beatnic - just wondering

When you move house and send your change of address cards out, you probably only put your new address on the cards and not your old one. And if people want to send you a “Happy New Home” card they’ll need to copy down your new address on to an envelope.

But when people change email address, more often than not, they send out the “Change of email address” email from their old email address. This is true for the last six such emails I have received.

So if you’re changing email address, transfer your contacts list and send your Change of address email from your new account. You never know how many virtual “Happy new home” cards you might be missing.

And please send them individually or use the BCC field. Just in case anyone accidentally hits the “Reply all” button.

I went to the launch of the Oxford Internet Survey last week at the House of Commons and haven’t had a chance to write it up.

Thankfully BBC News has picked up on the main points on its website.

A couple of things really stood out for me…

• 5% of people in the UK who have used the internet have stopped using it
• Entertainment usage has levelled off since 2005
• More people in the UK trust television than the ineternet and newspapers

Don’t be put off by the name!

If you’re interested in anything vaguely related to technology there’s something to listen to here.

I finally started catching up with some of my blog, news and podcast subscriptions recently and that coincided well with the arrival of my Nokia N95.

Some podcast stuff I’ve been listening to and would recommend includes:

• Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake telling the story of how Flickr started life as part of a massively multiplayer online game by Ludicorp and wound up becoming the darlings of the Web 2.0 world and getting bought by Yahoo! where she is now scattering the seeds of design thinking in everything there.
• Ideo boss Tim Brown talks in threes about design thinking - inspiration, ideation and implementation - and how it’s being picked up by big business.
• Irene Au, director of user experience at Google. On setting up a central user experience department, not biting off more than you can chew, and hiring T-shaped people.

A friend recently told me they hadn’t used LinkedIn since discovering Facebook, which I found interesting.

I think they are very different animals, each with their own set of services - a few of which overlap.

Not all my “connections” on LinkedIn are “friends” on Facebook and vice versa. It makes a good Venn diagram though!

[And yes yes I did once said I'd remain "LinkedOut" :)]

I get asked regularly - particularly by colleagues in the intranet/enterprise portal management world - how many people use the discussion forum, wikis and blogs which live on Gateway, the BBC’s intranet, which I manage.

Below are some snapshot numbers I pulled together in May.

To give some context, the monthly reach for Gateway is roughly 30,000 people.

In themselves they don’t tell a story. For some narrative we need to look at our trend data and qualitative research.

talk.gateway (discussion forum)

23,204 members have posted a total of 31,951 replies within 6,736 topics in 102 visible forums.

496 “Thanks” in the last 6 months

Gateway wiki usage

Examples: Future Media & Technology Projects overview, BBC Monitoring
staff map, Global News Division “Big Stories”

Blog usage numbers were unavailable, but they continue to thrive.

These tools were started by Euan and John in Digilab - they’re now looked after and developed by my team on behalf of our colleagues.

Every now and then I read something that seems to coincide with my life so perfectly I imagine there must be an Amélie-like character who has placed it in my path.

This is certainly true of John Maeda’s book The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life).

Maeda is a world-renowned graphic designer, visual artist and computer scientist at the MIT Media Lab.

At work we have a big simplicity theme going on at the moment which I’m closely involved in. The book is the perfect reference for this work.

On a personal note I found it covers themes which are incredibly important to me in the way I work and think as a technologist, designer and facilitator and also in my non-work life.

There are ten laws. If you’re really pushed for time the tenth law “The One” summarises them all:

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

The book is deliberately 100 pages long. Just knowing that when you’re reading it is reassuring and offers a feeling of simplicity in itself.

I must admit I enjoyed the book so much I broke the third law immediately by taking my time to ponder the content.

There’s a great explanation of how the iPod became more complex before it became simpler, like so many other things in life!

Maeda also covers Gestalt, one of my favourite subjects, and how it helps when designing and understanding design.

If you don’t want to buy the book, much of the information in the book is available on Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity blog, though I find the fact that the book packages the ideas and is itself simply designed means it works much better for me.

Just read this brilliant and incredibly timely (for me anyway!) post from the always passionate Kathy Sierra.

To avoid the Zone of Mediocrity, you must suspend disbelief.

You must be willing and able to turn off (temporarily) The Voice inside that says, “We’ll never get away with this. People will hate it.” That doesn’t necessarily mean The Voice is wrong, but until you can shut if off, you’re virtually guaranteed to stay with safer, incremental ideas. But remember–”safer” really isn’t safer anymore, unless you’re looking only to avoid criticism. Safe will keep you safely out of the spotlight. If that’s what you want (and sometimes that’s the best approach), then fine. But if not…

(side note: this is somewhat like The Inner Game approach or Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain or any of the other approaches to creativity that get your logical “talking” mind out of the way so all the more useful but non-speaking parts of your brain can get on with the important things you’re trying to accomplish.)

And it’s not just suspending disbelief about what users (or critics) will say… you must also suspend disbelief about what your company will let you do. I first experienced this at Sun, where it was almost impossible to creatively brainstorm about ways to improve things without someone jumping in with, “Yeah, but they’d never let us do that.” End of discussion. End of chance to do something amazing. Every time I do an internal workshop, the partipants are far more negative than when some of those same people are in a public version of my passionate users workshop. By taking them outside their company and having them brainstorm or work on fictional or other people’s projects, their minds are free to move about. I’ve nearly quit doing in-house workshops because the “they’ll never let us do that” syndrome is so strong.

You can’t help users kick ass until your employer lets YOU kick ass.

[Source: Creating Passionate Users: Dilbert and the zone of mediocrity]

It reminded me of the city of Mediocritaxa - well worth a visit.

The BBC is currently advertising for an “On-Demand Scheduler” (n.b. this link will self-destruct on 15th August)

The idea of scheduling on-demand content struck me as oddly amusing.

Distance: 11.78 miles
Time: 45 minutes 41 seconds on the pedal
Average speed: 15.4 mph
Max speed: 27.1 mph

Total elapsed time: 49 minutes approx.

And it’s superb.

You can add events really quickly - it understands things like “Mum here at 6 today”. And sharing events and calendars is intuitive too.

Ant sums it up nicely

With new and astute technical leadership, the company has begun the steady march to rebuild the infrastructure - readying it for faster development. But, culture is slower to change than code. We still tend to operate with the same deliberate, beaurocratic attitude. Change is hard for any company and it never comes quickly or without a few shocks to the system. We are receiving those shocks by way of a few ‘initiative projects’ by senior managment setting an example. With these I’m observing an interesting dynamic, something not totally dissimilar to post 9/11 USA where those who dared question the wisdom of the government were painted as ‘unpatriotic’. When culture needs to change and the agents of that change encounter resistance to it, they’ll toughen their stance to see their will enacted. Subordinates who wish to avoid lambasting (and gain political capital) make ‘yes’ their favorite word… and those that challenge the new “wisdom” are deemed ‘old guard’ and bypassed.

And they are:

Allianz Australia Insurance, Australia
ALTANA Pharma AG, Germany
Bank of Ireland Group, Ireland
Capital One, USA
IBM, USA
Merrill Lynch, USA
METRO Group, Germany
O2, UK
Staples, USA
Vodafone, UK

Summary:
This year, we saw increased use of multimedia, e-learning, internal blogs, and mobile access. Winning companies also encouraged consistent design by emphasizing training for content contributors.

Read more on Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com

Congrats to all winners.

It would be useful to know how many entrants there were, I couldn’t see that info available, maybe I missed it.

pervasive

adj 1: spread throughout; “a pervasive anxiety overshadows the triumphs of individuals” [syn: pervading]

2: spreading throughout; “armed with permeative irony…he punctures affectations”; “the pervasive odor of garlic”; “an error is pervasive if it is material to more than one conclusion” [syn: permeant, permeating, permeative]

fabric

n 1: artifact made by weaving or felting or knitting or crocheting natural or synthetic fibers; “the fabric in the curtains was light and semitraqnsparent”; “woven cloth originated in Mesopotamia around 5000 BC”; “she measured off enough material for a dress” [syn: cloth, material, textile]

2: the underlying structure; “restoring the framework of the bombed building”; “it is part of the fabric of society” [syn: framework]

Source of definitions: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

Just wondering… does anyone anywhere know of a webserver-based RSS aggregator that will run on an intranet?

Commercial, open-source, it doesn’t matter at the moment, I’m just interested to know what’s available.

It would help people share both internal and external feeds (subscription lists).

I’ve searched high and low but so far to no avail.

I wrote to the folk at Bloglines, but they said they had no plans on this front.

Here’s something that I wrote back in February and have been meaning to put in a post on here for ages…

There are quite a few good guides to managing email.

The latest one I’ve read is this one by Mark Hurst who runs a consultancy in New York.

You don’t have to read all 38 pages to get the point, but you do need to read the first few sections which takes about 15-20 minutes at a push.

I’ve managed to keep an empty inbox for a fortnight now and felt inspired to totally clear my desk too.

So I sent the link round to immediate colleagues, two of whom have now also totally cleared their inboxes (and desks!), so there must be something in it.

You may already have a method that works for you, but if you don’t then this might do it.

The basic principle is don’t use your inbox as a storage device

This is followed by a simple formula based upon 5 types of email:

1. Spam - delete it straight away
2. Personal - deal with it straight away, delete it (or file it if you really have to, but not in your inbox)
3. Newsletters - quick read then delete. You’ll get another one soon
4. For your information - read it and file it if you have to otherwise delete it
5. For your action - read it, if you can do it now do it, if you can’t mark it for action and set time aside to do it. File it under actions, then delete or file when complete

Once your left with 4s and 5s it’s fairly quick to work out which one an email is

I’m with Euan on Annotatable Audio, it’s a stunning thing.

And then this clever archive thingamijig comes along.

And I’m reminded why I like working for the BBC.

3 things that cross over between my work and my life:

• A desire to understand how things work. (What goes on under the bonnet? What do they feel like to use? What’s the story behind the design?)
• Using technology to help connect people with each other and with information
• My love of language(s)

Not to be confused with “work-life balance”.

Several times recently I’ve been describing walks and runs to people and thought wouldn’t it be great to be able to plot them out on the amazing Google maps service.

It already does a great job with routes from A to B (say East Dulwich to Marylebone High Street - my current daily bicycle commute).

Imagine being able to put a shape (circle, say) on to a map and then drag its edges to particular co-ordinates or landmarks until you’ve mapped out your route.

Then you could save this route and send it as a link to someone or link to it from your website.

I was just wondering if anyone has any info on anything like this being developed anywhere?

The life of a wikipedia page on the subject of the Heavy Metal Umlaut, brilliantly captured and explained in a screencast (animation of screens with voice-over commentary).

Via: podbat
See also: wikipedia

Yes, but how did I get here?

Yesterday I went to the Design Museum in London with some friends from work to see the design of information exhibition “YOU ARE HERE” (now in its last week).

It was full of amazing examples of how we convey complex information through models, signs and symbols, including navigation devices, orreries, maps, graphs, charts and timepieces. There were some interesting comparisons between how information is conveyed in different cultures.

But I felt it missed a trick by only showing the end results.

What I’d really like to learn is…

• Who was involved (not just the accredited designer)?
• What was discarded along the way?
• What was discovered along the way?
• What do the designs that nearly made it look like?
• How was the end result decided on and who by?
• What’s the story behind the design?

Though human genius in its various inventions with various instruments may answer the same end, it will never find an invention more beautiful or more simple or direct than nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing superfluous.

Leonardo da Vinci

Nothing to add…

Chatting to my friend Claire earlier about having cleared my inbox thanks to Mark Hurst’s very handy guide to Managing incoming email.

We talked about how, because of the tools we’ve been given to deal with our information, we’ve been encouraged to organise our information in hierarchical structures.

A few years ago I built a directory structure in Outlook that I thought reflected my working life. First under the headings “Me”, “My work” and “My team”, and then further sub-divided “My work” in to all sorts of folders to do with the various projects I’m overseeing or inolved in as well as the operational elements and so on.

For me this no longer works.

Now I’m so used to tagging in Flickr and labelling in Gmail etc., I want to be able to apply the same approach to my work information.

Great idea: This is broken

“A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it.”

Amongst the hundreds of posts is a picture of a “Restroom” sign in Seattle with an arrow pointing to the sky

Courtesy of Mark Hurst in New York who’s behind goodexperience.com

Buttons to operate toilet door on board train today…

Just wondering… how do you know when it’s locked?

I’m starting to narrow in on what to write about when I do my Masters

At the moment it’s looking like:

The application of Gestalt theory in user interface and information design for web-based applications

More later.