My three-and-a-half-year-old daughter (name withheld because I'm cross-posting this on a couple of blogs) is one of those preschoolers lucky enough to have her own computer.  Yeah, you read that right.  She has her own computer: a fully functional, laptop computer with a 15.4" screen, dual-core processor, running Ubuntu Linux with the Quimo window manager as the faceplate, blah, blah, blah...  a solid machine, in other words.  Actually, in all fairness, it is a solid-BUT-mediocre computer that was surplussed from my old job, and I (on a whim) snatched it up at a bargain basement closeout price... but still: my three-year old daughter has her own laptop computer.

Welcome to the twenty-first century. It's technological. It's pale green.  And it's covered with stickers.

About six months ago, when I had a lot more free time on my hands, someone -- let's call her a potential client -- proposed that I could build a website for a very specific audience.  The added challenge was twofold: (a) it had to be a kind-of 'version two' of an earlier site I'd worked on -- in that it had to do more, better, and more interactively, and (b) it needed to make some money.

I took on the challenge. I sketched out a rough business plan -- a few pages of notes mostly -- and put together a bit of a wishlist and wireframe of what such a website would, might, could look like. And the problem was that given the wide scope of website CMS systems out there, nothing really -- even when accounting for a wealth of plugins, addons, extensions, or hacks -- fit the solution to the business problem I was facing. So now what?

I bought a new computer last week.  I buy a new computer every couple of years, only springing for a brand new system when the cost of upgrading all the parts and the time involved just doesn't seem that much of a better deal than springing for a new system and starting fresh.

It does mean migrating data, though, all of it assisted by a big-ass network drive and a lot of patience.

I've been spending so much time re-downloading, cross-loading, and re-configuring all the bits-and-bobs I've accumilated in the past multiples of years, it's like a whole digital life flashing before my eyes.  Music and movies consolidate on a new two terabyte hard disk.  Over a hundred thousand jpeg files were nudged idividually by a fresh Picassa install.  My ISP, last week threatening usage based billing (but now having backed off) would have hit paydirt this month with me needing to download a respectable library of Steam games to a new machine.  And all of that doesn't even account for the dozens of little bits of software I've had to hunt down, upgrade, update, and re-jig with my existing data.

And to think I was excited about a new machine.

I've been looking, and as I mentioned in my last post, I've been struggling to find anywhere that someone has sat down, defined a list of taxonomic criteria, and branched off a series of high level classifications of web design and information architecture.  But I've been thinking, too.  And after a late night of jotting down a whole lot of ideas, I narrowed my own foundational taxonomy to four criteria.  (Something that I've been picking away at in my Wiki, but will share here.)

I've started by trying to consider four high level aspects of every website that can start as a branching point for this taxonomy.  It is not perfect, but I need to start somewhere, and the list of four was narrowed down from about eight or nine (and that was just too darn complex to kick things off.)

I was thinking that it is an odd thing that I've never seen an example of the practice of naming architectural styles applied to web and information architecture.  I mean, check out the Wikipedia entry on Architectural Styles and you'll see a ridiculous list of named styles and the influences that spawned them.  Of course, I might be missing something, or I might just be applying too much of my artists brain to an inherently technology-heavy set of ideas, but something tells me that if we started classifying architectural styles, grouping them, and understanding their derivations we might have a better chance at learning not only why they rise and fall, but in what ways they have been used, can be used, and should be used in the future.

I'm just saying.  Maybe I'll work on that.  But if anyone knows of something like this already being done, let me know.  I'd like to see what folks are thinking.

I thought I'd finally kick my New Year's information management and design reading list off with some purchases from Amazon. Just this morning I put in an order for three new books that should be arriving in the next week. When I get a chance to burrow into each I'll get some mini-reviews up, but that probably won't be until February.

I have been re-reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem (for the third time, no less) and it has set me to considering my own approach to learning and acquiring new knowledge. The book is built upon a fairly substantial collection (for a fictional novel, anyways) of foundational philosophical concepts, one of which is the ideas around The Long Now. It is easy to overwhelm oneself with the relative significances of passing time, particularly around the new year, but Stephenson seems to present an affinity for a more philosophical approach to this in his writing. In Anathem, time -- and specifically the deliberate compartmentalization of time by the characters -- is a means of focusing the perspectives differently among the ensemble cast. That is to say, because of the character's individual experiences within a society that has compartmentalized themselves around some of the philosophies of The Long Now, they interact in particular ways that drive the story forward.

What does this have to do with information philosophy, one might ask. I ask, what doesn't it?

In a philosophical approach to understanding how we learn and process new information in our own minds, time cannot help but be a key variable. With respect to The Long Now, it would not be so much the idea of how quickly one learns something though, but rather the idea of the value of information on a longer time scale. In other words, news and day-to-day trivia rank low on the priority list whilst histories, proofs and theorems rank much higher. One's personal information priority would never be as simple as choosing either extreme, however, but where one finds balance in the spectrum of information priority would have very much to say about one's approach to knowledge in general.

For my own part, I would suppose that this informational 'digging in' -- insomuch as that is even possible in the modern data clutter -- is an effort that could prove rewarding, at least from the perspective of self-education.