Sunday, May 17, 2009

Visualization Ideas

Concepts for book visualization
  • Photocopies of early letters
  • Excerpts from famouse correspondences

Title Candidates

Title / central concept ideas:
  • Dear Reader: Written Communications from Cicero to Cyrano, to Telegraph to iPhone
  • Communication Gap: The Chaotic, Devolving State of Written Communications
  • The Cyptic Psyche: The Chaotic, Devolving State of Written Communications & What it Means for Love, Family & Intellect

Book Layout

Every chapter will have these elements:

  • a representative excerpt of the communication ("use case")
  • a "good example" and a "bad" example
  • clear statement of the paradigm

More time on social nets than email

This per NYT post via @stevecase

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/technology/internet/18drill.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Much of this is video - "cool medium" ?

Andrew Potter & discourse

Possible additional ideas from Andrew Potter:


  • Topic drift as a passive indicator of discourse quality
  • Self - Other - Idea continuum

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Google Map Links / Generation

This snip shows how to refer to a Google map address from a web page. When Google Maps generates the URL ("link") for you, it hard-codes the current map display. Have the display zoomed to the desired level before requesting the link.

test test
Google Map

Monday, May 11, 2009

User Interfaces & the future

A jumping off point, tho rife w/ skeptical caveats and asides, are new breeds of UI's

E.g., see the YouTube playlist for novel UI's.

Insights from Web Design / Social networks

These tools and tips articles were not intended to be mini-treatises on communications styles, but they are.

Gladwell-esque

The book needs to be Gladwell-esque.

What does that mean?
  1. David Leonhardt calls it a mixture of "social psychology, marketing, self-help."

Twitter as Dialect & Digital_Nation

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/blog/2009/05/the-future-of-twitter.html

  • New dialects
  • new communication frameworks
  • compressed, more efficient business, personal life
  • insularity's opposite

Sunday, April 26, 2009

The email project redefined

The original insights were these:

  • enterprises were being managed through email, and the medium was not a passive one
  • email was transformative, in both good and bad ways
  • email first appeared in 1982, which seemed to coincide with a perceived decline in analytical writing
  • there was no precedent for the email "killer application"
  • Visit functionality for Exchange, Outlook, Gmail; suggest improvements and interview architects and designers for these products
  • go beyond what's in the two main books that have been published in the email space

I thought more about it, and realized that email was (just?) a stage in the evolution of written communication. Other significant inflection points in the history of written communication may have been:

The revised perspective focuses on how written communication has evolved. Social networking phenomena are part of this in the public eye, though in fact they may not represent a significant advances.

A new set of interests, related but different, emerged:

  • what it will mean that communications between people are shorter and more elliptical
  • alternative ways of managing complexity in the new media
  • A rethinking of McLuhan
  • Cognitive psychology of discourse thread management - how memory organizes and prioritizes multiple conversations in the new media
  • how romance is affected by these new formats
  • how management practices are subtlely or more obviously altered by email
  • why Twitter/Facebook are just aired-out email with elaborated address books
  • what the future holds
  • if video phones / video posts become commonplace, how will this transform written communications?
  • effects on "literacy" E.g., trends in verbal skills in SAT / GRE

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to manage the channels for my other blogs. This is not a public site.