#mediause

I have noticed an increasing dependence on media convergence in my personal media consumption in recent years. The convenience of having all media available at my fingertips is incredible, and as humans we are so susceptible to finding the path of least resistance and taking the easy route. However, between the threat of losing locally produced media content and the echo chamber effect of receiving news from the same source, it is never more important to consider the importance of applying critical thought in personal media use.

The world has undergone lightening-fast transformations in the growth of technology during the ever progressing digital age. Traditional broadcasting faces challenges to survive in the modern world. It is critical that traditional sources adapt to maintain diverse media content in an online age. For a Canadian example, I recall watching many hours of broadcasting from the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) when I was a child. At that point in my life, my media consumption was almost exclusively Canadian; watching episodes of shows on CBC such as “The Littlest Hobo” and “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” provided almost exclusive regulated Canadian content and allowed me to view the world through more of a local lens. Nowadays, my media content is from a vast amount of sources, as shown on my log. While this does have the benefit of providing a broader world perspective, the vast majority of these are not local, or even Canadian, sources.

Why?

Firstly because they still feel they need to fight piracy, and secondly they feel the need to implement a 'Virtual Schengen Border', an European internetfilter. And third, which is in my opinion the most moronic; the anti-cookie law, because cookies are used to track consumers for marketing goals the EU feels the need to make the use of cookies very annoying for visitors of websites.

What?

What they're obviously missing is that websites are stateless, so unless your goal is to cripple the internets it's better to look at more intelligent alternatives, like Do not track. Forcing the user to confirm every cookie is like shooting at a fly with the death star.

Another example is today's attempts to regulate the internet by giving governments more control over it, claiming it is to protect citizens but in effect it is more like an attempt to gain the ability to censure material more effectively.

How?

Why?

As I explained in a post a while back about how Piracy is Great, publishing your book for free, online, can actually boost the sales of the printed copy. But it also comes closer to the true goal of books, to share and spread knowledge and information. By sharing your knowledge with others you can boost innovation, simply because many minds can come up with more, and better, ideas than only a few minds.

What?

There are some great examples of free books, Clever Algorithms for one, a book that I've ordered and which I'm currently reading. Which discusses different algorithms for a variety of problems and shows an implementation of the algorithms in Ruby. Another book I'm currently reading is Learn you a Haskell for Great Good!, which is a great (and hilarious) introduction to Haskell.

A good repository for Open Books is the O'Reilly Open Books Project, which has a great variety of books published under various forms of "open" copyrights.

Interestingly enough most Open Books are books covering topics associated with Computer Science. It seems we geeks are ahead of the wave once again!

How?

In my post To License or to Unlicense? I discussed some licenses, but a a widely used source for licenses for open books seem to be the Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.

Why?

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, accurately named 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience'.

Especially in gaming people can achieve Flow, games have a lot of goals one can achieve, with build-in reward mechanisms. These goals combined with the need for focus, one cannot be successful in video games without concentrating. All factors contributing to flow.

What?

Two games that implement quite a bit of unobtrusive design features are Assassin's creed and Mirror's Edge. Let's start with Mirror's Edge, take a look at the image below. Quite distinctively there are red objects throughout the image, these objects help you navigate through it, clearly displayed in this trailer. The player doesn't have to look around for signs or textual directions, the flow isn't interrupted, instead the next target is obvious and you can keep going.

As mentioned, Assassin's Creed also have some unobtrusive design elements, perhaps the game play isn't as centered around it as it is in Mirror's Edge, but they're still very good examples!

In Assassin's Creed there are certain high up locations from where the player can explore a part of the map, viewpoints. These viewpoints are marked by an eagle either sitting on it, or flying around it, as pictured below.

The eagles fit in perfectly with the game, and when one isn't looking for them you won't notice them but when you are they're very easy to find. Great design!

Another feature in Assassin's Creed is the Leap of Faith, where the player dives off a tower/building into a pile of hay. However when you're in a high speed pursuit, you cannot first check if there is a pile of hay and then jump. So solve this issue the designers put pigeons on the edges of buildings from where the player can jump.

Another example of great design, they sit in so well with the game and yet are still very informative to the player all in a natural manner. Of course this does not mean everything in Assassin's Creed is like this, and perhaps this isn't even a bad thing. But I prefer eagles and pigeons over quirky arrows and icons, despite how informative they might be.

How?

Why?

I have done many projects, and as expected, every last one of them had specific requirements. That however does not mean the definition of them we used was very specific. Actually the requirements were described quite inaccurate, no matter if it were database, interface or software designs. But this isn't (just) a case of sloppy work, accurately defining requirements is just REALLY hard.

Imagine a tailor. Measuring his customers, their chest, back, legs and arms. Tailors measure everything, they gather exact numbers. And guess what? These numbers are requirements, and they're exact. So why can't this be done for IT projects, or other 'business' projects?

I'd like to play the complexity card here and pretend that it's not our fault, it's the project. But that's simply not true, because the complexity can be reduced by dividing the projects in smaller chunks, chunking.

So the complexity can be tackled, and we know that we can accurately define the requirements for less complex projects (Though I am not in any way saying making tailor made clothing is easy ;). So why is it still so hard, what can we do?

What?

To accurately define requirements one needs to explore the domain to get an overview of what matters, what doesn't how things are connected. But this is quite hard without submerging yourself in the domain and thus losing your perspective. So how can we keep our fresh perspective but still learn enough about the domain to accurately define the requirements.

How?

One of the things I came across not too long ago is contextual task analysis.  

The Contextual Task Analysis (CTA) focuses on the behavioral aspects of a task, resulting in an understanding of the general structure and flow of task activities.

Which is exactly what we need. An understand of the structure and the flow of task activities. But CTA isn't as much of a method as it is a methodology, it is a toolkit of different methods.

Two of these methods are Concept Mapping and the Critical Decision method (CDM). CDM is an interview method, albeit very interesting we won't discuss here, be sure to read up about it if you're interested in knowledge elicitation of course!

Concept mapping however has pretty diagrams, which I as an IT-geek love. For example one about Mars. Concept maps shows relationships between concepts, and look a lot like mindmaps. But they have one important difference, the relationships are defined, using linking phrases. These linking phrases add a lot of information, which is why Concept Maps are so valuable for understanding a certain knowledge domain.

Why?

The intent of a license is to grant or prevent access in a certain fashion to a product made by the licensor. Generally a license is used to protect the intellectual property of a party. For closed source and/or commercial products this is quite clear cut, after all for those products you want people to only use the product on exactly your terms.

For open source or better yet for your hobby project where you couldn't care less about if someone used it, it could be somewhat more complicated. I am not denying there's still a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo involved with closed source/commercial products, but even for a small hobby project there's too much involved. Just look at this list, it'll take you more than a few minutes to pick the right one. ;)

The public domain is something which is beautiful yet confusing in my opinion. Beautiful in the way that it stimulates creativity, sharing and innovation in general. Confusing in that it's almost never clear when you're allowed and how you're allowed to use it. I hardly ever read licenses any more, most of it doesn't make sense to me anyway.

What?

As a creator I never really paid much attention to the whole ordeal, figuring that whoever finds my code can figure it out. But admittedly that's not a very friendly approach, so when I came across Unlicense I was quite content. In short the Unlicense license allows you to waiver your copyright to your code (since that seems to be the main product for the license atm) completely.

The first line of Unlicense;

This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.

Is actually formulated in such a way that googling it will show you the software you can freely use/edit/compile/copy/etc. Which I think is pretty awesome! Now I can set my code free without confusing anyone who wants to use it.

How?

If you want to start using Unlicense I advise you to just read their website, it's clearly explained there, no legalese either.

Stuff like this does make me proud to be a coder/geek, because in a world where everybody just thinks about themselves, coders/geeks seem to be setting new trends for the public domain. With 'organisations' like Anonymous being the front-line combatants for internet freedom and free-speech.

I'd like to close off with the blessing SQLite uses instead of a license;

May you do good and not evil

May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others

May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

Why?

A rant: a loud bombastic declamation expressed with strong emotion. So I should probably type this blogpost with caps lock on and use a lot exclamation marks. But I won't, instead I'll start by explaining why I am annoyed by the over-usage of the 2.0 thing. A few weeks ago I attended a symposium, and one of the topics discussed was Education 2.0 and 3.0. Afterwards an elderly man approached me, looking somewhat confused, and he asked me what the meaning of this 2.0 and 3.0 was.

At first I was somewhat surprised by the question, but I'm not totally oblivious to people not understanding the IT lingo, or more fitting for 2.0, the 'overused marketing' lingo.

I had never really wondered why, so it took me a second to come up with an answer. What I ended up telling the elderly man was that 2.0/3.0 are version numbers, used to indicate a different version, or a (complete) renewal. And that it was a thing most commonly seen in software development. Of course it's also used in other areas, but by mentioning software development the man wouldn't have to feel bad about not knowing and I could feel good about helping someone.

So far we haven't reached the rant part yet, I know. But since that conversation I've started to see it everywhere, and I mean everywhere (don't think about pink elephants). 2.0 this and 3.0 that, but having in the back of my mind the fact that apparently this isn't clear to everyone I started getting annoyed. First off, most of these so-called 2.0's hardly even qualify for a 1.0.0.1 increment with the level of innovation they're showing. Also I couldn't help but thinking; "Why can't they be more original?!".

What?

To illustrate how not-original the 2.0 crowd is, here's some examples:

Web 2.0, Classroom 2.0, Museum 2.0, Health 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Gov 2.0, Government 2.0, Library 2.0, Emotional IQ 2.0, Career 2.0, Mobile 2.0, Publishing 2.0, Business 2.0, Travel 2.0, Ecommerce 2.0, Women 2.0 and many, many more (about 1,040,000,000 more).

There might be more popular uses of the same name, but this is just to illustrate how many there are. Nor am I affiliated with any of these sites, I merely did a search for "2.0" on Google, Wikipedia and Twitter.

It's also funny to note that the 'Point' in 'Two Point oh' doesn't really work, or at least not in domain names. They either end up with having just "2" or "20" in the domain name, both conveying a different meaning than 2.0.

How?

I don't have a clear cut solution for my frustrations, other than taking a deep breath though I'm sure the 2.0 hype will fade. The sooner the better ;). Mostly I hope people will put some effort into thinking of better, funnier and more original names. I am personally attracted to weird, funny, geeky names while the 2.0 thing makes me lose interest right away, so please be more creative, I know you can do better!

Some awesome names:

We Were Promised Jetpacks, I saw their name, loved it and then I started listening to their music, cool names work!

Google, have you ever heard it before?

37Signals, don't forget to read the article this links to!