Welcome to IA

Hello World. I’d like to introduce myself before getting into the inaugural Information Architecture blog post. My name is Greg and I am in charge of Ops and IA here at Pinyadda. I will be writing a weekly post (Friday mornings with Sliggity) with the goal of keeping you up to date on all things content. Phew, let’s get into it.

We hit a big milestone this week by crossing the one million mark in items indexed. First million is always the hardest, right? We have been increasing our content at an alarming rate and adding many new sites a day. During these weekly posts I will be summarizing a few of the big sites in hopes that you will add them to your Pin and explore a new realm of content. I will also touch upon some of our challenges and highlight our indexing numbers as well as those of our competitors (big numbers guy, I hate text).

As we expand rapidly one of the major challenges we embark on is the organization of our content. We do not want to simply index like Google and throw a firehose of information at you. Every item that comes in is carefully classified in real time by our taxonomy, which is constantly evolving as trending topics are surfaced throughout the web (and no, we don't use Twitter). This will ensure that you will find exactly what you are looking for in exactly the place you thought it would be. We're constantly adding more content based on our extremely complex standards, also known as a set of algorithms I came up with while studying at Babson, locked in the Cutler Center for days with only a keyboard and the classifieds section of a newspaper. Just kidding. We rely on a few simple metrics, our brains and your suggestions to discover and deliver the most valuable and trusted sites on the web to you.

New Sites, Week of 10/19/09 – 10/22/09:

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Raleigh News & Observer, Hartford Courant, Austin-American Statesman, Investor's Business Daily, Tennessean, Fresno Bee, The Palm Beach Post, The Press-Enterprise, Democrat & Chronicle, Birmingham News, Illinois Daily Herald, Des Moines Register, The Honolulu Advertiser, Los Angeles Daily News, Asbury Park Press, Florida Times-Union, Providence Journal, The Salt-Lake Tribune

(Free Pinata to anyone who can spot the trend in this week’s new sites)

As I’m sure you have many other interesting pieces of content to get into this morning, I am going to wrap this up. Please post comments or send me an email greg at pinyadda dot com, I’d love to hear new site suggestions and your views on IA.

Cheers,

Sligs

Building a Better Plane: Why RSS and the Social Web Don't Mix

TechCrunch released an article today with the headline "Bloglines On Life Support". And last week, NewsGator made the decision to shelve their web-based reader and allowed users to sync their feeds with Google Reader, which now moves into an uncontested leadership role in the RSS reader market. Can we sound the final bell on the era of RSS?

Probably not just yet. But soon - very soon. The beauty of RSS is its ability to get content from lots of sources in one place. But not a lot of people ever really got it. Many different services, from browsers to email clients to desktop applications, incorporated RSS into their feature sets. But how many Outlook users took the time to customize the RSS section of the app? How many Safari/Firefox users ever touched the built-in RSS feed readers? How many people ever downloaded a desktop reader like NetNewsWire? When compared to the general internet user base, these numbers are small. And not because RSS is nerdy or geeky - in fact, it's one of the simplest technologies to understand. The failures of RSS hinge on two key problems: infrastructure and time.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure can mean many things. Here I'm referring to it as the pipes through which RSS feeds travel and the pages or applications used to view those feeds. No one quite got it right. Even as Google Reader grows in popularity, it remains a technology of the few and not the many, for one key reason: you have to understand how it works to use it. You have to understand how feeds work, you have to know what you want to add, and you have to have some basic knowledge of how to organize the content your read online. This has been the case with almost all implementations of RSS - the "it's useful, it's kind of interesting, but I don't really get it and it's hard to set up" argument. It's a good argument - and even an expert RSS user will readily admit that it's not great, and there's probably a better way to do this stuff.

Time

RSS isn't real time. Probably because what we think of as "real-time" didn't exist when RSS was created. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no FriendFeed. The difference between 5 seconds and 5 minutes wasn't that great. Things have changed, and people demand almost instant information. RSS has responded, and services and protocols like Pubsubhubub are making it faster, indeed getting it much closer to real time. But it's the equivalent of strapping a jet engine to a glider instead of building a better plane. RSS isn't meant to handle real time information. It was intended for people who read a relatively static list of sources, looking for relatively specific types of information. It wasn't designed as a platform for people to run their whole world through, and it's not equipped to handle the influx of content from 100 sites, track the updates of 5,000 followers, or monitor the stream of 500 friends. It's simply too much content, too fast, and RSS inherently limits our ability to parse, sort, and rank this content. Services like my6sense are trying to solve this, but it's unclear if anyone has a good way to do this. I'm not convinced.

At Pinyadda, we have our own thoughts about the future of information. RSS was created to serve a specific information seeking need, before the social web was built. But now it's built and we want to use it for getting information - not just social updates and birthday reminders but also articles about politics and sports scores and song recommendations and product deals. And we want it all in real time. And RSS can't do it, even with ten jet engines strapped on. What we need is a better plane - a whole new way of thinking about information that uses the a social infrastructure to connect content across silos in real time. That's what we're trying to build for our users, and if we do it right they won't have to know a thing about how it works, they'll just know that it does work.

On that note, we'd also like to use this post to announce that we've been selected to participate in the AlphaPitch portion of the DEMOfall'09 conference in San Diego, September 21-23. If you're going to be there, please leave us a note, send us an email, or hit us up on Twitter (@Pinyadda). We can't wait to show the world what we've been building.

The State of Information Architecture

A large part of what we're doing at Pinyadda revolves around information architecture - the way content is organized on any given website. In many ways, the internet resembles the largest library ever created, harboring a collection of books, articles, photos, songs and videos in unfathomable quantity. Yet unlike the modern library, where every item is classified and sorted in a universal manner, the internet library is made up of millions of walled repositories, each with its own unique method of classifying content.

Classification is one of the most important parts of granting identity to any person or object - if I don't know what you are, it's nearly impossible for me to determine who you are. We classify things in our everyday life in a subconscious manner; it's how we make sense of the world around us. But if you've ever tried unsuccessfully to find a certain article on a certain webpage, you've experienced firsthand the limitations of the way things are classified on the internet. Was that article in the Culture section, or the Arts section? Maybe it was Entertainment? Or was it Local?

We have a few solutions to this problem, the first and most obvious being search, and most of the time it does the trick. You know what you're looking for, you type it in the box, and viola, up pops the article. Sometimes. Other times it's there, but it's buried 30 items deep in the results, and still other times it's not there at all. And most importantly, search requires that you knew what you were looking for in the first place.

What we're moving towards is a system of tags, like the ones at the bottom of this post, that allow us to label items instead of classifying them. This approach gives us a far more flexible way to categorize information while allowing it to remain organized and findable. By creating semantic relationships between tags, we can begin to infer implicit hierarchy instead of explicitly stating it. If all items tagged with "internet" are also tagged with "technology," but not all items tagged "technology" are also tagged "internet," we can begin to infer that the internet is commonly thought of as a subcategory of the Technology. But unlike defining a strict hierarchy that asserts Internet to be a subcategory of Technology and nothing else, inferring this relationship allows us to make reasonable assumptions without ruling anything out. Tags let us keep our options open.

But there's a catch. In order to infer useful relationships between tags, we need to place certain limits on their scope. A thousand tags loosely related to each other is far less useful than ten tags strongly related to one or two others. In the same way, a few tags used many times is far more useful than many tags used a few times. In order for us to identify patterns that make it easier for us to find information, we need to define the scope of our available tags. In short, too few tags limit different users' ability to find information, but too many render the system nearly useless . It's a balancing act, and a delicate one.

At Pinyadda, we feel strongly about creating a system that makes as few assumptions about individual users as possible. Everyone is different, and everyone's information consumption preferences are different. It's our job to make sure that we do as much to help you find the stuff you're looking for without getting in the way. The current state of information architecture on the web inhibits everyone's ability to get the most out of it, and it's a shame. The content you want is out there, somewhere. We hope we can bring a little method to the madness of finding it.