In my little world I’m hoping that people tried to comment on my blog posts recently. My apologies if you were hit by a Fatal Error. It’s now fixed. It was my fault (not my theme, which I’d tried to blame at least once). But it’s all fixed now.

So you can comment away, to your heart’s content!

Please.

Do.

p.s. Notice too that my del.icio.us tag cloud (below) is now Snap-icon free – thanks Erik (thanks also for persevering beyond my broken site to let me know – yay for Facebook!). If you too want to know how to prevent Snap icons appearing on specific bits of a post, see the Snap Shots FAQ (note to self: RTFM).

A couple of nights a go, I had a go with del.icio.us (which I struggle to spell, let alone get the dots in the right places!). I registered a bit back but, once logged in, had absolutely no idea what to do next. Someone suggested I install a delicious (sack the dots!) extension for Firefox. There turned out to be three available (when I searched Firefox’s extensions) so I installed the Yahoo! one (Yahoo! own delicious now).

Rather nicely, after installation, it launched a wizard that stepped me through importing my bookmarks from my local Firefox file. They imported okay and were saved as private. I then did some spring-cleaning and deleted out-of-date bookmarks, then tagged and re-tagged others. The imported bookmarks were automatically tagged according to the bookmark folders they’d been in, which was helpful.

So, anyway, here are my delicious tags. If you click through a tag, you’ll see the bookmarks that I’ve classified with that tag.

At the beginning of September, I went to the HCI 2007 conference at Lancaster University (in the North of England).

I was Chairing the HCI Practice Day (the Thursday) of the conference so it was all a little bit hectic but still, as usual, a lot of fun.

This year, in line with the times I guess, there was a fair number of papers on Second Life and other virtual environments, including one about BDSM in Second Life. In fact, there was definitely a bit of a trend this year for erotic HCI… (that, as a statement, either makes HCI cool, or it just goes to show that academics can make *anything* boring ).

There also seemed to be a fair amount about emotions – that is, how we engage with technology; eg why we happily waste an entire evening on Facebook or watching random videos on YouTube. Web2.0 was also in there, of course.

There were also some papers on bluetooth, several (as usual) on eye-tracking, and stuff about Accessibility, usability of the Web, methods of evaluating interface usability, and so on.

IBMers featured quite heavily in the HCI Practice Day (as you might imagine):

• Mark Farmer (IBM Warwick) introduced the IBM Task Modeler tool that he develops (the link takes you to the Task Modeler page on Alphaworks where you can download a copy to try yourself).
• Colin Bird (Master Inventor and Information Architect at IBM Hursley) followed up Mark’s introduction with a presentation about how you can (and we do) use Task Modeler to support information architecture: to model user tasks and create the navigation for information centres.
• Ben Fletcher (Senior Inventor at IBM Hursley) did a great presentation on deafblind technologies, including the possibilities of virtual worlds in supporting deafblind (and deaf or blind) users.
• Me (Technical Author at IBM Hursley) – I was raconteur for Alan Dix’s panel discussing the HCI issues in Web2.0 technologies.

The keynote speaker for HCI Practice Day was Jared Spool (the usability guru who isn’t Jakob Nielsen – and is much better and more credible, IMO) who moved heaven and high water (kind-of) to get here. He did a fantastic presentation that was very very funny and entertaining while being relevant and interesting too. He also attended as many of the other conference sessions as he could and participated by asking questions and making suggestions.

In fact, all the keynote speakers were great this year. Sometimes keynotes fly in, do their thang, then collect their expenses and go. All three (the others being Stephen Payne from Manchester Uni and Elizabeth Churchill from Yahoo!) all got involved in the conference, especially Elizabeth who was able to stay for the whole conference and seemed to be on every discussion panel going!

You can get the full proceedings of HCI 2007 (and, at some point, previous HCI conferences too) from the BCS eWIC site.

As a delegate, I also got the full proceedings as pdfs on a funky little USB drive, which I like.

It’s not long now until the call for papers will go out for HCI 2008 (to be held in Liverpool, City of Culture). If this blog is still active by then, I’ll post the call here. I encourage you to get involved in HCI – it’s more than user interface design or usability; it’s also about being innovative in how to design technologies for human beings.

Snap Preview Anywhere

Last night, I finally disabled the Snap Preview Anywhere feature (now know as Snap Shots) on my blog (I actually used the Snap Preview Anywhere WordPress plugin). It seemed like a good idea when I first installed it. Every external link on my blog had a little icon alongside it that you could hover over to get a thumbnail preview of the site you’d go to if you clicked the link. At first, however, it didn’t work – I just got a message saying that there was no preview available, for any link. That could have been the plugin not working properly because, after a WordPress update, some of the link previews started working, but only those that pointed to high-profile sites like Wikipedia and Flickr. Which is a bit crap because the majority of my links were still just saying that the preview wasn’t available.

Looking at the Snap website now, the description only really says that such high profile sites will be previewed. The original descriptions that I read when I first installed it on my blog suggested that the previews would work on any site as long as Snap Preview Anywhere knew about the link – and that they’d go preview new links within a short time. Maybe that was too much of a commitment for them to honour. It’s a free service so I’m not too bothered but it seemed like a good idea that’s not really happened.

Tag cloud

I’ve been thinking that although my blog/website is pretty and red, it is actually a slightly old-fashioned design now. So I was trying to work out what would be better without being dull. One of the things I wanted to do was make it a bit more Web2.0 – not that I particularly want loads of flashy drag-and-drop – more that I’d like to have fewer static-looking lists of links. Having a tag cloud is one of the things that I wanted. Partly because the categories that I had for my blog posts were pretty bad, and they have a fairly static, hierarchical feel about them. Although it’s a difficult mind-switch to make, I’d like to get away from thinking in hierarchies.

I once attended a task analysis tutorial given by Dan Diaper and one thing he said that stuck in my mind (bearing in mind my job as a technical writer) is that although we impose hierarchies on many many things (in order to categorise them), the real world isn’t hierarchical – that is, as soon as something belongs to more than one category, the hierarchy breaks down, and this happens frequently.

One thing that new, tagging-based sites like Flickr have shown is that we need to be more free with how we classify things for retrieval. On Facebook, for instance, although you post your photos in albums, you and your friends can tag the people in the photos so that it’s possible to retrieve all the photos containing a given person from across multiple albums. You aren’t restricted to a strict hierarchy of albums and sub-albums to locate an individual photo.

A similar example is some Adobe software that my Mum uses to organise her photos. She tags each photo with things like the names of the people in the photo, the location of the photo, the event taking place, and so on. The software can order the photos along a timeline so that you can pick a particular date in time and see what photos were taken on or around that day. You can also sort by tag; for example, show all the photos of pets, which is great because the software dynamically creates an album starting with the family dog when she was young, the pony she had from when she was about 15 years old until I was 15 years old, the dog she and Dad had for 17 years from before I was born, the various cats through the ages, up to their present dog and our two-year-old cats. Tony’s recently found a similar piece of Open Source software, F-spot, which aims to do something similar and which I’d like to try using to organise our photos.

So, anyway, information is all about retrieval. It’s no good me using logical but useless categories (like ‘Personal’ and ‘Opinion’) to organise my blog posts (they’re more useful for me than for other people). The trouble is that I find that when I’m thinking hierarchically, it’s difficult to decide which category or categories a post fits in to. Also, the site design that I use just lists the categories down the side of the page so the more categories I have, the longer and more boring the list. Tagging is a bit more natural an exercise, I think.

The SimpleTagging WordPress plugin provides what I want. I imported my existing categories (then decided they were terrible and deleted them all anyway), and then went through my existing blog posts and created and renamed tags to describe them. The tag cloud is a visualisation of the frequency with which each tag is used. The more popular tags (ie the topics on which I have written most) are shown in a larger, brighter font in the cloud.

What does the tag cloud show the reader? Well, apart from looking pretty, I think it gives the reader an idea of what the blog is about and, by extension, what I’m interested in writing about. I was a little bit disconcerted (though not terribly surprised) to discover that my interests seem to mostly revolve around cool or geeky stuff, though it’s nice to see that HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) is top at the moment.

On a bigger scale (though not here), the tag cloud can show what’s popular across a group of bloggers. For instance, a lot of IBMers have internal blogs at work. On there, a tag cloud can show what topics are of most interest to the IBMers who blog across the world.

What my tag cloud doesn’t show is the popularity of the posts with readers. In some ways, it might be interesting to show the relative number of comments on each post, or something like that. Though on a low-traffic blog like mine, that probably wouldn’t show enough to be that interesting.

Another interesting use of clouds is on the Nabaztag support website where the popularity of search terms is shown in a cloud so that you can just click a term in the cloud to retrieve the information instead of entering a search term. The more people who have searched on that term, the more prominently the term is displayed in the cloud. I guess the idea is that whatever problem you have, someone else has already had it and searched for a solution so you may as well benefit from their experience.

Anyway, take a look at my tag cloud, to the top-right of this post.

Archive calender

Before: an increasingly long list of months of blog archive.

After: a neat little calender in which you can click a date to view that day’s post (if there was one).

No plugin required for this one; just paste this bit of php in the right place in the WordPress theme and WordPress does the rest: <?php get_calendar(); ?>

Good eh?

Facebook badge

Finally, the last addition to my blog website today was my own personal Facebook badge – the photo of me and my Facebook status to the top-left of this post. Tony had made one of these and he showed me how. Just go to your Facebook profile page and scroll right to the bottom where there’s a link to create your Facebook badge. You get to customise the badge a bit, according to what information you want it to show. Facebook then generates the bit of HTML code that you need to paste into your blog page. And that’s it.

I’ve just joined Facebook. It seems that I’m the last one to that party! On the up-side, it means that there are many many people I know on there.

Much more fun than linkedin.com which I also joined a while back but never did much with.

I never joined Facebook before now because I’ve not been that interested in ’social networking’ as reason for using the Web. I use the Web for buying things and looking things up. I do use instant messaging…a lot…including using Sametime avidly at work (for work and for friends).

I’ve been on Friends Reunited for ages, though never paid the subscription. I’ve had one person contact me (which was great) but mostly I’ve just used it to keep track of what people from school are doing now.

Facebook is just a more fun way of doing that. And you don’t have to pay money to do interesting stuff!

Ah well, I’ll wait and see how many people accept my invitations to be their friend.