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Pay Per Tweet

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Interesting article about pay-per-tweet technology from izea, the company that already leads in pay-per-blog.  Seems like an awkward way to fund a social medium, having people pretend to like stuff because they’re getting paid to pretend.  Of course, we’re used to that from our funding for radio and television and publishing and …  Interesting that books, for instance, work on a completely different model, and that most movie revenue still comes from direct pay.  What’s different about the media we refuse to directly pay for, and the media we are willing to directly pay for?  Is it possible to change one into the other?

If the hidden price model is the only choice, we should seek a set of ethical rules for it.  Perhaps the adverts could just be clearly marked as being for-pay.

John

Co-Credit

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Very fun article about apportioning credit among multiple authors of academic papers.  Read the article for the details, but the author’s basic argument is that at equilibrium the total value per paper had better be constant with number of authors, or economists will start putting in tons of extra authors on their papers to boost their total credit.  (Assuming quality is held constant.)

I see the economic argument.  OTOH, it is also true that doing joint work takes more interaction and negotiation (and hence is more difficult) but often seems to me to lead to work that has a bigger impact.  Hence, an organization might prefer the joint work even if it is slower per person hour, if they believe the style leads to more impact.  (I suppose this is a cheap way of saying I don’t think you can really hold quality constant.)

John

Economy down, Traffic down

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Interesting post on Freakonomics blog about “at least the traffic is down”.  The really sad thing is that according to the book Traffic, traffic will rebound as people realize that driving isn’t as bad as it used to be.  Sigh.

Talk about needing a Geowiki!

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This Slashdot post talks about TIGR, the Tactical Ground Reporting System, which the US military developed for groupd troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Developed as much on the
ground in active warzones as in a lab, TIGR lets platoons access the
latest satellite and drone imagery in an easy-to-use map based
interface, as well as recording their experiences in the field and
accessing the reports of other troops.”

For more details, see the interview with the developers. Some fascinating quotes, including:

soldiers learn … the area that they’re
assigned. That is they learn the people. They learn the villages. They
learn the roads. And that knowledge that they gain over the course of a
deployment is often times lost. When those soldiers rotate back to the
United States and new soldiers come in and are assigned a territory,
then they come in without all of that knowledge. They used to come in
without all of that knowledge. And that was actually a very, very
dangerous period of time called the turnover of authority. And one
thing TIGR has done is that TIGR has made all of that information
available to the soldiers that are coming in new, as it were, to an
area, so that they’re acclimated and have good knowledge of the people
and the places and the roads and things of this sort when they arrive.

you’re just really looking for geospatially relevant information for
the mission at hand. If you’re going to take this route and you’re not
familiar with this route that you’re thinking of taking, you can look
and see how many attacks have taken place; what kind of attacks have
taken place; who’s been there before. So all of that information is at
your fingertips.

What a different application than Cyclopath! (And one that I personally would have qualms about working on, although I don’t see this as a simple case of ‘working on a military application’.) And yet the motivation for the approach is nearly identical. More evidence for the utility of a geowiki approach!

Way Beyond the Desktop

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When I teach user interface design, I always come to a point about 2/3 of the way through the semester where I show the students this picture. It’s a picture from circa late 70s or early 80s of someone sitting in front of a Xerox Star. I tell them this was the dawn of the desktop computer / GUI era, and this picture illustrates many of the assumptions that were implicit in this area. Then I ask the students to tell me what they notice about the picture.

Maybe you want to try it before reading any further…

OK, you’re back?

The students notice lots of interesting stuff, but a lot of what I want to point out they usually don’t notice: it’s too obvious to notice, like: the user is an adult, a man, can see, can read, has no motor disabilities, is white, is a white collar worker, which means he’s probably educated, is working (not having fun), is alone, etc.

Then I say that all of these assumptions are false for many (or most) human beings and for many (or most) human activities.

Well, at CHI 2009, I was finally convinced that the CHI community has definitively got that. Now, many CHI’ers have gotten this long ago. Maybe it’s just me noticing this is true about the field. In any case, there was great stuff about topics like: tabletop devices, social media, and, my favorite, designing in the developing world.

My absolute favorite event in this vein was Jan Chipchase’s presentation. Jan Chipchase has the coolest job in the world. He’s a researcher for Nokia, and he travels all around the world observing practices related (veeeeeeery broadly) to mobile phone use and coming up with ideas for new Nokia designs and products. By “all around the world”, I don’t mean North America, Europe, and Japan (although he certainly spends lots of time there). I mean Ghana and Uganda and Afghanistan and Vietnam, among lots of other places. He does contextual inquiry in monsoons, participatory design in shanty towns, and lofi prototyping in villages. His talk consisted of showing a large number of slides and telling stories. It was great. If you’re interested in learning more about what he does, check out his web site referenced above. He has lots of interesting blog entries and posts his slides for all or most of his slides.