Anne Kirah is Senior Design Anthropologist for Microsoft. She lives in Paris. She points to some of the oddities (from a US pov) of how cyworld.com (Korea) and Almererulez (Netherlands) are used. She gives lots of great examples of how cultural norms affect the take-up of tech, especially IM, text messaging, and the like.

Genevieve Bell from Intel Research points out that technology is not just going to be in our hands as we commute, it’s going to be in rural villages, powered by truck batteries, etc. We’ll see work-arounds to unexpected problems, she says, such as cellphone charging stations. She says the most popular phone service in China is a novella being sent out to cellphones via subscription, in part because cellphones can display 120 words, not just 120 characters. She says 30% of Koreans with Internet connections at home nevertheless use cyber-cafes because of the social millieu and because there is fragmentation across devices. She talks about the Indonesian e-mosque project, providing access through mosques because they are close to ubiquitous; Indonesia built access into the existing infastructure.

In most of Africa, she says, “flashing and peeping” predominate: You signal that you’ve arrived somewhere by calling home and hanging up. Families have developed remarkably sophisticated codes: Call once means “Where are you going?” Call twice means “I’ve arrived,” etc. She says that 95% of calls are incomplete. And flashing and peeping are being adopted by the African community in Europe.

Her conclusions: We should think more broadly about what computers can or should do, and we should be prepared to critically interrogate taken-for-granted terms and ideas. We could even look outside of the US for new technology cutures and design inspirations. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware]

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Six teenagers from a local sci/tech high school give presentations on how they’re using their computers socially in the course of a day. Random tidbits (kidbits?):

One got a gift certificate for iTunes, but otherwise she uses Limewire (a gnutella shell).

Text messaging costs too much to use.

One wishes there were upgrades for cellphones since hers can’t receive photos from others.

It’s rude to call up a friend just to ask about a homework question. So she uses IM.

One does a lot of Photoshopping and enjoys Audacity for remixing.

One doesn’t do much with IM but spends a lot of time on online forums about games.

One has a gmail address, a school address, and a “hotmail address for my junk mail.”

Q: Do you listen to podcasts? A: To what???

A few have blogs. One uses deadjournal instead of livejournal because it’s simpler and easier to figure out.

Q: Do you use Typepad? A: Never heard of it.

Blogging was big last year, but now it’s not. People got tired of commenting on their lives and sharing their lives.

One keeps a secret blog to put the feelings she doesn’t want to share.

One has blacked out all the names of her friends and all of their content in the screen captures she shows us in order to protect their privacy.

Some of the banner ads are fun to play especially since the popup blockers block the popups that result from, say, swatting the fly.

One’s phone broke, and even though she only talks on it maybe once a day, she “freaked out,” feeling completely disconnected.

“My attention span is just too short for email. I need a rapid response.”

They tend to use a handful of away messages. They do not use different screennames for different groups of friends.

They think the remixing they’re doing is within the law because they’re not redistributing the results. They think people will always invent new ways to get around any legal limitations on filesharing. They have no idea that “trusted computing” is going to lock down content.

They only buy music when it’s so new that they can’t find it on filesharing.

[Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware]

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I’m at the second Microsoft Social Computing Symposium in Redmond, a group of about 100 academics and normals. Last year, the conference was useful mainly outside of the presentations (and I say this as one of the presenters) because we didn’t quite figure out how to talk with one another in a public forum. This year, it’s more discussion-oriented. They even switched from last year’s One Big Room format to a hotel with some nooks and crannies.

The main room is a typical set up: long tables with chairs, all facing forward. (I’m sitting next to Liz!). But Shelly Farnham has us do an unusual opening exercise: A person stands up, says a few sentences about herself, and throws a ball of string at someone she knows, creating a physical knot of people.

The IRC is at irc.freenode.net #scs. Come join us. [Technorati tags: scs SocialSoftware]

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RAW files contain the raw, low-level info about the state of the camera when you took a digital photo. It’s important to the pros but it remains undocumented. Now Stanley Krute writes, in an email:

..we’re launching a website today that’ll spearhead our campaign to get the camera manufacturers to document their RAW formats. The website is here: http://OpenRAW.org There’s a press release here: http://OpenRAW.org/press/

Sounds like just the sort of thing wikis were built for. Anyway, good luck to the RAW folks. [Technorati tags: raw photography]

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The Stark (or is it spelled “S+ark”? Hard to tell) mouse from Microsoft is lovely — a chromium version of some bicameral body part. But the entire left and right side serve as the buttons, which means that you have no place to rest your hand. As a result, I end up clicking three times by mistake for every time I intend to. As my father would have said: Designed by someone who never used it. Ack.

(I’m being rude to my hosts. I’m at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, and the mouse was part of the swag. So I should at least mention the two lovely books they gave us, including The Interventionists from a very cool exhibit at Mass MoCA. Also, dinner last night was lots of fun.) [Technorati tag: PhilippeStark]

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In the course of researching a column for KMWorld:

The Encyclopedia Britannica has about 65,000 topics spread across 32 volumes, for a total of 44,000,000 words. Average size of a topic: 676 words. [source]

Wikipedia has over 500,000 topics in English. Average length (using year-old figures): 294 .

BTW, I may have found an error in Wikipedia’s Britannica entry. It currently says: “As of 2004, the most complete version of Encyclopædia Britannica contains about 120,000 articles, with 44 million words.” That page count refers to the online version, but I think the word count applies to the print version. I haven’t found a word count for the online version.

I haven’t corrected the Wikipedia article because I haven’t found a source that really clarifies this. Besides, I’ve never gotten a fact right. [Technorati tag: wikipedia]

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Traveling to Seattle today for two days at a Microsoft social software conference, a morning at Amazon doing research for my book, and a morning talking with CNN about taxonomic stuff. Back on Thursday night, possibly too late to catch Steve Johnson’s free talk at Harvard, which you would be nuts to miss if you’re anywhere nearby.

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Del.icio.us has a feature in beta that lets you collect a set of your tags into a “bundle” that then shows up at the top of the your personal page. For example, if you declare the tags “parody,” “sarcasm” and “puns” to be part of a “humor” bundle, all three of those tags will be listed under a big, bold “Humor” on the right hand side of your del.icio.us home page. You can create a bundle by going to http://del.icio.us/settings/YOURUSERID/bundle.

(Thanks to Hanan Cohen who found this at LibraryStuff who found it at BlogDriversWaltz. Very interesting discussions at both those sites.) [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags folksonomy delicious]

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Merry Willis, my sister-in-law the writer, has had a bunch of writing published recently.

You can read “The Story of Scheherezade and Dunzyad” in The Pedestal Magazine here. How can you go wrong with a story that begins “Except for the eunuchs…”? It’s a terrific read…sort of Scheherezade fan-fiction.

And the American Book Review gives Merry’s Dwight’s House and Other Stories a very positive review. That book and her new sf novel, The City Built of Starships, are both finalists for Foreward Magazine’s Book-of-the-Year award. Go Meredith Sue! [Technorati tags: MeredithSueWillis fiction]

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Booker Rising describes itself as a “News site for black moderates and black conservatives.” It aggregates news stories through that filter and comments on them briefly. In my poking around, it seemed pretty fair, and I’m finding stories there that I’d otherwise miss. (Thanks to Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice.)

(BTW, hardly any of the left column displays in Firefox, but it does in IE.)

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