little more email :)

09:12 PM | | linkme | home