Sonntag, 22. Mai 2005

Mobile community design: MoSoSo for backpackers. While mobile devices may not have been designed with community use in mind, several researchers in Australia are investigating how to create devices and services useful for community media. My latest article for TheFeature covers this mobile community media design research: Jeff Axup, a Ph.D candidate in the University of Queensland, Australia's Information Environments program, specializes in Mobile Community Design. He's working from a challenging foundation: although mobile telephones -- both devices and services -- were never designed to support community uses, more and more SMSers, mobile IMers and Mobile Social Software experimenters are using their small-screen, tiny-keyboard devices to kludge together roving social networks, smart mobs and other forms of mobile community. Axup and his colleagues believe good design begins with observing users in their natural environment. [Smart Mobs] 12:04:22 AM    comment []

25 Will Enter, 5 Will Leave (with Books). From around 25 entries received in the book giveaway, four copies of Radio UserLand Kick Start were mailed today to Rod Kratochwill, Ole Olson, Gary Secondino and Nick Starr. Steve Kirks is working with UserLand Software on Radio 9, a major upgrade to the software. Though I suspect that the upcoming release will affect weblog publishing features covered in early chapters of my book, Kick Start emphasizes two aspects of Radio that are important to learn and unlikely to change much in the future: the object database and UserTalk scripting language. A fifth copy of the book will be sent to Marinus as soon as I find one. I accidentally gave away more copies than I own. [Workbench] 12:01:15 AM    comment []