notes
Tuesday, 31 December 2002"The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?"
British comedy lives on in German television. Media: Millions will be tuning in tonight to watch a vintage sketch that is unknown in the country of its origin. [Guardian Unlimited]
"A lonely upper-class Englishwoman, Miss Sophie, hosts a dinner every New Year's Eve for her long-dead admirers: Mr Pommeroy, Mr Winterbottom, Sir Toby and Admiral von Schneider.
Her butler, James, makes his way around the table playing each of the guests in turn. As he does so, he drinks each guest's share of the wine, becoming more inebriated and familiar and repeatedly trips over a tiger skin on the floor."
Read about geoURL and decided to add the required metatags. Hardest part was getting accuarate idea of where I am!
Eventually discovered Auslig or Geoscience Australia's online Place Name Search to confirm latitude & longitude for Ultimo: -33.52 & 151.12.
Chat as a side-channel for face-to-face meetings. Clay Shirky's written up some findings from a brainstorming session he hosted in NYC last month that I attended. The meeting was a face-to-face affair, but virtually every attendee had a laptop with an WiFi card, and Clay set up a web-based chat for us to play with while we talked. A giant display at the front of the room showing the running chatter, and it created a really dense dialog that was very fun and productive.
Group conversations are exercises in managing interruptions. When someone is speaking, the listeners are often balancing the pressure to be polite with a desire to interrupt, whether to add material, correct or contradict the speaker, or introduce an entirely new theme. These interruptions are often tangential, and can lead to still more interruptions or follow-up comments by still other listeners. Furthermore, conversations that proceed by interruption are governed by the people best at interrupting. People who are shy, polite, or like to take a moment to compose their thoughts before speaking are at a disadvantage.Link Discuss (Thanks, Clay!) [Boing Boing Blog]Even with these downsides, however, the tangents can be quite valuable, so if an absolute "no interrupt" rule were enforced, at least some material of general interest would be lost, and the frustration level among the participants consigned solely to passive listening would rise considerably.
The chat room undid these effects, because participants could add to the conversation without interrupting, and the group could pursue tangential material in the chat room while listening in the real room. It was remarkable how much easier it was for the speaker to finish a complex thought without being cut off. And because chat participants had no way of interrupting one another in the chat room, even people not given to speaking out loud could participate. Indeed, one of our most active participants contributed a considerable amount of high-quality observation and annotation while saying almost nothing out loud for two days.
Matthew Thomas: When good interfaces go crufty. [Scripting News]
Dr Dobbs' Verity Stob defines 'cruft': "A rolling computer gathers "cruft." When you spot a class interface that is no longer used by any client, but that nobody dare delete, that's cruft. It is also the word "seperate," added to a spellchecker's private dictionary in a moment of careless haste, and now waiting for a suitably important document. Cruft is the cruel corruption and confusion inevitably wrought by time upon all petty efforts of humankind."
Very interesting - how actions like saving & naming documents and quitting apps are like archaeological remnants of previous generations of OS. Technology has soared ahead but the interface is held back in the sludge - and surprisingly, Apple are behaving as neanderthals too, well the early 1980s at least. Even more surprising - he points the finger of cruft at those in the best position to avoid it - linux programmers!
Introducing a different time/space spin to web searches. Even via a thick pipe it feels clunky. But very interesting potential to tweak the sensation of moving through results akin to the old project X interface Apple played with and dropped over 5 years ago. And not dissimilar to the Personal Brain interface (which I installed yesterday!). Now where are the google settings to adjust the speed and transitions?
Google Viewer. The Google Viewer is developed by the Web wizards at Google Labs. It runs a typical Web search through the Google engine, but allows you to view each and every page result in a JavaScript slideshow. It's incredibly handy for those of us who tend to remember sites on a visual basis, but the viewer is painfully slow, lest the user has a broadband connection to load each site in seconds. [MetaFilter]