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

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

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 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 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.

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

Italian:
- Putting People First
- Experientia news

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.

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)

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)

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.

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)

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

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)

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.

“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)

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”.

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)

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

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)

“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