29 Feb 2008
(cross-posted from Made by Many)
We went to mashup* Events Widgets last night. There were about 200 people there, four panelists and some people demo’ing new stuff. I went along to find out what is happening on the widget scene. I was hoping to hear about some concrete examples, and was interested in hearing how people, brands, media owners are making money from widgets. So was everyone else, and the audience attacked.
26 Feb 2008
No, not the little claymation chap who was Tony Hart’s imaginary friend. Morph is “concept device” created by by Nokia Research Center (NRC) in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre (UK) to explore the kinds of devices and benefits that nanoscale technologies have the potential to create. Have a look at this video (I will post it here when our video button is restored…). It shows how Morph can be a watch, a phone, a calculator and a beer mat. It can sense chemicals in the air; it re-charges itself from the power of the sun; it’s self-cleaning and it can turn into jewelery. The video animation depicts user benefits from a personal perspective: a young woman sits outside a cafe on a sunny day sometime in a future set to lame chill-out music. Everything is perfect. Can’t wait.
21 Feb 2008
(cross-posted from Made by Many)
(the logo on the left is cooler…)
Everyone’s going on about the Semantic Web. It’s tipped to be the big thing in 2008. It’s all you can hear in the cafes and bars. Semantic this… NLP-that… It’s hard to get a word in edge-ways, and don’t even bother going out if all you want to talk about is simple keyword extraction. Keywords don’t tell you sh*t. (thanks Mark)
Until now, all the talk about a new age of context and meaning has been largely that, just talk. And unless you could afford big technology and million dollar license fees this stuff was way out of reach for the little guy. The arrival of two interesting new services indicates that this may now be changing quite rapidly. People are excited. They talk about it at dinner parties. It’s palpable.
14 Feb 2008
If you worked in user experience during the lifeboat years, you’ll appreciate this from the awesome new Online Journalism blog:
People read websites very differently to how they read newspapers, watch television or listen to radio. For a start, they read 25% slower than they do with print – this is because computer screens have a much lower resolution than print: 72 dots in every square inch compared to around 150-300 in newspapers and magazines (this may change, but usage patterns are likely to stay the same for some time yet).
12 Feb 2008
Via the Mashable Twitter Feed comes news of a new life-tool: Inner Twitter. The service sends you a ‘chime’, a meditative phrase for you to ponder upon. It’s up to you whether sign up to receive a ‘chime’ every 15 minutes, every hour or every day… (I suggest starting with the daily chime). When you receive the chime, the idea is that you:
Listen. Pay attention to your breathing. Pay attention to what is before you. Really look at what is in front of you. Forget yourself and become whatever resonates, like stillness, peace or beauty
2 Feb 2008
Just signed up for a free ‘Matterbox‘, an idea I heard about via Lloyd Davies on a Seesmic video post. (I wrote two posts about Seesmic yesterday: I’m already dangerously addicted and just found myself checking in whilst waiting for an airplane).
Matterbox is an imaginative joint venture between Artomatic and Royal Mail. In a world of increasingly intangible stuff, they’ve set up to champion the physical: ‘real’ things you can hold and touch. As they say at the Matterblog.
Sure, this will take time, but if digital media continue to dominate even more aspects of our lives, there’s going to be a growing demand for the need to get to grips with things. Matter is a long-term project,
1 Feb 2008
JP Rangaswami has been talking a lot about about the way loosely joined up tools and services like SMS, Twitter, TwittyTunes, tinyurl and the Facebook mini-feed can work together. About the way it can be annoying for other people (err, yeah.. sorry to the victims of my BlogFriends feed btw). He has a great way of talking about this emerging Web of Data.
We’re not dealing with firehoses any more. We’re dealing with capillaries, as I discussed in my post yesterday. And these capillaries carry and distribute information nutrients, and process and eject information waste and toxins. The real power of all this lies in the increasing transportability of context.
JP’s found a beautiful way to talk about the potential (and the potential downsides) of the services we use becoming fluid quicker than we can work out how to cope with them.
I played with a new one this evening: Seesmic. It’s a video conversation site, like Twitter but up close and personal. Currently in Alpha, but you can sign up for an invitation. It’s an important one and it’s worth trying out. Be prepared to lose some time.
24 Jan 2008
Today I heard someone say that before the Web all communication was one-way, top down: from media producer to passive audience. I know what he meant but it prompted me to start a list of pre-Web forms of conversational folk-media. Please let me know if you can think of other examples and I’ll add them to the list.
So, to kick off:
22 Jan 2008
The Telegraph continues to re-invent itself with bleeding-edge web technology by announcing yesterday that it plans to become an OpenID provider by the end of February. The newspaper will be the first in the world - and the first British media company - to provide OpenID logins and the news came on the same day as Yahoo! announced their plans to do the same.
What this means for the Telegraph’s users is that they will have to remember fewer passwords in future and find it easier to move seamlessly between other OpenID sites (other sites include the well-known conservative hang-outs Digg and Blogger). OpenID provides users with a sort of passport (not be confused with Microsoft Password, which was an earlier, proprietary and therefore evil attempt to do this).
17 Jan 2008
Jeff Jarvis has written an interesting post writing off polls and listing a number of new ways to take the pulse of the nation during US election campaigning. They include:
Tim Malbon is a founding partner of social media agency Made by Many, a company specialising in next-generation websites and applications. Tim met the Internet in 1996 and has been creating online community since 2000.
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