Blogging Perspective

Posts Tagged ‘ideas’

God’s business strategy?

Ever had a superficial conversation suddenly run your blood cold?

On the short cab-ride to my hotel following FOWA (more to follow), the cab driver was explaining the extension of the conference venue. This is not usually the preamble to a conversation that changes your perspectives, except maybe on the architectural uses of steel spider’s legs and concrete. However, he was saying that the folks that bought Manchester United (actually, he should have said City), bought the Excel centre for a $1billion.

“Apparently,” said the cabby, “they do a lot of, you know, ‘God conferences’, evangelical like, yeah?”

“Oh?” I enquired—shocked because I’d been greeted by some charismatics in red teeshirts on my first visit to FOWA, and they’d been there every morning, greeting folks entering the conference and—strangely—leaving the toilets.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of money in it over in the States. Folks that run ‘em want to come to England, and get some British God-money, I guess. Problem for them is: there aren’t any places big enough! So, they buy it, and are building a bigger place. Lots of dosh!”

What?

I had cynically been thinking to myself that the red-tee-shirted cohort of pentecostals greeting me by name (no, nothing spiritual—we all wear name-tags!) had been selected for their good looks and ethnic diversity. But I thought I was being cynical.

But here’s the thing: I overheard maybe ten conversations between geeks (It was a web conference, after all) about the “religious people/ god-folk/ Christian nutters”, and my heart sank. One or two said that a cheery greeting first thing in the morning is quite nice. Most, however, thought they were over-bearing, weird, or strangely sexy.

The thing that gets me here, is that the public image of Jesus’ followers is horribly maimed here. Wasn’t it Jesus who through money-changers out of the temple? Wasn’t it Jesus who went to societies low-lifes and changed their worlds? You think he would have scored well with a PR agency? Think he had a Marketing team or cheer-leaders?

“The only thing spiritual they [Arab investors in the venue] get is this:” and the cabby rubbed his fingers in the international symbol of money.

What should I say to this? I’m lost for words…

Friday, October 10th, 2008 Tags: cab driver, church, context, editorial, emergent, Excel, ideas, Manchester United, perspective, PR, steel spider, United Kingdom, web conference
Category: emergent View Comments

Google’s 10^100 (how many can you help?)

Image via Wikipedia

I have begun to see that we may be entering a new age of polymaths, and I’m happy to be involved in a part of the business world which seems to sustain some of the best brains on the planet.

I remember reading about the beginners of industry—the pioneers of technology and science. I remember reading how Robert Fulton came up against problems in life, and simply invented new ways of doing things, leading eventually to the development of steam-powered paddle-wheel-boats. I remember, vaguely, from my propagandistically pro-industrial schooling that as a child, Fulton had invented or improved on the lead pencil, because the one he was using in school wasn’t up to scratch. The same story is reflected through many of the West’s inventors of what we’ve retrospectively come to call the Industrial Revolution: when opportunity or difficulty forced their hands, they changed the situation.

Now, aside from natural romanticism, I like to look to the past with neither rose-tinted glasses nor “isn’t-everything-better-now” short-sightedness. I’m sure that for every changer, there were crowds of followers in every age, and I’m sure many of you could point easily to both an earth-changer and a follower without too much effort. Besides, history pays scant attention to followers.

No, what I’m talking about is the seeming ease with which many of my colleagues in the web industry switch between impressively diverse tasks. Some I know make impressive presenters, and happen to hold PhD’s in fields more or less unrelated to what they do now… and can code Java and know a bit of CSS on the side. I fear to challenge any to play chess (since I haven’t played in over 5 years, and have the patience of a twelve-year-old), and several are rumoured to be better-than-average musicians. This diversified excellence, alongside the startups, ideas, enthusiastic organisations and programmes i’ve seen recently, remind me of the society-changers of a century and more ago. Not since then, I think, has such an importance been placed on ambition within social responsibilities.

One of the things I’ve seen most recently has been the Google 10^100 (apparently pronounced: ten to the one-hundredth with a typically geeky need to explain the pun) which aims to “help as many people as we can” by contributing $10million to fund earth-changing ideas. Their site is, in classic Google fashion, very straightforward, so I won’t repeat their blurb…just go have a read. But, while you are doing it, I dare you to set aside any cynicism you may harbour either toward a big business, or to any notion of “changing the world”. Think about what has and is being done, and then think how you could change the world.

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 Tags: change the world, chess, development, emergent, Google, ideas, Java, perspective, review, Robert Fulton, web industry switch
Category: emergent, interesting, tech View Comments

Organising the Workspace

Having been inspired by Lifehacker’s workspace show and tell, I’ve decided to organise my workspace a bit.

I have a quite deep, wooden desk with drawers which tend to fill with clutter. I’ve decided to feed a powerstrip through the back of one of the drawers so I can plug in two usb hubs and my MacBook power cable there, out of the way. I’ve also managed to organise a system for filing my papers (I hate paper, it should always be on screen and searchable!) loosely based on the GTD (Getting Things Done) meme.

One thing I’ve done is to mount a powerstrip to the back of the desk, so I lose some of the trailing cables. It still amazes me, though, how many wires a single office space can generate! There’s still a cluttered feeling to the desk, and there’s nothing on it aside from computing paraphanelia.

I’m planning to put some shelves behind the monitor—the desk is very deep—on which to place external hard-drive and other necessities. I’d like to hide the cables behind it somehow, so they aren’t trailing in any way. I’ve bundled all the cabling with wire ties, and fed most leads through the monitor back, creating a funnel. The overall appearance, though, is still a bit too ad-hoc or rustic or… I don’t know.

What do you think? What would you do with this desk space?

Sunday, June 29th, 2008 Tags: desktop blogging, ideas, intuitive products, perspective, stuff, web/desktop
Category: Uncategorized View Comments

Aesthetics and Applications

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. It should be intuitive to interact with it somehow. I fine OS X much more intuitive, and aesthetically pleasing. Some apps written for it, however, fall far short it it’s high mark.

ecto is a blogging application for OS X, and it’s plain. It’s not minimalist-chic. It’s not “sleek”. It’s boring and plain. It also isn’t intuitive, unfortunately. It’s got loads of features, but it misses its greatest asset: the fact that it’s built on the most advanced Graphic User Interface ever developed.

Strangely, I much prefer to blog using Windows Live Writer! Its design works well, it’s interesting-looking (without being LOUD, like the rest of the intrusive Vista package) and it does what it says it will. It interacts very well with images (unlike ecto!), videos and links. It also has the ingenious feature of dowloading your site’s CSS so you can actually see how the post should look in situ. (Granted, this doesn’t always work…)

The point of this slightly oblique and poorly-thought-out rant, is that the point of software is to make peoples lives better. Designers completely miss that. Window’s OS designers seem to have thought: “I know, they want pretty. We’ll give ‘em pretty. It’ll be so pretty, it’ll need 3GB RAM and a high-end Graphics Card just to run… that’ll show ‘em!”

Well, it’s rubbish.

However, whoever was heading the design team for the Live suite (Writer, Mail, Messenger et al), was clearly desinging from an end-user’s perspective. Their thoughts were probably more along the lines of:

“hmm, when I blog, I like to be able to do that with images. Wouldn’t it be good if we could see how it’d look on the site before we publish? Yeah, Hey! I think people will find this useful… ooh, that looks good, too.”

I’d love to hear how you get on when designing or using software. Being me, I don’t think it stops with software design, but is actually a feature of how we live and interact. Let me know…

Thursday, June 12th, 2008 Tags: accounts recievable applications, Aero, blog using Windows Live Writer, cough, Dell, desktop blogging, GUI, ideas, Linux, Mac, Mac OS X, Mail, Messenger, Microsoft Vista, Microsoft Windows, operating system, RAM, review, software design, tech, visual, Windows Live, writer
Category: blogging, tech View Comments

Selfish Web Users

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. People can think to themselves: “I’d quite like to buy an iPod, right now.” Within a minute, they can have a confirmation email and estimated delivery date in their inbox. This is using the web, and I think it’s not so much a ‘ruthless’ thing or a ‘selfish’ thing. You expect to buy what you’d like in a supermarket, and no one would call you ruthless for not setting up camp there for the afternoon. I know I like to spend as little time in Tesco as possible, and I don’t think anyone who considers me selfish or ruthless does so on account of that.

This is actually an issue of usability and confidence. People are more confident in their ability to purchase, find information, and network online. The majority of my book, electronic, and increasingly household purchases are done on amazon.co.uk. I check my calendar on Google before confirming appointments, and I even check people’s statuses on Facebook to see how they are. This is confident, comfortable use. I don’t need to spend an hour on a site when I can get the info I need in my RSS reader (Vienna, it’s brilliant!), but I still want the content.

I’m also still open to relevant advertising… If I’m after an iPod, I don’t mind being shown iPod accessories, especially discounted ones. I don’t mind being recommended a new book by a previously-read author. But, I do mind being shouted at by banner-ads and I tend to ignore them.

Having worked in online marketing, I couldn’t imagine a less-useful tactic than plastering your content with splashy ads and irrelevant content. It’s not helpful or usable, and goes against the grain of how the web works. It’s an open garden, and it’s rude to litter. This does not mean we’re ruthless, we’re just getting better at keeping our spaces clear and useful.

There’s the bin, put your Flash-ads in on your way out of our park, mate.

Image: “Rubbish!” by dogbomb from flickr

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 Tags: Amazon.co.uk, editorial, Facebook, Google, ideas, interesting, Jakob Nielsen, Land Rover Discovery 3, online marketing, particular site, previously-read author, reading, tech, Tesco, the Times, Vienna, Web 2.0, Web Users, web works
Category: Semantic Web, Web 2.0, interesting, tech, travel View Comments

Opening up Education

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!

Monday, May 19th, 2008 Tags: abstract, Education, ideas, interesting, Richard Baraniuk, Semantic Web, semantics
Category: Semantic Web, interesting View Comments