Excerpts from Attensa: RSS meets knowledge management: Start-up Attensa has developed a Microsoft Outlook RSS reader with a twist: it analyzes patterns in RSS feeds to see how information inside companies is being consumed. (...) The software has "attention analytics" which prioritize feeds for ind...
Methods for observing and understanding the digital cityscape
Just attended a session about urban computing. The first paper was interesting to me because of its focus on methods: Instrumenting the city: developing methods for observing and understanding the digital cityscape by Eamonn O’Neill, Vassilis Kostakos, Tim Kindberg, Ava Fatah gen. Schiek, Alan Penn...
Virtual hole
Virtual Hole by Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec: By employing digital technology, a virtual hole is created in the roof, through which the rain is allowed to fall through. The installation also allows the visitor him/herself to create rain inside the building, by dripping water drops on rain sensor, instal...
Spime meme map
A quick overview (transcribed from the slides) of Bruce Sterling's "Spime Meme Map" he presented yesterday at Ubicomp 2006 (I just copied his slides): It's basically a map of the characteristics of a spime, with different examples of bricks available today (web2.0 but also others) that would enabl...
Quali-Quanti discussions at Ubicomp
Here at Ubicomp 2006, there was a very pertinent discussion yesterday (instead of having a talk that everybody was awaiting: "No more SMS from Jesus? Ubicomp, religion and techno-spiritual practices" by Genevieve Bell) about methodologies to study mobile technologies (by Beki Grinter and Ken Anders...
Provocative design process?
Talking with Steve yesterday about Design, I was interested in the whole process. We compared the approach between research in my domain (cognitive sciences, hci) and user experience research/design. What I was mostly interested in was the main process: how from the same premices (roughly speaker: ...
Unknown unknowns
Interesting chat yesterday with Bill and Tamara about (among other stuff) "unknown unknowns" concept propelled by Donald Rumsfeld (taken from Slate compilation): Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are thing...
RhNav: Rhizome Navigation visualizations
Walter Rafelsberger is working on pertinent visualizations that he called RhNav (which stands for Rhizome Navigation). It's actually a visualization application framework meant for "building Navigation Interfaces based on Attention Data and User Behavior Analysis" (online demo here): RhNav - Rhizo...
"a satellite for the stomach": interdisciplinarity in research
Carefully reviewing the huge sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, I ran across this relevant article by Carrie Sturrock about "odd couples" in research: " odd couples doing extraordinary research: Gastroenterologists are working with aerospace engineers, geophysicists with pediatricians, ...
Insectopia: context-aware gaming
insectopia (developed by the Game studio, a lab of the Interactive Institute in Sweden) is a mobile phone game that rely on context-awareness: insectopia is a new kind of cell phone game where the real world spills into the game world. Players roam the cityscape searching for and catching a multitu...