Andrew Feenberg, the author of widely cited books like Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory(1995),Questioning Technology(1999), and Transforming Technology(2002) was interviewed by Mark Zachry in February 2007. Feenbergs' books on the subject illuminate numerous aspects of technology's ever-increasing influence that are so often overlooked. For Feenberg, technology is the most important issue of our era. It is a major constituent of our society and is intimately connected with politics, economics, culture and all forms of social and personal life.
Feenberg started computer work during 1980's when he was at the Western Behavioural Science Institute (WBSI). During his time there, he and few of his colleagues created the first online education Program. For the first question asked by Zachry (how did you come to be interested in computers?), Feenberg says that his interest started while he was working on the online education program and also during his time in France where he studied computer-mediated communication. He states that user agency is an important theme in technology studies. Users play an important role in re-design of any technology. Feenberg gives an example of internet which was initially designed for information exchange, not communication. The users changed the purpose of the internet.
Towards the end of the interview, Zachry asks questions on Online Communities and education. After few years of leaving WBSI, there was a lot of hype about online education and Feenberg always found himself in the middle of the controversy surrounding the topic. A lot of people like David Noble didn't really like the idea and called it a 'Digital Diploma Mills'. Regardless of the controversy, Feenberg was provided the fund to create the software by the US Department of Education. His first effort resulted to produce the software called TextWeaver which didn’t have much impact as expected. But the newest version, called Marginalia which is web based, has received a lot of attention.
The Design of Everyday things: Preface to the 2002 Edition
Dr. Norman was a cognitive scientist before he wrote the book. His interest gradually shifted towards usability/human errors after he and few of his colleagues examined the nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island in the United States and concluded that the fault laid in the design of the control room not the control room operators. He became interested in human error and hoped that his understanding of error would provide ways to teach people how to avoid mistakes. The author mentions that he spent some time in Cambridge England, at the Medical Research Council's world famous Applied Psychology Unit and was continually amused and frustrated by the workings of the building. He states that 'The Design of Everyday Thing' is the outcome of his frustration during his time in England.
The book was initially published with the title 'Psychology of Everyday Things' but was changed to 'Design of Everyday Things' (DOET) in the 2002 edition. The author says that the meaning was more meaningful and better conveyed the message of the book.
The book covers mostly three critical topics. They are
It is not your fault: According to the author, if you cannot figure out how to use a certain thing, it is not your fault, it's the design. Anything and everything should be clearly understandable to casual user if the design's purpose is to encourage use and efficiency
The Power Of Observation: People learn a lot through observation. But the problem is you need to learn how to watch correctly.
Design Principles: DOET contains several important design principles but the following are the short list of the most important ones
Conceptual Model: We as a human being receive information, process it and respond accordingly. According to the author a good designed system should enable user to create the right conceptual model of the system.
Feedback: Dr Norman believes that every system or application should provide user with some feedback for their action. A simple example could be taken of an online application form. The user should be provided with some feedback after they submit the form so that they are aware that the form has been submitted.
Constraints: 'The surest way to make something easy to use, with few errors, is to make it impossible to do otherwise- to constrain the choices'. Dr Norman says that to prevent mistakes we should restrict the kind of interaction that can take place in an object. For example the car door should not be locked if we left our key inside the car. The designers should make sure when the keys are inside the ignition switch, the door cannot be locked.
Affordance: Affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of an object that gives clues to its operation. For example plates (on doors) are for pushing and knobs are for turning.
The first chapter of POET starts off describing the importance of design. "Well designed objects are easy to understand. They contain visible clues to their operations. Poorly designed objects can be difficult and frustrating to use. They provide no clues or sometimes false clues." Norman introduces the term visibility here. The visibility of the product's controls and functions allows the user to map their relationships and see what the uses the product affords, something Norman calls a conceptual model/mental model. These models provide user with a clear idea of how the product should work.
Giving various examples on conceptual model and visibility Norman introduces two major design principles for understandability and usability in this chapter. They are:
1. Provide a good conceptual model
2. Make things visible
Giving the right conceptual model of a device or a product could be very tricky sometimes for the designers. Norman gives an example of his fridge at home. Norman says "control of refrigerator is made difficult because the manufacturer provides a false conceptual model. The fridge had only one thermostat and only one cooling mechanism for controlling the temperature. One control adjusts the thermostat setting, the other the relative proportion of cold air sent to each of the two compartments of refrigerator. The conceptual model provided by the manufacturer makes it difficult for users to use the product.
The user will have a mental model of how to use the object, and the object also yields a conceptual model (design model) for how it can be used. When the two models coincide, then there is a close "mapping". Norman writes that the designer usually expects the user's model to his design model, but this is obviously not always the case. Providing a good system image through documentations, instructions and labels act as a bridge between the design model and the user mental model.
Norman gives an example of a telephone to demonstrate poor visibility. Telephones today have lot of functions but are poorly designed. The functions are not easily visible for the users. Most users don't even realise that the functions are available. Norman says, "Whenever the number of possible actions exceeds the number of controls, there is apt to be difficulty". The telephone system has 24 functions, yet only fifteen controls and none of them labelled for specific action.
Lastly, Norman describes the principle of feedback. According to him, any action of a user should produce some feedback so the user can tell if the desired effect was achieved or not.
I really enjoyed watching this video. Some of the facts shown in video were very interesting.One particular fact that really impressed me was how long facebook took to add 100 million users in their site.It is certainly a strong sign of Social Media Revolution. It cannot just be a fad anymore.
I found a brilliant video floating around the internet by Markham Nolan. The video is targetted at two particular groups of people operating in the online content marketplace; people with money to spend but no idea about what they're doing, and so called 'social media experts' who claim that because they have 10 million Twitter followers and a highly active stumbleUpon account.
It's a hilarious video but you might want to use your head phone before watching it.
Facebook has come a long way since it was first introduced as a networking site for high school and university students. Since the introduction of Facebook platform and Facebook Markup language (FML), we can witness thousands of applications being built in Facebook by developers. Neale and Russell-Bennett in this research article investigates the value users derive from 'cool' Facebook applications, and explores the features that either encourage or discourage users to recommend applications to their friends.
The authors adapt the experiential view of value rather than traditional view of value as cost and benefit analysis for their research. They believe that Social Networking value is not evaluated with currency but with time and money. Therefore, they adapt the experiential value concept of Holbrook(2004;1994) and Sheth et al(1991) to categorize four types of value generated by Facebook applications; emotional, functional, social and altruistic (humane).
Emotional: Pleasure, fantasy or fun gained by using an application.
Functional: measured by performance and technical features.
Social: generated by connections with other people enabled by using the application.
altruistic(humane): obtained by helping others or society.
The authors also explore "Cool" in terms of Facebook application. Dutch researcher Carl Rohde describes cool in product terms as "inspiring and attractive, providing empowerment" to the user. In SNS such as Facebook and MySpace cool applications are mostly recommended and passed over to friends in network than the un cool ones which are ignored and not passed over.
Having defined "Cool" and value of Social Networking Sites, the authors conduct survey on their two questions. For their first question what value is created by a ‘cool’ application?’, the following theme emerged:
the ability of the application to facilitate self–expression of interests,values or personality.
the ability to facilitate competition/comparison with others and novelty/rarity.
For their second question, three different types of features were found to have influenced users to encourage or discourage recommending and application: Symmetrical, Polar, Uni-directional.
Neale and Russell-Bennett conclude by saying that even though functionality of an application plays an important role, it alone cannot make an application a success. It must be combined with either social or emotional value to create significant 'coolness'.
Multimedia has been around for some time. But, we do not yet have a de facto methodology for developing a multimedia enhanced application, whether it's a desktop application or a web based. Most of the companies today follow their own in house development methodology based on their requirements. We do have methodologies such as Feature Development Methodology (FDD), User Cantered development Methodology (UCDM), traditional methodology such as SDLC or Waterfall which are being used even today to implement multimedia applications. But the question is why we don't have a standard methodology for multimedia?
With the New Media Course, my aim is to understand Media in general, get involved in all the activities in New Media and along the way find out why we still lack a de facto methodology. Understating Media would help me understand the requirements involved in its development. I guess and I hope, by the end, I would be equipped to deliver a development strategy or methodology for a multimedia enhanced application on given requirements.
While looking into various disciplines and resources offered by DePaul, I found some courses that I think I would be interested in. Apart from the Proseminar (New Media), I am currently enrolled for Enterprise Project Management (EPR) course in CDM. The course covers the effective management of complex large-scale technology based projects as well as the management of multiple IT-oriented projects within an enterprise. My main reasons for choosing this course is because I feel that it is very important to understand how IT projects are managed in big companies and how they are monitored and controlled by program management offices (PMO).
From the Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse department I am interested in taking the Web Document Design and Writing for Web courses. I haven't yet decided on courses provided by Communication and Art, Media and design faculties. I feel I need to find out more about the courses provided by these departments.
There are few courses within CDM that I am interested in. Ecommerce Web Site Engineering Course in particular is something that I would like to take. The course covers almost all the aspect of developing an e-commerce Web Site. It introduces the Web site engineering methods, its life cycle and design issues and methodologies. The Scripting and Interactive Media course under HCI is an interesting course too. I have already done some structural programming with Action Script, so to learn OOP programming using Flash Action Script would be a natural progression. I was initially thinking of taking the User-Cantered Web Design course under HCI but I have already taken Usability course in my under grad level and I am aware of the methodology and the evaluation techniques like heuristic evaluation, Cognitive Walkthrough and Think aloud protocol. So, I think I won't be taking this course.
Multimodal Discourse- By Gunther Kress & Theo Van Leeuwen
In the book "Multimodal Discourse the modes and media of contemporary communication", Kress and Van Leeuwen introduces the "multimodality concept”. The term "Multimodality" means the use of various modes such as language, image, text, sound, music, and sign to create a semiotic product.
In this book the authors explore the principles behind multimodal communication and suggest that common semiotic principles operate in and across different modes. By this they mean, it is possible to encode action through music and emotions through images.
The authors question the issue of meaning in their framework. Meaning, according to the authors has traditionally been something with a static, singular mode of representation. To design an answer to the question of meaning, four critical concepts are introduced which the authors call "strata". They are discourse, design, production, and distribution. It is to be noted that the authors do not give any particular hierarchical order for their strata.
Discourse: Discourse is the first of the four strata defined by Kress and Van Leeuwen. "Discourses are socially built networks of ideas developed or produced in specific social context and are appropriate to the interest of social actors in these contexts”. To illustrate their argument they give an example of "ethnic conflict" discourse of war. This particular discourse could be used to discuss warfare but also could be used in a variety of other context such as airport thrillers or in movies set in Africa.
Design: Kress and Van Leeuwen states that,” Design stands midway between content and expression”. By this the authors mean that design serves as a cognitive process for creation. It is where ideas are formed. The authors also say that designs are completely different from productions. To illustrate this, they give an example of architectural projects which are never built. They remain on paper, in the mind or on the hard disk.
Production: "Production' refers to the organisation of the expression, to the actual material articulation of the semiotic event or the actual material production of the semiotic artefact". Here again, the authors differentiate design and production with an example of improvising music. They say that composers design the music and performers execute it. According to the author this is the critical difference between design and production. Design, which is the process before performing and production which involves the actual expression of the design practice.
Distribution: The authors explain the distribution strata through music. They state that "musical performers may need the technicians who record the music on tape and disc for preservation and distribution". Even though the authors mention that they don't put any of their stata's one before another, we can say that discourse, design and production would always come before the distribution strata.
The article concludes with an example of Stephanie's bedroom as a multimodal text to demonstrate the strata's. The authors in this example suggest that for the bedroom to be a final product, meanings needs to be realised by spatial arrangement. It needs to be conceptualised and designed before it could be produced.
Search engines are the primary source for any internet users to find a web site. Therefore, Web sites with good listing on search engines are more likely to get increased traffic than the ones without.Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about how to get your web pages accessible by search engines and how to improve your ranking on search engines. It is a process of increasing your number of visitors by achieving a high position within search results when relevant keywords are searched for.
SEO has been around for more than 10 years but still a lot of web sites fail to take advantage of it. Here, I will provide some quick guide on popular tricks used by most of the web developers to optimise their sites.
Choose appropriate Keywords: Choosing the right keyword is one of the important ways that you can optimise your site. Keywords and phrases picked up carefully may produce better result in search engine. Therefore, it is vitally important that you choose keywords that best represent your web site. For example it is better to have English Leather Shoes, Women’s high heel shoes, Man’s sports shoes rather than Shoes, Women’s Shoes, Men’s Shoes. Try to avoid using generic ones since it is going to be extremely difficult to optimize for them.
There are various places that you can put keywords in your html document.
1.1Keywords in TITLE tag:
<Title>English Leather Shoes, Women’s high heel Shoe’s </title>
J Query tutorials, PHP tutorials, JavaScript and Ajax, REST, SOAP,
OOP PHP and many more./”>
<meta name = “keywords”content = “ css, web, jquery, web development, security, JavaScript lightbox, JavaScript thickbox, shopping cart”/>
1.3Keywords in Alt tag: Alt tags are mostly used to describe pictures on the web page. Search engines don’t understand the content of the pictures. So, use the Alt tag to describe the pictures on your web page.
Example: <img src= “boat.gif “ alt = “small boat”/
1.4Keywords in the links: Make your links as clear as possible. For example instead read more use read more on SEO.
1.5Keywords in Header tags: Header tags are not used much these days.The size of the text is defined using CSS these days. But search engines look for these header tags. It allows search engines to see the information hierarchy of the page. So, it’s a good practice to include header tags in your html document rather than define it elsewhere.
2.0Avoid Duplicate Content :
Search engines like Google and Yahoo are very strict about duplicate content. Google, I believe penalises you for having duplicate content. Footer contents can be repeated without penalties but make sure you don’t make your footer content big to qualify as an article.
3.0Create a Site Map:
Site Maps are the great way to be found by the Search engine. Site maps lets search engine know about the existence of the page. It ensures all pages linked throughout a site will be crawled and indexed by the search engine.SEO experts recommend an HTML site map for the user and an XML site for th search bots.
4.0Avoid Frames:
Let’s not get into technical reasons for why frames are bad.Just avoid using them. Both from a design perspective and a SEO perspective frames are a pain in the neck.IT causes confusion to your users and stops web spiders from crawling through your site.
5.0Do not use flash based Navigation:
Web Bots cannot crawl through flash based content. So, avoid using flash navigation. I ‘m not aware of how flash designers work on SEO but as far as I know flash contents are not crawled by Web bots and it is recommended not to have a flash based navigation system. So, avoid if you can.
6.0 Reduce Code Bloat:
I cannot generalise but I still see some web deverlopers doing this. It is not a good idea to include your stylesheet and javascript within the html document. Your content should always be seperated from your layout. Having CSS and Javascript within your HTML unnecessarily makes your code bloated and wastes search engines time to access your page. Search engine simply do not need to know how your page looks like.
The following piece of code shows Javascript and CSS defined externally:
<h1>English Shoes, Men’s Shoes, Women’s high heel shoes </h1>
<p>Here's our main content. It appears at the very top of the "body"
section of our file. The search engine will find this text easily
and weight it more importantly, for determining what the page is about,
than text it finds towards the bottom of the file.
</p>
.
.
</div>
</body>
</html>
7.0Check for broken links:
I’m sure all of us have seen 404 errors on web pages. Error 404 means that the client was able to locate the server but the page was not found. If the page linking to the 404 error remains on this list for too long or has too many links to 404 errors, in all likelihood this would have a negative effect on the “Quality Score” of that page.
8.0Get linked by popular Sites:
Having popular sites linked to your site is a great way to increase traffic. In fact each click to your site is considered a vote to your site by the linking site. This is however a long process. So, you just have to be patient and find out ways that you can do it. Normally, if I want to increase traffic on my personal site, I would write articles on popular sites and request a link back to my personal site.
9.0Submit your site to search engine:
After you have all the above, it’s about time you submit your site to the search engine. You can start off with popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN and move your other commercial vendors. But do a thorough research on where you are submitting your website. Make sure you do not submit it to ones who submit your links to link farms. This might get you penalised.
10Use Tools To Analyse:
There are numerous tools that you can use to analyse your site. Google Analytics, Word Tracker, Microsoft Keyword Forecast. SEOBook Keyword Density Analyser etc are tools that you can use.
I might write a separate blog on SEO tools.
11. Avoid Using Black Hat Techniques:
Black Hat techniques mean optimising your site on search engine in an unethical way. Sooner or later, most probably sooner than you think you will get caught and get permanently kicked out with no chance of getting listed again. DON’T DO IT…
Conclusion:
Following all the steps above doesn’t guarantee you a good ranking on search engine. Do not expect changes to occur overnight. In fact, no one can guarantee a top spot onany search engine. Getting higher ranking on search engine is a continuous effort that takes time to obtain positive results.
In this article i have only covered few issues about what SEO is and how it is achieved. There are plenty of resources that you find on the internet. Starting off with the WikiPedia won’t be a bad idea.
The author lists five important things that an individual applying for a job in online media
should be aware of:
1. Don't Expect Your Blog to be your next full-time job. 2. Don't spend a ton of money on Pointless Social Media/Web 2.0 Conferences 3. If you really want to understand social media, you must participate 4. Don't waste too much time on learning HTML. 5. Remember there's no sure thing in online media either.
Online Media is constantly evolving. So, i have to agree with the author that there is not sure thing in online media. We still do not know which direction we are moving towards. The author writes that, like all other media, online media will continue to grow and evolve as a profession.
The book,” Don’t make me Think" by Steve Krug recommended by the author is an exceptional book i went through about a year ago. I think it was the first edition i read. If you are interested in web usability and want to understand how people use the web, you should definitely have a look at the book. In addition to the book, i think usability enthusiast should regularly visit Jacob Neilson's site. Jacob Neilson is a well known figure in Usability for his Heuristic Evaluation technique. You can find plenty of resources on usability in his site.
Cloud computing is a loosely defined concept. We can find thousand, if not hundreds of definition of Cloud computing on the internet. However, in simpler term we can define cloud computing as a convergence of three major trends; Infrastructure as a service(IaaS), Platform as a service(PaaS) and software as a service(SaaS).These are the classes of technology capability or IT infrastructure that are being offered as Clouds today.
Wiki defines IaaS as "The delivery of computer infrastructure as a service". Amazon's EC2 service is a very good example. They provide a web service that provides resizable computing capacity in the cloud. Developers or users get a virtual server, storage space, network configuration on a pay per use basis. PaaS type of clouds provides users with the service to develop, test, deploy and host sophisticated web applications in the cloud. For example BungeeConnect is a Web based IDE that allows users to build sophisticated mashup applications based on their requirements. And finally, the SaaS type of clouds provides users with software that could be run on the internet. Commercial software’s such as Clarizen's online project management tool, Zoho's customer relationship management and human resource application come under SaaS type cloud. There are also number of office application that could be considered as platform as a service cloud. Google Doc, blist, slide rocket are applications that allows users to create or blow documents into their online cloud and then to work on them using any kind of computing device using internet.
Cloud Computing can be seen in various forms. If you use internet you are most likely to be using cloud computing of some form. The survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project listed some of the activities considered to be cloud activity and found that 69% of the internet users have done at least one. The survey also found that young internet users of 18-29 are more likely to use cloud computing than the older ones (79%).
According to the survey, people mostly use cloud computing because of its ease and flexibility. Users don't have to run around with their floppy disk or hard disk to take their data to access from a different location. With cloud computing, data could be stored on the centralised location/server and could be accessed from anywhere via internet.
With cloud computing, data and computing are not in the place they use to be in (personal desktop). The data is stored at the service provider’s end. The location of where the data is stored is very critical because the possession of data in computing world implies control. If a data is stored in a personal computer you have the ability to copy, move or delete your data. Basically do whatever you want to do with your data. Now, with cloud computing, even though you have some level control over your data, you don't have control over what the service provider does with your data. Therefore, despite the popularity of cloud computing for it's ease, flexibility and mobility the Pew Internet and American Life survey found that users are still wary and concerned about how their personal data are being used by the service providers.
Cloud computing is definitely the next big wave in computing. It holds a lot of promise and is certainly here to stay for a long time. The fact that users don't have to worry about uptime, backups, system maintenance, system admins, power failures etc is a great benefit to any normal internet user or business.
To conclude, Cloud Computing is not a new technology. It is something which we already had but with a different name. It is not a technology on its own, it is simply a term given to three major IT trends that I discussed above.
