Archive for the ‘opinion’ Category

  • Can there ever be an online masterpiece?

    One of the SXSW sessions I attended today was the Ze Frank session on the ‘creative lifestyle’. I found it a bit pointless, really. It appeared to be a love-in between Frank and a room full of his fans. But it did get me thinking about art and the internet.

    The examples of Frank’s work left me unimpressed. I find them whimsical, disposable and inconsequential. I can see how they would provide some moments of entertainment, but this isn’t what I’m interested in. As I get older, I find myself more and more interested in identifying things that I can safely ignore and getting rid of them for good. My goal is to spend an extremely high percentage of my time on what I would like to call masterpieces.

    I realise that this puts me in a minority, but it’s something I’d like to explore here for a little while. Please understand that I’m not opposed to entertainment; it’s just something I’m not interested in. No pejorative judgement is implied if you like entertainment. Read full post

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    James Higgs By James Higgs

    13th March 10

    14 comments

     opinion

  • Battle for Your TV: The Big TV Smackdown at SXSW

    I made bad choices for the first two time-slots at SXSW, so I had high hopes for the third, PayTV vs Internet – The Battle For Your TV, featuring Mark Cuban of HDNet and Avner Rosen of Boxee.

    It was good to see a debate between two people who genuinely disagree by 180º on how the future of TV will pan out, even if some of the argument was basically dick-swinging.

    Cuban believes that the future of TV is basically the same as the present: subscription services over cable or satellite, with a light dash of so-called ‘Interactive TV’. Rosen believes, as I do, that the future of TV is on the web. To be clear: everyone sane accepts that we will continue to have a dedicated large screen in our houses on which we watch video. I just don’t believe that broadcast TV has a future that looks anything like the present, if it has one at all.

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    James Higgs By James Higgs

    13th March 10

    2 comments

     opinion

  • I love words: manopause, faffage, hellacious

    I learned to read a long time ago, but I can still remember the sheer amazingness of the discovery — like I’d found the keys to the universe and all of a sudden, EVERYTHING made sense. Words were everywhere and I was powering through them like a mad thing (and mispronouncing a fair few, I ought to add).

    reading

    Some years later, not that much has changed. I still read like a mad thing and I still love words. Only now there are more words to love, from the solid everyday standbys (“wattage”, “traveller”, “coax”) to the niche-y specialists you bring out for added pounce(“peripatetic”, “disingenuous”) when time and audience are right.

    The thing that really makes my head spin is the way language evolves. Even as I type this, old words are morphing and merging to send nifty little neologisms strutting out of our cultural soup of signifiers, all a-dazzle with tasty wordiness. Perhaps my favourite of these is the portmanteau, a linguistic mashup of two words and their meanings.

    For some time, I’ve been meaning to make a list of the niftiest new (or new to me) words I come across in daily parlance. Here are three I have enjoyed this week, with more to come as I encounter them.

    Manopause

    Noun: a break from dating, flirting, and all forms of sexual interaction with men

    “He is totally giving you the eye, go for it!”
    “I can’t, I’m on a manopause. He’s fit though — get in there, Shaz.”

    Faffage

    Collective noun: timewasting, to-ing and fro-ing and general faffing

    “You’re right — there is a direct correlation between the number of children a person has and the degree of faffage involved in their getting from A to B. Thank God we chose art over ankle-biters.”

    Hellacious

    Adjective: really awful with a sort of visceral twinge; a combination of hellish and atrocious

    “During the coldest night that winter in Siberia, Ferdinand was forced to rise every hour to stoke the fire with priceless Louis XIV furniture. For an antiques dealer it was a truly hellacious experience.”

    Photo courtesy of New York Public Library, used under a Creative Commons licence

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    Sara Williams By Sara Williams

    26th February 10

    0 comments

     content

    opinion

  • Can I Have My Opinion Back, Please?

    I seem to be one of a dwindling number of people who believe that opinions are among the most valuable commodities we have. Somehow, we’ve allowed the old ‘everyone’s got one’ joke to convince us that all opinions are equal, when they clearly aren’t. I think it’s hurting our creativity, it’s robbing us of leadership, and ultimately is retarding the pace and quality of innovation.

    Everyone is entitled to my opinion
    Photo by pink_fish13

    I’m sure it’s a function of the recession that people become more risk averse. People want ‘proof’ that their ideas will work before they spend money on executing them. But predicting what will work in the future is and always has been just expensive guesswork.

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    James Higgs By James Higgs

    25th February 10

    4 comments

     opinion

  • How Would A Robot Read a Novel?

    Picture 3

    Last week, I went to a rather interesting talk at the LSE titled ‘How Would a Robot Read a Novel?’. I was introduced to a software, primarily used in the social sciences, called Alceste (note: this, and many other sites I’ve linked to in this post, are Google-translated pages, from the originals which are in French. There seems to be surprisingly little about it on the web in English). What Alceste does is look for repetitions of co-occurrences of words over a large volume of text to assess patterns. In the social sciences, it is used (still in only a few places, and in a limited number of cases at that) to detect instances of bias in surveys. Research has apparently shown that when words occur in the same pattern repeatedly, it is rarely random.

    Alceste doesn’t understand meaning, and makes no pretenses about trying to do so. It was created by Max Reinert of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, and is now marketed by a company called Image that holds all rights to it, from what we were given to understand.

    Anyway, now that I’ve given you the context, let me move on to explaining what was really interesting about the talk. Dr. Kavita Abraham, a researcher at the LSE’s Methodology Institute, used Alceste to analyse a novel called the Kilburn Social Club by Robert Hudson. It is worth noting here that when Alceste was introduced as having been used to assess some literary works earlier as an experiment, members of the audience were easily able to identify the books as being Oliver Twist and Moby Dick. With the Kilburn Social Club, Dr. Robert Hudson (a history academic-turned-author) admitted that Alceste’s analysis matched the pattern of the story he started out intending to write, in that the words used were seen as generally being grouped around 4 themes (16% descriptive, 12% football, 22% finance and 50% relationships). So it could be used, hypothetically, during the process of writing to ensure that a book wasn’t skewed heavily in one or the other direction.

    Dr. Hudson clearly meant ‘hypothetically’, though, because the truth is, as we discussed after the talk, we don’t really need Alceste to tell readers about patterns in books. Why would you want to reduce a work of art to a mere jumble of statistically co-relating groups of words? People read literary works FOR that element of bias (I think James is writing a post about how opinion – bias, if you must – is in fact often not given the respect it deserves in today’s world). A quote of Mark Twain’s was proffered by one of the panel members: ‘A classic is something that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read’, but I’d argue that at a stretch you can extend it to summarizing business books  – the way Kevin Duncan does on his blog, for example. It’s useful to time-starved people who want to be able to speak intelligently about a book and learn the distilled lessons from it, but who don’t have the time to wade through it in its entirety. You just can’t do that with novels, though! Here’s an example of how Alceste summarized that potboiler of potboilers, The Da Vinci Code. It’s quite a laugh.

    Picture 1Picture 2

    One of the issues that was left simmering in my mind as I left the venue is that there are so many technologies we’re introduced to on a daily basis that many of us perhaps do not really question the need for – probably even more common in the case of clients. Is ‘I want a social media’ really still an accepted statement?

    Google Buzz is being debated upon as either a highly intrusive or potentially highly social application, while right here at Made by Many we’re arguing the benefits of using Yammer at work versus plain old Twitter. The question isn’t what we can do with it, as in the case of Alceste, where it has been accepted that it is really only useful to the social sciences because that discipline is based on the removal of bias. The question is do we need it at all?

    (A PDF of the talk, for those interested, is now available here).

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    Anjali Ramachandran By Anjali Ramachandran

    16th February 10

    8 comments

     Conferences

    opinion

  • Apple Needs a Good Syncing Story Quickly (Or: How We Need that Syncing Feeling)

    Now that the dust has settled from the latest application of the Reality Distortion Field and we are all salivating at the chance to get our hands on the iPad, it’s time to think about how all of these devices will work in our day to day lives.

    I’m a fully paid up member of the Apple devices fanboy club. I carry an iPhone and a 5th generation iPod with me wherever I go (even the largest capacity iPhone is nowhere near enough to store even a third of my music collection), I have a MacBook Air for holidays and overseas trips, a 17″ MacBook Pro for work and a huge cheese grater Mac Pro at home for media storage and its raw computing horsepower.

    I love all of these devices for different reasons, but one thing I don’t love is the difficulty of keeping them all up to date with the latest versions of my data.

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    James Higgs By James Higgs

    2nd February 10

    3 comments

     opinion

  • Awww… we were so analogue back then!

    analogueDigital technology is such an ingrained part of most of our lives these days that I think we forget just how far it has come in our lifetimes.

    We were once a very, very analogue people. Hilariously so. And every once in a while, just how analogue we were comes screaming back to me in a way that makes me feel very, very old indeed.

    You want to feel old… hang out with a child

    I babysit a friend’s fifteen-month-old from time to time and I find it fascinating that whilst this child’s life is partly a reflection of my babyhood and my siblings’ babyhoods (dummies, sippy cups, highchairs and cuddles), in others ways, it’s just so… digital.

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    Sara Williams By Sara Williams

    20th January 10

    14 comments

     opinion

  • We’ve sorted the UX. How about the EX?

    I think I can stick my neck out and say that *most* web industry professionals are pretty solid on user experience these days. The heuristics of web usability have become engrained in our brains over the years. When planning a site we often reach consensus on discussions around interaction touch points and navigation hierarchies very quickly and get on to writing the next user story.
    It wasn’t always like this. I can remember observing, and even occasionally conducting, usability tests on site prototypes and early design mock ups as recently as three years ago. It all seemed a bit low rent TV police drama but it worked. Voice and face recording, one-way mirrored glass observation rooms, scripts and lists of questions. A really compelling way to settle arguments between clients / developers / account management / designers.
    After doing this tens and tens of times you start to get a good understanding of how people approach looking for stuff on a site. The natural gravitational pull to the top right when looking for search. The twitch of the hand to point the mouse to the top left of the screen when wanting a home link. All quite predictable.
    I know there are still shocking usability examples out there on the web. In the same way that you’ll always get crap food in some restaurants and shonky service from estate agents. There will always be room for user testing on some level.
    But I think there may be a new avenue to explore. What about the emotional experience of using a site? How do we measure this? Is there any form of measurement for something so intangible?
    Following on form Isaac’s post about surprise and delight in service and product design, what are the metrics for a great emotional experience online? Just having a site that is easy to navigate is one thing, but what does joy look like? Is it the measure of ‘OMGs’ in Twitter mentions with bit.ly links?
    In short, what are the things that make a ‘normal’ web user love a site? Content, conversation, dripping with smooth jQuery loveliness? What do you reckon?

    I think I can stick my neck out and say that *most* web industry professionals are pretty solid on user experience these days. The heuristics of web usability have become engrained in our brains over the years. When planning a site we usually reach consensus on discussions around interaction touch points and navigation hierarchies very quickly and get on to writing the next user story.

    It wasn’t always like this. I can remember observing, and even occasionally conducting, usability tests on site prototypes and early design mock ups as recently as three years ago. It all seemed a bit low rent TV police drama but it worked. Voice and face recording, one-way mirrored glass observation rooms, scripts and lists of questions. A really compelling way to settle arguments between clients / developers / account management / designers.

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    Simon I'Anson By Simon I'Anson

    20th January 10

    2 comments

     design

    opinion

  • A rant about how society recognize talent

    Clay Shirky’s “rant about women” has been on my mind this weekend. Although the blog post is intended to advice women on how to become more successful, there’s something about it that made me feel very uneasy.

    Clay’s rant about women begins with his former male student’s request for a recommendation. Clay asks the student to write down what he thinks Clay should say about him. The student returns with his draft peppered with praise, which Clay then tones down a notch “…so that it sounds like it’s coming from a person and not a PR department” before sending it off.

    Right. If you ask me, this whole practice of writing your own letter of recommendation is dodgy, but that’s entirely another discussion.

    Having signed the letter, Clay is left feeling annoyed. The interesting bit is that he’s not annoyed at himself for getting into this situation, or the student in question for being cheeky – no, he’s upset at us women.

    Hang on. “What have we done to get the pointy finger?” I thought to myself reading this. Apparently it is not what we’ve done, it’s what we haven’t done, or will not do. Women, he says, would never write a letter overstating their abilities. And that’s because… Read full post

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    Elin Sjursen By Elin

    18th January 10

    11 comments

     opinion

  • What if Apple became a bank?

    RRW have been trading on a rumour that Apple’s new iPhone is going to have NFC functionality in the coming Spring. About bloody time if you ask me. NFC (Near-Field Communication) will technically allow you to use your phone as not only an Oyster card, a passport or a debit card but will also allow you to read RFID chips so you can see how much is on your Oyster card, check the microchip of a lost pet against the Pet ID database or even take payment from other people. There’s a wealth of possibilities. Nokia already has devices on the market with NFC built in but has never managed to make it appeal to the public.

    Apply being Apple, there’s no doubt that if they were indeed to implement NFC (clearly they’d call it something completely different) they would have some business model built around it in order to maximise profit from the new feature. And banking, micropayment and payments in general could do with a real shake up at the moment.

    apple bank

    It might sound ridiculous, it might sound scary or far fetched, but I don’t see why not. If you were to tell me 10 years ago that Apple were going to be the number one music retailer in the US, I’d have laughed in your face and insulted your intelligence. Probably.

    10 Comments

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    Mike Laurie By mike

    14th January 10

    10 comments

     opinion

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