The 'Book and the tree

I have been conspicuously (and by conspicuously, I mean in my own mind) from the blogosphere for a while now. I start blog entries and then forget about them. I wonder what there is to say that anyone could possibly care about. I still get comments on old blog posts and start writing but lose interest. Facebook and Ancestry.com have tightened their grip on me.

My friend Michelle invited me to join Facebook almost a year ago. I resisted at first, but I thought it would be a good way to research social networking, since my department was looking into building virtual communities. I thought the best way to study them was to become a member. Now I'm hooked on Facebook, and like the Internet itself, I can't imagine what my life was like before it. Well, actually, I know what my life was like before it. It wasn't full of poking, flair, and status updates by the nanosecond.

I've always felt somewhat alone in the blogosphere; Facebook, on the other hand, lets me connect with any of the currently 140 friends I have. I had no idea I knew 140 people, but they are, in fact, people I know, from work, school, the neighborhood, blogging, the gym, the past, my family. Some are casual acquaintances; some are people I've known for many years. In many ways my contact with them mirrors how I would interact with them in real life, but in other ways I've gotten to know people better by observing and interacting with them virtually. For instance, a colleague of mine is in the hospital recovering from a serious illness and was unable to speak on the phone. His wife, through Facebook, was able to keep us all up to date on his condition and relay messages to him. It was better than wondering how he is and having her be bombarded with phone calls and e-mails.

On our recent trip to London, I saved money on cell phone calls by contacting my cousins on Facebook to set up places and times to meet. I saw photos of our friends' new baby who was born while we were away. I correspond with my friend Michelle, who lives in Mongolia and is already living tomorrow. To me Facebook is not a substitute for human contact, and if someone lives hundreds or thousands of miles away, this kind of interaction makes sense. Oh yes, and many of my loyal readers are on Facebook!

But Facebook is only part of the reason why I've put aside blogging. The other part is my genealogical pursuit, which has grown considerably since I started 3 years ago with about 20 people in my tree. Now there are almost a thousand. I've gone back 6 or 7 generations on all four sides, taking me, in some cases, to the late 1700s. I've expanded across generations to almost 700 blood relatives, 400 of them living! I've uncovered cousins in Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, Australia, Italy, and many parts of the US. I've met dozens of new cousins both in person and through e-mail (and Facebook). And so far I've helped solve three family mysteries. But that's another blog entry. Stay tuned...

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Four-hand Touch

I was all ready to dive back into blogging again when I got an invitation from my friend Michelle to join Facebook. So I did, and now I'm totally hooked. But that wasn't enough. Oh no. I accidentally dropped Luis's iPod Nano in the toilet and killed it. I felt terrible, even though it was my Nano to begin with. So the next day I went to the Apple Store to get him an iPod Touch, and well, next thing you know, we're a four-hand-Touch home. Between Facebook, the Touch, the family tree, and "Family Guy," you can understand why there's no time for blogging. I know I should probably reading books, but I'm too busy SuperPoking my friends.

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In the right place

"How many people know there's a recent movie about Helvetica?" the presenter asked the audience at one of my conference sessions. Hands shot up. Those who did not raise their hands gasped. A movie about a typeface? How exciting!

In our ever-changing high-tech world, the notion of a typeface seems quaint: it evokes a certain nostalgia for those of us who've been in publishing over the last 20 years. Our labels have changed with the times. Graphic artists have become desktop publishers. Trainers are disguised as performance specialists. Technical writers are now information architects. While we've shed the old labels, it's more that we have adopted new skills to suit the age. Who is interested in typography? Or taxonomy? Or metadata? Well, those of us who have always been interested in those things. These terms are not new; we are adapting them to new technology that is always a moving target.

The conference I'm attending in Vancouver is all about trends in documentation and training. Ten years ago these two disciplines were considered church and state. Documentation was for reference, training focused on teaching. Now people realize they are cousins united by a common relative: content. The Holy Grail for a documentation and training department is single sourcing: write one piece of content and reuse it in multiple ways: training, education, reference, sales, and marketing. Single sourcing raises many challenges, not the least of which is that no two people think alike. Hence, the need for thorough analysis.

A recurring theme at the conference is how to take advantage of current Web applications like blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, and podcasts. Collectively, these constructs are part of the concept of Web 2.0. When the Web first gained popularity in the 1990s, people used it as an information source (known as Web 1.0). Now, they can push out their own information and interact with others.

I felt like I was swimming with the fish, among peers who understand the difficulty of navigating the waters in our jobs. One presenter asked us to write down the labels we use to describe ourselves: writer, editor, designer, developer, analyst, translator, engineer, information architect. I wear all those labels--and, as it turns out, so do others.

We are geeks. We care about the details as much as the structure. We want to understand how and when people find information, use it, apply it. We have to put ourselves in our users' shoes, just as an architect would do. If you want to build a house, how you will live in it? Do you like to cook? Do you have kids, or pets, or in-laws? Do you have special needs, like wheelchair accessibility? Do you like a certain building style? Do you want a swimming pool? Do you drive?

The best example I have found to explain information architecture is the public library. Imagine taking an ever-growing body of books and making them easily findable. In the 19th century Melvil Dewey attempted such an undertaking and created the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system, which organizes books numerically by subject into 100 divisions and 1,000 sections. Dewey intended his numbering system to proceed from the divine (philosophy and psychology) to the mundane (history and geography). (Although Computer Science was assigned 000, it is excluded from the hierarchy, but interesting that it comes before "the divine.") A major category, like Science (500), is divided into Natural Sciences and Social Sciences, and those categories are further subdivided. The decimal number to the right also has a meaning (like where you are geographically). The catalog number helps you home in on the subject you're looking for. Once you have your number, you can go to the stacks, find your number, and physically locate your book. Although many library scientists consider the DDC limiting, it is an elegant example of information architecture: a confluence of classification, consistency, organization, correlation, and usability.

By all appearances, it looks like I'm in the right place.

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