This is lovely.
Today I want to ponder the question: what if Microsoft, not Google, had created Gmail? What would be the differences in that web mail client for users today? What if we apply some of the same design rules that brought us Hotmail, for instance?
Read on. Great illustrations. Reminds me of the spoof put together by Microsoft folks meditating on what the iPod packaging would be like if done by Redmond.
Er, that’s what it says here…
Blonde women really do make men lose their heads, according to scientists.
Tests showed that men performed worse after they were shown pictures of fair-haired women, most likely because they believed they were dealing with someone less intelligent.
Researchers concluded that rather than simply being distracted by the golden hair, the men were subconsciously copying the stereotype of the “blonde bimbo”.
Academics at the University of Paris X-Nanterre examined men’s ability to complete general knowledge tests after exposure to women with different hair colours.
Throughout both trials, those participants exposed to blondes recorded the lowest scores.
“This proves that people confronted with stereotypes generally behave in line with them,” said Thierry Meyer, joint author of the study and professor of social psychology at the university.
“In this case blondes have the potential to make people act in a dumber way, because they mimic the unconscious stereotype of the dumb blonde.”
Now that’s what I call research. I’ve always wondered what went on at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. And is there a University of Paris IX-Nanterre?
Hmmm… This Newsweek.com piece has made me wonder if I’m right to dismiss Amazon’s Kindle gizmo as just another e-reader to add to the pile of earlier attempts to supplant the printed book.
Later: Having read Nick Carr’s piece, I think I’ll just add it to the heap.
Later still: Martin Weller is less critical.
That’s the title of the lecture John Lloyd is giving in Cambridge tomorrow to mark the 25th Anniversary of the Wolfson Press Fellowship Programme. John is now Director of Journalism Studies at the Reuters Institute in Oxford, but he’s done a lot of other things in his time. He was, for example, Founding Editor of the Financial Times Magazine, and now writes a weekly column about television. He has been a contributing editor at the Financial Times, reporter and producer for London Weekend Television’s London Programme and Weekend World, and editor of Time Out and the New Statesman magazines. He has written several books including “What the media are doing to our politics”. He also recently co-edited (with Jean Seaton) a special issue of the Political Quarterly entitled What Can Be Done?: Making the Media and Politics Better.
Lecture details here. All welcome. Please email press [at] wolfson.cam.ac.uk if you intend to come.
One of the many advantages of using Pobox as my email hub is its wonderful spam filter. Occasionally, though, it blocks a legit message, so I periodically have to skim through the piles of ‘discards’ it has blocked. It’s interesting to see the changing patterns of spam. The pump-and-dump, penis-enlargement and fake Rolex salesmen are still, er, hard at it. But there’s an increasing amount of incomprehensible Cyrillic guff. Putin’s Russia continues to develop along predictable lines.
This morning’s Observer column…
A few weeks ago, the band Radiohead made waves by making their new album In Rainbows available online as a free download. But people could also decide how much they wanted to pay for it. This experiment was greeted with gleeful incredulity by many cynics, who opined that Radiohead had showed a touching but naive faith in human nature, and predicted that freeloaders would so outweigh the paying customers that the experiment would be a financial flop….
Don Dodge has a nice post on an incurable disease which afflicts both mainstream media and the blogosphere…
There is a severe case of MacroMyopia spreading across the blogosphere. Today it is The Death of Email. Yesterday it was Inbox 2.0 – Email meets Social Networks. Macro-Myopia is the tendency to overestimate the short term impact of a new product or technology, and underestimate its long term implications on the marketplace, and how competitors will react.
Straight up and to the right – It is human nature to extrapolate the early success of a “new thing” to world domination, and to the death of the “old thing”. Insert any variable for “new thing” like; Facebook, Twitter, Text Messaging, Open Source, Linux, YouTube…and you can finish the sentence with the death of the “old thing”.
The best of both worlds – In most cases the early innovator of a product or technology wins some early success in a narrow market segment. The big winners come in later by incorporating the new technology into an existing product or service and creating a best of both worlds solution that appeals to a much broader market. I call this the “Innovate or Imitate – Fame or Fortune” scenario…
Lots more where that came from. Good stuff.
Interesting graph from Hitwise.
For the first time last month, UK Internet visits to social networks overtook visits to web-based email services. As the chart below illustrates, our custom category of the top 25 social networks, which includes Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, accounted for 5.17% of all UK Internet visits, compared to 4.98% for Computers and Internet – Email Services, which includes Hotmail; Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, amongst others.
Tim O’Reilly has put his finger on it…
If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that’s a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don’t want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.
And data mobility is a key to that. Syndication and mashups have been key elements of Web 2.0 — the ability to take data from one place, and re-use it in another. Heck, even Google’s core business depends on that ability — they take data from every site on the web (except those that ask them not to via robots.txt) and give it new utility by aggregating, indexing, and ranking it.
Imagine what would have happened to Google maps if instead of supporting mashups, they had built a framework that allowed developers to create mapping applications across Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google as a way of competing with MapQuest. Boring! That’s the equivalent of what they’ve announced here.
Would OpenSocial let developers build a personal CRM system, a console where I could manage my social network, exporting friends lists to various social networks? No. Would OpenSocial let developers build a social search application like the one that Mark Cuban was looking for? No.
Set the data free! Allow social data mashups. That’s what will be the trump card in building the winning social networking platform….
Andy Oram has a good idea…
The idea of micro-elites actually came to me when looking at the Peer to Patent project. There are currently 1611 signed-up contributors searching for prior art on patent applications. But you don’t want 1611 people examining each patent. You want the 20 people who understand the subject deeply and intimately. A different 20 people on each patent adds up to 1611 (and hopefully the project will continue, and grow to a hundred or a thousands times that number).
Even Wikipedia follows this rule in some cases. There are some subjects where everybody in the world holds an opinion and a huge number actually know some facts. But other subjects would never see articles unless a couple of the few dozen experts in the world took time to write it.
A corollary of the micro-elite principle is that one of the best ways to help a project requiring a micro-elite is to find the right contributors and persuade them to help out. We should also examine the rewards that such projects offer to see whether they offer enough incentives to draw the micro-elite. The key prerequisite for good writing is good writers.