Category: Technology

Managing Distractions

It’s all too easy to get sucked in to check­ing your Twit­ter and your Plurk and your Brightkite and your Face­book and whatever oth­er ser­vices you use; in my case I can claim I need to know some­thing about how these things work for a pro­ject. In the­ory I’m mak­ing use­ful obser­va­tions of how people inter­act with ser­vices and what value they get from them, but in real­ity I spend a bit more time watch­ing and read­ing than is needed for that. It’s very easy to fol­low tweeted links and then find myself web-surf­ing, just like it was in the early days of the web, when we all watched what came up next on NCSA Mosa­ic’s “What’s New” page. So it’s a little iron­ic that John tweeted a link that made me more aware of the slip­pery slope of online dis­trac­tions, and poten­tial ways to com­bat them. Thanks, John!

Twitter Musings

Tim recently pos­ted about Twit­ter, and it got me think­ing I should blog some of my own thoughts on the sub­ject of Twit­ter (and related ser­vices such as Jaiku). Tim’s not the only per­son to move from tweet­ing a bal­anced mix that includes appar­ently super­fi­cial trivia to mainly, or even only, tweet­ing work or busi­ness-related stuff. From my point of view, that’s regret­table. I fol­low only a few people, mostly people I know in per­son, because I want to know what they’re up to and main­tain some sort of con­tact with them as people, not because I see them as sources of busi­ness inform­a­tion. I’ve watched people’s blogs go from per­son­al-with-some-work to mostly-work, now I’m watch­ing people’s twit­ter feeds go through the same trans­form­a­tion, and for me there’s a feel­ing of loss, a feel­ing that I’m just watch­ing more masks (think­ing back to Julie Leun­g’s talk at North­ern Voice) being put in place. 

I guess it’s inev­it­able than any new mode of broad­cast com­mu­nic­a­tion be coopted in this way. I’ve had the same feel­ing at North­ern­Voice of being a King Canute in seek­ing to emphas­ize the per­son­al com­mu­nic­a­tions aspect of blog­ging and social media; the addi­tion­al prob­lem there of course is that people happy to blog at a per­son­al level appar­ently see no need to attend a blog­ging conference.

Many people whose recom­mend­a­tions I would value don’t blog much any more. They put the links to art­icles they’ve read, or books they liked, in their Twit­ter feeds. If I’m not read­ing Twit­ter at that time, I miss those links. No, I don’t like blogs that are solely link feeds, there does have to be a bal­ance, but if something’s worth recom­mend­ing, why not recom­mend it some­where it might live longer than a couple of hours? And some­where I have a hope of find­ing again if I have a men­tal book­mark that you wrote about some­thing inter­est­ing while I was busy doing some­thing else?

Company Websites 101

I’m not in mar­ket­ing, so I’m not going to pon­ti­fic­ate on how com­pan­ies should design the look and feel of their web­sites, nor on what they should say on their web­sites. But there are some really basic things that com­pan­ies should do to make their web­sites more usable, at least to a first degree. 

Item 1: don’t make your cus­tom­ers tell you where they live until they need to, nor what sort of ser­vices they’re inter­ested in. Case study: Rogers, a pur­vey­or of wire­less phones and oth­er tele­com ser­vices. The first screen you see at rogers.com makes you choose between res­id­en­tial and busi­ness ser­vices. If you click busi­ness, it assumes you live in Ontario. If you click res­id­en­tial, you then have to tell it which province you live in. Every time I pay my wire­less bill online, I have to go through the same rig­mar­ole. Can­’t they fig­ure out some way of giv­ing people the basic inform­a­tion and then let­ting them choose which sub­set of the site they want? Telus (anoth­er telco) does the same thing, you have to tell them which province you live in before being allowed into the site. Bell Canada (a com­pet­it­or) does this bet­ter. Not per­fect, they have this weird dia­log box float­ing in space, but it’s bet­ter. The login for people with accounts who want to pay them quickly is right there on the first page, unlike for Telus or Rogers. Maybe they should spend five minutes some time and fig­ure out who uses their sites? Or make their exec­ut­ives try to pay their own phone bills online?

Item 2: assume that some people will be lazy, and not want to type the “www.” all the time. Case study: Shop­pers Drug Mart, a Cana­dian drugstore/pharmacy. If you go to www.shoppersdrugmart.com, you get to the site. If you type shoppersdrugmart.com into your browser, you get “Unable to con­nect” as the serv­er rejects the con­nec­tion. This strikes me as bizarre and lazy; it’s not that hard to set up a serv­er to accept both types of address, and user-unfriendly to not do so.

Item 3: if you run a store, set­ting up a web site, advert­ising it, and then put­ting no con­tent on it is a waste of time. If you can­’t think of any­thing else to put on your web site, put your phone num­ber, your loc­a­tion, and your open­ing hours. A few words about products and/or ser­vices you provide would­n’t hurt either. Case study: too many, and they all make me won­der why they bothered.

More Asus

As inten­ded, I did take the Asus eee pc along on my trip to Maui last month. It was cer­tainly a lot light­er in the back­pack than the usu­al laptop. I even used it a bit (it has a fairly decent sudoku game on it). The wire­less con­nec­tion was a little flaky; I could some­times nom­in­ally con­nect to some wire­less net­work but no bits would actu­ally flow down the pipes. The error mes­sages were use­less, but then there often isn’t a lot to do when the wire­less does­n’t work. Even­tu­ally I found a net­work that did let me con­nect prop­erly, so I could check email and the odd web site.

If I were to use the Asus a lot, I’d need to fig­ure out a few dif­fer­ent applic­a­tions; for a few days while trav­el­ling or oth­er­wise not work­ing I can cope with check­ing feeds through browser-based applic­a­tions (after all, that’s how many people actu­ally do check feeds, if my log files are to be believed) and fun­nel­ling my per­son­al email through GMail, but even­tu­ally I’d want some­thing bet­ter. Learn­ing the key­board short­cuts does help, so maybe it would just be a mat­ter of get­ting used to those less-rich inter­faces. Or maybe they’d get more annoy­ing over time?

I’d also want to tweak beha­viour (move icons around in the tabbed win­dows), and add use­ful exten­sions. For example, I use the CoLT exten­sion on Fire­fox to copy the link and text, which is really handy on the small key­board. And I’d need to learn more usab­il­ity tips from sites such as the eee user for­um, such as the one about mov­ing big dia­log boxes around by keep­ing the Alt key pressed while drag­ging from inside the win­dow, so you can get to the but­tons. I’d prob­ably want to tweak my blo­g’s stylesheet as well; in fact I’m think­ing about how to do that any­way, hav­ing seen what it looks like on the small screen.

The Asus may not quite be what Roger­’s talk­ing about in his mani­festo for the walkaround-web tab­let, but it does fill a def­in­ite niche.

And I haven’t seen too many bugs, although I’ll close with the amus­ing pic­ture I snapped after leav­ing it in sus­pend mode for a while…

Asus eee pc screen after suspend

Balisage Deadlines

Bal­is­age is this new XML++1 geek­fest, put on by some of the people who used to put on the Extreme Markup con­fer­ence, which is aimed to get the brain cells run­ning again after sum­mer. It’s being held in Mon­tréal in the middle of August, which means all those street-level res­taur­ants, and brush­ing up on French cuisine (if not the language). 

Oh yes, the deadlines… 

If you want to speak at Bal­is­age or the Pre­con­fer­ence Sym­posi­um on Ver­sion­ing, you need to sub­mit your full paper by April 18th, using the sup­plied tag set. If you want to attend, advance regis­tra­tion closes on August 1st, so you have time for that. Hotel reser­va­tions must be made by July 1st if you want to stay in the con­fer­ence hotel. The con­fer­ence should be fun and mind-bog­gling at the same time, at least if XML-related the­or­et­ic­al mus­ings are your idea of fun.

1: this means XML is one of the sub­jects dis­cussed there, and most of the oth­ers are in some (albeit tor­tu­ous) way related to it. 

Asus eee: first looks

I got an Asus to take on hol­i­day (vaca­tion) with me, and to play around with. They’re cute and small and way easi­er to lug around than a laptop. With the small screen doing ser­i­ous work is more dif­fi­cult (a plus when you’re not meant to be work­ing) but I can still check email and web sites and maybe even catch up on some blogging.

I got the 4G ver­sion, and had the RAM increased to 2 GB in the shop so the war­ranty is still val­id. Just in case. Not to men­tion which, it cost all of $15 and 5 minutes for them to do it, and it would prob­ably have taken me longer to find the right screwdriver.

First impres­sions: it’s cute. The “easy desktop” is mostly use­ful, and the selec­tion of applic­a­tions reas­on­able (Fire­fox, Thun­der­bird, Skype, Open Office, Pidgin). I’m try­ing to restrain my inner geek and see how much I can get done with the easy desktop before I revert to type and install the full desktop. Some things don’t change though; one of the first things I did was find where to update soft­ware (add/remove pan­el) and update everything. You get this weird mes­sage for some applic­a­tions, such as Skype, say­ing that you can remove the pack­age after updat­ing, without say­ing wheth­er that’s just to clean up the pack­age remains after they’ve been installed, or wheth­er it really does remove the whole thing. Giv­en you can­’t remove (most of?) the default soft­ware, I’m assum­ing it would actu­ally unin­stall those applic­a­tions that can be removed; maybe when I have time to do the delete/reinstall cycle I’ll try out that assumption.

I’m not sure how far I can get without installing and con­fig­ur­ing some extra stuff. Some of the instruc­tions and scripts the on Abso­lute Begin­ners Wiki look use­ful so I’ll prob­ably break down and try them out. Part of the reas­on for restrain­ing myself on this is curi­os­ity — what does a Taiwanese com­pany think that “house­wives, office ladies and stu­dents” need in a mobile inter­net device? Part is also to fig­ure out wheth­er I can recom­mend this sort of device to non-tech­nic­al people I know, or wheth­er I’ll also have to tell them to do X, Y, and Z to make it usable.

More later, after I’ve played with it a bit more.