Posted on June 22nd, 2007 by Atif
I was on-site at Supernova today. David Weinberger, author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and the recently published Everything is Miscellaneous, spoke during an afternoon panel. His new book is a thought-provoking work about how we need to get comfortable with the disorder of information spawned by the web. David covers a lot of ground in the book but I’d like to focus on the observation he makes about information overload. He says that the way to solve the overload problem (think 13bn web pages and growing) is to feed more information to the user. It’s a powerful, yet counter intuitive, idea to which I’d like to add a branch or extension.My extension is that users face a different kind of information selection problem depending upon where they stand in the consumption lifecycle. Specifically, that the overload problem is much more acute later on in the lifecycle than in the beginning.Since lifecycles have a front-end and a back-end, we’ll break down consumption into those two spaces, recognizing that gray area exists. By front-end, I mean the user’s objective starting from the “point of inspiration”. There’s always something that motivates a user to seek out information to begin with. This inspiration can be casual or deliberate. A casual intent includes the desire to kill time or have fun…info-snacking, as they say. Deliberate intent is usually task-oriented but as I’ll demonstrate later, the distinction may not matter when it comes to overload.You might ask why information management would more challenging for users in the midst of consumption (versus at the start) when they face the same problem scope on the front-end as they do on the back-end (13bn pages to wrestle with no matter which end you’re into). To answer that you’d have to look at the “what and how” of content consumption from the “point of inspiration” to the “point of resolution.” Let me break that down. Read more »
Related Links
Filed under: Events, User Experiences, Web Apps, Innovation | 2 Comments »
Email It
Digg This!
Slashdot It!
Posted on June 15th, 2007 by Atif
I’ll admit to being schizophrenic in my web usage. This explains why plain-vanilla Google is set as my default browser homepage. On the one hand, I don’t want anything pre-defined for me when I start web browsing. The idea of a personalized page with feeds from sources tailored to my interests feels limiting to me. That may sound counter-intuitive because the point of such personalization is to save me time and effort by aggregating what I’ve defined as important. But it just doesn’t work for me precisely because it’s pre-defined. I prefer to start knowing that the whole web is my oyster.Google’s simple search box respects this sentiment. It stares back at me, daring me to query. It’s a much better starting companion on a journey into the web because it allows me to start anywhere I want.
For example, I often use it to type in the URL for a favorite sports site. I use Google’s box like a keystroke command. I find that easier than navigating to the address bar on the toolbar and mucking around with the entire address. Of course, I can just enter some query terms in the event I ‘m casually or seriously looking for new information. Like you, curiosity strikes me about a half dozen times a day and having Google there as my homepage is my zero latency strategy.
Another way to frame the issue is to say that web schizophrenia comes from the fact that I want nothing and everything at the same time. Google is the only product that offers that to me right now. Read more »
Related Links
Filed under: Google, Search Technology, User Experiences, Web Apps, Innovation | 1 Comment »
Email It
Digg This!
Slashdot It!
Posted on June 8th, 2007 by Atif
As reported in The Week, an online magazine called Pasadena Now has “hired two reporters to cover local government who have never set foot in Pasadena, and may never.” The reporters, who work from Mumbai and Bangalore, cover the beat by participating in webcasts of City Council meetings (open to all) and sorting through publically available archives on the web. In an era of email and Skype, it’s not hard to imagine sprinkling a story with quotes here and there from local politicians and stakeholders. The publisher describes these resources as “efficient” which “means he can pay his new hires $10,000 a year to generate 15 local news stories a week.”
Here’s an example of labor arbitrage impacting the frontline of journalism albeit on a small scale. The natural question is whether this is a one-off or a broader trend. What exactly is the latent arbitrage opportunity amongst other media jobs, especially those in the upper-echelons of journalism? The Week seems to be fairly resigned about the matter: “if you think you’re job is safe, ask yourself if somebody in India, Pakistan or Indonesia could do it for less.” Read more »
Related Links
Filed under: Management, Traditional Media | No Comments »
Email It
Digg This!
Slashdot It!
