Just came across one of those German compound nouns that cannot be translated 1:1 into English, may seem strange to the non-German speaker but sometimes perhaps capture the essence of a given phenomen or concept so aptly that they find their way into the English language. Like "Zeitgeist" or "Blitzkrieg" etc. - in this case, it was used by the German designer Dieter Rams - according to Manager Magazin a sort of design-grandfather of the iPhone: "Selbsterklaerungsqualitaet", refering to good design and his believe that displays / interaction models should be self-explanatory. It literally translates to "Selfexplenatoryquality" - which just doesn't seem as precise ( or grammatically correct for that matter).
Any mass market user interface should have "Selbsterklaerungsqualitaet" as the main objective. No manual needed. No help section needed.
Monday, 22 October 2007
Friday, 27 July 2007
FlashLite projection by VisionMobile
Interesting assessment on the future of FlashLite by VisionMobile, which was linked to on the latest version of the Carnival of the Mobilists.
Saturday, 14 July 2007
Peter Kollock: The Economies of Online Collaboration
Searching Technorati for further information on what makes people share, cooperate, create content on social sites, I came across a reference to Peter Kollock's article "The Economies of Online Collaboration". This article explores this question focussing on forums / sites where users help each other ("What can explain the amount of cooperation that does occur in online communities"). It was published in 1999, which of course pre-dates the entire web 2.0 hype by several years, but just brings to mind that there has been plenty of social user-generated content and cooperation since the beginnings of the web, not just since youtube and myspace.
Kollock sets out by considering the information given in usenet forums etc. (remember, this is the 90ies) as essentially free information, ie. gifts, given to mostly unknown recipients. I like this notion of seeing user's advice as "gifts" without direct reciprocity (giver does not know recipient) - another intrinsic motivation (the joy of "doing good"). Kollock, however, sees this from an economical standpoint, where the extrinsic incentive of giving free advice to a community lies in the perception that by giving to a community one is also entitled to ask back from that community. I think both incentives can be highly energizing motivators.
Perhaps the extrinsic part can be addressed by offering some sort of credit system per created content (at a minimum listing past contributions of a given user) - and e.g. listing the top 10 contributors on a site's homepage, or by expecting that other users will want to e.g. reply to people with high credit scores more easily, in order to give back. Kollock stresses the importance of identity persistence for this "anticipated reciprocity" to work.
Also find it interesting that he distinguishes between egoistic and altruistic motives.
He lists as egoistic motivators:
Kollock sets out by considering the information given in usenet forums etc. (remember, this is the 90ies) as essentially free information, ie. gifts, given to mostly unknown recipients. I like this notion of seeing user's advice as "gifts" without direct reciprocity (giver does not know recipient) - another intrinsic motivation (the joy of "doing good"). Kollock, however, sees this from an economical standpoint, where the extrinsic incentive of giving free advice to a community lies in the perception that by giving to a community one is also entitled to ask back from that community. I think both incentives can be highly energizing motivators.
Perhaps the extrinsic part can be addressed by offering some sort of credit system per created content (at a minimum listing past contributions of a given user) - and e.g. listing the top 10 contributors on a site's homepage, or by expecting that other users will want to e.g. reply to people with high credit scores more easily, in order to give back. Kollock stresses the importance of identity persistence for this "anticipated reciprocity" to work.
Also find it interesting that he distinguishes between egoistic and altruistic motives.
He lists as egoistic motivators:
- anticipated reciprocity
- reputation (bragging rights)
- sense of efficacy ("If a sense of efficacy is what is motivating someone, then contributions are likely to be increased to the extent that people can observe changes in the community attributable to their actions")
And as altruistic motivators:
- help someone who has a need
- attachment to a community: help the group with which one identifies to prosper
All of this of course only applies to those sites that enable the sharing of knowledge, but not the sharing of "self".
Usergenerated Content - Motivation
The other day I read a post on the Mobile Monday London mailing list about what is it that makes a lot of people share their knowledge, their experiences, their life and emotions on all those Web 2.0 websites in the form of videos, blogs, answers, comments, votes etc. ... without any monetary rewards / material incentive ... While - at the same time - a lot of other people are perfectly happy to just consume rather than add anything themselves ? This got me thinking - what criteria does a website need to fulfill in order to attract and retain both creators and lurkers ? What do each of those user-segments / clusters have in common?
Furthermore, do different kind of web 2.0 sites provide different incentives for sharing / adding content ?
According to Wikipedia motivation can be defined as follows:
This leaves motivation, ie. the expectation to fulfill a certain need, to achieve certain goals, as the main causal factor for users to add content. What goals a user might hope to fulfill may further vary based on the proposition / context of a site.
I think sites that attract / are based on user-generated content can be categorized as follows:
1) Blogs
2) Youtube, Flickr and other video- and photosharing sites
3) Knowledge-sharing sites / forums / online reviews, such as Yahoo! Answers, reviews on IMDB.com and Amazon.com
4) Social Communities like MySpace, Facebook - also dating sites like match.com and business networking sites like linkedin.com and xing.com
5) Social Bookmarking and Voting, like del.icio.us, digg, wis.dm
Motives can be intrinsic (for the sheer enjoyment, the activity itself satisfies the need) and extrinsic (as a means to a goal, e.g. praise / trophies).
Likely incentives / objectives for sharing content I could imagine to fall into both the intrinsic and the extrinsic category. The following list is surely non-exhaustive, and of course not based on any empirical data-analysis:
Intrinsic:
Furthermore, do different kind of web 2.0 sites provide different incentives for sharing / adding content ?
According to Wikipedia motivation can be defined as follows:
This definition also raises the question whether users who regularly participate and create content share some similar personality and emotional characteristics ? I would argue that the emotional state does not play a major role, as people post content when they are happy, sad, bored, unhappy, angry etc. . Personality might certainly play a role, e.g. one might argue that extroverts are more likely to reach out and share their experiences and opinions. On the other side, one might argue that introverts are more likely to use websites as an easier way to contact others. For the sake of argument, let's assume that personality traits are distributed equally amongst users of web 2.0 sites as they are amongst general Internet users - ie. covering the full range of personality traits, in a bell-shaped curve, with no single trait differentiating participating users from pure consumers.Motivation is a temporal and dynamic state that should not be confused with personality or emotion. Motivation is having the desire and willingness to do something. A motivated person can be reaching for a long-term goal such as becoming a professional writer or a more short-term goal like learning how to spell a particular word. Personality invariably refers to more or less permanent characteristics of an individual's state of being (e.g., shy, extrovert, conscientious). As opposed to motivation, emotion refers to temporal states that do not immediately link to behavior (e.g., anger, grief, happiness).
This leaves motivation, ie. the expectation to fulfill a certain need, to achieve certain goals, as the main causal factor for users to add content. What goals a user might hope to fulfill may further vary based on the proposition / context of a site.
I think sites that attract / are based on user-generated content can be categorized as follows:
1) Blogs
2) Youtube, Flickr and other video- and photosharing sites
3) Knowledge-sharing sites / forums / online reviews, such as Yahoo! Answers, reviews on IMDB.com and Amazon.com
4) Social Communities like MySpace, Facebook - also dating sites like match.com and business networking sites like linkedin.com and xing.com
5) Social Bookmarking and Voting, like del.icio.us, digg, wis.dm
Motives can be intrinsic (for the sheer enjoyment, the activity itself satisfies the need) and extrinsic (as a means to a goal, e.g. praise / trophies).
Likely incentives / objectives for sharing content I could imagine to fall into both the intrinsic and the extrinsic category. The following list is surely non-exhaustive, and of course not based on any empirical data-analysis:
Intrinsic:
- To leave a mark / make an impact: the desire to make oneself heard, with the satisfaction being the sense of making a difference. I would argue 1, 2. 3 and 5 above all contribute to fulfilling this need.
- Social needs: to interact and share with others, enjoying the act of communicating and sense of belonging. All of the categories of sites above will cater to this desire.
- Creative need: there is an immense intrinsic satisfaction in being creative, in having the sense of creating something new and unique. 1) - 4) do address this, 5) does not.
- Bragging rights: to see your name / nickname / video rated as highly popular, or listed on a popular sites homepage. On sites of the category 4) above, to show off one's popularity / connectedness might be the incentive to add and interact with as many contacts as possible.
- Romantic / sexual needs: Certainly, sites from category 4) have this drive as a main motive.
- Self-PR as expert for a given field: 1), 3) and 5) above
Surely, this list of motives is not exhaustive. But all of those motives are going to be present at some point as well with users who never or seldomly generate content. The potential for web 2.0 sites to fulfill those needs does not explain, why some people choose those sites to fulfill these needs and others choose different means. It does, however, serve as a starting point to nail down which needs different web 2.0 sites need to address and offer to satisfy, in order to attract those users who do tend to choose the internet as one way to fulfill these needs.
Sunday, 8 July 2007
Friday, 6 July 2007
Free Hugs Campaign
Just read about this hugs campaign - some guy holding up a "Free Hugs" sign at a street in Sydney with many pedestrians. The cynic in me discarded this immediately as hippie-crap, but the hippie in me watched the video - and I have to say, I was quite moved. Apparently, this quickly spread into a fun-thing to do, random strangers hugging - male, female, old, young - and then became a global phenomenon ... free hugs in Korea, Amsterdam, Hollywood - even though the my inner cynic introvert still produces some condescending comments, I really like the concept. After all, what's wrong with bringing more friendliness into this world - living in London, the standard modus operandi is to ignore others, or look as if one is practicing for a evil-look-contest. But then again - I have tried much less than a hug, namely just smiling at random people and did not find the smile being necessarily returned - ok, those were predominantly attractive females I smiled at, but still. Anyhow, I am all for it - bring on the hugs.
Wednesday, 13 June 2007
8 principles of fun
Something from the selfhelp department - quite enjoyed the presentation of these 8 principles, nothing revolutionary, but nice to watch.
Thursday, 31 May 2007
Saturday, 19 May 2007
TED: ideas worth spreading
TED (Technology Entertainment Design) is an annual conference with speakers from various fields, expressing novel/controversial ideas. This site offers an archive of over 100 filmed talks (adding more each week). Each talk is 18min long. Exciting stuff, I am spending several hours today listening/watching various talks. They are grouped by both fields (business, technology, arts, entertainment etc.) and themes (How the mind works, art unusual, the rise of collaboration etc.)
Paralysis through Explosion of Choice
Nice (and quite humorous) talk here by sociology professor Barry Schwartz about the flipside of the long-tail-maximizing-freedom-of-choice paradigm. His point is that traditionally it was possible to chose from a very limited number of options for a given situation, whereas today in affluent societies the choice is becoming almost unlimited. E.g. to chose from 5 different kinds of salad dressing is simple, but to chose from 500 is hard. And even when a choice is made, the nagging thought of the opportunity costs of all those other choices (wouldn't dressing X or Y have been even better) decreases the level of happiness / satisfaction one experiences.
Translated to user interface design I think this makes a good point of limiting the choices the user has to make at any given point in the navigation to a few items, that of course need to be relevant to that user at that point. Personalization is key to that, but also working with concepts / assumptions of what most likely it is that the user wants / is looking for in a given context.
Translated to user interface design I think this makes a good point of limiting the choices the user has to make at any given point in the navigation to a few items, that of course need to be relevant to that user at that point. Personalization is key to that, but also working with concepts / assumptions of what most likely it is that the user wants / is looking for in a given context.
haha
A Lifestyle-Blog ... not sure I understand what that means, but I like the postings, e.g. this video from a 60ies US games show with a performance by John Cage.
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
On Blogging And its Nihilistic Properties
Interesting article / essay about blogs and bloggers from a media-theoretical perspective. The basic premise of the article is that blogs are written into nothingness, as there are ca. 100 million of them and most of them have little to no readers. Well, that certainly rings true for this blog. The author Geert Lovink sees nihilism not in its early 20th century or 70/80ies Punk movement no-future crystallization, where it represented a pessimistic belief in the meaninglessness of life, but rather as a descriptive term that reflects the shallowness of the current epoch. I am not convinced this is an accurate term to summarize the times we live in.
Also, I am not sure I agree with the notion that blogs are a statement against the mass-media broadcast message, a distrust of that message. Certainly not true for the broad number of bloggers, neither consciously nor subconsciously ... I find it much more likely that the vast majority of bloggers do NOT blog to be citizen journalists, to provide truth in a context of lies, to be critical of established views. Lovink dismisses the notion that blogging is half online-diary, half self-PR management, but I would hypothesize that these exactly are indeed to dominant motivators in the bloggosphere. Along with a desire to keep track of daily discoveries made while oscillating through the cloud.
Personally, I know that my posts will remain more or less unread. Yet I enjoy the act of writing, of ordering my thoughts and to be able to retain at least some of the topics / sites / etc. that I find curious at a given time. My memory tends to quickly make room for new information, ie. bury acquired input and make it hard to recall. Recognition works fine, but recall can be a bitch - but in the brief time I have blogged (which was and is very much of an experiment) I find that re-reading previous posts helps me to substantiate the respective bits of information in my long-term memory which surely can't hurt.
Also, I am not sure I agree with the notion that blogs are a statement against the mass-media broadcast message, a distrust of that message. Certainly not true for the broad number of bloggers, neither consciously nor subconsciously ... I find it much more likely that the vast majority of bloggers do NOT blog to be citizen journalists, to provide truth in a context of lies, to be critical of established views. Lovink dismisses the notion that blogging is half online-diary, half self-PR management, but I would hypothesize that these exactly are indeed to dominant motivators in the bloggosphere. Along with a desire to keep track of daily discoveries made while oscillating through the cloud.
Personally, I know that my posts will remain more or less unread. Yet I enjoy the act of writing, of ordering my thoughts and to be able to retain at least some of the topics / sites / etc. that I find curious at a given time. My memory tends to quickly make room for new information, ie. bury acquired input and make it hard to recall. Recognition works fine, but recall can be a bitch - but in the brief time I have blogged (which was and is very much of an experiment) I find that re-reading previous posts helps me to substantiate the respective bits of information in my long-term memory which surely can't hurt.
Sunday, 22 April 2007
Digg Labs: Another Alternative To Represent Data
Similar to tag clouds, where tags grow in size the more often they are being used, this version called bigspy from the Digg Labs called of digged articles displays the respective article headline in a bigger sized font the more people digged it. Check the "all activity" section to get a clear picture of the concept.
The other lab products are interesting as well, but I don't find them as visually intuitive, more playful than useful really.
The other lab products are interesting as well, but I don't find them as visually intuitive, more playful than useful really.
Friday, 20 April 2007
What? Only 669 kbps ? - Yeah, I just stumbled on it.
Two new nice tools I, well, stumbled upon. The first one: StumbleUpon. A recommendation engine somewhat similar to digg, running via its own toolbar. In setting this up one selects topic of interest (e.g. books, news, internet tools, movies, robotics etc.), downloads the toolbar as an .exe and off it goes. The space at the top of my browserscreen is now becoming a bit crowded, with the address field, the menu-items, the Yahoo toolbar, the "Links" row, two delicious buttons that take up a row of their own, the Google toolbar and now the StumbleUpon toolbar. Somebody should come up with some sort of dynamic toolbar integrator that condenses different toolbars into single buttons, and displays them on-the-fly or something.
Anyhow, the toolbar has a "Stumble" button that calls up websites from your declared areas of interest - and that have been given a thumbs-up voting by other users. You can then vote on it for yourself. And it works: the results I received so far very actually really good, most of them got a "thumbs-up" voting from me.
One site that I will definitely use more often is a network speedtest. I thought I had a 2Mbps connection - but oh well, theory and practice.
Well, according to this speedtest I am actually at 1822 kbps . I guess it depends on which server they ping to determine downlink / uplink speed - surely it is also a factor of network traffic on my broadband providers network, but does is vary that much ?
Have not tried the video feature yet, but that's next.
Anyhow, the toolbar has a "Stumble" button that calls up websites from your declared areas of interest - and that have been given a thumbs-up voting by other users. You can then vote on it for yourself. And it works: the results I received so far very actually really good, most of them got a "thumbs-up" voting from me.
One site that I will definitely use more often is a network speedtest. I thought I had a 2Mbps connection - but oh well, theory and practice.
Well, according to this speedtest I am actually at 1822 kbps . I guess it depends on which server they ping to determine downlink / uplink speed - surely it is also a factor of network traffic on my broadband providers network, but does is vary that much ?
Have not tried the video feature yet, but that's next.
Tuesday, 17 April 2007
Snapshots: context is content
In the past months I quite enjoyed when I came across websites that had the Snapshot site preview implemented, that opens a small pop-up window with a miniature preview of the target website, when a user moves the cursor over a link. So when they announced today that they have extended this approach to further contextual concepts such as wikipedia-definitions, stockquotes, movies etc. I decided to give it a go myself.
The setup via the snap.com site the is very simple, well designed user interface. This blog-URL was identified and the instructions automatically provided specifically to a Blogger blog. All that is required is to copy/paste a Java Script code snipped into the HTML header of the blog template. This snippet references a .js file, which then does all the magic.
Conceptually I think it really creates value to the user to be able to preview the destination of any given link, and to decide whether it looks like a worthwhile site to access. The additional snapshot-contexts follow the trend that tabbed-browsing, widgets and other tools set, which is to make the browsing experience ever more integrated. The more relevant information is accessible on-demand in a convenient way in a single place, the more seamless the user-experience will be, the quicker the relevant information will be available and therefore processed.
Cool stuff.
The setup via the snap.com site the is very simple, well designed user interface. This blog-URL was identified and the instructions automatically provided specifically to a Blogger blog. All that is required is to copy/paste a Java Script code snipped into the HTML header of the blog template. This snippet references a .js file, which then does all the magic.
Conceptually I think it really creates value to the user to be able to preview the destination of any given link, and to decide whether it looks like a worthwhile site to access. The additional snapshot-contexts follow the trend that tabbed-browsing, widgets and other tools set, which is to make the browsing experience ever more integrated. The more relevant information is accessible on-demand in a convenient way in a single place, the more seamless the user-experience will be, the quicker the relevant information will be available and therefore processed.
Cool stuff.
Mobile Monday London
Last night's Mobile Monday featured a set of interesting presentations around location based services. First up was SeekerWireless, who provide a localization service that - according to the speaker - in terms of accuracy is half-way between GPS and Cell-ID based systems. I would like to find out more about what technology they employ (I did not understand how they use SMS) and also would like to see the system in action (there was no live demo yesterday). But I also was not clear that accuracy in locating a user is still a major issue in the LBS world. Specifically a slide outlining the various restrictions Nokia defines in the N95 GPS manual I felt made the drawbacks of GPS very clear.
Next up was LocoMatrix, outdoor games. The speaker was a sympathetic, entertaining if somewhat timid guy, with an obvious passion (which I totally respect): to help getting kids outdoors and moving around, in order to tackle isolation and obesity. Just not sure I was convinced by the games that were presented, I don't see that they can compete with the WIIs and Playstations / PSPs and indeed more and more advanced mobile games of this world. But cudos for the cause.
Trackaphone offers a service that helps tracking people, with apparently a focus on security-related use cases. They have a "red button" emergency concept, where upon acttivation of that feature a SMS/notification is sent to a number of defined recipients and the device starts recording what is going on ( I believe audio only). Living in a high-crime rate area of London I welcome any such technology, but wouldn't want this button to be pressed involuntarily while the phone is in my pocket without the keypad being locked.
Buddyping is one of those LBS products that I personally feel can play a part in LBS living up to its long unfulfilled hype. I don't believe that many users will look for the famous "pizza" place nearby, or be happy about receiving dozens of promotional SMS as they walk around (the Starbucks scenario). However, keeping track of your buddies with a Twitter component I think has huge potential. Which brand / product eventually establishes itself in that area remains to be seen, but I am positive that this kind of service will become exponentially more popular in the near future.
A neat tool for joggers, skiiers etc. to keep track of where they have been going in what time, distance, with a great maps integration is SportsDo. Definitely want to check it out, although need to check if I have a device they support and also - more importantly - need to get my lazy butt moving, and start running on a regular basis again.
The final presentation was by m-spatial, which again I think I need to play around with more - the demo showed how different content sources are integrated for any local search query. Another feature they presented was a tool that allows the user to highlight an address on a PC-desktop webpage, and then receive a link via SMS that takes the user to a mobile page with additional information about that location.
Next up was LocoMatrix, outdoor games. The speaker was a sympathetic, entertaining if somewhat timid guy, with an obvious passion (which I totally respect): to help getting kids outdoors and moving around, in order to tackle isolation and obesity. Just not sure I was convinced by the games that were presented, I don't see that they can compete with the WIIs and Playstations / PSPs and indeed more and more advanced mobile games of this world. But cudos for the cause.
Trackaphone offers a service that helps tracking people, with apparently a focus on security-related use cases. They have a "red button" emergency concept, where upon acttivation of that feature a SMS/notification is sent to a number of defined recipients and the device starts recording what is going on ( I believe audio only). Living in a high-crime rate area of London I welcome any such technology, but wouldn't want this button to be pressed involuntarily while the phone is in my pocket without the keypad being locked.
Buddyping is one of those LBS products that I personally feel can play a part in LBS living up to its long unfulfilled hype. I don't believe that many users will look for the famous "pizza" place nearby, or be happy about receiving dozens of promotional SMS as they walk around (the Starbucks scenario). However, keeping track of your buddies with a Twitter component I think has huge potential. Which brand / product eventually establishes itself in that area remains to be seen, but I am positive that this kind of service will become exponentially more popular in the near future.
A neat tool for joggers, skiiers etc. to keep track of where they have been going in what time, distance, with a great maps integration is SportsDo. Definitely want to check it out, although need to check if I have a device they support and also - more importantly - need to get my lazy butt moving, and start running on a regular basis again.
The final presentation was by m-spatial, which again I think I need to play around with more - the demo showed how different content sources are integrated for any local search query. Another feature they presented was a tool that allows the user to highlight an address on a PC-desktop webpage, and then receive a link via SMS that takes the user to a mobile page with additional information about that location.
Saturday, 14 April 2007
Art in Second Life
Interesting article about a new art-magazine (in print form) that illustrates / catalogues art being produced in Second Life. Apparently there are already 200 galleries with Second Life. The publisher of this magazine also argues that every avatar, as a creative, unique and novel expression of the person creating that avatar, can be seen as art. Apparently SL art is already being sold (IBM is named as one of the biggest buyers), despite the infinite reproducability of digital art - with the lack of scarcity prices will not increase.
The visual part of the cloud
A recent conversation brought up the question of how many images can be found out there in the cloud of the Internet. The actual question was "unique significant images". I was caught off-guard by this topic, and realized that my attempts at coming up with a likely overall figure took me to wild assumptions which in hindsight seem rather ridiculous. But the question persists in my mind and I wonder how to best tackle such an assessment.
Two definitions:
- "unique": well, meaning just that, a unique image - so I take a photo of my house, which is unique, and share it via email with 10 people, and put it on my blog and on Flickr. The image then exists 12 times in the cloud, but for the sake of the figure we are looking for it only counts as 1.
- "significant": I needed explaining for this - e.g. structural images for designing a page (borders of a box etc.) are not signifcant, neither are ads or page titles etc.
- cloud: means all of the Internet, hidden and visible web, email accounts etc. - not just what search engine crawlers would be able to see and index.
So then where do images reside in the Internet:
- on newspaper websites
- on blogs
- on photo sharing sites such as Flickr
- in the image search server caches of search engines
- in email accounts
- on FTP servers
- on other websites (from personals to porn to company websites and anything else)
Let's work with these. I think there are about 2 billion websites out there. A website being defined as any number of pages that make up a common site. Many of these pages are likely to be generated dynamically, where a page can load up with different images each time it is accessed or on different days of accessing the same page (e.g. newspaper homepages). So the relevant quantity here would be the number of images residing in the database of this site.
Furthermore, there are currently about 750 million Internet users out there.
One way of assessing the overall quantity of "unique significant images" would be to work with the users. Let's assume on average each of these users over their Internet-usage lifetime so far has shared 5 unique images in one way or another. I think that is a conservative assumption, give the proliferation of camera phones, digital cameras and the popularity of sharing images via mail, messenger and photo sharing site.
This alone would result in about 3.75 billion "unique significant images", with a growth curve that is probably more exponential than linear in nature.
Alternatively, one could drill down on each of the categories above of places where images reside in the cloud. But that opens a whole barrel of problems: e.g. how does one assume the number of newspaper sites out there, and the number of images in the databases of those newspaper sites? In terms of blogs, I read a recent figure that there are 80 Million blogs out there - but how many images per blog? The list goes on and on, for each type of site. Porn alone is going to account for a massive amount of images - but the overall quantity would be impossible to guess without deeper inside into the number of porn sites out there and the avg. number of images per porn site.
My point is that I find it impossible to come up with a verifiable estimate. Is it 5 billion images ? 50 billion? 100 billion ? These figures seem too large, but then - who knows?
Two definitions:
- "unique": well, meaning just that, a unique image - so I take a photo of my house, which is unique, and share it via email with 10 people, and put it on my blog and on Flickr. The image then exists 12 times in the cloud, but for the sake of the figure we are looking for it only counts as 1.
- "significant": I needed explaining for this - e.g. structural images for designing a page (borders of a box etc.) are not signifcant, neither are ads or page titles etc.
- cloud: means all of the Internet, hidden and visible web, email accounts etc. - not just what search engine crawlers would be able to see and index.
So then where do images reside in the Internet:
- on newspaper websites
- on blogs
- on photo sharing sites such as Flickr
- in the image search server caches of search engines
- in email accounts
- on FTP servers
- on other websites (from personals to porn to company websites and anything else)
Let's work with these. I think there are about 2 billion websites out there. A website being defined as any number of pages that make up a common site. Many of these pages are likely to be generated dynamically, where a page can load up with different images each time it is accessed or on different days of accessing the same page (e.g. newspaper homepages). So the relevant quantity here would be the number of images residing in the database of this site.
Furthermore, there are currently about 750 million Internet users out there.
One way of assessing the overall quantity of "unique significant images" would be to work with the users. Let's assume on average each of these users over their Internet-usage lifetime so far has shared 5 unique images in one way or another. I think that is a conservative assumption, give the proliferation of camera phones, digital cameras and the popularity of sharing images via mail, messenger and photo sharing site.
This alone would result in about 3.75 billion "unique significant images", with a growth curve that is probably more exponential than linear in nature.
Alternatively, one could drill down on each of the categories above of places where images reside in the cloud. But that opens a whole barrel of problems: e.g. how does one assume the number of newspaper sites out there, and the number of images in the databases of those newspaper sites? In terms of blogs, I read a recent figure that there are 80 Million blogs out there - but how many images per blog? The list goes on and on, for each type of site. Porn alone is going to account for a massive amount of images - but the overall quantity would be impossible to guess without deeper inside into the number of porn sites out there and the avg. number of images per porn site.
My point is that I find it impossible to come up with a verifiable estimate. Is it 5 billion images ? 50 billion? 100 billion ? These figures seem too large, but then - who knows?
Monday, 9 April 2007
Another Go at Artificial Intelligence: Hierarchical Temporal Memory
Last week I read this interesting WIRED article about Jeff Hawkins (creator of Palm Pilot and Treo) and his passion / project / company Numenta. Their objective is no small deed: they aim and claim that their software replicates the human brain. Based on the axiom that the basic working principle of the brain consists of passing information through several level of hierarchically structured layers of neurons, Numenta's objective is to create software that independently recognizes patterns in the outside world (focusing on computer vision). Lower nodes transfer their limited recognition of a pattern to higher nodes, which integrate these sub-patterns to eventually an integrated whole pattern - this process happens over time, hence temporal(the litmus test, Hawkins says, is for the computer to be able to differentiate between cats and dogs).
Then today I found this 12min podcast interview with Hawkins, which led me to check out Numenta's website, where a about one-hour video of a talk Hawkins gave at a cognitive computing event very nicely explains his concept (turns out Hawkins is an excellent speaker).
It is obviously a intriguing idea and research-area, and naturally brings to mind the likes of R2D2, Data, Hal 9000 etc. Independent of the feasibility of Hawkin's concept I wonder how much longer it will take until a system is developed that passes the famous Turing test. Just around the corner? 50 years? 100 years? 500 years? It may seem rather inconceivable, but then - so of course would today's world seem to a person 500 or 1000 years ago.
And - also a common question in most science fiction stories dealing with AI - will such a system ever have self-consiousness, a sense of "I"? In the human brain the sense of "mind" or "I" is either postulated as a emergent quality of the interplay of the brain's various subsystems (the rational-materialistic school) or - in various spiritual / religious variations - as a (eternal) soul. Considering the former to be case, then the question is on which level of complexity / interaction such a system would wake up to a sense of "I" and self ... which then in turn of course raises ethical questions about the "right to exist" of such an entity etc. ... anyhow, purely academic at this point of course, but fun to ponder.
Hawkins believes that his program, combined with the ever-faster computational power of digital processors, will also be able to solve massively complex problems by treating them just as an infant’s brain treats the world: as a stream of new sensory data to interpret. Feed information from an electrical power network into Numenta’s system and it builds its own virtual model of how that network operates. And just as a child learns that a glass dropped on concrete will break, the system learns to predict how that network will fail. In a few years, Hawkins boasts, such systems could capture the subtleties of everything from the stock market to the weather in a way that computers now can’t.
Then today I found this 12min podcast interview with Hawkins, which led me to check out Numenta's website, where a about one-hour video of a talk Hawkins gave at a cognitive computing event very nicely explains his concept (turns out Hawkins is an excellent speaker).
It is obviously a intriguing idea and research-area, and naturally brings to mind the likes of R2D2, Data, Hal 9000 etc. Independent of the feasibility of Hawkin's concept I wonder how much longer it will take until a system is developed that passes the famous Turing test. Just around the corner? 50 years? 100 years? 500 years? It may seem rather inconceivable, but then - so of course would today's world seem to a person 500 or 1000 years ago.
And - also a common question in most science fiction stories dealing with AI - will such a system ever have self-consiousness, a sense of "I"? In the human brain the sense of "mind" or "I" is either postulated as a emergent quality of the interplay of the brain's various subsystems (the rational-materialistic school) or - in various spiritual / religious variations - as a (eternal) soul. Considering the former to be case, then the question is on which level of complexity / interaction such a system would wake up to a sense of "I" and self ... which then in turn of course raises ethical questions about the "right to exist" of such an entity etc. ... anyhow, purely academic at this point of course, but fun to ponder.
Sunday, 8 April 2007
Datafountain
Check out this example as an approach to redistribute data to alternate non-screen/desktop-based media - data displayed as water fountains. Cool stuff.
Ting-a-Ling Timequakes, No Assholes and the 8th Habit
Interesting inspirations in the form of three different books I picked up while walking around town today. First, still embittered after a recent break-up with my Japanese girlfriend and walking up Charing Cross Road to my bus-stop on New Oxford Street I stumbled into one of these half-indie bookstore / half adultstore places - and came across Kurt Vonnegut. I had not heard about this author, which given the other authors surrounding his books (Paul Auster, Graham Greene, Albert Camus etc.) surely exposes me as blatantly ignorant. But after scanning through one of his books titled "Timequake" and reading a few deliciously pessimistic and misanthropic (see my state of mind above) paragraphs I decided to spend some quality time with this book and a grande Cappuccino at the Starbucks up the road. I really enjoyed the read, and continuously felt reminded of Charles Bukowski - perhaps the same outlook on life, albeit in a more sophisticated, intellectually charged language.
Here is one of the paragraphs that resonated well with me today:
The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it: "Somebody shoot me while I'm happy!"
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, "being alive is a crock of shit."
Then, after getting off the bus at Liverpool station and planning to buy some DVD, I found myself browsing through the business section at the local W.H. Smith store. I ended up buying "The No Asshole Rule" by the Stanford Management professor Robert Sutton, and Stephen R. Covey's "The 8th Habit".
The former resonated with my past and current job experiences, where from the top down I have found and continue to find myself confronted with some characters that I would label as "certified assholes" per the definition of the book and common sense. Getting some tips on how to deal with such jerks, and also just reading about how frequent a work-experience this is to millions of others, is very welcome.
The latter book made sense as I generally don't like to wallow in mire such as the one described above, and I remember being uplifted / motivated / inspired by "The 7 habits" before. Just started the first chapter, which relates the story of Muhammed Yunus's micro-finance banking concept (Grameen Bank) for the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh (for which he of course won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006). And - lo and behold - I feel more uplifted / motivated / inspired already :-)
Nothing like a healthy dose of misanthropic cynicism followed by a shot of philanthropic can-do-ism to keep heart and mind balanced.
Back to those books.
Here is one of the paragraphs that resonated well with me today:
The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it: "Somebody shoot me while I'm happy!"
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, "being alive is a crock of shit."
Then, after getting off the bus at Liverpool station and planning to buy some DVD, I found myself browsing through the business section at the local W.H. Smith store. I ended up buying "The No Asshole Rule" by the Stanford Management professor Robert Sutton, and Stephen R. Covey's "The 8th Habit".
The former resonated with my past and current job experiences, where from the top down I have found and continue to find myself confronted with some characters that I would label as "certified assholes" per the definition of the book and common sense. Getting some tips on how to deal with such jerks, and also just reading about how frequent a work-experience this is to millions of others, is very welcome.
The latter book made sense as I generally don't like to wallow in mire such as the one described above, and I remember being uplifted / motivated / inspired by "The 7 habits" before. Just started the first chapter, which relates the story of Muhammed Yunus's micro-finance banking concept (Grameen Bank) for the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh (for which he of course won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006). And - lo and behold - I feel more uplifted / motivated / inspired already :-)
Nothing like a healthy dose of misanthropic cynicism followed by a shot of philanthropic can-do-ism to keep heart and mind balanced.
Back to those books.
Saturday, 7 April 2007
One Afternoon on the High Street and 167 Messages in my Inbox
Another nice example of what is typically hyped as a standard future scenario for location based services, but in reality would completely backfire, can be found on MobHappy.
The scenario typically has two variants:
a) find me the closest Starbucks. Problem: as outlined in my post below, most of the time most of us move in a familiar environment and therefore will not use this feature.
b) Starbucks sending coupons: I liked this example so far, but have to agree now that this is not feasible, at least when done via SMS. Users would have to opt-in, and even then might perceive a bombardment with coupons as they walk down high street as spam. Apart from that, the advertiser would need to cover the SMS costs, which might quickly eat up any profitmargin of an advertised product.
The scenario typically has two variants:
a) find me the closest Starbucks. Problem: as outlined in my post below, most of the time most of us move in a familiar environment and therefore will not use this feature.
b) Starbucks sending coupons: I liked this example so far, but have to agree now that this is not feasible, at least when done via SMS. Users would have to opt-in, and even then might perceive a bombardment with coupons as they walk down high street as spam. Apart from that, the advertiser would need to cover the SMS costs, which might quickly eat up any profitmargin of an advertised product.
Self Geo-Tagging
Further to my post below about realistic location based services, I just read about Plazes (apparently a Swiss company) - for some reason I missed that they won the Mobile Monday Global Peer Award at this year's 3GSM. The service enables users to define and share (e.g. in their blog, MySpace or - nice idea - in their email footer) their current location, tagged on Google-maps or alternatively a flash-based map, and keep an archive of where they have been in the past. The user sends an SMS of the following format to set his location:
at centre pompidou in paris
or
at sony center in berlin
The product is still in Beta, and if I wasn't too damn lazy to continuously update my location I would probably start using it. Well, may be I will give it a shot in any case.
Regarding the community aspect: one can search for other users in locations - I checked one of their biggest locations (based on size of cityname in tag-cloud on the homepage), Berlin, and there were about two dozen people displayed on the map of Berlin. If this service takes off, then a city-map would quickly become too crowded and meaningless, so the level of "search location" granularity would have to be on a street/block/specific venue level.
at centre pompidou in paris
or
at sony center in berlin
The product is still in Beta, and if I wasn't too damn lazy to continuously update my location I would probably start using it. Well, may be I will give it a shot in any case.
Regarding the community aspect: one can search for other users in locations - I checked one of their biggest locations (based on size of cityname in tag-cloud on the homepage), Berlin, and there were about two dozen people displayed on the map of Berlin. If this service takes off, then a city-map would quickly become too crowded and meaningless, so the level of "search location" granularity would have to be on a street/block/specific venue level.
Friday, 23 March 2007
Motion-Sensing Comes To Mobile Phones
This could be an interesting way to create new mobile user interfaces:
MOTION-SENSING COMES TO MOBILE PHONES.
Apparently the wii-technology that allows to translate real physical motion into a game will be available for mobile phones. The article states that all tier 1 device manufacturers are working on integrating this technology (not sure what the cost factor is, but as these features go it is likely to expect them only in the high-end flagship devices).
Moving a device up, down, left, right could all be translated into browsing behaviour - which of course might make scrolling a lot easier.
The iPhone will apparently be the first-to-market, with the following implementation:
"The iPhone, set to debut in June on AT&T's wireless network, detects when the device is rotated, so it can tell whether to display what's on the screen in portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal) format. That allows the user to determine which format is best for viewing whatever is on the screen, be it a Web page, video or photo. The phone also can detect when it's being lifted to the ear, and responds by immediately turning off the display light to save power and preventing changes to the display image due to inadvertent contact with the touch-sensitive screen. The system restores screen power when the iPhone is moved away from the ear."
MOTION-SENSING COMES TO MOBILE PHONES.
Apparently the wii-technology that allows to translate real physical motion into a game will be available for mobile phones. The article states that all tier 1 device manufacturers are working on integrating this technology (not sure what the cost factor is, but as these features go it is likely to expect them only in the high-end flagship devices).
Moving a device up, down, left, right could all be translated into browsing behaviour - which of course might make scrolling a lot easier.
The iPhone will apparently be the first-to-market, with the following implementation:
"The iPhone, set to debut in June on AT&T's wireless network, detects when the device is rotated, so it can tell whether to display what's on the screen in portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal) format. That allows the user to determine which format is best for viewing whatever is on the screen, be it a Web page, video or photo. The phone also can detect when it's being lifted to the ear, and responds by immediately turning off the display light to save power and preventing changes to the display image due to inadvertent contact with the touch-sensitive screen. The system restores screen power when the iPhone is moved away from the ear."
Wednesday, 21 March 2007
Mobile Search 2.0
Yahoo! released the US version of oneSearch, a new mobile search solution.
Check out the official press release for more info, or try it directly by typing m.yahoo.com into your phone's browser, this should open up the mobile version of the US Yahoo portal with the search box at the top.
Check out the official press release for more info, or try it directly by typing m.yahoo.com into your phone's browser, this should open up the mobile version of the US Yahoo portal with the search box at the top.
Monday, 19 March 2007
Let's say you are travelling on business and you are looking for a pizza place nearby, so you type in "Pizza" and ...
There was this interesting thread on the Yahoo-groups MoMo London mailing list the other day, about how come that location aware/based services have not really taken off on mobile so far. For years and years, they have been hyped as the prototypical use-case, the inevitable cash-cow of mobile services. At least outside Japan and South Korea, in 2007 LBS has still not fulfilled that promise. Invariably, historically and even still today when one reads about LBS the standard use case seems to be someone in an unfamiliar surrounding looking for a great restaurant nearby.
In thinking about LBS, this seems to be a very striking myth and perhaps one of the reasons why LBS is still in its infancy: most of us are actually in quite familiar surroundings most of the time. And if we are not, we tend to be with someone who is. Or have done our research prior to getting there, online; desktop-online that is. Hence, such a service offering will not drive regular, widespread adoption. That is not to say it is useless, it simply will not deliver the level of uptake required for LBS to be considered successful.
So it seems that for LBS to take off there need to be more reasonable customer propositions, and it seems there indeed are many good ones floating around out there, some of which are the following:
1) Updates and events based on my particular loacation and preferences; e.g. who is playing at a local favorite venue, what is on in a cinema near where I live, traffic information on the journey home, special offers in shops / restaurants I frequently go to. Add mobile coupons to this mix, and users might accept this into their daily lives. Of course it needs to be mostly pull, or an opt-in push, and a perception of being spammed needs to be avoided, but that seems like stating the obvious.
2) Location tagging: with exponential growth of people documenting their life online via blogs, myspace etc. users might see it as a nice feature to be able to keep track of where they went. A drive for exhibitionism (with sufficiently voyerism to match it) would surely overcome any privacy issues for plenty of users. Such a service would then e.g. display dots / lines on a map where the user has spent time, potentially with links to the appropriate blog entries. Example: WeHangHere
3) Location tagging part 2: people leaving comments about their favourite places or linking to blog entries; someone who passes by those places can see what others thought about it / experienced here. Digital graffitti.
4) Kids safety / emergency: parents tracking their kids / emergency services locating a person in need - as far as I know already widely used in Japan.
Of course, apart from the services the main pieces in the puzzle that are missing would be:
1) LBS lookup costs to decrease, in order for any meaningful margins / business cases to surface. Another ask to the carriers - surely one of them will lead the pack, 3 ("Tear down this wall, Mr. Fox") seems to be a likely candidate.
2) Devices supporting GPS: Nokia is leading with the N95. Again, Japan seems far ahead - legend has it, that all 3G phones shipped after April 2007 are required to have GPS support. By the way: whatever happened to Galileo, the EU version of GPS ? And are there any devices already in planning to support Galileo and / instead of GPS ?
3) As with all mobile internet services: cost transparency and data flat fees.
4) The local content needs to be complete: if 9 out of 10 stores / bars / cinemas / gas stations I pass are not listed, little enthusiasm is to be expected.
In thinking about LBS, this seems to be a very striking myth and perhaps one of the reasons why LBS is still in its infancy: most of us are actually in quite familiar surroundings most of the time. And if we are not, we tend to be with someone who is. Or have done our research prior to getting there, online; desktop-online that is. Hence, such a service offering will not drive regular, widespread adoption. That is not to say it is useless, it simply will not deliver the level of uptake required for LBS to be considered successful.
So it seems that for LBS to take off there need to be more reasonable customer propositions, and it seems there indeed are many good ones floating around out there, some of which are the following:
1) Updates and events based on my particular loacation and preferences; e.g. who is playing at a local favorite venue, what is on in a cinema near where I live, traffic information on the journey home, special offers in shops / restaurants I frequently go to. Add mobile coupons to this mix, and users might accept this into their daily lives. Of course it needs to be mostly pull, or an opt-in push, and a perception of being spammed needs to be avoided, but that seems like stating the obvious.
2) Location tagging: with exponential growth of people documenting their life online via blogs, myspace etc. users might see it as a nice feature to be able to keep track of where they went. A drive for exhibitionism (with sufficiently voyerism to match it) would surely overcome any privacy issues for plenty of users. Such a service would then e.g. display dots / lines on a map where the user has spent time, potentially with links to the appropriate blog entries. Example: WeHangHere
3) Location tagging part 2: people leaving comments about their favourite places or linking to blog entries; someone who passes by those places can see what others thought about it / experienced here. Digital graffitti.
4) Kids safety / emergency: parents tracking their kids / emergency services locating a person in need - as far as I know already widely used in Japan.
Of course, apart from the services the main pieces in the puzzle that are missing would be:
1) LBS lookup costs to decrease, in order for any meaningful margins / business cases to surface. Another ask to the carriers - surely one of them will lead the pack, 3 ("Tear down this wall, Mr. Fox") seems to be a likely candidate.
2) Devices supporting GPS: Nokia is leading with the N95. Again, Japan seems far ahead - legend has it, that all 3G phones shipped after April 2007 are required to have GPS support. By the way: whatever happened to Galileo, the EU version of GPS ? And are there any devices already in planning to support Galileo and / instead of GPS ?
3) As with all mobile internet services: cost transparency and data flat fees.
4) The local content needs to be complete: if 9 out of 10 stores / bars / cinemas / gas stations I pass are not listed, little enthusiasm is to be expected.
Sunday, 18 March 2007
Meme Tracker
Another handy tool in organizing the latest and greatest - a "Meme" tracker integrates latest headlines on a given topic from a variety of sources. "Memes" is a term coined by Richard Dawkins in the 70ties to describe a unit of cultural information. In the context of technews, internet buzz etc. it describes the latest events, hypes etc. in the industry. Check out http://techmeme.com/ as an example. WAP review has reviewed the mobile version. If I understand correctly the difference to a RSS-feed reader is that the selection of the relevant sources is not done by the user, but the owner of the memetracker. I am curious to see whether I find relevant news that I cannot find by following a number of relevant sites and blogs from the area I am interested in, that have updates on a daily basis.
I wonder, if a memetracker will indeed surface topics that between the sources I have used so far I might miss. Or, alternatively, if a memetracker can serve as the first information stop, and other sources will become less important. Finally, intuitely I am asking myself: so how can I customize this service and add sources I like? But that does not seem to be the point, if I get the concept - if I want to define the sources, I use an RSS-reader. Memetracker I guess would be more like traditional media, ie. trusted gatekeepers that channel signal from noise for the recipient, only that the actual aggregation happens in an automated way.
But the all decisive question for me really is: how to find enough attention span and cognitive processing capacities to absorb all of this readily available constant information chatter ... sigh.
I wonder, if a memetracker will indeed surface topics that between the sources I have used so far I might miss. Or, alternatively, if a memetracker can serve as the first information stop, and other sources will become less important. Finally, intuitely I am asking myself: so how can I customize this service and add sources I like? But that does not seem to be the point, if I get the concept - if I want to define the sources, I use an RSS-reader. Memetracker I guess would be more like traditional media, ie. trusted gatekeepers that channel signal from noise for the recipient, only that the actual aggregation happens in an automated way.
But the all decisive question for me really is: how to find enough attention span and cognitive processing capacities to absorb all of this readily available constant information chatter ... sigh.
Saturday, 17 March 2007
Flipper Karten
Remembering my Hamburg years:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hqcITby-l4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvZNkrDiawg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S3JW26pL_4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV1M1YYyYoI&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4Gpb6JESNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ji1vvxhlsA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk5pQxJFv0A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hqcITby-l4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvZNkrDiawg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S3JW26pL_4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV1M1YYyYoI&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4Gpb6JESNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ji1vvxhlsA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk5pQxJFv0A
Let there be blog
So here goes. My first blog. I have been tempted before to set up and more importantly keep a regular blog, but never got past one or two initial posts before other things kept eating up my time - and the need to keeping a blog seemed infinitely less important than say spending quality time with my tele.
Yet another attempt goes here - and why? Why not just keep a good old diary or notebook, which has served plenty of people well in the centuries past to record and structure their thoughts, emotions, insights etc. Exhibitionism ? Some desperate need to gain attention? Somehow, plenty of negative associations used to define my position on setting up my own blog.
And it is not just that it seems to be one of those things that up-to-speed, self-respecting over-achievers seem to be doing these days. After all, that would still have nothing to do with me.
I think it has more to do with the fact that over the past 12 months or so I became a regular and quite enthusiastic reader of a variety of blogs, mainly in the mobile sphere, to catch up on the latest buzz and thinking and developments in the industry. And it made me realize that apart from helping to record and structure my thoughts and insights etc. the additional benefit of blogs of course is their networking and public properties - the opportunity to potentially interact with countless others and receive feedback, further ideas, hints from unexpected corners of the web and world. I fully intend to still keep the part of my life that I consider private out of this blog - but what cognitive and perceptive in- and output I find worth sharing and putting out there for peer review can henceforth be found here.
Prost.
Yet another attempt goes here - and why? Why not just keep a good old diary or notebook, which has served plenty of people well in the centuries past to record and structure their thoughts, emotions, insights etc. Exhibitionism ? Some desperate need to gain attention? Somehow, plenty of negative associations used to define my position on setting up my own blog.
And it is not just that it seems to be one of those things that up-to-speed, self-respecting over-achievers seem to be doing these days. After all, that would still have nothing to do with me.
I think it has more to do with the fact that over the past 12 months or so I became a regular and quite enthusiastic reader of a variety of blogs, mainly in the mobile sphere, to catch up on the latest buzz and thinking and developments in the industry. And it made me realize that apart from helping to record and structure my thoughts and insights etc. the additional benefit of blogs of course is their networking and public properties - the opportunity to potentially interact with countless others and receive feedback, further ideas, hints from unexpected corners of the web and world. I fully intend to still keep the part of my life that I consider private out of this blog - but what cognitive and perceptive in- and output I find worth sharing and putting out there for peer review can henceforth be found here.
Prost.
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