marypcbuk

Out here in the real world, I want the address, a map and directions as well, ideally from a GPS because I'd rather do my serendipitous exploring without the stress of getting lost and being late. In the digital world, I don't want directions: I want the address for the content I'm after. Show me, don't tell me. If there's a two-minute section in a video that covers what I want, I don't want all 93 minutes and the instruction to fast-forward 47 minutes and 15 seconds. I want the computer to do the scut work. If there's an event, I don't want to get sent to your calendar with instructions to scroll forward to March 20th, I want to go straight to the page. Don't point me at three weeks worth of discussions about the next project, link straight to the message where everyone agrees on the project spec. If I find what I want quickly then I'll have time to browse around and enjoy serendipity, but don't make me go through a maze if I don't want to.

To be able to give a user the address of the exact information they want means breaking down monolithic content like video streams and calendars and forum threads. And that means thinking about how things are indexed, and they they're presented. When Blinkx finds a video that matches what you're searching for it could send an offset to start the video playing at the right point - but content owners don't like that because they've put the ads that pay for their service at the beginning of the video. Too many groupware systems give you a link for the calendar, not a link for individual days or events in the calendar. And if a link to a forum comes up in a search you'll usually find yourself at the first post in the thread rather than the relevant post - the whole thread has been indexed rather than the individual posts.

What's the logical addressable unit of content? It's going to vary depending on the content type, but as a consumer I'm going to want more granularity than the producer expects. Often, there's a fragment of information that's exciting or interesting that I want to share rather than pointing someone at a whole work; I'm hoping they'll find the whole thing interesting, but it's the snippet I think will catch them. The smart content provider will see value in letting me push people to the interesting bit in the hope they'll want to see more rather than forcing people to sit through all of it. Addressability might look like losing control - actually it's giving both publisher and visitor finer grained control.

"never mind the dotted quad, it's the thread that binds the Net together." For years I've been saying of online success that people come for content and stay for community. I've just had a long and fascinating conversation* with Marc Smith of the Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group, nominally about the SNARF email triage tool and actually about the value and finite availability of attention, the value of interaction and current steps in detecting, visualising and using human relationships digitally. Ironically, talking about a tool that helps you with triage turned into a conversation that's sent me off in a lot of interesting new directions. I want to go to the Smithsonian folk music archive and find the songs from the first generation with choruses about how much people hate their cold, draughty, won’t-start-keeps-stopping, slow, dreadful, won't last wonderful new cars.

Marc is behind Netscan - software that measures and maps social spaces like Usenet; they're planning to turn it into a community reputation tool that could work for any threaded social space. Picturing Usenet - an article from the group in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication - has lots more visualisations and identifies various online personality types: questioners, answer people, trolls, locals, cynics, conversationalists... The treemaps that they produce apply to any hierarchical information - like the classic sales territories so many people track in Excel - so the Microsoft Treemapper with Excel Add-In they've made available could be handy.

Computers have the ability to slice, dice, drill and map so much data from the information we store of them and the monolithic way so much information is presented is a real waste. After playing with the colour categories and To-Do tags in Outlook 12 and the visualisation of conditional formatting in Excel 12, I'm rather hoping that 2006 could be the year of data visualisation. Marc mentioned the ClearContext Inbox Manager as a way of getting Outlook 12-style goodness now, and I notice it works with ActiveWords which I must make time to play with (I got distracted by being able to use shortcuts in the Windows Search deskbar to get verbs - so I can type lj or flickr and a username to jump straight to someone on either service).

I'm now looking forward to the two new versions of SNARF we'll get this year and the new features planned for them... luckily for me, some of the things I thought it would be neat to see (like tagging people who matter to me irrespective of the statistics of our email exchanges) are already on the list.

*best parts of my job, the conversations

**SNARF and the Treemapper have their own pages but they're also on http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/default.aspx -another of those interesting places to browse through. GroupBar is available there (a tool for grouping and managing windows for large desktops), as is the Search Result Clustering Toolbar for grouping search results into topics...

Want to be as picky at the theatre as you are on a plane? The London theatre and concert equivalent of seatguru.com, theatremonkey.com has a cheesier design but it also has seating maps for the majority of theatres. The official Albert Hall box office site lets you see the section your ticket is in but not where within that section you are; this has row and seat numbers, colour-coded by quality.

NB Fixtureferrets sounds similar but it digs out all the 3 for 2, BOGOF, 2 for £5 and other price reductions at the supermarkets. I'm not sure spending £300 on fuel to get a £5 Morrisons voucher is a bargain and I don't want Bernard Mathhews frozen turkey breast steaks at any price but I am tempted by the reduction on Caol Isla whisky at Waitrose (and maybe the 3 for 2 Ame for the morning after)...

I was looking for when I wrote about Office metadata last, which took me to the Guardian site. Not only did I spot the nice new search, but I found that my piece on USB security had slipped into print without my noticing. Checking on Google found some features I had forgotten I'd written, like looking at the print costs for inkjet and laser. I also spotted that my Office column for PC Advisor is being syndicated in PC World Australia.

Not as often as I ought to, I remember to check out the Microsoft Sandbox for toys that aren't released as products but have versions you can play around with. Netscan is a way of exploring Usenet groups to see what's new, what's popular and where you could go to discuss a particular subject - which I like because it's nice to see Usenet is still going. after all, you met such nice people there! But what I like most is this tree map showing the newsgroup hierarchy, sized by posting volume and colour-coded by increase and decrease in volume. There are historical snapshots so you can go back and see that in October 2000 people where talking about more and more things more and more every month. I'd like to see the maps animated to show the change over time ;-)