Things being as they are around here, I haven't had a chance to give the recent discussion about vCard and FOAF more than a cursory glance. One thing that did catch my attention though, was the SquirrelRDF LDAP mapper. Cool stuff and probably useful for our purposes.

After a quick run through Redland to add an rdf:type to each KB document (Piggy Bank apparently doesn't like untype subjects?) I dumped the list of unpublished, unarchived docs that Adam sent into Piggy Bank. I'm continually impressed by how great an interface it is for managing the KB (screenshot). It would be cool if there were a way to more closely tie the two together. As it stands now, the process for getting RDF out of the KB is a bit cumbersome.

Pursuant to our discussion this morning about the new version of help.unc.edu, I decided to revisit Flamenco. I'm pretty sure I've rambled on about that project before, but if not, well there it is. It's an interesting search interface that does many things well, I think. I read through one of their publications (pdf) and a few things jumped out at me:

• Searching can be categorized as being either directed or open-ended. One type of user is looking for a very specific answer; once they've found it, they'll know they've found it and that's the end of their search. It's easy to measure success in this sort of scenario. Either they found the answer or they didn't. The open-ended search is a bit more difficult to evaluate. As long as they find something then the search has some measure of success.
• Users performing a directed search aren't interested in advanced search options. All they want is a search box that they can type words into and get results back.
• Clicking on links to navigate through a collection is more intuitive than entering words into forms.

I love Lars von Trier's work. I also really, really like these 10 principles of good web design.

It's been a while since I've set up WP. I'd forgotten how 2003 it is when it comes to syndication. All things considered, I like WP the best of all the blogging tools I've used, but why, why, why is it still using Atom 0.3? They've definitely got some development issues, but in spite of the dark underbelly of WP, it does have a nice interface and is easy to use for most tasks.

I still have to get my old posts imported, but I think I'll probably just copy and paste. There's only about 20, half of which can probably just dissolve into the æther.