30 posts
Flights have been booked, passports renewed, and Tim’s brought his ten-gallon out of mothballs. Yes, that’s right — Made by Many, the entire company, is going to South by Southwest!Flights have been booked, passports renewed, and Tim’s brought his ten-gallon out of mothballs. Yes, that’s right — Made by Many, the entire company, is going to South by Southwest!
This morning I took part in a transatlantic blogger meet-up in the Martini Lounge (alas, not a one in sight, though it was 9am) at the new Arch Hotel.
The event was organised by our friend Jeremy at Transatlanticism, a New York-based organisation we’ve gotten to know through our work on Metrotwin.
Metrotwin is about creating connections, through people and places, between New York and London. This morning’s chat delivered hugely on that premise, so much so that I thought I would introduce some new additions to my transatlantic universe.
There’s a pretty cool iPhone app that I’ve been trying out for a few days nights which seems to capture the imagination of everyone I talk/Twitter/Facebook to.
It’s called Sleep Cycle and it purports to analyse and track your sleep patterns and then wake you at the optimum time in the morning (ie at the lightest sleep phase. You can check it out here (or purchase directly from iTunes for £0.59).
You set it up by placing your iPhone on the mattress (next to the pillow but not covered by it), and then the app uses the accelerometer to measure tiny movements in the mattress as you toss, turn and generally shift around.
One response among designers and UX folk to Apple’s new iPad has been to criticise the effort required of users to command the haptic interface. Microsoft’s Surface had the same response, as did the interface that Tom Cruise used in Mission Impossible.
‘Ergonomically speaking, it’s just too much hard work’ is the usual response. There’s a lot of supposition and conjecture there though, mostly based on the received wisdom that less work is better. It seems obvious that they require more work to control, but I’m not aware of any long-term study into the ergonomic effects of haptic interfaces in everyday use or indeed that they are even hard work to use on a daily basis. I’m certainly one of those people that look at this kind of interface and thinks “It just looks like a lot of hard work”.
As an erstwhile pedant and ex-employee of a major dictionary publisher, I have had my fair share of run-ins with punctuation. So I chuckled to see this brilliantly illustrated explanation of how to use the semicolon.
It used to be fags and booze that people gave up as a New Year resolution. 2010 was the first year I heard lots of people claiming they wanted to give up social networking. Fragile idiots.
This post is a sort of modified version of my ‘Stuff that’s floating around the office’ posts that I used to do earlier. With our increased use of Twitter, I realised that all of us at Made by Many were tweeting interesting links individually rather than sending them around the office. So I’ve turned to Twitter to aggregate some of the best links as fodder for this refreshed series of posts. They’ll probably reveal what a diverse bunch we are – and we like to think our diversity is reflected in our work!
People are sharing stuff online more than ever before. The popularity of services such as bit.ly, ShareThis and even Twitter are evidence of this.
You often hear people bandy around an “80/20 rule” (see Pareto principle) where in a social environment, 20% of people will contribute 80% of the content, be it through forum or blog posts, new topics, videos etc. It’s horribly over-simplistic but it’s a tidy rule of thumb. It’s a good way to remember that you will only ever get a small number of folk actually contributing anything to a community. The theory being that if you can get the 20% then the 80% might follow. It’s been around for a long time and you can see patterns of this in anything that exhibits long tail behaviour. It’s supported by Forrester’s highly useful Social Technographics® ladder of behaviors, which is worth grokking if you have the time.
This time last year I was deep in third year project stress at university. Given the guideline that we could do ‘anything’ there was initially quite a bit of mental flailing. Finally however, I landed on an area of personal interest – memory, what it means to us and how it is changing in the digital age.
Memory maketh the man – we are who we are thanks to our experiences. They’re sometimes comforting, sad, traumatic and always make good anecdotes. We obviously don’t carry all our memories in crystal clear form around in our head, but they’re there, lurking – all they need is a trigger to bring them out.
Signup forms are always a pain in the arse. For a long time, the volume of email addresses captured (as if they could get away) has been a pointless little metric. It allows brand managers to own something – “so we can write to them in the future”. But with open rates and click-throughs so terribly low for emails and the cost of sending bulk emails so high (remember when sending emails was free?!), we’ve seen implementations of single sign-on more and more common.
I came across a page on lifeblob.com via search results which required me to log in to view the content.
