An image of the headlines listed on the NY Times site on the Third of March 2010

The New York Times website has come up with a new(ish I’ve been pretty lazy with updating) way of displaying the news. It’s called the Times Skimmer http://www.nytimes.com/timesskimmer/ and I think it is amazing. A few years ago I had to do an assignment where I critiqued the usability of a website, I chose the SMH (Or the Sydney Morning Herald, for those of you not from Sydney), and one of my main beefs with it was that there wasn’t enough information about the articles, you would just get the title. Unfortunately, newspaper titles aren’t designed for the web; they’re not information loaded, but rather are attention grabbing. More recently I had to do the opposite, and justify subscribing to a magazine to my boyfriend. “Why not just read it the website” he cajoled “Subscribing is a waste of money.”

In the assignment I had I suggested that users probably don’t want to follow links like “I’m a celebrity rat, pass the hemlock” because they don’t really know what they are going to find. In print this sort of headline isn’t an issue, because you just flick your eye down a few millimetres and you can see what the article is about. On the internet, however, that isolated title seems intentionally (and irrationally and irritatingly) non-sensical. Users have to manually click to read the article to find any sort of explanation. An unclear headline to this is increased cognitive load because the user has to figure out what it is trying to say, and what it is about. This would be okay (but not good) on a small scale, but newspapers aren’t about giving you a few articles, they’re about trying to give you all the news you need. Because of this there is a bit of ‘information overload’. A perfect example is the normal NY Times site; There are two sections, first up are the main headlines, each with a bit of a byline. Then, below, there are each of the sections listed with three headings.  When you get to this point there are just so many attention grabbing headlines in list form that you become almost immune to them because of the cognitive load each of them demands. Overall newspaper sites offer up far too many attention grabbing headings, which make their sites confusing and a little difficult to follow.  On the other hand, magazines, like newspapers, are limited in the amount of information they can display by the fact that they are on paper.

Print media also allows for more serendipitous discovery of content than most newspaper sites. In this particular case the magazine was Time Out Sydney, which I enjoy due to my need for constant stimulation, and its recommendations for things to do. The website has a fairly traditional navigation structure, a home page with the latest major articles, and then links to each of the sub sections. This structure is incredibly good for a few things; finding upcoming major events like festivals or major movie releases, finding information about an event I already want to go to, and finding events in areas that I already enjoy. What it was not so good at was finding events that I would be interested in that were outside my traditional realm of interest. I wasn’t going to navigate to a section that I’m not excited about, and could completely miss one area that I would enjoy. For example I won’t click on the ’sports’ section, because I’m not generally a fan. In this case, though I might miss something that I would be interested in, like going to a gymnastics competition. In the paper magazine I have to flip past it anyways, and having a browse was a very low cost. “But what about the list of headlines from the NYTimes site?” I hear you cry! Well, for one thing there just isn’t as much, it;s only three headlines per section. And, the previously mentioned high cognitive load that the unclear titles require make you miss much of what you would have found in paper.

Times Skimmer solved both of these problems. The boxes for each article allows for a byline for each article, which is enough to address any ambiguities. It also artificially limits the number of articles displayed on the screen. This means that each heading gets an explanation and therefor lightens the cognitive load. As for serendipity it’s still not on par with page turning, but it has all the sections pre-loaded, so when you click on one it slides up instantly - it doesn’t have to reload the entire page. This lowers the wait for each page to load, so you’re more likely to explore. Overall it creates a simpler system for navigating articles. It’s almost like someone said “What would a newspaper be liked if we could design it for a screen” rather than “What would a website be like if it were for a newspaper”.

Obviously, Times Skimmer is not perfect.  I would like to see some more interesting ways of organising content, rather than the traditional sections. Perhaps if it looked at which articles you had read in the past, and how long you spent on them (with articles you read for longer being more important) and had articles ‘recommended for you.’  On a simpler level it also did not have a good use of images, which, as USA Today knows, is quite important for newspapers.

I’m doing two subjects at uni at the moment, one is Technocultures and one is Introduction to Media and Popular Cultures, so I’m mainly thinking about media related things at the moment. Next week as part of a tutorial I have to give a presentation on someone’s interpretation of McLuhan’s theory that “the medium is the message.” Whilst I was thinking about this I read part of this article, which made a comment about current media:

Today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line.

It made me wonder, if the medium is the message, then what is the computer’s medium. Is it the screen and keyboard? Is it the application? If it’s the application, then does that mean that the content you get from an RSS reader is different from the content you read in the web browser?

Photographs, for me, are on a trajectory that’s essentially the opposite of petrol (or oil, depending on which crazy country you come from). When gas was cheap we would just drive around with our friends, and enjoy nothing more than the freedom. But then the price went up somewhat significantly (compared to 200, not so much compared to recently) and driving is more of a practical thing now, to get from A to B. With the advent of digital cameras photography is now the opposite. 

The old fashioned type of photography is what most people associate with photographers. Back when you had to pay for film, and it was a finite resource, the activity was all about using this film to be all it could be. Rather than sending it off to the army, though, you would just be very focused on the end result. Taking the photo had one aim: to create the best photo possible. 

The other, more modern type of photographer has been set free from this traditional use. Taking a photo is no longer about the photo.  It’s now more akin to  Jackson Pollock’s idea about art. Sometimes the art isn’t the end result, but the process; The act of gathering your friends together, getting them all close, and saying “three, two, one, CHEESE!” Or when you’re out with a friend at a concert and you two squish your faces together and point a camera back at yourself and grin like a drunken sailor that just visited the red light district. The social action is what is important. The resulting photograph is a nice thing to have, but it often get buried under the deluge of media that we create and consume nowadays. 

The phony smile plays a part in the transition too. There was a psych study which got subject to put pencils horizontaly between their teeth without letting it touch their lips. Another group held onto one end of the pencil with just their lips. Then they rated jokes. The ones who didn’t let the pencil touch their lips rated jokes as more funny. Why? because holding a pencil like this forces your face into a smile-of-sorts, which tells your brain that you’re happy. So the point of this long winded tangent is that the phony smiles in group photographs are also part of the fun. 

This whole social photography thing took me a while to figure out, I wasn’t much interested in the process, I’m more the old style; I just wanted to get a good photo.  So I would get frustrated thinking “Grumble, why am I getting pushed in with everyone, and having a cheesy fake smile that will turn out to be a crappy photo anyways.” But now I get it, and am more than happy to oblige. 

p.s. if you’re curious about how to tell if a smile is real to fake it’s all in the eyes. We have control over the muscles that make our lips move, but not that give us proper crows feet.

p.p.s. if you want to check out my old style photos just click on photo gallery up the top rightish.

There’s a really interesting iPhone twitter application called Twinkle. It covers the usual bases of allowing you to update your status and receive status updates from your friends, but also it does one more thing; It displays tweets from people who are near you, not just your friends. I found out about this via Kottke, who wrote a short post about the random messages he would get from people in manhattan, and mentioned overhearing (over-reading?) people flirting semi-anonymously with each other via twitter messages. 

This is different to the internet where normally you read things which are organized by topic. Predictably, then, you’ll just read the things your interested in: like technology news, or how dreamy Obama is, and ignore the rest. You can often choose location based topics but most often it’s only based on the closest major city. Language is similar, but you don’t even realize that you’re selecting sites based on it, you don’t think “I’m going to read some english sites” like you would think “I’m going to check out the latest political news”.  But “[t]he Internet suggests a new map of the world, with borders redrawn along language lines.” (Virginia Heffernan wrote in an article for the NYTimes). I would argue that whilst language may form the countries in this new map, topics of interest would form the (slightly blurred) states (or provinces, or cantons…).  Twinkle, then, is like someone who comes in and redraws the map, as a circle around you.  

What is the effect of this metaphoric geographic reshuffling? You’ll get messages in your twitter stream that are entirely without context, some of the particularly random ones will remind you that it’s from someone who is only connected to you by their proximity. There’s not much else to think when you get a message like “@linzerschnitte i werds mit single malt angehen, und du?” These messages will be about things you don’t care about, about things you don’t believe in and in languages you don’t understand; Forcing you to engage with the space, people and concepts around you. The messages will break into the personal bubble that the iPod has helped to create.

It also allows for some interesting discoveries. I imagine if you use it for an extended period of time you’ll  start to notice updates from the same users and  start to learn about some them. By looking at what topics are coming up frequently you’ll get a pretty good idea about what people are talking about, and what news is popular or important.  And whilst there is a bias for people with similar points of views to live in similar areas, there will still be a much broader cross section of opinions than what you usually access by just talking to your friends

So twinkle redefines some aspects of the internet topography, is it really that big of a deal, should I be finding it as interesting as I do?

A few months ago I was talking to some friends about sending emails to lecturers (I know, we’re an exciting lot), and the topic got on to how they start emails. It turned out people would go to great lengths to find out what the official title was (Dr, Prof, Vice Chancellor), and considered it a major faux pas to write the wrong one. I was kind of surprised; To me it seems like such an old fashion Issue, like the type of thing that Jane Austin would be worried about. Not something a 22 year old student in Sydney should be concerned with. Particularly in Australia, which is such an informal country generally. Though, what I’m more curious about is why people maintain these patterns for email, but not for other mediums. What is it about email that makes other (normal?) people keep these patterns in tact for email, but not for other things, like facebook wall posts.

Email has always been a strange beast to me, I’ve never really understood it. It’s the most old fashioned of the online mediums. As such it still resembles it’s older brother, paper and pen mail. It has, whilst adding in a title section, maintained a more modern version of the ‘header.’ In the olden day, would be your address and the date, though now this is automatically inserted, and in turn frequently edited out by email clients. The user still has two write something though, and they will still generally still start with the antiquated  “Dear Paul,” and end with “thanks, Mike.” 

If we compare this to something like Facebook messaging,  we can see a number of further differences. People rarely use ‘Dear’ and generally just get straight into the message, which makes sense, since people (usually) already know who they are. There does, however, still seem to be a strong affinity for signing off, albeit in a simpler form of just “Mike” or “xoxo”. If there was a spectrum this medium would be on the “letter” end.

If we look at another similar web medium, the Facebook wall, we see a move even further away from traditional letter format. But why? In both instances you have your name and picture right next to the message. What is so different in them that it causes people to switch? Most likely it’s a similar reason to why texting is so different from email. Texts leave out these salutations primarily out of a lack of space. By the time you write “Dear Professor Brand, Thanks, Mike Brand” you’ve used up a quarter of your character allowance. As a possible side effect of this, or a mere coincidence, we only use SMSing for our friends and family. It’s a pretty rare occasion that we text our boss, or coworkers “hey I need that TPS report by today at 4:00 pm.” 

So the Facebook message, with it’s spaces for an address and title, and it’s larger text box, skew towards the more formal email genre. Meanwhile the Facebook wall post, with its much smaller text box, skews more towards being like an informal text message. In the end is one of these superior to the other? I like getting straight into it, but I have a feeling I’m in the minority. Most importantly, Is this important? No: I’m just thinking out loud.

As a bonus for this terribly boring post here’s some ‘art‘ that consist of two computers set up with auto reply vacation messages, bouncing back and fourth.

Social psychologists seem to love two types of studies. The ones that either tell us what we already know ‘People like attractive people’ or the ones that tell us the complete opposite of what we thing ‘The more people around, the less likely they are to help’. They like to get down to the nitty gritty of why we do the things we do.

For quite a while many researchers were doing studies like “How long does it take a person to put on or take off their shoes off? Do they do it faster if someone is watching?” (They then compared those times to how long it takes someone to put on and take off huge pink socks with someone watching.)  Basically they found that if you’re pretty good at something, then you’ll do it better if people are around, and conversely you’ll do worse if people are watching you do something you’re poor at.  That seems pretty obvious right? If you’re a billiards master then having a crowd watch you at the bar makes you even better. But if you barely scrape by in pool, you find yourself going from sinking a few balls to no balls, whilst you promise everyone you’re normally not that bad, I swear.

What about Tug-o-war? It’s kinds similar to pool; It’s a physical activity, and there can be people around, pulling alongside you. But in fact the more people there are on your tug-o-team the less the average person pulls (Ringelmann 1913). Of course there could be any number of explanations for this sub par performance. A guy called Alan Ingham set out to prove it more definitively. With his experiment he had people pulling on the rope, blindfolded, and he would tell them they were either pulling by themselves or with others. In reality they were the only person on their team. He found that people pull less when in groups. It wasn’t a huge difference, but still there; They pulled at 90% of their individual capacity if there was one other person and 85% if there were two other people.

So what’s the difference between playing pool and tug-o-war? Well it seems to be all about being able to differentiate each individual’s contribution. with pool people can keep track of each ball you sink, and see when you’re doing your part. With tug-o-war you could be pulling less than everyone else and no one would know. This applies to other areas too, anything where you can’t differentiate an individual’s work. This phenomenon has a fantastic name; Social Loafing.

Why does social loafing occur? There are a few things that can encourage it such as:

• If individual contributions can’t be easily evaluated by other people. No one’s going to know if we pull a little less hard, just as how Ashley the hole digger won’t know that Pat the hole digger shifted a lot less dirt.
• If we feel like our contribution isn’t important. I’m just an individual, what can I do?
• if we feel others are putting in less effort; We ‘match’ how much effort we put in to how much we think others are. Sam wasn’t even breaking a sweat, and here I am straining like a sucker.

How do you minimize social loafing? Just try to get rid of the things that cause it; Make sure that each person’s individual effort is recognized, and that everyone feels like their effort is important. A standard of how much and what type of work is expected can also help. Different groups of people are affected by it differently as well. Collectivist cultures, which emphasize a person’s place in a community rather than as an individual, are less affected by it, as are close knit groups of people, such as friends. No word on if it’s why politicians are so lazy though.

The arrow pointing up shows approximately where Baarle-Hertog is, the arrow pointing right shows approximately where Maastricht is.

When I first looked at a map of where Maastricht, the town I’m studying at, is located I was kind of puzzled about why it was part of The Netherlands. The image on the right shows where Maastricht is, the arrow on the bottom. When you look at the area it’s in you can see that it’s only connected by a very thin strip. The explanation according to Wikipedia is:

When the southern provinces sought independence from the North to form Belgium in 1830, the garrison in Maastricht remained loyal to the Dutch king, though the surrounding countryside came under Belgian control. Arbitration by the Great Powersin 1831 awarded the city and the eastern part of Limburg, despite being geographically and culturally closer to Belgium, to the Netherlands and the rest to Belgium.

I thought this was pretty interesting, It almost seems like a portion of The Netherlands being within Belgium.

On BLDGBLOG today (via Kottke) I found an even more interesting case; The city of Baarle-Hertog, which is indicated by the other arrow. It’s 5 Kilometers away from the main border of Belgium and is where no definite decision could be made on the border so “5732 parcels of land had their nationality laid down separately.” (BLDG BLOG has an awesome diagram of some of the parcels.) But the most fascinating is that some houses and businesses are split over two different nationalities.  At one point The Netherlands had laws requiring restaurants to close by a certain time, so the ones in Baarle-Hertog would shift their tables to the Belgian side of the store to keep business going. There are various markers about the town to show where the puzzle-like border is: Pavers along the side walk have lines to show the divisions and most of the building entrances also have little flags to indicate which country they stand in. 

Coming mainly from Australia I find these sorts of border problems fascinating. They bring to mind questions about nationalism and definitions of countries.  My home country is “girt by sea” (as we say in the national anthem), which makes things a little more obvious; If you’re on the mainland you’re in Australia. Well, There are a few exceptions.