18 June 2003

Unintrusive, delay-friendly: How IM augments conversations Instant messaging's mostly-synchronous nature mean that "it is OK to not answer an IM until you are ready—a pause of 30 seconds is perfectly acceptable where it wouldn’t be in voice (and the answerer doesn’t even have to hold the question in their mind while doing something else, but can refer back to it later)". Stewart Butterfield's office uses it to communicate across geographically distant teams (where presence is a useful feature), but "even in the office here, we often use them when we are only few feet away: to ask quick questions without breaking other peoples’ concentration". 11:11:04 AM     comments

Some speech recognition news, 18 June 2003 The Difficulties with Names: names have a zipf-like distribution - Smith covers 1% of the US population, the top five names have 5%, 2,000 cover 50% , the top 50,000 only gets us to 80% of the population, and one in a hundred names is unique. The W3C's Voice Browser Working Group has released a new working draft of CCXML, the Call Control Language TellMe has 16 of its top 20 wishlist customers bagged, and may roll out 411 (directory assistance/enquiries) services for network operators in the next months. Apparently they haven't updated their website since 2001 because they don't need to bother. Speechworks tweaks revenue and profit targets upwards for 2Q2003. 11:10:19 AM     comments

Alan Moore: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Just finished: Vol 1 of The LOEG, which was excellent. It manages to be both dark (in the usual Moore manner) and lighthearted, and it's feel is steampunk-(Gibson/Sterling or Stephenson) -meets-slipstream. It's fully-packed with references to turn of the [last] century pulp fiction. Campion Bond looks like George Lucas. We recommend it. LOEG is annotated in detail by Jess Nevin, and it seems that Nevin's work is being collected and published in an unofficial companion. More AM: long interview from 2000 and the Alan Moore fan site. See also: the COMICA event at the ICA later this month has talks from Warren Ellis and Joe Sacco, and features the launch of the OuBaPo (the Ouvoir de Bande Dessinee Potentielle, Workshop for the potential of comics). Previously read: Warren Ellis' Orbiter: Shuttle disappears, and mysteriously reappears 10 years later. Pretty good. 10:12:01 AM     comments

Terry Bell: The right hand of Frank Gehry LA Times feature on the managing architect/project manager who makes Gehry's buildings happen. Architect as project manager rather than visionary. Apart from "knowing how to build stuff," says Gehry, the key to Bell's role is "knowing how to keep a crew of workmen together, and earning a certain amount of respect for his position, because the construction guys always try to diss the architect." In another sense, Gehry continues, Bell's job is "like being the conductor: You've got the score. Now, how do you do it?" [via ?] 2:34:06 AM     comments

Christopher Priest on slipstream fiction Priest won the Arthur C. Clarke award this year for Separation. He picks his top ten slipstream books here, and luckily we also have Bruce Sterling explaining what "slipstream" actually means: ... this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility, but that looks pretty bad on a category rack, and requires an acronym besides; so for the sake of convenience and argument, we will call these books "slipstream." (Or put another way, slipstream is unheimlich?) Sterling also has a list of slipstream books. 2:28:52 AM     comments