Found these in Andrew Hinton's 25 Theses for Information Architecture, linked from Corante on Blogging.
Lots of resonance here for me. This is where my inner librarian and my inner technologist reach mutual understanding. Information technology needs to be about the technology facilitating the storage, dissemination, and use (by people) of information.
12. One goal of information architecture is to shape information into an environment that allows users to create, manage and share its very substance in a framework that provides semantic relevance. 13. Another goal of information architecture is to shape the environment to enable users to better communicate, collaborate and experience one another. 14. The latter goal is more fundamental than the former: information exists only in communities of meaning. Without other people, information no longer has context, and no longer informs. It becomes mere data, less than dust. 15. Therefore, information architecture is about people first, and technology second.
I need to ruminate on this some more. The "semantic" component is where the power of XML lies, to be sure, and I want to be sure to emphasize and build on that in my XML for the Web course next quarter.
It's not enough to know that this is a critical area of technology...it's also necessary to communicate that clearly and effectively. Russell Beattie wants to know why he's only now hearing about RDF when he's been using XML since '98. Probably because the people who understand its value and significance haven't been effective in getting the message out, and in operationalizing it in a way that allows people to "grok" its value and importance.
So, anybody got great examples of XML (RDF or not) being used in web contexts that I can use to make my class really "get it" next quarter?
Interestingly, the more time I spend reading blogs and following links and searching Google for content, the more I seem to end up in the same places rather than different ones.
I think that perhaps the effect of having this enormous "public sphere" of information is that like minds are better able to seek each other out and make connections. What seems purely serendipitous at first looks more and more purposeful or even inevitable.
Case in point. This week's elections had me thinking about the works by Habermas that I read during my first year of doctoral study. At the time (1992), I was struck by the relationship between Habermas' "ideal speech" situation and the communication environment provide by the Internet (e-mail and usenet, basically; this was still what Clay Shirky calls "the Before Time", pre WWW).
So I went Googling for people who might have explored the connection between blogs and Habermas' "public sphere." Who did I find? Why, Jill Walker again, in a blog called "blogonblog" that she and her colleague Torill Mortensen put together for a paper they'd written.
Somehow, though, this didn't surprise me. In the best of all possible worlds (for me, at least), it's intellectual affinity that draws people together. The fact that my early reading of Jill's current blog led me to link to her site and regularly read her entries seems an excellent indication that we share a common way of thinking about technology and the way we interact with it. This was an affirmation that I can trust my instincts, that if I follow my interests they'll lead me to the people who share them, and that those connections will be the ones that matter.
There's a cyclical component to this, I think. A reaching out and connecting to new ideas and new people, a circling back that affirms the value of those connections and integrates them into your own sphere, then more reaching out, using those new nodes in your personal network. There's a self-limiting quality to the process--you only reach out as far as your capacity allows, returning to the relative "safety" of known entities, adding a node or two at a time, paring the non-essential components as you go.
David Weinberger has an interesting column in Darwin Magazine called "What's Info Got to Do With It?"
Decontextualizing something constitutes changing its nature since context comes first: Things only are what they are in context. Meaning is emergent and irreducible.
So does it follow that blogs, by their nature, change the nature of the content they excerpt and link to? How does my context modify David's meaning? If meaning is irreducible, can it also be endlessly malleable throught this process?
And can I find any other ways to avoid grading exams this afternoon?
Via Andrew Hinton's memekitchen a great article by Zeldman in Digital Web Magazine. "99.9% of Websites are Obsolete."
Often, non-standards-compliant sites work in yesterday's browsers because their owners have invested in costly publishing tools that accommodate browser differences by generating multiple, non-standard versions tuned to the biases of specific browsers and platforms. This practice taxes the dial-up user's patience by wasting bandwidth on code forking, deeply nested tables, spacer pixels and other image hacks, and outdated or invalid tags and attributes.
More good food for thought for next quarter's web design students.
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