kip/bot/blog

Comcast has a technical support person on twitter.  John Dvorak TWiTed that he is responding to people individually.

While it’s not a great movie, Walk Hard has some great moments that I can’t stop re-watching (the protest song phase, India, the Beatles(!), and the world music song in particular).  While obsessing about the movie’s attention to detail in spoofing 70s rocker career (the Dewey variety show interstitials are awesome), I found the Dewey Cox album covers below.  I love when movies put together these kind of artefacts (right down to the tortured punctuation):

So, after a decidedly mixed launch, the XO will finally be tested by the audience and in the kind of environment it was designed for. (As opposed to bloggers and podcasters who have iPods, iPhones, XBoxes, two laptops and power towers.)

MIT’s Technology Review magazine has a piece about the Peru launch. It might be a little gentler about the criticisms, since it’s an MIT publication, but they summed it up nicely:

The success of OLPC can no longer be judged against ­Negroponte’s early predictions and plans, nor by the technical merits of the laptop itself. Peru is what matters now. When I was in Lima, OLPC’s former chief technology officer, Mary Lou ­Jepsen (she has formed Pixel Qi, a startup dedicated to making even lower-cost displays for OLPC’s computers and others), visited the education ministry to offer help and show staffers how to repair the machines. But she acknowledged that OLPC’s future doesn’t revolve around the hardware she helped bring about. “Laptops are easy; education is hard to transform,” she said. “I don’t even speak Spanish. How can I even start to transform primary education in Peru?”

Negroponte gets a lot of heat for saying this isn’t a technology project, it’s an education one.  It’s a comment I haven’t really understood myself (despite being a huge fan of the project and the actual product). But this article helps bring that dynamic to life. Henry Dietz, a Peru expert and professor at UT, points out that the XO is being introduced into very unpromising situations: “You get out of those provincial capitals, a half-hour in any direction, and you are in rural Peru, and things are pretty primitive. Electricity is a sometimes thing, and the quality of education–the school is four walls and a roof and some benches, and that is about it. There is very little there to work with.”
The first, and oddly, most important, thing the XO brings to this environment is books and light. Peru has brought nearly a half million XOs and warehouse staff are using flash drives to load them (individually) with classics, Aesop, Peruvian poetry, Mario Vargos Llosa. This is powerful education: learning to read one’s language through its greatest artists.
Along with the books, they’re adding chess, literacy training, sudoko (plus the usual stuff). And the 15 hour battery is, of course, a source of light in the home even if the XO isn’t in use.

Another overlooked, or at least underdiscussed, part of the XO is that its mere presence connects kids to the world around them. Children in even the remotest towns are aware that there is a world out there that has computers and books and cameras and that they are at a far remove from that world. The XO puts them much closer to that world. As one father of an XO owner said:

“Our hope for him is that he will have hope,” he said. “So we are giving them the chance to look for a different future–or the same, but by choice, not by force. These children who didn’t have any expectation about life, other than to become farmers, now can think about being engineers, designing computers, being teachers–as any other child should, worldwide.”

Some other interesting notes on the design and deployment:

• Peru spent $80 million on the hardware, and another $2 million on teacher training
• The Peruvian government consciously made a choice to go with poorer villages and towns outside of its cities, rather than towns that are better connected to the infrastructure
• Most of the XOs will have limited, slow, or bad internet connections
• The and X and O on the case now come in 400 color combinations, to help kids keep track of which one is theirs

I’m thinking of switching to a Nokia — partly to connect to the ways the rest of the world is connecting, but partly cuz I’m no longer convinced of the awesomeness of the iPhone.

I bought the iPhone about three months after the release. I had resisted the urge until I unpacked my bag for work and saw an iPod, a phone, a camera. I went and bought the iPhone and dumped the other stuff from my bag, a savings of two devices, charging time and hassle, and some carried ounces off my back.

Today, however, I’m back to three devices. The iPhone camera sucks too much even for me; I tend to load it up with so many boingboing TV, TED, coolhunting videos, and the occasional West Wing for late or bleary subway rides, that I seem to never have the right music on hand for work; and the hassles of email with entourage/exchange/whatever plus my continued non-adjustment to the keyboard leave me calendarless and hesitant to answer work mails (since replies go to gmail). Yes, that last will be fixed in June (as apparently, will be the mideast problem and global warming, if you listen to the more energetic Mac rumors), but I think I’ve lost too much love for the iPhone to hold onto it.

And, oh yeah, EDGE sucks.

Is it possible that Apple, usually so well-known for providing more to customers by doing less stretched itself too thin? I don’t think I’ve ever had an Apple device that so infrequently delighted me (I mean delighted me, like making me say Nice!) and so frequently frustrated me.

The other half of the abandon iPhone equation is professional. As non-touch screen phones become more important in people’s lives (due to price point, durability, and, in developing countries, non-theft-worthiness), I feel out of touch with emerging design sensibilities and mobile behaviors. I’m not ready to go back to a crappy phone, but, seeing that the N-Series is the direction cheap phones will go rather than the iPhone, I may make yet another expensive shift.

Technology Review ran an article about blogosphere and social network traffic visualizations which featured pretty and interesting pictures as well as insights into what’s worth measuring in social networks. (The full article isn’t yet available to non-subscribers in its full format.)  The picture below visualizes a number of things including, apparently, the relative ego size/socialness of political junkies and designers.

The two regions are held together by popular blogs with ties to both subject areas. The size of the ­circle representing a given blog is proportional to the number of other blogs linked to it. Hurst notes an apparent difference in culture between the two regions: pink lines, which represent reciprocal links, are much denser among the political blogs than they are among blogs focused on technology.

“Join the stuggle while you may
The revolution is just a t-shirt away”

Zeus Jones has nice, but regrettably short, piece about storytelling in marketing and advertising. It’s built around a line from Lee Clowe at AAAAAAAAA:

The ability to use the internet in terms of great brand storytelling is still at its infancy,” he said. “The internet advertising media, cross my fingers and hope to God, with bandwidth and with some ability, is going to become more artful; it’s going to become more interesting. … But it’s going to take creative people to embrace the possibilities of what you can do on the internet in terms of advertising and storytelling and make it a little better and smarter.

This reminds me a little of Spielberg’s line about a decade ago that video games would become an art form when one makes us cry: it’s a weird evaluation of one medium, through the value system of another one. In both cases, it’s a an older medium evaluating an emergent medium by its own standards. Z-J goes on to point out, rather crisply that, “There’s no doubt that online advertising is generally pretty dire, but then the Web isn’t really a great medium for delivering traditional advertising. But even more importantly it’s absolutely the wrong medium if all you want to do is tell stories.”
As advertisers and interactives race towards each others’ capabilities, storytelling is the word that many, most, nearly everybody uses to characterize that sacred center. Like concept, or big idea, storytelling is getting added on to the fundamental requirements of interactive experiences. For certain kinds of experiences, it seems like an unnatural bolting on. Is the logic that we should extend the formula of useful, usable, engaging to:

useful + usable + engaging + story == good experience?

Or are we saying that the way to be engaging should be through story?

In any case, it feels like storytelling is a heavy throw-weight word — strong on emotional attention-getting, light on impact — that we throw into the mix to let others know that we’re thinking of the next big thing.

Just saw this while ordering some forgotten/hidden/kooky New York books.  It’s a customer review for Lost New York:

HBR has another good article breathing new life into stale concepts (the first one is blogged here).  Right now, it feels like that the “MFA is the new MBA” is stuck in a squishy or puddle-thin space.  For some, it’s a call to be a right-brained thinker — take a drawing class, learn an instrument, write a short story!  A little more intelligent, but kind of thin, is the argument that the MBA teaches you decision-making, the MFA teaches you synthesis.  Not bad, but it doesn’t unpack into actionable ideas.
Katherine Bell, who got an MBA, worked in business, and then got an MFA at the highly selective Iowa Writer’s Workshop, has a “conversation starter” that gets deeper into the skills and attitudes that MFAs can acquire.  It goes deep enough, in fact, that it feels actionable.  Her points, which are also covered in the ideacast, are:

• the workshop is an important management tool and cultural goal in a business that thrives on ideas — Bell’s MFA is in writing, and one of the biggest adjustments she had to make was to the workshop:  a class where your fellow students look at your work and critique it along with your professor.  Everyone has to develop skills for an effective workshop:
• the author needs to learn to accept criticism about very personal things, how to sift good feedback from bad, and how to incorporate it into her work;
• the students need to learn how to give useful feedback.  This one is particularly interesting because it goes beyond “don’t be negative” into “don’t give executional feedback.”  This is something a lot of design shops, clients, and companies trying to be more design-focused have trouble with.  Comments should be “the colors are feeling kind of flat to me, not as energetic as this”, rather than “can you make it more red?”
• the professor needs to set the right tone for the workshop, facilitate the critiquing, and give measured, but strong comments. 
  

• by writing fiction, you learn empathy — Bell spends a lot of time talking about how writing fiction forces her into her characters’ heads and out of hers.  Being able to get so far into a character that it acts in ways that surprise you is one of her litmus tests for empathy.  But she highlights that management is all about understanding who you’re talking to and feeling empathy with them.  (It’s also important for design, and Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change has a terrific chapter about what empathy is and isn’t and how to focus your work on building empathy).

Even if you can’t go to a workshop or don’t bother writing fiction, it’s a useful read and think as it highlights parts of work and types of thinking that MFA==MBA inclined managers should dig into.

The idea that leading a guild in an MMORPG like World of Warcraft could result in some important skills has been around for a while. Joi Ito has done a couple pieces on it, including one in his blog and one in WIRED. But HBR’s got a “conversation starter” that puts some teeth into the idea, or the idea behind it.

The literal idea — that you should pay serious attention to candidates who run a game guild — still seems kind of silly to me, but this article highlighted some points about these folks:

• they are adept at email, IMing, and forum conversations as vehicles for making decisions, resolving/preventing conflicts, persuasion, etc. This one is near and dear to my heart. I’ve been in companies that consider walking to someone’s desk for answer to be a simple-minded waste of time, and where relying on emails for even the simplest question is considered to fraught with peril.
• they manage complex workstreams. It’s almost embarrassing to talk about it, but organizing and strategizing for a raid (a mission to kill a baddie which requires 20 or more people), is pretty complex and requires a lot of coordination and communication.
• they create or imaginatively use communication tools. A lot of organization needs to happen when players can’t all be on the game at the same time, so most guilds have a website, a bank, email lists, auto-alerts, etc. I’ve heard one person say he uses 37Signals tools for his guild.
• they are good at handling difficult personalities. Let’s face it, nerds and game geeks are big pains in the ass, frequently over-reliant on logic, and often the most effective but most difficult person on our teams (even non-tech, non-web teams).
• they understand temporary leadership. They know how and when to step into something and how and when to have or let someone else step up.

This last one is the most interesting to me. My industry (advertising and marketing services) has some very stale notions of leadership: the singular leader who owns it all; the creative genius who calls every shot; the moving lead between disciplines (IA -> Visual -> Copy -> technology) that leads to waterfall. Attempts to model leaders above a waterfall process can get you into tedious, theological discussions about delegation, abdication or back to the “everything bubbles up to me.” Temporary leadership implies ongoing judgment, continual shifts in primacy of thought, constant responsiveness and self-re-organization.

Worth a look (or a listen on HBR Ideacast #92).