But I was wondering about this weblog anyway: Graphic Designers for Dean.
Monthly Archive for March, 2004
This is an interesting article about presence.
A number of emerging technologies including virtual reality, simulation rides, video conferencing, home theater, and high definition television are designed to provide media users with an illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated, a perception defined here as presence. Traditional media such as the telephone, radio, television, film, and many others offer a lesser degree of presence as well.
This article examines the key concept of presence. It begins by noting practical and theoretical reasons for studying this concept. Six conceptualizations of presence found in a diverse set of literatures are identified and a detailed explication of the concept that incorporates these conceptualizations is presented. Existing research and speculation about the factors that encourage or discourage a sense of presence in media users as well as the physiological and psychological effects of presence are then outlined. Finally, suggestions concerning future systematic research about presence are presented.
I found this article via Sebblogging quoting Therese Örnberg (and her weblog Emerging Communication). She has written about Linguistic Presence on the Internet (PDF) which is also a fine read.
I am currently thinking about if I should run my german weblog here too. I decided to be bilingual – and currently the german weblog is more a weblog for my teaching activities. I don’t want to mix it like Erik does.
Matt Neuburg published a tutorial on “Creating Online Help with Tinderbox“. [via Schockwellenreiter]
The RSS feed is repaired. It’ll work on the old location, but it should be updated. It is now here feed://wrede.interfacedesign.org/xml/rss.xml (as http-Link).
There’s still a template missing for the single items at ther permanent URL.
Microsoft Research is doing a 70-people invitation-only symposium about social computing on Monday and Tuesday.
Kevin Shofield is one of the organizers who runs an own weblog. He writes:
“We really wanted to have the symposium webcast live on the Internet, but because we’re holding it at a ‘non-traditional’ facility, we couldn’t make that work. We are still videotaping all of the sessions, and will post them on the Internet as soon a possible.
We will have wireless Internet access available, so I am sure it will be blogged live, and I would assume IRC’ed too.”
Linux-Journal has published a review of COREblog online. COREblog is a weblog product for the Open Source Zope application server.
COREblog is developed by a Japanese programmer and an many members of the COREblog user community don’t communicate in English, but Klaus Alexander Seistrup in Denmark started an english mailing list.
Wiliam Denton has put together a facet-map howto:
“This paper will attempt to bridge the gap by giving procedures and advice on all the steps involved in making a faceted classification and putting it on the web. Web people will benefit by having a rigorous seven-step process to follow for creating faceted classifications, and librarians will benefit by understanding how to store such a classification on a computer and make it available on the web. The paper is meant for both webmasters and information architects who do not know a lot about library and information science, and librarians who do not know a lot about building databases and web sites.”
More on Facetmaps on the facetmap.com site.
Jeff Ward is asking if weblogs are publishing or actually some kind of converstation. He is pointing to Lilia Efimova who is warning about potential degradation of communication by superficial reading & writing (or listening & replying).
“I cannot adopt the concept that “conversation” alone is a good reason to invest this much time in blogging. Conversation is great when you have the leisure time to expend. What I get from reading and publishing a blog goes far beyond that. I learn from myself every time I write; I learn from others every time I read. When others take time to respond to things I written, I learn from that too. But I don’t always have the time to pursue or contribute to conversations.”
I agree.
Jon Buscall describes how he uses Tinderbox in class:
“As a teacher, it takes ages to create a set of worthy lesson plans. If you keep lesson plans/details as a hard copy you often have to make changes, can’t get a quick overview of your work and they tend to get tatty stuck on your shelf. It can also take a lot of time sifting through your email program, print outs, handscribbled notes to keep track of what you are doing.
Once you start to use Tinderbox you realise that you can simply drag everything into this nifty program, set attributes to categorize your information and set up agents to organize your work into subject or date related fields or anything that you care to use.”
I am sure I am going to use Tinderbox more (since I started to publish the weblog with it). It is definitely helpful to read about best practices. I have started a section with my own experiences as well.
I found this year-old posting over at Mark Bernstein about Clement Mok writing this in “Designers: Time for Change”:
“In the ensuing years, the deadening effects of social turmoil followed by stagnation and, later, the sheer volume of work created by waves of economic expansion engendered an environment of complacency. Designers increasingly just scrubbed and brushed what they already had for each successive client and project. They added more bells and whistles as was required by their clients, and chimed all the way to the bank.”
and
“The design profession functions as if each individual designer is selling his or her services in some sort of terminological vacuum, with nothing more substantial than his or her personal charisma or taste to serve as the foundation for vast edifices of public influence.”
Clement Mok is right, but I can’t really see that this is a behavior of designers in particular.
I just finished the first steps of redesigning this site in Tinderbox. There is a huge amount of things to look for. Many things need to be done in a particular way in Tinderbox. This does not necessarily mean it is harder than other tools – most of the time it is just different.
Another thing is: I do publish to a Zope server. So there is much under the hood that I can (and will) use together with Tinderbox. Zope will kick in everytime I need server-side functionality. But I am not yet there. First of all I have to get the templates straight and deal with a couple of open issues. It is not easy to do: Tempaltes there, content there, cascades of variables and parameters – this thing can get pretty complex very soon.
I jotted down some observations (and feature ideas).
Just a note: Someone used Tinderbox with XSL…
Technorati has a new interface – is it really new or did I miss the change? Unfortunatly it seems the database was recreated. All the references to my weblogs are lost.
I decided to do my new weblog with Tinderbox. But I miss a scriptability of Tinderbox, but for now it is the best tool I found to manage notes.
It still has a lot of bugs — especially when it comes to HTML export — and it is not very intuitive to design a weblog with it, but I hope I will sort that out after a while. I am going to take some notes about problems that I find here.
When browsing I even found someone using Tinderbox as a project management tool. Another one does papers with Tinderbox. A third person uses Tinderbox as rememberance agent.
In other words: Publishing to the web is just one way to use Tinderbox.
Update (Jan 2009): After almost 5 years of blogging with Tinderbox I switched to Wordpress.