Links for 2006-05-17
- The Christian Science Monitor has noise about a study on how e-mails are misinterpreted At first glance this is a pretty mediocre story about the old truim that you can't convey emotion well on e-mail (something we've known since the mid-nineties). But this digs a little deeper than most stories and cites some good research...
- Derek Powazek's written an interesting piece on people following Google's design patterns for Vitamin He's arguing for not blindly copying Google. The alternative argument would probably be something like Google have established a pattern language which now the rest have to follow or improve upon. Probably a bit of both...
- Apple have announced the 13" widescreen MacBook It's quite sweet actually. Quite powerful, relatively small and if you're prepared to spend a couple of hundred extra dollars then you can get one in black (with a little extra hard disk space)...
- Feed Rinse looks like an extraordinarily useful little service for making your RSS feeds more valuable... "Feed Rinse is an easy to use tool that lets you automatically filter out syndicated content that you aren't interested in. It's like a spam filter for your RSS subscriptions"
- Yahoo! Tech Monkey Challenge I'm not making this up - my employers have trained a monkey to race a human in getting a camera memory card into a computer to promote tech.yahoo.com. I have nothing to say about this whatsoever...
- It gets worse - the Yahoo Tech Monkey has a Flickr account I'm completely overwhelmed by this. You don't get this stuff when you work for the BBC, although I think maybe you should...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
That's no monkey, that's a chimpanzee!
They must have a hell of a time finding PG Tips for it in San Francisco.
→ Posted by: Jim at May 17, 2006 9:41 AM
But we can convey emotion by email! Email is written text, and written text can and has been used to communicate emotion for thousands of years.
It is not a fault of email or written communication that people who can't write particularly well are sending emails. The existence of bad poetry doesn't mean good poetry doesn't exist.
If we said "poetry lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well... In effect, poetry cannot adequately convey emotion", it would be torn apart. Why is it not the same with email? The only reliable explanation is that the people who send the emails which become the genesis of articles like this are unable to string words together coherently. That's not a story, unfortunately.
→ Posted by: Tom Morris at May 17, 2006 5:16 PM
God I hate monkeys. Nearly as much as I hate the Lost TV series.
You do know that the inhabitants of the island are all dead and they're all in a state of pergatory?
http://contentcontent.blogspot.com
→ Posted by: kenobi at May 17, 2006 5:46 PM
I think poetry can not adequately communicate the author's emotions, or the intended. (At least not if you don't know the author very well in person.) It's up for personal interpretation and nuances are bound to be lost.
Of course you can covey emotions in email, but not well, and only the big picture. Plus, the person who reads the message may not believe you're portraying your emotions honestly.
→ Posted by: Daniel at May 19, 2006 10:03 AM