Fredy D. Ore (Reloade) points to IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4, 2001, a special issue devoted to Knowledge Management articles.

On SIGIA, Dick Hill points out this journal. Edited by Ben Schneiderman, the Winter Issue of IT & Society was dedicated to Web Navigation and contains articles ranging from user frustration, to PDAs, to browser design.

The second issue of disinformation is out. Especially interesting is Don't trust your eyes - a laboratory study investigating consumer behavior on the net:

Responding pictures of secondhand goods or used vehicles, which are offered in the Internet e.g. with Ebay deceive frequently over the true quality of a commodity away. ...In our laboratory study which runs over a period of 3 months we logged the Internet purchase behavior of 859 persons with a customized XMosiac 10.5 browser. We can show in this study that during identical description of a product the preference was given to the article with a photo, in 87 percent of the cases. ... We can significantly show that a worse product with photo can be sold thus better than a better without photo.

This very clearly shows the power that information architects and web designers have to persuade visitors, which is what Andrew Chak and FutureNow (and I) have been saying for a while.

And, yes, as someone commented last time, disinfojournal is a bit strange, but that's what I think I like about it...

disinformation, “the first international e-journal of disinformation on the net,” has launched, and the first issue is available online. From their home page

There is obviously a huge lack of quality information on behavior, amount and usage regarding disinformation on the internet. As information has been increasingly invested with value, people have tried to manipulate, destroy, or acquire it in any way possible. Circumstances and instances cover a broad range of disinformation on the net or IP-based networks. The disinfojournal deals with topics in all areas of disinformation. This includes, but is not limited to library and information science, information technology, electronic publishing, database management, data mining, knowledge production, knowledge dissemination and of course malinformation and disinformation approached from sociological, psychological, philosophical, theoretical, technical, and applied perspectives.

The first issue includes About 5 percent of your intranet information is malicious or wrong and The usage of forms and false data: a field study, among others.

Unfortunately, the only way to get the full text is via email (?); HTML and PDF abstracts are available online.

I have been dealing lately with user research based on interviews and product usage data. Some needs related to this work have been bouncing around in my head. What's fascinating to me is that related new literature has recently come across my desk and I've also participated in some conversations recently that have definitely informed how I am considering fulfilling these needs. That any of these seemingly separate things (literature, discourse, my work) should be related is amazing to me.

Here are four related recent articles and discourses that seem to me to have the theme of comparing pre-determined information structure with information usage-based mapping/cognition.

• The latest JASIST, which arrived this morning, Effective methods for studying information seeking and use. JASIST Vol. 53, No. 2. (TOC not yet published)
• My conversation with office mate, Hilde, about Google and how social relevance reveals reveals information seeking/using behaviors rather than political/corporate agendas. Related is the article in the Atlantic, My conversation The Play's Not the Thing: Google's News Machine.
• My conversation with James Spahr about his projects using referrer logs to diagram information use
• Tanya's essay on Information Foraging Theory

The TOC for the special Knowledge Management issue of JASIST (JASIST Vol. 53 No. 12) is available.