Ross Mayfield's Weblog
Markets, Technology and Musings

Categories


blog-tribe.ryze.com
(by most recent)




Search weblog
Search WWW
 

 

Tuesday, December 31, 2002
 

IEEE Spectrum 2003 Technology Forecast & Review

Communications

  • What's Wrong With Telecom -- Combine greed, corporate crime, misguided regulation and explosive new technology, and you get an industry that's in serious trouble. By Peter A. Bernstein
  • What's Right With Telecom -- Broadband's secret success and our never-ending love of mobile communication are the aces up the industry's sleeve. By Steven M. Cherry

Opinion

  • Three Takes on Telecom's Trouble -- From IEEE members with intimate views of the industry's current woes and prospects. By Roch Guerin, Frank Ferrante & Jules A. Bellisio
  • The End of the Middle -- Intelligent devices on stupid networks are grabbing the phone business away from the traditional carriers. By David S. Isenberg

Computers

Opinion

Energy

  • Opening Up Energy Trading -- A small circle of players gave nascent U.S. electricity markets a bad name. By Kennedy Maize
  • Emission Permission -- Bartering in carbon dioxide will be big business. By Mark Ingebretsen & William Sweet

Opinion

  • Are We Safe Yet? -- Richard L. Garwin explains how to keep nuclear bombs out of the hands of terrorists. By Jean Kumagai

Transportation

  • Running off the Rails -- Why does high-speed rail work well everywhere but the United States? By Tony R. Eastham
  • Hybrid Vehicles to the Rescue -- They've been making major gains and could soon be in your garage. By Willie D. Jones
  • The Ticket Chase -- Can cutting off the middleman return needed revenue to airline coffers? By Holli Riebeek

Workplace

  • Reversal of Fortune -- Stanford University's Stephen R. Barley reflects on what's going on in the engineering workplace. By Jean Kumagai

Semiconductors

[Interesting People]


11:14:14 AM    comment []

Interruption Tax and Social Software

A key consideration in designing Social Software: Is the value of the interruption greater than what's being interrupted?  Interruption has a cost beyond switching tasks.  The cost of recovery.  Consider:

  • 15-20% of an employee's effort is spent dealing with interrupts (15-20 min. per interrupt) [R. Solingen 1998]
  • The recovery time after a phone call is at least 15 min. [DeMarco 1987]
  • Email interruptions occur more frequently (every ~ 5 min.) but have a shorter recovery time of a little over 1 minute [Jackson 2001]

Now these are studies of everyday work, not brainstorming meetings.  I have yet to find a study of IM recovery times, and it generally will be less than email.  When using In-room Chat as Social Software there is also the benefit of having similar content and context between the live discussion and what flows on IM.  One study of IM showed that if the message content was relative to the current task and if sensitivity to performance of the current task was low, the cost of interruption would be minimal.   These costs make me believe that the greater value of these tools to provide communication, cues and moves would be Out-of-room.

However, If the costs of interruption prove to be high relative to the benefit of free-flowing In-room chat,  renewed focus should be given to structuring the IM component.  The options I would suggest are using software for decision making or emphasizing asynchronous chat.  The objective of most meetings is making decisions.  Using software to signal, poll, draft and decide could add clarity, expression and value. 

Speaking from a personal experience of when weblogs were being used as Social Software at Supernova, I gained value from being able to step away from the instantanious commentary and communication that paralleled the presentations.  It let me listen and have time to annotate.  During downtime I could turn to postings and synthesize.

But the Social Software experiments today are discovering a new form of Jazz, of improvisation, of communal processing.  Kind of like a Happening from the 60s.  Its really a new mode of communication, with the discovery of design taking place it could move from art to science.


9:43:23 AM    comment []


Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website. © Copyright 2003 Ross Mayfield.
Last update: 1/2/2003; 9:41:41 AM.
This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme, but severly tweaked.
December 2002
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31        
Nov   Jan

<--Older | Newer-->

Subscribe to "Ross Mayfield's Weblog" in Radio UserLand. Click to see the XML version of this web page. Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog. @Ryze

Subscribe by email:



Recent Posts

HotTopic Outline

Reciproll

Ecostats
Technocrati
BlogStreet
BlogTree
Blogdex
Organica
Waypath
Google
Translate
German
Spanish
French
Italian