The Human Element Over Technology. One of the most pressing strategic questions facing e-commerce sites in their struggle to become profitable is how to turn browsers into paying customers. Part of the answer is a robust search engine -- smart technology that makes it easy for customers to find what they're looking for. But an even bigger part of the answer involves human intervention -- smart people who can interpret customer inquiries and deduce what they really want. [SNT Report]

Ron Lieber. She Reads Customers' Minds. Fast Company Magazine. Feb. 2001.

"That's Alissa Kozuh's job at Nordstrom.com. Kozuh, 28, who formerly worked on search-related projects for Microsoft, is now the editor of Nordstrom.com, where her most important role is to analyze the words that people put into the site's search engine every month."

Actually not fortune telling, but maintaining a DYNAMIC thesaurus. How dynamic a thesaurus should be depends on the information domain or ecology. In this case, descriptions in the retail fashion industry would change weekly or even daily. However, a thesaurus of mathematics might change slightly every decade. Mine.

10:58:12 PM    

"PowerPoint has automated lazy thought" [Daypop Top 40]

From 'Death By AutoContent' by Jeffrey Veen

"I recently came across an academic paper titled, The PowerPoint Presentation and Its Corollaries: How Genres Shape Communicative Action in Organizations [pdf] by JoAnne Yates and Wanda Orlikowski, both of the MIT Sloan School of Management. In it, they have a look at how the genre of PowerPoint presentations in business affects communication both inside companies and externally with their clients or customers. It's a fascinating look at how PowerPoint has, essentially, automated lazy thought. Or, to put it another way, created bullet-point expectations for all organizational knowledge.

Once PowerPoint hit the scene, the backlash was sudden and fierce, including parody in the form of the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation and Click To Add Title. Microsoft parried with the "AutoContent Wizard" -- a tool that creates a deck from a series of questions -- and things spiraled down from there.............

The paper does a good job of analyzing how PowerPoint presentations are being used in a variety of organizations. From internal training, to external sales pitches, to actual "deliverables" for a design firm. The authors also describe just how artificial and uninspired the output of the tool can be, especially joined with "telepresence" of remote presentation, or as a "leave behind" for someone not at the original meeting. These decks almost always cary too much detail for the event, and not enough context for later."

I wonder if this extends to academia? Just kidding. Of course it does. Although PowerPoint presentations can be good, if there is some spontaneity and opening for genuine discussion. It is just good content done right.  See another Jeffery Veen popular post, "Seven steps to better presentations"

10:41:35 PM