Two stories. 1) A former colleague of mine did a research project for a power company on one of those machines you have in your house that goes red if you are consuming lots of electricity. One participant started boiling water on the gas hob when she was making tea because that way she could keep the thing from going past amber. 2) A different colleague of mine uses an iPhone app which is...
What is a browser?
The lovely people at Google took to the streets with a video camera and asked passers-by three questions: What is a browser? What is the difference between a search engine and a browser? Which browser do you use? Less than 8% of people interviewed on that day knew what a browser was. Less than 8% of people interviewed on that day knew what a browser was. Are you surprised? I wasn’t. These...
Marmite, my mate?
I started a rather undersubscribed group on Facebook to take the discussion about the dreadful travesty that is the changed Marmite recipe out of the kitchen at work and into the wider world. This is very obviously a personal rant. If you are not a Marmite lover then please support my right to Marmite the way I know and love it and not this immitation stuff they made for the squeezy (pah...
Cor!
Stalking 2.0 – Should we go private or public?
I think we can safely say that I am quite comfortable with the interweb. For me it really is a utility without which I complain. So, I don’t think it comes as a terrible surprise that I am often taken aback by people’s concerns about using something like flickr. “I don’t want pictures of my family where the whole world can see them!” One of my friends goes as far as...
Participation culture and being ‘googled’
My friend Leisa wrote a post about participation culture recently. This is a subject she and I talk about quite often, mostly because she is a serious blogger and I am a little reserved about the whole thing. She is not the only one who talks about it and in her post Leisa references a Jakob Nielsen alertbox which talks about encouraging participation. I am with her when she says that: These are...