Here’s the video of the presentation I gave on Information Architecture at the Apple Store, Osaka. You’ll need QuickTime to view it but most people who have iTunes installed should have QuickTime. It is about an hour long and your comments are most welcome.
Information Architecture – How to improve your web site in 30 minutes by Ian Cheung
[If you attended please leave a comment below, good or bad. Tell me what you thought of it, what you liked or disliked about it or just a thumbs up or down]
I gave a presentation on Information Architecture earlier this week at the Apple Store in Shinsaibashi. It was the first time in ages I had presented to a large group. Here are my thoughts.
I enjoyed it, but the first 10-15 minutes I was more than a bit nervous. At one point my mind went totally blank! Garr had mentioned that it would be a strange feeling at first since the presenter is facing the audience and the bright backdrop of the store.
My greatest problem was remembering what slide came next. This meant that a couple of times I revealed the next slide too soon. On one occasion it meant that I had to skip a question to the audience because I had revealed the answer slide, and so I lost a small chunk of the presentation. This threw me off completely and was the reason my mind went blank a little later on.
There were a lot positives, at first it seemed that an hour would be hard to fill but I actually ran over and had to rush through the end part to squeeze the example sites and points in. I also enjoyed answering the intelligent questions at the end. The best thing wasn’t anything in my presentation but meeting the audience later and chatting with them at the store and nijikai. One of the audience members had actually met Joshua Bell and had a private lesson with him.
Things I would improve on the presentation are; the ending (it was a bit tame), connecting the dots on the whole process, and trying to remember which slide came next.
I was so nervous I forgot to thank everyone who helped. So big thank-yous to Garr and Stu for their help and advice, Rie for her patience the whole week before, Rie’s mum and dad for babysitting, and the staff at the Apple Store. The video of the presentation will be online sometime in the next couple of weeks. I’ll post a link here when it is. In the meantime, here are some links to things and sites I mentioned in the presentation:
Facebook (if you want to add me, my address is ianc [at] starconcepts.co.uk)
Oboeyasui.com (http://oboeyasui.com/ian is a list of all the online places you can find me)
WashingtonPost story: Pearls Before Breakfast (the full story about the not so ordinary busker)
Miss Teen South Carolina (with subtitles)
Zombo.com (if you have time, wait till the end and yes there is an end!)
I wonder if anyone else has noticed but Amazon isn’t so cheap for books any more. At least Amazon Japan.
I usually browse through books on Amazon and use the “Save for later” options. This has the effect of telling me of price changes since I last logged on. And prices have been going up in general. New books that I add to the list show savings of a few percent (￥66 on a book costing around ￥3000) or with a lot of computer related books 0, zip, nada.
Maybe it is Amazon shifting focus from market share to profitability which is good but it might also loose mind-share too. I spend way too much on books so maybe it is a blessing in disguise for my wallet. 
You know that you’re a geek when looking an air filter you notice that there are settings for 1, 4, and 8 hour cut-offs and you wonder where is 2? *ahem*
An interesting platform is Habari which is aiming to be the next gen blogging platform of choice. At first glance it is just another piece of blogging software in the world dominated by WordPress, Moveable Type and others. I took one look at it and thought “nothing much to see here”. BUT…
Upon hearing that Skippy (of WordPress fame) was involved I spent more than the 30 seconds of attention web browsers are famed for and looked a little more carefully. And I like what I see so far.
I do love WordPress, I’ve set-up countless blogs using it and have been using it from v1.2. I advocate its use almost non-stop to set-up blogs or simple web sites with little hassle. And in fact using blogs/sites running WordPress is hassle-free. The hassle comes in the development. Development of themes, plugins, and other functionality. Documentation is a rat’s nest, and while there are resources out there due to the number of users, it is sub-optimal. The development of WordPress itself shares a weakness with other open source projects in that, yes the source is open but the development decisions are taken by a select group. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn’t. Some say that you could always fork it but they don’t realise that barriers of entry to development are not zero even if the project is open sourced. Ok, in English that means even if you don’t like how things are going, and you are given the complete source, it is very hard work.
Habari’s difference is that it is setting out to be community driven. In English, that means if loads of your users tell you that the support forums and documentation while extensive is a mess, you listen. Or that while developers can update their installation with some fancy shell tricks blind-folded and encased in concrete you don’t forget that most users fret and sweat about deleting key files on the server before uploading new files.
This to me is the big thing and why I am looking forward to seeing Habari succeed. With initial developers including Skippy and Michael Heilemann I think it has a fighting chance.
It also aims to have cleaner, more documented code, easier for plugins and themes to be developed, not being locked down to a specific database etc. All of them admirable targets to have.
Hat-tip to Xuan to pointing me to Habari and mentioning that Skippy was involved.
