The morning was a bit rough trying to figure out what I missed on the day off. Weeded through the email for the important items. Went through the ticketing system to find any quick wins. Took care of a few items before the weekly UX touchbase meeting. The afternoon was more of the same — quick tickets, a meeting for search and product discovery on the site (yes — information architecture and taxonomy are integral to that process!), followed by a company leadership monthly meeting. I can’t tell you what went on in that meeting because it’s James Bond-like — if I told you, one of us would have to perish in some odd turn of events. Ok, not really, but it’s still confidential information.

Picked up Triumph of the City from the Zappos library to read this week. Ended up making it through 3 pages before falling asleep. Did I mention how tired I was?

Wednesday started out about the same, but a 9:30 meeting. The meeting went well, especially considering I’m trying to normalize the taxonomy so that no items are duplicated (one home — and only one home — for items). Worked out a work flow for this team which will help everyone out in the future, so a win first thing in the morning. Followed that up with a quick quality assurance test on a new feature for our in-house taxonomy tool. Found an error, and worked with the fab developer to get it fixed so that it might be released tomorrow.

After lunch, it was time for the weekly data sync, where the UX team, customer service people, analysts, and project & product managers get together to put everyone on the same page. I really like those meeting since there’s a lot of good information exchanged. The three o’clock crash then happened, where I felt like I needed a 2 hour nap. Acquired an Odwalla bar and some green tea to pick up my energy again, and pushed through another few tickets before the end of the day. Tickets ranged from taxonomy additions to search items that needed to be cleaned up or redirected to a taxonomy based search rather than a raw text search. That’s always an interesting vetting process since it’s a bit balance between search (the broad gathering of products) compared to taxonomy (the narrowed gathering of products), especially since you never want to assume what your user is thinking or for what they’re searching. They’re annoying little fights at time, but they’re what keep the job exciting day after day.

Oh, yes… and over the past two days we set up a new fish tank. The old one decided that it would be fun to short out on Friday. Smoke and everything. Glad it didn’t fry the lone tetra in the tank! But now fishy has a clean new home, and seems quite happy in his new digs.

Photo: Back To Work… by Richard Holster and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.

• Finalized a classification system for books at /usr/lib. Promptly helped to open the place as well.
• Worked. A lot.
• Trained. A lot.
• Cooked a 16 lb. turkey.
• Cooked for three potlucks.
• Ran — and finished — my first 12K race. Promptly finished last in my age group.
• Ate a lot of turkey left-overs.

You’re probably thinking right now, “Yeah, so what? It’s a list of mundane monthly tasks.” True. So, what did I learn?

• Writing takes time. I’m a chronic procrastinator, so the task probably won’t get completed anytime soon if I don’t have a deadline. Midnight rocks for that reason.
• Brushing the turkey with a liberal coating of olive oil creates the perfect golden turkey and helps to lock in the juices. But baste, baste, baste!
• After these three half marathons, I need to do something else for a month to let my legs & heels heal. Plantar fasciitis is not fun. And my cats tend to steal my therapeutic tennis balls. I might find one of the four tennis balls any given day.
• People have a hard time understanding the tasks and skills of Information and Knowledge workers. There’s still the 1930′s librarian stigma, even in corporate America. Been thinking about ways to change this.
• I seriously suck at answering emails. In fact, answering some emails is akin to talking on the phone: not something enjoyable for me to perform.
• Good blog posts hit once or twice every month. The rest is drivel and fluff that doesn’t tend to serve to better society, but instead calls out our narcissistic ways.

And that, my friends, is the end of NaBloPoMo. See you in January (and maybe before) for the next round of Library Day In The Life.

I’m lucky.

Growing up with a wide range of technology gives a perspective that the Millennials missed and the Boomers didn’t fully understand. I’ve seen the progression from a mostly analogue world to a very wired and digital world. This instilled an appreciation for the ease, the simplicity, the complexity, and speed at which information is now passed. It also provides a great basis on organizing information so that both Boomers and Millennials can find what they’re looking for.

In music formats, I’ve used 33 and 45 RPM records, 8 Tracks, cassette tapes, CDs, minidisks, and now digital formats. In addition to that, my great grandparents had some 78 RPM records that I knew about, even if they couldn’t be played. I learned how to edit sound on a reel to reel — complete with fresh straight blade and tape — and also used one of the first commercially available sound editing programs for the computer.

Computing? I’ve used an electric typewriter, word processor, and computer. I used mainframes, terminals, towers, laptops, Palm Pilots, and tablets. Screens were once large, monochrome and heavy, and now they’re thin, full-color, and lightweight. Data storage has gone from punchcards to 5.5″ disks to 3.25″ disks, Zip and Jazz disks, CDs, DVDs, SD cards, thumb drives, external drives, servers, and now the Cloud (in the 80′s & 90′s, the Cloud was known as the Internet: same concept rebranded for the new millennium).

Phones at one point came big and black with a rotary dial, then touchtones, pagers, Nokia 6160, Razr, Blackberry, VoIP / Skype, iPhone / Android and other smartphones. Cameras had external flashes and used film (120, 110, 35mm, Polaroid…). Pictures often discolored due to the chemicals degrading. Slides and black and white film was still common. The first digital cameras hit the scene when I was a junior in college. In my senior year, I started to experiment with digital video, which meant recording it on VHS, encoding it, editing it, and then dropping it back to VHS. The school had one computer that was equipped for digital video editing. Now it’s everywhere, even on your home PC with digital in and digital out, and cell phones with the ability to upload it immediately to YouTube.

About that time, I also started playing with multimedia production. As a kid, I was really into drawing and animation, creating flipbooks because it was fun. I learned HTML my freshman year and could display pages on Mosaic. I took that and experimented with HyperCube. I did 3D animation, starting from wireframes that would take 5 days to render 15 seconds worth of a basic movement. And I figured out how to combine them.

I remember a time without cable where you had to get up and go to the TV to change the channel. Then the channel box on a long cord that snaked through the room, and finally the hefty infrared controllers. MTV was just beginning. And the cable company had a public access channel, didn’t dabble in phone service, or deliver your internet service (that was left to the phone company and dial-up modems!).

Libraries still used card catalogs. Each book had a card that was stamped with a due date. We scoured through large paper tomes and volumes to find the necessary data for research papers, often trading the index for scholarly publications that were obviously used quite often. Microfiche was common. In the 1990s, computerized OPACs were commonplace but often terminal based and a pain to use. Now they use the same technology that websites use coupled with RFID, self-checkout, email notifications, and online renewals. Scholarly indexes are now electronic databases, often displaying PDFs of the articles within one or two clicks. Microfiche is being transferred to digital formats.

And that’s just in 30 or so years. Imagine what the next 30 will bring!

Photo: Old Technology by Robin Kaspar and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0) license.

Not that I’m a wolf all of the time, but hey… I like being different. Even though I’ve struggled with topics on occasion for this blog challenge, I used the proposed topic exactly ONCE since starting 22 days ago. I think BlogHer is a great site, but for really getting into the type of blogging I like to do, the proposed writing prompts in many ways could lead to way too much fluff.

Substance. More substance.

I’m a big fan of getting beyond the surface. What makes people tick? Their backgrounds and experiences? Stories that they tell. How it all comes together to make them who they are now. And many people aren’t willing to share that in person to even their closest friends.

Which is why many times blog prompts turn to fluff. It’s difficult to look vulnerable when being strong is touted as the way to get work done and gain friends. It’s also rare that a person truly knows and recognizes their true self. Some topics require this knowledge and courage to really cover well, exposing parts of the self which may show weakness or desire to improve their idea of self. In the short view, weakness may come through; but long term, this type of post requires more cahones and growth than most people want to put on the line.

I say go for it.

Photo: The Road Less Travelled by Ann Douglas and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) license.

Tonight I was perusing Twitter, looking for some inspiration when I came across a promoted tweet in the timeline. Yep. A little, yellow box with an arrow inside of it, just like on the Trends and Who To Follow sections. Not much unlike the the little green triangle with arrows in it, but buried a bit more subtlely in the timeline.

It made me throw up in my mouth a little.

Maybe it’s the GenXer side of me, but sheesh… I’d rather see ads on the sidebars than have them inserted into my timeline. At least I know what’s true content, and what’s promoted / advertising. It’s kind of like product placement in TV shows and movies as well, placed in there unobtrusively.

And that’s where this post is ending today since the train of thought has been derailed due to some news. I found out that Jim Robertson passed away today after a long fight with cancer. A former co-worker (and Ringling Bros. clown) who could always find a way to make people laugh. I hope you have them doubled over in laughter up there, Jimmy, with tears of joy streaming down their face.

Photo: Pay Here by R4vi and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) license.

Now that Vegas Tech Events is updated with a guest blog post and two new events, it’s time to focus on my blog post for the day. I should also classify a few more books for /usr/lib, but it’s not looking likely as my eyes are already closing.

Which I have no idea of what to write. Again. Damn you, writer’s block!

Googling Blog Post Inspiration. Received a bunch of results, about 75% trying to sell me their formula to make money blogging.

Oh, I smell a rant coming on about that. Instant blog post inspiration!

Trust me, I get that some people truly blog for a living. But the most successful bloggers tend to also consult. Sure, they may want to write all day long, show you a pop-up for their flavour of marketing and methods. Nothing makes me run from a site faster than that. 99% of the time, their content sucks big furry rock balls, so the extra click isn’t worth the energy expenditure.

Let’s take a look at some of the best known bloggers:

• Robert Scoble — started blogging as a way to provide customer service. Nope. No pop-ups here.
• Chris Guillebeau — world traveler turned blogger to help make people and the world a better place. Now in convenient and portable book form, too. Nope. No pop-ups here, either.
• Darren Rowse — Pretty much the king when it comes to blogging. He’s been at it since 2002, starting as a part-time blogger and experimenting until he found what worked. Links to his Dramatically Better Blog program, but — Nope. — No pop-ups.

Yes, I understand that I picked highly successful bloggers who are fairly well established. The cool thing about these guys is that they each create a few blog posts a week FOR FREE to share their knowledge and experience. They want you to see the content so that you may possibly be interested in their books, the ads, products they’re reviewing in the future because you trust them. Sure, they’re not giving away all of their tricks, but enough to whet your appetite for more information about whatever their topic of choice is for the day.

They all started out with blogs as a part-time way to help someone.

Yep. The Scobles, Guillebeau, and Rowses (and other similar bloggers) of the blogosphere give me something to aspire to reach.

The pop-up blogging program gang? I’m staying far, far away.

Photo: Netflix completes the open source giving cycle by opensourceway (Flickr user) and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.

It’s November, which is always a busy time of year. Holidays approach, relatives’ and friends’ birthdays…

Training for and running half marathons…

Creating content for the Vegas Tech site…

Opening a library…

And now NaBloPoMo.

Yep. I want to have my cake and eat it, too.

Bring it, November.

Been training to run three half-marathons in ~60 days. Three days of running, three days of cross training / stretching, and a day of recovery.

I have some writing to finish about the Vegas Tech scene for a new site. Due date: sooner than later!

Created a new cataloging method for the tech/business books for /usr/lib, which is now being put to the test while I classify approximately 400 books. It’s Swiss cheese, and there’s a lot of work to do in the next two weeks!

And I’ve also taken on writing a blog post a day for NaBloPoMo. See the three topics above? Chances are the blog posts are going to revolve around one of them.

So enjoy, and hope you enjoy the wild adventure that will be November!

Photo: Gas Pump by Brian Mitchell and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.

Morning = taking care of business. Poorly. (thanks, convention center Wi-Fi!)

Lunch = Awards Luncheon

Infomatics & Bibliometrics

Information Retrieval (IR) systems
Length of search time + search terms (long) = intervene and help the user (?)
Competitive Intelligence

How far do we reduce until there is no longer value to the data?
What can be done for advocacy of this area?

Be good at what people want or expect. Talk like politicians and persuade them!

Plenary:
How To Identify Ducks In Flight
Steve Kelling

Starts with duck identification. Males different identification marks than female. ~100 species in US.

Citizen Science Projects: Captcha, Fold It (proteins folded), Galaxy Zoo (digital map ID of galaxy)

eBird
Pretty dull interface, but asks for necessary information about sightings.
1.7 million of checklists worldwide, 99% data collected in 2011

Building community:
Key: understanding audiences!
Using crowdsourcing techniques to develop their community (pic of Crowdsourcing book)
My eBird, names on lists (’cause everyone likes to see their name in print), competitions
Tools to access the data submitted in different ways

Use mashup technologies — Google maps & purple dots

1,300,000 hours volunteered to eBird

Data use:
humans the only one who can identify biodiversity. Equipment can observe individual items such as environmental conditions.
Data ONE: how to pull all the data together and create meaningful associations between the datasets
data interoperability challenges
link semantic relationships & syntactic data

Used dublin (Darwin) core, expanded out to to create system that researchers can use.
50-75 publications per year from dataset

Create the data, also provides access to data and publishes results. Full scale!
Concerned with scalability — local to regional to national

Can see migratory patterns over time
Zoom in to allow land managers to see impacts of decision on bird species
Allows to see habitat preferences of birds — unknown before project started

How to apply information?
State of the Birds report from Secretary of the Interior — biological indicator
How birds use public lands? GIS analysis overlay public lands map w/ birds
Most birds found on BLM lands (BLM energy extraction, not conservation)

Used during oil spill to track affects on birds
Found very few died from result of spill

Gulf of Mexico environmental report card
several environmental indicies, grade for different regions

Next?
NEXrad imagery to see migration + sounds at different locations
Sounds hard to identify to species, use to sound waves to use machines to identify birds. Very accurate
Use to see how birds migrate, make forecasts to help mitigate hazards to birds (wind turbines, skyscrapers, etc)

Sessions:

Ux: Novelty Aesthetic appeal, usability, focus attention, felt involvement, endurability
Why needed for framework of human / information interactions?

Background
Literacy
Demographics
Process
Behavioural
Self-report
Outcome
User Engagement Scale (31 point scale)
Interviews
Reflection on the research product

Snapshots, log files, interviews
Change in competence? Needs? Motivation? Comprehension?

Affects
Contextual Variables Measurements
Context = mood, activities prior to info interactions
Experience = perceptions and memories of interactions
Preference = changes in info behaviours

Emotions can affect how a user completes a task. Does a user have information preferences? Better interaction or worse interaction = stronger the memory.

Credibility
Continuity — prior experience & knowledge
Pertinent eval — Subjective assessment
Heuristics — judgements based on mind’s basic computations