Month: March 2003

Forget “Hamlet on the holodeck”

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…it’s all about scriptable dancing bluetooth robots performing West Side Story round the watercooler:

“so damn cool, so damn script them to dance when I get email, so damn walk around my desk and stand by my diary when it’s a birthday and eat that you closed garden SPOTwatch, so all of that that it needs to be said again: Dancing Bluetooth robots!”

Oh, and before I forget, I must thank Matt Webb for his nice words about the underlying concepts of BBCi Search.

» Interconnected.org: “slipping gently into the age of ubicomp…”

Fashion telemetry, fading telempathics.

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Telempathics in keitai-culture:

“It seems girls just wanna find common ground, even if it’s designer handbags or the right pair of shoes. For 17-year-old Ayaka Sasaki, who lives on a farm in northern Japan, “Girls Walker gives me a heads up on what’s popular in Tokyo, so I don’t feel like such a hick.”

Meanwhile, Adam V-2 starts planning a moblogging conference, and the telempathics I really want to access today are only available via the googlecache.

» WiReD 11.03: Play: Blog Party
» Girlswalker.com
[via Chris and Keitai-l]

Fit to burst

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Martin Belam from the BBCi search team is thinking about how ‘word bursts’ could help improve the performance of our “best links” recommendations:

“…what I set out to do was to capture these ‘bursts’ of words from day-to-day on the service. That in itself isn’t hard, my principle of comparing snapshots of the service usage and calculating the differences works fine for this, but there is no context to the individual words.

Because it is nearly comic relief day, there were bursts in the use of ‘red’, ‘nose’ and ‘day’ as individual words within search – but on their own, without a human eye over them, they don’t logically group themselves together.

I wanted to find a way to put them into their context automatically for our editorial team – so they can concentrate on finding the best sites for our users, and not have to second-guess how they are going to look for them.”

» Currybet.net: “word bursts within BBC search log”

Storytelling

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From photomatt’s notes of SXSW panel “The Future: User-Centered Design Goes Mainstream” which featured Marc Rettig, JJG and Molly Steenson:

“…we make too big a deal of our prototype. A good story can be a prototype. Some film directors prototype their movies by telling people the story on a best. Be wise in how you apply those techniques. Iteration is at the heart of this. You can spend as much time as you want, you?re still going to be wrong. Three times around the wheel gets you pretty far.”

More on storytelling today from the barefoot doctor:

“What’s important and of real value, as opposed to relative, is not the myth you may feel tempted to use to justify yourself, but your own authority in terms of you being the one and only author of your own life story. You don’t need to draw on any higher authority to justify the story you’re creating – your very presence here is justification in itself.”

And finally, Belle and Sebastian:

“Now you’re a storyteller you might think you are without responsability
But in directions, actions and words
Cause and effect
You need consistency”

Retail Therapy

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a picture of my new phone, the p800Was down-in-the-dumps on Wednesday, so went and bought a p800.

It’s lovely.

Mini-review: camera not as good as Nokia7650, pda/pim stuff not fully explored by me yet, limited bluetooth fiddling due to lack-of-dongle atm; but the phone-UI is the biggest surprise: it’s great. One hand Jog-dial access to everything you need to do.

“Laffaire des Quatorze”

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Matt Locke has uncovered some wonderful stuff looking into slow networks:

“Googling on information for the slow networks post below, I came across this excellent paper from Princeton about communication networks in 18th Century Paris. The article gives an analysis of ‘Laffaire des Quatorze’ – an investigation by Parisian police into the author of some seditious poetry that had been circulating amongst students, clerks and priests. The interesting thing was that when they started tracing the route of the poetry, there was not the straight line back to an author that they expected, but a complex network of alterations, repurposing and adaptions that criss-crossed between 14 main protagonists (hence ‘The Affair of the Fourteen’). Its almost like a political combination of slow networks and a ‘rip.mix.burn’ philosophy, where the adaptation is part of the condition of a slow network. Very interesting…”

» Test.org.uk: More slowness – “L’affaire des Quatorze”