I _Really_ Don't Know

Robert Hoekman Jr's sequel to Designing the Obvious, Designing the Moment presents more insight into the steps that Hoekman uses to evolve designs from something difficult and obtuse to something that is foolproof (Poke yoke) and a pleasure to use.

The examples used are different to Designing the Obvious, and the justification is different. In this case creating a consistent sense of the application being pleasurable to use complementing his previous observations about obvious systems being more productive and making more money.

So, I wrote about a great keynote by Gary Vaynerchuk at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, saying that it was a greatly inspiring piece and well worth watching. It contains such great quotes as

There is no reason in 2008 to do shit you hate, ‘cos you can lose just as much money being happy as hell. Nad decided to wade in with one of his usual mega-soft wishy washy group hug lets all live in a fucking commune posts (NB: I love the way Nad has the courage to open up about stuff, publish poetry on his blog and stuff - maybe I should lighten up a bit more too). Nad adds a great reference to Paul Graham's How to Do What You Love to the discussion and a couple of choice quotes.

Rhys then decided to announce that "Do what you love" had achieved meme status. Perhaps a little early. <sarcasm>While clearly I am an international thought leader on many topics</sarcasm>, if one swallow doesn't make a summer than three posts certainly don't constitute a meme.

About two years ago my colleague Ian Davis and I were talking about different approaches to building web applications. I was advocating that we use ASP.Net; The framework it provides for nesting controls within controls (server control and user controls) is very powerful. I was describing it as a component-centric approach where we could build pages rapidly by plugging controls together.

This post also appears on the n2 blog.

I thought it was about time I got around to taking a better look at what might be possible with the OpenLibrary data.

Just found this great video of Gary Vaynerchuk keynoting at Web 2.0 Expo in New York. I found it via the Natural User Interface blog.

Vaynerchuk's keynote is entitled "Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape" but the main thrust of it is that everyone should stop doing what they hate and do something they really love.

Following on from vocamp I've got the ontologies I'm working with straightened out and about to be published.

First of all, I've made changes to aiiso (the academic institution internal structures ontology) to integrate it with foaf. Basically what I've done is deprecate the original aiiso:organisationalUnit and subclass all of the aiiso: classes for departments, faculties etc from foaf:Organization directly. This should allow them to work with other ontologies designed to work with foaf.

Just blogged for work about Thomson Reuters suing George Mason University over EndNote.

It seems slightly surprising that an organisation like Thomson Reuters, who are doing cool stuff elsewhere with projects like Calais, would be asking for $10 million from an institution like George Mason University.

After lunch here at vocamp, Tom is putting up his initial thoughts about a Whisky ontology. His intention is to be able to describe aspects of Whisky such that you could run a shop from the data.

This is interesting as the things you want to know about a Whisky are pretty specific, it's not a question of price.

We're sitting in Wolfson College, Oxford in a smart little meeting room overlooking a grassy quad. Nice location.

We've just done introductions and I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't intimidated by the number of PhDs in the room. There are people with substantial experience in neuro-science, computer science, insect genetics, philosophy and, of course, lots of semweb experience.

I'm often accused at work of being somewhat of a Microsoft hater. It's often fun, and easier, just to go along with it. The only difficulty with that is... it's simply not true.

A few years ago I was working at Egg and was one of the key proponents of introducing ASP.Net and C#. At the time the existing infrastructure for the main customer site was also one I'd been involved in choosing - Netscape Application Server (NAS), a Java based app server and Vignette StoryServer, a TCL/TK based content management server. After just 3 years of service both were looking under-loved by their respective vendors.