Letters Remain

Tag: technology

  • Taming White House Trolls

    When the Obama administration embraced blogging, sans commenting, on the White House website there were a number of detractors saying that Obama had retreated from his campaign promise of providing a site enabling public discussions. The reasons why are fairly obvious, but Clive Thompson looks at how the WhiteHouse.gov blog could enable commenting and successfully/safely control trolls (the…

  • History of the 160 Character Text Message

    I’ve never given much thought to this, and maybe that’s a sign of how well it was designed and implemented: the history and (high-level) technical development of  text messaging. Would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, [the research commitee] based their initial assumptions on…

  • Unintuitive Interfaces

    Expanding on Jared Spool’s thoughts on learning cycles and so-called ‘intuitive’ interfaces, Vicky Teinaki discusses the ‘knowledge matrix’ and makes this interesting point that I feel almost embarrassed to have not thought about previously: Digital devices can never be inherently ‘intuitive’, as the fact that they deal in abstraction automatically means that actions must be arbitrary.…

  • Why Local Content Matters

    Google.org on helping technologically developing countries in Africa gain a global voice: allowing them to be producers, not just consumers, of knowledge. Today, Swahili books online for example, number in the hundreds compared to the hundreds of millions of books in English available online. What message does this send to young people about the relative…

  • The Nerd Handbook and Caring for Your Introvert

    Rands In Repose’s Nerd Handbook is an essay on understanding geeks; from our insatiable appetite for knowledge to our hard-to-decipher social interaction ‘skills’. The Handbook is at times painfully precise. The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the…

  • The Beauty of Programming

    I don’t really know how to explain my fascination with programming, but I’ll try.  To someone who does it, it’s the most interesting thing in the world.  It’s a game much more involved than chess, a game where you can make up your own rules and where the end result is what you make of…

  • Breaking Past the Uncanny Valley

    The company who produce the animation for Grand Theft Auto, Image Metrics, claim to have create photo-realistic animations that break through the ‘uncanny valley‘ barrier. The Times is a believer, giving us a sample video and stating that IM’s lifelike animation heralds a new era for computer games. “Ninety per cent of the work is…

  • The World of Web Trolling

    The New York Times goes inside the world of online trolls, who “use the Internet to harass, humiliate and torment strangers”. […] Even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section,…

  • Joel Spolsky on Strategy

    Trawling through the Joel on Software archive, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading the Strategy Letter series. Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’re in, and gear everything you do accordingly, or…

  • Creating Indexed Users

    When it was live, I used to look forward to the next instalment of Creating Passionate Users; a blog on doing business in the IT sector where the writers were “all passionate about the brain and meta-cognition”. The entries were comical and the accompanying graphs were simple, elegant, and really were worth a thousand words.…