Majectical Electrical
Michael Forrest has his new album out today. I’m downloading it now, and I commend you to do the same. It reminds me of artists as diverse as Cobra Killer through ATR to Momus and Barry Adamson. This is definitely going out on my ShowCenter.
I’m always interested in the way artists choose to distribute their work - in may cases more so than the work itself. Forrest is notable not least by adding some weight to a casual observation I made about a similar online distribution of a work by Paul Robertson. Forrest distributes the work via the Internet direct to the audience, but this time imposes a time window of 25 days. He also says nothing about any licence.
In the absence of any further information about the license, we must assume it defaults to restrictive copyright. However, I find this an intriguing development not only because Forrest is silent on this point, but also because he invokes the concept of scarcity.
In the digital age, there is copyright and shades of it meditated by CC. There is also the idea that nothing matters as long as its free. I don’t quite know how to deal with scarcity in either context. Perhaps I’m making too much of all this - but my point is that I think those who have championed alternative licensing models may have misjudged the way the public will use (or ignore) the provisions of such schemes. If REM can release videos under a perl licence, “rip, mix, burn” may start to apply to more than just the work itself.
BBC Spinal Tap Joke
At least I assume it is:
EU Parliament Net Neutrality Attack!
Argh! The reform of the “European law on electronic communications” (AKA the “Telecoms Package”) will be debated in the European Parliament on 7th July - Monday!
Why the sudden flap? Well, it seems they’re at it again. Here’s what’s going on: take one, large, boring piece of regulatory legislation up for routine amends that most MEPs have little interest in. Insert some clauses that bypass the rule of law to allow unregulated surveillance and denials of the right to privacy. Make sure nobody notices. Wait for it to get rubber-stamped by a snoozing bunch of representitives.
That, my friends is democracy at work in Brussles whether we like it or not. All we can do is get on the wires and pummel our representitives to do something.
More info here and here.
Here’s my letter just sent:
We-Think: Documenting the Present
I’ve recently read We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, having attended one of his talks a couple of months ago. I thought I’d record my thoughts on it.
Books about the socio-political or cultural effects of the Internet are rolling fast off the presses right now. I’m now feeling a little less like the pallid geek I once was. The penny has dropped, even in the hallows of Downing Street (Leadbeater was a Labour advisor under Tony Blair for a while), that something rather important is happening out there in cyberspace. Territory is now being claimed by everyone from the plainly trivial likes of Macolm Gladwell and Andrew Keen, to the highly constructive, if sometimes baffling, Clay Shirky and Seth Godin.
Leadbeater sets about documenting the various phenomena he finds on the net to support his formulation of what he calls “we-think.” In a nutshell, we-think is the practice of solving problems or enhancing the quality of life by the free exchange of ideas and resources. Such activity tends to move from the periphery to the centre until - if it survives - it pervades the normal way of doing things. Examples of course are free/libre and open source software, but also offline activity evident in grass-roots initiatives in developing countries that spring up independently of governmental or official sanction. All this, he says, may be a new phenomenon in modern history, but a return to aspects of ancient modes of life which hitherto had been sunk beneath the waves of industrialism and refinements of capitalism that came with it. Well, I’d by that for a dollar, even if I can’t understand Leadbeater’s connection between a third-world micro-loans system and playing World of Warcraft.
Removing The Home Page
In many cases, the design and content of a “home page” - the first page you see when you view a web site from its document root - owes its existence more to tradition than sense. Perhaps a home page speaks to the idea of a “cover” in the same way as a cover for a book. However, web sites don’t have pages that need protecting from the outside world - quite the opposite in fact. In the age of Google and ever-increasing findability, providing a summary of the site is often unnecessary. There are several other reasons to abandon home pages as well. Here are a few thoughts I’ve been having about the issue.
Calendars and Date Range Selection
One thing that bothers me about “design patterns” is that they don’t always seem to be the best method of solving a design problem. In many cases, patterns are patterns simply because they are popular. This of course is a phenomenon not limited to design (music, for example, is another case in point). However, it becomes particularly frustrating for designers when a sub-optimal pattern then gets in the way of better designs because the pattern becomes something that people expect. Significant modification of the pattern is seen as negative, even if those modifications are demonstrably better. But you can’t do something better by doing the same thing as everyone else.
One example of a design pattern being a poor solution to a problem is the use of pop-up calendars to allow date range selections on form fields. Here’s an example of what I mean. I’ve chosen an example of a single calendar for selecting ranges because I think it illustrates better the points I’m about to make. A more common example is the “from/to” calendar: separate calendars for the “from” date and the “to” date, usually as separate fields on the form.
Here Comes Big Buck Bunny
It’s out! Not seen it yet, but I’ll be downloading as soon as I get out of the bath.
In case you’ve not been following - Big Buck Bunny is a feature-length 3D animation - and this is what makes it special. Do them a favour and download it (preferably by BitTorrent if you can).
Faviki.com: No OpenID - Fail
While I yield to no man in my admiration of Tim Rowe, I cannot accept his latest invitation to join him on faviki.com. This is because I have resolved to boycott any new service unless it supports OpenID.
I have written to Faviki about this. Let’s see what happens (nothing probably), but in my opinion, these days any new service not supporting OpenID deserves to fail. I have upwards of fifty different logins for on line systems and it’s driving me nucking futs. It’s got to the stage where the cost of having to comply with yet another “must contain two numbers and capital letter” idiocy is just too much unless the payoff of demonstrably huge.
While I’m at it, Marcus has been doing some creative thinking on ways to manage on line systems without login, or at least without the traditional hassle of having to remember user IDs and passwords. He also drew my attention to OAuth the other day. It seems very interesting - if only I could understand it.
Joi Ito: Why Mobile Hasn’t Happend Yet
In my dreams, I like to think that if I ever made a lot of money I would be like Joi Ito. He must rank as one of the most worthwhile people on the planet, and somebody that I’d love to meet. Today, he writes an astute post about the “mobile Internet” and why nothing very interesting is happening in that space, nor will it ever while the current closed systems exist.
Incidentally, he recently re-vamped his blog, so even if you have no interest in the subject matter, it’s well worth a look: there’s some excellent design going on there.
Worst Interaction Design Yet
What a beautiful mess. Your mission is to work out how to unsubscribe from one of the mailing lists in the “Newsletter Subscription” section. A lot of work went in to avoiding having check boxes in this design.
Administrivia II
Server upgraded, Webtorque will be looking rather sqiff for a while until I work out the Wordpress theme that I heavily hacked up and forgot to note any changes to… Enjoy.
[LATER] Pretty much done now. Wish I could work out a way of removing that pesky horizontal line beneath the header image.
Administrivia
Webtorque will be down this weekend for maintenance while I try to upgrade the server. It went wrong the first time, so here’s hoping. My Tiscali hell is also continuing though, so the downtime may be longer than it needs to be. Think of it as a rest.
The User Experience of Britannica Online
I have a 12 month subscription to Britannica Online. This was advertised as a way of letting me link to full Britannica articles free of charge from my blog, should I so wish. Indeed, have a read of this entry, which you would not have been able to see unless you had been a subscriber (try linking to it directly - clever, eh?).
I assume this is an Old Media marketing ploy to get me to buy a real subscription once my free 12 months is up, or at least a tactic to fight back against Wikipedia or something, but that doesn’t concern me here. Instead, I couldn’t resist the temptation to look a gift horse in the mouth.
The Time Is Now for Local Networks
My ongoing experience with Tiscali’s appalling broadband offering has made me research the overall broadband industry in the UK. The picture is now becoming alarmingly ugly. Something has to happen to avert a disaster, and that something may be local networks. But before I elaborate on the solution (although not a new idea), let me outline the problem.
There seem to be several horsemen of the information apocalypse riding over the horizon towards us. First, there is market economics and the primary fact that the ISPs have clearly oversold their capacity. This has resulted in hoards of disgruntled consumers wanting access to content that is increasingly out of their reach, while the ISPs compete on price after having exhausted what (if anything) they spent on infrastructure. This is also compounded by many other related factors including the BT Wholesale monopoly, the feeding frenzy whipped up by the 3G auctions, and the subsequent reluctance of network providers to invest in better delivery platforms after the spectacular failure of 3G technologies to deliver.
I Had No Idea
My god this is awful. The entire weekend my net connection with Tiscali has been so slow that YouTube, podcasts, BBC news and even Gmail have been pretty much unusable. I tried running a speed test just now and it timed out!
I now realise why I’ve always found broadband hell stories so boring - it was because I was living in a HomeChoice bubble! Broadband (DSL at least) has seriously crashed and burned in the four years we’ve been on our HomeChoice LLU cable. There was I wondering why people would grumble about getting less than 8Mb when our 2Mb connection gave me more than I could possibly download at speeds I was perfectly happy with. That’s because it was running at pretty much full speed the whole time.Now that we’ve been booted on to Tiscali’s execrable DSL system, I know what all the fuss is about. This is a disgrace. Something has to be done.
Current candidates are Sky and Virgin, and possibly Be. The complicator is the TV though. Tiscali is a TV/Broadband/Phone bundle. Coincidentally, FreeSat launches next month - or does it? Despite being a huge BBC/ITV joint venture, it seems more like a top-secret SAS mission. Not even Lord Grade’s mother knows the truth, I’ll be bound. Mind you, if it’s all a Great British Cock-up (as I rather suspect), there’s always FreeSat From Sky. Good to know we still have good branding agencies in this country, eh?
The No Net, No TV Challenge
For the past two weeks, and coincidentally at exactly the same time as my family have been away, I have had no Internet access, and very little TV reception at home.
I count myself as a pretty intense Internet user (although I watch very little TV), so was interested to see what would happen without any connectivity. This was not by choice of course, but due to a problem with my Tiscali (formerly Homechoice) set top box, which for some reason Tiscali took 13 days to sort out.
When Films are Free
I don’t watch nearly enough films, but my attention has been drawn to two animations recently. Both are free.
Firstly, the Blender project has brought out a new film (I wanted to embed it here but it breaks the page). It has a CC licence, and looks like an impressive bit of 3D animation (all the models and source files are also provided on the CD).
Secondly, there is the incredible new production from Paul Robertson: Kings of Power 4 Billion %. I assume this is public domain, but he is clearly is too cool to say anything about anything as boring as licensing, so I’m not sure. I’ve now watched it about … eighty times.
See also the wonderful anime geek flame war between the kuns and chans in the first thread on Robertson’s Livejournal page announcing the film. It’s Internet gold, I tell you.
Waste
For some reason I’ve been noticing a lot of greenwashing recently. At work we have plastic recycling bins along with receptacles for waste paper and cans. This is good because we get free bottles of water, juice and other modern comestibles. So, at least by recycling we can do something to offset the wanton destruction on the environment that these things bring. Incredibly though, I find myself pulling out three of four empty milk, drink and other plastic bottles from the general waste bin, and putting these into their correct place. Every day.
Are the people that throw plastic bottles into the general waste the same people that also print out everything they see on their screens? Some of the things I have seen by printers (uncollected) are mind blowing in both their pointlessness and sheer volume. At LBi all the printers doubled as shelves for mounds of unclaimed printouts. If it weren’t for the cleaners, we would have probably been able to cover them completely with this jetsam by the end of each week.
Expedia, however, practice one thing that is both convenient and green (as a side effect at least): “secure printing.” I’d not encountered this before I arrived, but everyone’s printer drivers default to this mode. When you send something to print, it is held by the printer itself in a queue shown on the console. Your print job awaits the input of your password before the printer actually prints it. This is convenient because it ensures your job is not lost inside somebody else’s run, or misplaced before you can get to the printer. It also removes the need pathetically to spam the office with “Please do not print to the printer in the next 10 mins because I need to do 80 copies of my report now.”
It is also of course green because it means the aforementioned print lunatics are unable to waste energy: the secure queue is automatically erased at the end of the day.
Identity Cards are Useful
A friend of mine recently said they thought ID cards could be useful. They said they thought one day they might forget to take their passport to the airport or on the Eurostar. It struck me that I’d not blogged about my thoughts on this (and hey, what’s a blog for if it’s not for idle pontification?).
ID cards will no doubt be very useful - in the same way as DRM is useful, or restrictive EULA contracts are useful. What matters is the consequences of that usefulness.
Take one small example that I’m interested in: the fact that the Identity and Passport Service today has 3,800 employees. That’s 3,800 potential points of data leaks, mistakes, abuse, impersonation, blackmail and other chaos.
Exiled from Plaxo
I ‘ve had a login on Plaxo for about two years now and have only received a couple of invites from people I know, but I’ve had a several in the last couple of months. Maybe it’ll be the next Facebook?
I won’t be there if Plaxo does explode though. Plaxo is so far my only OpenID casualty. Since trying to convert my account to using OpenID, I’m now in exile from the system. Previously, this wasn’t a problem, but today I had an invite from the mighty Nick Crascke. Since anyone who is anyone would jump at the chance to accept such an invitation, I naturally followed the invite link. But it hit an infinite loop on some OpenID request requesting something on Plaxo requesting something on myopenid.com.
A similar thing happened with and invite from Jon Curnow a few months ago. I tried mailing Plaxo. They replied with a solution to my OpenID woes. It seems I’ve got two duplicate accounts at the moment, one of which is my OpenID attached one, the other now orphaned in Plaxospace. Or something. But the fix sounded horrendously complicated so I thought better of it.
I suppose I could counter-invite all my invites… or something. Anyway, here’s the video (2.7Mb AVI) of what I’m getting. I should show it to Plaxo’s support I suppose…
Persona Insight? You Decide
At last, people are openly acknowledging that persona development, or at least the dogma that comes with it, is weird. I’ve been rude about Alan Cooper before, but this is another chance to stick the boot in.
I blame Cooper for coming up with the wonderful idea of personas. They’re great for summarising research. They help people – anyone really – get closer to design solutions when things get complicated. In my opinion, however, the problem space needs to be complex or personas are more trouble than they’re worth. Well, that’s one of their problems anyway (a bit like use cases really).
The Gnome System Menu
Having recently upgraded to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, I see the system menu hasn’t changed. Other than a couple of minor tweaks to the contents, it’s the same as it was in Feisty Fawn.
Video: How Difficult Can It Get?
With various digital media building up on my little hard drive, I thought I’d get one of those media streaming boxes so that I can watch or listen it all in my living room downstairs. TED talks, podcasts of various kinds, camcoder movies - ah lovely.
I knew video formats were going to be a bit problematic, but I had no real idea of the sheer jungle of codecs, containers, incompatabilities and various other weirdness that’s out there. It would be hard to imagine a more ridiculously arcane situation than we currently have with video. Here’s my experience with a Pinnacle ShowCenter 200 so far:
Serves Me Right
Regular readers will know that I had a free mobile phone last year, thanks to a 100% cashback deal. This year however, I’ve not been so lucky.
After hearing nothing from Phones 2 U Direct.Co.Uk Ltd after my first cashback claim in September, I served them a court order to get a response. They replied to the court, admitting they owed me the money. That was over three weeks ago, and I’ve still heard nothing. Now I see that they’ve gone under.
They will be served a judgement by default for non-payment, but it now doesn’t matter much. Oh well, I think I’ll write to their MD, a Mr David Ellis of Hartley, Longfield, Kent DA3 8EX, and send him a copy of a letter I have for Arun Sarin about the conduct of his company and why Vodafone should keep better tabs on their affiliates.
It’s good to talk.
Administrivia: Site Move
Webtorque will be moving servers soon (maybe this week… maybe next). I’d be delighted if anyone actually notices, but we may be down for a day or so while I get the web server back up. There’s a chance I might delete everything in the process - indeed sometimes I want to do that anyway, but a sugary sentimentality prevents me.
Another Gear Shift in the Cross-Country Rally of Life
Travel broadens the mind, and so it is that today I leave LBi to start work with Expedia. In my case I shall be joining hotels.com as an interaction designer.
Expedia makes a lot of sense. Having worked for about ten months on First Choice Holidays while at Wheel last year (although my work has yet to go live following their merger with TUI), I see travel as a suitably complex experience design challenge. Expedia is also a real online business. Not for me the clicks and mortar, or the pains of transformation to that.
Not since IPC and my involvement with Yachting and Boating World have I worked in-house though, so this will be a change. I feel sad to leave LBi though, and wish everyone there well.
I wonder if this was a co-incidence?
We Love Firmware
The two things that have most irked me about many devices I’ve owned is response time and shoddy UI. Usually, I assume there’s not much the manufacturer can do about response time, so I’m pretty forgiving on that point. But shoddy UI is another matter. Mobile phone UIs have of course been done to death on this point (although it’s fun to read this one), so I won’t harp on that - too much. However, I was recently pleased to discover a way out from bone-headed implementations or crass, commercially driven design. Free firmware - once beyond my powers of geek - is now well within it.
Now that’s what I call user experience!
Last week I got a mail from somewhere announcing the launch of a new property website called zoopla.com, so I thought I’d have a look. It’s a pretty nifty residential property sales site: good web2.0 thinking going on, nicely executed. Whoever put it together knows their stuff.
But it has a few things I thought could do with improving, so as is my habit, I bunged them a mail with my thoughts. I got a reply thanking me, and that was that. Meanwhile, I continued to play with the site.
Yesterday, I arrived home to find they had sent me a Waitrose Wine giftset in the post, with a note from their CEO thanking me for my feedback!
Lovely!
(PS: Happy new year all!)
SingStar Plug
I’ve not worked on an FMCG site in ages, so I’m taking the liberty of plugging this one, which we did for Sony Computer Entertainment this year. SingStarGame.com went fully live in all territories last week.
I’m on there too if you look hard enough. It’s running at about 1,000 registrations a day right now so it might get rather interesting in a while. My favourite so far though is this guy. Also, while we’re on the trivia, the video files uploaded by users are transcoded to FLV on the fly by a service called Hey!Watch at 0.07€ a pop. Props to them.
Yahoo! Political Dashboard Redesign
Yahoo! has a “dashboard” to let you track the progress of the various candidates in the US presidential race (at http://news.yahoo.com/election/2008/dashboard). Since I’m currently working on a dashboard myself, I thought I’d have a go at improving it from the point of view of information design.
Monoculture Reloaded
I used to think I had a handle on the state of spam and malware. I chuckled at the obfuscated spam content, marvelled at the botnets, and secretly admired the general ingenuity of those skript kidz and their r00tkits.
But I didn’t know the half of it until I read this (670K PDF - thanks to Francois for sending it to me)
“Professional Paranoid” Peter Gutmann, of the Department of Computer Science in Auckland, lists a deluge of flat-out evil business models and techniques in use by spammers and online criminals. This assessment of the current (but fast-moving) state of the industry fairly leaves me quaking.
The Man From Marblehead
“cookingforfun (http://www.grouprecipes.com/people/cookingforfun) wants to be your cooking buddy. You can login to accept or decline (http://www.grouprecipes.com/profile/).”
Is it me, or is this getting a bit silly?
Banking Innovation
Well, sort of. The recent sale loss of my data by the Revenue prompted me to change my bank account this weekend. Not that I think I really needed to after the fiasco at HMRC, but I thought some rate tarting was in order.
Alliance & Leicester have two interesting things in their online banking interface: a “unique image and phrase combination” and a fake logout (no, really).
The former is quite interesting. You are given a picture to which you attach some phrase known only to you. When you’re shown that picture, you give them the phrase as part of the login process. I’m not sure how secure or otherwise this is, since the temptation to simply describe the image is very strong. However, as long as it’s used as an anti-phishing method (which it appears to be) then it’s rather nice. Would have preferred to have been given their public key for some 256-bit blowfish goodness, but hey. Who wants PKI when they can have a sand dune to look at?
The latter is a somewhat surprising bit of UI design. I finish my session and log out… but what’s this? I’m not logged out - I’m being sold to! Good job I wasn’t in an Internet cafe, because the first time this happened, I didn’t notice the message. I was so surprised, I’ve shot a video of it (1.1Mb ogg).
French Thinking
I see this news from France last week. It’s an interesting innovation in the copyfight, but it’ll be a flop. With margins already wafer-thin, ISPs will be reluctant to ban their customers, and those that do will be removing people who will be clever enough to get round the bans.
However, it’s measures like this that might eventually mean the Darknet moves off ISP-controlled networks. Keep an eye on wireless: Consume.net is dead, but others like it may well rise again. And this time, they’ll be encrypted…
Vimeo.com - Nice Design
Only just discovered Vimeo.com. I like the overall design very much. It’s pushing the the stereotypical “web 2.0″ conventions on rather well: desaturated colours, rounded corners, etc., but it’s very well thought out - everything is there for a reason. I also note some interesting things going on: no scroll bars (just up/down arrows), no “handles” for users - it’s Facebook-style real names.
Wikipedia and Conflicts of Interest
Will Wikipedia survive the constant sniping its been getting about quality, style and everything else? In the last few weeks, I’ve observed (nay, been involved with) two issues relating to their conflict of interest policy. To save the blushes, I won’t divulge who was involved, but the first incident started when a PR operative at a medium-sized company decided that because a rival company had an entry in Wikipedia, they should have one too.
Facebook Coincidence
One of the things I like about Facebook is spotting odd coincidences. Here are two friends, one living in Tokyo, the other in London, neither of whom know each other from Adam - but their status messages make nice bookends.
Will Thermo Be Too Hot for Axure?
With the advent of Thermo “some time next year” things are at last hotting up in the RIA design space.
Regular readers of this blog (if there are any such people) will know that I have been wondering for a long time in a somewhat Pooh-bearish way about the future of “The Designer” in the “The Development Process.”
While this is hardly a topic unique to this blog, my particular angle on it can be summed up by the following idea. Designers (by which I mean anyone who specifies a system that other people build) will get increasingly nowhere unless the tools they use to describe their designs work directly with the tools used to implement them.
Continue reading this entry »
Won’t Anyone Think of the Children?
When I’m murdered in my bed by a gang of bored teenagers, I’ll try to remember to blame the RIAA as I expire.
Some issues are too big to arrive at any useful perspective until you have thought and experienced a great many ideas relating to them. For a long while now, I have tried to fathom what it is about my concern, not to say alarm, about the increasingly draconian imposition of copyright law and the erosion of fair use that has come with it.
Too Loud To Ignore
I am usually completely unsuccessful in hiding my glee at the demise of music publishers, and this post is no exception. I have been hoping for the last few years that what started as a trickle would become a flood. And now with Radiohead and even (gasp!) Madonna, it surely has.
I think the penny is dropping. If you are an artist, you now have a choice to become an artist and a business, or an artist and a slave.
Facebook, Google and Nothing to Hide
I’ve been looking at my Facebook profile in the light of their recent decision to make members’ profile data indexable by Google and other search engines. Trying to make sense of what I thought about this, and about privacy in general, I found the works of Daniel J. Solove, associate professor of law at the George Washington University Law School. He specialises in privacy and its relation to information technology.
Looking at his list of publications, I thought I’d get a primer on his work by reading a short essay called “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (240Kb PDF)
Anyone who’s interested in privacy issues needs to read this. I’ve always been frustrated by the “nothing to hide” argument, trotted out whenever somebody complains about privacy violations (I note it turned up in defence of CCTV cameras in a letter to Metro last week).
Continue reading this entry »
“We have a diagram of this.”
I’ve been thinking about “info graphics” again, and what a tricky area this is. It’s doubly so because a large part of what I do for a living is information design.
There is essentially an “emperor’s new clothes” problem prevalent in the production of information graphics. To me, the vast majority of subjects that I see addressed by such graphics (in particular, complex ones) would be better expressed in words - either spoken or written.
I recently found a quote by William S. Cleveland, a scholar in the field of graphical representation of data. He sums up the background to the problem I’m wrestling with:
“When a graph is made, quantitative and categorical information is encoded by a display method. Then the information is visually decoded. This visual perception is a vital link. No matter how clever the choice of the information, and no matter how technologically impressive the encoding, a visualization fails if the decoding fails. Some display methods lead to efficient, accurate decoding, and others lead to inefficient, inaccurate decoding.”
– William S. Cleveland, The Elements of Graphing Data, Hobart Press, 1994, p. 1
Vodafone Broken Calling
I was in Spain last week, on the Vodafone ES network, and dialled a wrongly-constructed number. The call didn’t connect (just went dead, no ringing) and I got this message. That number at the bottom is the number I was calling, properly formatted. If the system knows how to format the number - why not just dial it and not pester me?
The notion of “service design” can’t come on these companies too soon if you ask me.
Euro IA, Barcelona
Eric Reiss mentioned that at conferences in the States you have pre-conference workshops, whereas in Europe you just have lots of drinking. At the start of Day Two of Euro IA - I’m feeling rather sleepy after the cumulative effects of the the pre-conference party, and all the tappas last night. Hope I can hold out for the rest of the proceedings today!
It’s been great to meet lots of people I’ve been corresponding with - and so many people with whom I’ve not but who know my name from my various rantings. So far, everyone’s been kind about me, which is nice - despite my hogging the mic on the floor on most sessions. I realise I abandoned my post somewhat at the poster session to talk to others about theirs, and take some of the 500+ photos that I’ve got to edit down when I get back…
So far my notes are full of things like sentiment analysis techniques (Peter Van Dijk), cognitive organisation of requirements (Wiebe & Confer) and the incredible amount of data that Yahoo! Spain crunches per week (Ricardo Baeza-Yates) among other things. Today there’s service design and cross-context IA and other stuff - but it’s a two-tracker so I can’t have all of it (and we leave early for the airport later this afternoon).
No doubt I’ll be expanding on some of these things in later posts (although I may do this on Stream since this is in fact an expensed trip) - there’s a lot to digest - and it’s all been top-flight stuff.
Putting People in Control of Personal Data
I was thinking about how much I like using OpenID. I’m registered with myopenid.com, who could do with ironing out some kinks in their user experience, but it’s good enough.
One thing struck me after reading Tomas Baekdal’s excellent blog post on the subject of privacy policies. I summarised this in my comment on his post, but to cut to the chase:
“… statement of intent is all very well, [but] the practical reality of the situation is that data leaks. No matter how much you “respect” the people that gave you their data, respect alone won’t stop you leaving 10,000 names and addresses on a laptop in the local KFC.
This is why the real battleground needs to shift to putting users in control of how much data they release - regardless of privacy policies.
I would like to see, for example, the introduction of revocable keys for personal data. Have my name and address, but only in a form encrypted to you, with a key I can revoke at any time.”
Byrne/Eno Pean Again
I’m very rarely inspired to write about anything. When I do, it’s usually in reaction to something from outside. It doesn’t come “from me” in the artistic sense. Admittedly, I don’t write much uplifting stuff though - it’s mostly boring. This post is different however because I don’t know where it came from.
I was going though some bookmarks today (I remember a time when I thought I’d never use a bookmark manager), and saw My Life in the Bush of Ghosts go by. This, you may recall, is the incredible album from 1981 that turned into an incredible re-issue in 2006 accompanied by the CC-licensing of two of its tracks, both in their original 24-track form. This to me was a combination of two great tastes that taste great together: music and copyleft.
I’d not been to the site since just after its launch in 2006, when it had about five or six remixes uploaded. Now it has masses, and they are all wonderful.
I once thought we had lost the ancient art of the remix - the fuel of all music from the stone age to jazz. From about the 1970’s we witnessed the onset of the copyright plague that incubated the flesh-eating virus of pap pop, SAW and disco (we had to fight the punk wars to stay free - never forget that). But sites like this remind me that I was wrong.
I like being wrong. In the end, it feels better than being right.
Women on the Web
The female twist to Ofcom’s annual report today on the use of new media is interesting. One view of Internet use that’s always intensely annoyed me is that it’s a solitary medium best suited to male, sociopathic geeks. That may have been true of the web for a brief period between the decline of the dial-up BBS and the arrival of HTML 3.2, but with Usenet and the embers of the London dial-up scene in the mean time, my own online experience has always has been highly social. I assume this aspect of the web in it’s 2.0 incarnation is also one reason why the female audience now seems to be taking the ascendency in some areas.
I hope this will put paid to those who see being “on the Internet” as some kind of mindless activity akin to watching TV. May it make such an attitude seem as ridiculous as berating somebody for “reading books” or “having fun.”
Max Hole: It’s Businesses as Usual
Max Hole is President, Asia Pacific Region and Executive Vice-President, Marketing and A&R for Universal Music Group International. He has some soothing words for anyone who thinks the internets might be a bit worrying for music publishers.
When he’s using words like “… record companies … sign and encourage great music by great artists. This will never change”, you know they’re in trouble. At least, in trouble in the long term. One thing that’s true in business as in life is that nothing is forever. Mr Hole’s analysis of the situation for record companies seems to be based on the idea that nothing will, or really needs to, change for the music publishing industry. Musicians have no interest in business or marketing… consumers demand much more than just the music… pirates are sapping the ability to find talent… We’ve heard it all before. If you repeat it often enough, it might just make it true.
Hole completely fails to address what happens if, as seems at least likely, the making, discovery and consumption of music moves from the physical world of gigs and CDs to a virtual one, and along with that, whether the gatekeepers will see the fences come down.
Why Has My Son Been Fingerprinted?
My six year-old son went on a trip to the park today with his holiday playgroup. There were various activities there, and among them it seems the Met were hosting some kind of “meet the Police” event. Part of this appears to have involved his fingerprint being taken.
What the hell is this about? He describes it as being something the policemen did “for fun” - but I’m not laughing.
I don’t know (and I need to ask the teachers who were at the event) whether the police kept a record of this print, what was said about it, or whether anyone other than my son was asked about it. The fact that the “certificate” he received (which I found in his bag when he came back) is glaringly unsigned adds insult to injury. There’s no contact details, no reason, nothing on the back of the paper… nothing.
Talk about sleepwalking into a surveillance society. The police randomly fingerprinting six year-olds? You couldn’t make this up!
For the First Time, Ever
The UK government has rejected calls to extend the length of copyright on sound recordings beyond 50 years.
This is the first time any government in the history of the world has refused to extend copyright, and it’s great news. 50 years is of course far, far too long, but at least the madness of extending it has been averted for now. To quote Doctorow in the Boing Boing today:
“Extending copyright dooms nearly every author’s life’s work to obscurity and disappearance, in order to make a few more pennies for the tiny minority of millionaire artists like Cliff Richards (and billionaires like Paul McCartney).”
(and I’ll spell Sir Cliff’s name wrong because I can)
While Labour will have to do a lot more to make up for the Iraq war if they want me to actually vote for them, they get my approval on this outcome at least.
Going to Euro IA
I submitted an idea for a talk at this year’s Euro IA in Barcelona a few weeks ago (just met the deadline). The anonymous review process has now taken place and the results are out: they’d like me to do it as a poster.
While I would have preferred a talk to be able to do it justice, I am of course grateful to have been accepted. So, it’s off to Barcelona in September with my rolled-up poster under my arm. Let’s see if anyone understands what they hell I’m on about there.
Administrivia: Comment Posting
I’ve been told that comments aren’t working. I think this might be related to a relatively recent upgrade to Wordpress that might have broken the theme I’m running (I’m hoping it’s not to do with the very low version of PHP the server’s running).
I’m going to see if I can fix this, but if you have been dying to tell me something, then jonathan at webtorque dot org will do you.
The Rights and Wrongs of Tag Clouds
I’m not obsessed with tag clouds, really I’m not, but I think they are the single most useful, yet criminally misunderstood and mis-applied UI device out there. I’ve written about tag clouds before, but this time I’m turning up the heat.
Controversy time: writing about “best practice” for tag clouds in terms of what fonts to use and other minutiae is the hallmark of the usability nerd. The other hallmark is forgetting - in this case utterly - to consider context. Whether or not a tag cloud is useful at all is 100% down to the context it’s in. Everything else is as near as dammit to irrelevant. The fact that few things in information architecture are as clear cut as this is particularly damning here. The one thing you have to understand in user experience design is context.
Continue reading this entry »
Paul Birch of Revolver Records
If you want to know what company directors think about how the government in this country works, look no further than this flabbergasting statement by Paul Birch of Revolver Records:
“I … think allowing indiscriminate criticism of the RIAA is inappropriate for a Government funded institution”
At least in terms of editorial integrity, if you are being funded by the government it should be case that it would be wholly appropriate - if not actually desirable - to criticise a private company!
Paul Birch is probably not alone in seeing the government as being simply a tool of corporate influence. This just shows how bad things have got - that people like him now need to make no secret of the fact that they expect governments to work exclusively for commercial interests. This is just staggering I think.
The User Experience of Photosynth
There was a flurry of interest in Microsoft’s Photosynth this week. I’m not sure why, since it’s been around for a while, and was one of the WPF/e showcases at Designertopia last year. The engine for Photosynth is Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft last year I think), explained here in more detail.
Photosynth (or at least it’s primary concept) comes alive when it’s pointed at Flickr. So I was at first mystified as to why the public demos of Photosynth all used photos taken by one person, but the video explains that they were not able to use a Flickr feed for legal reasons.
However, whether or not the photos used are heterogeneous, there is a problem I think. Spatially relating the images is of course very clever, but if we ignore this and look at what it’s like to use the interface, there is clearly a “keyhole” feeling to it. You are, at any one time, simply flicking though similar photos. Despite the occasional panorama that jumps out at you, it is far too easy to become disorientated (even with the homogeneous photos, so I assume even more with the heterogeneous ones). I thought at first that this may have been due to my unfamiliarity with the UI, but I’ve been playing with it quite a bit today, and I still feel as if I’m looking though the wrong end of a telescope while walking on a high-wire. Overall it mainly delivers the same experience as sifting though a stack of photos grouped by place.
There is, however, something of the Bladerunner here. The promise of discovering something hitherto unknown about a place (cf the example in the video using the poster of Notre Dame). It’s all quite intriguing, but I have my doubts about its actual utility.
I Was Mugged By Wolff Olins
I now realise that I hated the logo for the XXX Olympiad* because I was meant to hate it. Wolff Olins grabbed me by the throat, shoved me up against a wall and made me. At exactly the same time, they forced everyone else to take a stance on it too. Now the Sun has centre-spread hate pieces, 50,000 people sign petitions against it, and the London digerati pretend they loved it the minute they saw it. For god’s sake Wolff Olins - it’s only a logo! Why have you visited such pain upon us?
I have to admit I don’t really know if the logo is good or bad, or what a “good” logo would be anyway in this context. Good for what? Multichannel deployment? Recognition? Attracting the kids? The only thing we’re told is that it’s supposed to be doing the latter. I don’t know if anyone’s asked them, but I just wish it would all go away.
I’m with Ken Livingstone on sport: it bores bores me to tears. If people want to do it they can; I just resent been beaten over the head by it in this way.
* Ah, now I see why they aren’t using the official name this year!
And Design Shall Start With Observation
The project I’ve been working on for the last ten months is now winding down for me, so I’m getting involved with some new stuff. One of these couldn’t be more different from the rather rigorous approaches I’ve been taking since last year. Having attended a “workshop” for this project recently, I can’t help feeling I’ll be firing off shots in the war against intelligence.
But perhaps that’s the rule, and not the exception. Certainly, looking at the vast majority of sites right now and their seemingly total disregard for considered design, it seems to be the case. I found a rather typical example of this today when I bought some SkypeOut minutes. It wasn’t until I’d chosen Visa credit card and submitted the payment for processing that I was told the method of payment also determines how long it takes for the minutes to be allocated to my account. Not only that, but they only gave me times for debit cards (about 15mins) and bank transfers (about 3 days). No mention of credit cards or PayPal. Don’t worry, I’ve mailed them my thoughts on this.
All this makes me even more impressed with Nokia. This article about Jan Chipchase’s world of contextual research is interesting. I know that mobile devices are a bit of a different kettle of fish to web sites, but it’s good to know that at least one company (the only company?) out there recognises the value of such research. I like the last observation “The question is how can we do our job as a large corporation and show people we interact with sufficient respect.”
Wise Guy, Eh?
Until yesterday, I’d not tried Any Questions Answered (AQA) - the old-school (as in not P2P) SMS-based answer service. For a mere £1, they will answer any question you have. I’d heard good things about them.
Their website allows you to ask one free question, so I did:
“Since 1950, how many people have been shot by the police in mainland Britain (excluding N Ireland) who were not later found to be innocent?”
Submission to Euro IA 2007
Here’s an idea for a Euro IA submission I was thinking about (eh Barcelooona!) to fulfil one of my annual HR objectives: the one that says I need to ramp up my public profile to attain the status of European Experience Emperor.
Some prodding about seems to indicate that people do see this as a problem worth addressing, so I’ve finished filling out the submissions form today. Just got under the deadline too, which closes today. See what you think:
Persona Development What/How Thoughts
From time to time it’s fun to think things through using the “what/how analysis.” This can be summarised by the statement “One man’s ‘what?’ is another man’s ‘how?’” and it can be applied to lots of things in order to work out where you are in a set of processes and how, or whether, some things have a natural relationship or hierarchy to describe.
I’ve been trying to apply this technique to the process of persona development, because in particular this seems to me to cut the designer off at the point where they actually need to design the end product (the UI of the system in most cases). In short, I wanted to know whether performing a thought experiment like this would reveal whether modelling users necessarily supports the design of a better system for them or not.
Maximising Profits, Minimising Innovation
When our grandchildren look back on the late and early 20th century - the dawn age of computing and the information revolution, they will see a company called Microsoft writ large across it. Just how large is difficult to grasp until you compare the profits that Microsoft makes from their nearly unchallenged monopoly.
Now compare these profits to the amount of innovation displayed by Microsoft in the marketplace. Who is this a problem for? I think it’s a problem for all of us because when I use technologies not produced by Microsoft I think of what might have been. What might computing and the information revolution be like today if we had had a competitive market in operating systems and software?
We will never know - but it’s interesting to wonder. Not least because Microsoft are now moving into areas like publishing.
Lull Before the Storm?
Cultural issues and technology are subtle things so I may be barking up the wrong tree, but on my recent trip to Japan, I met some teenagers who told me that they didn’t know much about computers (I’d told them that I design web sites. They were not impressed).
Instead, they use their phones for almost everything. Why didn’t they use computers? The answer seemed to be that they didn’t need to, so had no interest in them. Computers are big, phones are small. You need training for computers - but everyone can use a phone, they said. This latter statement appears to be true. I was struck by the consistency of the physical interfaces of most people’s phones in Japan, even across vendors the key layouts are pretty much the same, and I assume the virtual interfaces are therefore similar too. Why shouldn’t they be when content is king and the network operators business models are stable? Adults (sometimes even quite old ones) talked about their phones in the same way as quite young people in the West do, but not in terms of the features - they cared about the content.
I sometimes wonder if my skill set is too web-based, too classically client-server and desktop orientated. For all I know, a wave of mobile usage scenarios that I can barely guess at is going to break over my little world and obliterate it. How long can I chuckle over what I see as the risible user experience of contemporary mobile comms in the West and its utter failure - so far - to engage people?
Life with Linux
There are some posts that no real blog can be complete without, and that is some opinion about Linux. I’ve been using Ubuntu for over a year now and it occurs to me that I should write up something on it. Not that anyone’s asked, but then that’s what blogging is all about really isn’t it?
I switched from Windows to Ubuntu for no reason other than I wanted to see what it was like. I kept my Windows install in place on a dual-boot just in case, but mainly because I need access to Windows from time to time in order to work from home. Since installing Ubuntu, I’ve experimented with OpenSuSE and Kubuntu for a few months, but went back to Ubuntu when the Edgy release came out. I have a two year old Dell Dimension 5100, upgraded with an NVidia 7300GT video card.
UCD Crisis
There are too many methods of designing digital media. We currently have “agile” (hip, groovy) at one end and “waterfall” (a term of abuse) at the other. Each of our projects at LBi inhabits a space somewhere in between these two extremes at any one time - although because we’re an agency it’s mostly just different takes on waterfall. There have recently been some laudable attempts to be hip and groovy, although I’ve not yet had the pleasure of that myself.
From time to time my department (now close to fifty people I think) needs to vent a bit of excess energy (or hot air) in the form of periodic email discussions about industry tends, methods and related stuff. Some of this comes out on Stream, but mostly it’s by internal email. Today was a good example. Dan Saffer has written an article called Research Is a Method, Not a Methodology. This was duly discussed in fairly measured terms as Saffer makes some interesting points.
But then, I cracked.
The Joost TV Business Model
I will not be buying shares in Joost any time soon. This is not because they don’t have a good product - having been on their beta testing swarm for the last few months, I think it’s quite nice really. The trouble is, according to the Guardian they will be getting their content from media owners based on a lie. The lie is as follows:
“… Joost boasts a secure, efficient, piracy-proof internet platform, and is guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators.”
What a wonderful example of hubris: DRM will preserve the sanctity of copyright for the owners of films and videos and they can use the net as just another distribution channel. Phew! Thank god for Joost!
Unfortunately though, that won’t happen. It takes approximately 4 minutes for cracked versions of music from the iTunes store to appear on the P2P networks (according to Big Champagne). What makes Joost - or more accurately their investors - think that won’t happen to them?
I suppose the Graun can’t get it right every time, but let’s make this the subject of experiment. Give Joost the benefit of the doubt, put them up against Cory Doctorow’s assertion:
“I believe that we live in an era where anything that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes.”
Joost are pitching their tent right now. Let’s see how long they last.
Julian Cope Rarity
I was going through some stuff at the weekend, and