The Flicker Blog and Podcast

A dry and lengthy (but no less interesting) presentation by Verna Allee from the 2006 Mesh Forum on how the language of traditional economics is often innapropriate for understanding or explaining contemporary online business. We often hear of intangible assets; this presentation explains the need to quantify and measure them.

Economies are usually measured, valued or understood on the basis of trading finite resources. The information/attention/knowledge/etc. economy is hugely different. Put simply, knowledge multiplies when distributed – unlike a tangible product, it does not become scarcer.

Talking about traditional accounting practices, she highlights one of the major institutional and ideological conflicts that arise – to paraphrase:
The typical HR mantra: ‘People are our greatest asset.’
A typical accounting statement: ‘People are our biggest expense.’
If a business can’t agree on where it has value, how can it grow it?

A couple of links that have been doing the rounds at work - some Qualitive and Quantitive studies into the most commonly used web fonts:
A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which is Best and When?
and
Determining the Best Online Font for Older Adults

It’s interesting to read about the methods used, and the information may help inform (or at least defend) certain design decisions that are made, but it all unravelled for me when I read that Comic Sans, was one of the most favoured fonts by the participants!

The BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype movie shows a beautiful, elegant and seductive alternative for the contemporary desktop metaphor we’ve all known and used on our PCs since the 80′s. Whilst the demonstrated interactions are not 100% intuitive or self-evident, they do appear to be easy to learn (not unlike Grafitti on PalmOS).

Despite the impressive execution of the concept, I am a little puzzled as to what problem is being solved here. It would appear (to the designers of this prototype) that in the real world, the messy, cluttered desktop, with piles of documents scattered everywhere, is desirable. In the real world, your eyes can tell you in an instant, what you are looking at – making sorting and location of objects far easier. The resolutions of displays may be going up, but in this demo, all PDFs are displayed by their icon alone. Minus a filename or preview, how do you know what you are dealing with when sorting piles of documents?

For me, the most dissapointing aspect of this is that it just extends and polishes the existing metaphor. Piles of files – aren’t they just a new way of thinking of folders? With the virtual world, are such rigid presentational groupings appropriate? Wouldn’t an interface that shows connections and dependencies automatically be more useful?

I’m sure that there’s far more to the prototype than the movie shows, and that using the interface itself, would make the merits more forthcoming. However, I do feel that it’s wrong to assume that the actual, cluttered desktop is the optimum solution to the problem.

If I were to generalise hugely, and say that people fall into two camps – those that keep their desks tidy, and those who do not, who would this interface benefit? Aren’t those who keep their desks tidy most likely to save and manage files and folders as a matter of course, and those who do not, be most likely to dump everything on their desktop? My feeling is that the less tidy amongst us, are also those who are less likely to go to the effort of sorting a messy desktop into piles. To me, it would seem that this prototype is aimed at just those people.

As promised in my last post I’m posting the response I received from Speed Touch about using their modem on an Intel based Mac:

“We don’t have a date for supporting Intel Macs – hence the recommendation to get a router.”

Given that this is the modem suppied by Talk Talk with their free broadband offer, it’s worth being aware that as an Intel Mac user, you’ll either have to obtain another modem, or play the waiting game with the drivers.

When my father went in to discuss the matter with Talk Talk, they did give him another modem from Sagem. As he’s a hundred miles away, I haven’t yet had a chance to see if this new modem fares any better. Unfortunately, the Sagem website isn’t much help either – it only states that Mac OSX is supported, and gives no further details.

If you’re tempted by the free broadband forever offer in the UK from Talk Talk and have an Intel based Mac, I’d urge you to read on.

My Dad said that the offer appeared to be too good to be true, and unfortunately in this case, this would appear to be true (for the moment at least).

I recently spent several hours trying to set up the Talk Talk provided broadband modem with his Intel iMac.

Despite Talk Talk’s claims that Macs are supported, and after a couple of lengthy (and utterly pointless) support calls to them, I gave up and decided to contact the modem makers directly. It was obvious to me that the problem was with the modem drivers (even though I’d downloaded the latest OSX10.4 ones that day). Nobody at Talk Talk appeared to have any idea what to suggest, and given they charge for support by the minute, their sole purpose seemed to be keeping me on the line as long as possible without offering any assistance.

The official response from Speedtouch was: “The SpeedTouch 330 does not support Intel based MACs.” So – there you have it. I’ve responded to the email to ask if the drivers will be updated to support (what will be) all new macs. As soon as I get a response, I’ll post it here.

First the dramatic statement – this will be my last post on this blog.

Then, the far less exciting disclaimer – I’m simply moving over to to a new tool, the excellent and open-source blogging tool – WordPress.

All of the contents from this blog have been imported, and all future posts will now appear here. I haven’t yet had time to configure my template (so the appearance is the default provided by WordPress). I do promise to remedy that soon however – I just need to find some time!

Anyone interested in the RSS feed, can now get that here.

Came across this simple, yet rather nice idea today from Tiggdo. Create an account, point your phone at their WAP site and add your account details.

After you’ve been through the initial set-up process once, you’re prompted to save your homepage as bookmark on your phone. And that’s it! You use the website to add, edit or remove RSS feeds as you see fit. Given how clunky that the navigation is on mobile devices, this seems like a rather nice way of pulling all the stuff you care about into one, easy to access place.

Well nearly – Apple have officially released beta software (Boot Camp) to let you install XP on Intel based macs. Not that you couldn’t do it already, but an official Apple solution is going to be a whole lot more reassuring to the majority of consumers and becomes (IMHO) another incentive to invest in an Apple product.

I couldn’t help but be amused by their riff on the Windows Logo, and some of the none too subtle critiques of the whole Windows experience; for example: “EFI and BIOS – Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.”

A very interesting debate on Tech Nation between Baroness Susan Greenfield and Ray Kurzweil.

I won’t even attempt to do it justice. But, if you have any interest in technology affording us longer, fulfilling lives, and of the philosophical questions that arise as a consequence, I urge you to listen to it.

In retort to Ray’s articulate argument, that exponential growth in the tech sector will enable us to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles posed by nature, Susan Greenfield used a quote: “You’re not thinking, you’re being logical.”

I liked this. It’s all too easy to be gain confidence from the existence of a predicted trajectory. Her assertion, that gathering data in increasing amounts, and being able to process it is only half the problem, was followed up by another observation: “We’re answer rich, but question poor.”

She was referring to Neuroscience, but to me, the observation has an uncanny parallel to the environment being capitalised on by Web 2.0 services.

As we struggle increasingly with data overload, search engines provide answers only to posed questions, RSS readers only alert you to content that you have sought out, do we actually need help in understanding what the pertinent questions are?

Watch the video
Apparently, this was produced internally at Microsoft as a tool to communicate to the Marketing and Packaging teams just how wrong they tend to get things. It’s both a funny and powerful example of why less is so often more.

Also related (being about Microsoft marketing) the current Office Poster Campaign: ‘It’s time to evolve’ strikes me as having a rather inappropriate underlying message. Given the widespread use of Office by Enterprises, isn’t the suggestion that corporate life is currently hell (unless you upgrade to the latest version of office) also saying that this is the case because the previous version of office is unusable? For instance, a human being with a dinosaur head is seen turning up at reception saying ‘I’m either here for a 12 o’clock on the 11th, or an 11 o’clock on the 12th.’ Hmmmmmmmmmmmm, is that because you’re a dinosaur, or because you use Outlook?