Paula Hay (rabbitmountain)'s Public Profile in the Diigo Community

Publishing generalist with depth of experience in design and execution for both print and web. Formal education in journalism, editing and technical writing. Keen interest in content management focusing on search engine optimization, user experience, and conversion. Enthusiasm for entrepreneurship...

Member since Feb 24, 2009, follows 2 people, 4 public groups, 105 public bookmarks (105 total).

More »

Tags

Recent Tags:	content strategy(0), journalism(0), content(0), advertising(0), content management(0), peak oil(0), newspapers(0), viral-marketing(0), social-media(0), economy(0), usability(0), media(0), viral(0), IA(0), economic collapse(0), localism(0), small-business(0), relocalization(0), journalism business models(0)
Top Tags:	content strategy(14), content(12), journalism(12), advertising(10), content management(9), social-media(7), ia(7), newspapers(7), viral-marketing(7), peak oil(7)

More »

Recent Bookmarks and Annotations

A Map-Based Approach to a Content Inventory - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design on 2009-06-14
Content Analysis Heuristics - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design on 2009-06-08
To Plan for Emergency, or Not? on 2009-05-29
- the reason we all see it necessary to transition away from fossil fuels is that if we don’t, dire things will happen. But what if it’s actually too late to prevent some of those dire things from happening, and they occur during our Transition period and process?
- Obviously, what Transition and PCI have been advocating (community gardens, local currencies, etc.) are in fact at least partial solutions to these very problems, but so far we have discussed them in terms of proactive efforts to keep the problems from happening, or to build a better world in the future. Should the growing presence of these problems affect how our solutions are described (to the general public, to policy makers, or among ourselves) and/or how they are implemented?
- 6 more annotations...
- - It’s worth asking: What is Transition actually capable of doing to respond to an unprecedented economic crisis? In the most cynical assessment, it consists essentially of a lot of well-meaning local activists wanting to envision a better future. These are not the sorts of people to engage in serious emergency response work, nor do they have the support mechanisms to enable them to do it.
  - If what we are proposing to do can only succeed if we have a decade or so of “normal” economic conditions during which to grow our base, train more trainers, and deploy our methods, then . . . it may indeed be too late. But if we can adapt quickly and thereby strategically help our communities adapt, the result may be beneficial both to communities and to those who are organizing Transition efforts.
  - I intend to focus primarily on identifying efforts taking place in communities around the world that (1) address basic human needs in the context of economic collapse (2) are replicable and/or scalable, and (3) set us on the path toward sustainability. In fact this will also be the main focus for Post Carbon Institute for the foreseeable future, as we expand our Fellows program. I hope that what we come up with as a think tank will be immediately useful to Transition initiatives everywhere.
  - The key aspect of it, as with all of this, is tone. If it is presented as an emergency response force training, I don’t think it would be as effective as if it was Transition Teams or something. It would be great to get some marketing/advertising bods on board with it, to really focus the presentation and the language.
    Paula Hay on 2009-05-30
    
    marketing/advertising bods! Get thee behind me Satan!
  - As you say, many people will be focused on questions like
    
    “how can I remortgage the house so as to reduce my payments”, “how can I reduce my overheads by switching to a different home phone provider” and “how secure is my job”, rather than “how am I going to store rainwater”, “how am I going to dig up my garden” and so on.”
    
    If we can address people’s very real economic concerns, we will be offering tangible benefit. What are some strategies for saving money? Get family and friends to move in with you. Find ways to cook with less fuel (solar cookers are only one of many strategies there), use less water (gray-water recycling with or without re-plumbing your house), ditch your car, share stuff, repair stuff, make stuff. How to live happily without x, y, and z. How to live more happily and healthily than ever on a fraction of the income.
    
    The big question on everyone’s mind is: How can I get by once I’ve lost my job (or now that I’ve lost it)? Learning how to raise capital and form cooperative ventures that benefit the community (and are therefore worthy of community support) could be a life-saver. Also: how to set up barter networks, how to make community currencies work for you.
  - Why are we not having discussions about how it will feel if all our efforts to transition fail?
Phil Dick | How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later on 2009-05-28
Where the Wireframes Are: Special Deliverable #3 - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design on 2009-05-25
How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web | Miskatonic University Press on 2009-05-24
- Kwasnick (1999) identifies four classificatory structures: hierarchies, trees, paradigms, and facets.
- Hierarchies divide and redivide things into groups where each new group is a sub-species of its parent group; everything that is true of a group is also true of its sub-groups and so on down (Kwasnick 1999, 25). The Linnean taxonomy of living things is the classic example of this.
- 10 more annotations...
- - Trees, in contrast, do not have the rules of inheritance (Kwasnick 1999, 30). For example, North America contains Canada, the United States, and Mexico, and Canada contains ten provinces and three territories, but Ontario is not a kind of Canada, and Canada is not a kind of North America
  - A paradigm is a two-dimensional classification (imagine a spreadsheet). Use paradigms when there are two independent aspects to consider. Kwasnick (1999, 35-36) uses the example of terms describing kinship relations, which can be organized into a grid, with sex (male/female) along one axis, and relation (parent, sibling, parent's sibling) along the other axis
  - Facets will handle three or more dimensions of classification.
  - Kwasnick (1999, 40-42) lists several things in favour of faceted classifications: they do not require complete knowledge of the entities or their relationships; they are hospitable (can accommodate new entities easily); they are flexible; they are expressive; they can be ad hoc and free-form; and they allow many different perspectives on and approaches to the things classified.
  - Ranganathan's Colon Classification has five facets, now classic (see Ranganathan (1962), among his many books, for an introduction to the facets and how to use them):
    
    Personality (the something in question, e.g. a person or event in a classification of history, or an animal in a classification of zoology)
    
    Matter (what something is made of)
    Energy (how something changes, is processed, evolves)
    Space (where something is)
    Time (when it happens
  - look to BC2 for ideas (Broughton 2001, 79):
    
    thing/entity
    kind
    part
    property
    
    material
    process
    operation
    patient
    product
    by-product
    
    agent
    space
    time
  - Spiteri follows Ranganathan and divides classification into three parts: "the Idea Plane, which involves the process of analyzing a subject field into its component part; the Verbal Plane, which involves the process of choosing appropriate terminology to express those component part; and the Notational Plane, which involves the process of expressing these component parts by means of a notational device
  - Going from Idea (which Spiteri divides into two parts) to Verbal to Notational Planes take us from idea to word to number, from the general concept of what the entity is about to expressing that concept in a controlled vocabulary to turning those words into notation.
  - My procedure for making the faceted classification system rearranges Vickery's steps, and adds to the start and finish to make it complete from beginning to end.
    Paula Hay on 2009-05-24
    
    Detailed step-by-step follows
  - There are three questions to ask when planning how to build the web site. Finding and blending the appropriate answers will give you a good starting point for building navigational tools for the site.
Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication on 2009-05-24
- There is a fundamental difference in the activities of
  browsing to find interesting content, as opposed to direct
  searching to find relevant documents in a query. It is
  similar to the difference between exploring a problem space
  to formulate questions, as opposed to actually looking for
  answers to specifically formulated questions
- Merholz does not use the term “folksonomy.” He has
  written on his personal web site that the term is inaccurate
  due to its derivation from “taxonomy,” which he argues tend
  towards hierarchy and control. (Merholz, 2004) (See also
  Taylor, 2004, for discussions of problems and disputes with
  the term “taxonomy.”) Merholz prefers the term
  “ethnoclassification,” which is what he uses in his article,
  and there is no mention of “folksonomy” to be
  found. Ethnoclassification is also inaccurate, because as
  discussed, what is happening is quite unlike classification
  and far more like categorization.
  - Paula Hay on 2009-05-24
    
    What is the difference between "classification" and "categorization"?
Facets In Your Future on 2009-05-24
- f a top-notch information architect was on your design team, she categorized and classified your content, then arranged it in one or more taxonomies to support clean drill-down paths.
- The canonical example of a faceted directory is an ecommerce site like Wine.com, where visitors can browse by wine type, region, winery, or price
Jesse James Garrett: ia/recon on 2009-05-24
- When most people think of the job of being an editor, I think they imagine someone hunched over a desk, red pen in hand, marking up an endless stream of text, cleaning up split infinitives and dangling participles and the like. But the editorial role and the editorial discipline are two very different things. While there are definitely some people who specialize in this sort of work, there's usually much more to being an editor.
  
  In the broadest sense, an editor's job is to help writers make their writing more effective. This involves grammar and punctuation and word choice, sure, but a huge part of any editor's job has to do with creating effective structures. An editor might be responsible for structures at many scales, from the encyclopedia down to the textbook down to the article down to the paragraph down to the sentence.
  
  Like the editor, the information architect is concerned most fundamentally with creating information structures. But the discipline of information architecture views this responsibility in a very different light. In the world of information architecture, all structural challenges are currently viewed as variants of the same problem -- the problem of information retrieval.
- If you asked an editor at a magazine or a newspaper if the structure of her product had been tested with readers before its publication, she would laugh at you. To her, developing effective structures is a matter of exercising her professional judgment -- judgment honed through years of trial and error and hard-won experience with her craft.
  
  To her, the proof of her effectiveness in her discipline is her ability to exercise that judgment. To her, that judgment is the very reason for the existence of her role. To her, the idea of abandoning that professional judgment and recasting her role as a conduit through which research findings become structures would be simply absurd.
  
  And you know what? She's right.
- 7 more annotations...
- - Research benefits architecture most when it seeks to define the problem we must solve. Research benefits architecture least -- and can actually produce bad results -- when it seeks to define the solution itself.
  - It's not always easy to tell whether a research study defines the problem or defines a solution. During the research process, well-intentioned attempts to articulate the problem can turn into suggestions for solutions -- especially when the person conducting the research is also responsible for creating the solution.
  - When we hold the test up as the ultimate determinant of success or failure, we encourage specialization in beating the test. The unwritten law of usability is that the most efficient approach is the best. But again, outside the limited area in which user tasks can be readily identified and goals readily recognized, efficiency is not necessarily a universal good. Testing cannot account for all the possible goals of an architecture or its users.
    
    If our discipline continues to develop along its current course, we will have developed an entire body of knowledge about information architecture that amounts to little more than a set of tips and tricks for beating the test. Meanwhile, the real creative problems inherent in our work will remain as poorly understood as they are today.
  - The progress of the discipline depends on the development and iteration of a body of knowledge. This body of knowledge, in turn, can only come about through deliberate consideration of a wide range of architectural problems and potential solutions. What we need most of all are good test cases, and the insights that come from tackling them first-hand.
  - I have often been asked the secret of my success as an information architect. Here, I will reveal for the first time that secret.
    
    I have hunches.
    
    Of course, it's not enough merely to have hunches. They have to be good hunches. My hunches have to be better than the hunches my clients have -- that's why they hire me.
  - Currently, we are building a body of knowledge whose basic requirements -- a dedicated specialist, extensive time and money devoted to research -- automatically exclude the vast majority of real-world cases.
  - The message we should be sending is this one:
    
    Information architecture is a discipline that can be practiced by people in a wide variety of roles. Architectures can be designed to achieve a wide variety of goals, not just information retrieval. The single most important factor in the success of an architecture is the skill of its creator. This skill is applied through a combination of experienced professional judgment, thoughtful consideration of research findings, and disciplined creativity. This skill can be developed and applied by specialists and non-specialists alike.
    
    Only by being honest with ourselves about what makes us valuable can we convince others of that value. Only by being generous with our knowledge can we reap all of its benefits. And only by creating a culture in which these principles are fully embraced can we foster the growth of our field, and ensure our continued success.
Jesse James Garrett: Visual Vocabulary for Information Architecture on 2009-05-24

More »

Bookmark Lists

More »

Groups

Content Strategy

1 members, 19 items

The challenge of creating content that is reader-centered, coded properly, cost-effective, scalable, intuitively navigable, and tastefully compelling. Yowza!
Energy Wars

11 members, 858 items

What will be the global impacts from the end of cheap oil? This group covers energy news on what will it take to get off our drill and kill addiction.
Journalism

30 members, 296 items

A group to collect interesting links from the world of journalism, which is undergoing major change as it struggles to find a business model that will carry it into the digital future.
User Experience Design

63 members, 346 items

Information architecture, usability, findability, user centered design, semantics, social networking, user experience, user interface, mobile web, e-marketing, ROI, ...