http://jonathanmelhuish.com The professional blog of Jonathan Melhuish Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:16:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My third interview isn't actually with an ethical information system project but with somebody very involved in the field who is keen to help. Dr Terry Newholm is a lecturer in Marketing at the University of Manchester in the UK and a co-author of the book "The Ethical Consumer". I ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/11/interview-3-terry-newholm/ In my second interview in this series, I interviewed Wesa Aapro (in Finland) about his work on Consumer Gadget.  After an ambitious attempt to build a barcode-scanning device for providing ethical guidance to shoppers, Wesa is currently focussing more on the design of data formats for ethical information.  In January, ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/11/interview-2-consumer-gadget/ In order to give a bit of background to the various projects that are looking at how to provide ethical information to consumers, I though it would be good to do a series of interviews and release them as podcasts and online videos.  I don't know about you, but I ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/11/interview-1-easyethical/ This is a video of the talk I gave at the HCI2008 conference in Liverpool on 4th September 2008, entitled "News Not Noise: Socially-aware Information Filtering". I outline some of my key research findings regarding Facebook usage and suggest alternative interface concepts for browsing social news, making use of machine learning ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/09/hci2008-presentation/ I found Annesley and Kate in posh pizza-place The Yard, pondering a piece of paper packed with scribbled notes. This was the pitch - an attempt to explain the CarrotMob concept in a way that the bar owners of Old Street would appreciate its value. After briefly scanning ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/08/communicating-carrotmob/ I've been helping my friend Simon Hammond develop a social networking site designed specifically for mobile internet devices, called Bodder. Although Bodder has been in development for a number of years, it's never had a clear marketing strategy and has so far only been used by Simon's friends. ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/08/taking-bodder-out-into-the-real-world/ I was recently asked by Jonny White of Zimma to "write some copy" for a web site that he was working on. Although that's not something I've done before, it sounded like an interesting and reasonably straightforward task, so I accepted. It soon became clear that, like many ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/07/vca-technology/ Today I bought Russell Beale and Julie Christian a coffee as a token gesture of thanks for their help with writing my dissertation. Russell was my project supervisor and although I didn't see him often, the advice he gave me was golden. Julie is a researcher in the ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/07/some-feedback-on-my-dissertation/ I guess I'm not alone in feeling slightly uncomfortable when standing in a room of people we don't know. Nobody wants to stand in the corner making everyone else wonder why they have no friends, but at the same time initiating conversation with strangers instils a certain fear. ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/06/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people/ I've been keeping a personal blog for a couple of years, writing about a variety of topics.  Now that I'm leaving education and becoming a freelance I.T. professional and serial entrepreneur, it seems like a good point to separate out the personal from the professional.  Not because I'm trying to ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/06/welcome-to-my-professional-blog/ So we identified that online social networks don't make it easy to find the news that interests you, and we discussed different ways that we can figure out which social context each of your friends fits into. How can we now design a better user interface for browsing news ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/05/building-a-better-social-news-browser/ In my first post in this series, I suggested that current social networks are hobbled by their oversimplified underlying social model. So what can we do to improve this? In my research, I proposed five categories of friends: a close friend whom you see regularly a friend who was close but whom ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/05/putting-friends-in-boxes/ This is the first in a three-part blog series based on my final-year undergraduate dissertation. I've got 167 "friends" on Facebook. According to my research, that's pretty normal - actually it's slightly below average. We all know, though, that of those 167 people, only a handful are "friends" according ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2008/05/my-facebook-friends-arent-my-friends/ Nowadays, it's becoming quite rare to see a hitch-hiker. I'm sure there are many reasons for the death of hitch-hiking, but I suggest that these are the top three: trust (for both parties): it seems that we are becoming increasingly distrustful of our fellow citizens, and especially of strange-looking people ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2007/08/when-global-goes-local-hitch-hiking-for-the-networked-generation/ It's a symbol of America, and it's a concept that's spreading across the world - the out of town shopping centre. Built on cheap land on the edge of a city, these retail metropolises offer almost every product under the sun at low, low prices. Ample free parking ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2007/08/when-global-goes-local-the-death-of-the-super-mall/ We live in a society powered by fossil fuel. Almost everything we do consumes large amounts of non-renewable energy, because our cities, our industries and our lives are designed to do so. That's bad news, because energy is becoming more scarce and therefore more expensive. At the ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2007/08/when-global-goes-local-how-ubiquitous-connectivity-and-peak-oil-will-challenge-economies-of-scale/ Sometimes I feel like this guy - a little frustrated. Whilst the non-believers he's attacking are basically a lunatic fringe, I think there's a large majority who agree that climate change is a problem but are too concerned with their own lives to find out how they can help ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2007/07/positive-purchasing-power/ It's been a fun ride but now it's officially over - I've decided to call it a day on the Flukebox project. To be honest, I've made little progress over the last few months but the final nails in the coffin were provided by IndabaMusic. They've not been ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2007/06/the-end-of-an-era-a-flukebox-post-mortem/ Increasingly, our lives are being filled by interruptions - SMS messages, emails, calls, internet chat conversations, Twitter updates and RSS feeds, to name but a few. Things are only likely to get worse when your new robotic vacuum cleaner demands to have its bag changed and your car starts ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2007/06/designing-for-ignorability/ It's now generally accepted in the software community that the best way to develop software is iteratively, for the simple reason that it's really hard to design anything perfectly, especially if it's for somebody else.  The best we can hope for is to create something small that we think the ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2007/03/agile-business-providing-an-economic-incentive-for-user-driven-software-development/ Test-driven development seems like a great idea, but when it comes to actually spending the time to write the tests, it seems like a drag. Of course, it's not something that can be easily automated - tests should essentially be tightly-defined, programmatic versions of the design, and until computers ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2007/02/automatic-programming-well-almost/ Our modern lives are full of distractions from many sources, in person, on our computers and from a multitude of other devices. It can be very difficult to reach a "state of flow", to stay there for any period of time, and to regain that flow when interrupted. ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2007/02/a-state-of-flow/ "A Minnow on a Mission" - that's a mighty odd title for a blog about the environment and vegetarian cooking, you're probably thinking. Actually, the original intention was to blog about the online music community we're starting, Flukebox. But as I have a habit of doing, I got ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2007/02/its-easier-to-be-first-and-good-than-to-be-better/ As I'm living in Poland and the rest of my team are currently in various parts of the U.K., we naturally rely quite heavily on telecommunications technologies. Of course, we use email for most non-urgent communication and SMS for more pressing issues, such as organising conference calls. But ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2007/01/three-top-tools-for-tele-collaboration/ The idea of "music like water" assumes that the lowering cost of distribution and widespread copying of digital music will force record companies to offer all of their content under some sort of low-flat-fee scheme. It is a concept that seems to have grown in popularity recently, but, like so ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2006/11/music-is-art-not-a-utility/ I think manufacturers should start putting infrared capabilities back into mobile phones. "But infrared is crap, you have to keep both the devices pointing at each other in order to transfer data!". Exactly. So maybe just swap Bluetooth IDs over infrared, then automatically offer your business card to anyone you ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2006/11/bring-back-infrared/ Stepping on to the bus in Birmingham, I encounter a scene I had more expected to find whilst travelling than at home: a lady is asking, in quite clear English, how she can contact lost property, as she has lost her bag. The driver stares at her blankly, clearly not ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2006/07/too-busy-driving-to-ask-why-were-going/ On Monday, I should be the proud owner of Flukebox Ltd. It was actually surprisingly quick and easy, once I had actually read up on what all the legalese means. The Business Link website is generally very helpful, and outlines everything involved in starting a business. I ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2006/07/starting-up/ In my last post, I explained how the key advantage that Flukebox offers is not offered by any of its consitutient technologies, but by their combination. This might be its downfall, because this combination of novel technologies leads to a relatively complex and unfamiliar product: difficult to build and ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2006/07/another-day-another-fundamental-flaw/ For the benefit of those who don't really know what I'm up to (which includes me, most days), here's a brief run-down. About a year ago, I came up with some ideas about how various technologies could be combined to support independent artists, in a way that's never been seen ... http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2006/06/the-master-plan/