archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Five minutes after logging into my shiny new gmail account today and sending out a hello message toa few friends, I got a taste of new technology pranksterism: an old friend sent a reply to my hello loaded with keywords for everyone’s favorite flavors of spam. Naturally, my friend had read the Gmail intro that outlines their keyword targeted ad policy, stating that one of the conditions of participating in the beta was that Google would serve up ads related to the content of my messages within the new UI.
I don’t know how aggressively Google will match ads to content, but I haven’t seen anything tied to Scranton, PA on my screen yet. As a riposte, my friend should soon see plenty of discount remedies for embarrassing medical conditions, debilitating psychological illnesses, and other matters of questionable taste.
Funny or not, I find it a bit spooky that my mail is being parsed in order to drive advertising. Yes, un-encrypted email is basically as private as a post-card – but it’s highly unlikely that the local post office is going to slip a brochure for travel agencies and package vacations into friends’ mailboxes to accompany the post-cards I send them while I’m visiting Barcelona or Tenerife.
And then there are the inevitable followup questions: what kinds of patterns is Google building on top of this? Are they using geomatching to ID clusters of themes within zip codes? Maybe creating a history of my searching behavior and the number of times I follow the links placed by the engine, to establish a baseline for how susceptible I am to advertising? Or how often people in certain networks read and reply to messages with certain kinds of content?
I don’t think paranoia is appropriate, but there is a double-edged sword in every technology – especially one like this that combines accumulating personal data with tremendous interpretive power.
And even if I did sign up for the free account knowing that Gmail use implied acceptance of this practice, privacy remains a fundamental right. You can’t create valid and binding contracts that require or permit illegal activity.
Look out for travel guides to Scranton…

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Some star­tling num­bers about call cen­ter employ­ment, from the newslet­ter Knowledge@Wharton:
“an esti­mated 3% of the U.S. work­force [is] employed in call cen­ters“
That’s a greater share of the total than for all farm pay­rolls and agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion across the U.S.
“Call cen­ters… typ­i­cally expe­ri­ence a 30% annual turnover in employ­ees.“
Not as high as some meat pro­cess­ing facil­i­ties, but get­ting there…
“In some cases the mean dura­tion of employ­ment is 17 days.“
Which I believe at one point was the expected life­time of a freshly deployed infantry­man for the Soviet Army on the East­ern Front dur­ing WWII…

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I’ve loved my shiny new iPod since November of last year, when I gave in to an acute case of technolust and bought the 40GB model. Six months on, despite the entry cost, the inability of Apple products to live happily in a PC universe without loads of expensive accessories, and the disconcerting set of scratches that appeared on the display almost immediately, I’d still say I was very happy.
That is until last week. Apparently, while I was running a standard firmware update (to the 4/28/04 release), the basic file system on my iPod became corrupted without warning, and everything on the pod was — erased. *38 GB* of all sorts of personally and professionally important files evaporated without so much as an unhappy face…
As it so happens, I was planning to wipe and rebuild anyway, so I’ve decided to look at this incident as an example of pre-emptive self-cleansing on the part of an exceptionally eager to please iPod, instead of a catastrophic file system failure.
But I’m still pissed. I have strong memories of using a Mac at a design studio in ’99, and deciding that I should wear a helmet to work because it crashed so often. This reminds me of that in a more personal and equally frustrating way.
And it’s going to cost Apple some money, to boot. I just decided that I’d replace my aging Dell laptop with a tasty new Powerbook – and now I think I’ll be buying something else. Great design and marketing don’t make up for unreliability.

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It’s been awhile since I’ve had time to read the Word of the Day emails that I get from the good people at Merriam Webster and Yourdictionary.com: long enough that I’ve set up a filter directing their daily contributions to the betterment of my vocabulary into a one of those dead-end Outlook folders that you see highlighted in bold, but never manage to do anything other than bulk delete every few months when you recognize the number of unread messages has crossed from two to three digits. (The count of unread words of the day in my folder is now 91 – just about time to purge again.)
But now, thanks to the atrocious epidemic of spam that’s raging without surcease, I don’t need to feel bad about ignoring the latest juicy word to drop into my Inbox.
Now instead of knowing that it will only be shunted aside and ignored for months before its’ summary termination, I can calmly watch as it’s disposed of without ado.
Now all I need to do for a rich and unusual lexical lesson is peruse the subject lines of the dozens of spam messages that the layers of filters deployed by my ISP haven’t corralled as parasitic trash.
Thanks to the pertinacious conclave of spammers who’ve found the means to pollute the Internet with offers of discount medicines and penile enlargement disguised behind word combinations generated by dictionaries and scripts, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of uncanny solecisms gracing my inbox every day.
Things like, “libidinous plutarchy”, “inconspicuous megohm”, “charcoal expectorant”, and others not even worth mentiong despite their remarkable incongruity bring me unforeseen verbal richness.
Aside from the surrealists and their experiments with automatic writing during the 30’s, who but a spammer would ever think to send out a message about “albania seethe pfennig columbia” – which by the way would make a great name for comic book villainness “You haven’t won yet, Albania Seethe! Justice will be done!”
My day is already good when I can look forward to reading about “erosible integument”, which I seem to remember overhearing the last time I was within fifty yards of a geochemistry lab.
“Systemic cohomolgy” sounds like a pretty cool degenerative disease, or maybe a death metal band.
“Afghanistan surname baboon” is the sort of thing I’d expect to hear coming from one of those early artificial intelligence programs trying to recreate human speech: the sort that you used to see on Nova in the early 80’s; you know the scene – lots of twenty-something guys who haven’t been out in the sunlight enough even though they’re at UC San Jose are all standing around a radio-shacked amateur version of a speaker cabinet looking intently at an amber monitor, while one of them types “Hello. How are you today?” on a keyboard without a cover, only to end up visibly crestfallen when a tinny synthesized voice spits out something akin to gibberish above, and in the end they utter the inevitable combination of exuberant pronouncements regarding natural language processing, and conditioned realism about the fallacies of science fiction expectations.
Some of the spammers no doubt prefer to take a more Zen minimalist approach to fomenting palaver, using single words that bespeak a substantial degree of amphiboly; “gasify”, “archfool”, “deciduous”, “involute” and “burg” are examples of this tradition.
Then there are the imperatives, not to be casually ignored without some measure of trepidation: “deconvolve”, “rebut”, “throb”, and “migrate” for example.
With all these SAT words flowing uninterruptedly into my mailbox, there’s practically no excuse for not doing the Times crossword in pen.
So I say “Thank You Spammers!” Spam On! Whenever I want a tasty linguistic morsel, I’ll just shut off my spam filters…

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Seen a lot of movie trail­ers? Always been curi­ous about who owns the voice?
Thanks to JV for the answer:
”…Don LaFontaine, who is lov­ingly referred to in trailer cir­cles as the ‘Voice of God.’ A vet­eran of 40 years and more than 4,000 trail­ers, his rum­bling basso has enticed mil­lions with dra­matic into­na­tions like “In a world where …’”
Here’s the full arti­cle, from the WSJ.

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Courtesy of the media awareness and activism group Freepress.net:
1. A handful of companies dominate
Five media conglomerates – Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, News Corp. and NBC/GE – control the big four networks (70% of the prime time television market share), most cable channels, vast holdings in radio, publishing, movie studios, music, Internet, and other sectors. [Consumers Union/Parents Television Council]
2. Big Media are a powerful special interest in Washington
Media companies intent upon changing the FCC media ownership rules have spent nearly $100 million on lobbying in the last 4 years. FCC officials have taken more than 2,500 industry-sponsored junkets since 1995, at a pricetag of $2.8 million. [Common Cause, Center for Public Integrity]
3. Consolidation fosters inferior educational programming.
After Viacom purchased the independent KCAL in Los Angeles, children’s programming plunged 89%, dropping from 26 hours per week in 1998 to three hours in 2003 (the minimum requirement set by Congress). TV stations air programs like NFL Under the Helmet and Saved by the Bell, claiming they meet educational programming requirements. [Children Now, FCC]
4. Cable rates are skyrocketing
Cable companies lobbied for and won deregulation in 1996, arguing that it would lower prices. Since then, cable rates have been rising at three times the rate of inflation. On average, rates have risen by 50%; in New York City, they’ve risen by 93.7%. [US PIRG]
5. Big Media profit from a money-dominated campaign finance system
In 2002, television stations earned more than $1 billion from political advertising – more than they earned from fast food and automotive ads. You were four times more likely to see a political ad during a TV news broadcast than an election-related news story. [Alliance for Better Campaigns]
6. Big Media use the public’s airwaves at no charge
The total worth of the publicly-owned airwaves that U.S. broadcasters utilize has been valued at $367 billion – more than many nations’ GDPs – but the public has never been paid a dime in return. And the broadcasters claim they can’t afford to be accountable to the public interest! [Alliance for Better Campaigns]
7. Independent voices are fading
Since 1975, two-thirds of independent newspaper owners have disappeared, and one-third of independent television owners have vanished. Only 281 of the nation’s 1,500 daily newspapers remain independently owned, and more than half of all U.S. markets are one-newspaper towns. [Writers Guild of America, East; Consumer Federation of America]
8. Consolidation is killing local radio
The number of radio station owners has plummeted by 34% since 1996, when ownership rules were gutted. That year, the largest radio owners controlled fewer than 65 stations; today, radio giant Clear Channel alone owns over 1,200. [FCC]
9. Consolidation threatens minority media ownership
Minority ownership – a crucial source of diverse and varied viewpoints – is at a 10-year low, down 14% since 1997. Today, only 4% of radio stations and 1.9% of television stations are minority-owned. [Writers Guild of America, East]
10. The free flow of idea and information is being stymied
No copyrighted work created after 1922 has entered the public domain – an incubator for new ideas – due to corporate-sponsored legislation extending copyright terms. If laws being considered today had been in effect a few generations ago, you wouldn’t have access to products such as VCRs and copy machines. [U.S. Copyright Office, FCC, Electronic Frontier Foundation]

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Instructions from the Doctors Without Borders field manual
“The simple pit latrine is one of the simplest and cheapest means of disposing of human wastes. If well designed and built, correctly sited and well maintained, it contributes significantly to the prevention of feco-orally transmitted diseases.”
I’m not sure how you’re supposed to download and print these from the Web if you’re in a location without plumbing, but then again I suppose that’s what satelltie phones are for…

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Traces of Fire is an art exhibit and social exper­i­ment that used wildlife-tracking teleme­try to trace the move­ments of ten cig­a­rette lighters ‘lost’ in famous pubs in Lim­er­ick. The lighters were car­ried around Lim­er­ick by unknown peo­ple, as trans­mit­ters relayed loca­tion and motion data to observ­ing artists for nearly two weeks. From the cumu­la­tive data, the artists built a series of exhi­bi­tions show­ing pat­terns in the loca­tions and move­ments of the lighters around the city.

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It was a friend who was considering a career change to IA that kicked off this theme originally. I didn’t mention that in the last posting, which on re-reading might have made some of the questions and recommendations in the first entry sound a bit more like friendly advice, which was what I’d hoped. Apologies to all for lack of context. I’ve since heard that she’s read the Polar Bear book(s), actively done IA work on a well-known product company’s web site, and has the backing of management to invest in further development, possibly by even hiring a mentor.
Here’s my reply, and some recommendations on how to go further:
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It sounds like you’re doing all the right things. And if your manager is willing to back you with some dollars, then you’re way ahead of the game already You could look to hire a mentor – and I might be able to help with finding one – but I’d recommned using some of the time and money to look into education or training. And, ideally, a mentor would help you out for reasons other than simple payment. There should / will be a program available from the AIFIA soon to match mentors and candidates together. You might be able to use this.
AIFIA is the non-profit IA organzation started a while back to help support the community, further the discipline, etc – check the site at aifia.org for more info. It’s a cheap membership ($50 ?), and it will give you access to a good set of resources and professinal contacts that can help with more specifics on what and how to get started. Other organizations to look into include ASIST, ACM, and the UPA; none of these focus on IA exclusivly as AIFIA does, but all have strong communities and resources available.
There are a ton of education and training options, from full-on M.A. and Ph.D. programs, to half-day seminars. What areas related to IA interest you most? Where do you want to take your career? Do you think you’d like to approach IA from a strongly visual perspective, which might be rooted in laying out interfaces and defining page templates and standard control sets for user interactions? Or maybe usability is more interesting to you?
Some things to consider adding to your skills portfolio and using as a basis for pursuing IA further include usability, user research, interaction design, library sciences techniques like taxonomies and thesauri, business analysis, use cases and UML, task analysis, information design, systems architecture, knowledge management, community design and social architecture, most anything related to CMS, navigation design, etc.
All of these are relevant – it’s the way you put a set of them together that will define the approach you use for IA, and the work that you’re best suited for. I’d say try to follow up on one or two of these, put the techniques into practce, and then see how it goes. The decision to go to school obviously depends on your time and opportunities.
Eventually, you’ll want to emphasize and publicize the shift in what you’re doing; maybe with a title change, or a branded freelance offering, or a formal education reference like an MSLIS on your resume. If you can’t make the shift officially inside your current workplace, then it might be time to make a move into a new context that definitively shifts your role.
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Noth­ing like being blind­folded and lost in the woods to teach you how things look from the out­side…
Dur­ing an Out­ward Bound ses­sion last week, I was part of a group of IAs and Design­ers tasked with walk­ing a short dis­tance through the woods to a com­mon meet­ing point while blind­folded. We had twenty min­utes to pre­pare and twenty min­utes to fin­ish; the total dis­tance was about 50 yards.
After the clock started, I took my blind­fold off to look around. I saw a dozen peo­ple stag­ger­ing through the woods, with their arms wav­ing around and sticks in their hands, fum­bling through brush and trip­ping over logs. It was really funny. And a bit sad.
It was also a very good les­son in how silly things can look to some­one on the out­side. Shift­ing con­texts to the realm of IA, I’d have been upset if I were pay­ing for high-class con­sult­ing time from ‘experts’, and this is what I thought saw them doing.
Of course, from the inside, what we were doing made per­fect sense: we were simul­ta­ne­ously using dif­fer­ent meth­ods of tak­ing on a prob­lem com­pletely new to all of us. But you wouldn’t know that unless you’d either spent some time in the woods bind­folded before, or you’d watched us exper­i­ment with many, many, options for find­ing a tree (which all seem to feel exactly alike) dur­ing our prepa­ra­tion time.
We made it in the end, but it was as much luck as the result of our ‘opti­mized wayfind­ing strate­gies port­fo­lio’ — which is surely how you’d have to label a bunch of peo­ple wan­der­ing blind­folded in the woods in order to per­suade some­one to pay money for them to do so.

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