Tag Archives: research

Psychology, Society, Tech, Work

Everybody’s Talking (Or Not)

texting from the bar :P

texting from the bar 😛 (Photo credit: tray)

I’m not a huge fan of texting apart from the sort of messages it was intended for – quick hellos, arrangements to meet someone, thank-yous and so on.  The short, non-verbal nature of it combined with the feeling that you need to reply quickly means that some nuances of what you’re trying to say can be lost, leading to misinterpretation and who knows what consequences.  Well that’s how I see it sometimes, as opposed to the old days of writing long, carefully composed letters or actual speech where you at least have tone of voice to convey meaning.

It seems though that I’m in a minority, if recent research by Vodafone is correct.  They’ve found that average phone call lengths have halved in five years, to one minute forty seconds, with people seemingly preferring other methods of communication.

Surely people aren’t that worried about their inclusive minutes, or battery life, are they?

[Gizmodo UK]

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Tech

Normal Service Will Resume Shortly

Information overload

Information overload (Photo credit: Martino!)

This blog is just over a month old and it’s not been the best month to start something this time-consuming.  I have also found though that although I have plenty of ideas for articles most of them require a bit of research and source material and this is where I found a problem.

I have thousands of bookmarks in Firefox and lists of information in various places but no cohesive structure to tie it all together so at the moment I’m doing my best headless chicken impression to copy all these various sources of information into one place and this is where modern technology comes into its own again.

I realised a few weeks ago that an elephant could help me.

Before you ask what I’ve been smoking this elephant is the logo of Evernote whose collection of apps for just about any platform and even a webapp that I can access from work or any other computer is making this task of organising my virtual box of scraps of paper manageable.

I have notebooks containing whole articles or collections of notes or links to webpages that will become articles while other notebooks contain information on wider subjects that will be useful for many articles or books.  All these notebooks can be grouped together to organise things further and pages in one notebook can be linked on other pages so you can create webs of information in one place, ready to be pulled together, mixed vigorously and foisted onto the web, baked to perfection like a chocolate gateaux.

Combined with resources such as search engines and online encyclopaedias this ability to connect, sort and utilise the huge amount of information at our fingertips is one of the true 21st Century wonders.

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