http://blockslabpillar.com A weblog by Silver Oliver Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:17:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en How do you retain a sense of editorial voice and craft as information architectures become increasingly metadata driven? In my work with BBC Journalism we have been attempting to take the philosophy of Tom Scott's Wildlife Finder and applying it to News and Sport. Our starting point has been the Winter ... http://blockslabpillar.com/2010/03/06/the-importance-of-curation-in-a-metadata-data-driven-information-architecture/ I recently spoke at the News Linked Data Summit, a pan-news industry event looking at the potential of Linked Data.  Martin Belham and the Media Standards Trust have already blogged about aspects of the day but I wanted to add my slides and a perspective on the discussion. A topic that ... http://blockslabpillar.com/2010/01/25/news-linked-data-summit-and-native-to-the-web-controlled-vocabulries/ [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="432" caption="Government data panel - photo by Zac Beauvais"][/caption] Having just recovered from last week’s London Linked data meet up.  I thought it was time to collect together the talks and commentary from the day. Georgi and I are particularly grateful to everyone for coming, in particular those that ... http://blockslabpillar.com/2009/09/15/linked-data-meetup-london/ Georgi and I presented a jointly written (BBC, DBpedia and Rattle) paper at the European Semantic Web Conference a couple of weeks ago. My half of the presentation is avalible on slideshare. Media meets the Semantic Web - ESWC2009 -Part 1 View more documents from silveroliver. One point that I thought was particularly ... http://blockslabpillar.com/2009/07/02/media-meets-the-semantic-web/ As we build larger and larger websites it becomes increasingly difficult to scale meaningful user journeys.  Success is dependent on indentifying your key user journeys (narrative structures) and ensuring these can be dynamically populated as the site grows. Some of the largest and most successful websites have taken simple narrative ... http://blockslabpillar.com/2008/11/23/web-scale-narratives/ One of most memorable parts of the Euro IA conference was Adam Greenfield’s comment during his keynote regarding the networked fridge. “Unless anyone here works for Philips, I'm fairly certain that nobody in this room wants or will ever buy a networked fridge.” http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2008/09/euroia2008_part1.php Fair point but I wanted to revisit the concept ... http://blockslabpillar.com/2008/11/08/semantic-web-and-climate-change/ Deanna Marbeck and I presented recently at the EuroIA conference in Amsterdam. The research has come on since then building on the anecdotal evidence we presented it. We hope to publish a white paper later in the year with the full research findings. URL Design for Information ArchitectsView SlideShare presentation or ... http://blockslabpillar.com/2008/11/08/urls-for-information-architects/ Chris Sizemore and I gave this presentation a while back at the Essentials of Metadata and Taxonomy event. The presentation looked at the use of Wikipedia as a source of controlled vocabulary. Wikipedia as controlled vocabulary view presentation (tags: wikipedia linkeddata metadata cv) Chris covers most of the issues we discussed in ... http://blockslabpillar.com/2008/07/28/wikipedia-as-controlled-vocabulary/ Topic based aggregation pages are all the rage at the moment, David Weinberg comments on the addition of Huffington Post to the list of those adopting content aggregation. At the BBC we have also started to create are own Topic Pages. These pages are primarily designed to attract traffic from ... http://blockslabpillar.com/2008/07/28/what-makes-a-good-topic-page/ The title of this blog comes from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. In which he discusses the nature of language. I thought this quote was interesting particularly in the light of David Weinberg's Every Thing is Miscellaneous, which calls for a rethink regarding our obsession with classification and hierarchy. It will be possible ... http://blockslabpillar.com/2008/02/10/wittgensteins-philsophical-investigations/