Martin Belam has a fascinating article on keeping the BBC's 2 million web pages identifiable and usable. The BBC's offerings include television, radio, regional offerings, independent productions and lots of other content produced in lots of other categories. The keys to helping people move through the pages and to making the disparate pages identifiable as BBC pages are: navigation, search, and classification.
There's lots that's interesting in this article, but I want to highlight this bit on classification:
We have a real problem, in that we want to make everything simple and easy for people to understand, but at the same time we have been charged by the government to show the breadth and depth of our content, which as I said is over 2 million pages.
So we end up with things like the BBC Directory, with 14 top-level categories as follows:
Even to the untrained eye there are some serious flaws in the top level classification schema illustrated here.
To highlight a couple of them, the World Service is a radio station, so why is it classified as a top-level category in its own right, rather than a sub-category under Radio where all of the other radio stations sit? CBBC and CBeebies are two television channels aimed at children. So why are they not either under one Children's category, or sitting under the Television category with the BBC's other channels?
The answers are to do with the branding and the politics of the BBC as an organisation. The World Service is funded separately from the Licence Fee funded content on the BBC web site, so needs to be made distinct from the UK focussed public service offering. CBBC and CBeebies are aimed at very different audience age groups, and from a marketing point of view it has been important for the BBC to distinguish them as separate entities.
So you can see already that the whole of the current classification schema has been compromised by the priorities of the business taking preference over the priorities of the information professional.
There is another problem with this as well. We have a one page directory for the whole site, and of course, everybody within the business wants their content to appear in it. We end up with a page with 245 links on it. To shrink it down to the size that will fit on a PowerPoint slide or be an illustration in an article makes it completely unreadable. The page ends up as very little use to anyone, with too many links and too much scrolling.
....
Fortunately we do at the BBC have some people who understand the need for usable classification, so alongside the politically driven Directory, we also offer a comprehensive A-Z index of the website. This also has a spin-off benefit for us, because it means it is very easy for search engine spiders to reach and index all of our content.
Near the end of the article, Belam also discusses the new BBC initiative, backstage.bbc.co.uk, which allows users to take BBC content and re-mix it. New ideas direct from users are already coming from this initiative which may provide even more 'glue' for associating the BBC's disparate parts and making it easy for users to get what they want when and how they want it.
In his book, Slack, Tom DeMarco contends that the world of work promotes busyness at the expense of creativity and innovation. Our culture of lean organizations and individual busyness means that no one has room in their day to do new things. Everyone is busy simply 'doing.' Often, there is no time for thinking, even though we get requests to 'analyze this' or offer recommendations on that. When these are not new things, but things we can do in our sleep it's not a problem, it can simply be woven into the general busyness, but when they are new innovative things which require real analysis and thought, many of us simply don't have enough connected un-busy time to engage with the material. It is stressful for the people caught up in busyness and it harms organizations which can't respond to change, can't find the best solutions, and can't realize the potential of the staff currently in the organization.
We're often eager to bring in outsiders for new positions or for promotions. The outsiders will bring energy and new ideas. We recognize that they have different views and experiences and that those different views and experiences can be very valuable to the organization. What we generally overlook is the second reason they bring energy and new ideas--anyone starting a new job in a new organization has slack for the first six months to a year. They have 'free' time to do new things. After that, they're as busy being busy as anyone else. If an organization isn't willing to recognize the benefits of slack for its workers, the only solution is to keep bringing in new people every time the 'old' batch of new people reach the point of no-slack.
From the Introduction:
We live in an age of acceleration. Whatever the formula was for business success a few years ago, it won't work today. Today there needs to be more and more work crammed into less and less time. There are fewer people doing more and doing it faster in less space with less support and with tighter tolerances and higher quality requirements than ever before. The average manager or knowledge worker is so busy today that there is simply not a spare moment for anything. There isn't time to plan, only to do. There is no time for analysis, invention, training, strategic thinking, contemplation, or lunch.
...
Suppose that where the corporation is going now has to be changed. The needed change is not just to do the same thing still faster but to switch directions and do something else entirely. Change is always complicated and challenging, but in the superaccelerated corporation, change of direction is impossible. The very improvements that the Hurry Up organization has made to go faster and cheaper have undermined its capacity to make any other kind of change.
Among the things that happen in the culture of busyness is that responsiveness and efficiency actually suffer. Staff are encouraged to pick early due dates for projects even though they know and their managers know that those dates are impossible. Busyness without analysis can lead organizations to go rapidly in the wrong direction without any way to stop being busy and initiate some course corrections.
Regarding overcommitment and 'aggressive' schedules:
In the most highly stressed projects, people at all levels talk about the schedule being "Aggressive" or even "highly aggressive." In my experience, projects in which the schedule is commonly termed aggressive or highly aggressive invariably turn out to be fiascoes. "Aggressive schedule," I've come to suspect, is a kind of code phrase--understood implicitly by all involved--for a schedule that is absurd, that has no chance at all of being met.
DeMarco proposes a number of things that organizations can do to encourage slack, creativity and innovation. Among these:
Staring your boss in the face and saying June 1 when you know that even a year from June would be optimistic sounds bad. It sounds like lying. But being a Can Do manager sounds good. We're all expected to have a certain Can Do attitude. Admit it: You feel a little thrill of approval when the big boss calls for extraordinary performance and his/her subordinates respond, "Can do." ....
Can Do is, unfortunately, antithetical to risk management. Risk management has to acknowledge directly the Can't Do possibilities. There is no way to be a complete Can Do manager and also practice risk management.
Honest risk management, DeMarco says, requires that we put slack back in the system because it is the only way we can complete projects efficiently and effective, though probably not at the 'breakneck' speeds that many workers and managers are pressured to promise.
Slack expresses succinctly what many of us know--that we are busier than ever. Many of us also know that we are frustrated because in all our vast busyness (which is not necessarily 'busy work' but is often actually be 'getting things done') we are not doing the work we love--the creative, innovative work--there isn't time for that. And most of us can't figure out why; we hope, in fact, that if we just work a little bit harder it will all come together. Creative and innovative work, unfortunately for us, requires more than that. It requires, as DeMarco tells us, Slack.
From eric cogan:
#1 http://www.meebo.com - A small upstart company that has brought trillian (http://www.trillian.cc) like features to the web. You can access Yahoo! Messanger, Jabber, Gtalk, AIM, ICQ and MSN directly through the web in a desktop like enviroment that supports multiple connections to different IM networks much like trillian.
#2 http://www.rememberthemilk.com - Another cool web 2.0 creation. If you are like me you tend to forget to do things. Also if you are like me you are connected to the world in some fashion no matter where you go (my cellphone has yet to leave my side in years). Remeberthemilk is excellent because it supports reminders via cellphones, email and instant messaging.
...via Digg
There's a war going on at Boston's Logan Airport:
Logan International Airport officials' ongoing quest to ban airline lounges from offering passengers free WiFi Internet services is angering a growing array of powerful Capitol Hill lobbying groups, who say Logan could set a dangerous nationwide precedent for squelching wireless services.
Already under fire from the biggest airline lobby, the Air Transport Association, and the manufacturer-backed Consumer Electronics Association, Logan officials are also coming under new criticism from the top US wireless lobby, CTIA-The Wireless Association. All three groups are siding with Continental Airlines Inc., which has asked the Federal Communications Commission to overturn a Logan order last year shutting off Continental's WiFi service in its Presidents Club lounge in Logan's Terminal C.
Soon after activating its own $8-a-day WiFi service in the summer of 2004, the Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Logan, ordered Continental and American Airlines to shut down WiFi services in their Logan lounges. Massport also ordered Delta Air Lines Inc. not to turn on a planned WiFi service in its new $500 million Terminal A that opened last March.
The question is a big one: can a landlord tell tenants what communications they are allowed to implement?
...via Smart Mobs
It's a concept car so it probably won't ever really go into production, but this Nissan has a dashboard-mounted Xbox 360:
It will not work while the car is being driven, but when parked, the Nissan Urge’s steering wheel, accelerator and brake pedals can be used to control the Xbox, which will come loaded with Project Gotham Racing 3. A 7 in video monitor will flip down from the roof.
Or maybe one of these other predictions for the coming year
Google will unveil its own low-price personal computer or other device that connects to the Internet.
Sources say Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., among other retailers, to sell a Google PC. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not Microsoft's Windows, which is one reason it would be so cheap — perhaps as little as a couple of hundred dollars.
Bear Stearns analysts speculated in a research report last month that consumers would soon see something called "Google Cubes" — a small hardware box that could allow users to move songs, videos and other digital files between their computers and TV sets.
Larry Page, Google's co-founder and president of products, will give a keynote address Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Analysts suspect that Page will use the opportunity either to show off a Google computing device or announce a partnership with a big retailer to sell such a machine.
...via Digg
An article from David Weinberger:
Jimmy has been all over the news telling people that Wikipedia is not yet as reliable as the Britannica, that students shouldn't cite it, that you should take every article with a grain of salt. (One Wikipedian suggested to me that such a disclaimer ought to be on every page; I agree.) The media are acting as if this is a humbling confession when in fact it's been what Jimmy and Wikipedians have been saying from the first day of this remarkable, and remarkably successful experiment in building an inclusive encyclopedia together.
The media literally can't hear that humility, which reflects accurately the fluid and uneven quality of Wikipedia. The media — amplifying our general cultural assumptions — have come to expect knowledge to be coupled with arrogance1 : If you claim to know X, then you've also been claiming that you're right and those who disagree are wrong. A leather-bound, published encyclopedia trades on this aura of utter rightness (as does a freebie e-newsletter, albeit it to a lesser degree).The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures. Arrogance, individual heroism, accountability and discipline ... those have been the hallmarks of the institutions that propagate knowledge.2
With Wikipedia, the balance of knowing shifts from the individual to the social process. The solution to a failure of knowledge (as the Seigenthaler entry clearly was) is to fix the social process, while acknowledging that it will never work perfectly. There are still individuals involved, of course, but Wikipedia reputations are made and advanced by being consistent and persistent contributors to the social process. Yes, persistent violators of the social trust can be banished from Wikipedia, but the threat of banishment is not what keeps good contributors contributing well.