Entries from April 2008
Just saw a tangential reference to this on a visual studies listserv, and wonder if anyone has tried it (or wants to try it and post their evaluation).
Transana is software for professional researchers who want to analyze digital video or audio data. Transana lets you analyze and manage your data in very sophisticated ways. Transcribe it, identify analytically interesting clips, assign keywords to clips, arrange and rearrange clips, create complex collections of interrelated clips, explore relationships between applied keywords, and share your analysis with colleagues. The result is a new way to focus on your data, and a new way to manage large collections of video and audio files and clips.
Used to be free, now $50/user/computer. (Not clear to me if it’s 2 x $50 for 1 user, 2 computers).
Categories: research tools
Tagged: Transana
A Berkeley journalism student, James Buck, was arrested in Cairo and notified his friends by posting one word, “arrested,” to Twitter. Here’s the story from — of all places — the Daily Cal. One of the local TV news programs picked it up last night, where I saw it. He also kept calling contacts and posting updates to Twitter, and the university sent lawyers who negotiated his release.
Updating the world about one’s minute-to-minute activities can sometimes be worthwhile.
Categories: social/technology
Friends for sale: Buy and sell your friends as pets! You can make your pets poke, send gifts, or just show off for you. Make money as a shrewd pets investor or as a hot commodity! Friends for Sale is the bees knees!
Learned about this when I discovered that I had been “bought” as a “pet.” It took me a while to figure out how to disable this.
I can’t believe that people find this amusing — buying and selling people as pets? Without their knowledge or agreement? I know, I know, it’s intended to be fun, funny. Well, I find it disconcerting — tasteless. It was hard to even find out what it was, and how to opt out. Surely something like this should be an opt-in feature.
If I wanted to spend the time — but I don’t, life’s too short — I’d write a critique of Facebook from the perspective of a non-fan. Actually, someone must have done this, but life’s too short to spend time on this.
( I joined because that was the only way I could see content, and needed to know what was going on, for my research.)
But it leaves me curious about what such an app and the other Facebook functions and apps (1) mean about the people who find this interesting or amusing and (2) what these are doing to – or reflecting of — contemporary social interactions, at least among Facebook’s adherents. Yes, I’m sure there are serious analyses of Facebook somewhere, but it doesn’t happen very often that something that is very popular just completely baffles me. I could imagine my friends and I doing this in high school, when we were bored and our lives revolved around our social group. But — grownups?
Categories: social networking
The April 10 issue of The Economist has a special report on “The new nomadism.” Eight articles. I haven’t read them yet. Available online through the campus library, but some people might want to pick up the paper edition.
This is their list of “sources and acknowledgments”:
(more…)
Categories: mobile · technology
The DMV is almost too easy a target, but I can’t resist. Some usability problems are so incredibly dumb, it’s hard to believe.
Missing from the logo repro’d here is what appears just below it: “Save time, go online.” Well, it’s only a time-saver compared to the hours you sit there without an appointment. (When I last went in without an appointment, it took at least an hour, probably much more; I didn’t check the time when I arrived.)
Their online reservation system: Pick a location and they’ll tell you the first available appointment. Only. Beyond that, you get to play “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button?” (remember that game?) without the “hot” “cold” clues. Want a different time? Fine. You pick a time and they tell you if it’s available. Friday at 2 in Oakland? Nope. Friday at 4? Nah. Friday at 2 in El Cerrito? Hah! Monday at 9 in Walnut Creek? Try again!
This morning, after I went through this for three different locations and finally scored an appointment, I clicked on the button to reserve it — and was told the system was down, come back later.
Categories: usability at large
Adobe Photoshop Express has gone online — a free product from Adobe. I haven’t dug into it to see what it does and doesn’t do. The reviews that I’ve seen aren’t crazy about it. It’s designed for rank amateurs. It interfaces with some online photo sharing apps, and at least one review said it will work with Flickr soon, although other reviews say it’s not as good as Picnik.
It also offers a variety of sharing options, including emailing, building one’s own online “Gallery” hosted by Adobe, and embedding or linking photos hosted by Adobe to social networking sites and blogs. There was an uproar about the terms of service and ownership, which Adobe says it’s rewriting.
What I find interesting is that these online editing tools may make more sophisticated photo editors and, eventually, photographers of people who don’t know that much about photography by offering them such functionality as exposure compensation and white balance. If it does make posting and sharing easier, then it’ll encourage more of that, too.
Like other Adobe apps, however, the documentation is terrible, and the app is definitely not self-explanatory to its supposed target audience of people who’ve never used Adobe. Adobe’s big Achilles heel is its documentation, with usability not far behind.
Categories: photography · software
Today’s news coverage of the Olympic torch run in San Francisco has made a big deal of the protests, of course, but also of the torch run: interviewing torch carriers, talking about people who planned their vacations around the torch run in SF — even people who had flown in just for the day, for the torch run. And no, they weren’t all Chinese-Americans.
In 2002, when the torch for the Salt Lake City Olympics came through Oakland, I went to see it, and the story was very different. I had trouble finding out the route — not because of security concerns, but just lack of PR. I went to 51st Street in Oakland, and hung around with a handful of people, waiting for the torch. When it came, it had a small escort, and again only a handful of people watching. There was a handoff from one carrier to another near me, and both, as I recall, were developmentally disabled people.
Categories: random interest
