Government categorizations - .gov extension; supported by tax dollars; departments/agencies; policy briefings; on local level provides links to community resources, contacts, etc. - serves as information resource; safety/emergency alerts

www.cityofseattle.gov - offers several links to local community resources; has directory listings and information on policy

www.whitehouse.gov - provides public service links; information directories by issue/dept.

www.irs.gov - documentation; federal resources for processes

I reviewed THE DESIGN OF SITES by Douglas Van Duyne, James Landay, and Jason Hong at the recommendation of Dr. Gill for a text assessing web site genres. The book took it several steps further than what I was expecting in terms of web classifications and offered a complete profile of what they listed as 'patterns' - observable trends in web design that should be followed to lay the foundations for successful sites. The rules they prescribed, while perhaps achievable instinctively, are excellent prescriptions for what otherwise may be neglected in the early-advanced development stages. Like our inclass text, it strongly emphasizes user-centric design and offers several tips relating from page layouts, navigation, searching, writing & managing content, and e-commerce. The authors are keenly of the 'usability' camp and arguably pay 'design' attention only insofar as to express how valuable it is on a homepage (i.e. first impression) and its role in site branding. The text is a terrific comprehensive resource for all stages of site planning and implementation, but it offers little in the way of innovation.

http://students.washington.edu/lheian/book_review/

Group 3 Discussion_

Within our group, I focused on "Cognitive Psychology & IA: From Theory to Practice". The article strives to conjoin the (perhaps) not so immediately similar schools of cognitive psychology with information architecture and, I believe, succeeds insofar as that it successfully communicates interactive behaviors with the web should take cues from our real life interactions with actual environments.

Along cognitive lines, the article discusses mental category as a tool information architects can use to unite otherwise dissimilar groups of information by way of patterned commonalities or categories. The predominant challenge here is described as the process of categorization itself. Consider the nav bar for Amazon.com. If you wanted to search for the new Nike iPod shoe, would you be more likely to search under 'athletic gear' or 'electronics'? Be as broad in categories as possible without limiting the user in presented information. Cognitive/IA relationships are also discussed in terms of memory - limit nav bar items to a succinct amount and create layouts that are easily scannable and provide quick information retrieval. Furthermore, our brains naturally are inclined to stick with one topic and explore it. IA architects would best follow suite and structure information accordingly - providing links to related content the further users delve into the site. Finally, transference is discussed as the online mind's instinct to expect sites to function in certain ways based off of its experience with other sites. Employ cues, styles, and patterns that are easily recognizable in web culture. Don't break the mold insofar as to turn off or confuse your audience. Use their expectations to your advantage.












The science of laying out information in a manner corresponding to our natural habits of interaction. Simple things like following horizontal/vertical cues that our minds naturally respond due in laying out grids, starting search tools and nav bars at the top left corner of the screen where our eyes naturally start first to read.

From the homepage, I went to 'projects' in the upper right nav bar. I first went to 'Experience Design' first. It looked like it MIGHT contain videos in an option that wasn't immediately obvious. I explored a bit through hyperlinks and found nothing. I backed out to the homepage and tried 'Identity' with the exact same results. The web browser back button also sent me back to the course homepage where the hyperlink originated each time.

I finally tried the third option down - Interactive. Exploring, I lucked out with the first hyperlink I found and located the web videos for Honda. Probably twelve or so clicks total until I found the webvid page. The layout is very confusing in that the remainder of their project pages


The second task was easier. I was tempted to click on 'Company' but chose 'Contact' and was presented with the list of options to where their stateside offices were. I chose the New York office and was taken to mapquest, where a map was not immediately available, but rather the address to the location - this is where the error occurred. I went to 'map this location' and finally saw the map.

Gestalt would have a fit with this. The homepage alone places the most emphasis on their featured video projects, and less emphasis on their primary navigation bar. The navigation bar is small text in the upper right of the corner (it is not the first place the avg person starts to look) and appears as a sub-menu to the site.

The actual submenus were also not clearly distinguished from each other in terms of easily identifiable genres. It would've helped to have visual icons to compensate for this.

The news section had the appearance of an undeveloped page. The link icons were blurred (of course which clear when the cursor hovers over them). And the fact that text doesn't appear until that point was frustrating. This means you have to hover over each icon in order to browse to get to the story that you want. They appear grouped randomly with no discernable genres to them.

In text pages, there was a great waste of visual space throughout. Users are prompted to scroll down constantly when it is unnecessary (and the scroll bar doesn't work very well.)

http://www.peekvid.com/

This is suggestion is a bit biased toward the students who were in digital streaming course over the summer, but this is a very straightforward site that offers a large library of (albeit non-licensed) on-demand video content. The overall layout of the site is quite simple and very straightforward and emphasizes little else than the content itself. Individual files aren't organized in a very efficient way, so I think we could improve on something like this. But there are enough ppl in the class with experience in video compression, and I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to figure how to upload video files to a remote site.

http://www.refugeestories.org/

The second is a fairly simple but moderately well-organized collection of refugee stories, interviews, and other profiles regarding global refugee plights and survival stories. The flash animation is going to be beyond our level, but I think it incorporates a good use of pics and content that is achievable. I would hope we would be beyond even this level in 5 months' time, but I think it is a safe bet we can accomplish something like this.

'Rethinking Goals' (revised)

It's easy to confine goals to the personal level, but this course is more about team coordination than I had really anticipated. I can definitely see knowing how to navigate team flows, expressly in terms of web development, as a highly relevant skill set in the Seattle area. Along those lines, I would consider more relevant goals to be site planning (gathering input from the team and structuring a well-established foundation for a site), complementation (if that's a word?) - (publishing visual/text content that flows well together and is effectively coordinated by a team) and coordinated site maintenance/editing.

I would consider graphic design and copy writing to be my strongest assets - and the ones I would be the most comfortable contributing work to a team. I am only just starting to learn Dreamweaver, so I would prefer not to be responsible for local/remote site maintenance and technical adjustments.

'A Virtual Project'

The benefits of an all – distance work group for such a scenario is that those inputting the content are forced to think in a frame of mind that, ideally, benefits web interaction, ultimately. They are forced to consider people “outside the room”, whereas a physically-proximate work group may fall privy to thinking ‘locally’ and thus introduce a different design and functionality impact on the site itself. Another advantage, if this is to be an employee-wide website, is that it guarantees a diversity in corporate representation and interest across the company’s theatre of operations. Say, for example, Amazon.com sought a dramatic re-invention of its e-commerce site and the work team consisted only of developers native to the Seattle office. User interaction habits on the East Coast or Deep South may be paid significantly less attentions in the early development stage and would possibly result in a site that may have a fine local, regional appeal but perhaps less utility in other parts of the country/globe. Disadvantages count as coordination challenges, regional time zones, communication flows, and general site interaction. In such a situation, it is absolutely vital to have a project manager who can oversee all aspects of site development and serve as the core source of information and direction for an otherwise segregated, disparately focused team.


“We-ness” is especially difficult to accommodate over the web, though it would be assumed that the team members bring a certain degree of experience with online task forcing. I would most likely incorporate a combination of all available web technologies to facilitate as close to personable interaction as possible, at least in the early development stage. Combinations of tools such as Live Meeting, teleconferences, and video conferences (if accessible) would be employed to introduce the work group to each other and during staged demonstrations of site progress. More novel approaches like ‘Second Life’ meetings most likely wouldn’t serve as substantive development devices, but would do much to foster engagement and interest in the project at hand.

'Communities in Cyberspace' alluded to the notion that online communities and the emerging means by which to engage them are offering sensory experiences so advanced that it is difficult to distinguish user behavior here apart from that of the 'real world'. Second Life is one such MUD - growing considerably in popularity and hosted features.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=synxFmQJ_0A"

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6431819

The above links provide video and audio insights to the advantages and appeal of Second Life. It is a 3D virtual reality platform founded by Linden Labs and former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale. Hearkening greatly to Keller & Smith's discussion concerning extended 'identity' (those who opt for digital interpretations of their 'real' selves or go for more egotistic interpretations), Second Life users can choose their appearance and are given tools to alter and interact with the virtual world around them. A network community, it operates and evolves independently of any one user. Fluid (or dynamic) access as such is representative of the progressively dominant real time forums that are emerging - echoing real life as synchronous worlds of their own.

In the discussion of gender and racial issues, I thought the complexity of those issues, in terms of digital extensions, owe much to the choices that users are presented with. Users in Second Life can follow more real world confines in the creation of their digital self : choosing between man and woman, African American and Asian, etc. Or they can create fantastic creatures and characters entirely unavailble in reality. This forum hosts both dominant emergent viewpoints as to how cyberspace should be engaged.

Keller & Smith noted the impact of cyberspace onto the 'real world' when discussing political activism. Second Life offers perhaps an even more tangible avenue for this, as users accumulate 'points' which are convertible to actual cash. In effect, you can run a virtual business (selling property, virtual goods, rights, etc.) and reap real monetary profits. One can even create a virtual mockup of a real world conference room and run an actual PowerPoint presentation that you've created to show to your coworkers.

It also offers a prime example of the ultimate 'culture layer' : a digital replica interface of actual buildings, people, parks, streets, etc, as well as a truly interactive and randomly accessible new media portal, suggested in Principles of New Media as two of the definers of the title's name topic. In Principles, VR auteur Jaron Lanier suggested virtual reality will void the need for language-based and symbol-based communication.

Week 5 - The World is Flat : Flatteners 3 & 4 (for Group 2) @H-H@!

I'm prompted to wonder if Kathy's choice of divvying up Chapte 2 between groups is to see if we would all merge upon the same interpretation of Friedman's 'flat world'. He seems to be rather fanatic in sporting his personal terminology all over the text...and in cascadingly context-savy circumstances wherein you might think you hadn't a clue what the hell he meant unless you'd read chapter 1 word for word. Still, he's very good with the prose. And his definitions aren't too hard to deduce. From his anecdote about Wild Brain's production M.O, the flat world looks to be the connected world - able to support simultaneous collaboration and offer access and input to multiple participants. All on the same plane, I suppose, which is perhaps why Friedman chose the visual analogy that he did. In his covering of the 'flows of revolution', that he highlights the 'grassroots' dynamics of connectivity as the primary molder of web innovation. Subscriber demand cast Netscape into new roles that it certainly hadn't originated for. The hallmarks he notes are of the ones involving major steps away from physical necessity. The integration of the PC and email, editable digital content, and standardized digital protocols - all burgeoners of multilateral innovation. Ultimately, Friedman's FLATNESS is digital SEAMLESSNESS.

"Once a standard takes hold, people start to focus on the quality of WHAT they are doing as opposed to HOW they are doing it," Friedman prescribes. TOO TRUE! I'd never really taken the same realization before. Digital innovation seems to come around in such cycles : development, competition, standardization, innovation, saturation, development, compe-... etc, etc. Of course, the ultimate is to have a proprietary standard, owing much to the examples of eBay's acquisition of PayPal and Mac's iTunes among others.

The flattened world is the geek's heyday. Shareware, digital art, blogs, wikipedia...with no commercial intermediaries, the digital ether now offers art for art's sake and logic for logic's sake via the UPLOAD, which seems to be sufficing as the ultimate market equalizer now that the market is digital. Cultivated by communities, uploading spurs a tremendously positive force for creative multiplicity and allows a higher degree of conceptual diversity than ever would have been offered in a top-down-only medium. But he goes on to follow open source software, Wikipedia, and blogging/podcasting, and each of the three have their share of things to apologize for.

It seems self defeating to employ open source as a standard. I don't know enough about programming languages to anticipate the difficulties, but if independent parties are augumenting original open source code and releasing it into the market for free in return, doesn't the standard deviate from itself? The regulation of open source software seems to be the patch system (almost viral sounding from Friedman's Behlendorf | Apache story).

I think the bottom-up approach to innovation works best with his account of Wikipedia. Viral information sharing. And the standard being balanced as a reflection of content edits. I hadn't really realized that anyone can edit any Wikipedia entry. And I'm surprised that more entries aren't radically changed on a continuing basis, what with all the connected anarchists out there. What else interested me was his description of uploading as a means of intercultural communication. A sort of digital play pen where we are all happy to share each other's toys and it would be considered rude to charge our friends to use them. Is the Internet's inherently community-based design at eternal conflict with the top-down mode of control? Top-down excludes participation. It relies on passivity. And Friedman seems to think that day is nearing an end. The new user is interactive and expects the digital liberties to do so.

Week 4 - One of Bush's keenest apologies for science and technology is that information is now to be passed on through the life of a race rather than an individual human being. It is the vastness of available information and the task to review it in a manner befitting any legitimate benefit that he proposes as the ultimate challenge. Is the Internet Bush's ideal solution? Or his worst nightmare? All the vast amounts of data Bush describes is readily accessible. But it is precisely because of the Internet that there is now far more than even Bush seemed to have anticipated.

The obstructions Bush addresses are refined to the physical, particularly in his descriptions of the progression of photography, calculating machines, typewriters. And in terms of cost, he didn't correctly anticipate that this would be passed onto the consumer regardless of material production. The market has evolved to assign majority value to the cognitive and less to the physical necessity of access, as there is barely any anymore.

I saw a video interview on cnn the other day with steve wozniak. he had a small black box and pressed a button and a laser - projected, fully functioning keyboard appeared on the desk in front of him. I'd heard they were working on this for screens as well. I think ICT, or at least the access to it, will become more and more removed from the dependence on physical access - something Bush prognosticated as imaging/compression/storage increase in efficiency and decrease in size. With the more availability of information, information itself will become less valuable though.

In terms of long range technology, society gravitates toward uniform formats and diverse technologies. As a rule, we do not like proprietary formats (although Apple and others have proven that wrong on several occasions). And as interactivity becomes even more of a defining measure of ICT in the future, it will be necessary for survival. But it will also become the most challenging. Innovation for next gen technology looks to be pursuing points of divergency.