A pound of art

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Warren Ellis on his Bad Signal mailing list [my emphasis]:

“As of right now, there are 5400 people on the Bad Signal.
If all of you went to www.e-sheep.com and paid a lousy 25 cents to read a Patrick Farley comic, he would instantly become the best-paid serial creator in indie comics. If half of you went, he’s still be doing pretty well, probably constituting a pro rate for the work he’s doing. For twenty-five cents, microcasting work to an online audience of less than 3000 people would give him a shot at a living gig. Expand that out. Even 25 cents for an mp3 multiplied by half the readership of Bad Signal would mean that that musician is doing better than 90% of professional musicians — that is, earning more than US$600 a month. Seriously.

In fact, to support four artists you like, all you’d have to do is put aside an entire dollar a month to buy their art. And tell your friends.”

I guess this is the telling my friends part. Warren makes a good side-point about the use of tribe.net or other social-network services as markets for what he calls “microcasting” of creative work. There’s probably something to be learnt / crosspollinated from the creative networks around MMORPGs, but I’m not sure what. Anyway – go give Patrick Farley some money…

Oh good grief

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Ashley Highfield, head of BBC New Media:

“Our aspiration is to make it really simple – we have got to make the web as easy as just pressing the red button on interactive TV and I think that is something we can do.

“Clearly those people who have already got broadband are the early adopters and I am not sure they are the people who will tip it for the majority.”

The BBC is also working on other ways to increase consumer interest in broadband. Mr Highfield is considering “broadbanderising” the BBC website, which gets 10m visitors a month.”

“Broadbanderising?” Apart from it being an abomination of a word worthy of Dubya – has this man never heard of Loosemore’s Law? Make the web like TV? I know the BBC is meant to provide stuff the market cannot, but when the market walked away from interactive TV, they might have been on to something. Didn’t he learn anything at his previous companies?

Gah! Why am I letting the BBC still stress me out! I have no words. So I’ll take someone elses:

“He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the people want is creating a fictitious demand for lower standards which he will then satisfy.”

Lord Reith would have made people love the command line, bless ‘im.

Amazonster

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smallsocialamazon.gif So, the conversation went a little like this:

[Foe]: “I think Amazon would come up with a better social network service than Google would”

[Me]: “Haven’t they done that already?”

[Foe]: “What do you mean?”

[Me]: “Well, they’ve got straight to the part where the social interactions of thousands of people get them more cash, without having to deal with all that troublesome dating business”

[Foe]: “Heh… Yeah, I suppose… but what I mean is something where you see what your friends are buying and reading and wishing for, and that activity is what prompts connections and conversations”

Which got me thinking. Amazon already have incredible features for harnesses our connections and social behaviours, but they are all fairly anonmous, unlike the wave of social network services. Could Amazon benefit from some of the UI features of those sites?
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Stuff

moleitau

and nonsense:

Orkut

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Like many others I had a few emails inviting me to join Orkut this morning. I had first heard mention of it yesterday afternoon when some colleagues found it, and started snickering about it’s mission statement to make people ‘come together’.

It turns out that Orkut is finnish slang for orgasm.

Other than that what to say? It’s YASNS, it looks terrible (pastel colours and wierd faux deco drop-caps? urgh!) but actually has some pretty nice interaction design going on. I think it’s actually the most usable out of the SNS so far, and I suppose this will have to be a trend – new social-network-services aiming lowering barrier to particpation and transfer of networks as you weren’t the first.

It flows pretty intuitively, but with some funny quirks like only giving you access to some rating/karma features when it decides to. It’s affiliated to Google so I guess that’s worth thinking about.

There’s lovely

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“”If minority languages don’t make the leap to being used on the [computer] desktop as a fully functioning part of that desktop, people are going to close off a large part of their working lives to their minority language and use English instead.

“If it’s important to have road signs in Welsh, it’s even more important to have Welsh on computer screens where people are using the language every day.”

Instead of being driven mad by messages like “Browsing the network is not possible”, Welsh computer users can now tear their hair out when “Nid yw pori’r rhwydwaith yn bosib” keeps popping up.”

» Western Mail: Microsoft logging on to Welsh

Solar cycles

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solarcycle.jpg

I think it’s getting darker later here in Helsinki, and The Sun is creeping up in the sky a bit. At least when I left the office today the sky was dark-blue, not pitch-black.

It is very beautiful here at the moment… and very (-13c) cold.

Constant, partial, sorry what were you saying?

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Good overview of “absent presence” and other afflictions of modern technology, found via LMG:

For years, researchers have discussed how cell phones have trampled over the once communal public space of sidewalks and restaurants. The idea is that we may be physically on a street corner, but our distracted minds are not. We do little bits of everything and none well.

A convergence of technologies is making the distractions still worse. A new kind of personal computer called the Media Center allows users to easily watch TV on the same screen where they swap instant messages and burn music DVDs. And Asian cell-phone companies have begun building television tuners into their most advanced models.

How we manage these relationships between technology and people is a growing source of anxiety. It’s depressing, but somehow fitting, that convergence now allows us to be distracted from our distractions.

The article goes onto cover methods of rationing information, such as “email-free days” in organisations. In fact most of the suggestions mentioned for managing the relationships between technology and people are seen as ‘on or off’ decisions… or at their most sophisticated: ‘throttling’ the amount.

There’s no mention of changing the information into meaning through good design (see the Bruce Sterling quote I posted earlier about “what to pay attention to”) – information can be made sense of, and the burden on our attention made less by great information design, information architecture, interaction design, user-interface design.

I think it’s fantastic that journalists, bloggers, technologists and hackers are starting to pay more attention to sociologists, ethnographers and other theorists on the human condition and technology’s effects. However, research and analysis takes you only so far – synthesis means design. It would be a shame if designers couldn’t benefit from this recent, reinvigorated dialogue, as I think the other parties would definitely benefit by including them.

Great design internalises the observed human needs, and instinctively creates useful, beautiful things.

Great design creates meaning from information.

I guess however Foucault’s Pendulum demonstrates we could always end up with “meaning overload”…

» TwinCities.com: Pioneer Press: “Attention Please!”