For those of you not aware, some snowmen have lost their way.
Follow their daily adventures via the link over there on the right in the "Site Links" section...
So, I got a phone call from my friend Victoria yesterday. She is supposed to be the Matron of Honor in the wedding, BTW. She called to let me know that she is 3 months pregnant, which was a bit of a surprise to me since I was under the impression that she wasn't planning on having kids in the next few years. Anyway, the upshot is that she will be having a baby in early November, and may not come to the wedding. Since she lives in Paris, apparently she is not sure if she will be able to fly such a long distance. I am left torn between being happy for her, because she is pretty happy - and being pretty upset that this happened. I sort of assumed that maybe it was an accident, and they are just going with it - but no, apparently they decided in January that they were going to start trying to get pregnant. All of this leaves me wondering, if she knew this was coming, why didn't she ever mention it? And, it all makes me a little annoyed, since she's known since last March that I wanted her to be in the wedding. It seems like maybe they could have waited a month or two so they would be able to come. Is that selfish? I feel like a pretty awful person for being mad at her when she is so happy.
I like to keep on top of what's going on around here. Today i looked at some states about what search keyphrases and urls peopel are coming to talking-dog from. The percentages are all small, most people type in the url directly because you're all friends and come here on purpose...
914 porsche (7.3%)
indigotravel (3.9%)
shift linkage (3.4%)
matt iden (2.9%)
914 porsche for sale (2.9%)
porsche 914 for sale (2.4%)
timothy martin (2.4%)
engine disassembly (1.9%)
gvo design (1.4%)
lets elope (1.4%)
Let's here it for the elopers!
i can't believe i just wrote that last blog. I honestly feel like charlie from flowers for algernon. My brain is not working how i think it should be and when i read other somewhat intelligent looking things they make absolutely no sense to me.
Anyway, here's a very interesting blog about "stickiness" and web browsers.
Also, i figured out how my life will end up here. (doesn't seem to work in safari)
I had a discussion with someone at work about the decision making, planning, and general product development process at my company. We came to a conclusion (actually he had already decided this) which was that we are very good at making 1.0 products. However, not very good at taking those same products to 2.0 and beyond.
I've been thinking about that a bit lately. For instance, half an hour ago when i was sitting at my desk working my way into tuesday. I think the hectic and chaotic decision making as well as the ability to question very small details as well as major architectural aspects of a product at the last minute is what makes us so great at creating the initial innovative products.
However, there are unique challenges offered up by moving forward with a known product. Oddly, I think many companies know how to mantain and continue a product line and are often baffled by the process of making completely new products. Often first stabs at products are awful, and only upon further refinement and development through 2.0, 3.0, etc do products start to really get good. Funny that my company would have the opposite situation, where those more mature products seem to struggle to continue their innovation and former fame.
It is perhaps even stranger that I don't see these two processes as being that different. If I where to organize either task, I would do them in very similar ways. Neither would really be the one that my employer uses. Perhaps this is why I don't run a company? Or perhaps it is exactly why I should.
So, Linkmonger has become an interesting thing. When I first explained it to Heather she said, "I know two guys who did that." (Reminder: Heather works at Yahoo.) It occurred to me that i might be doing something that didn't add much value to the existing solutions. But the fact that linkmonger is all about a small group of people that know each other seems to be extremely relavent.
Linkmonger was the result of two main goals:
1) i want access to my links no matter where i am
2) among a small group of friends, i was amazed my the number of links that bounced around in email, and thought maybe if we put them all in one place and let people click on them when they had time rather than getting lost in the pile o' email.
I made a logical choice to implement a category structure, and figured that it was cool that i was flexible, allowing users to choose from existing categories and subcategories or create new ones. In fact, it's not a structure at all really, it's just two keywords, and i happen to enforce certain 2nd keywords based on what the first keyword is. For people like myself, the categorization was really important since i use linkmonger to store all my bookmarks. But i notice i don't really look at all the bookmarks very often, mostly i search for something if i need it.
Thus arose the first of the current issues:
1) categorizing links is a pain when you're entering a new one.
2) having non-categorized links is a pain when you're trying to get one back out of the archive.
3) categorizing things is hard.
4) getting your friends to categorize things in the same way you do is pretty much impossible.
So, I started doing some research. I was surprised at how much I didn't find. I wanted to find other existing systems for such things, and am surprised that i can't seem to find any directly relavent research. I know it exists.
So what am i thinking? I'm thinking of just removing any kind of true content categorization. But i'm also leaning towards including a "web site type" field that lets you select a type of site. Ryan asked me what the difference was and I wasn't able to explain it clearly at the time. For me, I think of the type as being very different then the content. There are all kinds of sites: blogs, galleries, news, applications, reference, videos, retail, etc. I figure a good search of the name, description, and maybe the URL, would get me all the necessary links i might be looking for but i still want the types of sites to be grouped together.
There's a problem with this, which is that it makes it basically unbrowsable. In a perfect world i'd be able to categorize things automatically and have the same links appear in multiple places in the browsable hierarchy. And in fact, that wouldn't even be that hard using a more open keyword structure. But it opens up a big can of UI worms. A big can.
So, how would you catalog the web?