thoughtcrumbs : february 2005

Please say "I love you" after the beep

A middle school classmate of mine was just written up in the New York Times for his efforts to cheer up a depressed friend.

Mr. Ng, a 26-year-old design student at the School of Visual Arts, decided to shower his disconsolate friend with the goodwill of strangers. He rented a $6-a-month voice mailbox and put up fliers around Union Square and the East Village bearing the phone number of the mailbox and a simple request: "Please say, 'I love you, Gary' after the beep."

He's received hundreds of calls from New Yorkers and is burning them to a CD.

Update: The flier and mp3s of messages are at Iloveyougary.org. (Thanks, Thomas!)

Fear of the letter "u"

My friend Michelle (who rocks in so many different ways) made a good point the other day: nauseous is a ridiculously hard word to type. Like many of the squiggly-line-in-Microsoft-Word-dependent generation, she says:

I won't even use spell check to show you how far I've strayed from standardized use. Words with two "u"s always catch me off guard. Really—vacuum, usurp—cause great anxiety.

Point of fact: In writing this post, I had to look up the spelling of nauseous. Twice.

Missing the whole point

Amtrak's rewards registration site has a field for email location. I guess I've been using IMAP for so long that the idea of email being tied to a physical location really bothers me. As does the fact that the field is required. Are they really going to target messages based on whether I'm at work or at home? Or is it just more insidious profiling?

ALA president-elect belittles blogs

Michael Gorman, soon-to-be head of the American Library Association, writes a scathing article about blogs for Library Journal. Certainly his condemnation of writers "untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar" holds true for a genre of blogs ("I like peanut butter sandwiches. Do you?"). And my rampant abuse of commas and parentheses on these pages pales when compared to the cringe-worthy degradation of the apostrophe on some of my friends' sites.

He says:

I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.

Gorman fails to recognize the merit of collaborative academic blogs, like Many-to-Many and Crooked Timber. And, though my blog wanders into peanut butter territory pretty often, I'm equally comfortable wading through lengthy academic publications, and regularly review them here. Gorman says he expects his view to be rejected by the uneducated masses of bloggers, one of whom previously called him an idiot. While I don't think he's an idiot, and I give him credit for a well-written argument, he completely discounts a growing segment of substantive online publishing, a narrow view to be held by someone ostensibly at the forefront of information. (Thanks, Noah.)

Back from travels

I'm back from a very stimulating trip across the country. After a full day of meeting researchers, I'm left with a profound respect for several aspects of human-machine interaction with which I hadn't had much experience, especially interactions based on speech recognition and natural language processing. (Which actually made my interaction with the voice menu at 1-800-GoFedEx today frustrating, since it was much more stilted and artificial than what I now know it has the potential to be.)

Speaking of experiential design, I also got in a brief visit to the Gates at Central Park. The orange banners were gorgeous next to the the white snow, although individually, they weren't as spectacular as I'd expected. Much more interesting were the conversations I had with strangers (both New Yorkers) about the effect of the exhibit—drawing so many more people to the park and eliciting conversation. For that, the artists deserve credit.

More photos may appear in my gallery soon, but here's one for now:


Update: The NYC photos are now online.

Another company with personality

Portland-based CD Baby continues to impress me with their tone of voice. As an online store, their only chance to really connect with me is in occasional emails, and they make me laugh every time:

Hi Moira -

It's been a long time since our big "Customer of the Year" party at CD Baby. (Remember all that, last time you bought a CD? Oh man, that was fun! Your picture is still on our wall.)

This will definitely translate into me buying a CD from them soon. I'm feeling all celebratory these days.

Radio silence

Things will be quiet here for a few days while I travel for a fellowship interview. Wish me luck! The time away from my computer will be good—it'll keep me from developing an unhealthy addiction to this grad application status blog. Posts will resume here Wednesday-ish.

Virtual communities tied to real places

Portland Stories is an excellent example of a collaborative site grounded in a physical community. Like ORBlogs, the site's contributors share a connection simply through living in the same place. Do you have a story to tell about a late night on Burnside? Or a run in Forest Park? The site's creator, Stephen Voss, says:

My dirty little secret is that I've only lived in this city for a short while, but it has quickly become my home. In writing about Portland, I'm hoping to find my own definition of the city.

As I prepare to leave Portland, I hope to imprint a stronger memory of this place that I love.

Information overload: NYC street signs

In this week's New Yorker, Adam Gopnik censures the New York Department of Transportation for imposing a massive blight on the city: a thousand large-print street signs. And he makes a surprisingly good case for their removal, with only a dash of metropolitan snobbery:

Unlike Los Angeles, where every corner looks the same, and high-speed drivers need plenty of warning, New York's streets are architecturally unique. Each avenue is instantly recognizable. So, the new signs:

"do more than contribute to the ongoing homogenization, the Americanization, of New York. They imply that the homogenization has already taken place."

And, aesthetically,

"They eclipse, as décor, the jaunty, jazz-era syncopation of the classic New York street-corner sign pair, each sign gesturing toward its own street, but with the two at slightly different levels, so that they have a happy, semaphoric panache."

Of course, the target audience for these signs isn't native New Yorkers, and Gopnik pretty much loses any sympathy he might have had from the usability crowd with these tongue-in-cheek last words:

"New York is not a hard place to get around in. If you don't know where you are, you don't deserve to be here."

HCI colloquium on Thursday

Just a reminder to the Eugenians that Melody Ivory will be speaking at the UO CS Department Thursday afternoon. The topic is The Persistent Problem with Help, and the event is being sponsored by my research advisor, Anthony Hornof.

I'll be there; the last time I was in 220 Deschutes Hall, I was defending my thesis. This should be a more pleasant experience, especially when topped off with a trip to the Warhol exhibit at the art museum.

For the single girls today

Meryn Cadell's song, "The Sweater" captures that middle-school crush and heartbreak. Sample lyric:

Girls,
I know you will understand this
and feel the intrinsic incredible emotion
You have just pulled over your head the worn,
warm sweater belonging to a boy
Now, you haven't had a passionate kissing session or anything,
but you got to go on a camping trip with him
and eight other people from school
And you practically slept together,
your sleeping bag right next to his.
. . .
The sweater has that faintly goat-like smell
which all teenage boys possess,
and that smell will lovingly transfer
to all your other clothes.

More of The Sweater

Mary Flower at Alberta Street

Folk guitar virtuoso Mary Flower played for a packed crowd at the Alberta Street Public House last night. Squished up in the front, I could smell the baby powder she applied to her fingertips. And who couldn't love a musician who felt the need to clarify that her tuning was "drop C," not "dropsy"?

Happy birthday, grandma

My grandmother is turning a sprightly 93 this weekend, but has declared that she doesn't want a big party because "it's just an in-between birthday." She lives in an apartment complex typically inhabited by frat boys and international students, and argues a mean political debate. I hope to be that feisty in the year 2071.

Finding hipsters in Portland

Google Maps says they're all downtown.

Brand recognition with six-year-olds

Last week at SMART, one of my first graders pointed to the Scholastic logo at the bottom of her book and said she'd seen it on TV. Perusing the shelves of paperbacks together, she asked me if all books had that picture on them.

I guess it's better she remembers a book publisher's logo than Joe Camel. But she probably knows him, too.

Apropos of nothing

Blogger's spellchecker wanted to replace "iPods" with "aphids."

iPods and social isolation (redux)

Regarding my previous post about egocasting, Adam had the following comment:

There is no such thing as a "unique life soundtrack" without participation in society on some level; if keeping the earbuds in all the time distracts you from the world, whatever's playing on the earbuds will lose their context.

On a related note, comments will be enabled here shortly. Thanks to the three of you who keep goading me.

Google profitability depends on attracting the best engineers

In this month's Communications of the ACM, Michael Cusumano reviews the sustainability of Google's business model*. The gist of the article is that Google became the market leader because of its excellent search algorithms, but a better search engine is potentially just around the corner, waiting to become everyone's favorite. Thus, Google is developing other services to keep people coming—GMail, Froogle, Scholar—just in case their search engine is supplanted by a better one.

Yet Cusumano doesn't mention one of Google's other advantages: its ability to attract the best engineers and designers. With some exceptions, a lot of people want to work there. Attracted by the "don't be evil" business philosophy, the opportunity to spend 20% of their time on personally interesting projects, or just the free lunches by the Grateful Dead's chef, really talented programmers flock there. So, even if it broadens into dozens of other services, Google's corporate culture will help to ensure it stays the best search engine in the universe.

*You'll need an ACM membership to read the article, but lots of university libraries also subscribe.

Angel's Rest

We've had an unusually large number of sunny days this winter—I fear what our seasonal karma will bring in the spring. But in the meantime, Hannah and I took advantage of a pleasant day in the Gorge to take a quick hike up Angel's Rest along with dozens of gregarious dogs and their owners. Pictures are up in the photo section.

My design portfolio

Though all my usability experience tells me brevity is best and that people look for navigation-type links at the top and sides of pages, I'm still worried that the graduate school admissions committees coming to this site won't notice the link to my design portfolio at the top of the page. And I just want to put a really wordy entry with prominent text links to my design portfolio in this blog. But linking so gratuitously to my design portfolio would be overkill, wouldn't it?

Today is Powell's day

We just built a huge new library at one of our campuses, and now have a correspondingly huge amount of money for filling the shelves. So, today a platoon of librarians will converge on Powell's, filling carts with glossy-covered paperbacks, swilling World Cup coffee, and abusing the WiFi network. And I somehow convinced them I'd be useful in the endeavor. If you're in the neighborhood this morning, I'll be on the fourth floor or at the technical bookstore communing with Fup.

Update: My apologies to anyone trying to find graphic design books there this afternoon; I'm pretty sure I bought them all.

If my coworkers consent, I may add more photos shortly.

Every night should have bellydancing

I had my first bellydancing class tonight, and oh, did I love it. The bare feet, the music, the jingle of bell-laden hip scarves. For a tense type-A like me, it's the perfect way to relax. Of course, my inner syntax nerd won't relax, and it's now fretting over whether "belly dance" is one word or two.

Storytelling on the web

Last night at CHIFOO, Jim Miller reviewed the nascent genre of web-based storytelling and the collaborative communities that spring up around it. Remember the huge promotion for the A.I. movie a few years ago? Microsoft designed hundreds of fake web sites that, when "read between the lines," revealed a murder mystery that seven thousand people converged on discussion boards to solve.

In 2002, Miller produced his own mystery story/game; he wanted to study its viability as a business model and (more interestingly to me) what happens on the boards. He built four fake sites (for a corporation, an academic research lab, a personal blog, and an activist group) and seeded clues across their pages for five weeks. He even built an Amazon account for the CEO of the fake corporation, with a favorites list full of money laundering books.

A community of puzzle solvers formed on the Alternative Reality Gaming Network (ARGN), trading discoveries and speculations both in-game (what will the protagonist do next?) and out-game (is the server down? what's everyone doing this weekend?). Miller said, "The board was the real game. We created the foundation for a social event that was playing out on the ARGN board."

What happens when the real and virtual worlds collide? Do the story characters know about the ARGN discussion? Of course not. But when the CEO ordered the murder of the research lab director, hundreds of ARGN members emailed the director, begging him not to go out that night. Miller's group decided at the game's outset not to reply to emails for scaling and continuity reasons. But the research director didn't go out that night . . .

Miller ended by pointing out that good general-purpose websites share characteristics with successful game sites: they are interactive and have a strong sense of character. (See my previous posts about businesses revealing personality through tone of voice.)

More about Miller's project is on his site (if you can stomach the overuse of the word "faux-ness.") His analysis is excellent; I can't wait to see what he does next.

Oh, and I won the drawing last night. Finally! After three years of meetings, I got to take home a nifty book: Digital Storytelling.