Dopplr's passing

Engaging social travel service, which never became an app and, sadly, faded. Neatly documented by one of its founders, Matt Jones.

Nominet UK's top 100 social technology enterprises

An eclectic list, presented idiosyncratically (the tiled layout, amongst other things, limits each entry to four classification categories; if tile size is of significance that beats me). But an interesting few moments' browsing. Charlie Leadbeater's description of the selection process provides some useful background.

Olympic information access

Interesting slide presentation by Alex Balfour on use of digital media during the London Olympics. It is a bit of a PR piece but the build up to the heart of the presentation, showing development of digital media use during the lead up to the Olympics, is a useful reminder of how access to information has changed over the past seven years or so.

Digital inequalities

John Naughton reports a NY Times article on wireless bandwidth consumption. Not surprisingly, 10% of users are consuming 90% of the bandwidth...and Finns consume 1 gigabyte of wireless data a month; 10 times the rest of Europe.

John Naughton on email

Direct quote, 'Zuck says: email's end is nigh. I say: LOL'.

Precisely.

Digital scholarship angst summarised

Martin Weller encapsulates the doomed, entombed and marooned viewpoint.

[via John Naughton]

The rhetoric of video presentations

John Pavlus, of Fast Company's design blog compares the utopian (dystopian) corporate video style of a recent Microsoft promotional video, Productivity Future Vision, with the innovator/craftsman style, usually showing clever bits of technology embedded in familiar, everyday life, adopted by Berg. Ouch.

On a different tack altogether, it's lovely to see this little piece of video nostalgia to promote a project to preserve Ludlow typecasting matrices.

Donald Knuth on email

"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study."

Alex Pang, who is writing a book on Contemplative Computing, has posted this lovely quote on Facebook, presumably from an interview with Donald Knuth; and a link to earlier comments on Knuth's (1990s) Stanford web pages.

Our children will never know...

...the link between the two.

Seems to be a bit of a meme, appearing in many forms (this one here). I can't find the origin.

[Thanks to Laura Laamanen]

Innovative uses of Google

I spotted this on Facebook
xxx: Every few weeks I speak to my aunt in Auckland on Skype and use its screen sharing feature to show her recent photos and talk through them. Yesterday we even used Google Earth to 'fly' over the Auckland suburb from which she recently moved, and where some of my family on my other side still live. To think that a generation ago contact with relatives abroad was limited to expensive phone calls and Aerograms. Thank you Skype creators.
yyy: have you ever played Google Streetview "This is your Life"? It's when you sit down with a friend or relative and have them "walk" you around the neighbourhood where they grew up. I did it with my parents recently. We flew around the Bronx (mum) and the Upper West Side (dad). Much had changed, but as it it with great cities, most places looked familiar. It was emotional.

Google are producing a quarterly glossy, thinkwithGoogle. Some nice articles but when they can generate spontaneous interactions like these one wonders why they need it.

Billy's no longer for books

The Economist has spotted that IKEA are increasing the depth of Billy's shelves, having noted that people use them for so many things other than books. It sparks another discussion of the future of the printed book.

[via Techcrunch]

Search alters memory

Apparently, according to research by Betsy Sparrow at Columbia University and reported by Wired, Ed Yong and in many other places. Using a Stroop test Sparrow found that, when presented with questions that were difficult to answer, students tended to think of computers (i.e. took longer to name colours used for words such as 'Google, browser or computer' than for words less connected with computers).

In a different study, Sparrow asked students to type out a set of unrelated trivia statements and found that those students who had been told the statements would be stored on a computer remembered less of the detail of those statements than those told that the statements would be deleted. Sparrow hypothesises that people use computers as a source of transactive memory - i.e. like a member of a social group who can be relied upon to remember detailed information. Sparrow tested this further in a study where, following typing a trivia statement, students were told the statement would be deleted, or stored in a specific folder. Students remembered more of the statements they had been told would be deleted than those they had been told would be saved, but their memory for the locations that the statements had been saved to was, however, rather good.

Everyone is at pains to say that memory is not getting worse because of computers, just different. Sparrow suggests that human memory is adapting to the tools available, remembering where information is, rather than its content. Yong comments that as location (i.e. specific folder information) becomes less significant in systems that enable search across all kinds of locations, remembering the key words used for searches may become more important than remembering file locations.

Social media in academia

Starting with the premise that other information enterprises (news, book-selling, music) have seen changes with the rise of social media, and asking what will lies ahead for academic life, a Berkman Center panel brings together four Harvard professors, long-standing users of social media, to describe what social media they use and how (more blogging than tweeting, to be honest). There is a heartwarming, albeit somewhat edited, clip of a three way video seminar between US, Chinese and Japanese students, following the Fukushima disaster, and some interesting reflections on the lack of serious challenge so far to the grip traditional publishers still have on academic libraries. Not enough of the post-panel discussion on the video, though. Could we have the technology to eavesdrop on that, too?

[via John Naughton]

On finding new books

Brian O'Leary on (unaffordable) research by Forrester revealing how people find out about new books (commonly, friends recommend and lend them, or they get them from the library). So the licensing of e-books to one account blocks some of the traditional routes to finding out about new books and authors. Both the post and discussion bear reading, not least because of O'Leary's reference to having time to read, 'now is the winter of my desk content'.

[via Tim O'Reilly]

Information overload - again

More here on Ann Blair's book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age, which I've written about here. This time quoting Seneca: "the abundance of books is distraction".

[via John Naughton]

Internet of things

John Naughton isn't impressed.

From Design of Understanding (Choosing communication channnels)

Chris Heathcote's presentation from Design of Understanding is here. I like his comment, slide 10, on the 26 options for communication his iPhone presents, 'humans are great at understanding just the right way to communicate with the right person in the right context'. Individuals, yes, mostly; organisations, less so.

Eva-Lotta Lamm's sketches capture the talks from the conference. Some of the sketches are easy to read to a non-attender (probably partly depending on the clarity of the speaker's argument).

As an aside on sketch notes, I've commented before on the distraction of real-time sketching for talks (note Eva-Lotta's are not real-time); more recently, note the distracting animations for Jimmy Wales' talk on The State of Wikipedia. Maybe I have had too much training as a radio listener but the content is interesting enough without the accompanying visual stream...and competing sound track. In this case not 'just the right way to communicate'.

Device, on-line article reading and time of day

 
Analysis by ReaditLater showing how different devices (computer, phone, iPad) come into play to read on-line articles, according to time of day. Not surprisingly, perhaps, iPad reading peaks at the end of the day.

Information overload - and the printed text

Ann Blair reflects on the innovations (indexes, libraries, catalogues etc.) that helped 15th and 16th century readers cope with the sudden explosion of information available through printed books. Some lovely parallels with current struggles with digital information. She quotes Erasmus' opinion of printers: “[they] fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive; and such is the flood that even things that might have done some good lose all their goodness".

On web openness and net neutrality

Tim Berners-Lee makes the case eloquently. Somewhat related, Steven Johnson argues at Web 2.0 summit for 'web redundancy', the mirror indexing of the pages of e-books (and possibly some apps) on the web, even if behind a copyright wall of some sort, so that they could be accessible to and citable and linkable. Without this access route, the scholarly traditions of referencing and citation, which have stood for centuries (starting with the indexing of the earliest printed books which, Johnson claims, underpinned the development of ideas in the enlightenment) lie at risk with the rise of 'stand-alone' e-books.

Berners-Lee makes specific mention of the stranglehold iTunes now has on music distribution. The final capitulation of Apple (records) to Apple (iTunes) last week is lamented by Christopher Caldwell in the FT. I would probably disagree with Caldwell about most things but understand why he finds this business so dispiriting.