(the logo on the left is cooler…)

Everyone’s going on about the Semantic Web. It’s tipped to be the big thing in 2008. It’s all you can hear in the cafes and bars. Semantic this… NLP-that… It’s hard to get a word in edge-ways, and don’t even bother going out if all you want to talk about is simple keyword extraction. Keywords don’t tell you sh*t. (thanks Mark)

Until now, all the talk about a new age of context and meaning has been largely that, just talk. And unless you could afford big technology and million dollar license fees this stuff was way out of reach for the little guy. The arrival of two interesting new services indicates that this may now be changing quite rapidly. People are excited. They talk about it at dinner parties. It’s palpable.

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We use the traffic ranking tool Alexa to keep an eye on what’s happening on the web; it’s a good measure of the speed with which social media is transforming web habits and economics. But most of its users know that Alexa’s a relative measure, so if a chart’s showing downward movement it doesn’t necessarily mean that traffic is falling.

Alexa measures traffic by encouraging people to download its tracking tool to their browser, and then monitors their usage. Most Alexa users know that it indicates a site’s share of reach, rank and page views by revealing what proportion of the Alexa sample has visited the site, and that there’s no clear indication of absolute numbers. Also, Alexa clients tend to be skewed towards techies and other early adopters so it doesn’t necessarily give an accurate view of market share across internet users as a whole.

To test Alexa accuracy and find out what its results might indicate in absolute terms, I decided to do a quick and dirty experiment with a sample of one.

I took a fairly big site for which I know absolute results (no names) and plotted it against the Alexa graph. Here’s the result for the last six months:
I could match the charts for the first three months or the last three months but not for both. There seems to be a step change between them.

This is the first chart, showing a nice correlation for the first three months…

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I love online cartoons. I’ve always been a fan of penny-arcade, pvponline and userfriendly. Since offline media began, monks have been scribing illustrations in margins and the newspaper cartoonist has been an institution in expressing the zeitgeist. Now several web2.0 startups like such as Toondo and Pixton let you create your own.

I like Toonlet which is so straightforward but allows for some cool looking comics. Here’s one I created earlier:

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It’s hard to think of the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission as a champion for design thinking. But I bumped into my old friend Rachel Abrams the other day, and she was brandishing a copy of Taxi 07 - Roads Forward, a policy document she helped produce for the TLC (ha!). Taxi 07 is an object lesson in using design thinking and great storytelling to change public policy.

We’ve been using storyboards, cartoons, diagrams and collage for many years to explain to clients what we’ve learned about their businesses, to analyse the complex interdependencies between services and products, processes, brand, customers and marketplace and to show what future alternatives might look like. Rachel and her co-editors, working for the Design Trust for Public Space and the TLC, have now applied this kind of system view and powerful visual explanations to changing a vital part of the New York transport system.

Taxi 07 gets right to the guts of the Medallion Taxi Fleet in grainy photos of New Jersey ‘hack’ garages where they hack production Crown Victorias into cabs, cartoon narratives illustrating passenger problems and driver issues and diagrams of typical journeys, but it also tells the story from the customer’s point of view and this, said the TLC (worryingly!) was a first.

The book also explodes some urban myths, like the scarcity of cabs being down to shift changes, and also shows that some myths are true, for almost no trips originate north of Central Park - you just can’t get a cab up there.

The document ends with a call for a comprehensive taxi service design process that looks at the entire system of activities and relationships involved in service delivery: the cab, communications with customers, owning and operating taxis and regulation. If you want to know simply everything there is to know about the public and private world of the New York taxi cab, or just want to see a really good way to tell a multi-faceted story, download your copy here.

Hoorah! After a tantalising wait, MyDeco.com has arrived. Much like a build on Grand Designs, it has been built from the ground up by a determined team with a very strong vision of what it’ll become. MyDeco is a site that addresses the big gap in the interiors market for a stylish aggregator that brings 1000s of products together in one place, with inspirational features, usable interior visualisation tools and a community to share the fun, trials and tribulations with.

From what I’ve seen so far, Brent Hoberman and co have pulled it off.

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(cross-posted from Knitware Blog)

Just signed up for a free ‘Matterbox‘, an idea I heard about via Lloyd Davies on a Seesmic video post. (I wrote two posts about Seesmic yesterday: I’m already dangerously addicted and just found myself checking in whilst waiting for an airplane).

Matterbox is an imaginative joint venture between Artomatic and Royal Mail. In a world of increasingly intangible stuff, they’ve set up to champion the physical: ‘real’ things you can hold and touch. As they say at the Matterblog.

Sure, this will take time, but if digital media continue to dominate even more aspects of our lives, there’s going to be a growing demand for the need to get to grips with things. Matter is a long-term project,

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