Posted: January 31st, 2006 | 1 Comment »
Doing some research on Korean virtual communities, I ran across this picture of South Korean Cyworld (taken on Wikipedia):
Cyworld (Korean: 싸이월드) is a South Korean web community site operated by SK Communications, a subsidiary of SK Telecom. Literally translated, “Cyworld” means “relationship world.”
Members cultivate on- and off-line relationships by forming “first-degree” (Korean: 일촌) buddy relationships with each other through a service called “minihompy,” which encompasses a photo gallery, message board, guestbook, and personal bulletin board. A user can link his/her minihompy to another user’s minihompy to form a buddy relationship. It has been reported that as much as 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20s are registered users of Cyworld, and as of September 2005, daily unique visitors are about 20 million.
Why do I blog this? Web platforms/virtual communities control displays might be amazingly relevant with regard to the kind of information designers could access to. Following in real-time what happen on Google, Web2.0 applications or multi-user games might be impressive.
Judging from the picture, there seems to be lots of quantitative data (various vizualisations) and some qualitative data (harder to summarize them visually). This raises lots of questions like what do they extract? how do they use them? + What’s about privacy concerns!
Posted: January 31st, 2006 | 1 Comment »
A BW article about digital marketing
Del.icio.us could be extremely useful for his business. Wiredset helps entertainment companies develop their digital strategies. By following the tags for a band, Ghuneim could let a record company know the level of buzz after a radio interview or live performance. He could find chatter about budding artists. Essentially, del.icio.us would allow him to listen in on the conversations on the Net that he cared about, minute by minute. He’s now obsessed.
(…)
companies are figuring out ways to take advantage of this phenomenon. As they tag, subscribers end up collectively highlighting changing trends and raging discussions all available at the del.icio.us site. Increasingly, innovative advertisers and other companies are trying to make sense of these discussions. “The conversation we’re having with clients is, ‘How do you stay on top of tagging? Because you need to, and it can be hugely beneficial,”‘ says Dan Buczaczer, a vice-president at ad firm Starcom Media Vest Group.
(…)
Wiredset is on the leading edge. It’s developing a service for record labels that pulls together a variety of online data — sales on Amazon.com, number of blog posts, tags on del.icio.us. The idea? Allow labels to see, in real time, the impact of their marketing. If Sony BMG Music Entertainment releases an MP3 from the band Franz Ferdinand on MySpace, it can track the buzz. Or watch how an MTV video affects Amazon sales. As a test, Wiredset is tracking the tags of a London band, Bloc Party. Wiredset follows the chatter around the band’s new album to pinpoint influential online players. “It’s good to find and establish relationships we might not know about,”
Why do I blog this? It’s interesting to see how a field of digital marketing emerge based on Web2.0 applications (technorati, del.icio.us…). Besides, my favorite part is when they say “It’s good to find and establish relationships we might not know about,” because it’s really what I like to do: finding and understanding connections between different concepts.
Posted: January 31st, 2006 | No Comments »
Towards a Playful User Interface for Home Entertainment Systems by Florian Block is a project that aims at using a tangible cube as an input device for playfully changing between different TV-channels. It’s carried out at the Embedded Interaction Research Group in Munich.
The basic idea for a new user interfaces for changing TV channels resulted of informal observations of people watching television. (…) The basic concept is to use a handy cube that allows changing the channels on TV by physical movement in a 3D-space. More specific a virtual version of the cube is shown on the television screen. On each phase of the cube a TV stream is rendered. The motion of the cube on the screen is connected to the rotation the user performs using the real cube. The user now can rotate the real cube in order to see the different sides and the TV channels respectively. If the cube is put down and not moved anymore the TV channel currently facing the user on the virtual cube is enlarged to cover the full screen. As soon as the user picks the cube up again the currently showing channel is resized back to the facing site of the virtual cube. Other channels are shown on the other sides of the cube.
Posted: January 30th, 2006 | 1 Comment »
Following my thoughts about Latour’s inscription (see last week’s post), I ran across this good paper about distributed software development and the link with ‘inscriptions’.
Latour’s inscriptions are about “social arrangements, debates, divisions of labor, and patterns of work become inscribed into the artifacts and representations in which science trucks”. In the context of software development, they want to study the relationship between technological artifacts and the social structures that shape them.
De Souza, C., Froehlich, J., and Dourish, P. 2005. Seeking the Source: Software Source Code as a Social and Technical Artifact. Proc. ACM Conf. Supporting Group Work GROUP 2005 (Sanibel Island, FL.)
Our work has been motivated by the question of whether aspects of informal software process can be found in the structure of the software artifact itself. Using a software visualization tool, Augur, we have been conducting an analysis of the artifacts of a number of software projects, a “software archeology” to explore the relationships between artifacts and activities as they are negotiated in distributed software development through mining software repositories.
(…)
Each pane displays a different aspect of the system being examined: changes in one view are immediately reflected in the others. The large central pane shows the line-oriented view of the source code. In the figure, the color of each pixel line indicates how recently it was modified; this allows a developer, at a glance, to see how much activity has taken place recently and where that activity has been located.
The conclusions are as follows:
Distributed software development presents two sources of complexity to its participants – the complexity of the software artifacts under development, and the complexity of the process of developing those artifacts. We have presented a study of software artifacts, conducted using a visualization tool, which demonstrates how these twin sources of complexity are intertwined. Software artifacts are not merely the objects of software development processes, but are also the means by which those processes are enacted and regulated. The structure of the artifact both reflects the processes by which it has been created and can be used to control those processes by centralizing points of access, by regulating the relationships between independent activities, and by making visible the relationships between individuals. It is a means, then, by which the articulation work of the project can be carried out.
Why do I blog this? I am fascinated by this: how technological artifacts and social structures might shape a certain phenomenon such as product development.
Posted: January 30th, 2006 | 3 Comments »
In the last issue of Wired, there is a short article about Periborg is very intriguing japanese company which does bizarre accessories for video-games.
My favorite is “Ore-Commander” targeted for trigger-happy gamers who need a thumb-mounted vibrator that can help pressing buttons 20 times a second.
Why do I blog this? I like this trend of having more and more devices/accessories on top of existing video games paltforms. It leads to a certain variety compared to the low number of consoles.
Posted: January 29th, 2006 | No Comments »
For fans of temporary architecture only: this bunch of temporary work capsules had been installed close to my place in Geneva. I like the way it looks – kind of apocalyptic shelter – though:
On the same issue, see Alain Bublex’s work.
Posted: January 29th, 2006 | No Comments »
Russell Buckley sunday post is of great interest for people who are wondering whether location-based marketing might work. For him, the most important question (presented after an insightful chain of arguments) is:
So, in fact, the really important question when studying LBM, the-answer-to-life-death-and-the-universe question of the subject, is: what kind of marketing messages should you say you’re going to send that will attract opt-in in the first place, that recipients will welcome and that they’ll respond to? In other words, what kind of messages will work? Knowing what the user wants is key to both opt-in in the first place and subsequently, optimising the channel’s effectiveness.
Stay tuned for the part 2 of his post!
Why do I blog this? if we extend our landscape to location-based messages (or place-based annotations or…), what would be the corresponding issue interaction designers would have to adress?
Posted: January 27th, 2006 | 1 Comment »
The NYT features a smart article about location-based services (By ETHAN TODRAS-WHITEHILL). Well-known projects like Dodgeball, Yellow Arrow, Social Light, Rabble, Street Hive or Rave Wireles are presented.
Mostly, those systems allow proximity-based interaction (ping registered participants when participants/friends are in the vicinity) or location-based annotations/blogging (i.e virtual post-its)… allowing the so-called “geospatial Web, the Internet overlaid on the real world”. Food for thought certainly for the current vocabulary disambiguation!
The article raises the issue of location-awareness, be it passive or active as they call it:
What the industry calls passive location awareness on the part of cellphones is critical to growth in mobile social software. It simply means that a phone knows where it is because it is equipped with technology like a Global Positioning System. Most current location-based services do not automatically keep track of where you are; you need to tell them by sending a text message. Passive awareness in your cellphone, by contrast, lets sites like Socialight or Dodgeball keep track of where you are all the time and send you relevant information posted by others.
But getting passive awareness on your phone is not easy.
(…)
cellphone users are suspicious of passive location awareness because they do not want to get unsolicited location-based text messages, or geospam, from advertisers as they pass stores.
Besides, the conclusion is very interesting:
As for other mobile social programs, a press officer for Verizon Wireless suggested that in the future the company might let its customers use such services through an off-network, “trusted content provider” model.
And geospam? It may actually materialize, and even the developers of mobile software are not thrilled by the idea.
“The billboards are already there,” said Mr. Allen of Yellow Arrow. “I don’t need a message in my pocket to tell me McDonald’s is around the corner.”
So true…
Technorati Tags: lbs, location-based games
Posted: January 27th, 2006 | No Comments »
Wow, I’d like this device could have a GPS inside so that I can fish on a city plazzas: “The latest introduction to the best-selling “Bass Fishin” series” (made by Radica).
They have plenty of intriguing devices like thumb warriors or friendchips:
- Girls send secret electronic notes using a chip and reader unit.
- Instant text message friends.
- Create ‘em, Pass ‘em, and Collect ‘em.
- Password protected for added security.
- Comes with two reader units and four chips.
Posted: January 27th, 2006 | No Comments »
Using psychophysiological techniques to measure user experience with entertainment technologies by Mandryk R, Inkpen K, Calvert T, Behaviour and Information Technology, Vol. 25, No. 2. (April 2006), pp. 141-158.
This seems to be the new trend in ‘user experience’ analysis: using psychophysiological techniques to attest/validate specific applications/environments. Here is roughly, the point of the paper:
Current subjective methods of evaluating entertainment technology aren’t
sufficiently robust. This paper describes two experiments designed to test the efficacy of physiological measures as evaluators of user experience with entertainment technologies. We found evidence that there is a different physiological response in the body when playing against a computer versus playing against a friend. These physiological results are mirrored in the subjective reports provided by the participants.
The authors base their claim on the fact that current methods are either costly (coding gesture, body language… then there are some inter-rater reliability) or too subjective ( user preference) and then advocates for taking psychophysiological techniques into account: Galvanic skin response, Cardiovascular measures, Respiratory measures, Electromyography, Emotions identifications.
Some of the results:
The methodological problems that we initially experienced in collecting and analyzing physiological data revealed a number of caveats for conducting this type of research. For example, great care must be taken to avoid stimuli that affect emotional responses, other than the stimuli being investigated. Although we took many precautions in Experiment One, such as the
caffeine intake, sex, and age of the participants, there were still effects that we did not predict, such as the responses generated.
