Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Thomas B. Passin’s Explorer’s Guide to the Semantic Web has sample chapters :)

I have an OpenOffice complaint. I’m starting to use it, and so far so good. It nicely opens all my legacy (by legacy I mean Microsoft) files, and all is good.

I’ve always thought Powerpoint was one of the most usable pieces of software I’ve ever seen. This doesn’t get said enough - it’s usability is undoubtably partly responsible for its success (which results in, yes, corrupting the minds of everyone who uses it. I know.)

For those of you who are not familiar with it, Powerpoint provides an editable outline view at the left, together with an editable slide view at the right and a notes view below that. Whatever you edit in one of the views updates simultaneously in the other.

For some reason, OpenOffice decided to throw out this innovation. Maybe it’s been patented? Anyways, in OpenOffice, you get an editable outline view, but no simultaneously editable slide view, nor a notes view. Which really spoils it for me, I’ve been trying to start a presentation and I just can’t do it.

Unless I’ve missed some setting somewhere, in which case please let me know.

Daedalus - How not to buy happiness: in short, yes, you can spend your money to be more happy, but most people don’t, buying things like cars instead.

Via Hoder: this Yahoo mail page is being filtered in Iran because it has the letters “sex” in its URL.

E:M | My upcoming projects (from the guy responsible for the popularity of blogs in Iran: “The enormous power of Wikis could be exploited in providing some independently and collectively produced textbooks for high school students in Iran. Those books can later be printed and used by parents, who do not agree with the content of the official ministry of education textbooks, as alternatives in a couple of sensitive subjects such as History, Social Studies, etc.”

I created a new category on the Guide to Ease: ethnography.

This Blog Sits at the: how to blog like an anthropologist. Yes! I’m going to read this entire blog. See you later.

This Blog Sits at the: how anthropology works: “I am in Seattle and doing ethnographic interviews. The project is for Domini (domini.com) and the objective is to see why people invest in socially responsible mutual funds.”

Less Cyber, More Cafe: Design Implications for Easing the Digital Divide with Locally Social Cyber Cafes
, by what we can call the Intel Gang.

How eight pixels cost Microsoft millions | CNET News.com: “When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and the product was promptly banned in India. Microsoft was left to recall all 200,000 copies of the offending Windows 95 operating system software to try and heal the diplomatic wounds. “It cost millions,” Edwards said.”

I am planning to experiment a bit with doing ethnography-like research and presenting it on the web using a mix of media (video, audio, text). There is a history of using video and images in anthropology, but there is still little work being done (that I know of) on using the web to what I think is its potential in presenting ethnographic research.

I’m looking for examples - tips welcome. visualanthropology.net seems a good starting point. Visual studies seems an interesting publication as well - you can see a sample online but you have to get a free login. (They’re good about providing linking options with each article.)

I have a documentary photography background, so I am all for using visual techniques. What I also want to do is to publish interviews and such, and annotate them, online. I want to publish unfinished, not-very-interpreted results of the study, so they can be re-interpreted by other people. I haven’t seen examples of this online yet. I say not-very-interpreted because I am well aware of the problems with trying to be objective - I won’t even try to be that.

A nice example of having extensive source material online and reinterpreting it through an ethnography is Looking at discipline, looking at labour: photographic representations of Indian boarding schools (PDF, 3M). (I think this direct link should work.) The ethnography looks at the documentary pictures of Indian boarding schools. A fascinating read, check it out. (A lot of classic documentary photography was commisioned by the USA and is freely available online.)

Photographs have the strange property of gaining meaning over time - the older they are, the more we can easily re-interpret them. Video may have the same properties.

More:
- Visual Anthropology Papers
- Understanding What We See: Subject, Author, and Audience in Visual Anthropology, which includes this quote:

“All over the world, on every continent and island, in the hidden recesses of every industrial city as well as in the hidden valleys that can be reached only by helicopter, precious, totally irreplaceable, and forever irreproducible behaviors are disappearing, while departments of anthropology continue to send fieldworkers out with no equipment beyond a pencil and a notebook. (Hockings 1975: 4)”

Also (this nicely illustrates the reluctance anthropologists seem to have with visual media) : “”Ethnographers worship a terrifying deity known as Reality, whose eternal enemy is its evil twin, Art. They believe that to remain vigilant against evil, on must devote oneself to a set of practices known as Science. Their cosmology, however, is unstable: for decades they have fought bitterly among themselves as to the nature of their god and how best to serve him. They accuse each other of being secret followers of Art; the worst insult in their language is ‘aesthete’.” - Eliot Weinberger, The Camera People”.

Here are some more thoughts on the same issues. A brilliant explanation of the history and issues in ethnographic filmmaking.

pasta and vinegar: [Research] Video Surveillance as a gaming platform. Now that’s imaginative!

I’m looking for a piece of screencapture software, or a methodology. I want to use it as follows - recommendations are welcome.

I am interested in studying how people use technology, in an ethnographic kind of way. When I visit someone’s house, I might take pictures of where the computer is. I might also want to take some screenshots. What I need is a way to make screenshots on pretty much any computer (varying OS’s).

As long as it’s Windows, I think I can do this: use CTRL-PRT SCR to make a screencap. Open M$ Paint (which is installed on all computers). Paste in the picture and save it. Then either save it on a diskette (most computers) or email it to myself (internet cafe where diskettes are disabled).

Any tips for macs?

Can a concept exist without words to describe it?
The Pirahã, a group of hunter-gatherers who live along the banks of the Maici River in Brazil, use a system of counting called ‘one-two-many’. In this, the word for ‘one’ translates to ‘roughly one’ (similar to ‘one or two’ in English), the word for ‘two’ means ‘a slightly larger amount than one’ (similar to ‘a few’ in English), and the word for ‘many’ means ‘a much larger amount’. In a paper just published in Science, Peter Gordon of Columbia University uses his study of the Pirahã and their counting system to try to answer a tricky linguistic question.

This question was posed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. Whorf studied Hopi, an Amerindian language very different from the Eurasian languages that had hitherto been the subject of academic linguistics. His work led him to suggest that language not only influences thought but, more strongly, that it determines thought.”

In my experience: yes. At least I can remember many times that I’m trying to explain something (a feeling, …) that I can’t find the right word for. And in different languages there are always words that can’t be exactly translated.

NewsNetwire 2.0 talks about the redesign of the tabs and compares with with Firefox. Funny, they’ve ended up with exactly the same solution I did a mockup for a few months ago. Which makes me think my instincts weren’t so far off :) The only difference is the placing of the x and the icon, I have it the other way round. Presumably because it’s Mac software - Mac closing buttons are alway at the left, Windows at the right. This was my solution:

This is their solution:

Via Dinah, O.K., Mom and Dad, time for a tech lesson. Good article: texting is like passing notes.

Luckily my mom is happy to learn new things now and then, even though she’s of the generation that writes down steps to accomplish something and doesn’t have enough understanding of the computer’s metaphors to try much new stuff. I think she’ll be happy with my upcoming Indian videoblogging!

Hello : Introducing BloggerBot: “Hello is brought to you by Picasa. www.picasa.com”, and Picasa is now free, brought to you by Google, who also bought Blogger.

I wonder if having all these talented people under one roof means that they’ll worry more about interoperating (technically and strategically) with eachother than with the rest of the web?

Interesting. Organizr is a Flash app that talks to the Flickr API, and is used to organize your pictures. Haven’t tried it, but maybe Google should have bought these guys instead of picture-software makers Picasa.

Discovered an interesting new blog with a great post on India and Technology

The New York Times - After Months of Hoopla, Google Debut Fits the Norm: Google is now valued at $27 billion, higher than not only an Internet company like Amazon.com, but also industrial giants like Lockheed Martin and General Motors.

Since a day or two I’ve been using Skype to call my girl in New York city. It works great once we read the known bugs report. The sound is even clearer than a normal phone (the headset has to do with that I think) and there is no delay whatsoever (there used to be). Brilliant. I was working today and the phone rang - that is, Skype rang on my laptop. A great experience, and since the calls are free nobody feels about about hanging on the phone for a while.

Om Malik on Broadband: India’s wireless culture:
“My recent trip to India opened my eyes to how Indians were using wireless technologies in various different spheres of life. I saw a wireless-enabled ATM machine on a ferry, and wireless-enabled delivery boys with credit card machines.”

On my upcoming trip to India (6 weeks woohoo!) I plan to keep an eye out for interesting uses of technology. Meanwhile, all pointers are welcome.

Lucas Gonze on videoblogging: “We’re almost there with the technology. I mean, really close. Just a little more elbow grease and *bing* — you pop a URL into your laptop and sit down with a bowl of popcorn. The sole problem is horribly broken A/V software from the 90s.”

Lucas is one of the few people who truly understands couch media versus desk media. Drazen Pantic made me understand politics is done on the couch.

Put one and one together, and it says: once we make true couchable videoblogging easy enough, politics will follow. And we’re soo close. I can smell it.

Hours after accessing the Paypall site for the first time in months I get one of those fairly convincing emails to “confirm your identity”. How do they know I’ve just accessed Paypall? Packet sniffing? Some trojan horse on my computer (which would really worry me)?

So I have this account - that I spent some time setting up and inviting people to by the way - on one of the social networking services, but I can’t remember which one.

Lawrence Lessig writes about the “The Balkanization of the Internet” - the idea that the internet is being divided in separate parts - China, …

The comments are good, and led me to Connecting China: “China will have at the beginning of 2005 100 million internet users, almost half of them connected to broadband. But outside China very few people know who is behind those astonishing figures, what are the Chinese doing with the internet and how is it affecting their lives.”

Marketeese is sneaky. I was describing the support you get with different levels of an online service I’ll be offering next year, and I caught myself writing things like “Basic discussion, advanced support and personal support”, when what I was trying to say was that you get access to the public discussion board, tickets & full phone support. There. Much clearer, and just as short.

I’m looking for examples of international information architecture - whatever that is.

I stumbled accross the English version of the Japan International Cooperation Agency, which contains an Oath of service on the homepage:
“With passion and pride, as professionals in development cooperation, we will perform our work responsibly and energetically with love and a sense of duty
[...]
and we will strive to fill the world with hope and happiness by promoting peace and sustainable development.”

What do you consider international or global information architecture challenges to be?

The New York Times > Technology > Trying to Take Technology to the Masses: “I kept asking myself, ‘what would the device have to do for someone on the other side of the digital divide to be desirable?’” Not to say this is a bad initiative, but he should have asked his users.

World’s biggest rural wireless network in India!: “Kerala one of the southern states in India has launched wireless broadband connectivity to rural areas where land lines or cellular phones are not available. The Kerala State IT Mission Department has setup 550 internet kiosks covering 3500 square kilometers of land.

The services available will be Internet access, VoIP Telephony and Video conferencing.”

Interestingly, I plan to spend a few weeks in Kerala in October, so I can investigate. Here’s the CNET story.

By the way, Victor Lombardi is now an independent consultant, with a focus on helping you setting up good teams and processes for design. Victor knows what he’s talking about, so if you want to improve the way your organization does design, it wouldn’t hurt to talk to him.

Victor:
“Organizations that have hired talented designers don’t always produce good designs.” And the reasons are many. Organizations with large usability teams do not consistently provide more usable designs than organizations with NO usability team. This doesn’t mean usability is useless. It means large organizations (and small ones) have a logic of their own, and we haven’t entirely figured out how that works.

Om Malik on Broadband: Glocalizing your phone. Since I am starting a time in my life when I’ll be between Belgium and New York a lot (they have about the same amount of inhabitants), I’m experimenting with phone services.

Skype is working great for broadband to broadband calls. There is often some fiddling with headphones, cables and mikes and such, so for now I’m using it for planned calls: let’s call tomorrow at that time. You have to be at your computer after all. Biggest advantage: it’s completely free. Skype also lets you call landlines (and mobiles) at prices similar to using a calling card, but I still have to be at my computer to do it.

Next I want to try out one of the VOIP services, which are closer to a real phone service, and are significantly cheaper than a real phone service. The new one mentioned in the article above even allows unlimited calls between the US and Europe, if I understand it correctly. Calls to “real” phones. Lots of interesting stuff. Still, all these services do have problems now and then, so they’re still not as solid as a tried and tested old fashioned phone.

I just knew Knowspam.net’s (an anti-spam service) challenge-response spam system (a new sender is sent an email with a link to a captcha page to prove they’re not a spammer script) had to have some strange side effects.

I experienced one today, subscribing to Evolt’s the List. After entering my email in their standard Mailman form, I was sent a confirmation email. Knowspam automatically replied with an email requesting them to visit a webpage. EZMLM interpreted this as a confirmation and subscribed me.

The net result is that anyone can subscribe me to any similar mailing list system, since Knowspam will automatically reply to unknown senders. Well, no system is perfect.

I’ve been setting up my home office and trying to get some good working practices going. Having 2 desks, one for the computer and one for paperwork helps me stay away from idle surfing. Having a radio helps spending a lot of time in this place. I’m also writing a detailed log of things I’ve done. It often helps to write down what I’ve done, and where I’m stuck, in order to decide on next steps. Moving on!

Ever since I read How Users Matter, I see it’s influence everywhere - in the co-construction of users and technology. In other words, technology doesn’t happen because of some kind of technological inevitability (an assumption geeky people like me tend to have), but users and non-users both influence the development of technology.

A simple example is The perfect weblog system this blogging wishlist.

Another example is an email conversation I’ve been having with a responsive company the past 2 weeks. As a result, they’ll be offering some pretty cool videoblogging features in September. Real users really matter.

Feld Thoughts: Bootstrapping Top 10 List: “If your answer to “What kind of company are you going to start?” is something like “Well, I have a few different ideas…” stop immediately.”

Good reminders about starting your own company. I’m one of those people who always have 20 different projects going on and (and this is the scary bit) tend to not finish many of them.

Adam Curry is starting a daily audio post called Daily Source Code, in MP3.

The BBC is quietly preparing a challenge to Microsoft and other companies jostling to reap revenues from video streams. It is developing code-decode (codec) software called Dirac in an open-source project aimed at providing a royalty-free way to distribute video .

Wired News: South Korean Company Buys Lycos: “South Korea’s top website operator, Daum Communications, is to buy the U.S. portal business of Spain’s Terra for $95 million, less than 1 percent of the $12.5 billion Terra paid near the height of the Internet boom.”