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.