Spammers are always coming up with new ideas for how to get by spam filters and new ways to fool people into thinking their messages require immediate reading. And these new ideas seem to come in waves, like fashion or style trends. For example, last week (and all in one day) I received about 50 spam emails (a full 20% of the spam I get daily) in the following vein:

Serious letter. You require to read.
Essential letter. You require to read.
Momentous letter. You must to read.
Grand message. You should to read.
Very important letter. You require to read.

And now, over the last 24 hours I’ve received the following spam subjects:

fw: Please do not come to work today
RE: No work tomorrow; Office closed
Fwd: Hey our boss got fired?
Fw: Hey are they starting layoffs yet?
fwd: Offices have been closed permanently

I can’t tell if these are attempting to exploit the recipients’ fear (of losing their jobs) or their laziness (by giving them hope that they can get a day off). But it makes me wonder: Is the public’s faith in the economy and/or their employers so bad that this type of spam is believable?

Has there been any formal marketing or demographic research into the typical “Spam Consumer/Victim”? I’d love to see that stuff — I’ll bet it’s extremely harsh reading.

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Here’s some news for web designers, interaction designers, graphic designers, information designers, user experience designers, and whatever else you might think of yourself as: New York Magazine defines “design” as “interior design”. And of course the fashion world uses the word “design” to mean “fashion design”.

I’d guess that if you asked a hundred people what a designer does, the most people would describe either a fashion designer or an interior designer.

There is no holistic all-encompassing capital-letter Design out there. Get over it.

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New York design firm Giampietro+Smith hits a little information architecture home run with their design for the magazine the revealer, a very interesting web site about media and religion. The problem of how to structure the presentation of breaking news, current-ish articles, and “evergreen” always-interesting material is something information architects face all the time but never seem to get right.

Using only three simple (and neatly alliterative) words, G+S nailed it:

When Behavior was working with the AIGA on the redesign of their Design Forum a few years ago, we at one point pictured an almost identical structure to the revealer’s, with three columns of content that each had a different “pace”. I imagined the three columns sliding vertically at three different speeds, like Stewart Brand (pictured here at the 2003 IA Summit in an awesome photo by Mike Lee) describing his Clock of the Long Now, in which different types of knowledge and understanding move and evolve at different speeds. We didn’t end up using that design concept, and I wonder if it wasn’t in part because we never quite envisioned it with just the right words for the three columns.

It’s great to see plain old fashioned English used to make information architecture work elegantly. All too often a seemingly-great IA or user interface design strategy falls to peices when you finally get down to nomenclature. Which is why I think it is essential for information architects to be excellent writers with large and strong vocabularies — if you can’t think of a way to take a 15-word button description and reduce it to three, if you can’t think of the one word that succintly describes the twenty types of content in a single section of your site, then you’re missing a critical tool from your UXD utility belt.

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I generally consider myself a capable writer, at least in the technical sense. In particular, I think I have a pretty good understanding of how to punctuate properly in written English.

But there are some areas where the language’s “standards” are in continual dispute, some areas where I think the standards are just plain logically wrong, and some where a few minor technical modifications to the rules might be helpful.

In fact, those of us who work in the computer industry might be able to exert some subtle positive influence on English grammar to make it clearer and more logical. You see, I suspect that many people who program computers have a unique grasp of grammatical logic. Not just HTML/CSS developers who are intimately familiar with structuring text in semantically-logical ways, but computer programmers of all types who work with logical structures whose meaning must be airtight.

[Note that I’m not saying that we need to “clean up” English a la some kind of Orwellian newspeak. I’m just offering some minor shifts of thinking to reflect our current technological competencies.] MORE…

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He has a web site, but he’s not a blogger.

It may sound obvious to point that out, but I keep reading news stories and commentaries that discuss, for example, how “blogging” is making traditional media obsolete or something… when in fact they really mean to say “the web” is revolutionizing media and communications.

Next time you write (or read) something about blogs, try mentally replacing the word “blog” with “web site” and see if it changes the meaning of the idea.

Are you talking about a regularly-updated, personality-based web site with certain specific features like comments, rss feeds, blogrolls? Does the site or sites in question even call themselves blogs? Are you even talking about web sites at all, or are you talking about instant messaging and file sharing and other non-web technologies? If not, then you should probably just use the word “web site” (or “message board” or “social network” or “news aggregator” or even just “the internet”, whatever the most appropriate term might be).

These are not blogs, but they are often lumped together by sloppy commentators as part of the “blogging phenomenon”:

• Google
• Wikipedia
• del.icio.us
• Flickr
• The Drudge Report
• Newsvine
• myspace
• Technorati

Sure some of these sites have blogs, but they are not blogs. They are each something else first. In some cases “what they are” is something entirely unique and innovative, and it is precisely this multi-faceted phenomenon of functional innovation on the internet that is the really salient reason why the web is changing everything.

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The coins-on-top method. Coins slip-sliding around on top of the paper bills.

It seems like over the past several years, every cashier in the world has decided — or has been told by their bosses — to hand customers their change by first placing the paper bills in the customer’s hand, then placing the coins on top of the paper bills.

Inevitably, each customer is then required to fumble around with this little money stack, using both hands, in order to (a) get a grip on the coins (which are essentially sliding around on top of the papers) and (b) to remove the paper money and put it back in your wallet without spilling the coins. With the old coins-on-the-bottom method, the paper is right there for grabbing and putting in your wallet while the coins are sitting right there in your palm, touching your skin.

To me, it’s glaringly obvious that the coins-on-the-bottom method is preferable, but I am reminded of the classic toilet paper debate (roll over from the top versus roll under from below) in which both sides think they are absolutely right. I’m an over-the-top person myself, but I won’t debate it because ultimately I think there are some usability issues that boil down to some kind of “taste” in user experience. (Besides, some of my favorite people in the world are under-the-bottom people. I figure if you change the roll at all, you have the right to decide!)

(This is a great topic for a future usability discussion: if a huge number, even a majority, of users prefer a interface that is empirically and demonstrably, but ultimately trivially, less efficient than another interface design, is it okay to go with the user-preferred, less-efficient design?)

The question that I wanted to answer, then is this: Is the coins-on-top trend a usability-taste thing, not attributable to any particular rational decision? Or is something else happening here, something deliberate? MORE…

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Today (amazingly the 410th anniversary of the deaths of both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare) I’ve finished reading the classic Don Quixote Parts I and II. What an unforgettable journey, and what an eye-opener!

A four hundred year old book (Parts I and II were published in 1605 and 1615) that in many ways paints a character — two characters, in fact — every bit as lifelike and nuanced as anything by novelists who would come hundreds of years later. Insights into the human psyche that presage our modern understanding of the mind. Historical perspectives on Europe, Spain, and even North Africa in the century after the expulsion of the Moors from Europe. And storytelling techniques that seem nearly postmodern. MORE…

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In a previous post, I mentioned the “Technologies of Writing” show I saw during SXSW at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. Since then, I’ve had several occasions to think about the exhibit again. So I thought I’d go a little more into some of the highlights from the show and share some of the related thoughts that have come up since then.

Before Writing

The first thing I learned when I entered the exhibition was this: Before there was any form of language-based writing at all, some early Mesopotamians used clay objects of different shapes to represent recorded word-based information. One would collect a small bundle of these objects and somehow, taken together, the group of objects would form a message.

Presumably the messages contained in these clay trinkets were somewhat prone to inaccuracy. For example, if you switch the order in which you read them, a message such as “Marduk owes Ishtar thirty shekels” could easily become “Ishtar owes Marduk thirty shekels.”

To correct for this, they started making little incisions in the clay. Soon (and by ’soon’ we’re talking many hundreds of years) these incisions evolved into a whole new writing system. The world’s first writing system, in fact: cuneiform. MORE…

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There’s a debate going on at Adam Greenfield’s V-2.org (and elsewhere) over Bruce Sterling’s neologism “spime”, a term he coined at Etech 2006 to refer to new technological/networked objects that emerge into human consciousness without a name or an apparent history.

In 2001 a new mammal was found in China. This cladogram shows where scientists eventually classified it and how they named it.

Adam suggests an alternative, “onto”, meaning “an individual networked object endowed with the power of self- description”, and “ontome” for the totality of all those objects (like what a genome is to a single gene).

This got me thinking about the word “taxonomy”, derived from the Greek “taxo”, meaning to order. In a taxonomic system consisting branches and nodes, a “taxon” is a single node. So “onto” should probably be “onton” (which also alleviates the unfortunate fact that “onto” is an English homonym).

But then I thought about the original purpose of taxonomies: to classify animals. That’s kind of like what we’re trying to do here: to classify things, to give names to strange new nameless things. More specifically, Bruce seems to be trying to come up with a name for a general type of thing without a name. MORE…

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