loose wire blog

When Technology Lets Us Down

(from tcbuzz's flickr collection)

Two recent events from the UK underlined how dangerous our dependence on technology can be.

The soccer UEFA Cup final in Manchester was overshadowed by riots when one of the massive screens installed in the city for fans who didn't have tickets broke down.

And more recently, the inquest into the death of a former BBC editor found that she committed suicide after failing to find support among her colleagues. Her line manager, the inquest heard, tried to find her counselling:

However, her manager sent an email to the wrong address and his request was never acted on.

Technology is passive, and doesn't take into account the implications of failure. In the first case the technology either didn't work, or those setting it up didn't know how to work (or fix) it. In the second case, the error was more obviously human: the sender of an email did not enter the correct address, or did not enter the address correctly.

This is more about our failure to anticipate failure in technology, and our blind dependence on it working.

Obviously, it would have been smart of the organizers in Manchester to have had a back-up plan in place for an eventuality like a screen breaking down. And the line manager's apparent failure to see whether the email arrived at its destination or even to have picked up a phone and tried to reach the counsellor directly.

But perhaps there are ways for technology to further help us by providing a layer of redundancy? In the case of the screen, could there be some sort of diagnostics test which would alert the technicians that something was amiss, or about to be amiss?

And, in the case of email, the answer is perhaps simpler. There are tools out there to determine whether an email has arrived safely and been opened. The one I use is MessageTag, which will inform me whether an email I have tagged with the service has been opened. (The advanced service will give me a list of emails I have tagged and show me which ones have been opened, and which havent--a very useful checklist to show me which emails I need to follow up on.)

(There are privacy implications with services like MessageTag/MSGTAG, which I've gone into before. But sparing use of the service, I believe, is acceptable, so long as you give recipients the option of opting out of future tagging. Other people use the receipt acknowledgement option in Microsoft Outlook and some other email programs.)

We perhaps need to be reminded that technology, as it stands, won't save us from ourselves.

Technorati Tags: failure,bbc,uefa,manchester,technology,suicide,email

The Size of the Future

(This is a guest post from a friend and long-time colleague, Robin Lubbock of WBUR, who will be contributing to Loose Wire Blog. You can read his blog, the Future of New(s), here.)

Why don't you buy hard-back books? Either they are too expensive, or too big. They are too big to comfortably hold in one hand. So if you're sitting in bed trying to read you've got to find a way to prop the thing up. Not a hurdle you can't overcome. But an inconvenience.

Now think about the reader of the future. It's the same issues. Size, readability, and cost. Any lessons you've learned from book reading, apply them to the electronic book and you'll be imagining the electronic reader of the future.

So why hasn't anyone made a good electronic book yet?

I was in Staples the other day and an assistant asked me what I wanted. I said "I want something about three or four times the size of an iPhone which I can use for browsing the Web when I'm in bed." He said they had nothing like that, but he wanted one too.

So when I saw photos of a group of proposed readers in an article by John Markoff in the New York Times this weekend I thought my dream had come true.

But Markoff has a different view. He says he also used to think he was looking for a mid-sized reader for the Web. He went over some of the issues. But he reached the conclusion that although chip power means that you can't get book performance out of a phone sized reader yet, people could be comfortable reading newspapers on a three-and-a-half-inch screen.

I took his implication to be that if people are happy with a small screen for reading newspapers and blogs, there will be no call for a mid-sized reader.

But I still want one. And I still believe the company that successfully develops a tool that has the same benefits as a novel, in usability, portability and ruggedness, will make a fortune.

The Book Will Outlive Us All

A wonderful post by an old friend and former colleague, Martin Latham, on why the book will outlast the e-reader:

Printed books are palimpsests of our lives. They bear our imprint: we press in them the mountain-holiday flower, we spill wine, bath water, suntan lotion and even tears on them. As babies, we chew them; as adults, we curl up with them. We crack their spines for pleasure: they are unbreakable. Tibetans wind them, mummy-style, in cloth (the unwrapping itself is a prefatory meditation).

Conversely, the great travel writer Wilfred Thesiger hated book jackets and had a post-purchase ritual of removing the garish cover to expose the tactile buckram. Others cannot resist writing in books, and there are now several works on "marginalia" through the ages. To a historian or anthropologist, the book, at 500 years old, is a new-born baby. It has a long life ahead of it.

The whole piece is worth a read. E-books will be good for "providing a channel for all those low-margin reference texts, siphoning off some of our overpublishing glut in an eco-friendly way." But books are much, much more: "an all-round psycho-sensory experience. Every reader has a few books which they love because they represent a transformation time in their lives."

Amen to all this. My friend is a bookseller, running a store in Canterbury, UK. We used to work in a bookshop together in the King's Road, a very happy episode of my life, despite the fact that the store itself was going bust. Being around books, and people who loved books, was a very nice way to earn a living.

It's unnerving to think I spend more time among bits and bytes than musty papyrus these days. I can't help thinking that the end of books as learning (as opposed to enjoyment) is on the way out. Watching today's students with their ubiquitous laptops and ready access to massive silos of information, where libraries are just places to plug in their MacBooks and Questia is the database of choice, one wonders where the serendipidity of wandering the aisles, thumbing through books that aren't on the reading list and spotting an interesting tome in the returned books stack, has gone.

Anyway, read Martin's piece.

Technorati Tags: books, waterstones, ebooks, paper, print

Power to the Consumer. (Is That All?)

Jan Chipchase, roving Nokia researcher, as ever inspires and provokes with this piece on the psychology of the coffee cup:

This Akasaka coffee shop includes a row of accessible power sockets (running a long the edge of the window) primarily to support laptop use - though over the course of an hour a number of people charged their phones (yes people here sometimes carry petite phone chargers). Recharging mobile devices in coffee shops is nothing new - but to what extent does the explicit nature of the infrastructure lead to new behaviours? Like? Well, maybe plugging in a printer? Or setting up a server. Or, or...

Jan points to the issues raised by offering power to consumers:

In some ways customers that don't use the power socket are subsidising those that do - after all they pay a the same for a cup of coffee. Or do power using power-users spend more money either on more items or on items that will last longer? What if the electricity socket was a stand-alone working micro market? As you plug into the socket your devices authenticates itself to the system, negotiates how much power (or fuel-cell fuel) it needs and charges away. As with the explicit presence of the socket to what extent does the explicit presence of a micro-market for power this extend existing behaviours? And given the relaxed ambiance that this coffee shop is trying to create is it desirable to create a market in this context?

It fascinates me that the average high street these days is as likely to have as many coffee shops as it is other kinds of outlets. And that people work, live, play, cry and get divorced in them. Why do we need the hustle and bustle of others to be productive?

But for me the biggest mystery is why these outlets don't bother to try to sell something more than just coffee, crappy CDs and bad finger food to these customers. Selling power to them might be a cheap shot, but let's face it, you're not really selling them coffee. You're selling them a place to work. A noise, an ambience. You're selling them the chance to feel cool. To show off their Air. To furtively check out members of a sexually appealing gender. To have physical proximity. To engage with engaging staff. A chance to get away from the office/family/silence.

That's what they're buying. But what about what they'd like to buy, that they just haven't considered yet? A chance to meet the people around them? A way to build an informal network with other users? To be able to print from their computers? To arrange pick up by FedEx? An ATM machine?

To me, Starbucks is never really about the coffee. Well, it is for the people who go in there, queue and then take it with them (and then, I think for a lot of them it's about delaying arrival in the office, or having something in their hands as a sort of weapon to take on the day; if it's halfway through the day it's a chance to get out of the office on an errand that is acceptable.) But for the people who stay in Starbucks, they're buying something else. And who knows what else they might buy if you try to sell it to them?

Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect: Behaviours Reflected

Technorati Tags: starbucks, jan chipchase, nokia, japan, power outlets, social space, work, coffee, environment

Reforestation, Google Earth Style

Here's a very cool way to mix technology and environmental stuff, via the Google Earth Blog. (Interest declared: It's part of the NEWtrees project, the brainchild of my publisher and friend Mark Hanusz):

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) offers you the opportunity to buy a tree which will be planted in a rainforest in Sebangau National Forest in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. In return, they not only plant the tree, but give you a Google Earth KML file in return with the location coordinates of your tree. Theoretically, as Google continues to update with higher resolution satellite and aerial imagery, you should be able to watch the growth of your tree (and the others who donate trees) over the coming years. To get started, you simply go to the web site mybabytree.org. They have a very cute animation that will guide you through the process, and you can use Paypal to make your donation. You can see the location and list of trees purchased so far here . Borneo is another location, like the Amazon, where rain forests are disappearing due to logging at a freightening pace. I hope WWF will extend the concept to the rapidly declining rain forests in the Amazon.

Why's this so good? Because it leverages straightforward technology -- GPS, Google Earth -- to make the global significant on an individual scale. I remember when I was a kid my dad planted a tree for me in Northampton as part of a local Men of the Trees project (now the International Tree Foundation). Sadly the project was bulldozed to make way for a bypass, but hopefully that's not likely to happen in Kalimantan. Certainly I could relate a lot more to one tree than a forest.

 

Google Earth Blog: Buy a Tree for the Rainforest - Get a KML

Technorati Tags: google earth, environment, borneo, indonesia, kalimantan, nokia, gps, satellites, green, trees, reforestation, timber

The Other American Idols

My wife's in the other room watching American Idol, and while I'm amazed it's been going so long, you gotta admire its emphasis on quality and professionalism. And no mention of money (isn't there something vaguely obscene about a program like Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader where avarice and greed are paraded before kids as incentives to learn?)

Anyway, while my wife's watching idolatry on a production line, I'm trading emails with the guy who wrote my favorite software of the moment, SuperNoteCard and a composer whose music I discovered as pirate tapes on the streets of Bangkok 20 years ago: Tim Story.

His Glass Green was the soundtrack to a dark period of my life and I still can't listen to those deceptively simple songs without being transported back to the night bus north to Sisatchanalai, pulling out of Morchit in the rain.

Anyway, I once confessed this to him in an email (after I'd tracked down the originals) and he was forgiving and very pleasant, so I'm proud to be one of the first to sign up for his new CD, Inlandish, not needing to listen to know it's going to be well worth the money. (Yes, it could be on MP3, but who cares?)

The point? I hate it when I can't even find an address on a website when I'm buying something. But that's so old wave: The new world is when we can discover and communicate directly with our heroes, whether they write great software that makes us more creative, or music to inspire us. And it feels good to support them.

American Idol fulfills an important role: finding the hidden gems scattered across America. But maybe the Internet does something even better: helps us find artisans who may be less interested in becoming idols to just making enough to be happy, and making others happy in the process.

Technorati Tags: software, mindola, tim story, music sharing, american idol, web 2.0

Computers: Right Back Where We Started

A lot of my time is spent writing for and talking to people for whom the computer remains a scary beast that is best kept at arm's length, or, better, in a closet. I feel for these people because I'm not naturally a techie myself.

I failed science and math in school and almost certainly would again if I retook those exams. (I blame the science teacher, an evil vicar who tormented me, but that's another story.) But perhaps these technophobes have a point? Perhaps computers and the Internet haven't really done us any favors?

Firstly, the stats. Has the computer/Internet boom made us more productive? Apparently not. Well, it did the first time around: the 1990s technology surge (the steep red bit in the chart above) made us all productive, and that continued until about 2003 (the extra years beyond the bubble burst helped by the momentum of the surge, and some serious cost-cutting. But since 2004 the U.S. has been in decline in terms of the rate of productivity growth (or trend productivity, to give it its proper name), to the point where we're pretty much back where we started in 1995. I know it doesn't exactly follow, but given a lot of us didn't have BlackBerries, ultraportable laptops and ubiquitous Internet connections in those days, does that mean we're doing about the same amount of work then as we are, with all those gizmos, now?

Scary thought. And in some ways the answer is yes. According to research firm Basex, nearly a third of our day is eaten up with interruptions from e-mail, cell phones, instant messaging, text messaging, and blogs like this one. In financial terms that's a lot of

McKinsey sees it differently: We've outsourced or automated all the simple stuff, so we're left with people whose jobs can't be done by computers.

I see it a little differently again. I believe that we have mistaken ubiquitous computing -- in other words, the ability to do stuff anywhere, anytime -- as making us more productive because we're filling "dead time". It's this misunderstanding of time that I think is causing us problems. Take some of these quotes from a story on how BlackBerries make us more productive, from July last year:

I can now use downtime--waiting to collect daughters, train journeys--to continue to read and action e-mails, which means I don't have a huge queue waiting for me when I'm next in the office

After a recent long weekend, I would normally have returned to around 150 e-mails ...Instead, I spent an hour on my PDA the night before I was due back into work, and the next morning, I walked in to only six mails that required attention. Not only did this make me more efficient, but it totally reduced my stress levels

The technology both increases output by enabling what would otherwise be unproductive downtime to be used positively, and is liberating in that it allows flexibility and responsiveness.

The BlackBerry has definitely extended the capability of utilizing 'dead' time effectively--trains, taxis, 10-minute waits or answering questions like this

We are all benefiting from quicker response times to things that need actioning 'now ... Communication between department managers is much quicker.

Each statement is usually followed by a 'I realise I need a balance/the wife hates it' comment, as if the user is aware of the pitfalls. But the pitfall is not the 'always on' culture this creates, or even the lack of awareness that the ability to react quickly to something will simply prompt another reaction and require another response. The pitfall is that the "dead time" of waiting for your daughter to finish school, or the "unproductive down time" is actually an important component of our lives, and therefore of our productivity.

Sitting in your car waiting for your kid, the lazy hour on a Sunday evening after the washing-up's cleared away and the kids are in bed, used to be time when you'd think about what needed to be done, or to reflect (on your daughter, hopefully, so you're mentally ready for her rather than still mentally scanning emails when she's gushing about gym class.) Dead time was there for a reason: a chance to think outside the box, reflect, think about that email you're going to send the boss rather than jab a misspelled couple of lines on your BlackBerry so you can cross that item off your Getting Things Done list.

Productivity may be slowing because we've just filled every second of that dead time already and there's nothing left to fill. If that's even partly true, then the productivity was fake, since it was based on a false assumption: that the dead time was empty, an unused resource. Anyone who has sat in a moving vehicle and looked out of the window reflecting on stuff knows that this is actually the most important part of the day, and by removing it most of our BlackBerry-wielding friends/colleagues/bosses/spouses have turned into zombies, unable to locate themselves in the here and now.

The solution then, to this productivity crisis is to use technology less, not more. I'm not suggesting we don't use BlackBerries -- although I don't -- but I'm suggesting we stop deluding ourselves that these gadgets are saving our marriage/hearts. They're not. They're like ping pong paddles with the ball on a piece of elastic -- we think are batting the problems out of our lives but they're just coming back at us. Time to put the bat down and look out the window.

Ideas Are Things

One guy I'm always inspired by is Jan Chipchase, who does more for Nokia's credibility than any of their products. Here he observes how small things are more likely to spread more rapidly than big ones, making them closer relations to ideas than to things:

Today we're comfortable with the rapid dissemination of information and ideas from one side of the globe to the other. What's in Tokyo today can be in Tehran tomorrow and vice versa.

When physical things reach a certain size - being pocketable seems about right, their ability to be picked up and moved around increases considerably. All things being equal small objects much like ideas, travel further, travel faster. They are put into bags, pockets and inevitably are introduced to people in far off lands. And if those people in far off lands like and value them enough, the container ships follow.

Great idea, and reminds me of Negroponte's bits and atoms shtick (sorry, meme.) Two points: Never underestimate the power of small things. People are much more likely to buy them than big ones, for the simple reason that they're less expensive. Retailers from Body Shop to IKEA understand this, and make sure there's lots of small things to buy in their shops so people feel they are part of the experience, even if they can't actually afford the lifestyle itself. And of course, these little products, and the branded bags they come in, walk out of the shop and around with the customer (in places like Indonesia, the bags are recycled as prestige items in themselves.)

Second point: Jan sees all this stuff because he travels. He is the modern equivalent of the foreign correspondent; because now traditional media can't afford them, it's people like him whose trained and observant eye (and great camera work) captures the stuff the rest of us don't see, either because we're not there or because we're not looking properly.

Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect: Further, Faster

Technorati Tags: nokia, jan chipchase, ideas, things, atoms, nicholas negroponte

We're All Information Gatherers Now

When we talk about the future of newspapers, the future of education, the future of media, and the future of learning we tend to ignore the most important aspect. We tend to focus on information delivery and not on the nature of information seeking. We think, somehow, that we still need to get the same kind of information to people, but just in a different way. But the bigger shift is how the Internet has changed what kind of information we're looking for and how we go about finding it.

A British Library report on the future of libraries [PDF] hits the nail on the head:

Library users demand 24/7 access, instant gratification at a click, and are increasingly looking for "the answer" rather than for a particular format: a research monograph or a journal article for instance. So they scan, flick and "power browse" their way through digital content, developing new forms of online reading on the way that we do not yet fully understand (or, in many cases, even recognise.)

A page later, the report says:

In general terms, this new form of information seeking behaviour can be characterised as being horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature. Users are promiscuous, diverse and volatile and it is clear that these behaviours represent a serious challenges for traditional information providers, nurtured in a hardcopy paradigm and, in many respects, still tied to it.

 John Naughton at The Observer helps put this in context:

What Marshall McLuhan called 'the Gutenberg galaxy' - that universe of linear exposition, quiet contemplation, disciplined reading and study - is imploding, and we don't know if what will replace it will be better or worse.

This is true, of course, not just of libraries and academia. It's true of newspapers and pretty much any medium that delivers information. The Internet has forced us, encouraged us, to develop scanning techniques way beyond the simple quick-reading skills of old. Now if I'm looking for information on the Gutenberg Galaxy I can do so quickly on Wikipedia simply by selecting the words on the page, right-clicking and selecting Search Google for... in the pop-up menu. Time taken: 2 seconds. (Indeed, Naughton and The Guardian/Observer could be considered somewhat backward by not providing the link in the piece itself.)

This ability to secure, and appetite for, quick access to snippets information (what I guess we used to call "gobbets") is part and parcel of the web and of the lives of those who spend any time on it. Why hunt for a dictionary if you can look it up on your cellphone/laptop/fridge display? The impact is still not properly understood or studied, however. If we satisfy our curiosity so easily, does our curiosity grow in all directions, both in breadth and depth, or does it flit from flower to flower like a bumble-bee in summer?

The British Library research seems to suggest the latter. Using words like horizontal, bouncing, checking, viewing, promiscuous, diverse and volatile seems to suggest we're entering a world where people are fickle and their attention spans short. Once the initial curiosity is satisfied ("What the hell is a gobbet?") the reader moves on, following the Serendipidity of the Hyperlink.

On the other hand, the word seems to suggest the readers have built-in safeguards against misinformation and inaccuracy. Our scanning skills are honed beyond merely being able to take in a page of information quickly. We -- or most of us; Facebook seems to presenting a challenge, if all the gullible messages my friends send me are representative -- are able to judge the source of information too, based on the layout, design and style of a web page and its contents.

This latter skill may be more important in the long run. Perhaps the shift is more about our understanding of what we need to know, and the time we can dedicate to knowing it, than to any shift in our attention span or ability to absorb deep columns of information.

The Gutenberg Galaxy, in fact, was bound to come to an end sometime. We simply have too much information to digest nowadays to be able, most of us, to take a leisurely stroll through the literature. And, frankly, in academic terms, much of the literature could be better and more tightly written. (I admit, I scanned the BT report and was mildly irritated it was a) in PDF format which slows digestion, b) didn't conform to usual layouts and c) lacked an executive summary and conclusion).

If there wasn't much information out there, and not much access to it, I would probably be quite happy dedicating my time to knowing a lot about Chaucer or the sex life of the fruitfly, and not much else. But the Internet has taught us a valuable lesson that we, as a race, seem to have forgotten: That there is so much stuff to learn out there we should be in a mad race to learn as much as we can about it as we can before we're run over by a Sat Nav-dependent truck.

Perhaps our generation will be the last to be stupid enough to think we know enough as individuals to be smart (or conversely, happy to wallow in our specialist expertise and general ignorance). Future generations may look back at us and ask why we were so incurious about all the things in front of us we didn't know anything about. Right now, I'd settle for knowing why the sky is blue, how many Grand Slam tournaments there are, what a grommet is and why there seem to be so many different types of plug to go on the end of a coaxial cable.

Thank God we're at last beginning to learn the skills necessary to find that stuff out before breakfast.

Reading:

John Naughton: Thanks, Gutenberg - but we're too pressed for time to read | Media | The Observer

Gutenberg and the changing nature of how we read and find information

'Google Generation' is a myth: pioneering research

Technorati Tags: printing, information, data, libraries, gutenberg, british library, research, web 2.0, future, guardian

The Innovation Gang

The AIA winners, Singapore Nov 2007

The past few weeks I've been interviewing and writing up the finalists for the Asian Innovation Awards and the Global Entrepolis awards, which are organized in part by my employer, The Wall Street Journal. It's the third time I've done it, and while it's great to interview them over the phone this was the first time I got to see all of them in the flesh.

The drive to innovate is a weird thing; if I had to identify one thing they've all got in common it's that they're all their own people. Not a blazing insight, I grant you, but they were characters in their own way, some quiet, some not so quiet, and it was frankly a pleasure to listen to their stories and then try to write them up.

Here are the WSJ.com stories (free access!) which appeared in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal Asia:

"Innovator Finds Clever Way to Wash Water" (gold winner - Australia)

"Creating Empowerment Through Cow Dung" (silver winner - Bangladesh) 

"Rickshaws Drive Entrepreneurship" (bronze winner - India)

"GES Winner Stifles Bollywood Piracy" (GES winner - India) 

Technorati Tags: innovation, aia, ges, singapore, wsj

Soccer 2.0

 

Photo: The Offside

In Soccer 1.0 the manager is king. But an Israeli football team is experimenting with a sort of crowd-sourcing, wisdom-of-the-Kop type approach, where fans monitor the game online and suggest starting line-up, tactics and substitutions.

Reuters reports from Tel Aviv that "diehard football fan Moshe Hogeg was so upset when star striker Lionel Messi was left off Argentina's side for a World Cup match against Germany last year that he teamed up with an online gaming company to buy a club where fans decide over the Internet who will play and in what position." Hogeg's company, an Israeli social network for sports fans called Web2sport, teamed up with online backgammon website Play65 to buy Hapoel Kiryat Shalom, a team in Israel's third amateur division.

Fans log on to the team's website and make suggestions and vote in poll which are monitored by an assistant to the coach. Ahead of the season's opening match some 6,000 people tried to log on to make suggestions. The team lost 3-2 to Maccabi Ironi Or Yehuda in injury time.

Needless to say, I have mixed feelings about this. I don't think crowd-sourcing is going to replace the genius of Wenger, Mourinho or Ferguson. On the other hand, as a Spurs fan, I certainly think manager Martin Jol could do with some help.

Press Release: The First Web 2.0 Football Club in the World

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, web2.0, wisdom of the crowd, soccer, israel

Design: It's All About Alarm Clocks

Business writer and entrepreneur Seth Godin throws out product ideas like other people throw out orange juice cartons:

For twenty cents or so, alarm clock manufacturers can add a chip that not only knows the time (via a radio signal) but knows what day it is too. Which means that they can add a switch that says "weekends." Which means that the 98% of the population that doesn't want to wake up on the same time on weekends as they do on weekdays will be happier (and better rested.)

But he's not touting a new alarm clock, he's making a point: "So why doesn't every alarm clock have this feature?" he asks. "Because most people in that business are busy doing their jobs (distribution, promotion, pricing, etc.), not busy making products that people actually want to buy--and talk about."

Indeed, companies are always far too busy doing what they're doing to think about what they're doing and wonder whether they can do it better. And, as Seth points out, this is because companies are compartmentalized into responsibilities, and brave is the person who tries to straddle departments.

The weekend alarm clock won't be made by a big alarm clock company, it'll be designed by someone like Gauri Nanda, who I mentioned a few weeks back as the inventor of Clocky, the alarm clock that goes walkabout. Gauri, needless to say, was working on her own.

Actually what I suspect happens in companies is that they just ignore the user entirely. This is partly because technical products are built (and much of them designed) by programmers and engineers. I hate to generalize, but these people thrive on complexity, not on usability. For them creating and mastering the opaque is an achievement, not a symptom of failure.

What usually happens is that there are two sides to product development: the people in the company who think it's a good idea and the people who have to build it. But in my limited experience there's no one in between who speaks both languages, and, most importantly, can see what the customer might expect and want.

This is the hardest bit: it's called usability and it seems to be the last thing people think about. If you've ever grappled with an alarm clock, to continue Seth's example, you'll know what I mean.

My favorite is the alarm clock that makes a beep every time you press a button: not so useful if you're trying to quietly set the alarm but not wake your loved one. One clock I have, despite being sophisticated enough to tell me the temperature, the time in Lima and how many thous in a furlong, even makes a beep when I hit the backlight button. And no, it can't be switched off without a PhD in molecular biophysics.

I wish I could say that this is confined to alarm clocks, but it's not. Nearly every device or program is dumb in its own way. But there are bright spots. One of the things I love about Web 2.0 is that the people designing the tools really seem to understand usability.

Of course, given the fact that Web 2.0 is one big feedback loop, where new versions pop up like mushroom after rain, it's inevitable. But the result is websites that are easy to navigate and to figure out.

Apple, of course, figured this out long ago, But everyone else seems to be having problems understanding it. I tried out a website the other day which was supposed to help me find the best form of transportation between two places. The search engine was not smart enough to know a building's earlier name, or even to recommend alternatives if I got the name slightly wrong.

The internal calculator was not smart enough to get the distances right (one walk I was asked to make between bus-stops would have taken me into the sea and halfway to the next country); neither was it smart enough to realize that was an error. All should have been spotted by any usability tests. All undermine the whole point of the website, which is to make it easy to figure out a way to get from A to B.

I won't bore you with more examples: You are users, and you come across this stuff all the time. What worries me more is that we're not listened to, at least in a way in that makes sense.

I was sitting in a seminar the other day listening to an employee of a global cellphone operator talking about she and her colleagues have been canvassing opinions about how consumers use cellphones. This is good, and what should be done, but I was surprised by how she went about it: Getting users together and asking them to make collages about how they use technology.

Frankly, I don't think making collages is the right way to go about things. We need to get out on the streets, into the offices, bars and clubs, into the villages and factories, and observe how people actually use technology. Don't expect people to fill in forms or do collages for you: Follow them around. Spy on them. I do.

One of the side-effects of the cellphone revolution is that it's taken technology out of the usual places (office, den) and into every other room in the house (texting in the bath, watching mobile TV in bed) and beyond, into the bus stops, the subways, the village gazebo. Technology is now a seamless part of our lives. Researchers need to get out more.

The sad truth is that we've moved on and the geeks need to catch up. Because, lame as the alarm clock that beeps all the time and doesn't know it's the weekend is, nearly all our devices are no better: They're too smart in the sense of feature density and too stupid in the interface that lets us use those features.

So, companies: Hire a usability consultant to tell you about your products and how they might be better. Or just try your own products: sleep in on a weekend or let your spouse try to find the alarm light button in the middle of the night and see how you like being woken up.

Then rub your eyes, get out of bed and head for the design table.

Seth's Blog: Alarm clocks

del.icio.us Tags: innovation, design, seth godin, alarm clocks, web 2.0, usability

Foleo, Foleo, Where Art Thou?

Caption competition:

"Is this a dagger I see before me?"

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio"

Now you see it, now you don't

Photo from BusinessWire

It has the grim predictability of a company that doesn't seem sure of what it's doing, and what people want. Ever since Ed Colligan unveiled the Foleo -- a Linux-based sub-sub-notebook -- a few months back, folks have been saying it was a mistake. Now it's dead.

I liked the idea, but felt it was the wrong solution: the iPhone and the Nokia N800 seem to prove people now want something that isn't just a workhorse, but another onramp to the social web, whereas the Foleo seemed to be aimed simply at business customers. Such folk have long been used to lugging heavy stuff around, so it made no sense.

Anyway, Ed has done the right thing and knocked the project on the head, taking a $10 million hit (while sparing a moment for the poor third party developers who committed time and resources to software to run on the dang thing). What is most telling, though, are the comments left on his blog post announcing the gadget's demise. They reveal the frustration and supportive passion of Palm users around the world, and to me illustrate what people really want from the once-great company:

• a better interface that isn't so buggy and unreliable.
• better battery life (the Foleo boasted six hours. But remember the IIIx: days and days on a couple of AAAs. How far backwards have we gone?)
• more durable. The IIIx also survived a lot of bashing about.
• a phone that isn't a sop to the phone companies -- in other words, so it can do VoIP, work on WiFi networks as well as cellular ones.
• find a way of getting a bigger screen onto a Treo. How about projection?  
• GPS. Things have moved on, Ed, and nowadays we expect our devices to fit a lot more in.
• Like good cameras. Not just for snapping, but for scanning.
• And 3.5G.
• And probably WiMAX.
• And big storage.
• And decent software that can handle PDFs, flash, browsing and interactive stuff.
• And decent keyboards (get back in bed with the ThinkOutside guys, or whoever bought them.) I still love my Bluetooth keyboard and can't understand why they're considered such an afterthought.
• Voice commands and voice recognition.
• USB connectivity

The bottom line, is that we've been thinking the PDA is dead, whereas we should be thinking the other way around: The smartphone is just a PDA with connectivity. A good PDA does all these things we've been talking about, and while we take calls on it, that's a small part of what it is about. We just want the things we did on our PDA to be connected, that's all.

That's not just about being able to take calls, it's about SMS, email, browsing, and of being able to meld into our environment -- GPS to know where we are, cameras and HSDPA and GPS to take photos that go straight to Flickr, tools like Jaiku to wrap us into our social network. It's still a digital assistant, it's just a connected digital assistant.

As one commenter put it, it's still a Getting Things Done Device.It's just we do lots of different things these days, so a to do list shouldn't be where you stop.

del.icio.us Tags: palm, foleo, pda, treo, iphone, smartphone, mistakes

Journalists Should Bite the Bullet

 
screenshot from CNN's website

It's the one area where old-style journalism hasn't really made the strides it could. I can understand why: Journalism is a very, very conservative profession. But The Journalism Iconoclast, written by Patrick Thornton, makes a telling point when he points to a nice new feature of CNN.com's website -- the bullet point:

One of the features many people may have noticed with the relaunch of CNN.com earlier this year is that CNN offers succinct bullet points above articles about the key points of the story. Most people skim stories anyway, so why not give them the ultimate way to skim an article? Maybe they will read the whole thing, but use the bullet points to help them remember key points.

Patrick suggests newspapers adopt this for their online offerings; I would actually be in favor of their doing it for their offline offerings too. Buzzmachine, for example, is not the only one bemoaning a buried lede. Indeed, I often find the inverted pyramid approach outdated and less useful for the sort of rapid scanning we do now we're so webcentric.

One commenter to the story, Marc Matteo, points to one of the key problems with newspapers introducing this kind of bullet-point approach: Shrinking budgets and harried editors. In which case I would farm the bullet pointing out to people who aren't even journalists. As Marc himself points out, non-journalism websites don't seem to have this problem. How about allowing readers to add the bullet points themselves? Indeed, it may even be possible to automate the process.

The nasty truth is that a lot of what we take to be good sound journalistic writing was designed for an earlier, slower time. Now we want to catch the gist of something in a few seconds, and we're looking for reasons not to read them, rather than feeling we should, we have to, or (God forbid) we want to.

Bottom line: Newspapers and all traditional media should not just be looking for new ways to deliver their news, but new ways to write it too. An example of good, pithy writing is actually Techdirt, which rarely strays (unlike this blog) over 250 words, including story, background and (usually quite tart) analysis.  

The Journalism Iconoclast

del.icio.us Tags: journalism, newspapers, media, CNN, design, citizen journalism

Google's New Interface: The Earth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've written before about how I think Google Earth, or something like it, will become a new form of interface -- not just for looking for places and routes, but any kind of information. Some people call it the geo-web, but it's actually bigger than that. Something like Google Earth will become an environment in its own right. I can imagine people using it to slice and dice company data, set up meetings, organize social networks.

Google is busy marching in this direction, and their newest offering is a great example of this: Google Book Search. This from Brandon Badger, product manager at Google Earth:

Did you ever wonder what Lewis and Clark said about your hometown as they passed through? What about if any other historical figures wrote about your part of the world? Earlier this year, we announced a first step toward geomapping the world's literary information by starting to integrate information from Google Book Search into Google Maps. Today, the Google Book Search and Google Earth teams are excited to announce the next step: a new layer in Earth that allows you to explore locations through the lens of the world's books.

Activating the layer peppers the earth with little yellow book icons -- all over the place, like in this screenshot from Java:

 

 

 

 

Click on one of the books and the reference will pop up, including the title of the book, its cover, author, number of pages etc, as well as the actual context of the reference. Click on a link to the page

Is it perfect? No. It's automated, so a lot of these references are just wrong. Click on a yellow book in Borneo and you find a reference in William Gilmore Simms' "Life of Francis Marrion" to Sampit, which is the name of a town there, but it's likely confused with the river of the same name in South Carolina.

Many of the books in Google's database are scanned, so errors are likely to arise from imperfect OCR. Click on a book above the Java town of Kudus, and you get a reference to a History of France, and someone called "Ninon da f Kudus", which in fact turns out to be the caption for an illustration of Le Grand Dauphin and Ninon de l'Enclos, a French C17 courtesan.

But who cares? By being able to click on the links you can quickly find out whether the references are accurate or not, and I'm guessing Google is going to gradually tidy this up, if not themselves then by allowing us users to correct such errors. (So far there doesn't seem to be a way to do this.)

This is powerful stuff, and a glimpse of a new way of looking, storing and retrieving information. Plus it's kind of fun.

Google LatLong: Google Book Search in Google Earth

Technorati Tags: information visualization, infoviz, google earth, google, search, interfaces

The Big Chill

 

Football (OK, soccer) is pushing to the forefront of adopting interesting technologies. Here's one I hadn't heard from Bolton Wanderers, where players enter a chamber at minus 120 degrees Celsius to enhance muscle recovery after training. It's called cryotherapy, according to the Daily Mail:

The technique was originated in Japan in 1978 to help arthritis sufferers and patients with joint conditions. In time, athletes claimed it enhanced muscle recovery and reduced muscle pain. [Bolton's new head of sports science and medicine Richard] Freeman said: "It's made from liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen mixed to the right proportion to become liquid synthetic air. It's quite safe despite the temperatures.

"It's still in its infancy but players benefit. It's like stretching before a game. There's little scientific evidence why it works but it clearly does. The players like it and feel they benefit. After a heavy training session, a weights session or an intense game, they feel better quicker and it has been shown to improve muscle structure and muscle function.

Cryotherapy, according to Wikipedia, stretches from applying an ice pack to this chamber approach, which is properly called cryogenic chamber therapy:

The chamber is cooled, typically with liquid nitrogen, to a temperature of –110 C. The patient is protected from acute frostbite with socks, gloves and mouth and ear protection, but in addition to that, wears nothing but a bathing suit. The patients spends a few minutes in the chamber. During treatment the average skin temperature drops 12 C, while the coldest skin temperature can be 5 C. The core body temperature remains unchanged during the treatment, while after it, it may drop slightly. Curiously enough, some patients compare the feeling to sauna at +110 C. Release of endorphins occurs, resulting in analgesia (immediate pain relief).

Want one of your own? Buy the CryoCabin CYRODOC from the Zwolle-based company of the same name:

Treatment in the CRYODOC CryoCabin takes only 3 minutes at a temperature of -130 Cº to -150 Cº , producing several important salutary effects throughout the body: energy boost, skin regeneration and rejuvenation, protection against fading skin, strengthening of the immune system, fighting stress and chronic fatigue, increased metabolic rate, weight reduction, fighting cellulite, pain reduction, and generally improving the overall state of health.

I'll spare you some of the more graphic pictures on their website (think cellulite and elbow rash. But I like the way this lady's earrings twinkle in her CryoCabin:

Come in, the air is lovely

Why giving players the cold shoulder - and everything else - is keeping Bolton Poles apart | the Daily Mail

Technorati Tags: cryotherapy, football, soccer, therapy

The World's Smallest Mobile Clinic

 
JP/J. Adiguna

I love this kind of stuff, and wish these kinds of initiatives got better support from government, NGOs and companies:

Harun checks the blood pressure and weight of a customer in a park in Menteng, Central Jakarta, on Wednesday. He has offered the mobile service for the past 10 years, charging Rp 5,000 (about 60 US cents) per checkup.

We found dozens of these kinds of businesses in a pretty small patch of south Jakarta, and there are probably hundreds more, from guys renting out their cellphones to doing tailored alterations to clothes. Cellphones have improved their business a lot, but imaginative use of technology could help them a lot more, I suspect. But most of these guys fly under the radar of those who might be able to offer support and help.

The Jakarta Post - The Journal of Indonesia Today

Technorati Tags: digital divide, indonesia, mobile, cellphones, business, health

The Real iPhone Lesson: the Power of Schtum

I first wrote about Scoble, then the Microsoft Blogger Enfant Terrible back in 2004 or something. Maybe even earlier. But he was the breath of fresh air the company needed at the time. Now the 'markets are naked conversations' thing is the main meme, the conventional wisdom the smart people (smugly) get. Now Scoble's on his own doing podcasts, still famous for being, well, Scoble, and just posted something that made me realize the game may already have changed:

Steve Jobs is MANUFACTURING great PR by keeping everyone’s mouth shut. Heck, I’ve met some people I KNEW had an iPhone and they were so scared of retribution or consequences that they wouldn’t answer a single question.

It's an interesting possibility: That the real lesson from the iPhone episode is that companies will throw their levers into reverse and batten down the hatches (and mix a few metaphors on the way.) Corporate secrecy rules again. What is the point of opening all your windows at the behest of bloggers if great publicity is possible by controlling the flow of information so it is not a trickle?

Let's face it: Jobs has perfected a form of self-censorship that is the antithesis of everything Web 2.0, social media, the blogging revolution and the instincts of every decent, right-thinking person. And it works. And we love him for it. Who isn't going to draw a lesson from that?

Technorati Tags: iphone, censorship, conversations, blogging, scoble

Getting My Brain Around PersonalBrain

 This week's column for The Wall Street Journal (subscription only) is about PersonalBrain, a topic I find hard to write about:

Here's a heads-up on some organizing software that may take some getting used to. Frankly, it's taken me nearly 10 years to appreciate its power. But now that I do, it has become something of an obsession. I even have dreams about it.

It's a defiantly different kind of thought-mapping program called PersonalBrain, and a new version (including versions for Mac and Linux users) will be launched next month by U.S.-based TheBrain Technologies LP. Users include scientists, soldiers, inventors and others who have used it to marshal their collections of thoughts, projects and even databases on criminal syndicates. I find it so useful and absorbing, there's nothing -- be it a Web site link, a random idea, a contact, a document, a scrap of information -- that I don't add to its spider-web-like screen, knowing it will throw up links my brain had never considered or had failed to remember.

 I love the program with the passion of the newly converted but often feel I'm not getting the most out of it. I also feel a failure in my efforts to convert friends to its power. It's almost painful to see them writhing with information that would reveal so much to them if they spent a bit of time getting their brains around PersonalBrain.

What tipped it for me? I think it was when I stopped trying to use it like a mind map and just trusted it enough to throw things in there and not bother too much. With PersonalBrain there's no right or wrong way to use the thing, and its tendency is to startle with surprising connections, rather than build a perfectly formed tree of connections. It thrives on connections, so the other lesson is that adding links is good. It's not, as like mind mapping, a sign of a confused mind, but a recognition that creativity and association is born out of the seeming chaos of our brains. Or something.

Technorati Tags: mindmaps, personalbrain, thinking

Technology and Getting A Life

Why do I like technology? Well, I don’t, actually. I think back wistfully do the days before computers and my love affair with the typewriter and my newspaper cuttings library (which I still have, weirdly.) But technology isn’t going away, so rejecting it is a bit like rejecting clothing. But if I was being honest, I would say: technology allows us to think hard about the future, to see it more clearly, and to be able to argue with people who are much smarter than us.

Take a column I have just been reading by a guy called Nicholas Carr. He’s a very smart fellow, written a skeptical book about IT called Does IT Matter? and generally says things that are smart. But like a lot of people, he doesn’t always seem to get things. One thing he doesn’t like is the idea that as technology gets more ubiquitous, so does recording our lives get easier. This, he says, in a recent editorial piece in The Guardian, would make Socrates (who said that “the unexamined life is not worth living”) turn over in his grave: “We're so busy recording our lives that we have little time left to examine them.”

This is the kind of thing that technology users have learned to live with: the nonsense that everyone who uses technology is obsessed by it, and watches as their lives roll by. But like all balderdash it has some truth to it. As parents we seem more determined to plot our child’s progress through the filter of an viewfinder or LCD monitor than to actually absorb the moment through our eyeballs (babies one day are going to start thinking a human face has one big eye on it, one vast rectangular ear and a blinking red light for a nose.) And as I’ve mentioned before, we cubicle wallahs may be forgiven for mistaking virtual lives via our Twitter and instant messaging lists for real ones.

But Nicholas is not really talking about that. He’s talking about things called lifestreams – where we nerds create a digital feed of all the things we’re doing, reading or taking photos of and share it with anyone who’s interested. One or two folk take this a stage further, and walk around with cameras on their head. Or they record on their Twitter page what they’re eating, or write blogs that redefine the notion of boring your audience to tears. (I have read blogs that have had me literally weeping with boredom.)

Now I can understand that non-techies may feel this is a vast waste of time, and can’t think of anyone whose lives they’d want to follow in such excruciating detail. But just because we, and Nicholas Carr, can’t imagine anyone wanting to see or hear or read this deluge of life-data doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. As with all technologies, we’ll both adapt it to our needs, and adapt to it.

Posterity is a funny thing: We don’t know what it is our future selves and descendants are going to be interested in. A BBC website requesting photos and recollections of the 1970s, for example, found that most British people fondly remembered the strike-induced blackouts. (This is true: I remember looking forward to them because we all slowed down for 10 seconds and Dad told us a story around the fire.) But don't expect to see any family snaps of that particular aspect of life back then. Unsurprisingly, not many people thought, as they shopped in the flickering gloom of candlelight, "Oo! I should record this for posterity! We'll look back on these grim days in 30 years' time with fondness!"

Then take a look at Flickr, or any online photo sharing site and see what people record and share these days. Now, technology allows us not only to see ourselves immediately -- no more waiting for the film to come back from the developer, no more tiny digital display that doesn't let us see much of what we've just shot -- but also, via 3G and GPS, to share it immediately with anyone else on the planet. Technology, in other words, lets us hold a mirror up to our existence, which we can observe in real time. Socrates wouldn't be alarmed, he'd be dancing around considering the possibilities.

True, we may not use this mirror as well as we could. A lot of what people record is banal, but who knows what people are going to find interesting about us 30, 50, 300 years down the track? Who knows what we're going to find interesting about us 10 years down the track? (I'm guessing the lurch in male fashion from long pants to those over-the-knee numbers.) The point is that we're not just recording our lives because technology allows us to. We're recording them because we want to. Nicholas Carr thinks this is narcissism. For some it probably is. For others the technology becomes a fence from which to hide behind and not participate. For the rest of us it offers chance to capture and reflect on a life that goes by way too quickly.

Technorati Tags: 1970s, photos, bbc, lifestreams, attention streams, attention, blogging, gps, 3g