Financial Times: “Economic migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean sent home $45.8bn last year, 20 per cent more than in 2003.” It seems like remittances are a bigger component of our economies every year. This is an important indicator of the further mixing of cultures that we addressed in the Practical Global IA session at the Summit. (“Follow the money.”)
NY Times article [free registration required] on Norbert Wiener (“The Inventor of Cybernetics”):
To be a truly famous scientist, you need to have a hit single. Einstein had E = mc2. Newton had the apple and gravity… But there’s another kind of scientist who never breaks through, usually because while his discovery is revolutionary it’s also maddeningly hard to summarize in a simple sentence or two.
There was a discussion last week on the IxD mailing list on what it would take to make our professions (IxD, IA, etc.) better known to the general public. When designing memes, simple, easy-to-relate-to ideas are usually the most effective. The article on Wiener starts off making the same point, one that I struggle with as I try to explain what I do to prospects, customers, and folks in general: can IA be boiled down to a single (one-sentence) idea that most people can relate to? What is it, and how can it be crafted so that it doesn’t short-change the field?
The recent success of the “folksonomy” and “Ajax” memes shows how rapidly ideas can spread when carried by simple, accesible stories. In the case of folksonomies, the story usually starts like this: “Do you know how you can tag pictures in Flickr?” In the case of Ajax, it’s: “Have you used gmail?”
What simple story we can tie IA to? What is our “hit single”?
Jakob Nielsen: “Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view.” This includes some folks for whom English is a second language.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communications: Cosmopoliteness in the Internet Age. “Most Internet use behaviors are positively associated with cosmopoliteness. However, this pattern was not found for other media applications such as e-mail and watching DVDs… Other things being equal, cosmopolites are more likely to travel more extensively, particularly outside of their local region and country. They are more likely to identify with a broad, perhaps global, culture than with a specific, more narrow milieu.”
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