Knowledge Management and Weblogs and Wikis and....

In the BBC Radio 4 "NiceWork" (29/03/05 edition) program, some discussion about Weblogs, Wikis, Emails, chatting in the canteen (the "watercooler") and knowledge management in the enterprise.

Real Audio (.ram) stream available in the program's webpage or this week in:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/nicework/ram/nicework_current.ram

The beginning of the program is dedicated to WiFi in the workplace. The discussion about Weblogs and all the rest starts around min 22:30.

Syndicated Collaborative Event Calendars

Source: evdb.com

One more to join upcoming.org. The idea is to share event calendars and syndicate via RSS or ICAL the content. The new web social netwroking app is edvg.org.

Via John Udells blog

Flashy Flash

Source: useit.com

Back in 2000, UseIt published in their AlertBox site a controversial article titled “Flash: 99% Bad” referring the use and abuse of Flash applets embedded in web pages and the reasons why it was (at the time) a bad idea.

Fast forward 5 years and the situation is pretty much the same. Flash is a brilliant tool, however not for everything.

Banking, the Social Way

Source: zopa.com

The internet enables people and business to connect in different ways. One of the latest one is to enable a network of people with some spare cash, to lend it to creditworthy people, all via the internet. There is a middle man (Zopa.com) that manages the whole thing and takes 1% cut. As this BBC news article puts it, is like an “eBay model” but for money.

Disclaimer: I am not related to Zopa in any way and I would suggest you to seek proper financial advice before using such services. There is already some advice related to Zopa here.

Wireframes

Source: greenonions.com

Probably, the first thing to take shape in an online/interactive project and that everyone involved can understand is the humble Wireframe Schematics of the interface. Wireframes (my “definition”) are simple representations of how an interface might look like in terms of the visual structure (such as the information architecture) and its functionality with basic interaction flow after integrating other aspects such as market and user research.

However, there is not a strict definition between the two and a wireframe can have various degrees of granularity, and even include aspects of the final design.

They are very useful used as a communication tool for the different stakeholders involved in the project as the simple visual language allows everyone to understand each other’s perspective (designers/programmers/clients/users/etc...) and contribute towards the goal.

Via the UXCentric Blog, I found Representing Data in Wireframes, a poster made by Dan Brown for the IA2005 submit.

SOAP Talk

From the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies (ETech) Conference, there is a presentation by Google’s engineer Nelson Minar telling us their experiences and lessons learned using SOAP for the AdWord Web Services API.

In the presentation there is a brief discussion of using standard HTTP GET/PUT/POST instead of SOAP for read-only semantic web APIs.

Via Google Blog

Back to Basics to Get Work Done

source: vim.org

Over at 43Folders, a blog dedicated to "be as productive as possible", the author is switching his text editor over to vim. Vim is a programmers dream and a casual user worst nightmare*. It is an editor targeted to power users.

In order to use vim (an open source version of vi) you have to learn it; there is no other way around. For the novel user, there is no easy way to jump start and use it than understanding the basic philosophy first (command mode versus insert mode) and then start practising and memorising commands.

However, once you learn it, what you gain (potentially) is an increase of productivity in text editing/creation related tasks. “No pain no gain” might be the case, but it can be one of those applications that let people be in the flow, or the ability to focus on task goal and not on the tool used. The tool becomes transparent.

Jef Raskin wrote about the issue of interface learn-ability versus productivity and beginners versus power users, arguing that we are all beginners/casual users and power users at the same time even within the same application.

Interface design can be about the tradeoffs of achieving maximum efficiency/productivity versus everything else (learnability/easy to use/visibility of commands/modes/automation /repetitiveness/keyboard shortcuts/user experience/emotional design/simplicity/generic and casual use/specialisation….).

However productivity versus “all the rest” is just one way to look at interaction design and every dimension brings different issues to the design space, and there is no doubt of the benefits of having easy to learn, easy to “jump start” user interfaces (i.e. just see the impact of blogging or photo blogs have had on the online community).

A good resource to help thinking about these topics is the write up of the CHI workshop “Testing for Power Usability”, that dealt with the “next level” of usability that does not include only beginners.

Food for thought…

* It is not that bad and there are GUI versions. However, in the pure command line version the first command that you have to learn is how to quit the application, as there is no obvious way of doing it.

Sensors-In-A-Box: Siemens "Ay one"

Source: ayone.siemens.com

Siemens has developed a prototype named Ay one packed with sensors for:

• temperature
  
• noise
• brightness
• motion detector. Is there anything moving around the box?
  
• egomotion. Is the Ay one moving?

Combined with networking capabilities (to mobile phones, to GPS modules, etc), simple user interface and a Java API that would enable developers to build their own custom Ay applications, the Ay one is designed as a device to explore the interaction space that opens the possibilities of sensing the physical world.

In their website they describe some possible scenarios and they are also looking for new ideas of how the Ay one could be used. Got any?

The guys at mobileblog.it have a video of the device taken during the CeBit fair in Germany.

The motion sensing functionality reminds me to the Compaq Itsy, the iPaq predecessor developed at the then Western Research Labs (now part of HP Labs) .

The Disappearing Computer

"The mission of the initiative is to see how information technology can be diffused into everyday objects and settings, and to see how this can lead to new ways of supporting and enhancing people's lives that go above and beyond what is possible with the computer today"

With the vision of exploring "how to interact with non-traditional information spaces", the Disappearing Computer (DC) initiative was funded by the European Union and integrated 17 different projects from early 2001 till 2003.

Now, Communications of the ACM is running (March edition) a special issue with some papers related to the DC initiative.

Communications of the ACM. March 2005 Issue : http://www.acm.org/pubs/cacm/toc/2005/march_toc.html

Desktop Search

More news on the "Desktop Search", "Metadata-Database Driven File Systems" and "Semantic Desktop" front:

Google Desktop is out of beta. It comes with a plugin-SDK and a "WebServices like" API that allows other applications to access the search facilities (see the Developers Guide).

Microsoft is going to backport WinFS to Windows XP.

And Beagle(and Dashboard?) will be included in Suse 9.3.

--
Update: WinFS port to XP might be a rumour (Via Slashdot)

"Zooming" Papers at CHI

Source: chi2005.org

Going through some of the papers of ACM CHI’05 Conference (Computer Human Interaction Conference), there are quite few papers (4 or 5, perhaps more) related to interfaces/interaction based on 2D Structured Graphics, or “Zooming” type of interface concepts.

Jef Raskins, who unfortunately passed away very recently, was a big proponent of Zooming based interfaces, reflected on his book “The Humane Interface” and in one of his latest projects: a Zoomable Desktop User Interface named Archy.

Open Source and Education

Source:flosse.dicole.org

Information, knowledge and tools want to be free. FLOSSE Posse is a new group weblog formed by a group of finish researchers that focuses on Open Source in education.

To start with, the blog have a series of interviews (Podcasts) with different researchers of the area about the future of education and open source.

Via Euro-CSCL.

GeoURL is Back

Source: geourl.org

After some time in development, GeoURL is back. What is GeoURL? It links websites to physical locations. From the website:

"GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location."


http://geourl.org/

More and More Aggregation. This time is Video Clips

Source: vimeo.com

With CiteULike you can create a database with bibliographical references and have it aggregated with other people.

With delicious you can do the same but with URLs, with flicrk the same but with photos, with 43Things the same but with “ToDo Lists”. And the list goes on and on. What emerges from the aggregation can only be unexpected.


Now, with Vimeo, you can do the same but with Video Clips.