September 2011 Archives

The Kindle? At that price point, in that form factor? It's stuffed. (pause for laughter) Amazon needs to become a platform, selling ebooks on all devices.

Since my job morphed from "head of blog development" to "editorial development manager" (which happened a while before the job title change), I've struggled to give a clear, one sentence description of what I do. The closest I've got is "figure out how changes in technology, journalism and social media present us with business opportunities as a publisher - and then do everything I can to make sure we take advantage of that". Not exactly a conversation-starter at a dinner party.

This problem is afflicting the whole of journalism, I think. Jobs are becoming less defined as the work we do becomes more mutable. Arnold King sums up this trend in employment thus:

The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for something for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced.

The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing.

Something to think about…

[via Jackie Danicki]

I've found mobile devices to be especially effective for on-the-street interviews. When New York City brought in a new system of letter grades for restaurant health inspections last year, the WNYC newsroom asked me to get reaction from New Yorkers. Using my iPad, I asked people on the street where they liked to eat and then looked up the restaurant's inspection report online. I was able to capture their reactions when they heard the details -- things like evidence of live vermin at their favorite restaurants. It was tape I could not have gotten in the moment without an iPad.

• App Store - Facebook Messenger
  UK iPhone folks: Facebook Messenger is here: http://t.co/K86pzQgW
  (tags: ifttt twitter adders)
• iPad market share rises
  Rises…!
  (tags: ipad tablets android)
• One Man & His Blog | Facebook
  Getting a Facebook Page together for my blog: http://t.co/Avnsq6G
  (tags: ifttt twitter adders)
• Topman pulls shirt over domestic violence row - Adult Care Blog
  RT @ComCareFamilies: #topman t-shirt debate: does the store glamourise #domesticviolence? http://t.co/XA1kDd2
  (tags: ifttt twitter adders)
• Westfield Stratford City - what the press thought - The Focus Blog
  Westfield Stratford City - what the press thought http://j.mp/odgEtq
  (tags: ifttt twitter adders)
• Five random thoughts on mobile - One Man and His Blog
  From yesterday: Five random thoughts on mobile http://t.co/p00SItt
  (tags: ifttt twitter adders)
• Newspaper video: Time to reconsider your video strategy?
  (tags: video)

1. The problem with a job that involves looking at how technology changes will impact on editorial content is that the rate of change of technology is a lot greater than the rate of change of editorial businesses, so I spend all my time panicing about how far we have to go...
2. All meetings should be measured on their Reggie Perrin Quotient. 0 RPQs is the perfect, enjoyable, productive, work-affirming meeting. at 100 RPQs, you're driving to the beach and preparing to fold your clothes neatly... (never went higher than 15 RPQs today)
3. People who just go ahead and give things a go, without being told to do A, B or C are worth their weight in any precious metal you care to name right now. 

First and foremost, the concept of an "editor" at TechCrunch is essentially just a title and nothing more. Generally speaking, neither Mike nor Erick (TC's two "co-editors") are overlords that dictate what everyone else covers. With a few exceptions (mainly for newer writers), no one person even reads posts by any other author before they are posted. 

Traditional journalists may be appalled to learn this. But this is a big key of why TechCrunch kicks their ass in tech coverage. We're fast and furious in ways they can't be, because they're adhering to the old rules. Are there benefits to those old rules? Sure. But in my opinion, the benefits of the way we work far outweighs the benefits of the way they work.

Even if it's just on a subconscious level, each of these authors must know that the future of their business looks a lot more like TechCrunch than The New York Times. Love it or hate it, that's the truth. It's inevitable.

A respected Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, might have been the first to raise the alarm about the effects of information overload. In a landmark book, he described how the modern world overwhelmed people with data and that this overabundance was both "confusing and harmful" to the mind.

Interesting couple of talks to round off the post-lunch session. Dan Hon walked us through the exploration of new forms of storytelling that have been going on online. Some are facilitated by a coder and writer combo. The development of new tools has lead to new forms of storytelling, from alternate reality games (ARGs) (Hon cites one associated with A.I. he got sucked into in 2001) to people using Twitter and its ilk to create fictional personas and narratives.

However, he suggests that there are significant issues around discovery and participation right now. In particular, as entertainment and information objects make a digital transition, we often lose the context of their design. Book covers become 200 pixel wide icons. TV becomes 640 pixel wide boxes on screen. Everything's being reduced to icons, to small versions of the physical object it used to be. We lose context.

We need to explore building products that facilitate these new forms of narrative and gaming rather than constantly adapting existing forms and tools.

Meanwhile Kars Alfrink was thinking the other way around - how we bring our understanding of games back into the physical work. In a sense the games of politics are already manifest in our world: there are towns split between countries as a legacy of history. There are fictional and real examples of cities which exist alongside one another without interaction) -  The City and The City and  Berlin in the post-war cold war era. Areas of London where gang confrontations happen alongside couples eating and drinking at a bistro. In extremes, this leads to riots.

Rules are fundamental to this. The riots highlighted the existence of two different cities in the same place - with different rules. What if we could make those rules more tangible? Simulation fever - the stress of two completing rules sets (games versus reality) He's not tailing about gamification - by rewarding reciprocity, we suggest there's not inherent value in it. Mary did a good post about this earlier. Games can bring societies together - like chess in the park - or they can create monocultures. (I suspects FPSes would count here).

Pervasive urban games are part of the routine. Visible Cities - a chase game, with checkpoints in "other cities". You're not allowed to interact with people in "different cities".

Rules as memes. Bookcrossing is a simple ruleset that promotes behaviour. Werewolf amongst geeky circles. Games as social practice. Nomic - a move is to suggest a new rule. Life is roughly a massively parallel game of Nomic. Can we create a game that takes these implicit rules and makes them explicit?

A really fascinating talk by Frank Chimero about curating, organising and accessing all the digital "possessions" we're accumulating, including Likes and things we favourite, and notes we make.

The very different characteristics of digital and analogue material are certainly a fascinating topic. Analogue is owned and forces you to remember it by its presence. Digital feels like we pay for access to it, and is often invisible until we seek to find it.

Digitally, we have piles of stuff, but it's not a physical pile  - it's a collection of information, much of which lacks context in an accessible forms - particularly our choices to star/heart/favourite/like/+1 pieces of content. Can we put everything we like in one place? 19th Century Gentlemen did in their Commonplace books. (An analogue Tumblr blog...?) It's "curation as authorship".

The Creator Economy - producing and consuming in the same act

The Architecture of Serendipity

Curation is collection with an architecture of arrangement. Arrangement requires  a second pass. (I agree with that - I often give onld sections of this blog a second pass - I should do more of that with my "information buckets") We need technology optimised for the second pass:

1. How we sort things - location, alphabet, time, category, hierarchy (latch. We tend to sort things in reverse chronological, which is great for the new, but not for things you've seen before. Digital is infinitely mutable - things can exist in more then one place at once.
2. How we move through time - content can time-shift. Instapaper allows us to postpone reading things. It's a time machine that pushes content into your future.
3. What media is supported - Lots of women's fashion blogs do this - they curate looks, Biblion - an iPad app that curates exhibitions specially.

Are we going to spend the rat of our lives staring at our mobile screens? A babysitter spent the first half hour just texting and ignoring Goto's kids. She bans texting, iPads et al at the dinner table.

We shouldn't be designing for addiction, but to fit in to people's rituals. Do you read a physical newspaper over breakfast or RSS feeds on an iPad? Do you listen to the radio as you commute, or podcasts? Goto is shocked by how little people understand the customers they're providing business services to.

Mood and context change people's experiences - she gives the example of her Mini, and the "fun" of its design, and the way that shapes her whole driving experience.

Challenges:

• get people to stay upright and communicate with others
• understand what machine to human communications should be and how they should work.

The gulf between what people tell you, what they believe about themselves and what they actually do is a problem when researching user needs.

The iPhone home button is comforting because it always takes you back to the home screen, something clearly happens when you use it, and it has a optic experience that make sit feel good. Oh, and you can customise it, if you want.

We've moved up the hierarchy of needs to the point of comfort, beyond merely usable. Sensory engineering has been around since the 1960s, Kansei provides a framework for measuring emotional response to design. I like the idea of "contextual personas" - personas which reflect what people do at different times of day. One of my minor obsessions is that people consume news in different forms at different times in their day, based on their working, commuting and relaxing patterns. This looks like a good way to start exploring those ideas, and understanding the context of how people use what we do.

Fascinating talk.

Don Norman appears to be scene setting - he's talking us through many of the current issues in technology. He's given us a little light Google-bashing, talking about the familiar issues that you are not Google's users (unless you're an advertiser) - you're the product. The nymwars around Google+. The lack of design expertise.

And others - Apple and its rules.  So switch to Android - and you have to design for dozens of different devices, screen sizes and versions of the OS, instead of two.

And now we have tablets. There's no consistent language of what you do to achieve any particular task across devices yet (and Apple is busy disrupting ideas by reversing scrolling in Lion, too).

"It's a great challenge - and we're still learning. Are you ready?"

The distinction between devices is blurring, you can't be focused on a single device type any more. Interfaces are changing and blurring.

Apple licensed music, and made it easy to sell songs at a reasonable price. They made it easy to find music. iTunes is an SAP database - they took that complicated database and made it easy to use. And they made it possible for other people to develop accessories. And they made an "iPod approved" system which meant they could make money from that ecosystem. Amazon has done many of these things with the Kindle. Kindle dominates because it has the easiest system.

Twitter: Built of social clusters of people. Retweets get you from one cluster to another. Twitter provides the tools, and we provide the content (and the usage methodology, too - users came up with @replies and #hashtags). We're curating and editing through these social processes.

"You need to think systems" - as opposed to a single app or website.

Ah, I'm beginning to remember the style of dConstruct from last year - some of these talks are so wide-ranging (if you're being kind) or rambling (if you're not) that they're hard to summarise in a post. Norman is effectively exploring how we need to shift our mindsets from single products to systems, that we build in co-operation with others, be they other companies, or our users.

.