marypcbuk

And I don't just mean the travelling ;-)

The Marc Smith interview I did for the FT on email overload and social metadata is going to be reprinted in a Swiss business newspaper called CASH. Presumably translated into Swiss German, though I'm not sure yet.

There was a fascinating talk at a press event for 2007 Office collaboration tools yesterday by Carsten Sorensen of the LSE covering how changes in manufacturing technology had defined early working conditions both physical and social, so that it's OK to interrupt people at work but not in a private space because by definition employees are available. Made me think of the stress induced by the Victorian stock tickers by telegraph whcih extended the working day to the club or the home. IT is having that effect: your fluid working day with information requested by email or IM is my interruption. Interconnect everyone for synergy and you make everyone deal with the impact of that on their work and we haven't got the working practices to deal with it, or often the right management attitude. I did like his story of 'email man' - a guy at Deutsche Bank who responds to 1,000 emails a day and who he descrived as an 'interaction machine'.

Yes, we are pretty much always travelling and yes, we're off again ;-) The late Spring US tour kicks off next month...

May 3rd - 6th New York - Microsoft Office
May 6th - 10th San Francisco - HP's mobility summit and possibly an Ajax conference
(May 10th - 14th) - not sure whether we'll stay in the Bay Area or drive down the coast; wineries and friends in the Bay Area tempt us!
May 14th - 17th San Diego - for the Future in Review conference which I'm very excited about because of the fascinating people we'll get to meet and talk/listen to. I interviewed Mark Anderson a couple of years ago, I read his Strategic News Service newsletter every month and I think he's very smart and nearly always right, plus the gathering of CEOs and others who also read the newsletter and turn up to talk about the issues he raises have had me wanting to get to the event for a while.
(May 10th - 14th) - not sure whether we'll go back to the Bay Area (friends, wineries etc, see above) or head straight up to Seattle
May 22rd - 28th Seattle - for WinHEC, plus meeting Marc Smith's team at Microsoft Research to see what's happening with SNARF
May 28th - 29th New York (and then home) - go back to New York because that's what our plane tickets do, see that nice spride in situ, get to be tourists!

As always, we're hoping to make business travel more fun by seeing friends along the way - if we're hitting your town, let us know when you're free! If you have ideas about nice cheap places to stay in New York, please let us know! I already have a couple of things I'll be trying to pick up to take to friends (lavender soap, rose wine...); if there's anything else you'd like us to bring you, let me know ASAP and we'll try to pick it up over the weekend.

Current Music: Jann Tierson - La Releve

Two pieces published yesterday, one in the Developer Register, the other in the FT Digital Business section, one about Higgins and the attempt to simplify the way developers work with identity, the other about the horrible state of the average inbox and what Marc Smith, Microsoft's research sociologist, thinks software should do about it.

Higgins is one of the interesting individual developments in identity that will go to make up an identity metasystem; enough small pieces and I won't have to call it Kim Cameron's idea for an identity metasystem, or designate it in any way because it will be widespread enough to really be a metasystem. Breaking identity up into little pieces tightly managed is one of those ideas it's easy to dismiss because it's a big thing; everyone has to play if it's going to work because it has to work with everything. It's like my childhood reaction to learning about communism; 'what a nice idea, it's a shame people aren't actually like that' (a hardened cynic by the age of 11). TCP and printer drivers were big ideas; one of them won because it was obviously a better solution, one because it made things easier for users and developers. (Guess which I think is which!). There are enough people and pieces and players and financial penalties coming together that we might get Identity 2.0. I'll be writing more about this for DevReg, covering Intel Research's project and what PGP is up to these days.

SNARF is one of those nifty tools that can dig you out of a hole (I'll point it at the email I skimmed whilst travelling in case I missed anything crucial) but it's only a prototype done to find out what people need. The nice thing about that is that if baby steps are useful, bigger lessons might be another big shift. The principle I took from my AI degree was that we don’t know enough about why we work the way we do to emulate or simulate it usefully, but we do know enough to start making interfaces that make it easier to work the way we do.

Marc Smith is hugely fun to talk to and a joy to interview, because he comes out with lines like No one is giving me more heartbeats per day or more minutes; there is no Moore’s Law for humans. I am not becoming twice as intelligent and half as cheap; if anything the cost is going up and I’m slowing down."

After Steve Ballmer's health scare, I heard rumours that he and Bill Gates can be found reading email on exercise bikes at the gym. Now they could switch to dancing through the messages. Imagine jumping on mail from your boss or kicking spam out of the way.

The StepMail application uses an off-the-shelf "dance pad"to let a user carry out commands in e-mail - such as scroll, open, close, delete, flag and place messages in folders - by tapping a set of six buttons on the floor. Another prototype application, StepPhoto, allows foot-controlled scrolling and sorting through digital photographs.
“Many information workers spend a majority of their time trapped at their desk dealing with e-mail. We wanted to provide them with an alternative,” said Brian Meyers, a member of the Step User Interface Project Group involved in the prototype. “By allowing information workers to stand and continue to read, delete and flag e-mail messages, StepMail gives them a break from the keyboard and mouse, which reduces the risk of repetitive stress injury in their hands and wrists and engages more of their bodies’ muscles.”

It also reminds me of a set of tech support war stories published by, I think, Compaq, where someone phoned up because the 'foot pedal' on their notebook wasn't very responsive. The foot pedal on my sewing machine gives me acceleration and deceleration as well as on and off. I've been playing Tux Racing on a THinkPad X41 using the accelerometer in the hard drive to detect how I wave the notebook around in mid-air. I love controlling the PlayStation through the EyeToy camera. One the one hand there's the sense of wonder you used to get from controlling a computer at all; on the other, it's a more intimate connection because you don't need to only use your fingers and your eyes. The MS researchers behind this are in the VIBE team (Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment) who do a lot of cool things. I interviewed the Senior Researcher, Mary Czerwinski, a couple of years ago for a piece on how our brains adjust to using two screens side by side (you very quickly tune out the bezel of the screen in the middle and perceive the split screen as one information source).

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Entries tagged with microsoft research

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Off we go again... May in the US

It's all about information overload really

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