::tuesday, february 20::

reveal

Official teaser for upcoming REM album "Reveal."

::monday, february 19::

ASIS&T 2001 Summit

Peter Merholz on the use of conceptual models: "My experience is that such models are the unsung heroes of systems design."

I suspect it's something we've all been doing, except it's the phase of design that ends up scribbled on whiteboards and napkins, that never gets the credit it's due. Here's to making it official and lucid. And for getting credit for it from our clients :-)

::sunday, february 18::

Xerox PARC UIR Information Foraging Information foraging theory is an approach to the analysis of human activities involving information access technologies. It aims to provide an understanding of how strategies and technologies for information seeking, gathering, and consumption are adapted to the flux of information in the environment. Much of the work is inspired by optimal foraging theory in biology and anthropology, which analyzes the adaptive value of food-foraging strategies.

WebReview.com: Content Must Suck: Pulling Users In with Jared Spool Users basically learn that there are whole portions of the page that are not useful to them, and they stop looking there. So that content in essence becomes invisible to the user. If you want users to start seeing that content again, the easiest way to do that is to just change the grid. Changing the colors and the locations of the grid, all of a sudden, user's eyes will rescan the whole screen, and they will see things they wouldn't have otherwise.

::friday, february 16::

ASIS Information Architecture Conference Presentations Online

Only for the information-architecture fetishist. The rest can quietly move along; move along please. Nothing to see here.

Unlike many of my colleagues, I just lack the energy to post to my site with ruminations on information-architecture. I guess I get my fill with the 50-60 hours I obsess over it in my job. Still, now and then, I guess it's good to throw a link or two up, talk a little shop.

Here are some of the presentations given at the excellent conference on IA in SF two weekends ago. I have to agree with one conference participant, quoted at Elegant Hack (or peterme?) "I have a tribe!" It felt both weird and good to be among so many who shared my particular neuroses.

The Jack Kirby Original Art Gallery

Kirby had a certain style of drawing faces, machinery, energy, that defined what "comic book" meant to me as a kid. The people could look so happy, and also so menacing, with just the flick of his pencil. All of them slightly unreal (the single line perfect teeth, the squared brow, the large expressive eyes) in the true sense of "comics" -- not too literal, but somehow more real because of it. Wish I still had some of the old books, but I simply wore them out. I never followed a series all the way, just picked up comics at convenience stores and gas stations as a pre-teen. Didn't even know there were such things as comic book stores (maybe there weren't in the 70's in Atlanta?). So I probably read those comic books more thoroughly and more times than anything I've ever read since. Kirby managed to burn this stuff in my brain, the only artist I remember noticing at that age.

::saturday, february 3::

Denver Rocky Mountain News: Entertainment

"Roe's writing isn't the syrupy, sanitized stuff you'd imagine, given his strong faith. Like Bruce Springsteen, U2, Paul Westerberg and Denver's own 16 Horsepower, Roe's lyrics are searching for answers -- and he realizes that sometimes the answers lie in secular darkness rather than in some phony, rosy light."