internet - Jimmy Breeze on Diigo

26 Nov 09

24 Nov 09

A Load of Cobblers: my tumblog on the favourite tools I use at Helpful Technology

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internet apps

31 Oct 09

Blended Reality — Read the Report! | The Institute For The Future

aka convergence

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internet society

We are creating a new kind of reality, one in which physical and digital environments, media, and interactions are woven together throughout our daily lives. In this world, the virtual and the physical are seamlessly integrated. Cyberspace is not a destination; rather, it is a layer tightly integrated into the world around us.
In our research for the Blended Reality work, we conducted ethnographic interviews with people who are pioneering new ways of living in the blended reality world. They are superstructing their realities and themselves in order to adapt to a changing ecosystem.

29 Oct 09

Germany Looks at Ways to Protect Online Journalism - NYTimes.com

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journalism internet

John Arquilla: Go on the Cyberoffensive

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conflict technology internet security future

27 Oct 09

Partners | Where I Live - Barnet

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community London internet socialmedia

20 Oct 09

Internet Archive: A Future for Books -- BookServer

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books opensource internet

05 Oct 09

The Future Place Blog: Why should you use a short term online research community?

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internet community future socialnetworks society research

30 Sep 09

The curious case of the game show neuroscientists, or how NOT to research an online community « The Human Element

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internet research commons socialnetworks

16 Sep 09

Forum For Democracy

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democracy video internet

13 Aug 09

100 top sites for the year ahead: our latest selection finds that location-based services, work-anywhere collaboration and video are prominent | Technology | The Guardian

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essential internet web2.0

10 Aug 09

Cosy social networks 'are stifling innovation' - tech - 05 August 2009 - New Scientist

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innovation socialnetworks diversity interesting internet

IT'S a dirty job, but someone's got to do it: for innovation to thrive on the internet, we must break up the very social networks that the web has made possible.
Previous research has shown that certain patterns of social interaction make radical innovation more likely. Bold ideas are typically incompletely formed when first conceived and easily shot down by criticism. Hence, they emerge more readily in communities in which individuals work mostly in small and relatively isolated groups, giving their ideas time and space to mature.
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- he problem, says social scientist Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the National University of Singapore, is that today's software developers work in social networks in which everyone is closely linked to everyone else. "The over-abundance of connections through which information travels reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking hold,"
- To restore the kind of aggressive innovation needed to build the next-generation internet will require re-engineering of the social networks of software developers themselves (Science, vol 325, p 396). This could be done, for example, if funding agencies ensured that research projects were carried out by many small, competing groups over longer periods.

06 Aug 09

Tracking News Life Cycles With Systems Like Media Cloud - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...05cloud.html - Preview

essential information memes media internet

but a comprehensive and reliable database that could track the daily rhythm of the news cycle over time and was available for public use didn’t exist. So Mr. Zuckerman and others at Berkman decided to create one.
The result is Media Cloud, a system that tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database, at mediacloud.org, will eventually enable researchers to search for key people, places and events — from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections — and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered
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- The findings, which can be graphed or mapped, can demonstrate the evolution of a report and variations in coverage. Users get to “do the fun part, which is analyzing the data,” Mr. Zuckerman said, “while we do the hard part of this, which is collecting it.”
- For the past decade or so, many researchers have used link analysis to figure out how information spreads, said Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor at Berkman who has been involved in creating Media Cloud. You could identify which Web sites were linked to most frequently and infer whose sites were most influential. But researchers have pretty much squeezed all that they can from that approach, Mr. Benkler said. Although Media Cloud is still in its early stages, it is among “the next generation of tools that actually look at what people are saying,” he said, adding, it is “a better microscope.”
- There are other kinds of media trackers. Cornell University researchers, for example, have developed MemeTracker, which maps the daily news cycle by grabbing repeated quotations from one million online sources.
- Amy S. Mitchell, deputy director of Pew’s journalism project, said Media Cloud “offers the public a great opportunity to play around with looking at a wide swath of media at more of a surface level.” But, she added, it cannot really capture the nuances of the news agenda of the news media. “There are certain things that computer algorithms cannot do that individuals can,” she said.
- What Media Cloud offers that no one else does is a tool anyone can use to answer all sorts of questions about the media landscape. One topic that Mr. Benkler and Mr. Zuckerman have long been debating is whether the Internet has helped open up the public sphere to more voices, or whether it just serves as an echo chamber, simply repeating information and views that the mainstream media already circulate.
- Mr. Benkler is using Media Cloud to test his theory that digital media is widening the circle of voices somewhat.
- Who has the power to place an idea on the national agenda is another question that Mr. Benkler said Media Cloud could help answer. For instance, how is the conversation about the recession and the financial crash shaped? Using some of the database’s more specialized tools, Mr. Benkler investigated who first floated the idea for a temporary takeover of the financial system by the government, as was done in Sweden in the 1990s.
- Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, first raised the idea in September 2008, but it was a cluster of influential economic and political bloggers like Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias who kept the idea alive.
- “If you’re actually trying to map where an idea starts and how it moves through the public sphere, you need a database like we’re developing, with time-stamped data,” Mr. Benkler said, explaining that services like Google and Lexis/Nexis are not as comprehensive or do not provide that level of detailed information. Media Cloud also enables more fine-grained analyses by examining language and context. “How does rhetoric change over time, and what’s the role of the Internet and the mainstream media in that?” Mr. Zuckerman asked.
- Some of his colleagues, for example, have been tracking the frequency of the words bailout and stimulus to pinpoint when one term overtook the other. Media Cloud mapped the results to show how the term bailout, used constantly in the news in the fall, eventually gave way to the word stimulus after President Obama took office. The results were graphed, illustrating precisely when the two lines crossed — where, as Mr. Zuckerman would say, “one meme took over from the other.”

23 Jul 09

Victor Keegan: Barcodes will be the next net revolution but only with smartphone support | Technology | The Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/...rcodes-new-internet-revolution - Preview

mobility internet marketing phone

we haven't cottoned on to the potential of the new generation of two-dimensional (2D) "dynamic" codes. They can turn any space on which they appear – a tree, an advertisement or photo in a magazine – into a direct link to the web. Once the software is loaded onto your mobile (from sites such as get.beetagg.com) the phone can read the 3,000 odd squares on the barcode and take you straight to a website. The quickest way to grasp this is to type a URL
You can put your own photo in the code if you want – they are reckoned to have 30% to 40% design flexibility so can be played around with a bit. The barcode created can then be placed on anything from a business card to an advertisement (zazzle.com) to provide a direct link to a website.
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- there is a street game in Spain where participants drop out when a rival snaps the barcode on their T-shirts. For other uses see the Fluid Forms blog.
- Why have barcodes taken off in Japan but not here? It is partly the fax machine syndrome. One is useless; ubiquity is nirvana. Japan had everything going for it – they were early adopters of high-quality smartphones with web access and they agreed on a freely available standard, QR. And the software was mainly pre-loaded into the phones so there was no need for any downloading.
- Could it happen here? There are definite signs of change, particularly in Germany, Holland and Spain, even though Nokia, the world's biggest phone manufacturer, seems curiously to be backing away from pre-loading the software in its phones. It is not in the new N86, Nokia's most powerful cameraphone.
- Once again the iPhone is leading the way by making it easy to access the web from a mobile, especially through its treasure trove of apps (that hardly anyone mentioned when it launched). There are various downloadable barcode apps on the iPhone for consumers. But developers may find that barcodes left in public places (from posters to T-shirts) could provide a direct route to selling their apps rather than being lost among the thousands of others in the App Store.
- Barcodes are something of a marketer's dream. This is not only because mobile phones, unlike the web, are a mecca for micropayments but, as Michael Bhaskar, co-founder of Quik Communications, has pointed out, this is "pull" marketing, getting people to come to you directly, rather than "push" – using a scattergun and hoping something will stick.
- n Japan there are newspapers and books consisting almost entirely of barcodes. There is huge scope for tourism, paperless ticketing, identification, self-branding, affiliate marketing and numerous applications as yet unknown. Is it too much to ask that our operators and manufacturers do two things: first, agree on a barcode standard and, second, preload the software into all smartphones? If that happened barcodes could play a major creative role in the era of mobile web browsing that is only just beginning.

21 Jul 09

Talk About Local (alpha)

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governance politics society internet UK

17 Jul 09

Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » Toward a New Future of “Whatever”

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video anthropology ethnography technology internet

15 Jul 09

Doodle: Easy Scheduling

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apps internet cloud

14 Jul 09

Personal Transformations in the Internet Age - Boing Boing

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identity internet

Almost ten years ago when doing research on technology and identity, my colleague Kathi Vian wrote: "We create our identity through reference points. We know who we are in reference to others... Identity is a conception of self that we create based on various reference points in our life." Meaning that we know we are tall because there are people around us who are shorter, we know we are smart because someone tells us we are, and we know we are shy or outgoing by comparing ourselves to those around us.
Sociologist Amitai Etzioni raises an alarm about existence of these persistent trails and reference points. In an article titled "Second Chances, Social Forgiveness, and the Internet"
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- By computerizing local public records, the Internet casts the shadow of people's past far and fast; like a curse they cannot undo, their records now follow them wherever they go.
- I wonder if as a result of pervasiveness of such information we may actually see greater social forgiveness and tolerance. After all, the more people see that even those they admire do stupid things once in a while, particularly when they are young, wouldn't our tolerance level go up also? And hasn't it happened already? The more we find out about personal indiscretions of various politicians and celebrities, the more inured the public has become, it seems. We are finding out that many of our heroes are fallible. Maybe, along with everything else, the Internet is democratizing human fallibility.

10 Jul 09

When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods (Alertbox)

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essential usability research qualitative design internet services

Modern day user experience research methods can now answer a wide range of questions. Knowing when to use each method can be understood by mapping them in 3 key dimensions and across typical product development phases.
- Attitudinal vs. Behavioral
- Qualitative vs. Quantitative
- Context of Website or Product Use
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- The Attitudinal vs. Behavioral Dimension
  
  This distinction can be summed up by contrasting "what people say" with "what people do" (very often quite different). The purpose of attitudinal research is usually to understand, measure, or inform change of people's stated beliefs
- While most usability studies should rely more on behavior, methods that use self-reported information can still be quite useful. For example, card sorting provides you with insights about users' mental model of an information space, which can help you determine the best information architecture for your site. Surveys measure attitudes or collect self-reported data that can help track or discover important issues with your site. Focus groups tend to be less useful for usability purposes, for a variety of reasons.
- usability studies and field studies. They utilize a mixture of self-reported and behavioral data, and can move toward either end of this dimension, though leaning toward the behavioral side is generally recommended.
- The basic distinction here is that, in qualitative studies, the data is usually being gathered directly, whereas in quantitative studies, the data is gathered indirectly, through an instrument, such as a survey or a web server log. In field studies and usability studies, for example, the researcher directly observes how people use technology (or not) to meet their needs. This gives them the ability to ask questions, probe on behavior or possibly even adjust the study protocol to better meet its objectives.

Google’s Operating System to Challenge Microsoft - NYTimes.com

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internet technology apps google business cloud computing opensource

“We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the Web in a few seconds,”
The plan is part of Google’s bet that a huge shift in computing is under way. In Google’s view, Web connections will become so fast and browsers so powerful that most of the programs that currently run on PCs will be replaced by online applications. That would eliminate the need to install, upgrade and back up software.
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- But Microsoft still has many advantages. It has been able to keep its software partners churning out games, media software, tax preparation software and other applications that rely on Windows. And it puts time and money into making sure that a vast array of devices like printers and cameras work well with its software.
- While Google’s new software will be free, other free products have failed to dent Microsoft’s armor. A handful of companies offer the free Linux operating system as an alternative to Windows, but Linux has not gained enough market share to weaken Microsoft. (The Chrome operating system will have Linux at its core, and like Linux it will be open source, meaning outside programmers will be able to modify it.)
- “Google has a reasonable stab at redefining the desktop,” said Mark Shuttleworth, the chief executive of Canonical, which makes a version of Linux called Ubuntu.
- Rather than buying bulky desktop computers, consumers have been turning recently toward small, low-cost laptops known as netbooks, which serve as little more than gateways to the Web. Google says its operating system will be initially aimed at netbooks, which are generally not powerful enough to handle the latest version of Windows.
- Google’s fundamental business model, too, may play to its advantage. The company says it believes that making Chrome free to PC makers will be worthwhile because more people will spend more time online, using Google’s search service and its other Web-based applications like Google Docs, a Web rival to Microsoft Office.
- Under its model, Google could even afford to pay computer makers to install its software on their machines, essentially subsidizing their cost.
- “If hardware is free and software is free, the only way you make money is off of services, and that is Google,” said Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation.
- “There are answers for Microsoft, but all of them entail a significantly less profitable business model,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Jimmy Breeze's Library tagged internet → View Popular

The dark side of the internet | Technology | The Guardian

A Load of Cobblers: my tumblog on the favourite tools I use at Helpful Technology

Blended Reality — Read the Report! | The Institute For The Future

Germany Looks at Ways to Protect Online Journalism - NYTimes.com

John Arquilla: Go on the Cyberoffensive

Partners | Where I Live - Barnet

Internet Archive: A Future for Books -- BookServer

The Future Place Blog: Why should you use a short term online research community?

The curious case of the game show neuroscientists, or how NOT to research an online community « The Human Element

Forum For Democracy

100 top sites for the year ahead: our latest selection finds that location-based services, work-anywhere collaboration and video are prominent | Technology | The Guardian

Cosy social networks 'are stifling innovation' - tech - 05 August 2009 - New Scientist

Tracking News Life Cycles With Systems Like Media Cloud - NYTimes.com

Victor Keegan: Barcodes will be the next net revolution but only with smartphone support | Technology | The Guardian

Talk About Local (alpha)

Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » Toward a New Future of “Whatever”

Doodle: Easy Scheduling

Personal Transformations in the Internet Age - Boing Boing

When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods (Alertbox)

The Attitudinal vs. Behavioral Dimension

Google’s Operating System to Challenge Microsoft - NYTimes.com

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