August 27, 2005
Malmö Festival, part 2
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Yesterday we went to Malmö for the festival, and The Raveonettes gave an excellent concert. Very energetic, and a lot of the songs they played were from the old albums. That was nice to hear as the last two concerts I have been to with The Raveonettes have been with songs from their new album primarily.
We also saw the Danish band The Figurines.
What an amazing band! I have to check them out some more. I don’t even know what kind of music they can be said to play, but it is absolutely interesting and original. You should check them out!
I can strongly recomment the Malmö Festival - it is fantastic! The whole city is involved in the happenings and activities, and everyone can enjoy something there; Music, food, tivolies, stalls with all kinds of crap, and so on.
I will definitly be back next year!
August 10, 2005
Malmö Festival
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Just want to draw a bit of attention to the upcoming festival in Malmö, Sweden. It runs from August 19th to the 26th. I went last year, and it was a blast!
This year I have one purpose there really: The Raveonettes (Friday evening), but there are a lot of bands playing, and several of them are bound to be interesting too.
Find more information and schedule here
August 6, 2005
What is so fantastic about Firefox?
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I was convinced some time ago about quitting my Internet Explorer in favour of Mozilla’s Firefox as my default browser. I have been very pleased with the services and possibilities in Firefox since I started using it. Up until today! I was cruising around on the Internet, not doing anything unusually from what I normally do, and not visiting pages I don’t usually do either. A little later on I needed another browser open, as one sometimes do, so I did what I usually do - clicked on the firefox icon in the bar - and swuuush…all my settings, pass words, my Sage, and preferences were gone! Please tell me what that is all about! That is just not okey at all!
So now I have gone back to Internet Explorer, which I have never had any problems with. So today I will spend much time trying to remember all my “new” preferences and passwords from Firefox and put them into Explorer. What a waste of my time!
[August 15th. Problem solved; Something had changed in the profile settings, I have changed it back - but I haven’t started trusting Firefox just yet!]
July 9, 2005
What is an information architect?
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I can hardly claim to be capable of giving a consice nor precise definition of what an information architect is. But I find it interesting that no one (that I have met at least) is able to.
In my world there excist two kinds of information architects: The very practical one and the more abstract one - so who is who, and who does what?
The practical ones
I regularly go to this Information Architect meetup in Copenhagen. Here I talk to quite a few information architects. What makes me wonder though is, that all the others in the group are working in a practial perspective with information architecture. In other words they very often work with the graphical stuf and how to structure interfaces, and functionalities on websites. A lot of method is practised in this area I know, but as I understand it, it is very much like testing-adjusting and the methods behind that kind of work which is used.
Definitely I discipline I have much respect for.
The abstract ones
My working title is information architect too, my education is a candidate degree in library and information science from the Royal School of Library and Information Science. I have focused my education on information and knowledge management, systems for information and knowledge management, communication of information and knowledge, and standards for handling information and knowledge.
So what does that make me able to actually do? Well data and information organization and structuring (my definition of knowledge makes it impossible to structure - one can only support handling knowledge).
That means that I know things about taxonomies, thesauri, and conctrolled vocabularies. I know about users seach patterns and relevance assesments, as it is tightly related to the organization of information. I know about metadata and standards for handling metadata.
Still none the wiser
I don’t know which kind of information architects are needed the most, and I don’t really understand either, that two so different groups of work areas are called the same. I have no suggestions to what the “practical” group should be called, as I find it logical that my domain is called information architecture - and the “pracical” ones would say the same about their area. Maybe they shoud both be called information architects - it just seems to confuse people as my expirience is that they think that all information architects are practical ones.
Last time we met in the meetup group we were actually talking about the situation that I was the only one out of ten people that night that were working with abstract information architecture. Another - for me bizarre - thing was, that I was the only girl present, and I usually am. What is that all about? Where are all the girls? (About 60% of all the students at the Royal School of Library and Information science are girls! And in genereal it is to be said that about 60% of the people who finish a long education are girls too!)
Anyways, I just don’t understand the situation and the confusion in the two rather different disciplines, and I have come across no one who has been able to explain to me me, why the domian has been split up in this way - if in fact it is one domain…