Yummy or Crummy?

Apple to pay $100 million in iPod patent disputes

Part of Creative’s patent is not specific to the technology related to their music player itself, but how the information is categorized. The method in
question is commonly called faceted classification, because an item could belong to multiple categories.

There is an interesting discussion starting in the IA community, because this seems to suggest that you can patent a way to organize information. Peter Merholz began a thread on the IA Institute’s mailing list, and someone posed interesting questions — perhaps somewhat rhetorically:

If information architecture creates mental models that frame a user’s experience, can you patent that? Or is the patent on the IA in use on a specific device? Is there a difference? Is IA a gateway to experience that you can patent?

I didn’t read the patent or anything, but the idea is rather unsettling. I think it’s easy to see that it’s a very slippery slope.

Does this mean Red Envelope owes Creative some money because their customers can choose to shop by recipient, occasion, or price? What if Webster decides to patent the way a dictionary is organized — A to Z! Want to sell clothes online? Better pay Gap — they patented organizing clothes by men, women, and kids. Ingenius!

I admit I have close to zero knowledge on this subject, so I’ll be interested to hear an expert’s take on this…

I just learned about Websort, a web-based application that allows you to conduct a card-sorting exercise remotely. It lets you set up an introduction page that explains the goal of your research, and allows participants to create any number of categories to put in the “cards” you give them. You get an email as someone completes the study, and you can export the results, or use the built-in analysis tool.

I haven’t actually used Websort, but I would be curious to try it out. It seems straight-forward, with not a lot of bells-n-whistles. The interface seemed easy enough to use, although I haven’t looked into customization options, like if you can set up a study where user can put in an item into more than one category. (Apple can be both “red” and “fruit,” for example.)

Upon looking further, there seems to be plenty of tools available in this arena.

Tamayura online tea store, found via Design Meltdown.

It’s a cute site, feels a lot like Teaosophy, which POP created. Rich information, evocative of that calming feeling when you sit down to have a cup of tea. This design is a bit more web 2.0, though. I liked the little trick of switching the stylesheet when you’re on a product detail page so that the background color of the module matches the color of the selected tea. Gimmicky as it might be, but I still like the attention to detail. Also the instructional drawing on the side is cute, too.

I can’t understand anything the site is saying, but it’s still a good user experience! (I was able to add an item to the cart, and begin the checkout process.)

Amazon has had tags on their product page for a while. And I’m not sure how long this feature has been in it, but it’s new to me.

It’s a keyboard shortcut for entering tags — whenever you are on a product detail page like this one, you can hit “t” on your keyboard twice to pop open a layer that allows you to enter tags.

It’s like a double-click, except it’s with the keyboard. A very short learning curve, although I had no idea such a shorcut existed to begin with. Once I learned about it, it was easy to remember and use. It was much easier than scrolling down to the tag field on the page. I almost never use their tags, but today I happened to be making a list of books for a presentation that I wanted to share with someone, and giving them a tag to search with was the first thing I thought of, so this feature was useful for going around and tagging a bunch of books pretty quickly.

istockphoto.com

I came across this site while I was searching for royalty-free stock photos on the Web. It’s an interesting marriage of micropayments and eMarketplace/eCommunity. I haven’t looked into it seriously — my camera’s resolution is not good enough to take pictures to make them useful for anybody. But when I get a new camera, I’ll be looking up this site to look to cash in!

Speaking of marriage of micropayments and eCommunity… I used to be really into Epinions. I really thought that I could make some money if I wrote a fair amount of good, honest reviews that people would find helpful. Well that never happened, and I lost interest after a while. I stopped paying attention to the site, and my general impression is that most people did, too. I speculate that the following factors had something to do with it: 1) overemphasis on merchandising (users have to get past all the crap about ‘comparison shopping’ before they get to the actual reviews), 2) too many product categories (there are a lot of product categories that don’t have any reviews at all, contributing to the impression that the site is not all that useful — plus it’s impossible to stay competitive with other ‘review’ sites if you’re not focused), 3) and poor IA that potentially buried well-written reviews underneath badly-written ones (they corrected this now, but back then the reviews were sorted by date — even if you wrote a masterpiece, one month later it was buried to the bottom of the page, giving your review practically no exposure). The way they corrected #3 is good (the default sort is based on how the reviewer him/herself is rated, then you have option to sort by date or product rating), but you still have to scroll all the way down, past all the merchandising info, to see the list of reviews.

I’m freaking out because I’m about to decide to buy a new computer for the first time in about 7 years. Yikes. I bought my PowerMac 7200 when I was in college, and since that became useless Lucretia and I have been sharing her iMac — which despite being only the second generation (lime green!) model, is doing quite well after being given new life with RAM upgrade and installtion of delightful OS X. The problem is that both of us tend to be home together often enough that we find this sharing situation sometimes difficult. She has been more than patient about my aimless surfing, but a new machine is still desirable. The time is right, now that Apple has lowered prices on Powerbooks, and another freelance gig is about to fall on my lap. It’ll be a tax write-off for me!

I’m freaking out because 3 grand is a lot to drop when you’re more than semi-unemployed and planning to move to a new city in the next 3 months. But everything I’ve read and heard so far have convinced me that this will be a good thing. My faith in Apple has been renewed since trying Jaguar, so this will be a good way to go another step to explore the things I’ve been wanting to try, including wireless networking and movie authoring.

So here I come, Powerbook 15-inch 1 Ghz! (I’ll be gentle.)