Technology, media, architecture & strategy
From AdNews:
Pacific Magazines’ Practical Parenting has launched its first website. The site, built as part of Pacific Magazines partnership with Yahoo!7, will act as the gateway to Yahoo!7′s parenting portal, and will include photo sharing though Flickr, as well as forums, advice, competitions and and articles.
I am working on faceted search across web and mobile sites at the moment and this article popped up so I check it out:
Faceted search is extremely helpful for certain kinds of finding—particularly for ecommerce apps. Unfortunately, the designers of mobile applications do not have established user interface paradigms they can follow or abundant screen real estate for presenting facets and filters in a separate area on the left or at the top of a screen. To implement faceted search on mobile devices, we need to get creative rather than following established Web design patterns.
Read more on UX Matters.
From UX Matters:
One of the most important aspects of product development is the process of predicting the behavior of a product’s intended users.
“Assumptions are important and useful. However, if not managed properly, they can definitely lead a project down the wrong path.”
From ZDNet:
Internet and email were the most preferred and frequently used channels for Australians to interact with the government, according to a report on interacting with government released today, outweighing calling and face-to-face interviews.
Phone hanging off the hook“Internet remains the most frequent channel last used to contact government with two in five (38 per cent) people doing so. This is followed by in person and telephone usage,” said the report. Participants cited convenience and the nature of their queries as the major factor in driving this decision.
There goes my Journalism degree!
Journalistic texts are characterised by a certain structure that algorithms can be programmed to imitate. The first tests still read or hear like early prototypes, but they’re already around in sports journalism, with finance or local news to come next.
In the US, two different projects have started work on algorithm produced journalism. Last week the sports statistics website StatSheet announced a plan to produce completely automated sports content as of this summer. The algorithm produced content will take the form of blogs, with a target that at least 90% of the readers should think the content was created by a human.
Pot shots galore:
The announcement on Friday that News International would implement a paywall for the Times and Sunday Times from June has sparked a lot of interest.
And now it’s offering people the chance to pre-register for the service. Wow – not only do you get to pay £1 per day, or £2 per week, but you also get to be the target of News International mailshots.
Such a hot topic and it’s fun to see so many negative opinions on the topic. Paywalls will not work. Simple.
After my Telstra debacle last year, I Twittered my frustration and after MONTHS of no joy with their call centre the Telstra Twitter team (bless their socks) cleared my problems up and I now no longer receive a bill for something that I had never been delivered by BigPond. So this AdNews article comes as some surprise:
Only 12% of the top 50 Australian brands are listening and responding to their customers’ comments on Twitter, according to a social media study by advertising agency BCM.
BCM analysed nearly 8,000 relevant mentions for 81 brands or organisations on Twitter throughout two weeks in Q4 2009 to monitor how brands were responding to consumers’ negative and positive commentary.
A segment from the Australian show ‘Hungry Beast’ Aired on Australia’s ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) network. http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/ Episode 14 Google’s phrase ‘Dont be Evil’…
Another IBM presentation on TheServerSide.Net:
Organizations continue to spend upwards of 70% of their technology budgets in maintaining an existing inventory of applications, some of which are redundant and some of which have exceeded their useful life, and continue to consume resources without returning value.
iiNet has acquired fellow internet service provider (ISP) Netspace for $40 million.
The acquisition will give iiNet a further 70,000 customers, nudging its market share to 12.4 per cent, just shy of what iiNet chief Michael Malone has previously said that he wants to reach in preparation for the activation of the National Broadband Network.