ia play

In Stumbling on Happiness Daniel Gilbert mentions more than once that his friends are frustrated by his continual identifying of problems without providing solutions. It is certainly true that this is not a self-help book but it may make you look askance at some of your most engrained truths about what you want from life.

Gilbert believes we are rubbish at predicting what will make us happy in the future. He blames:

• realism - the belief that things are in reality as there are in the mind. But our brains are fallible and rarely scientific; they take all sorts of short-cuts.
• presentism - the tendancy for current experience to influence one’s views of the past and the future. Our current feelings affect our view of the future (when we are full we can’t imagine being hungry) and the range of possibilities we can imagine is a narrow set ranging around the present.
• rationalization - the act of causing something to be or to seem reasonable. We view our actions more favourably than our inactions, we rationalize extreme pain more than annoyance (there must be a good reason for going through this!) and we are happier about situations we are committed to and can’t get out of.
• corrigibility - the capacity for being corrected, reformed or improved (or rather our lack of it). We don’t accept other people’s evidence about things they are doing right now because we are different.

The book contains a brutal and rather depressing graph that shows how parents’ happiness varies with the age of their children. That the lowest point comes with teenagers will surprise no-one but the fact that parents’ happiness only reaches pre-children heights once the kids have again flown the nest is really quite startling. For the most part we mis-judge how happy children make us but it is an error that evolution rewards .

The studies are only comparing happiness of parents over time and don’t compare with non-parents. I’d be interested to see if there was any research to back up the folk opinion that kids might mean sacrifices when they are at home but you’ll appreciate them when you are old (for both care and love they can provide and the sense of continuity/immortality).

In What is Web 2.0 Tim O’Reilly describes Amazon reviews as harnessing collective intelligence of the users:

“Amazon sells the same products as competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, and they receive the same product descriptions, cover images, and editorial content from their vendors. But Amazon has made a science of user engagement. They have an order of magnitude more user reviews, invitations to participate in varied ways on virtually every page–and even more importantly, they use user activity to produce better search results.”

We’ve found in our user research that our audience doesn’t expect to find reading or writing user reviews to beparticularly valuable. Important as the user research is, this doesn’t mean we won’t build the functionality (remember the faster horses).

Now I do pay attention to the reviews. Generally I’m not that interested in a Mrs J Laithwaite’s individual opinion of The Not So Big House but the fact that 9 out of the 10 reviewers gave the book 5* holds more weight.

But, just as in the real world, there are individuals whose opinions are more than enough, especially in a particular domain. Stephen A. Haines is the #9 reviewer on Amazon.co.uk and writes shed loads of reviews of popular science books. I can’t, however, subscribe to his reviews or do anything like sort his reviews to find all his 5* rated books.

Swapshop also restricts user-to-user relationships which seems misguided. Having swapped one book with eadaoin surely that increases the chance that I will find another book in their collection than in the general mass of books? It is pretty hard to even find the user pages, let alone subscribe to them. Your only hope is to hack the URL or stumble across one of their books.

LibraryThing, on the otherhand, is brilliant at this sort of stuff. Not only can you subscribe to anyone’s library and their reviews but LibraryThing actively suggests overlapping and similar libraries and provides ‘watch this library’ functionality.

The super-specific Small Pleasures describes itself as “all about cream teas” and indeed it is.

Froth on the Cappuccino: How Small Pleasures Can Save Your Life is essentially a yummy mummy manifesto, complete with pink ribbon. At times it is inescapably middle-class and insular; small pleasures listed include wearing cashmere, spa days, champagne, pashminas, and fresh pesto. According to Maeve, Spas are no longer ‘prerogative of the very rich’ but are ‘a possibility for most of us’.

I felt particularly out of sorts reading the section on ‘wearing cheap jewellery’ as I had this uneasy suspicion that Maeve’s idea of cheap jewellery might encompass the most expensive things I own. Cheap to me is Claire’s accessories, for Maeve it is asking a little shop in Paris to make her a custom glass tiara.

In the midst of this sweetly but rather obliviously privileged view of ’small’ pleasures there are a host of concepts that can speak to a much wider audience:

• doing something you’ve been putting off
• making satisfying economies
• being met from a journey
• tasks with an echo of the past
• listing 3 good things
• seeing life as a web not a ladder

What is surprising is how invisible work is in this book. Maeve is apparently a ex-TV producer, novelist, and journalist. Her biog says “her hobby is trying to balance work, motherhood and having a good time” but from reading this book you might get the impression that she gets no pleasures at all from her work.

Even when the named pleasure could apply to work, almost invariably the description ties it to a family or domestic situation. ‘Using the five minutes’ is illustrated with examples of the housework that can be done whilst boiling the kettle and the chores that can be combined with the school run. Perhaps work is a world of only big pleasures, or of none at all.

Fabio Lopez has created a version of Risk, War in Rio , where the world is replaced with Rio de Janeiro, and the armies are police squads and gangs.

The goal of the project is to generate serious discussion through “cynical entertainment”. It is gorgeously executed, in-spite of the subject matter.

via Bruno

I’m a week into a new year of work. The weather has been sodden all week and the London transport system seems to have had one too many sherries over the festive system. None of this helps fill me with the joys of returning to work, particularly since I took an unusually indulgent two & half weeks off.

That said, things are looking rosy. 2007 saw a few changes around bbc.co.uk:

A new homepage. Only a beta in 2007 though and it needs more interesting boxes (recipe search!). Pink is still my least favourite colour. The black is surprisingly nice, particularly with the Signs of Life promo (I can’t link to the combo - there’s no archive yet but it is on the list).

iPlayer is kicking off its nappy and wandering around. “Perhaps television’s multimedia future has arrived” is the Guardian Media Diary’s response; both non-commital and grandiose at the same time . Anyway I love the instant gratification of streaming (and that works in Firefox).

/programmes/ - the basic architecture is there but it needs elevators, some more furniture, and a lick of paint. This unassuming product is a huge step forward for us. For years, vast quantities of BBC programmes had no presence on the website at all and pretty much everything that was there had to be hand-cranked by dedicated web teams.

Identity (login, member pages, recommendations even) looks set to be the thing for 2008. It’s been the thing before (2004 and 2006, I believe) but every idea has it’s time. If we can resurrect MyBBC then why not?

Metadata should finally cease to be a management buzzword and so I reckon we should see some really interesting metadata work happening.

But I’m still glad it is Friday

Only an IA would have a favourite Wikipedia category. Mine is currently Fictional computers, as stumbled across when constructing a clumsy Skynet-related metaphor.

(From here I found out about Heinlein’s Mycroft Holmes computer which would have shared a namesake with my husband if my father-in-law had got his own way.)

This category particularly appealed to me as the person responsible many years back for the rather ludicrous plant CV at the BBC. I repeatedly had to explain that it wasn’t a list of plant species but, well, plant personalities such as Major Oak, General Sherman tree, Pando and Methuselah. Famous plants… I don’t know what I was thinking (although I am relieved to see Wikipedia has a page for each of the above).

I’ve also always had a soft spot for the Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Fictional locations also caused a more potentially controversial dilemma for the CV management team. Should heaven be a ‘location’ or a ‘fictional place’?

Of course, the sensible decision is the coward’s classification of ‘religious concepts’.

The latest addition to the Onopoly stable is http://www.fumsi.com/

Whilst the shiny new homepage comes complete with rounded corners and bouncing navigation (a new one on me) I can’t help feeling it would have scored more 2.0 brownie points if it had been named Fumzi. That would have rather spoilt the acrostic though.

I will be corralling, herding and coaxing the Manage section so expect more from me on FUMSI.

I have no idea if their work is any good but I love The Future Laboratory’s Christmas card.

Neologisms, a cute dog and the money saved goes to a tree charity. If only those neologisms went somewhere.

Any ideas for what Synth-Ethics is?

The rather grandly titled Mining the Collective Intelligence of NYTimes.com users announces the rather more simply titled feature of their search engine ‘Also Try’.

Also try “recommends relevant suggestions of related searches, based on a fairly simple formula. The basic principal [sic] is to cluster together all the search queries submitted to nytimes.com in the past week.”

A search for ‘caucus’ certainly brought up a set of related queries:

what is a caucus, caucus results, caucus process, new hampshire caucus, edwards caucus speech

Unfortunately the relevance of the query can’t guarantee the relevance of the results and clicking ‘what is a caucus’ seems to provide less helpful results than the original query. Can we have a Times Topic please?

Similarly a search for ‘weather’ offers ‘today’s weather’ as an alternative but that doesn’t get you any closer to a weather forecast. At least you have the comfort of knowing that you want the same thing as lots of other readers.