Dr. Ralph-Christian Ohr, a Swiss product manager, reflects thoughtfully on the recent strong discussion on user-led innovation.

“There has been quite a lot of discussion recently about a post by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen, titled “User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea”. Their major claim is: “Great brands lead users, not the other way around.” As expected, this lead to controversial discussions in terms of customer’s role in the process for innovation. The response reminded me of the reaction to one of Roberto Verganti’s polarizing posts.

It’s interesting to see that those discussions mostly result in ‘either-or’ positions – assuming that customer-centered and vision-centered approaches exclude each other. As innovation is about managing tension, I think a ‘both-and’ approach tends to be more promising.

Innovation aims at providing value to customers. Customers eventually decide whether or not an innovative offering is going to be adopted and to become successful. Therefore, the customer needs to be put in the centre of innovation considerations.”

Read article

A synchronicity:
Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing
by Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova

Available as a print-on-demand book from lulu.com. Click here to order.
Available as a free download here.

The Situated Technologies Pamphlets series, published by the Architectural League, explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism. How are our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the way architects conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing and what do technologists need to know about cities?

In the last five years, the urban computing field has featured an impressive emphasis on the so-called “real-time, database-enabled city” with its synchronized Internet of Things. In Situated Technologies Pamphlets 5, Julian Bleecker and Nicholas Nova argue to invert this common perspective and speculate on the existence of an “asynchronous city.” Through a discussion of objects that blog, they forecast situated technologies based on weak signals that show the importance of time on human practices. They imagine the emergence of truly social technologies that through thoughtful provocation can invert and disrupt common perspective.

Situated Technologies Pamphlets will be published in nine issues over three years and will be edited by a rotating list of leading researchers and practitioners from architecture, art, philosophy of technology, comparative media studies, performance studies, and engineering.

Virginia Heffernan writes in the New York Times Magazine on why Twitter is a trap.

“These worries started to surface for me last month, when Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on “connections” like the Internet, Skype and texting. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” he said. [...]

“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.”

Read full story

In an interview with Nokia’s IdeasProject, social media innovator Laura Fitton talks about the most basic of human connections: our immediate physical community.

This is the kind of intimacy that is built up over numerous ‘unimportant,’ low-level interactions…with the neighbours washing their car, the guy working at the cafe, or the woman walking her dog. It turns out these interactions add up to something very important; they anchor us in the world, and are a critical component to trust and connection.

“Fitton details the profound impact Twitter’s real time connectivity between individuals and their networks is having on how people work and live. The trivial, low-level nature of these interactions is also what gives them their power. Similar to the kinds of exchanges people have in their neighbourhoods, she documents how they work in creating a fabric of trust.”

- Watch video
- Read transcript

Related:
- Interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams
- SAP Global Survey interview with Laura Fitton

The Financial Times has posted a very long analysis on Twitter as a social phenomenon:

“In its deceptively simple way, Twitter has stumbled on a formula that a whole generation of recent web start-ups has been searching for: a way for people to connect with friends, express themselves and find information that stands a chance of one day becoming as popular as other mass online trends such as blogging and social networking.”

Read full story

If you are on Twitter, check out the Twitter feed of the author of Putting People First.

Bruce Sterling keynoted last week on “The Short but Glorious Life of Web 2.0 and What Comes Afterward” at Webstock in Wellington.

No video is (yet) available, but American journalist Annalee Newitz was there and she reports:

Sterling began his talk by poking fun at Web 2.0, calling it mostly a social network of investors and developers. He complained that it’s not an ideology or set of aesthetic tenants; it’s just a little network – “a little network for the network.” He talked about how Web 2.0 uses the Web as a “platform” for services, and then dismissed that as an “utter violation of common sense” based on the kind of thinking, translated into the financial realm, that caused the current global financial crisis, where mortgages are aggregated together and turned into a kind of Ponzi scheme platform.

Sterling acknowledged that of course Web 2.0 is not the same thing as the financial system, “but that frail and problematic system was what funded Web 2.0. After all, Web 2.0 is supposed to be business.”

Read full story

Other local bloggers like Ben Kepes and Daniel Nations also wrote on Sterling’s talk but seemed not to have liked what they heard.

UPDATE:
Here is the transcript of the talk.

The launch this Sunday of a Putting People First group on Facebook has been quite a success: nearly 250 members in just a couple of days. If you haven’t yet joined, do so now, as we hope it will become a rich networking tool, where you can share news, post events and check job announcements (and more).

Two other Facebook groups could be of interest too: the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea group is for alumni in the broad sense of the word of the meanwhile defunct Interaction Design Institute Ivrea; and KashKlash provides you with insight, background and provoking ideas on the future of value exchange (and while you are at it, also visit KashKlash.net and fill out the questionnaire).

As an experiment, we created two new Facebook groups today:

Interaction Design Institute Ivrea
This group is open to all who ever worked, studied, consulted or visited Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and liked what happened there. It complements an existing and popular email list.

Putting People First
This new Facebook platform for Putting People First readers grew out of the need some of you sometimes feel to post things quickly and share it within our professional community. This new Putting People First space is yours. Use it to share, to announce, to post, to plug.

Let me know on Facebook itself if this is something that you find useful.

Podcamp Barcelona’s Chris Pinchen interviewed Nokia’s Adam Greenfield at Visualizar ’08 (Madrid, Spain) the day after the US elections.

Their conversation ranged widely over subjects including corporate Situationism, fear of ubicomp, the technological disparity between everyday life in the US and that in other parts of the world, and the odd and occasionally uncomfortable freedoms afforded anyone living in a culture to which they are not native.

Listen to interview: part 1 | part 2

(via Adam Greenfield)

Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher on the impact of information technology in developing nations, reports on his blog on a recent panel discussion, organised by the Open Society Institute, on new media in authoritarian societies.

The discussion started from the premise that our understanding of the effects of online media on society “are largely based on research in open societies, especially in the U.S. But there’s lots less work on the effects of new media in other parts of the world, especially in closed societies, and much of the work that’s done is incomplete and sometimes inaccurate.”

Aside from Zuckerman himself, panels included John Kelly, founder of Morningside Analytics, who talked about the emerging networked public sphere and presented his maps of online social networks in Iran, Egypt, Russia, and China; Evgeny Morozov, who is writing a book on the Internet in authoritarian countries; and Porochista Khakpour, an Iranian-American writer who discussed how the Iranian diaspora uses the Internet..

Read full story

(via Worldchanging)

“How can you rob a bank in a world without money?” wonders science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, one of the collaborators of the new foresight project KashKlash. 

KashKlash is a lively platform where you can debate future scenarios for economic and cultural exchange. Beyond today’s financial turmoil, what new systems might appear? Global/local, tangible/intangible, digital/physical? On the KashKlash site, you can explore potential worlds where traditional financial transactions have disappeared, blended, or mutated into unexpected forms. Understand the near future, and help shape it!

Imagine yourself deprived of all of today’s conventional financial resources. Maybe you’re a refugee or stateless — or maybe it’s the systems themselves that have gone astray. Yet you still have your laptop, the Internet, and a broadband mobile connection. What would you do to create a new informal economy that would help you get by? What would you live on? E-barter? Rationing? Gadgets? Google juice? Cellphone minutes? Imagine a whole world approaching that condition. Which of today’s major power-players would win and lose, thrive or fail? What strange new roles would tomorrow’s technology fill?

Besides Bruce Sterling, the initial collaborators are Régine Debatty (of we-make-money-not-art), Nicolas Nova (LIFT) and Joshua Klein (author and hacker), who have been collaborating on initiating the discussion.

KashKlash is now opening up to you. You can join and follow the debate of our experts or contribute yourself by leaving a comment on the different matters or fill out our KashKlash questionnaire.

This public domain project is conceived and led by Heather Moore of Vodafone’s Global User Experience Team and run by Experientia, an international forward-looking user experience design company based in Turin, Italy.

Check the project description for more info.

Teemu Arina, who will speak at the upcoming Mobile Monday event in Amsterdam, has put a lengthy essay on his blog on the topic “how mobile is changing our society.”

“I have a feeling that the question we pose today is wrong. It’s not about mobile anymore. For some people, mobile means the devices that we carry around as we move, usually hooked up to a cellular network. The truth is, the activities we go through online with computers and what we do with our “mobiles” cannot be seen as separate anymore. This convergence means our language needs to change or our culture will never understand its future.

As ordinary physical items enter the same network, it’s not going to be about virtual or physical activities anymore. Both will be different faces of the same coin. It’s not going to be about context or not. Context will be the primary component of everything. The primary device will no longer be a “mobile”, but more like something that interacts with the network in a highly contextual way. Ideas, people and physical objects will be part of the same network in a very literal sense.”

Read full story

(via Smart Mobs)

Mobile Revolutions is a great blog about mobile phones, youth and social change by Lisa Campbell, that I discovered via Mobile Active. What’s more, she has actually taken the time to write a lengthy, seriously researched and in-depth paper to dwell on the subjects that are dear to her (and important to us).

“In this paper I outline the transformative power of new media technologies in Latin American contexts as tools for social change, comparing examples of youth digital activism from both Costa Rican and Panamanian contexts. Focusing on two types of Social Media, both Social Networks and Mobile Communication are examined as tools for Central American youth activists. In my conclusion I summarize the effects of national media policies, the situation of the digital divide and its effect on media democracy. The powerful nature of Citizen Media illustrates how overcoming the digital divide can produce democratic access to the media and societies’ larger institutions for social change.”

You can read it in one go, or split out over four chapters:

• Global new media hegemonies: Latin American youth and social change
• Social networks and youth in Central America
• Mobile warriors: Costa Rican youth, mobile phones and social change
• Telecommunications: hegemonic landscapes for resistance

Just in case you don’t know, Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken also writes for Core77, the online design magazine. He takes a somewhat different angle there and post items on “Core” that do not really fit with the Putting People First themes.

His latest post is about a new Milan-conceived desktop concept (which actually is also quite relevant for Putting People First). Earlier posts can be accessed from this archive page (which still sports Core77′s old logo).

On Wednesday 2 July Nicolas Nova (LIFT lab) moderated a session at the World Congress of Architecture in Turin, Italy, entitled “From ubiquitous technology to human context – Technology applied to architecture and design: does it solve problems or create needs?”.

Speakers were Adam Greenfield (Head of Design Direction, Nokia), Jeffrey Huang (Director, Media and Design Laboratory, EPFL, Switzerland) and Younghee Jung (senior design manager, Nokia).

Videos: About ten minutes into the session, I realised that no provisions had been made by the organisers to videotape the presentations, so I started recording everything myself, from a small handheld Nokia N95. Obviously image quality is not so great but the sound is quite good. I uploaded everything on Google Video: Adam Greenfield, Jeffrey Huang and Younghee Jung.

Two apologies: first to Nicolas for not having taped his session too – as I said, I realised too late that the organisers were not doing it themselves – but luckily Nicolas has posted a summary and his slides on his own blog. The second apology goes to Younghee, whose presentation is only half recorded, because the N95 battery died.

The session unfortunately ended a bit in chaos. As it had started late, it also ran a bit over time and people from the next session started filling up the seminar room and at one point hackled the last speaker – Younghee Jung – to finish things up. A fragile Younghee – during her talk she shared a personal event with the audience that was very close to her emotionally – suddenly had to summarise 30 slides in 2 minutes and this is luckily not on video. Perhaps she can send us her presentation still.

Richard Anderson reports on a discussion session that Elizabeth Churchill and Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken participated in, held at the recent CHI conference in Florence, Italy, that dealt with the role of interactions magazine in bridging communities – “something essential for “user experience” to play the role it should be playing in business”.

“Jon Kolko facilitated an important discussion between Elizabeth and special guest Mark Vanderbeeken about the concept of open access to intellectual content and its relevance to interactions magazine. (Sorry that Mark’s head is largely obscured by Elizabeth’s in the nearby photo.) One might argue that open — i.e., free — online access to interactions magazine content would in and of itself help to bridge the communities for which interactions magazine is of relevance. However… (Portions of and extensions to the CHI 2008 discussion will appear in Elizabeth’s column and in “interactions cafe” in the September+October issue; both of those articles will be made available via the interactions website to all, facilitating everyone’s opportunity to respond and share his or her perspective.)”

Read full story (with SlideShare presentation)

A few weeks ago I attended the CHI conference in Florence, Italy.

I was only there for a day and a half, and this being my first CHI conference, I am not in a position to give it a solid review.

One thing that stands out of course is that it has a strong academic angle, which can make some of the presentations and discussions quite irrelevant for practitioners such as me. On the other, there was a lot of emphasis on the term “user experience”, which came back in titles, abstracts, presentations and papers.

Combing through the (Mac unfriendly) conference DVD, I found quite a few treasures, and I selected 40 papers out of a total of 556, that I will be presenting in ten separate posts, under the headings: emerging markets, mobile banking, mobility, product design, security, social applications, social context, strategic issues, sustainability, and usability.

The conference is not set up in order to help you meet new people, and this is a real pity. You just tend to meet those you know already, or those whose presentations you attended. (Unless you are lucky enough to be a speaker of a well attended session, so everyone else knows you.)

During CHI, I conducted interviews with Bill Buxton (Microsoft), Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo!) and Mike Kuniavsky (ThingM), on which I will report in the coming weeks. Also in the coming weeks I will publish reviews of the books: Sketching the User Experience by Bill Buxton and Keeping Found Things Found by William Jones.

Because of this blog, and in particular a post of praise, I was part of a panel (others were Elizabeth Churchill, Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko) on the relaunched Interactions Magazine, now under the inspiring and volunteer (!) leadership of the latter two. Check out the magazine!

Here is my selection on papers related to social applications presented at CHI 2008.

(Papers are linked to their pdf downloads, if available.)

Ambient social tv: drawing people into a shared experience [abstract]
Authors: Gunnar Harboe, Crysta J. Metcalf, Frank Bentley, Joe Tullio, Noel Massey and Guy Romano (Motorola Labs)
Abstract: We examine how ambient displays can augment social television. Social TV 2 is an interactive television solution that incorporates two ambient displays to convey to participants an aggregate view of their friends’ current TV-watching status. Social TV 2 also allows users to see which television shows friends and family are watching and send lightweight messages from within the TV-viewing experience. Through a two-week field study we found the ambient displays to be an integral part of the experience. We present the results of our field study with a discussion of the implications for future social systems in the home.

Results from deploying a participation incentive mechanism within the enterprise [abstract]
Authors: Rosta Farzan (University of Pittsburgh), Joan M. DiMicco (IBM, Cambridge), David R. Millen (IBM, Cambridge), Casey Dugan (IBM, Cambridge), Werner Geyer (IBM, Cambridge) and Elizabeth A. Brownholtz (IBM, Cambridge)
Abstract: Success and sustainability of social networking sites is highly dependent on user participation. To encourage contribution to an opt-in social networking site designed for employees, we have designed and implemented a feature that rewards contribution with points. In our evaluation of the impact of the system, we found that employees are initially motivated to add more content to the site. This paper presents the analysis and design of the point system, the results of our experiment, and our insights regarding future directions derived from our post-experiment user interviews.

Exploring the role of the reader in the activity of blogging [abstract]
Authors: Eric Baumer, Mark Sueyoshi and Bill Tomlinson (UC Irvine)
Abstract: Within the last decade, blogs have become an important element of popular culture, mass media, and the daily lives of countless Internet users. Despite the medium’s interactive nature, most research on blogs focuses on either the blog itself or the blogger, rarely if at all focusing on the reader’s impact. In order to gain a better understanding of the social practice of blogging, we must take into account the role, contributions, and significance of the reader. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of blog readers, including common blog reading practices, some of the dimensions along which reading practices vary, relationships between identity presentation and perception, the interpretation of temporality, and the ways in which readers feel that they are a part of the blogs they read. It also describes similarities to, and discrepancies with, previous work, and suggests a number of directions and implications for future work on blogging.

The network in the garden: an empirical analysis of social media in rural life [abstract]
Authors: Eric Gilbert, Karrie Karahalios and Christian Sandvig (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Abstract: History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet, we know little about how rural communities use modern technologies, so we lack knowledge on how to design for them. To address this gap, our empirical paper investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. Using a dataset collected from a broadly popular social network site, we analyze users’ profiles, 340,000 online friendships and 200,000 interpersonal messages. Using social capital theory, we predict differences between rural and urban users and find strong evidence supporting our hypotheses. Namely, rural people articulate far fewer friends online, and those friends live much closer to home. Our results also indicate that the groups have substantially different gender distributions and use privacy features differently. We conclude by discussing design implications drawn from our findings; most importantly, designers should reconsider the binary friend-or-not model to allow for incremental trust-building.

Healthcare in everyday life: designing healthcare services for daily life [abstract]
Authors: Stinne Aaløkke Ballegaard, Thomas Riisgaard Hansen and Morten Kyng (University of Aarhus)
Abstract: Today the design of most healthcare technology is driven by the considerations of healthcare professionals and technology companies. This has several benefits, but we argue that there is a need for a supplementary design approach on the basis the citizen and his or her everyday life. An approach where the main focus is to develop healthcare technology that fits the routines of daily life and thus allows the citizens to continue with the activities they like and have grown used to — also with an aging body or when managing a chronic condition. Thus, with this approach it is not just a matter of fixing a health condition, more importantly is the matter of sustaining everyday life as a whole. This argument is a result from our work — using participatory design methods — on the development of supportive healthcare technology for elderly people and for diabetic, pregnant women.

International ethnographic observation of social networking sites [abstract]
Authors: Christopher N. Chapman (Microsoft Corporation) and Michal Lahav (Sakson & Taylor Consulting)
Abstract: Current research on social networking largely covers US providers. To investigate broader trends, we examine cross-cultural differences in the usage patterns of social networking services with observation and ethnographic interviews in multiple cultures. This appears to be the first systematic investigation of social networking behavior across multiple cultures. We report here on the first four locations with observation and interviews of 36 respondents, 8-10 in each of the US, France, China, and South Korea. The results show three dimensions of cultural difference for typical social networking behaviors: the users’ goals, typical pattern of self expression, and common interaction behaviors. These differences exemplify a developmental path of interest in social networking and the gradual integration of social networking behavior into more general communications behaviors. Future work in other cultures and with additional methods will evaluate the hypotheses presented here.

Stowe Boyd, an internationally recognised authority on social applications and their impact on business, media, and society, published today an interesting reflection on the fact that conversation online has moved away from the blogs that once seemed the nexus:

“Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is is most social.

Personally, I don’t think the genie can be put back in the bottle. Twitter et al are simply more compelling a conversational medium than blog comments. While the close relationship of blog posts and their associated comments may seem like a positive attribute, it is actually very limiting and closed. In general, people have to blunder into an interesting comment thread by moving to the post, opening the link to the comments, and manually scrolling down through them. A lot of time and effort, all based around the metaphor of wandering around in the web of pages. It’s like a trip to the library.

Twitter and other similar apps are based on the web of flow: information of interest comes to us, not the other way around. And it flows through people, through relationships: it’s not a bunch of clicks on URLs, scrolling, and so on. It’s a move away from hunting and gathering and into relationship agriculture: information grows in our flow applications instead of us spending time hunting it down.” [...]

Today’s blog technologies were not designed with flow in mind: they are based on Web 1.0 principles, and although they have helped to engender a revolution in sociality and flow, they don’t support it very well.

Read full story

Jason Kaneshiro posted a similar reflection recently.

(via Bruce Sterling)

But — just perhaps — the situation is not so clear-cut: BBC News launched a new home page today and the announcement article already has 533 comments, that is five hundred and thirty three (and it’s still increasing).

The people from the German consultancy Trendbüro published a short interview with Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken on the topic of identity.

It is part of their strategy to publicise their forthcoming Trend Day, which has the theme: “Identity Management – Recognition replaces attention”.

Mark is in very good company: they have also published interviews with Richard Florida, Willem Velthoven of Mediamatic, Hartmut Esslinger of frog design, and Dick Hardt of identity 2.0.

Read interview

Today Torino World Design Capital published an interview Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken recently conducted with Bruce Sterling. This time not about spimes, ubiquitous computing or digital fabrication, but about his experience with the city where he lived for the last six months.

Bruce likes Torino and in this interview he gives quite a few reasons why. He goes into much detail about why “Turin is really a 21st Century” and how “it has somehow managed to deal with problems that many, many other cities, regions, cultures and nations have not yet faced up to.”

“Turin,” he says, “is one of those places that appeal to my temperament. If I were an Italian person, I would likely have been a Turinese.”

He also shares with us a content of a new story he has been writing:

“Yes, it’s a fantasy story set in Turin. The protagonist is a FIAT executive, but he’s also a necromancer. The story is set in an esoteric Turin where all the magical things that are said about Turin by New Agers are factually true.

There’s a chunk of the New Cross here and the Holy Grail is here. The Shroud of Turin really is drenched in the blood of Jesus Christ himself; there are all these ley-lines and axes of mystical power. Our hero who is an R&D investment guy at FIAT, is called into hell by Gianni Agnelli, who is dead, yet still upset about urban development issues in Torino. So he calls this former chairman down to hell to have a board meeting.

My hero, the necromancer, is accompanied by his spiritual advisor, an Egyptian mummy from the Museo Egizio whom he raised from the dead. This mummy accompanies him now and gives him good advice. It’s like the “Lone Ranger and Tonto” thing – him and his mummy. It’s a comical story, exaggerated and satirical, a fable about Turin and its issues. I could never have written it without being here.”

Bruce is now in the last days of preparation of the Share Festival that he has been curating. Come and see it if you can.

The interview is suffering a bit from poor layout and it is not so easy to see what my questions are, for instance. All the links have also magically disappeared.

Read interview

As most of you know, Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken also writes for Core77.

Here is the list of recently posted contributions, meanwhile 70 items long.

Neuroanthropology is a collaborative weblog created to encourage exchanges among anthropology, philosophy, social theory, and the brain sciences.

Here is the blog statement:

“Neuroanthropology is a collaborative weblog headquartered in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University. We hope that it will bring together scholars from around the world interested in the implications of new findings in the brain sciences for social, cultural, and psychological theory in anthropology.

In general, cultural anthropology has not kept abreast of new research in the neurosciences so that our theory of culture does not sufficiently take into account what we now know about the brain. A more open exchange is likely to produce a cultural anthropology that is not only more scientifically plausible, but also much more scientifically engaged with those interested in cultural variation (although they might not call it that) in a host of fields. We may find new evidence to work with on cultural theory, but we may also find new collaborators and new audiences, as long as we learn to speak their languages.

‘Neuroanthropology‘ is a broad term, intended to embrace all dimensions of human neural activity, including emotion, perception, cognitive, motor control, skill acquisition, and a range of other issues. Unlike previous ways of doing psychological or cognitive anthropology, it remains open and heterogeneous, recognizing that not all brain systems function in the same way, so culture will not take ahold of them in identical fashion. Although we believe that human neural structure is biological and the product of evolution, we also recognize that the development processes shaping each individual include a host of other forces as well, so that we cannot privilege any single cause over all others.”

The EPIC 2007 conference on ethnographic praxis in industry has a blog, and it’s not what you think.

The format is that of a newspaper or magazine advice column where readers can ask questions to a specialist. Each week the “doctor” will be selecting one of those nagging questions to ponder.

The doctor this time is Tony Salvador, director of research for the Emerging Markets Platforms Group (EMPG) within Intel Corporation. Previously, he was a Research Scientist and co-founder of Intel’s People & Practices Group.

UXnet, the user experience network, launched its new website this week, with some major improvements.

UXnet is a platform organisation that provides tools and resources for the user experience community. It works with a worldwide network of local ambassadors.

The new site, which has been more than a year in the making and now runs on WordPress, makes it far easier for the local ambassadors to profile the UX activities and landscape in their local areas.

Major attention has been put into the events calendar, which is now key the feature of the site: it has become a fledgling application that brings in events from all user experience disciplines and locales around the world.

Selected posts from the Putting People First blog are also — automatically — included in the UXnet news. News items from other sources will be included later on as well.

Even though as a board member of UXnet, I have been somewhat involved in this redesign, the site is really based on the hard work of Keith Instone, who squeezed much of the relaunch into his tight schedule. As Lou Rosenfeld wrote (and I totally agree with): “Keith is an incredible team player and hard worker who, in his positive and low-key way, successfully collaborates with a diverse collection of backgrounds and egos. Keith really is the model of what a user experience professional should be. So it’s not surprising that UXnet has named its volunteer award after him. Thank you, Keith!”

UXnet is currently in the process of expanding its vision and charter, and the website is designed to scale and enhance the organisation’s future activities.

So — and I am once again quoting Lou Rosenfeld here — if you’ve had a “wait-and-see” attitude about UXnet, this is a good time to take another look. And if you’re interested in participating as an “ambassador” for your area, we want you.

All regularly updated Experientia feeds:

English:
- Putting People First
- Experientia news
- E-Democracy

Italian:
- Putting People First
- Experientia news

The mobile platform is currently undergoing somewhat of a revolution in the developing world — and so are people’s lives — with Africa now more advanced than the rest of the world in terms of mobile banking. The user experience challenges are only beginning to be addressed.

If you want to keep abreast on developments in this field, here is a crop of news stories from just this last week:

A recent special report in Business Week on how basic cell phones are sparking economic hope and growth in emerging — and even non-emerging — nations. The report takes a particular look at the micro- and macro-economic impacts of this development, and what it means for local entrepreneurs and major mobile operators. It also features an online extra on the use of mobile phones by artisans and tradespeople in rural India, a summary graphic and a slideshow;

A Reuters story on the beeping boom in Africa, what the social practices are, and how that is pushing mobile operators to innovate their services;

A post on the Vodafone R&D Betavine blog on the Mukuru Kash service that like Paypal will store funds that you pay to them online and then set up a voucher which can be redeemed at the petrol station for fuel;

“Next: bridging the digital divide“, a recent post by Niti Bhan, where she puts developments in the bigger picture of bridging the digital divide between the digital haves and have nots, and wonders what will happen if all these people in the developing world can also start accessing the internet from their mobile devices;

In a recent post on mobile banking, Barbara Ballard of Little Springs Design guides us to three blogs on the topic: Mobile Banking (news and analysis from Brandon McGee, a VP in charge of mobile banking), Mobile Money & Banking, and Mobile Banking, the blog of Hannes van Rensburg, CEO of a South African mobile banking provider Fundamo.

Note by the way that all the user research work by Jan Chipchase and others seems to have paid off: Nokia dominates the mobile handset landscape in India with an astonishing 74% market share.

Jaiku co-founder and former Nokia ethnographer Jyri Engeström (bio | Jaiku site) recently gave a presentation on the future of social media, entitled “Microblogging: Tiny social objects” at Reboot 9.0 and at Mobile Monday Amsterdam.

Why do people like microblogging? Because most people can’t write several blog posts per day/week but like to keep conversations alive around topics and they like to stay connected with each other in a simple and easy way (accessible through different interfaces and/or devices), including the mobile phone obviously.

- Presentation slides
- Presentation video (49:40)

Social Technographics
Mapping Participation In Activities Forms The Foundation Of A Social Strategy
by Charlene Li
with Josh Bernoff, Remy Fiorentino, Sarah Glass

Forrester just released a new report, titled “Social Technographics“.

Executive summary
Many companies approach social computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed – a blog here, a podcast there – to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. Forrester categorizes social computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term “Social Technographics” to describe analyzing a population according to its participation in these levels. Brands, Web sites, and any other company pursuing social technologies should analyze their customers’ Social Technographics first, and then create a social strategy based on that profile.

Author Charlene Li provides us with some more insight into the report:

“We group consumers into six different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation.

For example, 13% of US online adult consumers are “Creators” meaning that they have posted to a blog, updated a Web page, or uploaded video they created within the last month. [...]

The value of Social Technographics comes when it’s used by companies to create their social strategies. For example, in the report we look at how Social Technographics profiles differ by primary life motivation, site usage, and even PC ownership.

The report also lays out how companies can create strategies using Social Technographics. For example, I’ve used the “participation ladder” to help figure out which social strategies to deploy first – and also how to encourage users to “climb up”, so to speak, from being Spectators to becoming more engaged.”

- Read full story
- Related blog post (by Ross Mayfield)

We are very pleased to announce that we have created an Italian version of Putting People First.
Siamo molto lieti di annunciare la realizzazione di una versione italiana di Putting People First.

It contains summaries of all the articles of the English version of the professional blog and goes back nearly 8 months – to September 2006. The blog, which contains about 450 posts in all, is in essence identical to the English one (just a bit shorter) and features all the functionalities that the English version has.
Questa contiene i riassunti di tutti gli articoli contenuti nella versione inglese del blog professionale relativamente agli ultimi 8 mesi, da settembre 2006. Il blog, contenente circa 450 post, è sostanzialmente identico a quello inglese (solo un po’ più sintetico) e le stesse funzionalità disponibili nella versione .

The English site does now no longer include weekly Italian summaries and older summaries have been removed from the site so that they will – surely to the delight of many – no longer show up in search results.
Il sito inglese, quindi, non conterrà più le sintesi settimanali in italiano, e le sintesi datate sono state rimosse dal sito, per cui non saranno più ricercabili – sicuramente per la felicità di molti – tramite la funzione di ricerca.

People who have subscribed to the Italian summaries via rss or email, do not have to change anything. They will now get individual Italian article feeds or article emails instead of the weekly summaries.
Le persone che avessero sottoscritto le sintesi italiane via rss o email, non devono apportare alcuna modifica. Adesso loro riceveranno i feed dei singoli articoli in italiano o email degli articoli, anzichè la sintesi settimanale.

Web 2.0, a catchphrase for the latest generation of Web sites where users contribute their own text, pictures and video content, is far less participatory than commonly assumed, a study showed on Tuesday.

A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google’s top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise.

Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found.

The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation’s couch potatoes — voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Tancer’s statistics show.

- Read full story (Reuters)
- Read related story (vnunet.com)

(via Bruce Nussbaum)

Liz Danzico has written a very interesting and somewhat counterintuitive piece for Adobe Design Center on user research how people are consuming news. She starts the article by featuring two people Paul and Rebecca who are news junkies, but not in the way you think, and goes on to underline how important it is to do this kind of research in context – at home, at work, or wherever people normally are.

Paul and Rebecca both characterized themselves as “heavy online news readers.” And although it’s true that they’re heavy consumers of news, their behavior reveals that they are not getting the majority of their news from newspaper websites, as this description might suggest. While Paul is using the Internet to set up his newsletters and alerts, he’s not really reading news online. Instead, he’s reading e-mail newsletters, which is typical of about 50% of Americans who have broadband at home. Rebecca, for all her diligence, is really gathering all her news and commentary offline, then supplementing it by scanning the headlines online, typical of about 24% of all online news readers. Neither one, then, really lived up to their characterization of how they use the news.

It’s no surprise that Paul and Rebecca can’t articulate what they actually do. People often say one thing, then demonstrate another. Rebecca and Paul are just two of twelve people that we’ve been spending time with for a design research project for a news and media company called Daylife. While the results will be used to inform the user experience of a website in the short-term, our larger goal is to understand how people are consuming news and information today. And the fact that people are unaware of the way they consume news is precisely the reason we wanted to conduct the study in the first place.

Liz Danzico is director of user experience at Daylife, a website that gathers, organizes, and analyzes news from around the world. She is also the senior development editor for Rosenfeld Media, a publishing house dedicated to user experience. Liz has served as director of experience strategy for AIGA, formed the information architecture team at Barnes & Noble.com, and managed the information architecture group at Razorfish, New York.

Read full story

Last Saturday (14 April), Carlo Ratti of MIT’s Senseable City Lab and Régine Debatty of we-make-money-not-art.com were featured in a six page article in Ventiquattro, the magazine of the highly regarded Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore (somewhat comparable to The Wall Street Journal).

Of course, this is delightful news. I have featured Carlo and Régine and their work several times on this blog and I know them both quite well. Each of them has a connection with Torino: Carlo who is originally from the city divides his life between Torino and Boston. Régine has lived in Torino for many years, and moved only recently to Berlin.

The article, with gorgeous photos, is really a double self-portrait featured in a section called “New lifestyles”. They each write about how they live their rather unique lives: Régine as a full-time blogger, and Carlo with a professional architecture studio in Torino and a research group and lecturing activities at MIT in Boston.

Download scan of article (pdf, 1.1 mb, 6 pages)

Some blogs that I have been following for a long time, and have sometimes written about, are now on the Webby award nominee list.

They are UX Magazine in the category Blog – Business; we-make-money-not-art in the category Blog – Culture/Personal; and WorldChanging in the category Magazine.

Voting begins today and ends on 27 April. Login here and vote.

McKinsey is out with a Global Survey that shows business execs love user-driven collaboration, especially peer-to-peer networking, web services, social networking, podcasts, wikis and RSS feeds. But execs do not like blogs very much.

“The rising popularity of user-driven online services, including MySpace, Wikipedia, and YouTube, has drawn attention to a group of technological developments known as Web 2.0. These technologies, which rely on user collaboration, include Web services, peer-to-peer networking, blogs, podcasts, and online social networks.

Respondents to a recent McKinsey survey show widespread but careful interest in this trend.1 Expressing satisfaction with their Internet investments so far, they say that Web 2.0 technologies are strategic and that they plan to increase these investments. But companies aren’t necessarily relying on the best-known Web 2.0 trends, such as blogs; instead, they place the greatest importance on technologies that enable automation and networking.”

According to Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week, companies are afraid of blogs

“Only 16% of the companies surveyed said they were investing in blogs, compared to 63% for web services, 28% for peer-to-peer networks, and 19% for social networks.

78% identified web services as the Web 2.0 technology/tool most important their their business.

McKinsey doesn’t try to analyze why execs aren’t investing in blogs as a Web 2.0 tool but I will venture to suggest that most managers are afraid of blogs. Very few blog themselves and when they do, it runs through the marketing or PR departments. Managers in general still worry about loss of control with blogs. Letting their employees and consumers into the conversation and allowing them their say frightens them.”

Read full story (Registration required)

Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken started blogging for Core77, the USA-based online design magazine.

Eventually he wants to bring a bit of an Italian angle to things, as he is also going to do quite some writing for Torino 2008 World Design Capital. An interview with the 32-year old Torino 2008 director will also soon be published on “Core”.

And more on social networking: after the professional email groups there are now the professional social networks.

Mobile Communication – the social implications of mobile communication is a social network for mobile society researchers. The new site is focused on the academic analysis of mobile communication in society.

Members create their personal chat group, share photos and videos, post in a forum and are related to one another on the basis of their institutional affiliation or scientific background.

The network, hosted on Ning (which by the way is very slow), was created by Richard Ling, a sociologist at Telenor’s research institute located near Oslo, Norway. It has currently 12 members.

What does this mean?
Are email groups things of the past? What is the real difference between email groups and these social networking sites, except that you can upload video and photos? Should Putting People First become a social networking site too? Or is it one already? Is there a need for a new social networking site?

(via Smart Mobs)

Brad Stone writes in the New York Times about companies that are helping large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online.

Next week Cisco Systems, a Silicon Valley heavyweight, plans to announce one of its most unusual deals: it is buying the technology assets of Tribe.net, a mostly forgotten social networking site, according to people close to the companies’ discussions.

It is a curious pairing. Cisco, with 38,000 employees, makes networking equipment for telecommunications providers and other big companies. Tribe.net, run by a company with eight employees, has been trampled by newer social sites like MySpace and Facebook.

But along with the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, the deal will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks.

They look at MySpace and Facebook, with their tens of millions of users, as walled-off destinations, similar to first-generation online services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. These big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.

The new social networking players, which include Cisco and a multitude of start-ups like Ning, the latest venture of the Netscape co-creator Marc Andreessen, say that social networks will soon be as ubiquitous as regular Web sites. They are aiming to create tools to let ordinary people, large companies and even presidential candidates create social Web sites tailored for their own customers, friends, fans and employees.

Read full story

KPMG has released a 36-page report on how digital media are affecting work, play and relationships across Europe, and in particular how Generation Y is interacting with that media.

The paper contains interviews with industry experts and a summary of consumer research, based on interviews with 3,000 people in Germany, Spain, United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the U.S.A in December 2006.

The document is not particularly innovative in the description of the technological and social changes taking place. More insightful is its analysis of the impact on business, although it positions KPMG a bit too much as the wise guide for companies trying to adapt to these changes.

Broadly, there have been four big developments in the online world in the past few years. The first is the decline in the cost of media distribution—thanks to digitisation and broadband—which has helped to make even relatively unloved content commercially viable. The second phenomenon [...] has been the rise of user-generated content perhaps better described as “participatory media”. [...] The third development is the rise of sharing. [...] The way in which information is organised is also changing – phenomenon number four. Instead of a traditional hierarchy of information by experts, i.e., a taxonomy, web users are increasingly categorising online content—web pages, photographs and links—for themselves. given rise to new businesses. [...]

With the costs of distribution tumbling, media companies should spend less time trying to find blockbusters, and more time trying to make it easy for consumers to find the stuff that interests them, however arcane. [...] Media companies [should also] incorporate user-generated content into their own offerings, [...] make offline content richer and more analytica, [...] and reduce the cost of traditional content generation.

Download report (pdf, 1 mb, 36 pages)

“The social networking craze has seen phone manufacturers, network operators and big internet names announce various tie-ins to give users access to their own content,” writes Spencer Kelly, presenter of the Click Online tv programme, on the BBC website.

“Blogging on the internet is different from blogging on the mobile,” said chief executive Paddy Holahan of Newbay, a company that provides mobile networks with servers and back-end support for picture and video uploads. “The mobile user is more likely to take a picture or a video and upload it, because he’s got a cameraphone in his hands. The internet blogger is more likely to type because he’s got a keyboard in his hand. [Therefore] mobile tends to be much more about your lifestyle; internet blogging tends to be much more about your opinions, politics, things like that.”

The virtual world Second Life currently seems to represent the cutting edge of the idea of Web 2.0, populated as it is by user-generated characters, buildings and businesses.

IBM’s private Second Life play area is a kind of “thought lab” where the company is trying out methods to combine Web 2.0 and mobile devices in a more homogenous way. IBM’s master inventor Zygmunt Lozinski explained his vision does not simply involve accessing Second Life from your phone – it involves using your mobile as a bridge between the virtual world and the real world.

Read full story

“The virtual (internet) network of people has always been a problem for [Indian] lawmakers,” reports Ritwik Donde in Infotech, an online technology news source of the India Times.

“One of the problem with internet has been that it is impossible to control or censor it. Internet or the world wide web never remains the same.

Thousands of pages are added to it every second. Hundreds of new sites pop up every second. Now, web’s new version, Web 2.0, driven by users, is creating a completely new set of problems for the Indian law makers. The challenge is that content, music and video is being generated by millions of users and put on the world wide web.

Earlier, the government could regulate content by pulling up publishers like portals, ISPs and other service providers. These large corporations would bend to the government’s will as they did not want to get on the wrong side of a government.

But now, lawmakers are in deep see, wondering how to control copyright infringement of an hindi movie hosted for free downloads. How to prevent a defamatory posting on a blog. How to prevent downloads of a video clip that violates somebody’s privacy.

Recently the Mumbai Police started a dialogue with portals such as YouTube.com and orkut.com on how to handle these situations.”

Read full story

“Innovation [in the news industry] is mainly coming from local papers (better able to harness user generated content) and by a new wave of web-only news sites that have replaced news editors and subeditors with the readers themselves, who vote to move stories up to the top of the page or consign them to oblivion,” writes Victor Keegan in The Guardian.

“You can try some of the leading ones such as Digg, NewsVine, Tailrank, NowPublic, Reddit and Technorati. [...]

I have been very impressed with the pace and quality of innovation of these sites except for one vital ingredient: usability. If you have to go through several stages of evaluation after each story there will be even less time to read the newspaper itself. Few of these sites – yet – are easy on the eye and until they look less like nerdy lists, they may find it difficult to make the jump to mass-market acceptability. [...]

The question is whether these new approaches will sweep all before them or, as the noises get more confusing on the web, people will migrate back to “trusted sources” such as the BBC and the Guardian (which is engaged in an each-way bet, expanding on the web while strengthening the paper as a trusted source). What will happen?”

Read full story

About 2,500 people read Putting People First every day, 1,500 of which via rss and e-mail.

But dear readers, I know very little about you. Who are you? What do you like about PPF and what not? What would you like to see changed? What would you like more of or less of? Feel free to share anything else.

Use the comments section (you need to register first) or drop me an email at info at experientia dot com.

I am particularly looking forward to get some feedback from those of you who have never been in touch with me yet.

Mark

As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.

“[...] the forest of arms waving cell-phone cameras at concerts, the MySpace pages blinking pink neon revelations, Xanga and Sconex and YouTube and Lastnightsparty.com and Flickr and Facebook and del.icio.us and Wikipedia and especially, the ordinary, endless stream of daily documentation that is built into the life of anyone growing up today. You can see the evidence everywhere, from the rural 15-year-old who records videos for thousands of subscribers to the NYU students texting come-ons from beneath the bar. Even 9-year-olds have their own site, Club Penguin, to play games and plan parties. The change has rippled through pretty much every act of growing up. Go through your first big breakup and you may need to change your status on Facebook from “In a relationship” to “Single.” Everyone will see it on your “feed,” including your ex, and that’s part of the point.

It’s been a long time since there was a true generation gap, perhaps 50 years—you have to go back to the early years of rock and roll, when old people still talked about “jungle rhythms.” Everything associated with that music and its greasy, shaggy culture felt baffling and divisive, from the crude slang to the dirty thoughts it was rumored to trigger in little girls. That musical divide has all but disappeared. But in the past ten years, a new set of values has sneaked in to take its place, erecting another barrier between young and old. And as it did in the fifties, the older generation has responded with a disgusted, dismissive squawk. It goes something like this:

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.“

The author, Emily Nussbaum, then goes on to describe the three main changes that define the younger generation:

• They think of themselves as having an audience
• They have archived their adolescence
• Their skin is thicker than yours

Read full story

(via the Design Directory newsletter of Core77 and Business Week)

Bruno Giussani (interview) reports on a LIFT conference panel on "dealing with technological overload", that included Stefana Broadbent, head of the User Adoption Lab at Swisscom , Fred Mast, professor of cognitive psychology at the university of Lausanne, and Nada Kakabadse, professor at Northampton Business School; moderated by Matthias Luefkens (interview), media manager at the World Economic Forum.

Broadbent contributes some interesting reflections:

“I’m seeing much more the arrival of the private into the workplace than the workplace into the private sphere. What we are seeing through empirical research is that people are increasingly using IM, e-mail and SMS to keep in touch with their group/family/friends/community, and it’s becoming an expectation to be able to keep our social network alive, and be plugged into it, over work time.”

Giussani comments that, paradoxically, Broadbent is observing and measuring this the country – Switzerland – where the roots of protestant work ethic are.

“She asks who in the room checks private e-mail at work, and all hands go up (although it’s not clear where the border of private and public is). People are happy to be able to continue to bring their social life/network along wherever they go. There is something in the type of channels people are using.

The most fascinating discovery I [i.e. Bruno Giussani] have made this year: a reduction of voice and increase in written channels (SMS, IM, e-mail, tagging, blogging). Everybody expected that with Skype people would be speaking for hours a day, but that’s not happening. It’s more engaging, you have to commit more, you can’t multitask – while requires less commitment, and you can multitask.

I ask Stefana whether rather than to tech the addiction is maybe to social relations: to friends and family and colleagues and where they are and what they do and what they think. In the research we do, she answers, we ask people to keep a diary of whom they communicate with and how. People that are not heavily online, their average number of contact is about 20. People that are online, it goes to 70 upwards. The difference is obviously that the cost of maintaining contacts decreases. 20 is what you can handle with a one-to-one channel; as soon as you add asynchronous channels, we can handle more.

How do we unplug, asks the moderator? Stefana: that’s not a theme. If I unplug, I lose my social intelligence. We looked at small companies, and the availability and reachability of their employees. There was a radical difference between startups and more established companies. The people in the latter can switch the phone off, or answer tomorrow; the former felt they had to be reachable at all time.”

Read full story

Leisa Reichelt (an Australian user experience consultant based in the UK) has published two audio interviews with Bill Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981), founder of the design firm IDEO, and author of the book “Designing Interactions“.

In part one of the interview (10:01), Moggridge talks about the process he went through to design/write the book (yes, there was a prototype involved!) as well as some thoughts on what factors are common where good interaction design is created.

In the second part (05:48), Moggridge talks about designing games and what interactions can learn from games design.

Part three (10:28) finally, deals with the ingredients of successful design teams – who is in them, how do they work together, where do they work, etc.

(via Usability in the News)

Microsoft has hired William Tschumy as its second user experience “evangelist”, with the aim of supporting Chris Bernard “to communicate Microsoft’s position on the importance of user experience in software design”.

Bernard started his Microsoft evangelising in June 2006 on the TypePad blog Design Thinking Digest.

Tschumy, who was director of experience strategy at Scient, lead information architect at Walmart.com and director of experience at Flock, has written a nice short piece on why he has taken on that role.

Read full story

Universities and employers concerned with the state of engineering education should steal a page from popular Internet culture, visionary John Seely Brown said at a conference Friday, writes Martin LaMonica on CNET News.com.

A consultant and former chief scientist at Palo Alto Research Center, Seely Brown spoke at a conference on technology and education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The conference was organized to mark the end next year of an eight-year partnership between Microsoft and MIT [article] to explore the use of technology in learning.

Seely Brown argued that education is going through a large-scale transformation toward a more participatory form of learning.

Rather than treat pedagogy as the transfer of knowledge from teachers who are experts to students who are receptacles, educators should consider more hands-on and informal types of learning. These methods are closer to an apprenticeship, a farther-reaching, more multilayered approach than traditional formal education, he said.

In particular, he praised situations where students who are passionate about specific topics study in groups and participate in online communities.

“We are learning in and through our interactions with others while doing real things,” Seely Brown said. “I’m not saying that knowledge is socially constructed, but our understanding of that knowledge is socially constructed.” [...]

The evolution of the Internet can facilitate this approach, he said. Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis and blogs, make information sharing and content creation easier. [...]

The Internet is also helping drive a transformation from a mass media model–where information is delivered from experts to consumers–to a situation that allows people to create content online, often by using existing content, he said.

Read full story

“User experience is an overloaded term,” says Microsoft ‘Evangelist’ Jon Udell (who is the successor to Robert Scoble).

“I propose that we unpack it into (at least) two separate concepts. One is the basis of the “aha” moment. For now I’ll call it the use experience. [...]

I’ll reserve the term user experience for something else: the tax we pay in order to enjoy the use experience. This tax is not the basis of an “aha” moment. It’s expressed in terms of the devices, cables, batteries, applications, menus, dialog boxes, and — last but not least — the concepts we must grapple with in order to reliably reproduce the use experience. A great user experience makes all this crap relatively less awkward, confusing, and annoying. A lousy user experience makes it relatively more so. But the point is that it’s all crap! It’s the tax we pay to enjoy the use experience, and we want to pay as little of it as we can get away with.

How do you engineer a great use experience, as opposed to a great user experience? Part of the answer is deep personalization.”

Read full post

“IBM is planning to introduce a set of social software tools Monday that will bring the kind of blogging, idea-sharing and war-story-swapping typically associated with sites like MySpace to the corporate world,” writes Laurie J. Flynn in the International Herald Tribune.

“Called Lotus Connections, the new software, which should be available to companies this year, will let employees set up virtual worlds in which they can meet like-minded colleagues within the company and exchange ideas with them, all in the name of improving productivity.”

“The idea, said the IBM vice president for social software, Jeff Schick, is to ‘unlock the latent expertise in an organization’.” [...]

“Lotus Connections has five components — activities, communities, dogear, profiles and blogs — aimed at helping experts within a company connect and build new relationships based on their individual needs.

The profiles component, for example, lets users search for people by name, expertise or keyword. The program then not only provides contact information and reporting structure details, but also lists blogs, communities, activities and bookmarks associated with the person.

Inside IBM, employees have been using a prototype of the profiles feature for the past few years, and 450,000 profiles of IBM employees are stored there.

IBM Research, the company’s laboratory arm, has long had an interest in social networking, with several projects under way within Second Life, for example, the virtual world that allows people to communicate in a three-dimensional universe.”

- Read full story
- Somewhat longer article in Reuters

UPDATE:
IBM itself seems to have already changed the name of this new tool. The press release calls it Lotus Quickr rather than Lotus Connections.