October 6, 2009 9:01 am
Published by Fran
I’ve not been writing much lately, having finished my dissertation on September 1st and hours later having handed in my notice at work, to take up a new post as Taxonomy Manager for the BBC. I was delighted to be offered a role that follows on directly from my studies of taxonomy work, and I can’t wait to get started. I have been very busy during September handing over to my successor, so inevitably thinking about knowledge transfer. Records management has been for the most part fairly straightforward mainly due to the nature of the business, which has enabled us... Read more »
August 28, 2009 8:11 am
Published by Fran
Why bother with information architecture? — RenaissanceCMS. I was happy to be asked to write something on information architecture generally for Rob’s blog. It’s easy to forget that not everyone takes for granted the usefulness of IA, so I have tried to inspire people who aren’t sure what it is or what it can do. Rob creates charming ethereal designs as well as working on marketing, branding, and visual identity and being generally ethical and sustainable. I particularly liked his latest post on tagging. I tend to approach folksonomy from a management and retrieval point of view, and so find... Read more »
August 20, 2009 10:49 am
Published by Fran
Social Tagging and the Enterprise: Does Tagging Work at Work? | Earley & Associates confirms my suspicion that people aren’t as enthusiastic about content tagging at work as they are at home, tagging for fun or when it is their own content. As usual, it’s all about context. There are lots of ways tagging can work at work, but it isn’t reliable for core or high value asset management and information retrieval. Taxonomies are sometimes criticised for not being scalable (or at least not scalable cheaply), but folksonomies only work really well when the scale is massive (e.g. web-wide). Most... Read more »
August 15, 2009 1:54 pm
Published by Fran
Public knowledge, private ignorance by Patrick Wilson is one of those fascinating books that reads as if it had been written yesterday, but in fact was written in 1977. In what struck me as such a contemporary theme, he discusses the importance of personal contacts and trusted authorities as sources of knowledge – a theme that has returned with a vengeance in the form of “social search” and leveraging social networks for recommendations etc. A wonderful example of this was given to me by a friend last night who told me about how their archives division suddenly gained recognition when... Read more »
August 6, 2009 12:18 pm
Published by Fran
I’ve just read Steve Bailey‘s book Managing the Crowd: Records Management 2.0. It is a thought-provoking and timely read and very enjoyable as well. There’s an RM 2.0 Ning site too. There’s a good summary on the TFPL website. Bailey is clear that he is trying to provoke debate, so I will raise a question. There is a widely held belief that people like tagging, but I’m not sure that this applies once you get into the office. People love to tag their own photos on Flickr, but is that because they like tagging or because they like their own... Read more »
July 26, 2009 8:58 am
Published by Fran
I just read this very excited article about the use of wikis and blogs to revolutionise the US intelligence community: SSRN-The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community by D. Andrus. Its giddy praise of Wikipedia amused me (especially as I found it as a linked reference from a Wikipedia article), but it does include a clear exposition of the principles of complexity theory. Dave Snowden at the ISKO event in April discussed complexity theory, and I remember an emphasis on “light touch” control of complex systems. This seems to be an emergent paradigm at the moment.... Read more »
July 19, 2009 12:55 pm
Published by Fran
I was very pleased to be sent this link: Mozilla design challenge showcases new browser tab concepts – Ars Technica. The winner is a lovely hierarchical visualisation that could work really well with concept maps/visual thesauruses/taxonomies. It preserves parent/child relationships using a radial format, which is more flexible than traditional trees, in that you can follow several pathways at once and maintain an overview.
July 12, 2009 2:51 pm
Published by Fran
Pandora Pandemic – Scatter/Gather – the value of a robust taxonomy for serving up music people want to hear. The Music Genome Project is paying dividends for Pandora – the iPhone “radio station”.
July 10, 2009 1:16 pm
Published by Fran
July 2009 Metadata Maturity Survey Findings | Earley & Associates – good to see that metadata really does help!
July 10, 2009 1:08 pm
Published by Fran
The Future of the iPhone: Intelligent Object Recognition looks like fun. I suspect it will work better with GPS and possibly RFID as those are a lot more straightforward than image-based retrieval.