Chiara Fox .com (Now with more Fox)

*** Originally posted on the Adaptive Path Blog ***

This week I joined 1100 other folks at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose. I attended this conference back in 2007 and I'm happier to say I really see a difference in the past two years. Back in 2007, everything about the conference was about the technology. What was the code that made this stuff go? I tried to keep up in a number of sessions where they kept flashing XML up on the screen. I'm happy to report that my experience was much different this year.

From the moment of the first keynote, folks were talking about the user experience. Yay! Our message is finally getting out there. It seems to me that they have finally gotten the technical bits mostly figured out on how to make this semantic web thing go. Now it's time for the fun stuff: using it to power things that make people's lives better.

There seemed to be two big uses for semantic technologies that I heard at the conference. First were the groups of folks talking about plug-ins and snippets of code that anyone can drop into their browser or onto their web pages to make an enhanced experience. Yahoo!'s Search Monkey and Google's Rich Snippets are both examples of simple XML bits that you can add to your pages to enhance your results listing on their engines. Adaptive Blue is a Firefox plug-in that let's you see your friends' reviews of books, movies and other stuff as you look at these items on different sites.

The other use is more like what I traditionally think of when I think semantics. There were lots of examples of vendors who can create ontologies and connections by parsing the corpus of unstructured text you give it, whether that text be email, Wikipedia or the Bible. These tools let you see what topics occur in given populations (such as football and the Longhorns in Enron internal email) as well as moving through those related topics. The guys at The New York Times talked about how they use semantic tools to publish their topic pages as well as their news alerts, widgets, RSS feeds and to automate their editorial process.

It was a fun 2.5 days. I learned a lot and am eager to update my personal sites with Rich Snippets, RDFa and microformats.

Join me on Wednesday, June 24 for my virtual seminar on the semantic web. I'll explain the basics of how this stuff works and why user experience folks need to be involved.

"I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same." — Suw Charman-Anderson

I signed up and pledged to blog about a woman in technology. Turns out 1832 other people have also signed up. I wanted to blog about Dr. Lene Vestergaard Hau, a Danish physicist who works in the field of quantum physics.

I worked with Lene Hau when I was a librarian at the Rowland Institute for Science in Boston, around 1997-2000. Lene ran the group working on atom cooling and Bose-Einstein condensation. While I and her team were working there, they slowed the speed of light! I remember walking into the Institute one morning, and the team had put up a spoof of those Volkswagen Beetle ads that said "0 to 60? Yes.", but with numbers for the speed of light: "300,000 km/sec to 17 m/sec? Yes!" Eventually they were able to stop it.

Lene now works at Harvard University. She has published numerous scientific articles and papers, and was honored with Harvard University's prestigious Ledlie Prize in September 2008. She was Elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on January 16, 2008.

In 2002, John Preskill wrote a poem about her, called Lene Hau.

I admire Lene for her amazing achievements. Physics is a branch of science that is still dominated by men. Lene is incredibility smart and talented. She has risen to the top of her field. I'm proud that I was able to work with her for the little bit that I did.

You can learn more about her on her lab's page at Harvard and on her wikipedia page.

--- Originally posted on the Adaptive Path Blog ---

About a year ago, Jesse came to me and suggested I change my title from Information Architect to User Experience Designer. He gave a number of reasons, but none of them resonated with me. I clearly remember commiserating with some dear friends at the IA Summit 2008 about this proposed change in title.

I didn’t want to give up the title. I considered myself an information architect first and foremost. I’ve called myself an IA for nine years now. I was proud of the name. It was who I was. So I didn’t change it.

In Memphis this past weekend, at the IA Summit 2009, I spent a lot of time talking with first time attendees and those new to the field of information architecture. I hosted a round table at lunch for those new to IA. They were a great table, with tons of questions.

One of the things they really wanted to know was how to become a great IA. My answers surprised me. I didn’t tell them that they had to master multi-faceted classification or be able to generate thesauri and controlled vocabularies from scratch. I didn’t tell them about stencils and templates for making better wireframes.

I told them how important it was to listen to the customers of the organizations they would be working for and to deeply understand their behaviors and motivations. I told them to be champions for the user. I told them to listen to the pain of their clients, and think about how their designs could ease it. I told them not to go in shouting about CVs and classification and indexing and how their clients were doing it all wrong. Be subtle, I said. Listen for their needs. Present classifications and metadata and all that cool stuff as the way to get your designs implemented, not as an end in and of itself.

And I realized… I wasn’t telling them how to do good information architecture. I was telling them how to do good user experience design. I realized while I love IA, and it is my core competency, it is also only a small part of what I do.

For that reason, I am taking on the title of User Experience Designer.

Today I am giving a talk at the IA Summit about the Semantic Web, called The Semantic Web: What IAs Need to Know About Web 3.0.

It's hosted here on Slideshare:

There's a brilliant little video over at AdFreak showing what it would be like if a stop sign were to be designed today using the typical big corporation design process. It's from the same folks who did the if Microsoft designed the iPod packaging video.

Designing a stop sign

It makes me more than a little sad that so much of this rings true for what life is like as a consultant.

It's amazing the change that can be made when one has power in the marketplace. Amazon.com has started a new program called Frustration-Free Package.

They are working directly with manufactures to eliminate the excess packaging that many products have these days. Rather than encasing everything in layers of plastic, they are using simple, cardboard boxes that can be mailed directly. This has the added benefit of getting rid of the box-in-a-box situation. And it removes the problem of having to fight with the box to get to your stuff. Everyone wins!

I'm so glad to see Amazon doing this. They have become a big enough player in the retail space that they can actually get companies to start changing their business practices. Way to go Amazon!

Fast Company has an awesome article today on the women who are making Web 2.0 go. It's so wonderful to see these amazingly talented and inspiring women called out. And that fact that I know a bunch of them makes it that much more special.

Way to go Leah Culver of Pownce; Rashmi Sinha of Slideshare; Dina Kaplin of blip.tv; Marissa Mayer of Google; Cyan Banister of Zivity; Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and Elisa Camahort Page of BlogHer; Caterina Fake of Flickr; Gina Bianchini of Ning; Kaliya Hamlin of OpenID; Mena Trott of Six Apart; and Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post. You are all an inspiration!

--- Originally published on the Adaptive Path Blog ---

I've been looking for a metaphor or a model that I could use to describe how the Information Architecture day of UX Intensive is structured. The day is focused on metadata, controlled vocabularies, classification schemes and search. They sort of build on each other, but not in a simple, neatly stacked way. I was thinking about this while in Copenhagen a few weeks ago, when the answer hit me: Stone Soup!

Do you remember the story of Stone Soup? It's a Grimm Brothers' tale about returning soldiers and their guise to get a selfish, starving town to learn the lesson of cooperation and its benefits. They can make soup from their stone, but it will be a more tasty and filling soup if they get the whole town to pitch in and add ingredients.

Information architecture is like Stone Soup. You can make a website without explicitly thinking about the IA. You don't have to use metadata or control your vocabularies or develop thesauri. You don't have to tweak your search engine and play with recall and precision to improve your results.

But it will be better if you do.

Putting structure into your unstructured data allows you to make your site that much better. It's a way to "plus" it. A way to add some "BAM" to your site, to borrow a phrase from Emeril Lagasse. Because it's easier to slice and dice and do interesting things with structured data than it is when your data is a big, undifferentiated mass.

IA from a stone? Fancy that.

I wanted to make a big shout out to all the folks who came to my talk at the EuroIA Conference today. Wow! Thanks! I had no idea so many people were interested in content analysis.

Here is a PDF version of the presentation: Content Analysis Slides [ PDF: 4.2 MB ]

And here is a link to a audit spreadsheet template that should get you going: Content Audit Template [Excel: 54 KB]

I am forming all kinds of things to talk about that I've learned here, but for now I need to get to bed if I have any chance of making to the morning sessions.

Tomorrow is the official start of the EuroIA Conference here in Amsterdam. I'm so excited to be able to be a part of it this year!

Adam Greenfield will be giving the opening keynote. I remember first hearing Adam speak at an IA Summit about the issues of IA in the international space, especially as related to the work he had done in Japan. He talk was incredibly insightful and I was able to use some of his ideas in my work at PeopleSoft. He also gave a talk at Adaptive Path when his book Everyware first came out. I always find Adam a very engaging speaker, bringing together points in ways that are insightful and clever and always make me think. I can't wait to hear what he has to say.

There are a slew of great speakers that have be lined up. Some are names that I know from the IA Summit and others are ones I'm looking forward to meeting. There are two tracks each day, and it's going to be hard to chose. I'm on opposite Eric Reiss, tomorrow at 2:30, and will be talking about content analysis and how to really understand all the stuff that builds up on a site.