3 Questions About the Future State of the Web

April 16, 2008 07:01 PM | Posted in: Ideas

Now that the web is clearly social, what happens when the web becomes emotional?

Streams are already under pressure from the technorati as expired. What will follow the stream (which is a liquid, really) as a metaphor for the state of the information layer? Gases, or plasmas? What will gases and plasmas made of information feel like experientially? How will they behave?

Does it even make sense to think about this in terms of the states of matter, or will information exhibit different states and take different forms?

local tags: infoverse, metaphors, physics, plasmas, streams

IA Summit Talks on Ethics, Experience Design, Social Networks

March 4, 2008 06:52 AM | Posted in: Ideas , Information Architecture , Networks and Systems

Thanks to Facebook's public mistakes and apology to those affected by Beacon , as well as a number of other ham-handed attempts to monetize the social graph, the intersection of ethics, design, and social networks is receiving overdue attention. Two talks at this year's Information Architecture Summit in Miami will look at ethics as it applies to the daily work of creating social networks, and user experiences in general.

First is Designing for the social: Avoiding anti-social networks, by Miles Rochford, description below.

This presentation considers the role of traditional social networks and the role of IAs in addressing the challenges that arise when designing and using online social networks.

The presentation discusses philosophical approaches to sharing the self, how this relates to offline social networks and human interactions in different contexts, and provides guidance on how online social networking tools can be designed to support these relationships.

It also covers ethical issues, including privacy, and how these can conflict with business needs. A range of examples illustrate the impact of these drivers and how design decisions can lead to the creation of anti-social networks.

Related: the social networks anti-patterns list from the microformats.org wiki.

The second is The impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design - experiences from the Norwegian woods, by Karl Yohan Saeth and Ingrid Tofte, described as follows:

This presentation discusses ethics in IA from a practical point of view. Through different case studies we illustrate the impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design, and sum up our experiences on dealing with ethics in real projects.

If you're interested in ethics and the practicalities of user experience (and who isn't?), both sessions look good. I'll be talking about other things at the summit this year. In the meantime, stay tuned for the second article in my UXMatters series on designing ethical experiences, due for publication very soon.

local tags: design, ethics, social_networks, user_experience

Blogtalk 2008 slides available

March 3, 2008 07:12 AM | Posted in: Ideas , Networks and Systems , User Experience (UX)

My slides from Blogtalk 2008 are available online now: I went through a lot of ideas quickly, so this is a good way to follow along at your own pace...

FYI: This version of the deck includes presenters notes - I'll upload a (larger!) view-only version once I'm back from holiday in lovely Eire.

local tags: cocreation, computer, conflict, design, diy, ethics, future, ia, innovation, method, methods, permeation, social_media, social_networks, spime, technology, transmedia, trend, ubicomp, ui, ux, webdesign

'Designing Ethical Experiences: Social Media and the Conflicted Future' is live at UXMatters

February 12, 2008 03:43 PM | Posted in: Ideas , User Experience (UX)

UXMatters just published part 1 of a two part series I'm writing on ethics and design titled, Designing Ethical Experiences: Social Media and the Conflicted Future.

Here's an excerpt, to whet your appetites for a practical take on what's often seen as a philosophical subject.

Questions of ethics and conflict can seem far removed from the daily work of user experience (UX) designers who are trying to develop insight into people's needs, understand their outlooks, and design with empathy for their concerns. In fact, the converse is true: When conflicts between businesses and customers--or any groups of stakeholders--remain unresolved, UX practitioners frequently find themselves facing ethical dilemmas, searching for design compromises that satisfy competing camps. This dynamic is the essential pattern by which conflicts in goals and perspectives become ethical concerns for UX designers. Unchecked, it can lead to the creation of unethical experiences that are hostile to users--the very people most designers work hard to benefit--and damaging to the reputations and brand identities of the businesses responsible.

Stay tuned for part two, which will share a set of suggestions for how design can manage conflict and work toward the creation of ethical integrated experiences. Meanwhile, let us know what you think of the ideas here, or at the UXMatters site.

local tags: design, DIY, ethics, integrated_experiences, user_experience

Information Archaeology

September 9, 2007 11:18 PM | Posted in: Ideas , Information Architecture

In addition to the customary joys of DIY life in the new mediaverse - contending with opaque and incomplete documentation, reconciling conflicting content models and templates, and the seemingly endless repetitive labor of manually naming, tagging, and reviewing migrated items - changing publishing platforms means the opportunity to explore what it will be like to be an Information Archaeologist in the future.

Operatively, this means digging deep into the many layers of cumulative information strata beneath the gentle orange user experience that greets visitors to JoeLamantia.com. When performed on a website you've created and maintained for almost 10 years, the experience is a mix of cleaning out your attic, workshop, or garage, and excavating the foundations of a former residence.

Such an effort yields a rich assemblage of digital artifacts:

• dozens of orphaned HTML pages comprising a design portfolio, created by hand using deprecated markup and tags
• "multi-ethnic" style-sheets cross-bred and reused for so many different site looks or designs over the past ten years that deleting style references is like playing russian roulette with your user experience
• four or five derelict publishing package installations (MT, WordPress, etc.), spanning technologies from PERL/CGI to PHP RUBY - the Infoverse equivalent of a collection of abandoned and decaying rust belt factories
• hundreds of half-empty shell pages populated with dummy content, created during tests of publishing tools
• multiple sets of overlapping archives, accumulated over generations of upgrades to blogging tools. the trend here is toward increasingly human-readable output files, away from the raw database style naming of early blogging platforms
• a score of miscellaneous documents, audio / video files, and MS Office format files stored on the server for temporary download, now comprising a retrospective of outdated resumes, drafts of deliverables for long-over projects, and backups from system crashes long-forgotten
• numerous design tools and templates, now linked from external publications, and indispensable to unknown thousands of downloaders

Just like the older layers of cities and habitations uncovered during new construction, these cumulative information castoffs tell stories within a larger context: changing career plans and jobs, new technologies and tools, shifts in business and economic climates, life events, aspirations and interests, hardware failures.

What will the information archaeologists of the future find when excavating our virtual habitations and workplaces? How will they map and understand what they find? What meanings will they make, and what insights into our lives will they draw, from the information (waste? pollution? byproducts?) we create at such stupendous rates?

Like so many life forms before us, we are very busy living in the moment, not thinking overly much about the vast deposits of information detritus we leave behind in the course of saving dozens of versions of text files, booking air travel, sharing photos, or obeying regulatory compliance directives for medical archives.

But in the long view, all this will matter in some way. Witness the fact that 10% of the land area of the former Soviet Union is contaminated with radioactivity or industrial pollution.

What is the difference between pollution, waste, and recyclable and reusable matter in the infoverse?

Can we make use of these vast deposits of information in new ways?

The Garamantes of the Sahara relied on deeply buried reserves of fossil water to sustain a brief empire, a culture that flowered and perished entirely in line with it's ability to exploit finite reserves of irreplaceable groundwater (paleowater)stored in aquifers.

Living off the fruits of past accumulation is a habit we've not shaken yet in North Africa (Libya's Great Man Made River project supplying 6,500,000 m³ of freshwater per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirt and elsewhere is the largest engineering effort in the world), or here in the United States, as we drain the enormous Ogallala Aquifer - that supports nearly one-fifth of the wheat, corn, cotton, and cattle produced in the United States - at an alarming rate.

As (it seems, always...), Sterling has visited this future, in his novel >Holyfire, which mentions wildcatters who get rich discovering lost landfills rich in plastics and other rare materials, in former Eastern Europe.

Moving past the archeological horizon brings us to the geologic time scale.

Will future virtual economies depend on the industrial style extraction, processing and mass consumption of these new informational strata we are laying down today, in the same way that we depend upon fossilized forests of the Carboniferous era to power our new hydrocarbon age?

The vast oil and coal deposits that power our economy exist because the bacteria and other decomposer organisms of the time were unable to effectively break down plant cell materials. We recreate this cycle by mining assorted fossil fuels, turning them into plastics that existing decomposers are unable to break down, and then dispersing these new proto-fossilized non-degrable materials widely throughout our own environment (yielding contemporary phenomena such as plastic micro-particulate contamination of tidal waters, and dating of landfills by the plastic materials preserved in them.

local tags: ecology, futurism, information_archaeology

The Rise of Holistic Thinking

July 24, 2007 05:22 PM | Posted in: Ideas

Good design is the result of an unusual mix of two very different ways of thinking that must work together to a common end; reductive approaches (to define a problem) and holistic approaches (to solve - or redefine - the problem by considering every aspect). The combination is a powerful synthesis which relies on a balance between competing forces.

Designers have understood the importance of this balance - and thus the indispensable role of holistic thinking in design methods - for a long time. But as a consequence of the long-standing dominance of industrial production processes and logics, which eliminated or severely restricted opportunities for most people to design any part of the fabric of their everyday lives, holistic approaches and thinking have had minimal visibility in the modern cultural landscape.

That seems to be changing, and I suspect few would dispute the rise in visibility and importance of design within the cultural landscape. Some might say we are in the midst of a renaissance of design (that comparison breaks down under a critical lens, in the end demonstrating more the positive aspirations of design advocates than anything else).

Looking at the culture as a whole, the rise of design is one aspect of a larger and much more important cultural shift: the rise of holistic thinking. This shift towards holistic views is changing the things we talk about and think about, and hold central as the elements of our basic frame of reference - in short, the way we conceive of the world.

The concepts in the list below are good examples of the rise of holistic thinking across disciplines and fields. Seemingly willy-nilly (which is exactly the point!), all these ideas rely on, include, or enhance holistic viewpoints at some level:

• networks
• collective intelligence
• emergence
• the Internet
• systems thinking
• globalization
• design thinking
• sustainability
• cross-cultural communication
• climate change
• ethnography
• multi-culturalism
• patterns
• complexity
• internationalization / localization
• social media
• the mashup
• ecology
• remixing
• collaborative production models
• the green movement
• open source
• urbanism and urban planning
• the creative class
• architecture of participation
• the knowledge economy

It's no accident that this list is also an index of many of the major ideas and concerns of our day. What does it mean? Well, it's good for design at the moment. And maybe there's a book in it for someone with the time to synthesize an idea and work up a solid treatment...

local tags: cultural_shifts, culture, design, design_thinking, frames_of_reference, holism, holistic_thinking, rise_of_design

Is Daylife the Collective Conscious?

July 20, 2007 03:55 PM | Posted in: Ideas

Jung posited the idea of the collective unconscious (later refined, but a good point of departure). Do Daylife and similar stream aggregators / visualizers (I'm reaching for a handle to describe these entities) like Universe, point at what a collective conscious could be?

Universe

Some precursors might be Yahoo's Taglines and TagMaps, Google Zeitgeist / Trends, and the various cloud style visualizations like cloudalicious, etc.

Plainly, the number and variety of tools and destinations for visualizing what's on the mind of groups is growing rapidly.

If the parallelism holds, meaning Daylife and kin are themselves points of departure, where is this going? I'm not thinking of collective intelligence - just the visualization aspect, and how that may evolve.

local tags: collective_conscious, collective_unconscious, jung, media_aggregators, social_media, streams, visualization

Boxes and Arrows: It Seemed Like The Thing To Do At The Time

June 27, 2007 10:05 AM | Posted in: Building Blocks , Ideas , User Experience (UX)

The Lessons From Failure Series (curated by Christian Crumlish) kicked off today at Boxes and Arrows, leading with my meditation on being an entrepreneur and what it means to face failure as a member of a rigidly defined society, titled It Seemed Like The Thing To Do At The Time. Stay tuned for three further installments from talented fellow panelists.

Also, look for part two of my series on designing healthy user experiences for portals using the IA Building Blocks in early July. Part one - The Challenge of Dashboards and Portals - describing the structural and usability weaknesses of flat architectures, was published in December.

Many thanks to the hard working volunteers at B+A for creating a forum for these ideas and the community around them!

local tags: boxes_and_arrows, entrepreneurship, ia_building_blocks, lessons_from_failure, portals, self_definition, social_systems

Why Failed Societies Are Relevant to Social Media

June 18, 2007 10:08 AM | Posted in: Architecture , Ideas , The Media Environment

For regular readers wondering about the recent quiet here, a notice that Boxes and Arrows will shortly publish an article I've been working on for a while in the background, titled, "It Seemed Like the Thing To Do At the Time: The Power of State of Mind". This is the written version of my panel presentation Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs from the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas.

I've written about organizations and failure - Signs of Crisis and Decline In Organizations - in this blog before (a while ago, but still a popular posting), and wanted to consider the subject on a larger level. With the rapid spread of social software / social media and the rise of complex social dynamics in on-line environments, exploring failure at the level of an entire society is timely.

In The Fishbowl
Failed or failing societies are an excellent fishbowl for observers seeking patterns related to social media, for two reasons. First, the high intensity of failure situations reveals much of what is ordinarily hidden in social structures and patterns: Impending collapse leads people to dispense with carefully maintained social constructions.

One source of this heightened intensity is the greatly increased stakes of societal failure (vs. most other kinds), which often means sudden and dramatic disruptions to basic living and economic patterns, the decline of cities and urban concentrations, and dramatic population decrease. Another source is the very broad scope of the aftereffects; because a failing society involves an entire culture, the affects are comprehensive, touching everyone and everything.
Secondly, societies often command substantial qualitative and quantitative resources that can help them manage crisis or challenges, thereby averting failure. Smaller, less sophisticated entities lack the resource base of a complex social organism, and consequently cannot put up as much of a fight.

Examples of resources available at the level of a society include:

• Leaders and planners dedicated to focusing on the future


• Large amounts of accumulated knowledge and experience


• Sophisticated structures for decision making and control


• Mechanisms for maintaining order during crises


• Collective resilience from surviving previous challenges


• Substantial stores of resources such as food and materials, money, land


• Tools, methods, and organizations providing economies of scale, such as banking and commerce networks


• Systems for mobilizing labor for special purposes


• Connections to other societies that could provide assistance (or potential rescue)

Despite these mitigating resources, the historical and archeological records overflow with examples of failed societies. Once we read those records, the question of how these societies defined themselves seems to bear directly on quite a few of the outcomes.

I discuss three societies in the article: Easter Island, Tikopia, and my own small startup company. We have insight into the fate of Easter Island society thanks to a rich archeological record that has been extensively studied, and descriptions of the Rapa Nui society in written records kept by European explorers visiting since 1722. Tikopia of course is still a functioning culture. My startup was a tiny affair that serves as a useful foil because it shows all the mistakes societies make in a compressed span of time, and on a scale that's easy to examine. The Norse colonies in North America and Greenland are another good example, though space constraints didn't allow discussion of their failed society in the article.

Read the article to see what happens to all three!

Semi Random Assortment of Quotations
In the meantime, enjoy this sampling of quotations about failure, knowledge, and self, from some well-known - and mostly successful! - people.

"Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal." - ALBERT EINSTEIN

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." - CHARLES DARWIN

"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." - EPICTETUS

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - THOMAS EDISON

"It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success." - HAVELOCK ELLIS

"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it." - ANAIS NIN

"We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us." - RABINDRANATH TAGORE

"Whoever longs to rescue quickly both himself and others should practice the supreme mystery: exchange of self and other." - SHANTIDEVA

"Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes." - JOHN DEWEY

local tags: archaeology, boxes_and_arrows, culture, failure, mental_models, organizational_culture, selfdefinition, social_media, social_systems, state_of_mind, success

Smart Scoping For Content Management: Use The Content Scope Cycle

February 19, 2007 04:01 PM | Posted in: Ideas

Content management efforts are justly infamous for exceeding budgets and timelines, despite making considerable accomplishments. Exaggerated expectations for tool capabilities (vendors promise a world of automagic simplicity, but don't believe the hype) and the potential value of cost and efficiency improvements from managing content creation and distribution play a substantial part in this. But unrealistic estimates of the scope of the content to be managed make a more important contribution to most cost and time overruns.

Scope in this sense is a combination of the quantity and the quality of content; smaller amounts of very complex content substantially increase the overall scope of needs a CM solution must manage effectively. By analogy, imagine building an assembly line for toy cars, then deciding it has to handle the assembly of just a few full size automobiles at the same time.
Early and inaccurate estimates of content scope have a cascading effect, decreasing the accuracy of budgets, timelines, and resource forecasts for all the activities that follow.

In a typical content management engagement, the activities affected include:

• taking a content inventory


• defining content models


• choosing a new content management system


• designing content structures, workflows, and metadata


• migrating content from one system to another


• refreshing and updating content


• establishing sound governance mechanisms

The Root of the Problem

Two misconceptions - and two common but unhealthy practices, discussed below - drive most content scope estimates. First: the scope of content is knowable in advance. Second, and more misleading, scope remains fixed once defined. Neither of these assumptions is valid: identifying the scope of content with accuracy is unlikely without a comprehensive audit, and content scope (initial, revised, actual) changes considerably over the course of the CM effort.

Together, these assumptions make it very difficult for program directors, project managers, and business sponsors to set accurate and detailed budget and timeline expectations. The uncertain or shifting scope of most CM efforts conflicts directly with business imperatives to carefully manage of IT capital investment and spending, a necessity in most funding processes, and especially at the enterprise level. Instead of estimating specific numbers long in advance of reality (as with the Iraq war budget), a better approach is to embrace fluidity, and plan to refine scope estimates at punctuated intervals, according to the natural cycle of content scope change.

Understanding the Content Scope Cycle

Content scope changes according to a predictable cycle that is largely independent of the specifics of a project, system, organizational setting, and scale. This cycle seems consistent at the level of local CM efforts for a single business unit or isolated process, and at the level of enterprise scale content management efforts. Understanding the cycle makes it possible to prepare for shifts in a qualitative sense, accounting for the kind of variation to expect while planning and setting expectations with stakeholders, solution users, sponsors, and consumers of the managed content.

The Content Scope Cycle

The high peak and elevated mountain valley shape in this illustration tell the story of scope changes through the course of most content management efforts. From the initial inaccurate estimate, scope climbs consistently and steeply during the discovery phase, peaking in potential after all discovery activities conclude. Scope then declines quickly, but not to the original level, as assessments cull unneeded content. Scope levels out during system / solution / infrastructure creation, and climbs modestly during revision and replacement activities. At this point, the actual scope is known. Measured increases driven by the incorporation of supplemental material then increase scope in stages.

Local and Enterprise Cycles

Applying the context-independent view of the cycle to a local level reveals a close match with the activities and milestones for a content management effort for a small body of content, a single business unit of a larger organization, or a self-contained business process.

Local Content Management Scope Cycle

At the enterprise level, the cycle is the same. This illustration shows activities and milestones for a content management effort for a large and diverse body of content, multiple business units of a larger organization, or multiple and interconnected business process.

Enterprise Content Management Scope Cycle

Scope Cycle Changes

This graph shows the amount of scope change at each milestone, versus its predecessor. Looking at the changes for any patterns of clustering and frequency, it's easy to see the cycle breaks down into three major phases: an initial period of dynamic instability, a static and stable phase, and a concluding (and ongoing, if the effort is successful) phase of dynamic stability.

Scope Cycle Phases

Where does the extra scope come from? In other words, what's the source of the unexpected quantity and complexity of content behind the spikes and drops in expected scope in the first two phases? And why drives the shifts from one phase to another?

Bad CM Habits

Two common approaches account for a majority of the dramatic shifts in content scope. Most significantly, those people with immediate knowledge of the content quantity and complexity rarely have direct voice in setting the scope and timeline expectations. Too often, stake holders with expertise in other areas (IT, enterprise architecture, application development) frame the problem and the solution far in advance. The content creators, publishers, distributors, and consumers are not involved early enough.

Secondly, those who frame the problem make assumptions about quantity and complexity that trend low. (This is in companion to the exaggeration of tool capabilities.) Each new business unit, content owner, and system administrator's items included in the effort will increase the scope of the content in quantity, complexity, or both. Ongoing identification of new or unknown types of content, work flows, business rules, usage contexts, storage modes, applications, formats, syndication instances, systems, and repositories will continue to increase the scope until all relevant parties (creators, consumers, administrators, etc.) are engaged, and their needs and content collections fully understood.

The result is clear: a series of substantial scope errors of both under and over-estimatio, in comparison to the actual scope, concentrated in the first phase of the scope cycle.

Scope Errors

Smart Scoping

The scope cycle seems to be a fundamental pattern; likely an emergent aspect of the environments and systems underlying it, but that's another discussion entirely. Failing to allow for the natural changes in scope over the course of a content management effort ties your success to inaccurate estimates, and this false expectations.

Smart scoping means allowing for and anticipating the inherent margins of error when setting expectations and making estimates. The most straightforward way to put this into practice and account for the likely margins of error is to adjust the timing of a scope estimate to the necessary level of accuracy.

Relative Scope Estimate Accuracy

Scoping and Budgeting

Estimation practices that respond to the content scope cycle can still satisfy business needs. At the enterprise CM level, IT spending plans and investment frameworks (often part of enterprise architecture planning processes) should allow for natural cycles by defining classes or kinds of estimates based on comparative degree of accuracy, and the estimator's leeway for meeting or exceeding implied commitments. Enterprise frameworks will identify when more or less accurate estimates are needed to move through funding and approval gateways, based on each organization's investment practices.

And at the local CM level, project planning and resource forecasting methods should allow for incremental allocation of resources to meet task and activity needs. Taking a content inventory is a substantial labor on its own, for example. The same is true of migrating a body of content from one or more sources to a new CM solution that incorporates changed content structures such as work flows and information architectures. The architectural, technical, and organizational capabilities and staff needed for inventorying and migrating content can often be met by relying on content owners and stake holders, or hiring contractors for short and medium-term assistance.

Parallels To CM Spending Patterns

The content scope cycle strongly parallels the spending patterns during CMS implementation James Robertson identified in June of 2005. I think the scope cycle correlates with the spending pattern James found, and it may even be a driving factor.

Scoping and Maturity

Unrealistic scope estimation that does not take the content scope cycle into account is typical of organizations undertaking a first content management effort. It is also common in organizations with content management experience, but low levels of content management maturity.

Two (informal) surveys of CMS practitioners spanning the past three years show the prevalence of scoping problems. In 2004, Victor Lombardi reported: "Of all tasks in a content management project, the creation, editing, and migration of content are probably the most frequently underestimated on the project plan." [in Managing the Complexity of Content Management].

And two weeks ago, Rita Warren of CMSWire shared the results of a recent survey on challenges in content management (Things That Go Bump In Your CMS).

The top 5 challenges (most often ranked #1) were:

1. Clarifying business goals


2. Gaining and maintaining executive support


3. Redesigning/optimizing business processes


4. Gaining consensus among stakeholders


5. Properly scoping the project

..."Properly scoping the project" was actually the most popular answer, showing up in the top 5 most often.

Accurate scoping is much easier for organizations with high levels of content management maturity. As the error margins inherent in early and inaccurate scope estimates demonstrate, there is considerable benefit in creating mechanisms and tools for effectively understanding the quantity and quality of content requiring management, as well as the larger business context, solution governance, and organizational culture concerns.

local tags: content_management, cycles, ecm, enterprise, project_management

Announcing The Arrival of 2.0 2.0

June 9, 2006 10:42 PM | Posted in: Ideas

It has recently become clear that we're now in the first stages of 2.0 2.0.

And I'm pleased to report that all indicators firmly support universal expectations that 2.0 2.0 will be much better than 2.0 1.0 was, or hoped to be.

In fact, 2.0 2.0 is predicted to positively blow the doors off 2.0 1.0.

Besides being cheaper, faster, and better than 2.0 1.0, 2.0 2.0 will be vastly more profitable, fully nourishing in a non-fattening ecologically and ethically responsive way, and a supremely snappy dresser for all occasions.

2.0 2.0 is a bold reconceptualization of the basic framing tenets of 2.0, that takes full advantage of the new capabilities and possibilities latent in the emerging 2.0.

Whereas the inherent weaknesses of the basic conceptual construction of 2.0 1.0 were only apparent in the after-the-fact fashion that was typical of the fundamental limitations in the 2.0 1.0 understanding of 2.0, 2.0 2.0 is a fully transparent, self-funding, scalable, genuinely progressive, emancipatory, empowering, and comprehensive vision of the future evolution of 2.0.

Now that 2.0 2.0 is here, we can look back on the inadequacies of 2.0 1.0 with a mixture of pride - after all, it was the only understanding of 2.0 available at the time, and it did lay the foundations for the sublimely enhanced 2.0 that is 2.0 2.0 - and chagrin, since we recognized even in the moment that the fullest flower of 2.0 1.0 could only hope to be an incomplete portrayal of the true possibilities of 2.0 that precluded realizing 2.0's full potential as long as it was the dominant paradigm for interpreting 2.0.

Thankfully, we can now look forward to the imminent realization of the full promise of the 2.0 2.0 vision, as it harnesses collective, emergent, non-linear, thingies to bring peripheral benefits unimaginable in the era of 2.0 1.0, such as improving conversation at industry cocktail parties, and making everyone a good dancer.

local tags: business20, content20, enterprise20, web20

The End of Empire: IBM, OpenDocument, and Enterprise Monocultures

May 30, 2006 12:57 AM | Posted in: Ideas

IBM recently announced the next version of Lotus Notes will support OpenDocument Format as a native file format (as reported in IBM Bets Big On Open Source In Next Release Of Lotus Notes). This shift to an open file format is - as the majority of the coverage of IBM's announcement correctly interprets it to be - a direct challenge to the dominance of the Office suite of productivity applications, a class of products in which Microsoft has long relied on proprietary file formats as a cornerstone of it's market control strategy. Making the challenge explicit, the next version of Lotus Notes will also include "...built-in word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics software".

Since Microsoft relies on the integration of SharePoint and the Office suite as a pillar of it's collaboration plans (in Gates outlines SharePoint strategy, hammers IBM, John Fontana of Network World quotes Bill Gates as saying, "The key point is that SharePoint is becoming the key platform for collaboration of all types... When people look back on what we are doing with Office [2007] here, the most revolutionary element will be what we are doing with SharePoint."), IBM's shift to OpenDocument Format is also a strategic move in the larger category of enterprise collaboration, itself a subset of the emerging comprehensive information working environments Forrester Research calls the information workplace.

An End to Imperialism

I've suggested already that the conceptual construct labeled 'collaboration' is at heart another instance of enterprise software and solution vendor marketing rhetoric designed to mask reality - it's simply not possible to change established cultural, organizational, perceptual, or philosophical understandings of what work is and how it should be done with an approach centered on technology - in a quasi-utopian haze.

IBM's adoption of OpenDocument doesn't change this picture of the collaboration landscape. Instead, it indicates a larger shift; dawning recognition and acknowledgment that monocultures are no longer viable, or valid, or broadly acceptable in the enterprise arena.

The creation and preservation of monocultures (recently in the news associated with Microsoft thanks to Dan Greer and others' prescience) is one of the salient characteristics of the old approach to enterprise software solutions. It is especially visible in those enterprise solutions whose intended role within a portfolio of product and service offerings is to serve as a consistent revenue source, strategic bulwark against competition, and cost shifting mechanism whereby clients paid for the development of new products and services, often under the guise of maintenance, patches, upgrades, etc.

Broadly, the old approach to enterprise solutions was an imperial model, with aspects of colonialism, that pursued a military style take and hold growth pattern.

Wikipedia offers the following introduction to imperialism:

"Imperialism is a policy of extending control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires. This is either through direct territorial conquest or settlement, or through indirect methods of exerting control on the politics and/or economy of other countries. The term is often used to describe the policy of a country's dominance over distant lands, regardless of whether the country considers itself part of the empire."

In the realm of software imperialism, the customer organization buying and installing an enterprise software package was seen as a form of territory to be occupied or controlled by one or more hostile, rivalrous software and services vendors seeking to extract continuing revenues from their occupied possessions; revenues in the form of maintenance, support, customization, administration, or other sorts of solution upkeep and extension expenses.

Empires exerted control formally through a variety of political and economic mechanisms, and informally through influence over political, economic and cultural spheres. Wikipedia's entry for "empire" offers some instructive parallels to the enterprise solution model:

"First, in an empire there must be a Core and a Periphery. The empire's structure relates the core elite to the peripheral elite in a mutually beneficial fashion. Such as relationship can be established through any number of means, be they aggressive, coercise, or consensual. And while there is a vertical relationship between the core and periphery, there is a lack of substantive relations between periphery and periphery. This relationship he describes as an incomplete wheel: there are hubs and spokes, but no rim."

The relationship of interconnected elites is easy to see in the pattern of incented sales and buying decisions; "Need tickets to that exclusive event? No problem, we'll get them for you right away..."

But it's the idea of disconnected hubs and spokes that is key to understanding the correspondence between the old enterprise model and imperialism. How often do individual client solutions (perhaps for different departments or business units) interact with each other? How often do instances of the same solution for different clients allow effective interaction between different clients of the same vendor? How often do different products nominally part of 'integrated' solution sets that were in actuality assembled by aggregating the offerings of acquired companies successfully interact?

Again, without overloading the analogy, there are clear parallels between the degrees of empire and the lifecycle of enterprise solutions and vendors.

"Motyl also posits varying degrees of empire: Formal, Informal, and Hegemonic. In a formal imperial relationship, the core can appoint and dismiss peripheral elites, obviate any external agenda or policies, and directly control the internal agenda and policies."

As a consultant, I've seen aggressive software and services vendors directly drive business direction, strategy, investment, and process change decisions all too often. Organizations lacking vision, effective leadership, or those entering complacency or suffering decline look to vendors for leadership by proxy, allowing or asking vendors to apply their own inappropriate frames of reference and perspectives to understand and choose courses of action in situations outside the vendor's proper domain.

"In an informal imperial relationship, the core has influence but not control over appointing and dismissing peripheral elites, direct control over the external agenda and policies, and influence over the internal agenda and policies."

This informal relationship is the position of the entrenched vendor that provides 'perspective' on many situations outside their proper domain. Vendors seeking to increase their territory within client organizations often pursue growth via this method. Alternatively, vendors will control the environment in which customers and other service providers make decisions, as in the "open API" approach wherein the enterprise exposes a portion of it's architecture, code base, or other platform, but maintains exclusive control over the API without any binding commitments.

Wikipedia continues:

"Finally, in a hegemonic relationship, the core has no control over appointing or dismissing peripheral elites, control over the external agenda, influence over external policies, and no control over the internal agenda or policies."

This is the stage that the existing collaboration solutions seem to be entering, as witnessed by IBM's announcement, and Microsoft's failure to date to advance the OpenXML standard to full legitimacy.

The Passing of Imperium

In essence, the old enterprise approach exemplified the closed system, one that was sustained by the authority and credibility of the originating vendor in the face of other competing closed systems. Fundamentally, software empires and imperialism are predicated on the validity of closed systems. What happens when open systems become the preferred model?

"Empire ends when significant peripheral interaction begins, not necessarily when the core ceases its domination of the peripheries. The core-periphery relationship can be as strong or weak as possible and remain an empire as long as there is only insignificant interaction between periphery and periphery."

OpenDocument is designed to allow exactly the sort of periphery to periphery interaction that closed architectures prohibited. IBM's shift to OpenDocument shows awareness that old style closed imperial enterprise systems are no longer viable. In this, they are following the changing rhetoric of those such as Larry Cannell from collaborationloop.com, who offers a strongly pro-open system view in A Vision For Collaborative Technologies:

"I believe openness breeds innovation, and there are many parts of the collaborative technology market that need a big injection of innovation. While vendors continue pushing integration as their primary value proposition for closed systems, the astute competitor will embrace openness and provide innovation within an ecosystem of collaborative technologies based on open standards. Today we have a plethora of email systems which nearly everyone connected to the Internet is capable of using. We need comparable open and simple choices for other collaborative technologies; whether it is collaborative workspaces or online communities. It will not be until we have simple open standards that foster familiarity and easy interconnectivity that will we see widespread use and explosive innovation."

Cannell is careful here to take a positive and forward-looking line regarding collaboration, but his view of closed systems is clearly negative. And the implied consequence of a closed system is lack of innovation, one of the key signs of organizations in decline.

Didn't I start out by saying that we should be wary of the marketing rhetoric surrounding collaboration? Yes, precisely because the majority of the rhetoric coming from enterprise vendors still exemplifies the closed system, imperialist enterprise ethos.

However, in the case of IBM, it's clear that they've anticipated the consequences of ignoring the environmental shift to open systems that is at hand, and reacted accordingly, at least as regards the core document standard underlying Lotus Notes (which is still awful, BTW, just in case anyone misinterprets this article to mean I think otherwise...). The relationship of Notes to Workplace seems largely unknown at this point, and still subject to bitter infighting, in another great parallel to the imperial model. Microsoft, as the other major collaboration vendor, may be able to stem the tide against open systems in the short term, but will eventually have to respond.

My thoughts on the current form of enterprise solutions as a class / industry / way of solving business problems remain unaltered - in fact I think that IBM's move supports many of the predictions I made earlier this year, following earlier treatments by others writing on the same subjects.

local tags: collaboration, enterprise, ibm, lotusnotes, microsoft, odf, sharepoint, systems_theory

Cartograms, Tag Clouds and Visualization

May 22, 2006 10:56 PM | Posted in: Ideas , Tag Clouds

I was enjoying some of the engaging cartograms available from Worldmapper, when I realized tag clouds might have some strong parallels with cartograms. After a quick substitution exercise, I've come to believe tag clouds could be to lists of metadata what cartograms are to maps; attempted solutions to similar visualization problems driven by common and historically consistent information needs.

Here's the train of thought behind the analogy. Cartograms are the distorted but captivating maps that change the familiar shapes of places on a map to visually show data about geographic locations. Cartograms change the way locations appear to make a point or communicate relative differences in the underlying data; for example, by making countries with higher GDP (gross domestic product) bigger, and those with lower GDP smaller. In the example below, Japan's size is much larger than it's geographic area, because it's GDP is so high (it's the dark green blob on the far right, much larger than China or India), while Africa is nearly invisible.

Gross Domestic Product

Tag clouds pursue the same goal: to enhance our understanding by communicating contextual meaning through changes in the way a set of things are visualized, relying additional dimensions of information to make context explicit. Where cartograms change geographic units, tag clouds change the display of a list of labels (the end point of a chain of linkages connecting concepts to focuses) to communicate the semantic importance or context of the underlying concepts shown in the list.
Visually, the relationship of clouds to lists is similar to that of maps and cartograms; compare these two renderings of the most popular search terms recorded by nytimes.com, one a simple list and the other a tag cloud.

List Rendering of Search Terms

Cloud Rendering of Search Terms

This explanation of cartograms from Cartogram Central a site supported by the U.S. Geological Survey and tional Center for Geographic Information and Analysis makes the parallels clearer, in greater detail.
"A cartogram is a type of graphic that depicts attributes of geographic objects as the object's area. Because a cartogram does not depict geographic space, but rather changes the size of objects depending on a certain attribute, a cartogram is not a true map. Cartograms vary on their degree in which geographic space is changed; some appear very similar to a map, however some look nothing like a map at all."

Now for the cut and paste. Substitute 'tag cloud' for cartogram, 'semantic' for geographic, and 'list' in for map, and the same explanation reads:

"A tag cloud is a type of graphic that depicts attributes of semantic objects as the object's area. Because a tag cloud does not depict semantic space, but rather changes the size of objects depending on a certain attribute, a tag cloud is not a true list. Tag Clouds vary on their degree in which semantic space is changed; some appear very similar to a list, however some look nothing like a list at all."

This is a good match for the current understanding of tag clouds.

Diving in deeper, Cartogram Central offers an excerpt from Cartography: Thematic Map Design, that goes into more detail about the specific characteristics of cartograms.

Erwin Raisz called cartograms 'diagrammatic maps.' Today they might be called cartograms, value-by-area maps, anamorphated images or simply spatial transformations. Whatever their name, cartograms are unique representations of geographical space. Examined more closely, the value-by-area mapping technique encodes the mapped data in a simple and efficient manner with no data generalization or loss of detail. Two forms, contiguous and non-contiguous, have become popular. Mapping requirements include the preservation of shape, orientation contiguity, and data that have suitable variation. Successful communication depends on how well the map reader recognizes the shapes of the internal enumeration units, the accuracy of estimating these areas, and effective legend design. Complex forms include the two-variable map. Cartogram construction may be by manual or computer means. In either method, a careful examination of the logic behind the use of the cartogram must first be undertaken."

Doing the same substitution exercise on this excerpt with the addition of 'relevance' for value, 'size' for area, and 'term' for shape, yields similar results:

"Erwin Raisz called tag clouds 'diagrammatic lists.' Today they might be called tag clouds, relevance-by-size lists, anamorphated images or simply spatial transformations. Whatever their name, tag clouds are unique representations of semantic space. Examined more closely, the relevance-by-size listing technique encodes the listed data in a simple and efficient manner with no data generalization or loss of detail. Two forms, contiguous and non-contiguous, have become popular. Listing requirements include the preservation of term, orientation, contiguity, and data that have suitable variation. Successful communication depends on how well the list reader recognizes the terms (of the internal enumeration units), the accuracy of estimating these sizes, and effective legend design. Complex forms include the two-variable list. Tag cloud construction may be by manual or computer means. In either method, a careful examination of the logic behind the use of the tag cloud must first be undertaken."

The correspondence here is strong as well.

Stable Need
The fact that cartograms and tag clouds show close parallels means that while the tag cloud may be a new user interface element emerging for the Web (and major desktop applications like Outlook, in the case of Taglocity), tag clouds as a type of visualization have strong precedents in other much more mature user experience contexts, such as the display of multiple dimensions of information within geographic or geospatial frames of reference. Instances of strong correspondence of problem solving approach in both mature and emerging contexts could indicate simple application of parallel framing (from the mature context to the emerging context) as an untested conditional, until the true extent of divergence separating the two contexts is understood. This is very common new media.

Instead, in the case of tag clouds, I think it points at stable needs driving structurally similar solutions to the basic problem of how to visually communicate important relationships and additional dimensions of meaning under the limitations of inherent flatness. The parallels between cartograms and tag clouds place the appearance of the tag cloud within the larger history of continuing exploration of new ways of visualizing information. In this view, tag clouds are a recent manifestation of the stable need to create strong and effective visual ways of conveying more than membership in a one-dimensional set (the list), or location and extent within a two-dimensional coordinate system (the map).

local tags: cartogram, cartography, tagclouds, tagging, visualization

Who Should Own How We Work? Collaboration, the New Enterprise Application

May 14, 2006 11:55 PM | Posted in: Ideas

Collaboration is the latest rallying cry of software vendors hoping to embed new generations of enterprise class tools and user experiences into the fabric of the modern workplace. Microsoft, IBM, and other firms expect that control or leadership in the market for collaboration, whether by owning the architecture, systems, or other solution components, will be lucrative. A recent Radicati Group study (quality unconfirmed...) of the market size for enterprise collaboration offered an estimate of $1.6 billion now, growing 10% annually to $2.3 billion in 2010.

Beyond the substantial money to be made creating, selling, installing, and servicing collaboration solutions lies the strategic advantage of market definition. The vendor(s) that own(s) the collaboration space expect(s) to become an integral to the knowledge economy's supporting environment in the same way that Ford and General Motors became essential to the suburbanized consumer architectures of the post WWII era by serving simultaneously as employers, manufacturers, cultural marketers, capital reservoirs, and automobile sellers. Collaboration vendors know that achieving any level of indispensibility will enhance their longevity by making them a necessity within the knowledge economy.

It's worth taking a moment to call attention to the implications: by defining the user experiences and technological building blocks brought together to realize collaboration in large enterprises, these vendors will directly shape our basic concepts and understanding (our mental models and cognitive frames) of collaboration. Once embedded, these architectures, systems, and business processes, and the social structures and conceptual models created in response, will in large part define the (information) working environments of the future.

And yes, this is exactly what these vendors aspire to achieve; the Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Development Team blog, offers:

"SharePoint Products and Technologies have become a key part of our strategy for delivering a complete working environment for information workers, where they can collaborate together, share information with others, and find information and people that can help them solve their business problems."

[From SHAREPOINT'S ROLE IN MICROSOFT'S COLLABORATION STRATEGY.]

And IBM's marketing is not pitched and delivered in a manner as sweeping, but the implications are similar, as in the overview IBM® Workplace™: Simply a better way]:

"IBM Workplace™ Solutions are role-based frameworks to help customers apply IBM Workplace technologies faster and more productively... These solutions are designed to provide 'short-cuts' for creating a high performance role-based work environment, helping to accelerate time-to-value."

The Models for communication and relationships built into our tools are very powerful, and often employed in other spheres of life. How many times have you started writing a birthday card for a friend, and found yourself instinctively composing a set of bullet points listing this person's chief virtues, notable character traits, and the most important / amusing moments of your friendship. The creeping ubiquity of the rhetorical style of Powerpoint (Tufte's essay here) is just one example of the tremendous social impact of a habituated model of communicative practices that's run amok.

What does the future hold, in terms of enterprise vendor control over everyday working experiences? I've written before on the idea that the days of the monolithic enterprise systems are numbered, making the point along the way that these behemoths are the result of a top-down, one-size-for-all approach. I think the same is true of the current approach to collaboration solutions and working environments. And so I was happy to see Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School make several strong points about how enterprise collaboration efforts will realize greater success by *reducing* the amount of structure imposed on their major elements - roles, workflows, artifacts, and relationships - in advance of actual use.

McAfee sees considerable benefit in new approaches to enterprise IT investment and management that reduce the top-down and imposed nature of enterprise environments and solutions, in favor of emergent structures created by the people who must work successfully within them. McAfee advocates allowing staff to create the identities, structures and patterns that will organize and govern their collaboration environments as necessary, in an emergent fashion, instead of fixing these aspects long before users begin to collaborate.

McAfee says:

"When I look at a lot of corporate collaboration technologies after spending time at Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Blogger I am struck by how regimented, inflexible, and limited the corporate stuff seems, because it does some or all of the following:

• Gives users identities before they start using the technology. These identities assign them certain roles, privileges, and access rights, and exclude them from others. These identities almost always also place them within the existing organizational structure and formal corporate hierarchy.


• Contains few truly blank pages. Instead, it has lots of templates--for meetings, for project tracking, for documents and reports, etc.


• Has tons of explicit or implicit workflow-- seqences [sic] of tasks that must be executed in order.

How much of this structure is necessary? How much is valuable? Well, the clear success stories of Web 2.0 demonstrate that for at least some types of community and collaboration, none of it is."

The critical question is then "what types of community and collaboration require which approaches to creating structure, and when?" As anyone who's used a poorly or overly structured collaboration (or other enterprise) tool knows, the resulting environment is often analogous to a feudal society designed and managed by crypto-technical overlords; one in which most users feel as if they are serfs bound to the land for in perpetuity in order to support the leisure-time and war-making indulgences of a small class of shareholding nobility.

Answering these questions with confidence based on experience will likely take time in the range of years, and require numerous failed experiments. There's a larger context to take into account: the struggle of enterprise software vendors to extend their reach and longevity by dominating the language of collaboration and the range of offerings is one part of a much broader effort by society to understand dramatic shifts in our ways of working, and the social structures that are both driven by and shape these new ways of working. And so there are several important ideas and questions underlying McAfee's assessment that social system designers should understand.

One of the most important is that the notion of "collaboration" is conceptual shorthand for how you work, who you work with, and what you do. In other words, it's a distillation of your professional identity. Your role in a collaboration environment defines who you are within that environment.

More importantly, from the perspective of growth and development, your system assigned role determines who you can *become*. Knowledge workers are valued for their skills, experience, professional networks, public reputations, and many other fluid, context dependent attributes. And so locking down their identities in advance strips them of a substantial proportion of their current value, and simultaneously reduces their ability to adapt, innovate, and respond to environmental changes by shifting their thinking or practices. In plain terms, determining their identities in advance precludes the creation of future value.

Another important underlying idea is the importance of properly understanding the value and utility of differing approaches to systematization in differing contexts. McAfee's assessment of the unhealthy consequences of imposing too much structure in advance is useful for social system designers (such as information architects and knowledge managers), because it makes the outcomes of implicit design strategies and assumptions clear and tangible, in terms of the negative effects on the eventual users of the collaboration environment. For complex and evolving group settings like the modern enterprise, creating too much structure in advance points to a misplaced understanding of the value and role of design and architecture.

Fundamentally, it indicates an overestimation of the value of the activity of systematizing (designing) collaboration environments to high levels of detail, and without recognition for evolutionary dynamics. The design or structure of any collaboration environment - of any social system - is only valuable for how well it encourages relationships and activity which advance the goals of the organization and it's members. The value of a designer in the effort to create a collaborative community lies in the ability to create designs that lead to effective collaboration, not in the number or specificity of the designs they produce, and especially not in the artifacts created during design - the templates, workflows, roles, and other McAfee mentioned above. To simplify the different views of what's appropriate into two artificially segmented camps, the [older] view that results in the premature creation of too much structure validates the design of things / artifacts / static assemblies, whereas the newer view valuing minimal and emergent structures acknowledges the greater efficacy of designing dynamic systems / flows / frameworks.

The overly specific and rigid design of many collaboration system components coming from the older design viewpoint in fact says much about how large, complex enterprises choose to interpret their own characters, and create tools accordingly. Too often, a desire to achieve totality lies at the heart of this approach.

Of course, most totalities only make sense - exhibit coherence - when viewed from within, and when using the language and concepts of the totality itself. The result is that attempts to achieve totality of design for many complex contexts (like collaboration within enterprises large or small) represent a self-defeating approach. That the approach is self-defeating is generally ignored, because the pursuit of totality is a self-serving exercise in power validation, that benefits power holders by consuming resources potentially used for other purposes, for example, to undermine their power.

With the chimera of totality set in proper context, it's possible to see how collaboration environments - at least in their most poorly conceived manifestations - will resemble virtual retreads of Taylorism, wherein the real accomplishment is to justify the effort and expense involved in creating the system by pointing at an excessive quantity of predetermined structure awaiting habitation and use by disenfranchised staff.

At present, I see two divergent and competing trends in the realm of enterprise solutions and user experiences. The first trend is toward homogeneity of the working environment with large amounts of structure imposed in advance, exemplified by comprehensive collaboration suites and architectures such as MSOffice / Sharepoint, or IBM's Workplace.

The second trend is toward heterogeneity in the structures informing the working environment, visible as variable patterns and locuses of collaboration established by fluid groups that rely on adhoc assortment of tools from different sources (BaseCamp, GMail, social bookmarking services, RSS syndication of social media structures, communities of practice, business services from ASP providers, open source applications, etc.).

But this itself is a short term view, when situation within a longer term context is necessary. It is common for systems or environments of all sizes and complexities to oscillate cyclically from greater to lesser degrees of structure, along a continuum ranging from homogeneous to heterogeneous. In the short term view then, the quest for totality equates to homogeneity, or even efforts at domination. In the long term view, however, the quest for totality could indicate an immature ecosystem that is not diverse, but may become so in time.

Applying two (potential) lessons from ecology - the value of diversity as an enhancer of overall resilience in systems, and the tendency of monocultures to exhibit high fragility - to McAfee's points on emergence, as well as the continuum view of shifting degress of homogeneity, should tell us that collaboration solution designers would be wise to do three things:

1. Adopt the new design viewpoint and focus on designing structures that allow collaborators to create value


2. Specify as little structure of any kind in advance as possible


3. Anticipate the emergence of new architectural elements, and allow for their incorporation under the guidance of the community of collaborators

The end result should be an enterprise approach to collaboration that emphasizes the design of infrastructure for communities that create their own structures. Big vendors be wary of this enlightened point of view, unless you're willing to respond in kind.

local tags: architecture, collaboration, enterprise, lotus_notes, mental_models, organizations, social_systems, ux, web20

Tag Clouds: "A New User Interface?"

May 3, 2006 10:58 PM | Posted in: Ideas , Tag Clouds

In Pivoting on tags to create better navigation UI Matt McAllister offers the idea that we're seeing "a new user interface evolving out of tag data," and uses Wikio as an example. For context, he places tag clouds within a continuum of the evolution of web navigation, from list views to the new tag-based navigation emerging now.

It's an insightful post, and it allows me to build on strong groundwork to talk more about why and how tag clouds differ from earlier forms of navigation, and will become [part of] a new user interface.

Matt identifies five 'leaps' in web navigation interfaces that I'll summarize:

1. List view; a list of links


2. Left-hand column; a standard location for lists of links used to navigate


3. Search boxes and results pages; making very large lists manageable


4. Tab navigation; a list of other navigation lists


5. Tag navigation; tag clouds

A Lesson in 'Listory'

As Matt mentions, all four predecessors to tag based navigation are really variations on the underlying form of the list. There's useful history in the evolution of lists as web navigation tools. Early lists used for navigation were static, chosen by a site owner, ordered, and flat: recall the lists of favorite sites that appeared at the bottom of so many early personal home pages.

These basic navigation lists evolved a variety of ordering schemes, (alphabetical, numeric), began to incorporate hierarchy (shown as sub-menus in navigation systems, or as indenting in the left-column Matt mentions), and allowed users to change their ordering, for example by sorting on a variety of fields or columns in search results.

From static lists whose contents do not change rapidly and reflect a single point of view, the lists employed for web navigation and search results then became dynamic, personalized, and reflective of multiple points of view. Amazon and other e-commerce destinations offered recently viewed items (yours or others), things most requested, sets bounded by date (published last year), sets driven by varying parameters (related articles), and lists determined by the navigation choices of others who followed similar paths.)

But they remained fundamentally lists. They itemized or enumerated choices of one kind or another, indicated implicit or explicit precedence through ordering or the absence of ordering, and were designed for linear interaction patterns: start at the beginning (or the end, if you preferred an alternative perspective - I still habitually read magazines from back to front...) and work your way through.

Tag clouds are different from lists, often by contents and presentation, and more importantly by basic assumption about the kind of interaction they encourage. On tag-based navigation Matt says, "This is a new layer that preempts the search box in a way. The visual representation of it is a tag cloud, but the interaction is more like a pivot." Matt's mention of the interaction hits on an important aspect that's key to understanding the differences between clouds and lists: clouds are not linear, and are not designed for linear consumption in the fashion of lists.

I'm not saying that no one will read clouds left to right (with Roman alphabets), or right to left if they're in Hebrew, or in any other way. I'm saying that tag clouds are not meant for 'reading' in the same way that lists are. As they're commonly visualized today, clouds support multiple entry points using visual differentiators such as color and size.

Starting in the middle of a list and wandering around just increases the amount of visual and cognitive work involved, since you need to remember where you started to complete your survey. Starting in the "middle" of a tag cloud - if there is such a location - with a brightly colored and big juicy visual morsel is *exactly* what you're supposed to do. It could save you quite a lot of time and effort, if the cloud is well designed and properly rendered.

Kunal Anand created a visualization of the intersections of his del.icio.us tags that shows the differences between a cloud and a list nicely. This is at heart a picture, and accordingly you can start looking at it anywhere / anyway you prefer.

Visualizing My Del.icio.us Tags

We all know what a list looks like...

iTunes Play Lists

What's In a Name?
Describing a tag cloud as a weighted list (I did until I'd thought about it further) misses this important qualitative difference, and reflects our early stages of understanding of tag clouds. The term "weighted list" is a list-centered view of tag clouds that comes from the preceding frame of reference. It's akin to describing a computer as an "arithmetic engine", or the printing press as "movable type".

[Aside: The label for tag clouds will probably change, as we develop concepts and language to frame new the user experiences and information environments that include clouds. For example, the language Matt uses - the word 'pivot' when he talks about the experience of navigating via the tag cloud in Wikio, not the word 'follow' which is a default for describing navigation - in the posting and his screencast reflects a possible shift in framing.]

A Camera Obscura For the Semantic Landscape
I've come to think of a tag cloud as something like the image produced by a camera obscura.

Camera Obscura

Where the camera obscura renders a real-world landscape, a tag cloud shows a semantic landscape like those created by Amber Frid-Jimenez at MIT.

Semantic Landscape

Semantic Landscape

Like a camera obscura image, a tag cloud is a filtered visualization of a multidimensional world. Unlike a camera obscura image, a tag cloud allows movement within the landscape. And unlike a list, tag clouds can and do show relationships more complex than one-dimensional linearity (experienced as precedence). This ability to show more than one dimension allows clouds to reflect the structure of the environment they visualize, as well as the contents of that environment. This frees tag clouds from the limitation of simply itemizing or enumerating the contents of a set, which is the fundamental achievement of a list.

Earlier, I shared some observations on the structural evolution - from static and flat to hierarchical and dynamic - of the lists used as web navigation mechanisms. As I've ventured elsewhere, we may see a similar evolution in tag clouds.

It is already clear that we're witnessing evolution in the presentation of tag clouds in step with their greater visualizatin capabilities. Clouds now rely on an expanding variety of visual cues to show an increasingly detailed view of the underlying semantic landscape: proximity, depth, brightness, intensity, color of item, color of field around item. I expect clouds will develop other cues to help depict the many connections (permanent or temporary) linking the labels in a tag cloud. It's possible that tag clouds will offer a user experience similar to some of the ontology management tools available now.

Is this "a new user interface"? That depends on how you define new. In Shaping Things, author and futurist Bruce Sterling suggests, "the future composts the past" - meaning that new elements are subsumed into the accumulation of layers past and present. In the context of navigation systems and tag clouds, that implies that we'll see mixtures of lists from the four previous stages of navigation interface, and clouds from the latest leap; a fusion of old and new.

Examples of this composting abound, from 30daytags.com to Wikio that Matt McAllister examined.

30DayTags.com Tag Clouds

Wikio Tag Cloud

As lists encouraged linear interactions as a result of their structure, it's possible that new user interfaces relying on tag clouds will encourage different kinds of seeking or finding behaviors within information experiences. In "The endangered joy of serendipity" William McKeen bemoans the decrease of serendipity as a result of precisely directed and targeted media, searching, and interactions. Tag clouds - by offering many connections and multiple entry paths simultaneously - may help rejuvenate serendipity in danger in a world of closely focused lists.

local tags: semantics, tagclouds, tagging, ux, visualization

NYTimes.com Redesign Includes Tag Clouds

April 11, 2006 09:58 PM | Posted in: Ideas

Though you may not have noticed it at first (I didn't - they're located a few steps off the front page), the recently launched design of NYTimes.com includes