An interesting conversation about 'users doing other things' starting in Graham Attwell's blog
24-June-2006
- A del.icio.us API python script for co-ordinating multiple accounts | KNotations
- Yup! We're always doing 'other' other things - and that context is important
- Graham Attwell, The Wales-Wide Web | Real life experience
Graham notes, in his blog, a point that came up while we were chatting on the phone this morning:
...there is a world of difference between someone sitting down to develop use cases when this is the thing they are doing i.e. installing, testing, using, a service or a piece of software as the task in itself - and using the services and applications as one small part of their everyday working life.Graham Attwell, The Wales-Wide Web | Real life experience Good computer systems should let me keep doing things my way, even if for a few minutes I will be sending things their way.
This is a surprisingly important point, and one which is surprisingly hard to get across. I hope we can illuminate the issue with further discussion - and some examples - over the next months.
I replied at length in his blog, and not being one to use prose once-only, I paste most of it below as well :o) ... see the extended text for this entry.
This is a much more important issue than it sounds, because by enabling casual, connected gestures of content-creation, systems like API-enabled weblogging and del.icio.us bookmarking let us share context to at least some extent. If it isn't *really* easy to post in the context of what I'm doing now - if I cannot make lots of tiny content-connecting/creating/categorising gestures without stopping what I'm doing - the good systems effects that we see in del.icio.us for instance will not emerge.Yup! We're always doing 'other' other things - and that context is important (Mike Malloch in the wales-wide web)
PLE workshop summarised at Scott Wilson's Workblog
10-June-2006
Scott Wilson has posted a damn fine summary of a damn fine PLE workshop:
PLE workshop [Scott Wilson's Workblog, June 09, 2006]I've had a pretty good two days at the PLE workshop. Some very interesting ideas from the participants - looking back I think we were extremely lucky to get such a varied, knowledgeable, and positively engaged group - and I actually managed to do a demo without getting a firewall/proxy/gateway/dns related problem.
No doubt there will be a much more detailed wrote-up at some point; for now I think I'll just note a few things I found interesting...
I enthusiastically endorse Scott's outline of the important issues and the emerging points of consensus. I had a wonderful (if exhausting) time at both days, and feel very positive about the emergence of a developer/practitioner community with some real vision and momentum. I've had to put nose to grindstone since the meeting, hammering out design and project work, and I won't have a chance to write extensively on the subject for a while. Let me just say what a pleasure it was to participate in such a focused and productive meeting with people as smart and long-sighted as Scott and Oleg.
