Chemical carrots

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Monkeymagic has been listening to Dr. Robin Dunbar:

“Dunbar was talking about his new book, The Human Story. One of the ideas in it was that religion, myth and story-telling are cohesive forces – they offer ways to help us make the trade-off between short-term desires and long-term gains, and they oil the wheels in our social machinery.

Religious ecstasy, feeling at one with the (socially constructed) world, and that buzz of being in an audience watching something good all seem to be signs that opiates are beginning to float round our circuitry.

These chemical carrots exist as an aid to group-forming. But here’s the rub. These same carrots might also ensure that the group acts against any individual who might take away their high. The bigger the high, the bigger the aggression.”

The internet must be such a great petri dish for scientists like Dr. Dunbar. I met him once at a Cap-Gemini event examining how religions are built, but I forgot to ask him if he took note of online groupthink and flamewars.

» MonkeyMagic: The Flipside of the Collective is War.

One-stringed instruments

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Via John Battelle’s SearchBlog, the chief of Amazon’s A9 search engine Udi Manber declares:

“Think about how the Web has changed your life in the last 10 years. Now, try to extrapolate 10 years forward and you should feel dizzy. We’re still in day one of developing and innovating in search. There’s still a lot of exciting discoveries to be made,”

In his keynote to the WWW Conference in NYC, he goes on to say:

“For most users, they expect it to be as simple as possible and that’s a barrier. If music was invented 20 years ago, we’d all be playing one-string instruments,”

which struck me at first as a statement that would make a crowd of developers chuckle, but otherwise isn’t particularly helpful.

First up: if music was invented 20 years ago then there wouldn’t be much differentiation in expertise between players and the listeners. They would probably be very happy with the one-stringed instruments, grinning like loons, thinking that this new ‘music’ stuff was where it was at.

Secondly: complaining that your ‘users’ are holding you back is not a argument most users have a lot of sympathy with, cf. Boo.

However, if one interprets it as a comment on the medium – on the difficulty in communicating with computers and through digital interfaces – then perhaps it makes sense.

If A9 and Amazon commit their resources to understanding how to play a few more strings and still get their audience humming along with them, then the search engine wars won’t be over till the fat lady sings.

Or something.

Dark knights in London

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Dan moblogs the new Batman movie being filmed with Bloomsbury as a backdrop.

“I didn’t see any of the glittering cast (dir. Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Katie Holmes, Morgan Freeman, Rutger Hauer etc.) though I did see plenty of replica US police cars with Gotham Police Department insignia on the side. Rather incongruous in genteel Bloomsbury, I can tell you.”

Well, if a Welshman can be Bruce Wayne, why can’t Gotham City be Bloomsbury? Come to think of it, there are some great contenders for Arkham Asylum in Wales… this in my hometown, for instance.

Stealing sheep by default

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“Anyone who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep.” – Frederick Goudy

The Typepad templates insist on letter-spacing or tracking the type of the section headers in my side bar. I don’t have a clue how to get round this other than to upgrade to the $150 pro level, which is far to much money to spend on the self-indulgence of blogging, let alone the self-indulgence of being a typography nerd, when most people probably read this tripe with the type their RSS-reader dictates.

I’ve fiddled as much as I can to try and get the design to something I like (no way I can find to make the main body of text any wider – which really ticks me off as it’s not quite a comfortable reading width for a single column, and it’s a fixed, not ‘fluid’ design) within the constraints of the Typepad UI, which really, really encourages fiddling. The ‘safety’ it inspires, along with the myriad tiny but tempting changes one can make lead to hours of fiddling.

6Apart should sell some AdWords space in their interface, the amount of time my eyeballs are in it…

Massputer

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Om Malik and Rajesh Jain have been thinking about a Massputer, a $300 device that

“should be able to do basic tasks like writing documents, Internet surfing, email and perhaps some business-related tasks like data entry.”

I am guessing that this is different to the much-touted “Simputer” of a couple of years ago, in that it is not designed to be mobile, ruggedised or adapted in any way other than to be affordable.

Om writes:

“The $300 sticker is vital- it keeps the devices affordable, and at the same time allows the corporation selling this massputer makes a decent profit. Gizmos such as color televisions, washing machines, refrigerators and air conditioners were snapped up in large numbers once they were priced right around $300. The proliferation of mobile phones in the emerging world is proof that at the right and affordable price people everywhere will adopt the right technology. There was a time when a mobile phone cost $400 and a mere 10 million people had the service. Now more than 400 million phones will be sold this year and 1.4 billion people, many in not very rich countries, will make mobile calls. That is because the price of the phone at $100 is now affordable in these emerging countries. More users means the price-per-minute has come down as well. In short, everyone benefits.

The social implications of Massputer cannot be underscored. Popularity of cell phones and text messaging promoted social revolutions, and peaceful protests in hitherto turbulent societies in Asia. Philippines comes to mind. I believe the availability of a Massputer connected to the Internet will help develop more educated, more informed and more open societies. If rest of the world has to embrace the principles of free markets, they need the tools. Massputer is a perfect example.”

Unlike the Massputer, The Simputer and other projects to create affordable, accessable ICTs have followed the dedicated, simplified ‘information appliance’ design route, assuming that the societies that need access to ICT need robust and simplified products to begin with.

Sugata Mitra’s work at the NIIT showed that even in rural areas with little exposure to technology and lower level of literacy – people, especially children learned to use computers (albeit with ruggedized input devices) in short order with no training.

Ultimately, people who want access to information and computing power want access to the same as everyone else, not a ‘special’ user-experience which keeps them on the wrong side of a new type of digital divide. Om and Rajesh make a great business argument for the Massputer also – let’s hope someone takes them up on it.

Hosted

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I have moved over to Typepad, as my MT installation was getting broken, complicated and onerous to fix.

It means I have lost the design temporarily that Tom coded for me, but I’ll try and edge back towards that as time and Typepad’s training-wheels allow.

Comments should work again now, although I’m a little wary of the lack of comment-spam control that Typepad has, and the reports of deeply unpleasant amounts of deeply unpleasant comment-spam that friends have gotten, so we’ll see how we go.

The RSS feed for this site is now http://blackbeltjones.typepad.com/work/index.rdf

Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for reading.

User-centred RSS

moleitau

Robert Scoble of Microsoft uses persona-driven design in illustrating the potential of RSS.

Has there been any serious user-research and investigation of RSS from a user-experience or information science point-of-view?

Not just the UX of the aggregators or readers, but how people might use RSS in their daily information foraging behaviour, and as part of a greater mix of media that we’re all swimming in these days.

Or has anyone looked further outside that to ‘pain-points’ in people’s everyday lives where an rss-type delivery of information or services might bring benefit?

Greetings from (over and over again) Astbury Park, NJ

moleitau

In a feature puffing this week’s e3 and bemoaning lack of plot or gameplay in current videogame offerings, USAToday gets this bizarre quote:

”Consumers expect to have another experience based on a (game) franchise. The same is true, on a psychological basis, in the music business,” [Sony Computer Entertainment America president Kaz] Hirai says. ”You don’t call Born in the USA ‘Bruce Springsteen 7.’ But if you want to go back and experience the world of Bruce Springsteen again, you buy his new album. It is catering to consumer wants and needs to re-experience that artist, that franchise or that motion picture.” The key, he says, is that developers must also continue to ”keep pushing the envelope with new franchises so they will be next year’s sequels.”

Perhaps it’s just me, that seems like a mind-bendingly odd (and faintly depressing) way to look at the work of an musician; and it doesn’t do that much for gaming either.

Bruce Springsteen is not a world.

I think.

No comment

moleitau

Came back from Australia to find the commenting on this site faulty. They’re being lost somewhere, somehow. I don’t have the time or the facillity to sort it out, so for now if you have something to add, mail me. The world will probably scrape by with one less place to debate search-box positioning, cities, bad kerning and comic book physics.