In his Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab “How to prototype and influence people” lecture, Aza Raskin said “to design is to inspire participation” and one of the problem in inspiring participation is the communication bandwidth.
It is interesting to observe that the bandwidth expansion is a byproduct of reducing ambiguity. Continue reading →
I recently spoke with Aza Raskin at FOWA on Ubiquity commands/annotations sharing. I promised I’ll prototype something, here it is…
(If the video is clipped, try it here)
When someone applies an Ubiquity command to a piece of content that tells us what’s the type of that content. The user is making an annotation which is not made for the annotation sake, but made for solving a real need. That annotation if shared could be useful in various ways.
But first let’s look at all the data involved, consider that Alice is selecting some text on a web page, invokes Ubiquity and types ‘translate to japanese’. We have the folowing elements:
I’ll assume that who reads this knows what Ubiquity is, if not check it out, it’s awesome.
Since Ubiquity can remember edits you do to a page (via edit and save commands), it may also be able to remember what other commands you applied to a piece of content, such that when you revisit that page you’ll see a small visual hint (could be similar to Alex Faaborg microformats experiments, or Aza Raskin’s mouse Ubiquity experiments) that would let you re-apply the command.
Imagine that you visit a blog post about a party, and the map command is just one click away just because you did it before.