Went to get a pizza on my way home, and sat in the booby chair in pizza restaurants where you wait alone for your take-out pizza, while all around you laugh with their loved ones.
I surrended to the in-restaurant sound system, took out my earphones, ritually-wrapped them around my iPod and put it down on the table in front of me.
The secret sign had been deployed.
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If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s medieval mysticism and conspiracy a la Eco‘s Templar plots in “Foucault’s Pendulum” [currently reading] or the fictitious renaissance seer Rambaldi who supplies much of the macguffinalia of Alias.
So finding a post on Tesugen which mentioned Raymundus Lullus set me going a treat.
Who was he?
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Hopefully put to rest by this report.
“Instead of implementing personalization strategies, the report suggests, companies should concentrate on the basics, such as making their sites easy to search and navigate.
“Given flexible, usable navigation and search, Web site visitors will be more satisfied with their experiences and will find fewer barriers to the profitable behavior sought by site operators,” according to the report published Tuesday. “In fact, good navigation can replace personalization in most cases.”
The report criticized personalization as not only ineffective, but surprisingly costly.
Personalizing a site was more than twice as likely to result in finding visitors who would never pay for anything, as it was to attract paying customers, Jupiter’s study found.
Operating the personalized Web site cost more than four times what operating a “comparable dynamic site,” Jupiter found. The report said costs came primarily from the human effort needed to measure results, manage rules and optimize the system, on top of the licensing costs for personalization software from vendors such as Broadvision, Epiphany, Teradata, IBM and ATG.
Stymieing personalization campaigns is consumers’ deep-seated suspicion of Web sites that try to extract information from them, the report found.”
An ex-colleague of mine Matt Karas has steadily held this belief (that personaisation projects never achieve a return on the investment) for the last 7/8 years I’ve known him. Although I reckon that smart reactive personalisation can make a service a lot more pleasurable and easy to use [especially for attention-impoversihed interfaces], I think pretty much the same now.
Hopefully, senior managers and the like who only can be convinced by something when they read it in a Jupiter report will now think again about the ROI of big content management and personalisation projects that don’t address tough basic service / business design questions but opt for a technological solution.
Foe is at Digital ID World in Denver, and a talk there on RFID has inspired her to some wonderful speculation about the social life of objects:
“Imagine a book that can say I have been read by 36 people before you – in 3 cities (London, Sydney and Helsinki) – and all of them paused on page 132. I once spent 5 days in the lift at the British Library, just travelling up and down, after being released by a BookCrosser.”
In a brief IM-exchange with Paul about the idea, he remarked that “its so easy to get hung up on the negative aspects of RFID”. Perhaps because we hear so very few imaginative or empowering scenarios such as this one.
Foe has this from Oliver Goodenough’s talk at ‘The place of values in a world of facts’ conference/event last Saturday:
“According to Oliver Goodenough… people possess domain-specific capacities in their evolved psychology for tangible property, tied to their emotions. And culture and law have tried to expand the notion of property into other domains – e.g. intellectual property that have much weaker links to the emotions. He therefore argues that intellectual property, although a good idea formally, is too new for people to respect.”
Goodenough’s talk was thought-provoking and delivered at breakneck speed… hopefully the LSE will post the papers soon enough.
In the the mean-time, I have some exceedingly rough notes from Richard Dawkins and Frans de Waals talks…
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here.
I had a couple from a Q&A and signing of Quicksilver [wiki] he did tonight in London. I had a sound file of him answering a question I asked of him regarding “In the beginning was the command line”. I captured both the images and the sound on my phone.
Which has now just reformatted itself.
No-one reading this really needs a newsflash along the lines of “gosh, phones are complicated these days”, but still it seems unacceptable that your phone can crash. That your phone can wipe itself.
We are more forgiving of our PCs, as, while the data they hold or the tasks they enable may be crucial – in general they inhabit a far less intimate and personal place in our lives.
As our phones become not only repositories of contact details, but of images, sounds and memories (of, oh, meeting a favourite author perhaps); that position will only consolidate. And increase the burden of reliability placed upon them in turn.
That reliability need not just be measured in uptime or how robust the hardware is; it could be something as simple as improving the interface design around tasks such as capturing media. To not only ease the process of capture, but also ensure the safety of ones memories. Digital camera interfaces, while imperfect in many ways make sure that even novices know how many pictures can safely still be captured at any point on the device’s memory.
My P800 does not do even this*. Had it alerted me, I maybe would have deleted some drunken pictures of my mate’s shoes to capture a picture of one of my literary heroes. Now I have lost the lot. Drunken shoes, hero-author and pictures of where I proposed.
The irony of all this of course is my question to Stephenson was about the Eloi and the Morlocks as referenced in his “In the beginning was the command line” essay, and whether he thought the situation for the technologically-baffled Eloi of this world was worsening.
His answer was: yes, it’s getting worse.
This Eloi can only nod his head in between banging it on the keyboard.
##THUD##
OFVJAB
##THUD##
AVFQIW
##THUD##
ITHGTOU
Damn.
A typeface designed to combat dyslexia [thanks Jeremy!]
Erik Benson (excuse the long quote):
“We’ve all participated in processes that have grown stale. Directions will always go bad. So of course someone has to maintain the processes. Hopefully it’s a smart person. But we’re back where we started… the group’s intelligence is still being maintained by an individual, and if that individual leaves the company, he/she will have to be replaced. So companies build processes in order to ensure that the processes are properly maintained. That doesn’t solve the problem though. Someone has to maintain those processes that are maintaining process. Soon, you have a cascade of processes maintaining processes that is so complex that they cannot be maintained by an individual any longer. They become locked and unmaintainable. Then they become stale. Then they make people go down the wrong roads and there’s no simple way to change that.
That’s why I think that building process (alone) is not the correct way to improve the intelligence of a group. If I were in charge of improving the intelligence of a group, maybe I would create process-killing individuals who worked alongside process-making individuals.”
I’ve definitely seen process become dogma in a number of workplaces, particularly around user-centred design.
Theory: because it’s actually common-sense.
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Dan picks up on the Apple luxury item Nick Hornby took on his Desert Island, thus destroying the entire premise of the show:
“He pretty much single-handedly destroyed 60 years of radio show – the 8 records he’d chosen paled into insignificance compared to the 10000 he’d just snuck on to the notional island in his pocket”
^ Cover of The Economist, November 23rd-29th, 2002 © The Economist
Today is my last day at the BBC. It’s been a hard, but fun two years where I’ve had the chance to work on some cool projects (BBCi Search, iCan) and with some great people.
Next up for me is a bit of an adventure. I’m moving after 8 years in London [here it is, putting on an amazing show {via 2lmc}], to Helsinki, Finland; where I’m going to be joining Nokia. On my contract it says “Manager, concept development”, which actually means I’m going to be working in the user-experience area of their Insight & Foresight division.
I&F is charged with looking at “disruptive technologies” and trends. I’ll be working to make the insights the tech and business people have with us user-focussed folk into concrete things. Prototypes or illustrations that communicate these ideas clearly to the rest of the business.
The Economist cover pictured above has haunted me for a year or so, so I’m really happy that I can start working in the sphere of mobile, personal, social technology.
I think it’s going to rock.
Petafloptimism 
