You know that face you make when you’re about to take that perfect shot of yourself for myspace?
You know, the one where you push your mouth out in that weird combination of a pout and a kissy face make it look like you’ve got big pouty lips and model-quality cheekbones?
It’s called “duckface”
STOP DOING IT.
IT ISN’T SEXY.
YOU LOOK STUPID
Just because I was looking at the website for Christmas presents and then for some gadgets doesn’t mean I need to be emailed almost every day in December…
There must be a better indicator of whether someone is likely to purchase an item than “looked at it”.
I recently had the pleasure of visiting Hong Kong for a week while presenting a poster at the 18th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. In short, Hong Kong was an intense experience. The population density was overwhelming and the 25C temperature in November caught me by surprise.
You can see more photographs in the Flickr set.
I didn’t want to create an ordered list of my favourite albums from this decade accompanied by pretentious paragraphs explaining my choices so I abandoned that idea and decided to just put up the album covers and forgo the reasons.
Bonus: Clicking on an album cover will lead you to a legal stream of the album so you can check it out.
Ask yourself this: can you ever remember being willing to pay £16.99 for a CD?
I wanted to take some time to reflect on what I liked and what I disliked at The Edinburgh Festival 2009.
An outstanding, entertaining, and engaging puppet-show. I strongly recommended it to everyone who would listen, however, I think the stigma of puppet-show was too much to overcome. (A alternative reason is my friends don’t trust my recommendations!) Randy was a children’s entertainer telling us about this life and relationships and how it was all messed up. The writing was excellent and the performance was brilliant. I’m sure from time-to-time I’ll fondly remember Randy shouting “WHERE’S WILLIAAAAAAAAAAAM?”
I have been building an interest in Classical music since living in Bristol – Jim regularly listened to BBC Radio 3 when he drove us into work. Seeing a live orchestra was an great experience, there was much more energy than can be conveyed over the radio or on a CD.
I didn’t know anything about this until I saw a 5-star review on somebody else’s newspaper on the Glasgow Underground. Power Plant was an incredible light and sound exhibition at the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens Glasshouses. There were some beautiful touches like the flame pipes producing rhythms and sitting on the couches looking over the disco ball palm trees. It’s difficult to explain this exhibition but I strongly recommend seeing it on tour. I didn’t take any photographs because it wouldn’t do this exhibition justice.
I queued for tickets to watch the concert from Prices Street Gardens and I would do it again. Hopefully I will remember ear buds for next year because fireworks have never sounded so loud. A friend managed to take some great photographs of the display and this is the best quality recording of the concert I have been able to find:
We recently attended the free Banksy Exhibition at Bristol Museum after queuing for just over two hours.
The only restriction on taking photographs was that you couldn’t use a flash. Here are two pieces I particularly enjoyed. Overall, the exhibition was playful and I liked how you were forced to explore the entire museum to see everything.
The exhibition is on until 31st August and entry is free, however, you are advised that you may need to queue for at two-to-three hours. See twenty-one more photographs in the set.
In April, I visited Trento for an EU project meeting:
We stayed in a hotel in Sardagna and had this beautiful view from the balcony. The Grappa was fantastic and I loved eating pizza with freshly cut Speck. See a few more photos in the slideshow.
I visited Toulouse in April to present a workshop paper at the European Conference on Information Retrieval:
Toulouse had a wonderful atmosphere and the confit du canard was delicious. See a few more photos in the slideshow.
Finally, in June, I visited Madrid for an EU project meeting:
A colleague recommended a particular cafe for churros, and we were not disappointed. I also managed to visit some friends and see parts of Madrid that were a little off the beaten track. See a few more photos in the slideshow.
I recently filled in an online request to return my iPhone headphones for a replacement. Apple quickly sent a jiffy-bag containing return instructions, the replacement headphones, an envelope to put the defective headphones into, and a pre-paid return envelope.
For a company that seems to be taking steps to focus on the environmental impact of their products, as can be seen in the Environmental Status Report of the iPhone Tech Specs, the size of the pre-paid envelope is absurd.
I thought that online shopping was supposed to herald a new era of consumer-supplier interaction. The promise of being able to purchase from any supplier, regardless of their geographic location, has only partly come to fruition and the reason for this partial success is a combination of closely linked technical and social issues. I’m only going to speak about the social issues.
In 1995, Amazon.com and eBay were founded and this seems to have heralded the beginning of 24-hour online shopping. Amazon has grown into a massive online store where you can purchase almost anything you want at any time of day, perhaps it could be considered as a Web equivalent of Wal*Mart… eBay has developed into an online auction center where you can probably buy or sell almost anything you desire.
But lets consider the following, over simplified, scenario of buying a music album.
I read a review for the latest Animal Collective album, Merriweather Post Pavillion, on my favourite music review website, and based on hearing some samples on their MySpace player, I decide that I want to purchase the album.
Scenario A: Bricks and mortar
I walk into town to check our the prices and packages available in the record stores. The album is priced at £8.99 in HMV, a major retailer, £9.99 in Fopp, a national retailer, and £9.99 in Avalanche Records, a local and independent retailer. I decide to purchase the album at the local and independent retailer for £9.99 and pay using my Visa Debit card. I take a copy of the album to the cashier, hand it over, provide my payment method and PIN when asked, and leave with the album.
Scenario B: Online shopping
I open up my Web browser and visit a some online music retailers selling both physical albums and digital downloads: 7digitial.com MP3 Store, eMusic.com MP3 Store, iTunes AAC Store, Amazon.com physical and MP3 Store, Play.com physical and MP3 Store, HMV physical and MP3 Store, to name a few in the sea of choices. I decide to purchase an electronic copy of the album and find that a store I don’t usually use can provide it in the quality / drm-free / price category that interests me. The expectation seems to be that I will create a new account with a username, that I most likely cannot have so I get stuck with something like desmond1832, and yet another password and I need to yet again enter my payment card and address details. After entering all these details, I can download the album but I might need to install a piece of software to help me with my download. What?
In the Bricks & Mortar scenario, there is no cognitive friction involved in making a purchase. I can pay using cash or using a card; in the case that I use a card, the Chip & Pin system means I only need to remember four digits before I can leave the store.
In the Online Shopping scenario, I am almost certain to feel frustrated by the experience if I want to purchase from a retailer I have not used in the past. The repetition of typing the same details into Site X that I’ve already typed into Site Y is enough to drive you to distraction.
There are a few promising attempts to simplify this problem. Amazon Marketplace allows retailers to sell their goods through the Amazon.com website, it feels like a Flea Market; eBay Stores offers almost exactly the same thing; Google Checkout lets retailers use the Google payment system to process their transactions; and Paypal Business offers a similar system to Google Checkout.
Perhaps one of the reasons for none of these systems becoming the defacto standard is that they are all instrinsically linked to a business. Amazon Marketplace and Amazon.com, eBay Stores and eBay, Paypal and eBay. From a consumer and retailer perspective, it doesn’t feel like Visa Debit is linked to HMV or Mastercard is linked to Tesco, and maybe that helps retailers to trust that processing Visa Debit or Mastercard payments is less likely to cause them problems at any time in the future.