Interrelativity

Category: Research

  • Blogging for Better Business: In Community with Customers

    The central message of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel is best summarized in the following quote: The revolution is about the way businesses communicate, not just with customers but with their entire constituencies — partners, vendors, employees, prospects, investors and the media.…

  • Stumbling on Happiness: Simulation, Surrogation, Attachment and Service

    Dan Gilbert gave an inspiring talk at Microsoft Research recently (before heading into Seattle to present to a larger audience at Town Hall), sharing some insights from his book Stumbling on Happiness.  Dan provided numerous opportunities to experience "learning through laughing" as he guided us through an engaging, enlightening and often delightful exploration into how…

  • Workspace Personalization: Physical, Digital and In-Between

    I’ve encountered a number of articles lately about organizational and personal aspects of ubiquitous cubicles (UbiCubes?), and these have brought to mind a number of ways that people have explored personalizing their workspaces with atoms and/or bits. Fortune recently posted an article, Cubicles: The Great Mistake, providing an historical overview and future predictions for the…

  • The Art, Science, Business and Politics of Happiness

    The Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled "Happiness, Inc." in this week’s Weekend Edition, which described how research into happiness is being applied in business contexts.  I’ve encountered a whole bunch of happiness-related pieces recently, and this one prompted me to weave them together. The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, by His…

  • The Price of War … and Peace

    The Seattle Times published an article yesterday on "What will war cost? Studies weigh oil prices, lost produtivity, more", based on two recent studies on the topic: "The Economic Costs of the Iraq War: An Appraisal Three Years after the Beginning of the Conflict" by Linda Bilmes (The John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard…

  • Third International Conference on Communities and Technologies

    A rather early announcement on the conference website: In an increasingly networked world, the concept of community has taken on new meanings and inspired the development of a wide range of technologies aimed at forging connections, improving communication, and enabling coordination among groups of people. Today, such terms as virtual community, blogging, podcasting, and smart…

  • Blogging as Therapy

    A recently published Blog Trends Survey, sponsored by AOL / Time Warner, provides some evidence that people often seek therapeutic effects from blogging.  The press release reports that Nearly 50% of respondents say they write a blog because it serves as a form of self-therapy. One-third of bloggers write about self-help and self-esteem topics. Fifty-four…

  • Microsoft Social Computing Symposium: April 25-26

    Microsoft Research is sponsoring a second Social Computing Symposium to be held April 25-26, 2005, presumably somewhere in the greater Redmond / Seattle area.  [Update: I initially posted the wrong dates in the first sentence and the title; the correct dates are there now — April 25-26.] Like last year’s event, which was invitation-only, the…

  • Frontchannels, Backchannels and Sidechannels at CSCW 2004

    CSCW 2004 was an engaging experience along numerous dimensions. In addition to an interesting collection of papers, panels and keynotes presented in the frontchannel(s), we had WiFi coverage and designated IRC channels throughout all the sessions. In one session, we projected the IRC window onto the main presentation screen, moving the backchannel toward the frontchannel,…

  • A Chat-Augmented Conference

    Jun Rekimoto gave the opening keynote at CHI 2004 last week (I hope to post more on other CHI-related topics in the near future). Among the interesting highlights from his portfolio of projects was a chat tool used to augment a conference (the annual Workshop on Interactive Systems and Software in Japan) since 1997. One…