Archive: Technology
February 17, 2010, 3:33 pm
Next Steps for Augmented-Reality Maps
by Lisa Agustin
Fresh from the TED2010 conference: an amazing talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, in which he demonstrates how Photosynth software is transforming cartography into a user experience: first by stitching static photos together to create zoomable, navigatable spaces, then with superimposed video for a swear-you-are-there experience. Not to be missed.
February 16, 2010, 9:47 am
Old Search Engines Never Die…
by Henry Woodbury
Jacob Gube at design site Six Revisions uses the Way Back Machine to create a “then and now” piece on search engines. It’s worth a look, just for the screenshots. Chrome and content tell a story. For most of those still around, lots of chrome and lots of links have faded away, replaced by minimal chrome and minimal links.
MetaCrawler and WebCrawler are still around. They look like Google.
January 30, 2010, 9:23 pm
Real-Time Bus Location
by Henry Woodbury
Using GPS and Google Maps, MASCO — the Medical Academic and Scientific Community Organization, Inc., of Boston, Massachusetts — offers this elegant real-time bus map for its shuttle service. The map shows buses in service, their location, and their direction of travel.
For folks waiting at the bus stop, the service is accessible via web-enabled phone at http://shuttles.masco.org/m.
January 29, 2010, 4:21 pm
Why Hospital Data is Growing: Genetic Testing, EMRs, and the “-Ologies”
by Lisa Agustin
As a UX consultant with clients in the healthcare arena, I’m not unfamiliar with the kinds of data needed by employees on a hospital intranet, or by current and prospective patients on a public site. But I’m usually more concerned about the best way for people to find this information, rather than where it’s coming from and how it gets managed.
So I was especially interested in the Global Information Industry Center at UCSD’s eye-opening report on data growth in hospitals. (If the group’s name sounds familiar, these are the same folks who recently concluded that Americans consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information per day in 2008). Eleven healthcare IT executives (nine from major medical research-focused medical centers and two from medical insurance organizations) were asked to estimate their future rates of growth and identify the reasons behind it.
Author Jack Robert identifies the following as the six main drivers of growth:
- Image Technology. The number of images generated by each “ology” (radiology, cardiology, etc.) is growing both locally and centrally. The ability to create thinner and denser slices of organs makes for huge images; a single slice can be as big as 1 gigabyte.
- Web 2.0 Applications. Web-based software that enables a medical team to provide care collaboratively is a growing trend. An example of this: medication list management, where every care team member has the ability to list, delete, or annotate a patient’s list of medicines.
- Clinical Decision Support for Physicians. Physicians are treating more patients, and thus have less time to spend with each one. As a result, they expect instant, anytime access to data and specialty applications to help in their decision making process. This means a heavy reliance on electronic medical records for patients (see next).
- The Electronic Medical Record (EMR). The number of hospitals and physician offices using this is currently small, but wider adoption is expected in the coming years for two reasons: the realization that the current healthcare system is too expensive, and the federal stimulus incentives that will be given to hospitals and clinicians who demonstrate “meaningful use” of EMRs by 2011. The what-if scenario of an EMR for every person in the U.S. is staggering in terms of data size.
- Health Networks. These community initiatives will connect physicians, hospitals, health centers, labs, and patients electronically, building upon the capabilities of EMRs by collecting information from multiple medical sites, processing it, and providing it to physician offices.
- Genetic Testing. Genetic testing for high-risk patients will serve as another potentially huge source of new data, given that “there are now 2500 diseases for which there is a genetic test.”
The main problem with this growth is how best to manage it all. Much of the data is decentralized (especially in the case of research data), difficult to backup due to the increasing size of databases, and replicated by default (e.g., the processing of a blood workup means information is duplicated and stored in multiple places). But while there is no easy answer on how to address the exponential growth of medical data, the one hope is that the end result is improved and more efficient care for all patients.
January 20, 2010, 6:32 pm
What Price Content?
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times has announced that it will initiate a pay-for-access model starting in early 2011. The general framework is to give visitors a limited number of free articles each month before invoking a flat fee for unlimited access. Print subscribers will also have unlimited access.
While The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times both charge for access, the Times is significantly more popular:
NYTimes.com is by far the most popular newspaper site in the country, with more than 17 million readers a month in the United States, according to Nielsen Online, and analysts say it is easily the leader in advertising revenue, as well.
While analysts point out that this gives the Times ample resources to adjust their scheme if they start losing readership, the Times‘ revenue problems reflect a broader reality. Yet if the newspaper does succeed in setting up a successful micropayment model, other media sites will follow.
Looking forward, I can easily imagine the Times using the leverage of its popularity and reputation to cut deals with major ISPs. People already pay for different packages of cable television channels. The same broadband providers could apply the same business model to charge for a package of subscription web sites. If it works for The New York Times, ESPN will follow.
The low-hanging fruit is the smart phone market. For a few nickels a month, Verizon or AT&T can provide the subscription tied into the app that accesses it.
UPDATE: The Times offers a Q&A. Most interesting is their determination to accept incoming links from other web sites:
Q. What about posting articles to Facebook and other social media? Would friends without a subscription then not be able to view an article that I think is relevant for them? — Julie, Pinole CA
A. Yes, they could continue to view articles. If you are coming to NYTimes.com from another Web site and it brings you to our site to view an article, you will have access to that article and it will not count toward your allotment of free ones.
January 12, 2010, 3:42 pm
Death by Aggregation
by Henry Woodbury
In an interview for his book You Are Not a Gadget (scroll down) technologist Jason Lanier looks around and sees Internet dystopia:
Web 2.0 collectivism has killed the individual voice. It is increasingly disheartening to write about any topic in depth these days, because people will only read what the first link from a search engine directs them to, and that will typically be the collective expression of the Wikipedia. Or, if the issue is contentious, people will congregate into partisan online bubbles in which their views are reinforced….
Web 2.0 adherents might respond to these objections by claiming that I have confused individual expression with intellectual achievement. This is where we find our greatest point of disagreement. I am amazed by the power of the collective to enthrall people to the point of blindness. Collectivists adore a computer operating system called LINUX, for instance, but it is really only one example of a descendant of a 1970s technology called UNIX. If it weren’t produced by a collective, there would be nothing remarkable about it at all.
Meanwhile, the truly remarkable designs that couldn’t have existed 30 years ago, like the iPhone, all come out of “closed” shops where individuals create something and polish it before it is released to the public. Collectivists confuse ideology with achievement.
At The New York Times, John Tierney takes Lanier’s critique and runs with it — in a different direction. Where Lanier seeks to change the software technologies that undermine individual content creators, Tierney questions the net culture of intellectual property theft:
In theory, public officials could deter piracy by stiffening the penalties, but they’re aware of another crucial distinction between online piracy and house burglary: There are a lot more homeowners than burglars, but there are a lot more consumers of digital content than producers of it.
UPDATE: Glenn Harlan Reynolds of Instapundit reviews You Are Not a Gadget in today’s Wall Street Journal. While agreeing in part with Lanier’s critique of the failure of the aggregate model to reward creative individuals, he points out that social media applications are popular because they are fun – and not just for geeks:
Mr. Lanier is nostalgic for that era [the 1990s] and its homemade Web pages, the personalized outposts that have largely been replaced by the more standardized formats of Facebook and MySpace. The aesthetics of these newer options might be less than refined, but tens of millions of people are able to express themselves in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago. And let’s face it: Those personal Web pages of the 1990s are hardly worth reviving. It’ll be fine with me if I never see another blinking banner towed across the screen by a clip-art biplane.
December 22, 2009, 11:18 am
Mashing Up Suggestions
by Henry Woodbury
In The New York Times, IBM scientists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg have some fun with search engine auto-suggestions. Type in even a single word and you receive “a list of suggested, presumably popular completions.” (In courtroom dramas, this is called leading the witness.)
The fun is seeing how different investigations overlap. Here’s one example:
November 6, 2009, 2:54 pm
Cellphone as Paintbrush
by Lisa Agustin
Cell Tango is an evolving digital installation that dynamically organizes images transmitted by cellphone based on cellphones’ area codes, carriers, time and date of transmission, and participants’ contributed categories and descriptive tags. Created by artists George Legrady and Angus Forbes, the exhibit is not so much an artist’s vision as it is an audience vision–one that suggests that everyday images taken with your cellphone camera could, in fact, mean something more. Legrady suggests:
Will cellphone technology transform how we create/use images produced “on the fly”? In what ways do online visual databanks such as Flickr recontextualize the images we create and share? Can such online images be used creatively as components in artistic works that explore the construction of visual narratives through the juxtaposition of sequenced images? What may be relevant implementation of voice annotation to add metadata to images?
Cell Tango will be on display at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA, through December 13.
See also:
November 6, 2009, 11:58 am
The Virtue of Forgetting
by Henry Woodbury
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of the newly published Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, points out that for humans, forgetting is an important way of organizing and prioritizing information. Digital storage, however, has made forgetting almost impossible — yet what is stored is devoid of context and may not apply to the individual of the present.
In an interview with Nora Young on the CBC radio show Spark 90, Mayer-Schönberger elaborates on the cognitive issues of memory and what this means for Google, social networking web sites, and other digital spaces:
Now today there are few human beings who, for biological reasons, cannot forget. What sounds like a blessing, they certainly do remember where they parked their car in a shopping mall. It turns out that they have tremendous difficulties in acting in time, in deciding in time, because they remember all their bad, failed decisions in the past, and therefore hesitate to make a decision in the present.
Because they’re forever tethered to the past, they can’t act, they can’t stay put in the present, and they can’t imagine the future. I fear that with digital comprehensive memory, we might resemble these human beings, and we might lose our ability to act in time….
[I]f you ask young people who share a lot of information on social networking sites, and YouTube, Flickr, and so forth, they still are concerned about their informational privacy…. The problem is in a lot of circumstances, young and older people don’t realize when they share information on the Internet that this information not only is shared with potentially everybody, but that this will also remain accessible potentially for a very long period of time.
Once we begin to become aware of these implications, once we begin to acknowledge and understand that digital memory is comprehensive and enduring, we may become extremely more cautious in what we do online.
Mayer-Schönberger proposes that online information be associated with an expiry date, an idea that is being adopted by some social networking sites:
What I want is a world that is teeming with information sharing and information exchange, of experiences being shared among people, but also a world in which we are aware that information is not endless, but has a life span, just like the yogurt in our refrigerator might expire over time.
November 5, 2009, 12:25 pm
Follow the Necktie
by Henry Woodbury
It is always interesting to me to see how designers using different methods tackle some of the same visualization challenges that we do. How do you represent an abstract idea like “mobility” or “business”?
Here is Virtualization in Plain English, a marketing video for Intel made by Common Craft.
Keep track of that necktie.
October 16, 2009, 10:10 am
Infographics for Web Workers
by Lisa Agustin
Web Design Ledger offers a collection of infographics of special interest to web workers, including process flows, data driven visualizations, and musings (like xkcd.com’s Map of Online Communities, above). Enjoy.
October 15, 2009, 8:23 am
It’s Mysterious in English, Too
by Henry Woodbury
To translate the English term for computing resources that can be accessed on demand on the Internet, a group of French experts had spent 18 months coming up with “informatique en nuage,” which literally means “computing in cloud.”
France’s General Commission of Terminology and Neology — a 17-member group of professors, linguists, scientists and a former ambassador — was gathered in a building overlooking the Louvre to approve the term.
“What? This means nothing to me. I put a ‘cloud’ of milk in my tea!” exclaimed Jean Saint-Geours, a French writer and member of the Terminology Commission.
“Send it back and start again,” ordered Etienne Guyon, a physics professor on the commission.
And so they have.
My brother reports that the Japanese have no such compulsions. By email he writes:
Japanese borrow English terminology with such carefree abandon that at times even I wonder sometimes why they didn’t use the Japanese equivalent. Though there are so many homophones in Japanese that it can be very convenient to have words whose meanings are confined to a specific context. The English “out,” for example, is used widely in sports: an “out” in baseball, a ball that is “out” in tennis, the “out nine” (and “in nine”) of a golf course.
“Cloud computing” in Japanese is “kuroudo konpuutingu”.
September 16, 2009, 11:05 am
Mobile Accessibility
by Matt DeMeis
Not being an iPhone owner, I can’t personally comment on the ease of use of the device. Regardless, I was impressed by this video on the accessibility features of the 3GS. It’s hard for anyone with their eyesight to grasp just how well this would work for someone who is visually impaired, but to me it seems like Apple did great job.
September 4, 2009, 1:12 pm
The Times Goes Google on Us
by Henry Woodbury
I just discovered the New York Times Developer Network.
This resource provides data from The Times to third party developers through content-related APIs:
Our APIs (application programming interfaces) allow you to programmatically access New York Times data for use in your own applications. Our goal is to facilitate a wide range of uses, from custom link lists to complex visualizations. Why just read the news when you can hack it?
Most or all of the APIs respond to a query by returning data in XML or JSON format. Some developers have built custom search engines and topic-specific mashups around this functionality. Others are more interested in the sheer excess of the data — and how it can be visualized.
Artist Jer Thorp is one of the latter. Thorp accesses the Times Article Search API to create visualizations that compare the frequency of key words over time. The image below, for example, compares ’sex’ and ’scandal’ from 1981 – 2008:
When you zoom in, the visualization reveals branching segments called “org facets”. Thorp writes:
[These are] organizations which were associated with the stories that were found in the keyword search. This is one of the nicest things about the NYTimes API – you can ask for and process all kinds of interesting information past the standard “how many articles?” queries.
September 2, 2009, 2:20 pm
What’s Wrong with this Chart?
by Henry Woodbury
The chart, of Federal Spending FY 2009 YTD, is from USAspending.gov, a web site mandated by law to provide the public free, searchable information about U.S. Federal expenditures.
Seth Grimes at Intelligent Enterprise figures out the problem and its cause:
USAspending.gov produces its charts dynamically using the Google Chart API…[but] passes values to Google that are out of range. Google truncates them, just as [its] documentation explains.
Here is Grimes’ corrected chart:
Unfortunately, data misrepresentation isn’t the only problem he finds.
August 18, 2009, 4:09 pm
“The credits sequence cost more than most films made up to that point.”
by Henry Woodbury
I’m talking about Superman (1978). Here are the opening credits:
Today, this is a student project. Here’s a version by “saucejenkins” done in After Effects for “a Digital Editing & Compositing class”:
August 17, 2009, 3:46 pm
Stop Motion Marketing
by Henry Woodbury
This is a response to a D&AD Student Award “bespoke creative brief” by Hewlett-Packard. Titled HP – invent, it was created by Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth.
I just wish it were longer.
July 28, 2009, 12:16 pm
“Both stayed close to the mound where the Eagle set down, except for Armstrong’s quick jaunt over to the rim of East Crater to shoot some photos of the outfield.”
by Henry Woodbury
To provide context for the first walks on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, NASA provides us with a map of the Sea of Tranquility superimposed over a baseball diamond. The Lunar Module is situated on the pitchers mound with the activity of the astronauts indicated as tan paths. This shows a blob of extensive activity around the module and a number of longer walks by each astronaut.
Created by Thomas Schwagmeier from a suggestion by Eric Jones, the map is part of the NASA Apollo 11 Image Library. To really appreciate the details (including a legible key), click through to the full size version.
What looks like the original for the overlay is Schwagmeier’s elegant rendition of the “Traverse Map” — Figure 3-16 from the Apollo 11 Preliminary Science Report. The two maps are shown side-by-side below. As with the baseball overlay, click through to the full size versions to see all the detail.
July 20, 2009, 12:12 pm
Cloudy Predictions
by Henry Woodbury
In the New York Times, Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain voices his objections to cloud computing. Zittrain brings up obvious privacy and security concerns, but then makes the case for a more fundamental risk:
But the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate. The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice or Firefox.
While Zittrain does well to call out Apple and its approach to iPhone apps in a later paragraph, he missteps here. Apple long outdid Microsoft in its corporate control over the peripherals and software that would run on its hardware. As for Microsoft, only an anti-trust case forced the giant software maker to share its application programming interfaces with third-party developers.
Given the holes in Zittrain’s alternate history, his fears about the freedom to innovate in the cloud have to convince on their own merits — and they do not. Facebook does not control the Internet, nor does the iPhone dominate the smart phone market (ever heard of the Blackberry?) While Facebook, Amazon, or Google could turn into “a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code” the underlying infrastructure is out of their control in a way that was never true of the old PC world.
July 3, 2009, 9:39 am
Innovation at Wimbledon
by Henry Woodbury
The most visible innovation is the retractable roof over Centre Court.
But this year’s Wimbledon Championships at the All England Club is also host to several IT innovations, most dramatically a smartphone application that superimposes match data on top of the phone’s video display.
IBM, Wimbledon’s long-term IT partner, developed the “Seer Android” app for the T-Mobile G1 mobile phone:
Pointing a G1 phone at a court, for example, would tell the user the court number, details of the current and previous matches and Twitter comments from experts and players, such as Andy Murray and Roger Federer.
The championship’s first official Twitter feeds are also up and running at @Centre_Court and @Wimbledon.
June 15, 2009, 12:17 pm
Erudition Analytics
by Henry Woodbury
There’s more to data mining than click-through rates and advertising revenues. This Zachary Seward article at the Nieman Journalism Lab (via Althouse) explains how the New York Times examines user behavior as it relates to their style. Using a Web analytics report of words most often looked-up by Times readers, deputy news editor Philip Corbett sent out the memo to reporters and columnists:
Our choice of words should be thoughtful and precise, and we should never talk down to readers. But how often should even a Times reader come across a word like hagiography or antediluvian or peripatetic, especially before breakfast?
…
Remember, too, that striking and very specific words can become wan and devalued through overuse. Consider apotheosis, which we’ve somehow managed to use 18 times so far this year. It literally means “deification, transformation into a divinity.” An extended meaning is “a glorified ideal.” But in some of our uses it seems to suggest little more than “a pretty good example.” Most recently, we’ve said critics view the Clinton health-care plan as “the apotheosis of liberal, out-of-control bureaucracy-building,” and we’ve described cut-off shorts as “that apotheosis of laissez-faire wear.”
So what do we say if someone really is transformed into a god?
May 18, 2009, 12:21 pm
This is Not a Painting
by Henry Woodbury
Take a look at the Art of Science 2009 Gallery for some stunning images generated by researchers in a wide variety of scientific disciplines.
The image above is an unusual example in that it starts with an artistic representation. Researchers loaded a bitmap of the Mona Lisa into the memory of a test computer, then examined it after power interruptions of increasing lengths.
The title “The Persistence of Memory” is both literally descriptive of the experiment and a clever reference to Salvator Dali’s most famous painting.
May 11, 2009, 8:39 am
War Games with Firewall
by Henry Woodbury
The U.S. Defense Department graduates about 80 students from its cyberwar schools. Here is a very cool article about how they are tested:
…the young man in battle fatigues barked at his comrades: “They are flooding the e-mail server. Block it. I’ll take the heat for it.”
These are the war games at West Point, at least last month, when a team of cadets spent four days struggling around the clock to establish a computer network and keep it operating while hackers from the National Security Agency in Maryland tried to infiltrate it with methods that an enemy might use.
My grandfather served in World War I running telegraph lines from balloon observation posts. Today he would be writing code.
April 30, 2009, 12:46 pm
Happy Birthday, Dad of Info Theory
by Lisa Agustin
Per Wired, on this date in 1916, Claude Elwood Shannon, the father of information theory and the man who coined the term “bit,” was born:
Shannon’s 1938 master’s thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, used Boolean algebra to establish the theoretical basis of modern digital circuits. The paper came out of Shannon’s insight that the binary nature of Boolean logic was analogous to the ones and zeros used by digital circuits.
His paper was widely cited, laying the foundations for modern information theory. It has been called “one of the most significant master’s theses of the 20th century.” Not bad for a 22-year-old kid from a small town in Michigan.
April 8, 2009, 11:46 am
Cloud Computing: To Manifesto or not to Manifesto
by Kim Looney
An article on Economist.com, “Clash of the Clouds,” brought to my attention the the recent publishing of a cloud computing manifesto.
What is cloud computing you say? Well, according to the manifesto:
…cloud computing is really a culmination of many technologies such as grid computing, utility computing, SOA, Web 2.0, and other technologies…”. And it’s key characteristics are “the ability to scale and provision computing power dynamically in a cost efficient way and the ability of the consumer (end user, organization or IT staff) to make the most of that power without having to manage the underlying complexity of the technology.
All that sounds good, and open standards also sound good for the consumer. But what about providers and associated technology businesses? There are some conspicuous absences on the list of supporters for the manifesto. I don’t know much about standards creation or technology policy-making, but I will be watching for developments on how cloud computing finds its place as a staple in computing technology — and not only so I can represent it visually for a client.
April 7, 2009, 8:52 am
The Power of Humble Documents
by Henry Woodbury
In 1968 a handful of computer scientists began trying to figure out what to do with the rudimentary network they had designed for the government. Graduate student Stephen Crocker volunteered to write up the notes on protocol. Thus were born the “Request for Comments” that became ” the formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards.”
Crocker describes how an open process invited participation and the sharing of ideas:
…we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.
Arguably, this not only made the Internet possible, but laid the foundation for the open source movement and other cooperative software and computing ventures.
For more details on that rudimentary network, one can read Michael Hauben’s “History of ARPANET: Behind the Net – the untold history of the ARPANET — or — The ‘Open’ History of the ARPANET/Internet”.
March 5, 2009, 1:52 pm
Correlation is not Causation, not Even on Facebook
by Henry Woodbury
Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith stirs the statistical pot:
Griffith used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence….
Griffith came up with the idea as a way to show how to take two separate sets of data that were pretty straightforward on their own – in this case, the average SAT score and the favorite books among students at various universities – and combine them to become more interesting. Griffith says, “Their unity is hilarity incarnate. This is to inspire people to think creatively about the data sets that are on the Internet.”
Given Griffith’s puckish sense of humor, I read “think creatively” as “be skeptical.”
His other well-publicized “be skeptical” project is WikiScanner a tool that that uses IP addresses to identify anonymous Wikipedia edits made from corporate and government domains. (In my mind the joke here is the idea that Wikipedia is trustworthy in any fashion, but that’s just me.)
January 20, 2009, 10:06 am
Goosing the Gray Lady
by Lisa Agustin
Interactive infographics and visualizations have been part of the New York Times’ online edition for some time; typical examples include the “Word Train,” an interactive mood database for collecting public opinion on Election Day, and “Casualties of War: Faces of the Dead,” a project merging photography, databases, audio, and graphics that marked the date U.S. military fatalities in Iraq reached 3,000 (both pictured above).
Now this week’s issue of New York Magazine features an article on how the Times’ Interactive Technologies Group came to be:
The proposal was to create a newsroom: a group of developers-slash-journalists, or journalists-slash-developers, who would work on long-term, medium-term, short-term journalism—everything from elections to NFL penalties to kind of the stuff you see in the Word Train. This team would “cut across all the desks,” providing a corrective to the maddening old system, in which each innovation required months for permissions and design. The new system elevated coders into full-fledged members of the Times—deputized to collaborate with reporters and editors, not merely to serve their needs.
Most interesting to me is this idea that the roles of journalist and developer have merged at the Times, resulting in projects that aren’t window-dressing for articles, but offer new ways to explore and make the news more relevant to its readers.
January 16, 2009, 10:39 am
Gerrymander Away
by Henry Woodbury
Computers have arguably made the gerrymandering of U.S. Congressional Districts easier and more egregious. They should be able to make the problem go away. That is, if anyone can figure out an algorithm:
…it is surprisingly hard to define, or at least reduce to a set of rules, what a “gerrymandered district” is. Writing a formula for drawing districts requires us to define how funny-looking is too funny looking. And what is funny, anyway?
“The idea is that circles are the best shape for districts,” said George Washington University’s Daniel Ullman, talking about one school of thought. “Unfortunately, they don’t tessellate well.” This was apparently a joke, because the room burst out laughing. For the rest of the afternoon, the word tessellate never failed to produce giggles. (Tessellate means to tile together, as in an M.C. Escher drawing.)
Mathematicians and lawyers are focused on improving the reapportioning process coming up in less than two years. Another use of their analysis is simpler – to find the worst offenders and shame the politicians that put them in place. Is this too funny looking?
December 15, 2008, 1:56 pm
Manipulating the Historical Web
by Lisa Agustin
You may be familiar with the Internet Archive (a.k.a. the WayBackMachine), an Internet library of 85 billion web pages that lets you search for a specific web site (including ones that are now defunct) to see how it looked on a given date in the past. But while these historical views are interesting, their usefulness is limited since they only provide single, unconnected snapshots frozen in time. Enter the Zoetrope web crawler, a system created by Advanced Technologies Lab at Adobe Systems. With Zoetrope, users will be able to manipulate earlier versions of the web and generate visualizations of web data over time. “Time lenses” can be used in different regions of a page, to see specifically how data in that section has changed over a specific period of time. These lenses can even be combined to see the interrelation of data sets, enabling the user to explore cause-and-effect hypotheses (see the Zoetrope demo for an example of this). Intended for the “casual researcher,” it’s easy to see how data junkies could spend hours with this application. Zoetrope’s creators expect to release the application for free next summer.
November 25, 2008, 12:01 pm
MIT Media Lab Announces Center for Future Storytelling
by Lisa Agustin
The traditional approach to storytelling is at risk, thanks to an attention-deficient lifestyle, and the technologies that feed into it, like text messaging and YouTube. Now the MIT Media Lab has teamed up with Plymouth Rock Studios, a Massachusetts-based movie studio, to create the Center for Future Storytelling as a way to keep the storytelling process alive by revolutionizing it. According to the MIT press release:
By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web. Center research will also focus on ways to revolutionize imaging and display technologies, including developing next-generation cameras and programmable studios, making movie production more versatile and economic.
The Center is expected to leverage technologies pioneered at the Media Lab, like digital systems that understand people at an emotional level, or cameras capable of capturing the intent of the storyteller. While the movie-making world is expected to benefit directly from the Center’s research, it will be interesting to see how results might innovate the business world and the approaches companies use to tell their own unique stories.
November 3, 2008, 3:48 pm
Microsoft Chart Advisor — Consider the Source
by Mac McBurney
The prototype Chart Advisor for Excel 2007 from Office Labs sounds like a step in the right direction:
This add-in uses an advanced rules engine to scan your data and, based on predefined rules, displays charts according to score. Top scoring charts are available for you to preview, tweak, and insert into your Excel worksheet.
An early post by Program Manager Scott Ruble describes the Excel team’s motivations, which at first glance seem admirable. On second thought, Ruble’s understated description of the group’s noble “intent” and responsiveness to strong feedback reminded me not to get my hopes up. (Emphasis and sarcastic comments added by me):
When Office 2007 was released [and not before then?], one of the strong pieces of feedback was Excel needs to do a better job guiding users in the proper selection of charts to effectively communicate their data. Though it wasn’t our intent [I feel so much better now], some of the new [and the old] formatting options [and defaults] such as glow and legacy 3D charts can [only] be used inappropriately, which obscure[sic] the meaning of a chart. Some people [silly, silly people] felt that these features contributed to creating more “chart junk.” In an effort to improve this situation, we have created a prototype called the Chart Advisor.
Mr. Ruble is being too modest. The new features and default settings — like the old features and default settings — guarantee more chart junk. This team wasn’t born on the day Office 2007 was released — quite the opposite. Saying that inappropriate use and obscuring the meaning of a chart was not the team’s intent seems, frankly, laughable.
I expect an upgrade from Microsoft to include new features — new things that users could do. Giving good advice about what a user should do is more difficult and risky, and it would ultimately be much more valuable. This is ambitious, and let’s hope it signals a greater focus on improving the real-world capabilities of Excel users, not just increasing the capabilities of the Excel software.
So far, Chart Advisor is in no danger of becoming an artificial Edward Tufte inside Excel. The add-in still serves a side order of chartjunk with your data.
Tim Mays reported that Chart Advisor ignored a whole column of source data and then (not surprisingly) recommended the wrong chart type. At first, Excel guru Jon Peltier didn’t even get that far.
Hey, that “advanced rules engine” is just a prototype. (More on the rules engine). If the wizards at Microsoft succeed in upgrading Excel’s brain, here’s hoping they have the courage to give it a heart and good taste as well.
October 29, 2008, 11:58 am
Improving Mobile Search
by Lisa Agustin
First, a confession: I love my iPhone. But using the touchscreen keyboard leaves me (and others as well) feeling annoyed and just a bit uncoordinated. And when it comes to searching? Not fun. Why is mobile searching so hard? The problem, in part, is a misconception that PDAs and phones are just small laptops. Luckily, this mindset is changing. Mobile technology companies are increasingly aware that technology by itself won’t fix the problem; the key will be using these solutions (voice-recognition, leveraging of built-in cameras and, eventually, the semantic web) to create intuitive user experiences.
October 23, 2008, 10:01 am
Don’t Eat the iPod Shuffle—Seven Years of iPod Design
by Kirsten Robinson
Wired has published a look back at iPod design, starting with this paper and foam core prototype from 2001:
Check out the article to find out how the scroll wheel evolved over time, when color was first introduced (on the body and the screen), and where the title of this post came from.
July 17, 2008, 10:31 am
The End of the Scientific Method
by Lisa Agustin
According to Chris Anderson at Wired, the scientific method is no longer relevant, thanks to the enormous amounts of data now at our disposal. The traditional (and sometimes imperfect) approach of testing hypotheses via modeling made more sense when scientists were trying to understand the underlying mechanisms that connect a handful of results. This is no longer the case:
This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.
Anderson gives a couple of examples to prove his point, including how new species of bacteria were “discovered” using high-speed sequencers and supercomputers (“a statistical blip”). The idea that data is the starting point, and relationships and rationale can be established later is not a new idea for data viz practitioners, but thinking about this approach in the context of dismissing other methodologies? I’m not so sure.
June 20, 2008, 10:32 am
A Radiated Library and the Televised Book
by Henry Woodbury
In the canonical history of the origins of the Internet, Belgian Paul Otlet does not make an appearance. He was, perhaps, too early and too utopian, setting forth a plan for “a global network of computers” in 1934. Otlet’s vision derived from his life’s work creating the Mundaneum, a “universal bibliography” cataloged on index cards. For a fee, anyone in the world could mail or telegraph a request that Otlet’s small staff of professional librarians would investigate.
As the Mundaneum accumulated millions of entries, Otlet realized that his index-card-based system was becoming too cumbersome to manage. At that point he began working on ideas for electronic data storage and a totally paperless system — in his words, “a radiated library and the televised book.”
Eventually lack of funding and the onset of World War II doomed the project. Only recently have Otlet’s writings and the remnants of the Mundaneum archive begun to receive attention.
In this vein, The New York Times article linked above provides a history and appreciation of Otlet’s work, a visual explanation of the Mundaneum card cataloging system, and a clip from the documentary film The Man Who Wanted to Classify The World.
April 1, 2008, 3:23 pm
Standards vs. Compatibility
by Henry Woodbury
Joel Spolsky offers a look ahead at Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. What he foresees is a web developer flamewar.
Headed by developer Dean Hachamovitch, the MSIE 8 team has decided to move its default mode away from MSIE 7 compatibility and closer to web standards. Spolsky offers a long quote from Hachamovitch’s announcement of this decision, but it boils down to this:
We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.
This means that some HTML pages coded to take advantage of some of MSIE 7’s quirks will break in MSIE 8.
This is a problem? It shouldn’t be.
Barring the introduction of any new quirks (say a new way to misinterpret the box model), there’s no reason any Web site HTML and CSS should break in MSIE 8. If a web site has been tested against MSIE 6, MSIE 7, Firefox, and Safari (as are all of our public-facing projects), and if its developers have used a robust HTML structure and the subset of mutually-supported CSS styles (rather than browser-sniffing to write specialty CSS), then the odds of that site rendering incorrectly in MSIE 8 should be very small.
JavaScript-driven functionality, however, is harder to predict. Here, I rely on the folks behind Prototype and jQuery to handle MSIE 8 so I won’t have to. We’ll see how that goes.
March 10, 2008, 11:40 am
Let the Penguin Explain
by Henry Woodbury
In a few weeks an AOL penguin will begin educating users about advertising cookies. Here’s a sample storyboard from the ad campaign:
A penguin?
March 10, 2008, 9:00 am
What Does “Capable” Mean in Redmond?
by Henry Woodbury
Today’s number one most emailed article from the The New York Times home page is about operating systems, of all things. Specifically, it is about users who upgraded to Windows Vista and “got burned.” Users like Mike Nash, a Microsoft Vice President, and Jon Shirley, a Microsoft board member.
These stories come from Microsoft internal emails, acquired in a class action law suit. At the heart of the dispute is disagreement about the meaning of the word “capable.”
Originally Microsoft planned to label Windows XP PCs with sufficient hardware and graphics power to eventually run Vista as “Vista Ready.” To avoid hurting sales of lower-end computers, Microsoft created a new classification, “Vista Capable.” This supposedly “signal[ed] that no promises are made about which version of Vista will actually work.”
An internal Dell report exposes the folly of this idea: “Customers did not understand what ‘Capable’ meant….”
February 8, 2008, 6:08 pm
Logo Evolution
by Henry Woodbury
From the Neatorama blog comes an interesting exhibit of tech company logos and their changes over time. The companies range from Apple to IBM to Nokia to Palm, offering an engaging contrast between start-ups professionalizing their brand and manufacturing firms reinventing their business. IBM, for example:
November 27, 2007, 12:05 pm
The Slow Death of the Technical Specification
by Lisa Agustin
The days of the web developer’s technical spec are long gone, writes columnist Richard Banfield: “In a world of intensely visual design, we have to ask why we still need to write massive documents to describe web products that real people will use.” According to Banfield, there was a time when it made sense to document everything before starting any software development, and that this way of doing things was largely a result of limited technology and lower design costs. These days, developing a web site or application demands a more agile approach–one in which visual tools play a key role:
“Once the priority of a project is established, the team should immediately move toward visualizing that idea. This can take many forms, but we have found that whiteboards and large pieces of paper work wonders to get everyone on the same page. Nothing slows down the creative process like a 60-page document, complete with spreadsheets and appendices.”
This has been our experience as well. While some engagements do require some type of written narrative — especially in cases where there needs to be a more detailed explanation of the application for a broader group outside of the development team — we’ve seen immense value in translating requirements into a visual form during all phases of a project. I would take Banfield’s comments a step further by suggesting that visuals are not just helpful tools, but can often replace specification documents as deliverables. Diagrams (for expressing high-level user experience), process flows (for explaining complex transactions), and heavily annotated wireframes (for describing functionality at the page-level) are “closer to reality” than a Word document that describes them. This makes the idea behind an application easier to understand and discuss, leading a group to consensus about direction much more quickly.
October 4, 2007, 1:28 pm
Visualizing Digg
by Lisa Agustin
Making sense of the activity on Digg is the mission behind Digg Labs. The Labs offer four different views of Digg data: Arc (shown at left), BigSpy, Stack, and Swarm. Like the Digg site itself, each visualization tracks similar information, including the newest stories that users “digg,” story popularity (number and frequency of “diggs”), and the names of “diggers” themselves. Best of all, the visualizations are in real-time, making the energy and behavior of the Digg community a palpable one. But while the tools give a new perspective on Digg activity, they fall short on helping users see any obvious patterns or draw specific conclusions. Some critics even consider them confusing. Despite the criticism, these data visualizations have provided direction on how to improve the Digg user experience, according to Digg creative director Daniel Burka:
“After seeing users congregate around stories and examining their relationships, we’ve tweaked our algorithms to take [content] diversity into account when determining how popular a story really is,” Burka says. This allows a wider range of subjects to show up on the home page, for example. “Many of the lessons we’ve learned in the Labs are also influencing future feature development and the general direction of the site.”
An article in Technology Review offers further details on Digg Labs: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19079/?a=f
August 23, 2007, 11:03 am
How Google Works
by Henry Woodbury
Condé Nast Portfolio offers this “infographic” on How Google Works. (The text version is here.)
Interesting stuff, and nicely visualized — especially step 3 on “The Cluster”.
July 27, 2007, 10:32 am
Map Markup
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times takes note of internet mapping tools, highlighting the non-expert angle:
“It is a revolution,” said Matthew H. Edney, director of the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Now with all sorts of really very accessible, very straightforward tools, anybody can make maps. They can select data, they can add data, they can communicate it with others. It truly has moved the power of map production into a completely new arena.”
Most of the sample maps linked by the article are better described than seen, for the actual visual product is a cookie-cutter hodge-podge — often just a Google or Microsoft Map overlaid with clunky icons. While this is a new way to serve up data, it is not really a new approach to mapmaking. Many local, printed trail guides, for example, benefit from the contributions of non-experts, hikers who annotate U.S. Geological Survey Maps with descriptions of trail markers and landmarks. I remember my dad planning cross-country vacations with end-to-end road maps and highlighters. Anyone always could — and did — make maps, they just couldn’t share them as easily.
July 20, 2007, 9:55 am
Is Marketing the New Finance?
by Henry Woodbury
Here is economist Hal Varian, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal:
WSJ: In the past, promising new economics PhDs who didn’t want to work in government or academia probably aspired to work on Wall Street. In the future, will they aspire to work at companies like Google?
Varian: I think marketing is the new finance. In the 1960s and 1970s [we] got interesting data, and a lot of analytic fire power focused on that data; Bob Merton and Fischer Black, the whole team of people that developed modern finance. So we saw huge gains in understanding performance in the finance industry. I think marketing is in the same place: now we’re getting a lot of really good data, we have tools, we have methods, we have smart people working on it. So my view is the quants are going to move from Wall Street to Madison Avenue.
And it’s all thanks to Google. According to Varian, the business model for search is not much different than the business model for publishing. The difference comes from Google’s ability to manage pricing on a real-time basis and thus transact an enormous amount of data. Here’s Varian again:
Adaptive forecasting, how I revise my forecast to take account of updated information, you use that a lot on Wall Street, where you have time series of stock prices. And some of those things carry over into things that Google is doing, that have this real-time flow of data. How do I detect unusual events, and react to them?
The internet gives us an engine. Now we start figuring out what fuels it.
June 1, 2007, 2:18 pm
In Which No One Knows What They Want
by Henry Woodbury
James Surowiecki writes about feature creep in a recent New Yorker column. He starts by naming the usual suspects: engineers devoted to custom tweaks, marketers enticed by more selling points.
But feature creep goes beyond the failure of the internal audience:
You might think, then, that companies could avoid feature creep by just paying attention to what customers really want. But that’s where the trouble begins, because although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It’s only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity.
Thus it falls to designers to aggressively promote simplicity (over everyone’s objections).
May 10, 2007, 9:09 pm
Hyperbolic Views: Mapping the Blogosphere
by Mac McBurney
Discover Magazine discusses a series of maps of the blogosphere created by Matthew Hurst.
Discussion of the pros and cons will have to wait for another day. Until then, here are two more hyperbolic tree visualization examples:
Interactive Tree View of the LexisNexis Directory of Online Sources
National Science Digital Library
Tell us what you think.
April 25, 2007, 9:31 am
The Entrepreneurs of Simplicity
by Henry Woodbury
My father recently recommended to me a book on technology entrepreneurs: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston. Founders at Work is a collection of interviews with technologists from Steve Wozniak (Apple) to Caterina Fake (Flickr).
Here are some quotes Dad sent my way (all of a theme):
I think I was also surprised by the success of something so simple. [W]hat we built wasn’t that amazing. It was the idea of putting a couple of things together and being able to establish a lead by doing something really, really simple. How far you can get on a simple idea is amazing…. ~Evan Williams, Co-founder, Pyra Labs (Blogger.com)
Do as little as possible to get what you have to get done….Doing less is so important. People often wind up adding features, adding stuff. Making it bigger is the typical way you engineer out of a problem, right? It’s the traditional, ‘I apologize for the long letter. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.’ “ ~Joshua Schachter, Founder, del.icio.us
‘We’re making a product for mom and dad. Some of the features that you think we should add may not be the ones that they want to use. ….. It’s hard to convince 500 flesh-and-blood developers that their pet feature may not be desirable to 500 million imaginary users.” ~Blake Ross, Creator, Firefox
April 5, 2007, 3:56 pm
The Neurological Case for Diagrams
by Henry Woodbury
Researchers at the University of New South Wales say the brain is not equipped to read and listen at the same time:
The findings show there are limits on the brain’s capacity to process and retain information in short-term memory.
John Sweller, from the university’s faculty of education, developed the “cognitive load theory”.
“The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster,” Professor Sweller said. “It should be ditched.”
“It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.” (my emphasis)
Powerpoint is everyone’s favorite target these days, but of course, it’s how people use Powerpoint that is the problem.
Also interesting: People learn by studying already solved problems. Learn a solution and you have a better chance of applying it the next time you run into a problem.
April 4, 2007, 12:03 pm
Netscape is Number 1…
by Henry Woodbury
…on PC World’s list of the 50 best tech products of all time:
Netscape was the reason people started spending hours a day on the Internet, leading to the boom (and bust) of many a Web site. The advent of the browser also led to the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Microsoft, after the company embedded Internet Explorer into Windows. And Netscape’s August 9, 1995, IPO is universally considered to be the official start of the dot-com era.
It’s all there: popularity, impact, influence.
Are there any “aha” moments in the list? Instead of one-and-done devices like the Zip drive (#23), how about TurboTax (#38)? Now that’s a piece of software with ongoing impact. Once software handles the tax code (on the front-end and the back) it changes how the tax code can be permitted to change.
March 28, 2007, 1:27 pm
Microsoft on Channel 9
by Henry Woodbury
We’ve linked to Channel 9 before (see here). With its blog format and aggressive comments section, you might not guess it was sanctioned by Microsoft — until you notice the “Microsoft Communities” bar at the top and the little “msdn” in the URL.
Now Wired describes how Channel 9 was born and how it has generated great PR for the company normally viewed as centralized, bureaucratic, and secretive:
…marketers say [Microsoft] has become the model for how corporations can use the Internet to manage their image. “The messages coming out of Microsoft used to be so one-dimensional and managed,” says John McKinley, who until the end of 2006 was CTO and head of digital services for AOL. “Now you can get four clicks into the organization and see engineers talking about products. It gives Microsoft a human face.”
March 7, 2007, 8:49 pm
PowerPoint Gives the Game Away
by Henry Woodbury
PowerPoint despair makes it to the Guardian Unlimited, in this essay by Jonathan Wolff:
What is it about PowerPoint? Perhaps it is the only thrill left to the jaded academic: not knowing whether the technology you are using will actually allow you to give your talk.
While Wolff mocks the dog-and-pony-show marketing of PowerPoint, he focuses on a larger point:
For those who prefer to project the idea that a talk is a unique event, a voyage of discovery that could go in any one of a number of directions, and may well go in all of them, PowerPoint gives the game away. As someone once said: “The art is hiding the art.” With PowerPoint, everything is on display. Elegantly effortless performance is hard enough as it is. PowerPoint makes it impossible.
As another well-known detractor points out, PowerPoint is relentlessly sequential, undermines a presenter’s ability to present rich data in context, and sets up “a speaker’s dominance over the audience.”
I doubt Edward Tufte is going to change his mind, but if Wolff ever watches Steve Jobs at work he might acknowledge that elegantly effortless performance with presentation software is possible.
Okay, so Jobs uses Keynote. But it’s not the software that makes the difference. It’s the approach.
We do a lot of work in PowerPoint. We have two fundamental strategies for creating elegant presentations. First, we approach the entire presentation as a single narrative or composition. Each slide is a storyboard that advances the theme. This lets us leverage PowerPoint’s sequential format to our advantage. We can set up suspense in one slide and resolve it in another. We can establish a motif, then evoke it again and again. We can use pattern and variation.
Second, we treat every slide as a potential visual explanation. Sometimes all you need is text, but with images you can represent concepts, show connections, and evoke emotion. Images also make presenters inherently more interesting. Instead of repeating bullet points on a screen (which people can read for themselves), the presenter speaks to that which the audience sees.
But Tufte and Wolff cannot be ignored. Sometimes the multimedia presentation is simply a bad choice of format. Let us give Wolff the last word. Referring to the power of the image (say, the portrait of a famous philosopher) he writes:
These days, of course, digital pictures of Descartes are cheaper than ten-a-penny, but I’m still unsure of the benefits of showing his bony face to the audience. They have already got me to look at. And if they are looking at me, rather than a screen, I can look back at them. And I can judge whether they have understood what I have just said, and, if not, have another go at making the point.
March 1, 2007, 9:33 pm
How Digg Works. Or Not.
by Henry Woodbury
What is Digg?
Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that’s important to you!
Like a search engine, the Digg engine — trading in its own version of hits — invites optimizers. In Wired News, Annalee Newitz writes how she created an intentionally pointless blog, then promoted it on Digg using a paid service:
If the corporate brass at Digg were right, this would be a complete waste of my money. CEO Jay Adelson told me before I conducted this experiment that all the groups trying to manipulate Digg “have failed,” and that Digg “can tell when there are paid users.” Adelson added, “When we identify a (Digg user) who is part of a scam, we don’t remove their account so they don’t realize they’ve been identified. Then we let them continue voting, but their votes may count a lot less. Then the scam doesn’t work.”
What’s most interesting about Newitz’s story isn’t that Digg can be gamed. It’s that her pointless blog made the popular list because authentic Digg users added their honest votes to her paid ones:
Despite their doubts, Diggers kept digging my blog. There’s a perverse incentive here: Diggers who vote early on stories that become wildly popular become more “reputable” in the Digg system. If you’re trying to move up the Digg ranks, it’s in your best interest to vote on anything that looks like it’s gaining popularity. And my blog, with its flurry of paid votes, fit the pattern.
February 26, 2007, 9:35 am
Visual Identity: Identicon
by Lisa Agustin
Reading a string of comments on a blog is not the most stimulating user experience. Moreover, if a blog post is riveting enough to start an online conversation via comments, following the exchanges between participants may require closer reading to see who said what. Enter the Identicon. Programmer Don Park developed the Identicon as a way of enhancing the commenter’s identity by using a privacy protecting derivative of each commenter’s IP address to build a 9-block image to identify the writer. Referred to in its debut as “IP-ID,” the Identicon is written in Java and based on the first four bytes of SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm). The Identicon’s visualization consists of a small quilt of 9 blocks that uses 3 types of patches, out of 16 available, in 9 positions. To try this yourself, visit Park’s blog and scroll down to the comment form, which will display your current Identicon. Mine at the time of this writing:
How it works: the Identicon code selects 3 patches: one for center position, one for 4 sides, and one for 4 corners. There are additional details in the code for determining positioning, rotation, color, and inversion of the blocks.
For users with dynamic IP addresses, their Identicons will change over time. However, according to Park, it doesn’t appear to change often enough to affect identification beyond a “typical comment activity cluster” (presumably a single session during which a comment might be posted). Park adds:
I originally came up with this idea to be used as an easy means of visually distinguishing multiple units of information, anything that can be reduced to bits. It’s not just IPs but also people, places, and things. IMHO, too much of the web what we read are textual or numeric information which are not easy to distinguish at a glance when they are jumbled up together.
Besides the intended purpose of identifying individual users among a sea of many (e.g., wiki authors, customer tracking in CRM tools, etc.), there may be other uses as well, such as identification of individual computers within a large network. Plus the Identicon seems to be gaining in popularity: a PHP version is now available, as well as one that works for WordPress.
February 14, 2007, 1:36 pm
Learning Curve
by Henry Woodbury
“If it had been that straightforward I wouldn’t have called helpdesk”
February 1, 2007, 10:16 am
Your. User. Is. Not. You.
by Henry Woodbury
That advice from computer science instructor David Platt could be carved in stone. It pretty much applies to everyone that makes anything for other people, but Platt has a particular target in mind. Programmers, he asserts, don’t think like users:
People who write software programs value control. The user, on the other hand, just wants something that’s easy to operate.To illustrate his point, he notes that computer programmers tend to prefer manual transmissions. But not even 15 percent of the cars sold in the United States last year had that feature.
Business executives don’t think like users either. Frankly, users don’t think like users. Here’s David Thomas, executive director of the Software & Information Industry Association’s software division:
You don’t want your customers to design your product. They’re really bad at it.
What you want to do is ask people what they want, then compare it to what they actually do.
Platt’s Suckbusters web site is here. A typically entertaining lede:
The common technique of confirmation, popping a dialog box into the user’s face and asking, “Are you really Really REALLY sure you want to do that?” is evil. It’s unfriendly, it’s distracting, and it’s completely ineffective. Have you ever, even once, said, “Whoa! I didn’t want to do that. Thanks,” and clicked No? Have you seen anyone do that? Have you even heard of anyone doing it? I haven’t. It shouldn’t exist. Anywhere. Ever.
January 23, 2007, 9:04 pm
The Future of Gesture UIs
by Lisa Agustin
Without fail, the start of the new year gets people thinking about What Will Be Big This Year. The latest issue of Digital Web Magazine features an interview with Doug Bowman, a Visual Design Lead with Google, in which DWM asked which apps from 2006 are most significant and what that means for 2007. Aside from the expected endorsements of Google’s Calendar and Spreadsheets, Bowman had some interesting comments touching upon the themes of selective content sharing (e.g., Six Apart’s Vox) and more consolidation (e.g., Yahoo! Mail).
But what piqued my interest the most were Bowman’s comments regarding “gesture user interfaces,” or UIs that are driven by physical movements of the user. This is not a new thing, of course–dragging and dropping is something that most users accept (maybe even expect) with the latest applications. But recent offerings like the Nintendo Wii and the Reactrix interactive advertising display are giving us glimpses into what user experience may hold for the future. (Okay, so maybe the holographic screen in that Tom Cruise movie wasn’t completely off the mark?) What I find most interesting about gesture UIs is not so much what the final user experience will be for gesture-driven apps, but how would you architect and then document the desired experience? What kinds of description languages will need to be developed to describe the experience programmatically? What kinds of new user input paradigms will emerge moving forward? Stay tuned.
January 19, 2007, 2:18 pm
The Swiss Army PC Toolbox
by Henry Woodbury
If you’re not sure when or where you might need to service a computer, this may be the tool you need. It features “bit wrenches, hex sockets, torx, hex, and pozidrive bits, screwdrivers, pen, pliers, wire tools, and more”. The corkscrew is for hard drive failure.
In a related vein, Victorinix also sells a knife with a fold-out 1GB memory stick.
January 8, 2007, 11:07 am
The Secret Weapon of Product Designers
by Lisa Agustin
This month’s issue of Fast Company offers a peek into the DesignAid kit, a collection of twenty inventions with “unexpected properties,” such as impact-absorbing silicon (useful for building a sturdier car bumper) or sound-recording paper (consider a talking postcard). Created by Inventables, the kit changes quarterly and offers product designers a peek at some unusual technologies along with suggestions for various applications. Kit recipients can decide whether any of the offerings might be somehow integrated into their own products, or just use the kit as a source of inspiration for innovative thinking.
December 6, 2006, 10:57 am
Spamalot
by Henry Woodbury
Spam is back. According to this New York Times story (free registration required), existing filters are being fooled by “image spam,” in which telltale advertising phrases are presented in bitmaps instead of text. As antispam companies have added optical character recognition to their solutions, spammers have added speckles and dots to fool the scans.
To fool other spamblocking techniques, spammers have vastly expanded the practice of using viral “spambots” to send spam from the computers of unsuspecting users and have developed ways to give each copy of a spam message a unique digital “fingerprint.”
As for the stock tips you’ve been getting, here’s the scam:
Spammers buy the inexpensive stock of an obscure company and send out messages hyping it. They sell their shares when the gullible masses respond and snap up the stock. No links to Web sites are needed in the messages.
Though the scam sounds obvious, a joint study by researchers at Purdue University and Oxford University this summer found that spam stock cons work. Enough recipients buy the stock that spammers can make a 5 percent to 6 percent return in two days, the study concluded.
November 27, 2006, 12:12 pm
Paper as an Electronic Storage Media
by Henry Woodbury
Sainul Abideen, an Indian engineering student has created a new data-storing technology in which electronic files are converted to geometric shapes and printed in dense patterns on ordinary paper. These “Rainbow Technology” sheets can then be read via a customized scanner and decoded into the original files. An A4 sheet (8.27 x 11.69″) can store up to 256GB, making this an extremely affordable storage technology — Abideen’s “Rainbow Versatile Disk” has a storage density greater than high-end DVDs, uses less raw material to manufacture, and is biodegradable.
The idea of paper-based storage creates intriguing possibilities for data distribution. Imagine this: You buy a newspaper, tear out an RVD swatch, insert it into a RVD-capable device (an MP3-player, a cell phone, a PDA), and listen to the audio version of the printed text. Or listen to some new music. Or watch movie trailers.
Update: Commenter DD points to a Wikipedia article that casts doubt on the accuracy of the news report summarized above.
As referenced by Wikipedia, here’s Jeremy Reimer’s debunking. He points out that print resolution and scanner technology likely limits the storage capacity of a single A4 sheet to 100MB after error correction. Reimer also illuminates the importance (and limitations) of Abideen’s use of geometric shapes to render data:
The claim that “circles, triangles, and squares” can achieve … extra orders of magnitude can be easily challenged. There is a word for using mathematical algorithms to increase the storage space of digital information: it’s called compression. No amount of circles and triangles could be better than existing compression algorithms: if it was, those formulas would already be in use!
November 16, 2006, 11:21 am
AOL Goes Web 2.0
by Henry Woodbury
David Pogue at the New York Times reports on AOL’s embrace of the Web 2.0 bubble and “the business plan known as free”:
AOL had been losing members at a staggering rate, with 300,000 people a month canceling their AOL accounts as they switched to high-speed Internet from their cable and phone companies. AOL now has fewer than 18 million members, down from 35 million in 2002.
So AOL decided to get out of the Internet service-provider game, a dead-end business for a company that doesn’t actually own the wires running to your home.
AOL’s plan is to grow like Google:
Since it went free, AOL has lost 2.5 million paying subscribers — but gained 3 million free members. That’s more people looking at the ads, which AOL figures will attract even more advertisers.
Like Google, AOL is rolling out free goodies, of which Pogue has a nice list.
October 31, 2006, 2:07 pm
Computer Culture
by Henry Woodbury
Computers may still be binary calculating machines, but their social impact is profound. According to a New York Times report on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board “2016″ symposium, computers have become so integrated into scientific and popular culture as to drive qualitative changes in how people interact — and how social scientiest can study them:
The new social-and-technology networks that can be studied include e-mail patterns, buying recommendations on commercial Web sites like Amazon, messages and postings on community sites like MySpace and Facebook, and the diffusion of news, opinions, fads, urban myths, products and services over the Internet. Why do some online communities thrive, while others decline and perish? What forces or characteristics determine success? Can they be captured in a computing algorithm?
Don’t miss the “a Web Site as a Living Organism” diagram linked to the article. The format is a fairly typical node map, but adroit display of multiple properties of each node makes for an engaging graphic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/science/31essa.html (free registration required)
September 18, 2006, 9:10 am
Video Mash-Up Approval
by Henry Woodbury
YouTube, not yet profitable and a potential target for copyright violation law suits, has signed a big partner:
Under a revenue-sharing deal announced Monday, New York-based Warner Music has agreed to transfer thousands of its music videos and interviews to YouTube, a San Mateo, Calif.-based startup that has become a cultural touchstone since two 20-something friends launched the company in a Silicon Valley garage 19 months ago.
Unlike the notorious music sharing programs, YouTube offers value that entertainment companies want to leverage, not squelch:
Perhaps even more important for YouTube is that Warner Music has agreed to license its songs to the millions of ordinary people who upload their homemade videos to the Web site….
To make the deal happen, YouTube developed a royalty-tracking system that will detect when homemade videos are using copyrighted material. YouTube says the technology will enable Warner Music to review the video and decide whether it wants to approve or reject it.
September 11, 2006, 3:48 pm
Wikipedia Will Not Restrict Content
by Henry Woodbury
The Chinese government has blocked access to Wikipedia since last October. Founder Jimmy Wales has declared that Wikipedia will not compromise its standards and called for other Internet companies to follow suit:
Wales said censorship was ‘antithetical to the philosophy of Wikipedia. We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for the freedom for information, and for us to compromise I think would send very much the wrong signal: that there’s no one left on the planet who’s willing to say “You know what? We’re not going to give up.”‘
Good for Wales.
September 6, 2006, 1:53 pm
Media Entrepreneurs in Training
by Henry Woodbury
The film school at Arizona State University is just over a year old. Instead of competing with established programs that train students in editing, cinematography, writing, and directing, the ASU film and media studies program focuses on the intersection of entertainment with new technologies.
“The digital age, and that 800-pound distribution gorilla, the Internet, is changing everything,” he said. “The technical people and the creative people need to be able to work together, and there is no forum for that now.”
While “entertainment technology” sounds like a reference to digital content creation — that world of three-dimensional animation, game design, and digitized special effects — the ASU program has a much more conceptual approach. Student Alex Baer, an 35-year-old software executive, explains he took the program’s introductory course to “find out what we need to know about the narrative form when presenting it on different screens.”
In a world where Over The Hedge competes with YouTube, that would be a valuable thing to know.
August 31, 2006, 2:13 pm
Your Blog, Coffee-Table Version
by Henry Woodbury
Blurb.com is testing a service that “slurps your blog right into a slick coffee-table book, professionally designed and bound to attract attention.” The goal, says Blurb CEO Eileen Gittins, is “to position Blurb authors at the forefront of an increasingly digital publishing landscape.”
Economics professor Tyler Cowen is unimpressed:
Translating good blog ideas into book format is best done by people who…have experience writing books, or who have journalistic experience, not by people who have large staplers.
It’s hard to take the Blurb “position” seriously enough even to knock it. Sounds like Blurb has some cool publishing technology, but when your output is business briefs, baby books, and pet portfolios you’re not exactly competing with HarperCollins.
August 21, 2006, 9:59 am
Politics Plays on YouTube
by Henry Woodbury
Digital video and a place to publish it means political gaffes don’t fade away. Instead, they show up on YouTube for endless replay. In addition to capturing the unscripted errors of politicians, partisans can piece together candidate quips with other images and post their own mini-biopics — supportive or not.
The debate among political analysts is whether Internet video will make public figures even more preprogrammed, or whether it will encourage them to loosen up, show their personalities, and communicate more directly.
August 16, 2006, 8:08 pm
Medical Products and the User-Centric Experience
by Lisa Agustin
This week’s Innovation column in BusinessWeek Online features an interview with Stuart Karten, principal of Stuart Karten Design, an industrial design firm known for its user-centric approach to product design. The interview focuses specifically on Karten’s experience designing medical products, including a bone marrow biopsy needle, an infant ventilator, and a defibrillator.
Karten’s approach to medical product design extends beyond form following function, taking into account not only the product itself, but the context in which it will be used. On the question of what makes for a successful defibrillator, Karten notes:
What we realized is the actual frequency of use is really low, but when you have to use one, your adrenaline is pumping and you’re in a very highly charged state. So the ability to educate prior to use is important, and in this case we’re designing a public defibrillator, so we’re thinking about it like a public health service announcement.
Karten’s research techniques are familiar ones to information design practitioners, and include interviews and direct observation of the user interacting with the object (user testing, anyone?). It’s yet another example of how understanding and improving the user experience is the key to creating a successful product.
August 11, 2006, 9:46 am
Reverse-Engineering Utopia
by Lisa Agustin
It’s time to catch up on summer reading. The Knowledge@Wharton site offers an excerpt from Idealized Design: How to Solve Tomorrow’s Crisis…Today, in which authors Russell L. Ackoff, Jason Magidson, and Herbert J. Addison propose what seems to be a simple idea: “the way to get the best outcome is to imagine what the ideal solution would be and then work backward to where you are today.” According to the authors, this “ensures that you do not erect imaginary obstacles before you even know what the ideal is.”
The book is based on the collective experiences of the authors. Ackoff’s seminal experience began on a side trip he took in 1951 to visit an acquaintance at Bell Labs. While there, he inadvertently became part of an all-hands meeting called to innovate the telephone communications system–a system that had not introduced a revolutionary contribution since 1900.
Tasked with improving the system as a whole rather than its individual parts, the six sub-system teams were instructed to design whatever integrated system they wanted, subject to only two constraints: technological feasibility and operational viability.
Interestingly, Ackoff noted that after his involvement ended and these design teams continued their work:
They anticipated every change in the telephone system, except two, that has appeared since then. Among these are touch-tone phones, consumer ownership of phones, call waiting, call forwarding, voice mail, caller ID, conference calls, speaker phones, speed dialing of numbers in memory, and mobile phones. They did not anticipate photography by the phone or an Internet connection.
Ackoff’s description of how the teams approached this challenging task contained two elements worth noting: an early phase of analyzing existing system problems and establishing users’ needs or requirements, and then working with each sub-system team to get a better understanding of how suggested improvements would impact the larger system. Above all, this approach reveals that creative thinking combined with a rigorous analytical process can result in big changes.
July 28, 2006, 12:24 pm
What Makes A Successful Blog?
by Lisa Agustin
New York Times technology columnist David Pogue recently posted his interview with (in)famous blogger Ana Marie Cox, the original editor behind Wonkette, a behind-the-scenes look at political happenings and gossip in Washington, D.C.
Now the Washington editor for Time.com, Cox offered her take on the popularity of blogging and why the number of blogs continues to skyrocket:
[It] has a very low bar to entry. But the reason why anyone does it, I think, has to do with, like, having an opinion you believe is worth other people hearing, and having something to say beyond to the three or four people you talk to every day. And I think that’s why people get into journalism. And so it sort of would be a little odd if, given a chance to talk to a couple million people, rather than a couple hundred thousand people, you said no.
As for how to be successful, Cox suggests that would be bloggers have a “strong, defined personality with a sense of humor about themselves. An ability to filter news quickly and to recognize…what is interesting to other people as well as interesting to themselves, and finding the balance between those things.”
July 21, 2006, 4:04 pm
The World Cup on Mobile Phone
by Henry Woodbury
It’s like the early days of Web design, but more so. This Design Interact article describes how Yahoo planned and delivered its mobile device site for the 2006 World Cup. The goal was to make a site that could work on as many browser-enabled phones as possible. The problem was the baffling idiosyncrasies of those devices:
“The Web browsers on phones vary from basic to super basic,” explains Keith Saft, senior interaction designer at Yahoo! Mobile. “They also have these eccentric bits of HTML and CSS that they don‘t support, and there aren‘t really any standards or consistency across phones.“
As they catalogued the technical limitations of mobile browsers, the Yahoo team created a design strategy that prioritized usability:
With production also came usability testing. And here, surprisingly enough, the team did not try to achieve perfect layout and content consistency on every phone. Instead, it wanted to make sure that users understood something it called “design intent.“
Do users navigate efficiently through the site? Do they understand how items are grouped on a screen? Can they retrieve the information they want? “Design intent” is design by information architecture.
July 8, 2006, 8:31 am
Flash Takes Over Video
by Henry Woodbury
With YouTube, Google Video and other Web sites using Flash as their video format, the animation player has leapfrogged over more established competitors:
Flash has soared from zero to No. 2 in its market in just two years, according to Paul Palumbo, research director for Accustream iMedia Research. Microsoft’s Windows Media format is the leader, handling 60 percent of all streaming video in 2005; Flash has 19 percent of the market, jumping ahead of RealNetworks at about 10 percent and Apple’s QuickTime, with about 8 percent.
“Flash is going to be dominant,” Palumbo said. “You can embed this into the Web page and it’s instantly ‘on.’ It’s a seamless process.”
The fact that Flash is embedded in the browser also means that it “plays nice” with other programs. It does not attempt to establish itself as the default video application on your system. Nor does it relentlessly bug you to upgrade to a “pro” version.
Seamlessness is a marketing decision, not just a design decision.
(hat tip: Paid Content)
June 20, 2006, 1:05 pm
Designing On a (Really) Small Scale
by Lisa Agustin
Nanotechnology is science and engineering at the scale of atoms and molecules. Think about these futuristic-sounding scenarios, described by the New Scientist:
Imagine a world where microscopic medical implants patrol our arteries, diagnosing ailments and fighting disease; where military battle-suits deflect explosions; where computer chips are no bigger than specks of dust; and where clouds of miniature space probes transmit data from the atmospheres of Mars or Titan.
Now think about what would be involved in designing these materials and devices–objects that are so tiny that nothing can be built any smaller. The NS Technology blog recently posted a link to NanoEngineer 1, software that lets nanoengineers create moving blueprints for their nanoscale designs. The NanoEngineer site’s gallery of animations includes intricate gears and bearings, among them a first-time simulation of the Drexle-Merkle Differential Gear. (A much larger version of this kind of gear lets the wheels on a car rotate at different speeds as it goes around a corner.) While the static model did a good job of describing the gear’s internal assembly, the animation adds another level of understanding to how the various components work together.
For the New Scientist Technology blog: http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2006/06/nanoengineers-toolbox.html
For more information on nanotechnology: http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/nanotechnology
June 6, 2006, 9:44 am
What Does Google Run On?
by Henry Woodbury
According to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, Google runs on trust. Which makes him wonder about its prospects:
Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if Google has peaked. The reason is that, for lots of different groups of people, Google’s reputation as good guys has been stained. And I’m not sure what Google really has to bank on, besides a good reputation.
Reynolds points out that users can easily switch from Google to a competitor like Ask just by typing a different URL. However the barriers to change are not as low as he suggests — baseline users will use Google until it fails as a service while the webheads that are paying attention to Google’s PR problems may also have a Gmail account or run Google Desktop. And until advertisers see a change in traffic, they have no incentive to switch to a lesser-known service.
On the last point, Reynolds does link to a Buzzmachine post that suggests that Google’s marketing approach is not extensible. This doesn’t mean the current “views and click-through” model is at any risk, however.
May 18, 2006, 8:32 am
The Universal Library and Who Owns It
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times Magazine this week sports a long essay by Kevin Kelly about the possibilities of an electronic, universal library:
When fully digitized, [all the information in the world] could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords.
As a “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, Kelly unfolds some very interesting and imaginative possibilities. After discussing the obvious advantages of linked bibliographies and cross-referencees, Kelly elaborates on “Books: the Liquid Version”:
At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or “playlists,” as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual “bookshelves” — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf’s worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these “bookshelves” will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages.
At the moment, writes Kelly, the real obstacle facing the universal library isn’t technology, butcopyright:
In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright has had a perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark. In most cases, the original publisher simply doesn’t find it profitable to keep these books in print. In other cases, the publishing company doesn’t know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were not as explicit as they are now. The size of this abandoned library is shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world’s libraries are orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal library, is dark.
Google has an answer. But it’s being contested by publishers. Read the article to get the gory details.
January 13, 2006, 10:23 am
Is it Illegal to Annoy on the Internet?
by d/D
News.com correspondent Declan McCullagh has caused a stir among bloggers and free speech advocates with his report of a new U.S. law that makes it a crime to “annoy” other individuals via an anonymous email or Web post:
“Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called ‘Preventing Cyberstalking.’ It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet ‘without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.’”
McCullagh worries that the law “could imperil much of Usenet” and be used against whistle blowers.
http://news.com.com/Create+an+e-annoyance%2C+go+to+jail/2010-1028_3-6022491.html?tag=newsmap
Looking to the legal experts, opinion is divided. Professor Orin Kerr asserts that the law is actually just an extension of a long-standing ban on telephone harassment, which takes constitutional speech protection as a given. What is affected is not speech laws, but the definition of “telecommunications device:”
“Now I suppose you can criticize Congress for being lazy. They haven’t rewritten the old 1934 statute in light of the modern First Amendment, and that has resulted in a criminal statute that looks much broader than it actually is.”
http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_08-2006_01_14.shtml#1136873535
However, First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh points out that extending old laws to new technologies can have unexpected consequences:
“How is this different from traditional telephone harassment law? The trouble is that the change extends traditional telephone harassment law from a basically one-to-one medium (phone calls) to include a one-to-many medium (Web sites). This is a big change.”
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_08-2006_01_14.shtml#1136923654
November 10, 2005, 10:54 am
The 500 Pound Web Application (and its Brother)
by d/D
Clearly challenged by the success of Google’s Web applications, Microsoft is repackaging many of the features of MSN and Office into a pair of new online services:
“Windows Live and Office Live will give users much of the functionality of the company’s two most profitable products but without requiring them to install and maintain the software on a computer hard drive.”
Potentially of great interest in this move is the capability of online applications to leverage collaborative use:
“Office Live Collaboration provides 22 small business applications along with tools to let distant users together edit documents in Word, Excel and other Microsoft formats through the Internet.”
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,105868,00.html
October 10, 2005, 12:18 pm
Check Your Site in A9
by d/D
Amazon.com’s A9 search engine couples search hits with interesting meta data. Do a “Web” search and each site returned includes a “Site Info” icon that pops up information such as “traffic rank,” “sites that link here,” and “people who visit this page also visit…” The site stats come from Alexa Internet, a subsidiary of Amazon.
Other A9 searches pull up books or movies, Wikipedia articles, images, and many other types of data. There is a sense of serendipity that comes from trying these out. A search for images with “Dynamic Diagrams” as the keyword, for example, pulled up many images related to our work (some by us, some by others) from all over the Web.
October 10, 2005, 11:09 am
Enhancement Overload
by d/D
A new paper by Wharton marketing professor Robert J. Meyer, with Shenghui Zhao of Wharton and Jin Han of Singapore Management University, describes a “paradox of enhancement,” the way in which perceived consumer interest pushes technology products to become too complex to use:
“When people are considering buying next-generation products, they find the bells and whistles attractive and decide to make the purchase, but when they acquire the products, they find the complexity of the new features overwhelming and end up using only the products’ basic features.”
This a warning to technology companies caught up in the process of “nerds designing products for nerds.” Technologies that crossover to general consumer use may not be less sophisticated, but they must be simpler to use. That is the problem for interface and industrial designers to solve.
August 11, 2005, 1:04 pm
Instant (Business) Messaging
by d/D
Getting beyond the personal, instant messaging (IM) tools are being adopted by organizations as a means of instant communication and distributed collaboration:
“Of U.S. companies that have deployed internal IM networks, 44 percent did so to boost intraoffice communications…. But the potential cost savings also are compelling — 33 percent said they offer IM to their employees to reduce long-distance phone charges.”
In our own experience, we have found instant messaging to be a convenient way for people to quickly touch base and set up more formal communications — such as a conference call — especially when key personnel are in different time zones or travelling.
http://news.com.com/Businesses+are+getting+the+instant+message/2100-1032_3-5770640.html
August 11, 2005, 12:42 pm
One Spammer Down…
by d/D
Joint lawsuits filed by Microsoft and New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer have resulted in a $7 million settlement from a business responsible for more than 38 spam million messages a year. Score at least this one for Microsoft:
“We have now proven that we can take one of the most profitable spammers in the world and separate him from his money.” Brad Smith, Microsoft chief counsel
August 11, 2005, 12:40 pm
Filtered Away
by d/D
The OpenNet Initiative, an organization dedicated to investigating and reporting on state efforts to control the Internet, has issued a disturbing report on China:
“China’s Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world…. It comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control. It involves numerous state agencies and thousands of public and private personnel. It censors content transmitted through multiple methods, including Web pages, Web logs, on-line discussion forums, university bulletin board systems, and e-mail messages.”
http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china/
Coinciding with this report are stories on concessions that major technology companies have made to the regime. Such companies include Microsoft, who agreed to Chinese requests that its weblog service, MSN Spaces, restrict words such as “democracy” and “Tibet”, and Yahoo, whose Chinese search engine filters out politically sensitive results.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/story/0,14024,1506602,00.html
June 17, 2005, 1:14 pm
Wi-Fi Backlash?
by d/D
Some cafe owners are apparently questioning the economics of free Wi-Fi. Tables may be occupied for hours by patrons who make minimal purchases and inadvertantly change the vibe of the establishment:
“A cafe’s nature can be classified as ‘office,’ ’social,’ or a hybrid, according to research by Sean Savage, who recently earned his master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley…. In his work, Mr. Savage found that an office cafe discouraged conversation and was filled with people who came alone and were focused on their work. Social cafes have customers who arrive in groups. ‘If you come into a place like that and it’s a particularly busy time, you get dirty looks if you open a laptop and start zoning out,’ Mr. Savage said.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/technology/13wifi.html (free registration required)
On his Weblog, Savage offers his own commentary on the story:
“I see no evidence of a new trend: both of the San Francisco cafes in question have been experimenting with limited access for more than a year.”
May 11, 2005, 1:16 pm
Manufacturers Follow their Users
by d/D
Democratizing Innovation, a new book by MIT Professor Eric von Hippel, explains how low-cost design tools let enthusiasts customize high-end products to their own specifications. Using the Internet, these “lead users” are able to popularize their ideas and create demand for them that filters back to the manufacturer:
“In a study at 3M, [Von Hippel] and several colleagues found that product ideas from lead users generated eight times the sales of ideas generated internally — $146 million versus $18 million a year — in part because lead users were more likely to come up with ideas for entire new product lines rather than minor improvements.”
http://www.dynamist.com/articles-speeches/nyt/innovation.html
Professor Von Hippel’s book is available for download from his Web site at:
April 7, 2005, 1:34 pm
The Case for a $100 Laptop
by d/D
In this interesting article on Nicholas Negroponte’s concept of a cheap, WiFi-based laptop, the “how” is almost as thought-provoking as the “why”:
“By using 1 gigabyte of solid-state memory to store software and data, ‘We’re thinking maybe you won’t need a hard disk drive,’ he says. And instead of expensive batteries, the $100 laptop could come with less-capable batteries and a hand crank for juicing them back up, like a radio on M*A*S*H.”
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/maney/2005-02-08-maney_x.htm
March 11, 2005, 10:03 am
Bug Free Health Care?
by d/D
Studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association report that treatment tracking software may be problematic for patients. This summary in the New York Times only vaguely distinguishes between data standards, software development, and usability, but clearly some of the reported problems relate to information architecture:
“To find a single patient’s medications, the researchers found, a doctor might have to browse through up to 20 screens of information….Among the potential causes of errors they listed were patient names’ being grouped together confusingly in tiny print, drug dosages that seem arbitrary and computer crashes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/09/technology/09compute.html?incamp=article_popular_5 (free registration required)
The first of the JAMA studies, “Role of Computerized Physician Order Entry Systems in Facilitating Medication Errors,” is offered for free on the association’s Web site:
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/293/10/1197 (guest registration required)
January 12, 2005, 2:29 pm
For Academics: Blog or Perish?
by d/D
Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University addresses the question: “how [do] blogging and academic scholarship go together? In specific, he wonders what might have inspired Professors Richard Posner and Gary Becker to enter the fray:
“I’ve heard that if Posner were a law school, his citation index would put him in or close to the top ten. And Becker just gave up his Business Week column a few months ago. He is also the most widely cited living economist, not to mention that Nobel Prize. So why are they blogging?”
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/11/the_scholarly_c.html
The Becker-Posner blog is at:
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
Cowen credits Northwestern University Professor Eszter Hargittai with raising the question; Hargittai’s writings include some thought-provoking ideas and many links to other opinions on the subject:
“There are posts on blogs that are certainly much more original and careful in their arguments (and more clearly written) than many articles that get published in academic journals. I think people’s reluctance to consider blog writing as comparable to journal publishing comes from thinking about journals in a somewhat romanticized and unrealistic manner.”
January 12, 2005, 2:27 pm
Collective Editing via Wiki
by d/D
Five years ago, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, a well-reviewed book that argues that the Internet’s hardware and software protocols determine how the medium is controlled by vested interests.
To update the book, Lessig has decided to post its contents to a Wiki, a platform for collaborative editing by everyday users (most famously in the Wikipedia encyclopedia). Lessig will then edit the Wiki-based updates to produce the final new edition:
“My aim is not to write a new book; my aim is to correct and update the existing book. But I’m eager for advice and expert direction…. No one can know whether this will work. But if if does, it could be very interesting.”
December 8, 2004, 2:48 pm
The Online News… from 1836
by d/D
This past month, National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Bruce Cole announced a project with the U.S. Library of Congress to place 30 millions pages of old newspapers online:
“Now, with this new digital program, you will see the papers just as they were–you will be able to search the actual page. The technique is OCR–optical character recognition. In fact, there is already a model up on the Library of Congress site. It’s got the Stars and Stripes from World War One. It shows you the whole page and there’s a zoom device so you can focus in on a single story and be able to read it. It’s key word searchable. It’s a quantum leap from trying to read microfilm.”
The archive will start in 1836, the point at which the OCR technology can read typical newspaper type, and end in 1922, after which copyright issues come into play. However, all newspapers published in the United States, from 1690 to the present, will be included in an associated online bibliography.
http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/speeches/11162004.html
To see how the technology works, you can go to the Library of Congress’ Stars and Stripes archive and select any issue:
December 8, 2004, 2:44 pm
Google Rules for Scholarly Content
by d/D
Google’s new “Scholar Google” (http://scholar.google.com/) is a public search engine specifically targeted to scholarly information. Of interest are the implications of Google’s typically terse recommendations for submitting and accessing different kinds of content. Regarding abstracts, for example, Google requires open access:
“Regardless of the source, you should be able to see an abstract for any article, with the exception of those that are offline and referenced in citations only. Please let us know if you don’t see even an abstract.”
These are issues we’ve encountered many times in our work for university publishers and professional associations. Google’s recommendations are likely to start turning good practices into industry standards.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar/about.html
Google Scholar is generating a lot of interest online; here are two reports:
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3437471
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2004/11/wow-its-google-scholar.html
November 10, 2004, 3:14 pm
Complexity and its Costs
by d/D
The Economist surveys the state of the IT world in terms of one idea: complexity. The thesis is that complexity slows the adaptation and spread of new technologies, undermines the usability of existing technologies, and, most bluntly, increases costs:
“The Standish Group, a research outfit that tracks corporate IT purchases, has found that 66% of all IT projects either fail outright or take much longer to install than expected because of their complexity. Among very big IT projects — those costing over $10m apiece — 98% fall short.”
The survey is mostly a catalog of known debates such as the virtues of Linux vs. Windows or voice-over-Internet vs. “plain old telephone service,” but it does pull together many different issues into a comprehensive pattern.
http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3307363
November 10, 2004, 3:12 pm
Shortcutting the Semantic Web
by d/D
The W3C’s Semantic Web project is an attempt to define the attributes necessary to make Web data usable by database applications as well as people. Now, Sony Computer Science Laboratory is promoting its “emergent semantics” technology as an alternative. Instead of a markup-level tagging system, Sony’s system looks at how content is accessed and shared:
“In emergent semantics, a user’s agent bootstraps the information and categorization of content, such as the classification of music in genres. Through interactions among agents trading ‘favorite’ songs, genres emerge that are common to sets of users. Such emergent semantics as self-organizing genres are automatically tagged onto the content as an extra layer of information rather than depending on people to do the tagging”
http://www.eetimes.com/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=51201131
The W3C’s Semantic Web home page is at:
October 13, 2004, 9:57 am
The Afterlife of Digital Information
by d/D
A recent story on National Public Radio describes a Library of Congress’ initiative to preserve digital information that can propagate, change, and disappear without a trace. As of December 2000, the Internet, just one digital medium, had more than 4 Billion Web pages whose average life was 44 days.
Speaking to NPR’s Robert Siegel, Laura Campbell of the Library of Congress compared the repository to government photography archives from World War II:
“We can’t collect everything but we can certainly take a snapshot in time to tell the story about what local life was like…. We will have people who go through and sample what’s on the Web so that we can create that same kind of archive.”
http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=4062797
The Digital Preservation Program web site describes the breadth of the the undertaking. Projects range from the technical development of Web archiving tools to the funding of specific archives to the defining of metadata standards:
September 16, 2004, 3:34 pm
RSS Stalled?
by d/D
Web Designer Andrew Boardman has some interesting comments about whether the spread of the RSS syndication standard has stalled and what could get it going again. His kicker:
“Web browsers need to find a way to integrate RSS into their interfaces. Apple’s Safari is slated to do this, but until Microsoft works out a way to do it, RSS will fail.”
August 12, 2004, 3:37 pm
Information Density and the David Rumsey Map Collection
by d/D
A common problem of digital media is its relatively low information density compared to print publications. Maps can be an especially rich way to present information, but online versions are often reduced to multiple bitmaps of equal simplicity (consider Yahoo Maps or Mapquest, for example).
The David Rumsey Map Collection manages its library of high resolution scans with powerful compression software and the use of the Insight® browser, an Internet application designed specifically for the browsing of images as oppposed to text.
While one might consider alternative presentation methods that fit more seamlessly with standard browsers, the Insight® technology offers an example of a fully customized approach that is worthy of examination.
August 12, 2004, 3:35 pm
Extracting Data from User Forums
by d/D
Edmunds.com’s user forums contain more than 2.5 million messages and 100,000 car reviews. To extract meaning from this wealth of commentary, questions, and answers, Edmunds.com is analyzing the data with Attensity Corporation’s PowerDrill software. PowerDrill is notable for its use of sentence diagramming to identify the actors, actions and objects in unstructured text:
“[In beta tests] Edmunds.com was able to analyze trend information from conversations on the forums, including shopping and dealer behavior, re-occurring issues, and concerns which can also be used to predict future behavior.”
Tools such as PowerDrill that turn free form text into relational data may cause Web developers to take a new look at how they utilize forums, feedback forms, Web logs and free-form content spaces.
August 11, 2004, 3:41 pm
“Do not touch the blue E!”
by d/D
For the first time since beating out Netscape, Internet Explorer is losing marketshare:
“No one is forecasting the demise of Internet Explorer, but the most recent data from WebSideStory show that of visits to Web sites the firm tracks, the number made using Explorer declined 1.3 percent from early June to mid-July. At the same time, use of other browsers – Firefox and Opera in particular – rose.”
The key impetus for ordinary users to seek out a different browser appears to be dissatisfaction with pop-up advertisements. Download speed and security concerns also play a role.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/12/technology/circuits/12brow.html (free registration required)
July 9, 2004, 4:42 am
Interaction Design for the Internet
by d/D
According to designer Philip van Allen, the Internet could and should be far more interactive. Users need new tools to act as producers of meaning, rather than a passive consumers of information. The goal is what van Allen calls “productive interaction”:
“In contrast to traditional media, productive interaction’s strength is facilitating and provoking the dialog. It enables juxtaposition, and supports the remixing of the actual content.
“Productive interaction gives the reader a pair of scissors and permission to cut up the book.”
Beyond an examination of data structures, increased collaboration between designers and software programmers, and the rethinking of authoring systems, van Allen calls for a broad commitment to experimentation:
“Interaction designers should devote part of their practice to breaking the common constraints; designing for very large displays, moving away from the ‘mouse crouch,’ incorporating tangible interfaces, and experimenting with new delivery systems.”
http://ojr.org/ojr/technology/1088538463.php
A detailed research paper and demo are available from van Allen’s Web site:
May 8, 2004, 8:26 am
Where to Go Wireless
by d/D
If you’re traveling — to Brighton Beach, say, or a San Francisco Giants baseball game — JiWire has a guide to wireless hot spots around the world:
April 8, 2004, 8:36 am
Rethinking Encyclopedias
by d/D
Over the past decade the expansion of electronic alternatives has dramatically undermined the encyclopedia market. In response, publishers are looking for ways to obtain more value from their content:
“The shrunken reference powers that survived the shakeout — namely Britannica, World Book, and Grolier, the maker of Encyclopedia Americana now owned by Scholastic Library Publishing — have now retooled to focus more on online products.
“Voluminous sets are still printed, but mostly only for institutions. The encyclopedia companies are also targeting consumers with more concise and less expensive reference books.”
Online, the possibilities are exciting. The same data that drives an encyclopedia Web site could be queried by many different kinds of customized informational tools. The success of such tools, however, depends upon equally customized information architectures, each tailored to help a specific audience extract meaningful information from a specific body of content.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/11/disappearing.encyclopedia.ap/
March 9, 2004, 9:21 am
Google Under Fire
by d/D
Can a business model based on an algorithm succeed? As Yahoo ends its partnership with Google (see http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5160710.html ), the popular search engine faces aggressive new competition:
“‘When Google first launched, they had some new tricks that nobody else had thought about before,’ says Doug Cutting, an independent software consultant…. But plenty of other search engines now offer intriguing alternatives to Google’s techniques…. “For example, there’s Teoma, which ranks results according to their standing among recognized authorities on a topic, and Australian startup Mooter, which studies the behavior of users to better intuit exactly what they’re looking for. And then there’s the gorilla from Redmond: Microsoft is turning to search as one of its next big business opportunities.”
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/roush0304.asp?p=0 (free registration required)
January 8, 2004, 9:41 am
No More Unbinding and Rebinding
by d/D
In its understated way, Micropaleontology Press, feature of a recent NPR story (http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1572223), points out another advantage of electronic media:
“In 2003, the Foraminifera Catalogue reached 106 looseleaf volumes containing more than 87,000 pages … Since all the printed volumes must be unbound and rebound each year for the alphabetic insertion of 500 to 600 additional pages, the internet edition has quickly become popular.”
See the very bottom of http://micropress.org/history.html
December 8, 2003, 9:47 am
Dead Links and Scholarly Research
by d/D
When footnotes are URLS, footnotes disappear. Faster than you may think:
“In research described in the journal Science last month, the team looked at footnotes from scientific articles in three major journals — the New England Journal of Medicine, Science and Nature — at three months, 15 months and 27 months after publication. The prevalence of inactive Internet references grew during those intervals from 3.8 percent to 10 percent to 13 percent.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8730-2003Nov23
Mentioned in the article is the digital object identifier system known as DOI. This is a system we’ve seen used effectively in our work for scientific publishers. The DOI web site is http://www.doi.org/.
December 8, 2003, 9:45 am
PowerPoint: Love it or Loathe it?
by d/D
David Byrne has learned to love it:
“Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent.”
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1.html
Edward Tufte believes it is an evil program:
“Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html
Our take? By importing images and objects (including Flash movies) we can make our presentations as customized as we like. Even Tufte admits that PowerPoint “is a competent slide manager.” Furthermore, we have found PowerPoint quite useful for making wireframes (page schematics). It is sufficiently flexible, accommodates notes, and everyone has it (unlike Visio, for example), so clients can circulate documents easily within their organizations.