Making ConnectionsOccasional thoughts on knowledge, community, collaboration, usability and the webEmerging uses of technology- May 28, 2003 Bob Baxley writing at Boxes and Arrows about his impressions of the recent ETCON: "My biggest takeaway from the second annual O&146;Reilly Emerging Technology Conference was that emerging technology is not nearly as interesting as the emerging uses of technology. What I heard had a lot more to do with politics, power, individual choice, and collective action than it did with PHP, CSS, XML, or XHTML. "Most interesting for us as a community of designers and user advocates was the obvious subtext.http://radio.weblogs.com/0118812/2003/05/28.html#a81 Weblogs and knowledge management- May 27, 2003 Predictably good commentary from Jim McGee taking a second look at weblogs and knowledge management, summarising and drawing together a number of strands from recent blog posts. His closing comments are worth dwelling on. Talking about a post by Gary Murphy at TeledyN, he says: "Murphy provides the critical link here between weblogs and organizational need. It is the realization that KM in organizational settings is primarily a social phenomenon and not a technology one. Most prior efforts to..http://radio.weblogs.com/0118812/2003/05/27.html#a80 Design consistency and user tasks- May 21, 2003 Jared Spool writes about The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch, promoting continuous design improvements over the big-bang all-or-nothing redesign of a site. Towards the end of the article he talks about how task success is key for users - and how it influences users' perception of the design: "Our findings show that consistency in the design plays second fiddle to completing the task. When users are complaining about the consistency of a site, we've found that it is often because they are...http://radio.weblogs.com/0118812/2003/05/21.html#a78 New toy- May 17, 2003 I finally bought a Mac this week, primarily as a test platform for web apps. It's a G4 iMac - one of the weird hemispherical ones with a flat screen on a pivot. And yes, the choice of model was at least partly influenced by the fact that it looks more fun on my desk than all the grey and beige Windows and Linux boxes stacked underneath. It's about ten years since I had a Mac and so far I'm impressed. I plugged it into my primarily Windows network and it found its way out onto the Net without...http://radio.weblogs.com/0118812/2003/05/17.html#a77 What is social software and why now- May 17, 2003 An interesting article by Stowe Boyd on social software, talking about what it is, what's the big deal and why now. Trying to answer the question of what social software is, he suggests three premises: Support for conversational interaction between individuals or groups Support for social feedback Support for social networks And he concludes: "Social software allows us to create new social groupings and then new sorts of social conventions arise. Kenneth Boulding, the economist, humanist...http://radio.weblogs.com/0118812/2003/05/17.html#a76 (Untitled)- May 16, 2003 David Reed writes that security doesn't create trust - that building security into a system is more likely to foster mistrust: "I think there may indeed be technological mechanisms that promote trust. But don't try to tell me that security technology creates trust. It can't. At best it's neutral, and upon reflection, most times it increases mistrust and fear." His footnote about technological mechanisms that promote trust says: "Humans gain trust by interacting and 'getting to know'...http://radio.weblogs.com/0118812/2003/05/16.html#a75 |