City of Bits Blog
Usability, user experience, technology, ethnography, design, the workplace and public policy, from a UK perspective
Friday, October 31, 2003
Usability Flash Mobs?
I've just been having a correpondence with Tom Smith over the last couple of days over his proposal to produce T-shirts with the greatest sins of usability printed on the front.
My proposal yesterday was to establish a usability flash mob wearing these T-shirts, which would target HQs of companies with usability *issues*. The idea seems to have caught Tom's imagination.
Rationale? Flash mobs are - by definition? - pretty pointless. Why not give them a point? Give them a purpose that could (a) hit the press and (b) change behaviour.
Tom and others have posted a list of *issues* that could decorate said T-shirts.
Another UK MP has joined the blogging fray! Clive Soley launched this month on Typepad.
How many MPs does it take to achieve critical mass, I wonder? Take a look at Robert Paterson's summary of the main points of Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point.
Verified voting is an idea that originated in the US, aims to provide a realistic solution to the lack of an audit trail in electronic voting systems, and will help to ensure the integrity of the democratic process should electronic voting be adopted (planned for around 2006-2010 in the UK). Verified Voting provides a simultaneous paper trail to the electronic ballot, that is checked by the voter. This means the voter can instantly check the way their vote is being cast (not otherwise possible with electronic systems) and also provides the material for a recount should the result be challenged (again, not otherwise possible). The US resolution has already garnered thousands of endorsements and is starting to influence government policy. We're hoping the same will happen here.
To find out more about the issues surrounding electronic voting see Jason's website, and to look into verified voting look at Professor David Dill's US VerifiedVoting website. To endorse the European resolution, go to the Resolution page, where you can also see who else has endorsed it. By the way, the Resolution is Europe-wide, so if you live anywhere in Europe, I encourage you to endorse. [There are plenty more materials on electronic voting on my own e-voting page, and more still on the Usability Professionals' Association website.)
The other project is Tom Steinberg's MySociety, a venture aiming to both secure funding for civic society software projects, and to allocate those funds to worthwhile and realistic projects that will contribute to the greater social good. Tom has a column in today's Guardian newspaper, explaining the rationale. Tom needs money, ideas and people who can do stuff. Again, he's more than happy to consider projects originating outside the UK.
Equipment to scan fingerprints and take photos of foreign visitors to the US arriving through air and seaports is planned to go live on 5 January, reports Wired. Apparently a US General Accounting Office report has described the proposed system as "a very risky endeavor". The 'exit' portion is still under development.
With more and more sites dealing with usability, it's sometimes time consuming to keep track, which is why sites such as Newsability, run by Tom Smith, and Usability Views, run by Chris McEvoy, are so useful as collators of useful articles.
While it's a shame that the detailed work on usability evaluation and user trials conducted by John Clarkson and Simeon Keates of the Engineering Design Centre at Cambridge is not included in the report (published separately - I will try to track this down), the report provides food for thought and some potentially far-reaching recommendations.
The report recognises that for the present, most people will be accessing DTV through set-top boxes with separate remote control devices, rather than through integrated TV equipment. The usability issues here are multifarious, ranging from poor device integration, multiplicity of remote controls, the 'mental model' of interaction with a TV-style device versus that with a computer-style device, right through to the usability of content and electronic programme guides.
One good aspect of the study is that it encompasses the entire user experience from pre-purchase and purchase, through to installation, tuning, joint operation with other devices, finding out what's on, navigating menus, accessing settings and accessing interactive content. While the report focuses more on accessibility (including cognitive impairment) than usability per se, the authors recognise that even those users without impairment would be affected by the issues raised.
In both the usability evaluation phase and the user trials, the report points to a huge array of problems with current DTV equipment. The authors believe that manufacturers already compete in terms of ease of use, if only in the superficial marketing sense, but that there are good arguments for industry collaboration to achieve true ease of use for the entire DTV experience: there would be gains in improved social learning, reduction in channel costs such as retail staff training, and minimisation of system issues that 'fall between the cracks' of different pieces of equipment in a system.
The solution proposed? Give an an industry group the task of addressing cross-industry interaction design for content, with the aim of producing a code of practice to be used as a reference source; and integrate this activity with industry-wide system interaction design.
This might not be welcomed by manufacturers, but seems a sensible route if high take-up is to be achieved (the UK government aims to switch off analogue TV between 2006 and 2010).
As the report points out, "Usability is not an altruistic goal. If DTV products are perceived to be usable, then the market size will be increased and the products will reach beyond the technology literate early adopters who are perhaps quite tolerant of poor usability, towards groups who are less au fait with technology..."
We're heading firmly towards November 5th, and fireworks are not only only things falling thick and fast around these parts.
The general exasparation with spam in all its forms - including 'spam as comments on blog posts' - has culminated in the launch today of The Work Foundation's latest report, 'Fat Pipes, Connected People: Rethinking Broadband Britain'. The original focus of broadband providers on content always seemed perverse to say the least. This report has a few things to say about what should be concentrating minds instead, such as improving the user experience through tackling the spam issue.
On a different front, people in usability have long been concerned about the usability aspects of digital TV, which many local authorities have seen as their salvation for opening up a digital presence to a wider public. 'Digital Television for All' is a timely report addressing the usability and accessibility concerns about the medium, commissioned by the Department of Trade and Industry. In the meantime, DigiTV, the interactive digital television national project, announced today that its launch event - scheduled for 12 November - has been called off and will now take place next year. Ho hum.
New Media Knowledge have organised a social software event for December, and have invited along William Davies (Work Foundation), Lee Bryant (Headshift) and yours truly to talk about the potential commercial applications of social software in its various manifestations.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world's largest computing professionals' organisation and its digital library a repository of tens of thousands of articles from many top-flight publications in the sector. Among these publications is the industry standard 'Interactions', addressing the area of human-computer interaction and related areas such as usability.
So it's ironic that the digital library giving immediate access to all this fine material is so unusable. If you're lucky, you only get a popup logon box appearing every 5-10 minutes, and if you're unlucky - as I was yesterday - you can end up going around in circles as the system accepts your logon to access an article and then promptly throws another logon screen at you just as another part of the system has sent you half way to being able to download a paper. The obsession with security, keeping outsiders out, means that those who are members are forced to go through tortuous routines time and again.
Yesterday's little episode then led my to change passwords yet again, in a futile attempt to solve the problem, which went fine. And then I was given a link right in the centre of the page, to take me back to my original paper download page, so I clicked and got this little gem:
An error occurred while evaluating the expression: find("CFID",want_href) EQ 0 Error near line 1833, column 40. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Error resolving parameter WANT_HREF ColdFusion was unable to determine the value of the parameter. This problem is very likely due to the fact that either: You have misspelled the parameter name, or You have not specified a QUERY attribute for a CFOUTPUT, CFMAIL, or CFTABLE tag. The error occurred while processing an element with a general identifier of (CFIF), occupying document position (1833:12) to (1833:45) in the template file F:\WWWROOT\PORTAL\V6\POPLOGIN.CFM. Date/Time: 10/27/03 10:03:02 Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Alexa Toolbar) Remote Address: 217.134.11.50 Query String: dl=GUIDE&td=1067267175776
Phew! Should anybody really be faced by such a message as a result of clicking the main link in the centre of what must be a frequently visited page? Has anyone tested any of this stuff?
Some time ago, a manager at one major UK agency producing websites for corporates said that "usability is the Laura Ashley of computing" - all his guests laughed. My response is that systems without usability input are all too often the Ratner's* of computing.
* (For those of you outside the UK, Ratner's was a national cut-price jewellery chain, effectively killed by its chief executive when he admitted in public that one of his firm's products was "total crap").
I'm sometimes taken aback by the way some people in the tech sector remark on the way ordinary computer users manage their machines. Dismissive remarks such as "Oh and they don't even run defrag!" or an incredulous "But haven't you installed a firewall?" are all too common.
While in my experience most ordinary users now master the basics of applications such as word processing (though not mail merge), sending an email (though not an attachment), and even setting up a small database (though using a program not intended for that purpose, i.e. a spreadsheet program), when it comes to the behind the scenes stuff ordinary users generally have little or no knowledge of how to go about this. This situation is aggravated by PCs being generalist machines, with a host of possible permutations for operating system and patches and programs that may or may not work successfully together. Software producers don't do much to help, scattering housekeeping tasks around with a pepperpot (cookies, defrag, temporary files, firewall, updates and patches) and failing to keep users informed in simple terms about what needs to be done. The introduction of Windows has to some extent made matters worse: apart from its security issues, Windows gives an appearance of ease of use but hides 'innards' functions from the user.
Microsoft's full page ads in recent weeks in the British press warning people about the types of action they should take to improve their computer security seem more PR than any real attempt to show people what needs to be done.
Ordinary users, without training, cannot be expected to be experts in computer security and computer housekeeping. The average person in the street will have a vague knowledge of intellectual property law, but often gets mixed up between trademarks and patents and wouldn't know how to file a successful application for either; the average house owner can paint their windowframes or replace a broken pane of glass, but would make a pig's dinner of rewiring the building or installing an alarm system. Cars are now so complex that many people who used to maintain their own vehicle now do little more than keep the oil and water topped up and book with the mechanic for anything more. We shouldn't expect any greater skill level when it comes to computers.
An article in today's Register, Joe Average User Is In Trouble, hits the nail on the head, giving a very fair account of the true skill level of most users. As Scott Granneman says, "It is a huge - and growing - problem for IT professionals at businesses to keep up with all the patches Microsoft issues. How, then, are non-professionals supposed to deal with the problem? More importantly, how are security pros supposed to deal with the bigger problem: that non-pros don't deal with the problem?"
We either need a sea-change in the way housekeeping and security tasks are addressed, with simpler centralised routines that the ordinary computer user can confidently deal with. Or we need to admit that computer housekeeping and security, even for the home computer user, is now a job for the professionals only. The companies who have for years now encouraged all and sundry to buy these 'easy to use' computers and go online bear some responsibility for this situation and need to address the issue in a more meaningful way.
A new group blog, misbehaving.net, looking at women and technology was launched on Friday. Bloggers include Jill of jill/txt blogging fame, Meg Hourihan (one of the founders of Pyra Labs and blogging at megnut.com), Halley Suitt (who has written this on the politics of male blogging on her own blog), Liz Lawley (whose own blog is mamamusings.net), Caterina Fake (personal blog at caterina.net), Gina Trapani, Danah Boyd and Dorothea Salo. Good project.
Last week Amazon announced a new service, a "search inside" feature that allows you to perform full-text searches of over 100,000 books in its digital archive.
Steven Johnson points out on Slate that we are probably just as likely to use the facility for books we do own as for those we don't. I know I already often check book details (e.g. bibliographic matter) on Amazon rather than digging around through bookshelves if I happen to be sitting in front of the computer. Amazon now takes the possibilities one stage further. The potential for such a tool is even greater for the publications of countries without a tradition of providing proper book indexes (e.g. Spain).
Why you should go and see Jerry Springer: The Opera if you haven't already (even if you like neither musicals/opera nor Jerry Springer) 1. The overall concept is great. 2. The lyrics are hilarious and memorable (but mostly unrepeatable). 3. There are many good singers in the (original National Theatre) cast. 4. This is as clever and well thought out piece of theatre as you'll find in the West End right now. 5. You'll probably end up putting The Producers on the video again (there are some definite parallels with scenes in Springtime for Hitler). 6. Do you need any more reasons?
Thanks to the amberlighters for asking along a few of us 'honorary' folks ;-)
I'm just experimenting this weekend with implementing commenting on the blog (not part of the Blogger package) and not doing too well right now. Still trying to get it right - let me know if you hit problems, or if you've got a favourite commenting utility (I'm using Enetation at the mo').
The BBC's long-awaited iCAN project is now in Beta, with the official launch due on 3 November. iCAN aims to help people find the people and the information that will help them take action on issues that concern them. Content is a little thin right now: this will be provided by people who use the website.
One of the first campaigns to get going is a corker: getting the Beeb to provide downloads (e.g. MP3) for material currently supplied in streaming form (organised by Kevin Marks). Another laudable campaign launched is against estate agents' signs.
iCAN can be considered on several levels, for example interaction design, social and political.
On the interaction level, it has to be said the site is still firmly in Beta, and the projected live date seems a little ambitious. There are some glitches and areas where interaction design could be improved, but according to Matt Jones there are already a couple of design iterations in the pipeline.
On the social level, both Matt Jones (who spent the last two years working on the project) and Tom Coates (who works at the BBC now) have offered some thoughts. Being a bear of little brain, I've still got my thinking cap on.
On the political level, while the UK government has for some time expressed concern about the level of participation in the democratic process (well, only really about low election turnouts if we're being honest), with a range of politicians and civil servants promoting increased citizen engagement and participation in speeches and reports, I have more than a suspicion that if this project truly takes off it will raise more than a few hackles in government over years to come.
For example, I can imagine that any campaigns designed to organise direct action activities against government policy would prove particularly troublesome. Were the next fuel protesters' action, the next miners' strike or the next poll tax riots to be organised via the BBC's website, what would the government's reaction be? While one of the spurs to the project was the BBC finding itself out of touch with grass-roots campaigns that went on to make the headlines, with iCAN it could well be putting itself at the eye of the hurricane.
iCAN is a bold move that seems in tune with the times. It's the kind of social software that government itself would be developing and using, were it to be truly interested in increasing participation in the political process.
'Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election', the film that I blogged earlier this month, is to get another UK screening, this time at the Riverside Studios (Hammersmith, London) on 13 November at 8pm. In the meantime, the film has been showered with awards (NY International Film Fest Grand Jury Prize and more).
Javier Cañadas of Cadius fame in the Spanish-speaking world has a new project in hand: the launch of a Spanish-language interaction design journal, aiming to bridge the worlds of academia and practitioners/business.
It strikes me that in Spain (I know less about Latin America) the silo-isation of the business and academic worlds in the field of interaction is much greater than in the US and the UK, and it's a divide that needs breaking down. Javier is planning an editorial board of both academic and industry representatives, and he has kindly asked me on board as an industry practitioner.
It's also good to see that Interacción 2004 conference in Spain - the main national HCI conference - is to have an Industry Day, following in the footsteps of the new Industry Day at the HCI 2003 Bath conference. Such a format has limitations, but is a good first step. Alan Dix is to be a keynote speaker.
Further details to follow as the project matures....
Tom Smith of The OTHER Blog wrote to me yesterday about missing events - and then I managed not to find out about Dan Gillmor being in town until this morning! Sorry, Tom. Some kind of more systematic approach to all this is sorely needed.
Reporting on the HITS 2003 conference in Chicago that aims to build bridges between design and business, Peterme has some ponderings this week on the need for innovation, which he thinks has descended into fetishization: "It worries me because I live in a world where the things that already exist typically don't work as well as they should."
Meanwhile over at Confusability, Chris McEvoy wonders whether with the demise of Concorde - amazing how everyone talks about it as if it were a single 'plane - we are turning our backs on innovation and concentrating on risk minimisation and profit maximisation. [He's also got a pretty nifty photo from the old days at Filton, near Bristol, where Concorde was built.] And Nico MacDonald railed earlier this month against design for sustainability as an impediment to ingenuity and progress.
I feel Peter is right: we spend a lot of time trying to send various things and people into space whilst failing to address such simple things as the best way to lay out a cooker hob. On the other hand, space science has as a byproduct given us improved materials for making our cooking pans. This does seem a pretty expensive route for product development though.
As Peter points out, most of us don't get to work on innovation most of the time. We spend much of our time "shoring up poorly planned solutions". Spending our time on innovation would be great, but in the real world other more practical considerations overtake us. I think the impact of sustainability approaches is the least of our worries.
While with one hand the government is busily passing legislation outlawying spam, some areas of the public sector have started propagating their very own variety.
This afternoon I received an unsolicited e-mail from UKeU, trying to sell Master's courses in computer science at a UK university. UKeU is a body wholly funded by the UK government, to the tune of £55m. The received address for UKeU begins 'e-targeting@'. Targetting? Not exactly. I already have an MSc.
Perhaps they are unaware of the UK Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, which come into effect on 11 December, and whose purpose is to prevent spam and other unsolicited marketing communications being sent without the prior consent of the recipient.
I look forward to being able to take such people to the cleaners. Meanwhile the UKeU postmaster mailbox rejects UKeU's own message as being spam of the highest order. Touché.
Most of the business pages are carrying the story that Google is to hit the stock market, with a float planned for next spring.
The Guardian reports that Google's owners are "considering a new IPO method that would bypass investment banks and sell the shares directly to investors using an online auction system". Google meets eBay?
Some people who read this blog also consult my London events list. And some of those people even end up going to an event as a consequence. Which is nice.
One of those people - the very amiable Ian Forrester, a lecturer at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication (fantastic URL) in south London - recently had a chat with me about the possibilities of turning this fairly unstructured information into a feed. Nico MacDonald went one further, and suggested a London-wide events list related to all things design (the current list is pretty much informed by my personal interests and prejudices, though hopefully none the worse for that). This may take some time, but in the meantime, I'm exploring the theme of event information and notification.
I've just spotted Upcoming.org, a collaborative event calendar aiming to help manage personal events lists and 'to find others like you', which has something of the personal flavour aspect built in as a feature. I haven't tried it yet, but will give it a whirl when time allows.
This week also saw the launch of a new Demos report, London Calling, exploring how mobile technologies can aid the process of public sector transformation.
Alison Jackson's talk at the ICA on Monday, where we also had the chance to look back over many of the images of celebrities she has constructed in recent years (PDF), was a million miles away from last night's talk by William Davies at the Royal Society of Arts about how the important element in 'ICT' is really the 'C' or communication, not the 'I' or information, but I feel a connecting thread coming on.
Jackson is clear from her artistic experiences - such as taking the 'lookalike Beckhams' to Japan and seeing that people went crazy over them and didn't care whether they were seeing the real thing or not - that the cult of celebrity is a rising tide in our society, but sits on the fence regarding the question of whether this is a bad thing.
Davies, as someone who believes that social software can be harnessed to build social capital through the very act of communication, thinks what we communicate about - the information element - may be of secondary importance or no importance at all. Social capital - particularly of the bridging sort - is considered a 'good thing' that should be encouraged.
So my questions to William might be: Do we in fact build social capital through mindless and endless chatter about celebrities? And is this something we should encourage?
PS Alison's doing a Christmas special for the Beeb. Can't wait!
Well my (US) video version of 'Unprecedented: the 2000 Presidential Election' has arrived, much sooner than expected. I ordered the video on Amazon.com (not available in the UK), and paid the appropriate postage (and threw in that old favourite Roger & Me too, jst of rthe heck of it). And then the video was despatched, tout de suite from the Netherlands, and presumably at much lower cost for the vendor, but it also arrived much more speedily than I can normally expect form the US.
I notice that Moreover is now offering "the first enterprise-grade weblog search" giving "enterprises access to high value information".
"The product harvests information from over 25,000 hand selected, business-critical weblogs in real-time and enables corporate users to gain access to the high value news, commentary and consumer opinion that resides within weblogs," according to the press release.
So many daft competitions on UK television - Fame Academy, Pop Idol, Big Brother - using telephone voting for candidates brings to mind the old days when 'other' technology loomed large in the UK televisual landscape, measuring audience response in an altogether different way. In the studio. Or in the polling stations. But which always grabbed the imagination of the public.
I'm talking the Clapometer (used on Opportunity Knocks, to measure the amount of audience clapping), which according to the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television (scroll down for an image), "gave a visual score on screen based on how loud the studio applause was", and was offically known as the Audience Reaction Monitor (1968).
Note: "This is probably the first example of interactive TV in the UK". Yes, those dastardly words, interactive TV.
But of course the mainstay was the Swingometer (includes image), that stalwart of BBC TV late night election programmes, showing the effect of a particular voting 'swing' in various constituencies on the allocation of seats in the House of Commons in our first-past-the-post system. A device that perhaps elevated BBC election coverage to the heights of game show format (?). Almost.
It may well be the case that said meters and so on were 'respositioned' by hand, but in terms of interpretation by the viewing audience this equipment gave us what we wanted. We could all understand just what they meant.
I'm sure these were not the only two examples of 'lo-tech hi-tech' in the televisual world. Please send me more...
I groaned. This is a bit like deciding the only people who can ever talk about film are Steven Spielberg, Charlton Heston and Tom Cruise... or like believing that the only opera worth listening to is from the Three Tenors. Though I suppose it's an easy turn for a journalist to sit around for a day at a commercial series of tutorials in London - the Nielsen-Norman circus - and spend a week writing about the people who talk there.
I could not agree more with Chris McEvoy's blog post. There are plenty of UK people that are experts in this field that they could be talking throughout the year - even inside the Beeb itself! - but they never get the chance.
This point reminds me of something that happened last month, when the BBC Woman's hour researcher who asked me to come and speak about blogging said she had sent out an internal email asking for information about blogging and bloggers - and got a response from famed blogger Tom Coates, who was sitting in the office next door! Sometimes I think the Beeb knows not what is has within its own walls. Expertise management, anyone?
And how about some fresh voices on mainstream media, and a bit more effort from BBC reporters?
So many things don't get blogged, because life takes over.
One thing I've been meaning to blog is The Guardian's 30 September G2 dedicated to '50 women to watch'. What immediately struck me was the lack of a 'technology' section. We had all the traditional stuff...music, dance, politics, theatre, education and so on. But no technology.
And then the following Thursday, on the letters page: "While we applaud the recognition given to influential women, it's a pity there was no one to watch in the fastest growing sector in the UK economy: technology......" And so on. My thoughts exactly.
For going on a year, I've been wondering whether I should put this blog onto Movable Type. And now of course there is TypePad too, from the same stable.
There was a feature on BBC Radio 4 last night about a Colour Museum...which seems to be run by the Society of Dyers and Colourists. Sounded interesting, so I decided to check it out.
I went to find them on the Web, located the site, and then had problems just finding where - in which city - the museum was. Bradford, but then the address given is a Post Office box. Much of the site is about the organisation - for professionals in the trade.
I know such organisations often have 'issues' on the Web: lack of expertise, decision by committee, voluntary efforts...I've had recent experience of this. But encouraging people - via the site - to visit a physical museum, and then seemingly not having any details about where it is and when it's open....
Crikey, is it really another three days since I last posted? Ummm. Apologies to regular readers, and to Tom Smith in particular, who's pulled me up on this one before.
Well, the delay is probably because on Tuesday, I zipped off to AIGA Experience Design, expertly masterminded by Nico, who lined up some excellent speakers to talk around the subject of user-centred design
.....when I should have been at the Usability Professionals' Assoc, at exactly the same time, to hear Deana McDonagh talking about emotion and design
...and then yesterday, after somehow managing to deliver a fairly lengthy ethnographic report based on a study I massively enjoyed (I'm so glad when people like the pics, too)
...it was off to Tom Steinberg's abode in the wilds of the Caledonian Road (Kings Cross, London), for crissake - second time in that neck of the woods in two weeks, for the first time in my life. What's going on up there? Something in the air?
...where the collected brain matter of serious thinkers and movers and shakers - don't laugh! - did some of that storming stuff around the 'civic software' innovation fund Tom's launching. He now has seed funding for his nascent project, and things are getting off the ground...which is good news indeed....Should be in the old Grauniad next week.
Since then I've been madly trying to finish something related to Mexican radio about traditional cooking methods, healthcare, smoking and stuff...when others have not been picking my brain about submitting multilingual tenders to the Department of Health, or about what's the best way to go about combining HCI and translation expertise in localisation projects. Nice to see people taking care, doing research and being professional. This is what makes me happy [amongst other things ;-)]
Right now, I've got me working teeth sunk into Andorra. Mmmm.
Three years ago I was writing about how e-book formats were being sabotaged by the various hardware and software suppliers, and how they would never take off in their current form. And how paper had lots of advantages over electronic formats in this particular camp.
Now we have yet another US report of the failure of e-books to take off.
Interestingly, Helen Fraser of Penguin reports some comparative figures: sales of 40,000 paper may be accompanied by 4,000 audio and 4000 e-book format for a particular title. Not exactly a revolution. Bizarre tales from colleagues of people prancing into the smallest room avec laptop should continue to be taken with a pinch of salt.
The international e-voting discussion list I recently launched on behalf of the Usability Professionals' Association is going from strength to strength, with individuals from more international locations joining by the day. It just goes to show the need for such a list....
Recent topics include details of electronic voting systems in Brazil, theft of votes in the UK, and recent use of voting terminals and older-style systems in the US.
Voting technology can be good or bad regardless of the length of time the system has been in place, which is why the list covers both low-tech and high-tech voting technologies. What's good about the list is the way that people around the world can find out about what's going on elsewhere, often from the horse's mouth.
Chris McEvoy has just added Tom Smith's blog - The Other Blog - and Tom Coates' blog - Plasticbag.org - to his list of Userati source sites, along with two or three others. There was some discussion a while back of how you could contributing a blog 'networking quotient' to the Userati list - 'blogwork' perhaps - but it seems easier just to add the relevant blogging sites to the Google parameter mix.
I'm still unable to quite put my finger on why professional women in the UK don't blog like (a) professional men, and (b) women in the US. James Crabtree of Voxpolitics recently asked the question about female political bloggers in the UK (I couldn't think of any). I could write an essay here about blogging differences: difference in UK/US academic blogging behaviour, difference in UK/US professional blogging behaviour, difference in types blog run by men and women. But the conclusion is always that there are hardly any female bloggers in the UK in either academia or the professions.
Nigella Lawson's Desert Island Discs [BBC Radio 4 last week] were quite fun - though there was the odd intrusion of a strange remix when the original would have been far better.
But we hear from The Now Show - taking the rise out of Nigella - that DID is a format of the past. Desert Island MP3s is the new monicker, apparently. But I still have fun putting vinyl on the turntable. And still have one of those turntables where you can lift the platter off to change from 45 to 33 r.p.m. And unlike the CD player, it doesn't break down of get 'fluffed up' (well, you can blow the fluff off rather than having to take the unit down to the service agent at vast expense).
The Lord Chancellor's Department has all but disappeared, to be replaced by the Department for Constitutional Affairs. And the new-ish site, still under the old moniker, brings together links to various resources across government websites on elections. A major problem here is thare have always been so many departments and agencies responsible (and there still are).
Various people have come out recently announcing the number of government websites that exist. E-Envoy Andrew Pinder, speaking at the HCI 2003 Conference last month in Bath, stated that there were around 2,500 government websites, hosting some 5 million pages, which he referred to as 4 million too many.
Well if Arnie wins today, let's just forget those way too modern touch screens, and look forward to this wonderful Fisher-Price voting device for 2004, which any ol' fule can follow.
We've been yakking in recent weeks/months about moving a particular site over to Movable Type, and then I mentioned to someone today, at a monthly meeting, that it will be interesting to see what we get in terms of look and feel, as MT sites often adopt a very similar look and feel.
And then I get home and find that Mr Bush has now got a weblog that runs on MT. Oh boy. That is a bit of a shocker. But this one doesn't have the MT look and feel.
Had a fun meal with bunch of fellow nuts on Friday, in Bermondsey (the new Hoxton, dontcha know), down at the Bermondsey Kitchen. Boy, has this area changed over the last few years.
Tom Smith and Jonathan Briggs and Jane Austin are among the people making things happen in the area. Gerred Blyth from Amberlight joined us for the event (from way up in Holborn, but also a sarf London resident). Jane popped her head around the door owing to work commitments, but promises to be back next time.
We've decided that more good food and good wine (BK's list is quite decent, and littered with good new Spanish regions - Priorat, Galicia) over conversation about design, media, usability, democracy, civil society and e-voting, folkloric client tales of horror (kind of approaching urban myths) and blogging, has definitely got to happen again soon.
Could we possibly establish a monthly event, I wonder, that revolved around good food and drink and conversation? There are a few monthlies in London now that are centred on formal meetings with topics and the pub, but the flavour of conversation over the dining table is quite different (the service was slow, but we sure made up for it).
[And talking of meals, hoping the Toms, the Dans, and all the others, are having a great time today in London over dim sum with Cameron Marlow (founder of Blogdex). I unfortunately have an US conference call to attend to about a conference panel next year.]
'Act in the present, don't yack about some fictional future'
Douglas Rushkoff will be at Demos next week - Thursday - to launch his new pamphlet, Open Source Democracy: How online communication is changing offline politics. To get an invitation for the talk and party: http://www.demos.co.uk/projects/forthcomingevents_page57.aspx
Demos seems to be getting a little more generous with its material, having just established freely downloadable reports, but its claim to be the first to do so among UK think tanks seems to me a little disingenuous.
Chris McEvoy has now assembled a most stunning collection of links to audio materials - more than 80 recordings - from various BBC sources, related to user experience, design, ethnography. [My faves are the Laurie Taylor recordings: he has gathered together so many interesting figures from the world of ethnography.]
According to reports on BBC Radio 4 today - from the Labour Party conference - the fact that ID cards were not mentioned in speeches was evidence that "the Home Office proposals on ID cards are in *deep* trouble".
Blogs are often convenient places to plonk something you don't want to lose track of - Oh I wish that bookmark systems were so flexible! - and here is a case in point: Marc Rettig put together a wonderful document about how to use walls in a way this is useful for teams, and the doc is a PDF: Walls - Beyond Whiteboards, which a few people has been having problems locating recently....Warning: it's big.
Salon this week features a story about e-voting: Another case of electronic vote tampering? This one's about recent events at technical standards setting body IEEE. You'll need a sub (or free day pass? hmm) to read the full article.
Anyone interested in the standard-setting process should read the Electronic Frontier Foundation's media advisory on what's currently going on at IEEE over the voting machine issue.
Electric Six - the clowns that contaminated Glastonbury with Gay Bar this summer ('rathergood' parody) - claim their "website is being redesigned and so are we...!".
Is that the sequence, structure, of events that we can expect in the future: "I am a website therefore I am" or somesuch? Oh well...
Employees are obliged to work at their computers on productive tasks following the collapse of the Internet.
"Computer technicians at most offices couldn't do anything but sit by helplessly as people worked through stacks of filing, wrote business-related letters they'd put off for months, and sold record amounts of goods and services over the phone.
"Shortly after office workers found their web, e-mail, and instant-messaging capabilities disabled, reports of torrential productivity began to reach corporate offices nationwide...."
--snip--
"With workers denied access to ESPN.com, Salon, Fark.com, and Friendster, employers struggled to keep up with the sudden increase in efficiency."
While this does bring to mind recent power outages in the US, London, Malmo and Italy, perhaps more pertinently it echoes the announcement last week by one British company, Phones4U, that it was banning all staff e-mail in a bid to increase productivity and save millions.....
On Friday, the French Internet Rights Forum published their recommendations to the French government on e-voting. The recommendations document, Quel avenir pour le vote electronique en France?, can be downloaded from the Forum's website: http://www.foruminternet.org/recommandations/lire.phtml?id=651
Jean Gonie of the Forum - who was here in Oxford last month on behalf of the French Internet Rights Forum - says they are working on an English version.
For those on the UPA e-voting discussion list, I have posted a very brief list of highlights in English. These include non-recommendation of remote voting for political elections, recommendation of polling station kiosks for political elections, open source systems, creation of an electronic national voter register, creation of a national electronic voting 'Observatory', recommendation that e-voting be a choice and not compulsory, and the need for a widespread public debate on use of electronic voting in political elections.
As far as I can fathom with my fairly grotty French, the 60-page document does not mention issues to do with Verified Voting, and in general I get the impression - from here and elsewhere - that perhaps non-English speaking countries may not be aware of developments in this field in the US (though I may be wrong). All the more reason to promote the international exchange of information on these issues.
