By
Tunde Cockshott, on June 18th, 2010
Now things are getting interesting. Time has released a video demo of their latest demo of a future tablet magazine. There is a Time app on the iPad but it is not very inspiring – this however is much richer and has some nice UI touches and unique gestures.
But the production of this sort of rich content will be expensive to produce, and the tools needed to deliver this form of new media have yet to be developed. How they intend to do this is not clear, but there is clearly an opportunity to develop a DTP tool for tablet magazine creation. The format is evolving and it is interesting to watch, and more interesting to play a part in its development.
Well worth a look: View on Youtube
By
Tunde Cockshott, on October 27th, 2009
This study by Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy looks at the effect of the digital revolution on the geographical distribution of our social networks.
They studied 100,000 Facebook and email users and mapped the volume of communication against geographic distance. It turns out that we predominantly use these digital tools to talk to our geographically close friends.
By
Tunde Cockshott, on October 21st, 2009
Earlier this year Engagementdb released a social media brand ranking tool and an accompanying report. They rate the level of social media engagement and the number of channels of the top 100 brands. They then correlate this against financial performance. This tends to show that those brands with a high social engagement saw their revenues increase by 18% while those with low engagement saw a reduction of 6%. This does not take into account many other factors so it is a simple approach but it is one of the few instances where actual ROI has been applied to engagement.
By
Tunde Cockshott, on October 16th, 2009
We all know the mantra of ‘talk with’, not ‘talk at’ your users. Here is a very simple example of how this can be achieved. It uses a standard aspect of design in a new way. Rather than make login and registration a purely simple functional form filling exercise, Moof, a social music site, uses the idea of a conversation to engage users.
However, it falls down when you enter incorrect data. The error checking and warning messages revert to old school error messages and this destroys the friendly impression.
By
Tunde Cockshott, on October 16th, 2009
Interesting work done by Stefan Herzog & Hertwig, R. (2009) on how to apply a form of wisdom of crowds, but when there is only one person. They call it dialectic bootstrapping.
The idea is that when you have to make an estimate of a potential value, such as a date, a numeric value a percentage etc, you follow this procedure:
1. Make your first estimate. This should be done in the way you would normally make an estimate; with as much thought and consideration you would normally apply.
2. Assume that your first estimate is off the mark.
3. Think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? What do these new considerations imply? Was the first estimate rather too high or too low?
4. Based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.
Then average the two estimates to get a new dialectic estimate – based on the
Continue reading Wisdom of one
By
Tunde Cockshott, on October 8th, 2009
Amazon has just announced that Kindle is going global – or at least it will be sold in 100 countries, arriving in UK on 19th October. Sony has just released the second generation of its ereader. At the same time Apple is rumored to be in talks with publishers about selling books through iTunes with enhanced functionality and content. These would be available via their much hyper tablet device. So it appears that ebooks may be finally ready for mainstream adoption.
The question is what advantages do ebooks really offer? If Apple is to offer enhanced content and functionality, what will be the killer features which will make enough of us abandon paper in favor of digital?
So far the Kindle and other ereaders have offered, portability, mass storage, long battery life (but not as long as that of a traditional book), book marking,
Continue reading The age of Book 2.0
