Zach Beauvais

It’s been a few months since I last spoke about Kiva.org, and I wanted to bring it up again.

Since writing, I’ve tried out the lending scheme, and am blown away with the ability to make a difference to places where it’s seriously needed. Not only has Kiva created an infrastructure for microlending which makes it incredibly easy to lend small amounts to entrepreneurs in developing countries, but it makes use of the very nature of the Web in connecting you with people all over the world.

The idea of ’sponsorship’ isn’t really stressed. This isn’t a: “For pennies a day, you could clean this water…” It’s much more of a chance to invest directly into the lives of people who need it, and have a chance to pull themselves up.

My primary worry, when lending (giving) is that I’ll be made to feel like a vouyer in some way. Instead of concern, I worry that I will be made to focus on fascination or curiosity. This doesn’t seem to be the case with Kiva. Although it doesn’t feel like a standard business transaction, it does present enough facts in a straight-forward way. There is not over-blown language, but clear presentation of cases.

I also feel more comfortable lending directly to “partners” in developing nations. I feel this is much more efficient, and more in the spirit of a digital age.

Image by . SantiMB . (too busy) via Flickr

I grew up in a Mac family. My dad used to programme accounts recievable applications on an old, black and white Macintosh, and that was my first encounter with any sort of GUI. Since then, I’ve used both Mac’s and PC’s and have a MacBook for work and a poorly-running, but still brand-new Vista box in my home study. I’ve even dabbled with Linux several times.

However, I’m starting to realise something: an aweful lot of applications (on every platform) get aesthetics completely wrong.

There’s a balance between looking nice, feeling comfortable, and aiding use. I think that the appearance of an application is as important a part of the design as the application itself. It’s a part of the usability, it’s not ‘eye candy’ slapped on for gratuitous reasons.

This is something Mac’s understand, and their GUI is gorgeous. Vista’s pretty good-looking itself, but that’s it’s problem: that’s all it is. The operating system is huge, heavy, slow and unpredictible. It crashes, hangs, and takes minutes to load. I bought a brand new (though admittedly budget-conscious PC) from a manufacturer who shall remain nameless (cough! Dell! cough…) which barely runs just the OS. I’ve had to triple the RAM and will be re-installing this weekend.

So, what Can I do about it? I can switch Aero off… leaving me with a huge, heavy, unpredictable and slightly-less-slow OS which is now ugly. So there’s Vista, tipping in the balance with an “eye candy” approach at aesthetic design.

I see the visual layout, graphics, and overall presence of an application as part of it’s feature-set.

Image via Wikipedia

I’m trying out a Zemanta blog post. What it does, apparently, is to suggest ideas for the article you’re currently writing. It’s a semantic blog suggestion feature, and it’s manifested in this instance as a firefox plugin that adds a write widget to my WordPress WYSIWYG editor. IIt updates every 300 characters, and also has ’semantic features’. There’s an interview over at R/WW, for more information. I’m kind of trying to see what it recommends so need to fill in the 300 characters:

Well it looks like it suggests related articles, and adds a bunch of Zemanta boxes into the blog space. It also finds images from Flickr.

I could see this tool being very handy in future, though I usually blog from a client, and I don’t think this supports ScribeFire or ecto (which is rubbish, by the way.) However, there are a few problems with it:

1. It generates an unhelpful set of areas in the blog itself. So if you include a Zemanta suggestion, it pastes it where you’re typing, and you end up typing in an alt area in the code… annoying.
2. It updates every 300 characters. This is annoying because it’s not necessarily that real-time. This is an awkward interface feature. It also places your curser at the top of the post every time it updates, meaning what I just typed appeared above the opening line…

The BBC reported a few days ago that:

Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online, reveals research.

The idea is that people are using the web to get things done, and don’t seem to notice that service providers want them to stick around. They even get tetchy with intrusions or ‘widgets’.

I agree, to a certain extent, with this statement—that people are impatient with adverts on sites. However, I’m not sure if I feel this article is that well informed. Yes, it is backed by Jakob Nielsen (so-called “Usability Guru”); which means it’s founded on stable research etc…

But, what’s a widget if not a short-cut to a result? An Amazon widget on a site is basically a way to buy a product without the need even to visit Amazon.co.uk. I don’t think it’s helpful to lump all widgets together on this one. Most widgets are functional—In fact, I’d go so far as to say that a non-functional widget is just a banner-ad.

It IS annoying when your browsing is interrupted with a flash game or advert placing itself over your text or form. It doesn’t help me make a decision, and actually puts me off that particular site. The Times Online had a long-running Land Rover ad which drove over the page, stopping me from reading. Since when is a Land Rover Discovery 3 an impulse buy?

What this article fails to notice is that users are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do: use. The internet is usable now.

I just watched this talk by Richard Baraniuk (link if embed doesn’t work), about opening up access to educational text and information. One of the most amazing ideas from his talk and the project they’re working on (Connections) is open-sourced text books.

The idea is that collaborative text-books, published on-demand could answer more questions and provide a better, more tailored resource to students and teachers. If educational resources are produced with granularity (i.e. like ‘Lego’ blocks which can be reused at a small level) they can be used and reused in a variety of novel and unpredicted ways.
Have a look and let me know what you think!

I was listening to one of Stephen Fry’s ‘podgrams’—”Wallpaper“—in which he briefly touched on the idea that the English tend to classify something as ‘pretentious’ if they don’t understand it. It’s a form of defense of tradition or perspective. Intelligence or flamboyance are marked as a personality flaw; people exhibiting uncomfortable behaviour or traits are disarmed by being seen as blemished. Pretension is perhaps the greatest fuel for satire and ironic mockery—maybe because it produces such good, well-recognised material. It is funny to see pretentious people mocked, and they are therefore rendered harmless. (I find particular hilarity in piss-taking of Tony Blair and would happily laugh at someone poking fun at Jacqui Smith, also!)

I think I recognise this, and I wonder whether there might not be more perspective defenses? The way we perceive the world—metaphorically “see”—is a deeply personal and fundamental aspect of our characters. Perhaps it’s tied in with our own beliefs about ourselves to such an extent that a conflict of perspective resonates with an attack on our person.

We defend our perspectives, especially perspectives involving personality or other foundational ideas, because they are metaphorical constructs to help us understand our world. Maybe that’s why it hurts so much to be called pretentious (speaking from the platform of a much-called pretentious git)? Because one is consigned to the same category as the most-maligned in cultural conscience?

Makes me think…

image “wine snob” from j/f/photos