It’s a measure of a term achieving zeitgeist status when people apply it liberally, even in circumstances where it doesn’t really fit — as with the managers who sought to label their initiatives as Total Quality Management or Business Process Re-engineering in the nineties, even if they only half-grasped the original intention behind these terms. […]
Month: July 2006
Information foraging theory
Foraging rabbit,copyright and cc-licensed by caro wanders by mistake. I came across information foraging theory via Jakob Neilsen, who described it as “the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993”. Wikipedia has a reasonable overview, noting that “information seekers… use the same strategies as food foragers — informavores constantly make decisions […]
Top online brands and the calculation of charts
My friends at Futurelab have posted their own chart of the Top 100 Online Brands, as an alternative to that provided by Interbrand (here’s Interbrand’s 02005 list, with the 02006 one due soon [Update, 28 July: the link to 02005 list now redirects to the 02006 list]). What does a chart of brands mean, and […]
Why is Pandora big in Beverly Hills?
An amusing little bit of trivia about Pandora, the online music discovery service that I’ve written about a few times (here’s my most in-depth review). Yesterday’s CNET News feature on Pandora mentions in passing that the most popular zip code of Pandora users is Beverly Hills’ 90210. Pandora is only licensed in the US. To […]
Learning Light web site launches, research published
Learning Light is a not-for-profit organisation set up in Sheffield to “overcome the everyday obstacles our members face within the field of e-learning”. It is supported from Yorkshire’s regional funds but is open to more or less anyone. I did some work for Learning Light last summer to build up their Knowledge Base, working with […]