archive.Joe Lamantia.com

JoeLamantia.com complemented my formal professional work in technology, design, product, and strategy, beginning with the early(ish) Web moment of the middle 90s.

For approximately 15 years, beginning about 2000, the site shared practice-related tools, methods, frameworks, industry and academic publications, professional presentations, and evolving perspectives (after 2006, genuinely raw thinking out loud mostly happened via Twitter).

The final postings publish industry analysis on the then-emerging field of data science, with a broader frame of the expansionary category of analytically-driven business products and services.  My roles at the time emphasized product strategy for B2B software applications and B2C platforms powered by predictive models built from collections of business, consumer, and research data – composite assets newly recognized as Big Data.  I described this as  the machine intelligence space, to clarify the focus on new technology and product development outcomes, and distinguish the broader category of AI.

From 2016 onwards, with ‘software eating the world‘, my professional roles shifted to leading scaled / scaling product development groups, with charters emphasizing innovation powered by the expanding stable of human-centered technology disciplines: information architecture, interaction design, user experience, content strategy, design research, product strategy (still not well-articulated…).  With broad success and growth within the business context (read, steady buyers), the questions shifted from foundational — e.g. codifying ‘What is User Experience?’, and shaping ‘How does it even happen?’ — to operational  — ‘How is this done better at scale?  In new channels?  For the entire business? With customers around the world?’

To answer these basic ‘get it done’ questions on crafting human-informed products daily within large business contexts, the cross-border communities for product development, technology, and media spun up a healthy circuit of professional gatherings,  and a layer of complimentary social forums.  Conversations that originally took place via small group gatherings and niche news groups or listservs, shifted to Big Conferences, and Big Social Platforms.

In that landscape, there was less to share directly in the blog format.  Also, there was the rest of life: family, home, community.

Then in 2018, after a series of minor maintenance and administration incidents, that show how the social Web and the entire Internet environment was changing to a regime of financialized surveillance capitalism, and algorithmically amplified predation, there was no ‘there’, there.  JoeLamantia.com went dark, as far as sharing my work was concerned.  The domain was doing a different job, for different audiences. and stayed that way.

Before I decided to focus fully on looking ahead and making new things for the new spaces of the early Web, I’d planned to study history, media, and technology – essentially looking in the other direction, as a scholar.  I *almost* did a PhD at U. Chicago or Pitt (thanks to both programs for seeing potential and offering opportunity).  This path not taken taught me the deep value of a historical perspective, especially when you’re considering where to go next, and how to get there.

Now, almost exactly ten years since the last original post in June of 2014, following a modest technical reanimation effort, I’m happy to offer a restored archive version of JoeLamantia.com.  It’s not *everything* that was written, said, or shared — but it’s most of what mattered.  We’re back.

To move forward, we’ll be reflecting on some of the “practice-related tools, methods, frameworks, industry and academic publications, professional presentations, and evolving perspectives” shared, to assess and learn from them by looking in both directions.

Thanks for your consideration: then, and now.

We’ll be upgrading to MT4 in the near future. Apologies for any technical difficulties that result.

Related posts:

I’m pleased to announce an impending platform change for JoeLamantia.com. No, this isn’t a switch in blogging packages. It’s a move to New York (city!) that’s been in-progress for a while, and will take place at the end of the month (just a few weeks!). To make it seem a hard-won prize, I should note that we survived several heat waves and torrential downpours, in addition to facing the customary intensity of the New York real estate market. Tales of bravery aside, all the adventure leaves us very much looking forward to unpacking and settling in soon. Look for an impromptu sidewalk sale Brooklyn while the truck is unloaded, as we realize exactly what will and will not fit into our new (smaller!) home in lovely Brooklyn…
Beyond moving, lots of good stuff is happening. Some of the things I’ll try to catch up on and post on in more detail when life settles down:

• Recent work with topic maps
• Recent work designing a faceted classification system and faceted browsing experience
• Potential ways to quickly refine and evaluate a facet system by involving users – including customers – in iterative facet design and prototyping
• Planning for the first stages of an enterprise metadata effort
• A tag cloud related project that will (I hope, pending my travel schedule…) launch soon. Call to action: I’ve recruited one brave soul to help with this effort already, but there are many others with very interesting things to say on the subject of tag clouds – please drop me a line if you’d like to be involved.

There are some very interesting IA-related events coming up: Oz-IA, EURO IA, and IDEA 2006 (I’ll be at this one). Too many good events for my travel budget, but having many good choices is a much better dilemma than having none at all…

Related posts:

On Saturday and Sunday, I took advantage of the Blizzard of ’06 to:

1. imple­ment a tag cloud for navigation
2. tag all posts with sub­ject metadata
3. rebuild the some­what creaky col­lec­tion of stylesheets behind JL.com
4. add a recent com­ments tile

(And people say I don’t know how to have a good time…?)

The tag cloud is powered by the MoveableType plugin Tags.App. New stylesheets are loosely based on an OpenSource template from www.oswd.org called Phenom.

Between trips outside to shovel, I forgot to upload one of the new .css files. Following that, some Notes apologists justly sent me to school for displaying my comments in cripplingly small text font.

Thanks to the Notes faithful for the feedback, and condolences to any and all who contracted eye strain as a result.

After months with­out com­ments — thanks to all the dili­gent spam­mers out there for car­ry­ing out their cor­ro­sive activ­i­ties with such thor­ough­ness, I’m open­ing the site up to feed­back again.
Of course, for the time being, Mov­able­Type just does not feel like coop­er­at­ing when it comes to comments…

No related posts.

In busi­ness terms, I’d call the last sev­eral months of tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties with Unacom.net a bad ven­dor selec­tion and man­age­ment expe­ri­ence. From a more per­sonal per­spec­tive, it was frus­trat­ing, and a dis­ap­point­ment, since I’d wanted to add fresh con­tent to the site on a reg­u­lar basis after some trav­el­ling and start­ing a new full-time posi­tion before the win­ter hol­i­days.

Una­com charges lit­tle and deliv­ers less; for $80 per year, cus­tomers can count on receiv­ing badly con­fig­ured host­ing envi­ron­ments, poor sup­port and respon­sive­ness, and sub­stan­dard reli­a­bil­ity. I won’t cat­a­log their sins, but I will offer one exam­ple of the qual­ity of their offer­ing: sev­eral days ago their entire net­work went down — name­servers and all — for almost 24 hours, and a friend of mine who uses them to host his on-line order­ing and ful­fill­ment site had to do some ama­ture detec­tive work and call the owner’s *mother* in order to find out what was hap­pen­ing.

I sin­cerely hope my new host­ing ser­vice — APlus.net works out much bet­ter.

There are lots of lessons in this, but what struck me the most was the intan­gi­ble costs. I started look­ing at Una­com on the rec­om­men­da­tion of a friend who used them as a pre­ferred host for clients for some time, and is now severely embar­rassed when­ever the issue comes up.

I cer­tainly don’t hold him respons­ible for Unacom’s incom­pe­tence, but I know that he feels bad about the time and oppor­tu­nity wasted by the friends and clients who choose Una­com at least par­tially on the basis of his rec­om­men­da­tion. As a con­sul­tant, your liveli­hood depends on the cred­i­bilty of your rec­om­men­da­tions. And as a busi­ness, it depends on meet­ing the com­mitt­ments you make to cus­tomers — which Una­com doesn’t seem capa­ble of doing.

After a few long evenings (and lots of chmod…), JoeLamantia.com is now pow­ered by Move­able­Type 2.6. This marks a much-needed upgrade, since the older ver­sion ran on MT 1.4: it’s akin to mov­ing from sail to steam.

I’d orig­i­nally intended to move from 1.4 to 2.6 as a first step, and then imme­di­ately put a gen­uine CMS behind it — most likely Dru­pal — once the new blog core was sta­ble. But after all the trou­ble with Una­com, I’ve decided to just post for a while.

As an exper­i­ment, I’m going to use MT to man­age all the pages on the site, mean­ing that sta­tic pages and nav­i­ga­tion will grad­u­ally dis­ap­pear as I fold those sec­tions into the blog-managed systme of entries and cat­e­gories.

In the mean­time, I’ve per­suaded friends who are much bet­ter at devel­op­ment to exper­i­ment with Dru­pal, and report back to me on the install and tem­plat­ing sys­tems.

I looked at using a wiki for this pur­pose, but again I’ve decided to wait and see how this approach works out for some oth­ers. With ref­er­ence to the over-worn tech­nol­ogy adop­tion cycle graph (which is sec­ond only to Maslow’s Hier­ar­chy of Needs as the most abused exam­ple of a trite the­o­ret­i­cal simpi­fi­ca­tion of the inor­di­nate chaos of the real world used by those with­out expe­ri­ence as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for spec­u­la­tive buseinss deci­sions), I sup­pose this strategem marks me as a “Insid­i­ous Vision­ary” more than an “Early Adopter”: I select a likely tool or solu­tion based on needs and trend analy­sis, and then con­vince oth­ers to actu­ally try it and see what hap­pens…

Unfor­tu­nately, the new lay­out looks like crap (again a tech­ni­cal term) in Opera and Mozilla for rea­sons unknown. There are no tables and posi­tion­ing as almost totally dri­ven by stylesheets. A deep and abid­ing resent­ment of the has­sles of deal­ing with browser incom­pa­biltity lead me to aban­don development-based roles in the mid­dle 90’s, so I’m going to just admit defeat on this point right now, and have done with it. Pend­ing the move to a new set of tem­plates in a new sys­tem, I’ll revisit the issue.

JoeLamantia.com is mov­ing to a new host­ing provider over the next few days, and might be down from time to time while I migrate, upgrade, and rearchi­tect. Please bear with us dur­ing any tech­ni­cal difficulties…