http://blog.alexkelleher.com Psychology, data, future gazing, and the internet. Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:18:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Building, as I am, a companythat delivers user benefit from observing behavior and processing that data, I spend a lot of time looking into the latest research on human/internet behaviour. The thing is, all this research is obviously very new.  We don't yet fully understand how daily integration of online affects ... http://blog.alexkelleher.com/2008/11/07/continuous-partial-attention-or-how-to-focus-on-everything/ This out in August, but missed me until now.   Ofcom's (UK communications regulator) "Communications Market Report".  Apart from talk of the UK getting faster broadband (I'm not holding my breath, although buying a BT iPlate increased my connection speeds by almost double, I kid you not), something grabbed my attention.  The ... http://blog.alexkelleher.com/2008/10/28/ofcom-report-share-of-media/ Every so often (i.e. not very often), the web springs a pleasant and unexpected surprise.  Like when I clicked on the "enter site" link on Searcy's guide to the 30 St Mary Axe, London (the "Gherkin").   I won't spoil it, give it a go! http://blog.alexkelleher.com/2008/10/15/flash-goodness/ For the first time, one "chat bot" managed to fool 25% of its human conversationalists that they were chatting to another human.   The annual Loebner prize ($3000, so they're not in it for the money) was won by Elbot, created by Fred Roberts, this last Sunday.  The "Turing Test" model sets ... http://blog.alexkelleher.com/2008/10/13/artificial-intelligence-25-of-testers-fooled/ Recently Infoworld published their 10 "future shock" predictions.  Here they are, and what I think of them (and a couple of my own): 1.  Triumph of the cloud - following on from Amazon's EC2 services and the like, and from early attempts such as SETI@home'sdistributed search for E.T.  Verdict: quite likely, ... http://blog.alexkelleher.com/2008/10/09/10-future-shock-predictions-well-12-actually/ Every so often, a product idea just clicks.  This is one of them - a virtual "cable" projected onto the windscreen that shows you exactly the turning you need to take.  Simple.  Brilliant.  Check out the videos on their site. While I'm on the subject, a bit more TomTom - style "social" networking ... http://blog.alexkelleher.com/2008/10/03/satnav-wrong-turns-and-social-driving/ 253 million at the latest count, according to the government agency China Internet Network Information Centre.   Impressively, 214 million of those are broadband users - but the biggest growth is mobile phone access.   Apparently, the "Great Firewall of China" is still blocking or rendering unusable large numbers of sites, so ... http://blog.alexkelleher.com/2008/09/26/china-has-more-internet-users-than-any-other-country/ I've said on here before that not enough visualisation is being used, so it's great to find new ideas - even if they're not totally useable/useful. DoodleBuzz is one such example, you could call it the Zen of news exploration. Even after 5 minutes of doodling, I have relatively little ... http://blog.alexkelleher.com/2008/09/25/exploring-the-news-visually/ Given that I use this as a demonstration of an effective, viral-style ad quite a bit, I thought it was about time I posted it here.   At 2.2m views, and 2,500 comments (as well as a bunch of either copy, copycat or homage videos with strong incremental viewing) it's a resounding example ... http://blog.alexkelleher.com/2008/09/20/dude/ I just went to an event with Dick Powell from product design agency Seymour Powell talking about all aspects of design and creativity as part of DesignLondon.  It was good material about some of their now iconic designs for kettles, toasters, toilets and the like.  The fact that he could have given (and ... http://blog.alexkelleher.com/2008/09/17/5-minutes-of-zero-gravity/