I recently did a presentation at the very excellent DigitalNow conference, in Orlando. It’s a conference for leaders of professional associations, who have a vested interest in virtual community building and keeping their constituents engaged, even in the splintered information-saturated “Web 2.0″ world.
I combined a couple of previous years’ IASummit presentations and added a […]

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It’s easy to overlook them. The Skinner-box button-pushers, watching the wheels roll and roll. Surrounded by a ‘paradise’ that still leaves them wanting — and thinking they’ll find it like this.
Vegas was a mixed bag. I guess I’d always seen so many glamorous photos and film shots, even the ones that tried to be […]

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I managed to finish my presentation for this year’s IA Summit, and present it in under 50 minutes. Huzzah!
As promised, I’m posting the whole thing with notes here on the blog. If you want the PDF of the presentation (16MB), go here: http://www.inkblurt.com/media/hinton_summit07.pdf

And if you want to see the “blog post of record” about the […]

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Didn’t know about this til Peter Morville mentioned it in a session today.
Semapedia.org: index
Our goal is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.
Map, meet Landscape.

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I’m flying to Vegas tomorrow for the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit 2007. Never been to Las Vegas before, so it’ll be a hoot.
I’m not sure if I’m going to try mad blogging of the summit here or not. We’ll see what kind of attention span and/or energy I have.
I have a feeling, really, […]

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I played a small role in starting the IA Institute five years (and 30 lbs) ago, but I can’t take credit for the success it’s had since. Lots of dedicated people have worked very hard on it during that time.
Recently I became a little more involved, when Stacy Surla gently prodded me into helping […]

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Business 2.0 makes an observation I find painfully obvious, but that evidently more people need to hear:
Why commercial outfits can’t get Wikis to work - Feb. 21, 2007
By tirelessly nurturing their specific communities, not by randomly “crowdsourcing,” Wales, Butterfield, Fake and their ilk encourage responsible gardening. Wiki novels, Wiki op-eds, a Wiki Amazon: these […]

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I’ve been kvetching for a year or more now about how crazy it is trying to keep up with various social networks online.
The truth is, many of us have stuff we do at MySpace or Yahoo, some we might do on our own blog (either self-hosted or at TypePad or Blogspot, etc), and maybe […]

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UPDATE: The presentation is done, and was presented on 3/26. By the time I finished working with it, I changed the title to “Architectures for Conversation.”
[UPDATE 2!: I’ve taken down the link to the PDF — it’s big and now outdated.]
TO VIEW OR DOWNLOAD: See it on SlideShare.net.
(Or go to my spot […]

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I’ve been thinking a lot about mashups recently. I’ve been asking myself the question: as a user-experience designer, what happens when the experience I’ve designed gets usurped, or disintermediated, by people taking what they want of it and leaving the rest behind? What does that mean to me as a designer: i.e. what is it, […]

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I was looking at the wiki Lawrence Lessig used until recently to work on the new version of his book “Code” (Code 2.0) and ran across this description of MUDs/MOOs from 1996. With just a little tweak or two, it could easily describe the current participatory Web 2.0 world.
LambdaMOO is a virtual reality. It is […]

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There are references everywhere — I saw it on the news while I was travelling — but here’s an article at USA Today
IPSWICH, England — Tear down the traffic lights, remove the road markings and sell off the signs: Less is definitely more when it comes to traffic management, some European engineers believe.
They say drivers […]

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