I spent Saturday at the BlogHer conference. Arrived somewhat late for the morning session which was titled: Play by today’s rules, or change the game? When I arrived, discussion was focused on the Technorati A list, and other similar lists (and why there are very few women on these lists). Ideas ranged from developing other more multidimensional lists, to having a BlogHer list, to linking more to each other.
Since I had never seen the Technorati 100 before, I headed there. And predictably, found few women on it. I generally find such lists to be unidimensional and mostly useless, so do not feel unduly concerned that it is a male-dominated list. The important issue is reaching the people you want to connect to. The web is all about being able to reach the Long Tail. So, the more relevant question to me is: Do women bloggers have a harder time reaching people who are interested in the same topics? If the answer is yes, then that is more problematic.
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Categories: Uncategorized
Word is Yahoo will soon be coming out with its OddPost inspired version. Ethan Diamond, one of the Oddpost founders, now working on Yahoo mail thinks that users are more likely to use folders than tags to organize emails. I tend to agree. I like the controlled messiness of del.icio.us tags for my bookmarked urls. And the social discovery of others’ bookmarks is very compelling. But for something as personal and important as my email archive – I prefer either a combination of folders and robust search.
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Categories: Design · Google · Information Architecture · Tagging
Joe Krause recently wrote that “Its a great time to be an entrepreneur“. Yes, it is. Joe talks about cheap hardware, free infrastructure software, cheap global labor markets, and search engine marketing. There is another reason that its a great time to be an entrepreneur – an excellent example of which is Joel Spolsky’s latest project: CoPilot.
Take a good open source software. Something really useful. Something well built, that solves a real problem. Something like VNC. You can take your pick from the many flavors of VNC – Tight VNC, Real VNC, Ultra VNC …- . There is no better way to share your screen with someone – if you are willing to deal with the usability problems that come with it.
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Categories: Business · Design · Entrepreneurship · Open Source
![corporate anthropology]()
Two recent articles about anthropology in the corporate environment caught my eye.
The article in Fortune magazine focuses on anthropological work at Microsoft and contrasts modern corporate anthropology with its origins:
“Their fieldwork is far removed from the popular perception of the anthropologist as lantern-jawed adventurer in baggy shorts and pith helmet, canoeing up the Amazon in search of the proverbial lost tribe. But there is a certain correspondence between Microsoft’s research agenda and the work of those old-time anthropologists, many of whom were funded by colonial governments that needed to understand their native subjects in order to rule them more effectively. The modern version of this knowledge-power dynamic is Microsoft, a multinational technology colossus that hires anthropologists who study the natives in order to sell them more software.”
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Categories: Cognition · Design · HCI Methods
![ibm mobile conference]()
I am at the IBM: New Directions in User Computing conference. It is the annual user interface summer conference held at IBM every summer. During Dan Russells’ and Steve Cousins introduction, we learnt that this is the 13th such conference. This year, the focus is on mobile computing.
Its about 100 or more people. I saw a lot of Bay area HCI researchers (the same ones that you run into at CHI conference). Unsurprisingly, there are quite a few IBM researchers and interns. Also, unsurprisingly, there are very few practitioners. This is mostly the CHI crowd – i.e., mostly researchers.
I was there for just the morning. Really enjoyed a talk on Social Mobile Computing by Ian Smith from Intel Research Laboratory in Seattle.
Here are my notes for the talk.
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