Gossip in a distributed workplace

It's hard to gossip at work when you're no longer colocated with your fellow workers! Enter Overhear.us.

Overhear.us: Corporate Gossip 2.0

technorati tags:overhear.us, gossip, net-work

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Rescue Time

I had my students use Basecamp this semester for managing their group projects. They gave it generally good reviews, but pointed out that they often forgot to update it. Therefore it didn't provide an accurate record of their accomplishments. But, they added, they realized that there's not much you can do about it -- there's no way around manual recording of your accomplishments.

This morning, I saw this on TechCrunch:

Seattle based Rescue Time actually tackles the issue of having to input data into a time management tool for the time poor head on by offering a web based personal time management service that takes its input via software. The software tracks what you are doing on your computer at any given time, then uploads the data to the service for later review.

Rescue Time: Automated Time Management meets Web 2.0

technorati tags:rescue-time, basecamp, time-management

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JotSpot?

What the heck happened to it? Google took it over and closed it to new subscriptions late last year. I had expected them to unveil it under the Google framework in February, but here we are in May. Which brings up the question that Howard Rheingold asks:

Smart Mobs: Is Google abandoning JotSpot?

technorati tags:jotspot, google, rheingold

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Spimes

Johndan talked recently about spimes (at WIDE and CCCC), so when I saw this post, I clicked through. Sterling takes a while to get to the point, but the spime idea is really interesting. Stuff like Wakoopa and SlifeShare seems to get closer to these, but in terms of interactions of applications rather than artifacts.

Slashdot | The Internet of Things - What is a Spime?

technorati tags:wakoopa, slifeshare, spimes, bruce-sterling

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Wakoopa review

From the Lifestreamblog:

Add Software Usage to Your Lifestream with Wakoopa | Lifestream Blog

technorati tags:wakoopa, lifestreams

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WIDE in Currents

Michigan State's Writing in Digital Environments center is profiled in the latest Currents.

Program Profile: MSU's Writing in Digital Environments Center | Currents In Electronic Literacy

technorati tags:wide, cwrl

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Profiles in courage

More on the Digg/HD-DVD decryption incident. Here's what Digg founder Kevin Rose says on his blog:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Translation: We'll be courageous, if that's what you want! It reminds me of the scene in The Life of Brian in which Brian tells the crowd that they are all individuals, and they unanimously repeat "Yes, we are all individuals."

Steve O'Hear is as flummoxed as I am, since "Digg is willing to face a costly legal battle (which I'm not sure they'd win) in order to appease a portion of their user-base — even though it clearly states in the site's term of service that users need to comply with the law (the DMCA in this case)."

Digg the Blog » Blog Archive » Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

technorati tags:digg, kevin-rose, hd-dvd, crack

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A bus accident and a WEP phone

So I was standing at the bus stop yesterday morning, waiting for the bus and passing time by reading my news aggregator on my phone. Yes, I go online in my spare moments these days. And I happen to see this story: "BREAKING: Bus Slams Into Building in Central Austin."

Interesting, I thought -- that happens to be on my route, but "downstream," so the coming bus should still be on time. I read that

a Capital Metro bus has crashed into a building at Medical Parkway and West 39th Street, near Seton Medical Center. At least half a dozen victims are now in the hospital, with 9 more people treated on-site for minor injuries.

Shortly afterwards, my bus arrives. I immediately ask the driver what he's heard about the accident. His response was along the lines of: "Is that what happened? All I know is that they told me to take a detour." Then he quizzes me about the accident. Who was driving? What happened? How many injuries?" And then: "I need to start watching the news!"

Me, I haven't watched news broadcasts in I don't know how long. But there's certainly a market for local news, and my news aggregator fills it.

A few hours later, waiting at another bus stop, I got the details. Was it featured on a local news broadcast? Who cares?

Silverlight

Michael Arrington, and everyone else in the tech world, is talking about Microsoft's Silverlight, their answer to Adobe's Flash and Flex environments. Microsoft wants to make a play for the rich internet applications (RIA) sector, and apparently they have a winner:

Silverlight will be the platform of choice for developers who build rich Internet applications. It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy. After the keynote, the main topic of conversation in the hallways centered on just how effectively Microsoft carried out its execution of Adobe.

I am reserving judgment.

Why Silverlight Is Important

technorati tags:silverlight, flash, flex, ria

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The case for a strong executive

Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield makes the case for a strong executive who sometimes supersedes the rule of law. The implications make me uneasy, but what I want to highlight here is that Mansfield approaches the question by tracing the historical development of the Constitution, including the separation of powers, and lays it out as an organizational problem: how did the Framers approach the issue that Aristotle laid out, the question of "whether it is more advantageous to be ruled by the best man or the best laws." Their answer, he contends, was to develop a system in which both cases could be true, depending on the circumstances.

OpinionJournal - Federation

technorati tags:constitution, executive, aristotle, machiavelli

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Hyperbole

FranticIndustries parses yesterday's incident on Digg, in which someone posted an exploit to get around HD-DVD encryption. Digg's people removed the post, but other Diggers kept reposting it until those posts filled the entire front page. Digg surrendered, and FranticIndustries' Stan Schroeder remarked:

But never until today has the entire Internet risen as one to protect their right of free speech, with one string of hexadecimal numbers being their defeaning shout.

How one hexadecimal string changed the Internet - franticindustries.

technorati tags:hyperbole, free-speech

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Engrade.com

Here's a web startup with a fatal flaw:

This free service allows teachers to manage their classes and students can also see assignments, attendance records, and grades. It’s much more than just a gradebook, in fact. Some of the features it offers: gradebook, attendance book, homework calendar, student reports, and useful things like grading scales and weighted assignment options.

The site does not require downloads or installations; everything is web-based. The only questions might be whether it is entirely secure and private, and this will only be known with time, and also there is the possibility that information could be lost. Also it will be a test of the service to see whether it can handle years’ worth of classes as it gets used more and more.

Security is the big issue here. I can't imagine my university being sanguine about student grades ending up on someone else's servers, no matter how secure and private, unless the university has approved it.

Engrade.com – Free online gradebook for teachers - KillerStartups.com

technorati tags:engrade, utexas, grades

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Clay's nightmare

AirTroductions:

AirTroductions is an interesting concept. Basically, you enter in your flight information and check out who else is going to be on your flight. Then, after checking out the other passengers’ profiles, you choose who you’ll be sitting next to. That way, you can make the most of your multi-hour flight. You can network, or maybe meet a love connection, or sit next to someone you just happen to know and didn’t know they’d be on the plane. So next time you’re flying, check out who else you could be sitting next to on the plane before you ever arrive at the terminal to make the most out of your hours in the sky.

I am incredibly productive on airplanes -- although I hate air travel -- because I carry 4-up printouts of everything I'm writing, and I refuse to talk to my seatmates. Can't imagine someone sitting next to me and saying, "So you're a professor at UT? How's that goin' for you?" Thanks, social networking.

AirTroductions.com - There's Something in the Air - KillerStartups.com

technorati tags:airtroductions, serres

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Wakoopa: Last.fm for desktop applications

You know how you can use Last.fm to share with everyone what music you're listening to? Wakoopa promises to do the same thing, but with desktop applications:

Wakoopa’s tracker logs what applications you use and for how long, updating your personal profile every 15 minutes. On the website, the aggregate data lists the most recently used applications and most used applications of all time. Each application has a profile that lists the people and groups who use it, reviews, and tags. For free applications, it also includes a download link for various versions, potentially creating a more social SourceForge.

Implications for lifestreaming might be interesting, particularly in terms of sharing ambient workflow awareness with collaborators.

Wakoopa: Last.fm For Desktop Applications

technorati tags:wakoopa, last.fm, lifestreaming, workstreaming

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"By the time she starts dating, I wont need to greet her dates at the door with a shotgun..."

"... I will have a digital history of the poor kid and know pretty much everythng about him, before I meet him."

Mark Cuban, who has given up on apostrophes altogether but who makes up for it in trenchant observation, discusses the generational difference in self-documentation. He continues:

We are beginning a generation where much of everything they do will be recorded, monitored and maintained and more importantly, shared online. Every generation of parents has used the tools they can afford to be our kids biographers till they leave home. This generation will have the fortune or misfortune of those tools having an ever declining cost to with no cost per capture (no developing pictures or even having to buy tape), and as it stands today, little or no cost to share all those digital hours online.

Your are what your search results return and so are your kids - Blog Maverick

technorati tags:oligopticon, google, agora, shotgun

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Twittering about IM

Now that seems dizzyingly recursive to me.

Reading :: Good to Great and the Social Sectors

Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great
By Jim Collins

I recently reviewed Good to Great, a bestseller that attempts to define what distinguishes "good" companies from "great" companies based on the author's research. That book focused on Fortune 100 companies and drew several principles from them. However, the book didn't focus on public institutions, nonprofits, and not-for-profits (for which Collins uses the blanket term "social sectors"). In fact, some of the primary points of that book didn't apply well to the social sectors. Collins lists some of these (my paraphrase):

• Social sector organizations typically don't use business metrics, so it's harder to define "good" and "great"
• Social sector organizations typically use a more diffuse power structure, meaning that leaders don't have as many tools at their disposal for enforcing their vision
• Social sector organizations have a harder time easing out people who do not contribute well to the organization's mission
• Whereas Good to Great makes the company's "economic engine" a chief focus, social sector organizations are far less concerned with profit and more concerned with resources
• In social sector organizations, "turning the flywheel" has more to do with brand (p.3)

Collins, who himself works at a public university [Correction: Collins appears to run a research lab unaffiliated with a public university -- CS 4/26/2007], recounts that 30-50% of the correspondence he receives on Good to Great is from social sector organizations. So he's written this monograph on applying the Good to Great insights to such organizations. Like Good to Great, the monograph was based on "critical feedback, structured interviews, and laboratory work with more than 100 social sector leaders" (p.3), but he cautions that the study has not been executed to the level of the Good to Great corporate study: "such research studies -- done right -- require up to a decade to complete" (p.3). So with that caution, let's look at some of the key insights.

One useful distinction Collins draws is between executive and legislative leadership skill.

In executive leadership, the individual leader has enough concentrated power to simply make the right decisions. In legislative leadership, on the other hand, no individual leader -- not even the nominal chief executive -- has enough structural power to simply make the right decisions by himself or herself. Legislative leadership relies more upon persuasion, political currency, and shared interests to create the conditions for the right decisions to happen. (p.11)

Collins stresses that the two kinds of leadership skill are not exclusive to a given sector, but legislative skill is more predominant in the social sectors. (It certainly is at my own university). And in the private sector, executive leaders don't have "the same concentration of pure executive power they once enjoyed" either, so leaders in both sectors must bear in mind that "true leadership only exists if people follow when they have the freedom not to" (p.13, his emphasis).

One consequence of more diffuse power structures in the social sectors is that it's harder to get rid of the underperformers. For that reason, Collins argues, "early assessment mechanisms turn out to be more important than hiring mechanisms" (p.15). He encourages us to hire "those who are productively neurotic, those who are self-motivated and self-disciplined, those who wake up every day, compulsively driven to do the best they can because it is simply part of their DNA" (p.15). (This is what a competitive tenure process is meant to achieve.)

Finally, Collins talks about the issue of economic engines. In Good to Great, he argued for the "hedgehog concept," the notion that great companies stayed within the intersection of three circles: what they are deeply passionate about, what they can be best in the world at, and what drives their economic engine. But in a social sector organization -- say, a church -- the focus isn't on profit but resources:

The third circle of the Hedgehog Concept shifts from being an economic engine to a resource engine. The critical question is not "How much money do we make?" but "How can we develop a sustainable resource engine to deliver superior performance relative to our mission?" (p.18)

Collins identifies three components of such resource engines: time (how to get people to contribute their efforts for free or under market rates), money (how to sustain cash flow), and brand (cultivating "a deep well of emotional goodwill and mindshare of potential supporters") (p.18). To support his discussion, Collins describes four quadrants of the social sector, defined by two axes: (1) charitable donations & private grants; (2) business revenues (p.21).

Overall, this monograph does some valuable work in fleshing out the Good-to-Great framework for social sector organizations. It's a fast read, but only if you've read Good to Great already. And like Good to Great, it's written clearly and lucidly. My main objection was that it didn't list the participating organizations or discuss methodology in detail. Nevertheless, much of the advice rings true for those of us working in the social sectors.

TeacherTube

TeacherTube is like YouTube, but for posting instructional videos. Pictured below: The "Perimeter Rap."

Outdoing Jimmy Page

Jimmy Page is, of course, famous for playing a double-neck guitar for Led Zeppelin. But former bandmate John Paul Jones has thrown down the gauntlet:

Will we see an escalation? Is this the musical equivalent of a Gillette razor?

technorati tags:john-paul-jones, jimmy-page, led-zeppelin, triple-neck-guitar

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SMS or dinosaur

A hyperbolic open letter about SMS. The thrust: if your business isn't leveraging SMS, you are going the way of the dinosaur.

Communities Dominate Brands: Letter to American Execs: Joining the future of communication, via SMS text messaging

technorati tags:sms

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Facebook is now competing with Twitter

People have been saying that Facebook should either acquire Twitter or reproduce its functionality. Now they have made their choice. Let's see what happens.

Facebook | What's everyone up to?

technorati tags:facebook, twitter

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Telecommuting to save the planet

Instapundit has a discussion on telecommuting as a way to save the planet by avoiding physical commuting. The problems with telecommuting are alluded to, but not discussed by name. Let's name the big one: telecommuting has not yet come up with a reasonable substitute for colocation.

Instapundit.com -

technorati tags:telecommuting, colocation

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Reading :: Worlds Apart

Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts
By Patrick Dias, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, and Anthony Pare

Worlds Apart is an unusual book, at least for mainstream writing research. Unlike most efforts in our field, it has multiple authors, and those authors coordinated related research projects to produce a multisite comparative research study aimed at answering the research question: "What are the relationships between writing as it is elicited in the university and writing as it is generated in the workplace?" (p.3).

How did they set out to answer this question? I found their approach to be interesting, perhaps more interesting than the research question itself. To answer the question, the authors "selected four matching university and professional settings" (p.10) and investigated each with the same data collection and analysis methods. Data collection methods included

• inventorying the genres in each domain
• document tracking
• conducting research protocols of designated readers
• ethnographic observation of designated readers
• ethnographic observation of writers involved in tasks of composing
• interviews
• participant validation (pp.12-13)

Data analysis methods included syntactical, rhetorical, and conceptual analyses of writing; analyses of oral discourse surrounding the texts; and sociolinguistic analyses of production and reception of texts (pp.13-14).

The methodology was informed by the theoretical frames the authors used: situated cognition (drawing primarily on Lave); genre studies (based in North American genre theory and its use of the Bakhtin Circle's work); activity theory (via Wertsch); situated learning (via Lave and Wenger); distributed cognition (via Hutchins); and semiotic theory (via Peirce, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov). If that sounds like a lot of ground to cover, well, it is: Although these frames all have a similar sociocultural orientation, they also have some significant differences -- particularly situated cognition, distributed cognition, and activity theory, as Bonnie Nardi argued in Context and Consciousness. As a reader, I found myself wondering why all of these frames were pulled in. Are we supposed to focus on the similarities? In that case, why not narrow the number of frames rather than providing such an extensive discussion and set of resources? Or are we supposed to become aware of the contrasts? In that case, why not systematically highlight these, perhaps in a summary table, so we can see how a synthesis works better than the frames in isolation? My sense, based on the discussions of the studies themselves, is that the authors all had their favorite frames and decided to finesse the issue rather than to agree on a unified theoretical framework. Each frame was invoked in one or more of the component studies. Consequently, some coherence problems are introduced in the studies, leading to some theoretical difficulties in comparisons across studies.

The studies themselves were solidly conducted, but didn't present many surprises for anyone familiar with workplace writing studies. I did appreciate some of the examples from the studies, and some of the phrasing. For instance, the authors declare that "genres are both text and context, and altering the regular features of repeated documents has a ripple effect out to the practices used to create, distribute, and interpret texts, and to the settings within which these documents operate" (p.123). (I am not fond of the concept of "context," but I get what they mean.) Similarly, the authors declare that "when students leave university to enter the workplace, they not only need to learn new genres of discourse, they need to learn new ways to learn such genres" (p.199).

In the conclusion, the authors explain that writing is "a complex network of activities in which the composition represents only one strand" (p.222). Again, this is not a terribly new insight, but it's given new weight through the studies.

All in all, Worlds Apart provides an empirically grounded summary of writing as it is understood in sociocultural approaches. Although the insights are not new, those who have not assimilated the theoretical literature will find it to be a valuable overview; those who want to design empirical studies of writing will draw inspiration from its methods and methodology; those who need to make arguments about writing in the disciplines will find it to be a valuable source of evidence.

Nonviolent video games

Here's a report from an Austin news station about a nonviolent video game design competition. I want to congratulate the CWRL students whose game was featured: Noah Mass, Anthony Matteo, and Jeff Howard all talk about the game, based on the Neverwinter Nights game engine.

Viz.

Viz. is the new website by the CWRL's visual rhetoric workgroup. Its tagline is "Rhetoric - Visual Culture - Pedagogy," and it has a good start on providing valuable resources for all three. If you're interested in researching and teaching visual rhetoric, please do check it out.

Reading :: Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 2ed

Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches
by John W. Creswell (Author)

I really liked the first edition of John Creswell's Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, particularly the comparative approach he took. In fact, I've used it for a couple of qualitative research courses now. But the book had some flaws, so I was glad to see that Creswell has come out with a second edition.

As in most second editions, this one doesn't change in terms of the book's basic framework and thrust, but it undergoes some beneficial refinements. The first is in the subtitle: Creswell no longer calls these traditions, he calls them approaches -- an important distinction in that Creswell is highlighting the coherent, designed nature of these competing ways of conducting qualitative inquiry. Creswell reframes his discussion of biography -- one of the "traditions" from the first edition -- as a subset of the narrative approach. He gives more emphasis to the interpretive qualitative approach, frankly confessing that he has a methods orientation but still treating less methods-oriented approaches with respect. He also outlines some of the approaches he doesn't take up (participatory action research, conversation and discourse analysis).

Most of the book is not substantially impacted, but parts are selectively enhanced throughout, particularly in his reframing of biography as a subset of narrative inquiry.

Overall, it's a worthwhile revision. I'll almost certainly use it the next time I teach qualitative research at the graduate level.

Surveillance in Texas

Speaking of panopticons, Danger Room discusses some proposed measures to keep tabs on citizens in Texas.

Danger Room - Wired News

technorati tags:surveillance, panopticon, texas

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Your blog is your resume -- sort of

In a post currently making the rounds on Techmeme, blogs are declared to be the "new resume." True enough as far as it goes -- I would have said "personality portfolio" -- but the post hints that the blog is only the tip of the iceberg:

Your blog isn’t the only mirror of your life.
Folks are getting savvy to the places that people are building online. Your facebook account, MySpace account, LinkedIn profile, Flickr set…all of these represent you, too. Make sure not that they paint you in an unfailing light, but that they represent you accurately. The best defense is truthfulness…be sure to always be truthful about yourself and everything will fall into place.

I agree with the first part -- the totality of one's online identity is getting easier and easier to aggregate -- although I disagree with the second. (You edit your resume and portfolio, and I don't see why you can't edit your online presence as well.)

So what are the other "mirrors of your life"? How is the totality of one's online identity presented? I've been posting a lot about one variant, lifestreaming, in which you collect and aggregate all of the traces you leave online. iStalkr is one recent example: a social feed aggregator that allows you to place your stream of interactions alongside those of others.

But what if others aren't playing? What if you want to monitor your friends' -- or enemies', or potential hires' -- online identities? Well, you could use Tabber:

Tabber works like this: You create contacts (or import them), then addtheir various online bases of activity - like their blog URL,del.icio.us and Digg usernames, photo gallery, etc. Once you'veimported all that information, Tabber keeps tabs on your friend'sactivities and lets you know when they've updated their blog, theirphoto gallery, or what site they just bookmarked in del.icio.us.

So Tabber is basically iStalkr without an opt-in. That seems fair game, since the information is public anyway, it's just being aggregated. As Bill Hart-Davidson reminded me yesterday, Latour gestures toward this in Reassembling the Social when he says that "information technologies allow us to trace the associations in a waythat was impossible before ... they make visible what was before onlypresent virtually" (p.207). These make possible oligoptica: "from oligoptica, sturdy but extremely narrow views of the (connected) whole are made possible -- as long as connections hold" (p.181). Social aggregators are currently their fullest expression.

technorati tags:tabber, istalkr, lifestreaming, blogs, oligoptica, latour

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Coopetition

Finnish futurist and learning scholar Teemu Arina:

So those who are enemies are actually the most important resource for you to learn and reflect on your thinking, because they bring such different points of view in a conversation, so I can't point to any single enemy. I don't like to pick enemies.

Smart Mobs: Robin Good Interviews Teemu Arina

technorati tags:coopetition

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Free Accessibility Training in Austin

STCAustin.org Newsletter: Free Accessibility Training

technorati tags:accessibility

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There's the other shoe

Google's office suite is officially going to include presentation software. Michael Arrington notes:

Schmidt also said that they’re office suite isn’t a threat to Microsoft. That, of course, is complete spin.

Google’s Office Suite Complete: Google “PowerPoint” Confirmed

technorati tags:google-docs, powerpoint

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We're number eight!

Austin is city #8 in the global distribution of Twitter users, between Toronto and Singapore. Tokyo is #1.

Smart Mobs: Global Distribution of Twitter Users

technorati tags:twitter

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Flattery will Twit you nowhere

I just discovered this in my spam filter:

I'm following you on twitter because I find your comments interesting but
you won't see my comments unless you follow me as well.

Thanks,

Paul

Thanks, Paul! I'm glad you're enjoying my twitters. And a little surprised, since I'm basically using Twitter to make notes that I can use to fill in my timesheets later.

Paul, something tells me we're going to be seeing a lot of attempts to have people opt-in to advertising on Twitter by flattering them into becoming followers of spambots. Any thoughts on that?

ReviewBasics

ReviewBasics is a site where you can attach comments to someone else's documents, photos, or video. It's Flash-based and a bit slow, but looks impressive. The functions appear intuitive and the fact that you can apply the same sorts of contents to just about any sort of media is impressive. Possible applications: web design contracts; documents shared across companies; nonprofit promo materials; students' group projects.

ReviewBasics -- Home

technorati tags:reviews, collaborative

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The most informed consumers of news

People are pointing to this survey of levels of knowledge about current affairs, broken down by news source. Yes, the audiences of the Daily Show and the Colbert report are scoring at the top. But Andrew Sullivan points out that your average Dittohead knows as much about the news as your average NPR listener.

technorati tags:news

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300 million reporters

The future of breaking news: publishing via social networks and footage via mobile phones. At least the news companies still have editing.

Smart Mobs: Virginia Tech Shooting. Eyewitness testimonies and footage dominate news

technorati tags:news

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Twitter's uses expand to churches

SmartMobs reports on still more uses of Twitter. The key junction between mobile phones and broadcast media is what makes Twitter work.

Along these lines, I've finally set my Twitter account to "follow" a few people, so I receive their twitters during the day. It's very interesting, but I can see how a more focused organization (such as a church devotional group) would make for a more productive experience.

Smart Mobs: Twittering churches

technorati tags:twitter

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LeapTag

Here's the description of new web service LeapTag:

LeapTag enables you to discover the Internet on your own terms. You define your interests, show LeapTag a few examples of what you like, and it does the rest, scouring the Internet for relevant news, blogs, books – and more. LeapTag works on your computer, allowing you to discover your interests in total privacy.

Get it? Tivo for websurfing.

LeapTag.com - The World According To You - KillerStartups.com

technorati tags:leaptag, tivo

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MyQuire

Via FranticIndustries, MyQuire is a cross between a social networking service and a project management system. The idea is positive, but the execution lacks the elegance and simplicity of Basecamp or Facebook.

MyQuire.com - Social Networking with a purpose.

technorati tags:myquire

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UIscape

UIScape is a new group blog devoted to discussing user interfaces in broad historical context:

HCI is an insanely broad field, drawing from psychology, ergonomics, design theory, computer science, sociology and anthropology. HCI research can involve studying users, modelling human behaviour, designing and building solutions, and experiments to test hypotheses and designs. This breadth not only makes it hard to define what HCI is, but also to predict what you will find on this site. However, what all the work has in common is that it is relevant in some way to how humans interact with technology, and therefore potentially interesting to anyone involved with this aspect of design. Whether you are an interaction designer, software developer, product designer, architect or simply a design and technology enthusiast, we’re sure there’ll be plenty of interesting stuff for you in there.

Looks really interesting.

UIScape

technorati tags:user-interface-design

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kill -9

"It's like I'm running Thunderbird and you're still stuck with Pine." (Via my sysadmin)

kill -9 (kill dash nine. the geek unix / linux song by monzy) - video

technorati tags:nerdcore

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"What really killed that goal once and for all was the web."

User interface consistency is dead. It was overrated anyway.

Should adolescence be abolished?

I have't read the book or listened to the podcast, but I wanted to flag this discussion because it seems to be coming up in different venues.

Instapundit.com - The Glenn and Helen Show: Should Adolescence Be Abolished?

technorati tags:adolescence

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WriteWith launches

WriteWith is "a group writing platform that falls somewhere between a blogging platform, a wiki, and an online Word clone." My impression after a few minutes: It's simpler than GDocs, appropriate for blogging and straight text, but I'm not sure it will be up to doing medium-duty word processing and collaboration yet.

Y Combinator’s WriteWith Launches - Collaborative Blogging

technorati tags:writewith, collaborative, writing, google, docs

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VisiblePath sounds a lot like ContactMap

VisiblePath is an Outlook add-on that tracks and visualizes personal networks. ContactMap was a project that Bonnie Nardi and associates wrote about in 2002, an app that -- tracks and visualizes personal networks. Nice to see how research and innovation follow parallel tracks.

VisiblePath Is A Lot Like LinkedIn, Except It’s Useful

technorati tags:visiblepath, contactmap

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Twitter's tools

Opening your API tends to result in rich interoperability if your service is simple enough, as Twitter's is.

All Twitter tools and mashups in one place - franticindustries.

technorati tags:twitter, tools, api

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Alternative terms for lifestreaming

This item is a few days old, but still interesting. What I've been calling "lifestreaming" has been mutating as it's applied in different ways.

lifestreamblog.com » Blog Archive » The Many Terms Used to Describe the Lifestreaming Concept

technorati tags:lifestreaming

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Web annotation services

TechCrunch has a roundup.

Five Ways to Mark Up the Web

technorati tags:web, annotators

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Special issue of TCQ

Jason Swarts and Loel Kim are calling for proposals for a special issue of TCQ on new technological spaces.

cfp: New technological spaces [TCQ Special Issue] | Kairosnews

technorati tags:tcq, cfp

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Dandelife

The LifestreamBlog has a feature on Dandelife, a personal biography site that is incorporating the lifestreams idea.

lifestreamblog.com » Blog Archive » Preview of New Dandelife Streams Feature

technorati tags:dandelife, lifestreams

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Reading :: Good to Great

Good to Great
by Jim Collins

Jim Collins' Good to Great, which follows on the heels of his bestselling Built to Last, has become a bestseller in its own right. Collins, who left his faculty position at Stanford's Graduate School of Business to found a management research lab in Boulder, attempts to define what distinguishes "good" companies from "great" companies. How do companies make this transition, and what are their characteristics?

To be specific, his team studied

companies that showed the following basic pattern: fifteen-year cumulative stock returns at or below the general stock market, punctuated by a transition point, then cumulative returns at least three times the market over the next fifteen years. (pp.5-6).

Eleven companies on the Fortune 500 fit these characteristics. His team compared each company directly with a competitor in the same industry. They also examined six "unsustained" comparisons, companies that made a short-term shift but did not sustain that trajectory. That made a total of 28 companies (pp.7-8).

The comparisons were not just financial. Collins' team also examined "articles, analyses, interviews, and the research coding" (p.9), systematically comparing the "good-to-great" examples to their comparisons. Based on this work, they drew several conclusions that cut across the grain of management wisdom:

• "Celebrity" leaders who were brought in to run companies were negatively correlated with success. The good-to-great companies were characteristically run by people who came from within the company and who were both modest and determined.
• No forms of executive compensation appeared to have any effect.
• Long-range strategic planning did not appear to have any effect.
• Good-to-great companies were as likely to focus on what not to do as they were on what to do.
• Technology did not precipitate good-to-great transitions, although it could accelerate transitions that were already in progress.
• Mergers and acquisitions played no role.
• Good-to-great companies spent little time on motivating people.
• Good-to-great companies did not launch efforts with events or programs; they often were not aware of the magnitude of changes at the time.
• Good-to-great companies were not generally in great industries; they performed despite their industries. (pp.10-11)

In many ways, then, this book is the analogue to The Millionaire Next Door, the famous study that revealed how many millionaires live in middle-class neighborhoods and drive used cars.

Collins found that great leaders, so-called "Level 5" leaders, were "self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy" (p.12), a sharp contrast to the brash type-A personalities that we often think of as leaders. These leaders, Collins says, tended to focus on getting the right people first, before setting vision or strategy (p.13). The best companies, like prisoners of war, confronted the brutal facts about their situations even as they maintained faith that they would prevail (p.13).

Good-to-great companies also employed what Collins calls the "hedgehog concept": staying within the intersection of (a) what the company can be best in the world at; (b) what drives the company's economic engine; (c) what the company and its people are deeply passionate about (pp.95-96). They did not stray out of that intersection, while comparison companies tended to diversify too much or hang onto a legacy area for too long.

The good-to-great companies had a "culture of discipline": "When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy," Collins states (p.13). They also used carefully selected technologies to accelerate their momentum, without relying on that technology for the initial spark (pp.13-14).

Finally, these transitions relied on steady momentum rather than great leaps, a concept that Collins calls the "flywheel" (p.14).

Okay, let's get critical. I really like the narrative of this book, which follows the plot of Aesop's fable about the ant and the grasshopper or the tortoise and the hare -- and I always root for the ant and the tortoise in those stories. On the other hand, those stories are a bit simplistic. And even though I believe Collins when he says these stories emerged from the data, I see places in which they also tend to be a bit simplistic.

For instance, at least in the telling, the study seems to rely heavily on the recollections of the good-to-great companies' CEOs and executives, and retrospective interviews are notoriously unreliable. Some of the interview questions also relied on simplistic categories: CEOs, for instance, were asked to name their "top five factors in the shift from good to great" (p.155), as if abstract and overbroad categories such as "technology" and "consistency" were discrete and readily evaluated. Similarly, Collins tends to overemphasize the individuals' roles in the transitions, not only focusing on the executives but also asserting that they key to success is hiring "the right people" (p.192) -- while underdefining what constitutes "right." When Collins talks about how workers collaborate, which is not often, he characterizes successful collaboration as a natural result of hiring people who are passionate and motivated. That is, the system is simply an effect of having the right individuals.

Even though I'm skeptical of some aspects of the study, though, the book is quite valuable for thinking through what it takes to build sustainable positive change within an organization. The precepts generally make intuitive sense, particularly the notion of working steadily in one direction (like the turtle, I suppose, rather than the hare), and Collins' clear writing style makes the pages turn quickly. I'll be using this book as a reference as I continue to work within my own organizations.

"Why are law types so fond of rules and repression? It makes me sick."

Ann Althouse takes aim at the recent Washington Post op-ed written by Georgetown law professor David Cole, in which he advocates banning laptops from classrooms.

Game :: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Longtime readers of this blog will recall that although I rarely read fiction, I enjoy long narrative console games. The gold standard of this genre, of course, is The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (N64), which has been called the Citizen Kane of gaming. Ocarina's combination of strong narrative, puzzle solving, and combat earned it a perfect 10 in reviews, and it was so popular that it was rereleased on the GameCube with new puzzles. Even with comparatively low-res graphics, it's still a compelling and challenging game.

Ocarina is part of a long series of Zelda games, starting in 1987. In every game, Link has to acquire skills and a series of tools by visiting different dungeons and beating different bosses, finally saving the Princess Zelda and the land of Hyrule from the villain Ganondorf. Each time, by the way, the principals are the same but the details are different, and this fact is addressed in the later games by referring to past legends of the hero Link and etc. This mythos was brought out most strongly in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, the GameCube offering that came out a few years ago. (See my review.) Wind Waker was enjoyed by many and reviled by many others, due to its use of cel shading and its cartoonish look. Personally, I liked the look a lot, but I didn't like the tedious nature of travel or some of the unavoidable side quests. I really liked the continuity, though.

Wind Waker's follow-up is last year's Twilight Princess, released simultaneously for the GameCube and the Wii. The advance buzz was very strong, with some critics claiming that it was even better than Ocarina. We got it as soon as we got the Wii, and I went to work. TP has gone for a much more realistic look than any other Zelda game, and it pays off, producing a game that feels more serious and adult than Wind Waker. Is it better than Ocarina? I don't think so -- but I think it comes very close.

The story is very strong, as with most of the other Zelda series (except the execrable Majora's Mask, the only game that made me actively hate all NPCs). Like Ocarina and Wind Waker, TP starts Link off in his own village, meeting the villagers via low-stakes puzzle solving. The gameplay ratchets up fairly quickly once the basic skills are learned, though, and anyone who has played the other Zelda games won't have too much trouble learning them. (The Wii controls do present some challenges, though, which I'll get to in a moment.) After a short time, Link is off to Hyrule Field with his beloved horse Epona -- a name you'll recognize from Ocarina. In fact, you'll recognize a lot from Ocarina: TP is most emphatically a sequel to that game, a direct sequel, so the tools, locales, and even dungeons are essentially the same, though eons later. That Link's adventures are all but forgotten, but you acquire his garb, gallop through his lands, and eventually fight his nemesis.

Let's take a moment to discuss this, because it really has an effect on how you view the game. Two points really jumped out at me as making these direct connections. One is when you visit the fishing shop, and the proprietor casually mentions that one of the pictures on the wall is of a supposed ancestor, the championship fisherman of his day. It's a screen grab of the proprietor of Ocarina's fishing shop -- a little detail that puts you on notice that this isn't just a retelling. The other is when you pick through the ancient ruins of a building in a sacred grove, find out how to open the ruined doors in a clearing, and on the other side, you see what building once stood there: Ocarina's Temple of Time. It's hard to describe how viscerally this hits someone who has played the previous games, each of which creates a specific mood and fosters a deep emotional connection with the land and the mythos.

But although this is the same Hyrule of Ocarina, it's a very different experience. In Ocarina, the scale was so small: mountains seemed like hills, rivers seemed like streams, and Lake Hyrule seemed like hardly more than a pond. In TP, though, the effect is the opposite: Hyrule Field seems like an entire country, Lake Hyrule seems enormous and incredibly deep, and even the dungeons seem cavernous. The twilight that threatens to take over Hyrule is just creepy in a Japanese anime sense, and adds quite a bit to the effect.

Puzzle solving and tools are not terribly different from the other games. One surprising and disappointing thing, though, was that the dungeon bosses were not hard to beat -- in fact, the sub-bosses were consistently harder. This is true pretty much up to the point that you face Ganondorf himself, at which point the difficulty ratchets up considerably.

Unlike Ocarina, there is no magic system to speak of. However, you do spend a lot of time as a wolf, and later in the game you have to switch back and forth between human and wolf in order to make any headway. You do also visit several places that weren't in Ocarina.

Some have complained that the game, which was developed for the GameCube and ported to the Wii for its release, doesn't make good use of the Wii's graphics capabilities. Maybe. But my chief gripe was the controls. To swing the sword, you swing the Wiimote, which seems like a great idea but does not work as well in practice. To perform a spin attack, you shake the Wii's Nunchuck attachment lightly, something that worked inconsistently for me. I also found that I had a tendency to turn the Nunchuck inwards without realizing it, so I would sometimes think I was pushing the control stick forward when I was really pushing it sideways. Most distressingly, while swinging the sword, I found that the Nunchuck would sometimes detach for a split second and reattach while I was pressing the control stick -- and suddenly the Wii would think that center position = back and forward = neutral. That made it difficult to fight, and I got used to temporarily pausing so I could reset the stick orientation.

Nevertheless, the game is really quite good, and I am impressed at how well told and moving the story turns out to be. Defeating Ganondorf was satisfying (although I started to feel sorry for him, since the game allows you to retry if you've been defeated, and I took advantage of that four or five times during the final battle). The great thing is that, now that I've won the game, I can wander around Hyrule exploring all the parts I didn't get to. That's what I'll probably be doing in my spare time next week.

Joi Ito on Jaiku vs. Twitter

I surfed over to Jaiku.com annd spent a few seconds looking at the big map on their homepage, the one that looks like Twittervision, in which new messages show up on the globe as they're posted. Coincidentally, Joi Ito posted just that moment to note that he had blogged on the differences between Jaiku and Twitter.

Well, it was fate, so I clicked through.

The post is interesting in that Ito has a relationship with both companies, and he elaborates minimally on the point he made at SXSWi2007 that the US has been slow to "get" SMS compared to Asia and Europe. But the post ends abruptly, as if Ito had been called to dinner just before starting the main point of the post. Maybe we'll see more thoughts later.

Joi Ito's Web: Jaiku vs Twitter

technorati tags:jaiku, twitter

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Jaiku, social networking, and human activity

When looking at Jaiku, a Helsinki-based service with some similarity to Twitter or Dodgeball, I noticed that the co-founder was Jyri Engeström. Engeström + Helsinki may ring some bells, and in fact, one of Jyri's contacts is Yrjö Engeström. It's not clear what their familial relationship is, but I can guess.

Jyri is a Ph.D. student at Lancaster, studying the relationship between technical innovation and organizational transformation.

What I'm interested in is how these study insights are being transformed into a social networking app. It's unclear to me how many of these services have any sort of theory behind them, so it'll be interesting to determine whether this particular service can translate theory into practice.

Jaiku | About Jaiku

technorati tags:jaiku, socialnetworking, engestrom, theory

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Coop

Everyone's talking about the currently-just-proof-of-concept social browser Mozilla Labs is working on. Steve O'Hear on the Social Web has a pretty good take, and asks the obvious question: Where does this leave Flock?

I've been using Flock, the social browser built on Mozilla Forefox, for a few months now and am finding that it has more potential than it has realized. I love being able to use del.icio.us as integrated bookmarks searchable through the search window; I love the Flickr integration; I like (but do not love) the integrated post-to-blog feature (which I'm using right now). On the other hand, so much more social networking integration is possible, and the integration that exists is not entirely smooth. For instance, I sometimes bookmark pages that never show up on del.icio.us, or do so only after a long delay.

So Coop seems like a promising development in that it offers competition in the social browsing arena. On the other hand, I feel a little bad for Flock's backers: Flock has done a lot to advance social browsing, and it looks like they will get the customary thanks that first movers get in the tech arena.

» Firefox exploring social networking features | The Social Web | ZDNet.com

technorati tags:coop, flock

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Obama campaign goes Web 2.0 on policy

Barack Obama's website has a policy page in which citizens follow this process:

1. Weigh in with their own ideas, stories, messages, and video
2. Collectively "define and refine the best ideas"
3. Incorporate the best ideas into the campaign's policy

This process is touted as "open source policy development," but shares a lot with participatory frameworks such as future workshops. It'll be interesting to see if it takes off.

techPresident – Open Source Policy Development

technorati tags:obama, web2.0

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Zinch: Social networking for those seeking universities

From the description (my emphasis):

Zinch is a disruptive technology that changes the way students will find and be found by universities. The current system of college recruiting and application is broken. The only way the universities can find students is to buy list of students with a high ACT or SAT score. This is only useful to the most cerebral universities and students. Everyone else is left on their own. Zinch solves that problem by recognizing that students are more than a test score and that most universities care about more than your test scores. Students get to represent themselves however they would like by posting test scores, videos, text, images, music etc. This is changing the game by bringing the universities to the students instead of the other way around.

Zinch.com - Bring the Schools to You - KillerStartups.com

technorati tags:zinch, university, recruiting

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Althouse, meet Austin

Ann Althouse is in Austin this week and has some good photos up, along with Althousian commentary.

"Why does email continue to be such a big driver of political discourse in the African American community?"

Spencer Overton speculates.

techPresident – The Continuing Significance of Email Among African Americans

technorati tags:email, african-american, community

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Vista breaks Blackboard

Vista breaks Blackboard.

Slashdot | Vista Failing "Blackboard" College Courses

technorati tags:vista, blackboard

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Reading :: The Age of the Network

The Age of the Network
by Jessica Lipnack, Jeffrey Stamps

David Ronfeldt offhandedly cited this book in his monograph on societal organization, so I put it on the list. It's oriented toward business readers, and perhaps in consequence it is thin on the scholarly side and overpromises the results of networked organizational structures. However, it does provide a useful introduction to the differences among organizational structures.

Lipnack and Stamps' central argument is in a pull quote on the first page:

The network is emerging as the signature form of organization in the Information Age, just as bureaucracy stamped the Industrial Age, hierarchy controlled the Agricultural Era, and the small group roamed in the Nomadic Era. (p.3)

Sensibly, the authors point out that networked organizational structures do not supplant earlier forms of organization, but coexist with them. Hierarchies don't cease to exist. (Ronfeldt cites this argument in his similar argument about societal organization.) And although the distinctions are made a bit superficially, the authors do provide some good examples of how networks coexist with other structures and how they are implemented through "teamnets," "coopetition," and boundary crossing.

Lipnick and Stamps argue that networks have five key organizing principles: unifying purpose; independent members; voluntary links; multiple leaders; and integrated levels (p.18). Networks, they say, exist at the top of "organizational sediments" that include previous forms (bureaucracies, hierarchies, and "small groups" or what Ronfeldt calls tribes)(p.35). Like Ronfeldt, they peg these organizational types to epochs (p.38) and, later, to human evolution (p.140). In this latest phase, the Information Age, "relationships are the dominant reality" (p.42) and links across agents increase dramatically, leading to greater horizontal complexity across and within organizations. Those links convey the benefits of flexibility, power, and speed (p.70), but only if the complexity can be managed.

That's the meat of the book; the authors go on to discuss case studies and extract principles, but also to offer heuristics that seem a bit too simple (such as a "hierarchy ruler," p.137). They get positively giddy in Chapter 7, which is about online communication, and promise far too much. But the first few chapters serve as a worthwhile primer for net work.

Reading :: Sources of Power

Sources of Power
by Gary Klein

I've been sitting on this book for weeks, waiting for my other projects to quiet down so I could spend the time to review it. It's a really fascinating book about how people make difficult decisions under trying circumstances.

I'm not that familiar with the field of decision making, although it has a lot of apparent overlap with the problem solving studies that I've read (Lave & Wenger, Suchman, Scribner, etc.). In fact, he acknowledges that problem solving and decision making tend to blur in natural settings (p.141).

In this book -- which is well written and accessible for a lay audience despite being based on rigorous qualitative research -- Klein tackles the question: why do people work so well and make such good decisions under difficult decisions? To investigate, he describes several careful naturalistic studies of decision making

• under time pressure,
• in high stakes activities (firefighting, warfare),
• by experienced decision makers,
• with inadequate information,
• when goals are unclear,
• with poorly defined procedures,
• involving "cue learning," the ability to recognize patterns and make distinctions,
• in context,
• under dynamic conditions, and
• in teams
(pp.4-6)

That's a lot of constraints, but together they make for a focused set of studies that cut across several domains and enable Klein to make some strong claims about decision making.

For one thing, he becomes very skeptical about formal decision-making processes (p.29), arguing instead for a renewed valuing of tacit knowledge: "Intuition grows out of experience," he argues (p.33), sounding a lot like researchers who have studied tacit knowledge in education and HCI and workplace studies.

He also argues that "mental stimulation" -- the ability to model consequences of different solutions mentally before trying them out physically -- is a central skill (p.45), although limited by the mind's memory constraints (p.53) and the tendency to rationalize conflicting evidence (p.65). He claims that successful decision makers operating under these constraints tend to come up with a single strategy for solving the problem; unsuccessful ones often follow a more formal comparative evaluation, which is appropriate for deliberation but not for decisionmaking under these constraints. Similarly, "forcing functions" of the environment lead plan structure: stable environments and plentiful resources lead to complex interconnected plans, while rapidly changing environments with scarce resources lead to modular, limited plans that were more fault-tolerant and segmented (p.145). (Klein doesn't go into the implications for netwar, but they seem obvious.)

Klein identifies eight aspects of expertise: "things that experts can see that are invisible to everyone else." I'll just block quote these:

• Patterns that novices do not notice.
• Anomalies -- events that did not happen and other violations of expectancies.
• The big picture (situation awareness).
• The way things work.
• Opportunities and improvisations.
• Events that either already happened (the past) or are going to happen (the future).
• Differences that are too small for novices to detect.
• Their own limitations. (pp.148-149)

Klein also points out that expert decision makers generate counterfactuals as well: "explanations and predictions that are inconsistent with the data" (p.154).

Not surprisingly, Klein advocates for increasing initiative in organizations (such as military and fire-fighting units) by decreasing central control, pushing decision making out to the people who are most immediately engaged with the decision making context (p.224). He stresses that this means commanders have to learn how to communicate intent while leaving discretion to those who implement that intent (p.225). (This is the distinction between command and control that we're seeing a lot about in netwar and power-to-the-edge approaches.)

Towards the end of the book, in Ch.14, Klein draws some regrettable analogies between team and individual minds and between team development and the development of individual cognition. These analogies are problematic, given what we know about early cognitive development, but present only a minor flaw in the book.

Klein ends in Ch.17 with a discussion of the naturalistic research he conducted and a stirring defense of qualitative research in general.

Overall, I was impressed by the book and would even consider assigning readings from it for a qualitative research class. Klein's clear descriptions, well chosen illustrations, and careful research make for a solid piece of work that sheds light onto decision making and complements the sociocultural literature on problem solving.

HiTask

This looks really, really interesting. It's a sort of cross between Basecamp and TaDa Lists. But the killer here is that you can list your tasks in various ways: by project, by chronology, by color (arbitrary categorization). It also uses tags.

HiTask - free online task management

technorati tags:hitask, basecamp

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Instructional videos are now almost as easy as instructional text

Sure they are. Digital video is cheap, often built right into your phone. YouTube is out there. And startups such as 5min and Jabbits aim to create specialized platforms for short instructional videos and video Q&A, respectively. Just as the read/write web allowed everyone to share their text instructions, these changes will allow everyone to share video instructions -- probably a beneficial move, since people have different learning styles.

CSUN report

Josh Whiting of WebAIM reports on the recent CSUN conference. Among the highlights: WAVE 4 is coming out soon, including a new toolbar for Firefox.

WebAIM: Blog - CSUN 2007

technorati tags:accessibility, wave, csun

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Prom Queen

TechCrunch asks:

Is the future of new media going to be a world where stories are told over eighty episodes that are each ninety seconds long?

Maybe. Episodes of that length are also easier to watch on one's phone, something that people seem to  be forgetting.

Shakespeare, Happy Days and Prom Queen

technorati tags:promqueen, video

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OpenFloodgate

OpenFloodgate is a self-publishing site like Scribd, but gives creators more control. Documents are published as "series of image files or PDFs," something that makes plaigiarism -- and reading -- harder.
OpenFloodgate: Online Publishing with Control

technorati tags:openfloodgate, scribd

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Redefining IMG -- it can only get better, right?

Michael Arrington reports:

The basic format for embedding images into a web page using the [<IMG>] tag has been around almost as long at HTML itself, since the first graphical web browser. It works, and it is used constantly. But can it be better?

That's the question that advertising network AdBrite's new BritePic standard is trying to answer: "Just by changing the embed code, web publishers can add a caption, watermark, zoom, share, resize and other features."

Unfortunately, BritePic doesn't seem to have any embedded accessibility features: no embedded ALT text, no <NOSCRIPT> functionality. My sense is that these would not be hard to add for basic image description, but really problematic for reproducing all the functionality BritePic tries to embed (e.g., adding pictures to RSS feeds, emailing them, linking to them, etc.).

Redefining The IMG Tag

technorati tags:britepic, accessibility

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I'm glad April Fools' Day is over ...

... because a significant minority of the stories in my aggregator were either obviously fake, or repeated an obviously fake story, or gave earnest commentary on an obviously fake story (I can't find Dave Winer's commentary on the story above, but it was there yesterday).