Adaptive Path Blog

This entertaining video (via information aesthetics) celebrates the evolving nature of text on the internet. I’d like to see a similar exploration of how text is evolving across the landscape of networked devices. If the internet’s awesomeness is largely due to it’s unprecedented ability to associate and manipulate text, why don’t designers have a more extensive shared vocabulary for varieties of text? I’ve developed my own informal lexicon based on what behavior is enabled by different genres of text.

Microtext: Short formats like SMS suitable for sending messages when using a device with a constrained input, while short on time, or when you want to send a snippet of text like an address.

Minitextin: Formats that enable conversation-like exchanges; work best with an optimized, familiar input, like a QWERTY keyboard. May be synchronous as with active instant message chatting, semi-sychronous as with instant messaging while multi-tasking or asynchronous as in campfire.

Multitext: Texting to groups like twitter or dodgeball; good for spreading information across a network of people, provokes low-touch awareness and passive uptake of information. Context is often inferred.

Intratext: Sending text across multiple platforms like from AIM to cellphone. Or cellphone to blog.

I’d love to know how others have teased apart the many varieties of text based on experiential value.

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Search is a subject that I’ve always been interested in. Especially internal or enterprise search, within a site. Not web search like Google or Yahoo!. Sure there’s lots of search engine optimization (SEO) or marketing (SEM) tricks you can do to improve your ranking in the web search engines. But that’s never really held any fascination for me.

Enterprise search — now that’s fascinating! It’s much easier to tune an enterprise search engine to make the results you want float to the top. (Assuming, of course, you have access to your IT department to make the changes you want.) Weighting of metadata is a simple way to do this. Tools like Verity or Vivisimo make categorization, “best bets,” and other changes to results lists easy easier to do. Though I have to admit, the librarian in me is very skeptical of the promises that those companies make. I don’t trust their auto-classification engines to do a job as good as a person could (or to do it in the time they say it takes). And I firmly believe that having someone to care and feed the classification/taxonomy/vocabulary/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is the best way to get good results.

Recently, I started looking into what is being called “vertical search.” It’s taking the approaches traditionally used on enterprise search (like classifying results) and applying it to the web at large. Folks like Kosmix and Clusty are leading the charge. This sounds a lot like what Northern Light (remember them?) was doing back in 1999 and 2000. However, unlike Northern Light, who used people to come up with their categories (the blue folders), Kosmix and Clusty are using complex algorithms to determine what the web pages are about. Kosmix, for example, focuses on a subset of the web (e.g., travel, health, politics) and subdivides the results into different categories.

Just like with the enterprise search engines, I’m a bit skeptical about this approach. The classification that they are doing isn’t very sophisticated (they use categories like “basic information” or “blogs”), but it is certainly more helpful than a list of thousands of results ala Google results. It will be interesting to see where this goes. A hybrid approach using both algorithms and human-moderated categories seems like it would give the best results. Though I don’t know of anyone really taking that kind of two-pronged approach. Do you?

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Amanda asked me a question the other day that got me thinking. “What is the name for navigation systems that emerge from tags?”

Hrm. Good question. “Folksonomy” is the term being used for an uncontrolled vocabulary that is made by lumping together different people’s tags. But I don’t know that I’ve heard of an emergent navigation system based solely on tags.

The more I started thinking about navigation based on tags, the more the information architect in me started to worry. The problem with free-form tagging is that there is no relationship between the terms, except colocation, and frequency of use/appearance. There are limited applications (that I can think of) where a navigational structure based on colocation and frequency would be the optimal method to use (news may be one, where the “top news” items are highlighted in a persistent nav sort of treatment, but would change as the news changes). The risk of the system becoming a self-fulfilled feedback loop is large; a small number of tags bubble to the top and then stay at the top because everyone keeps clicking on them. The Technorati’s top 100 list is like that in many ways.

Amanda pointed out that on Flickr and You Tube the navigation is aggregated “stuff”: Most Popular, Yours, Your Contacts, etc. I would argue that the navigation still isn’t driven by tags in these cases. What the sites have done is to create spaces where the content within the space is organized by tags, but those spaces are consistent, ever-present and not tag driven. “My Contacts” is not a tag. The content that appears within “My Contacts” is tag driven - it’s the photo stream of people I’ve tagged as friends. But “My Contacts” doesn’t change to “vacation” just because “vacation” is the most popular tag at the moment.

The idea that the global navigation of a site changes and flexes based upon the ebb and flow of tags used on the site screams out against the ideals of consistent, clear global navigation that I’ve believed for years. But after the knee-jerk reaction has passed, I wonder if there is an appropriate use for such a system. I’m just not sure.

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