attractions, events and exhibitions, hotels, restaurants and bars.Way back when – the Internet was new and DOS titles were giving way to CD-ROMs and Windows 95 based software (not apps as we now call most of them) – there were a number of staple products.
Flight Simulator for games, John Madden’s Football, and Mavis Beacon’s typing program (now in its 20th edition - http://www.broderbund.com/store/broder/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/Mavis_Beacon_Teaches_Typingreg_Platinum_20/productID.164510900/categoryID.13528800 ).
I never learned to type properly- in other words, formally.
Believe me, I tried really hard – I even joined a typing course (mostly because I thought the girls were cute on that course) and I qualified at the princely speed of 28 words-a-minute - my father who was a solid 50 WPM person on a typewriter was mortified.
I can now type much faster using the not-quite-right but-definitely-not-bad Professor’s patent typing method with five left hand fingers and three on the right.
I have timed myself at 70 words a minute on a very good day. But normally it’s about 40-50 words a minute – that’s me thinking and typing at the same time!
I love Libraries and where I live we have a brand new library.
It’s all open space and fireplace and an area for kids - except, its layout for books is really poor.
The ability to find information easily is perhaps confounded because finding information via Google and other search tools has become ubiquitous. We don’t really have to think about it.
But information and access to content is a sacred trust. The owners of content and the purveyors of same both have an obligation to do a good job.
However they don’t always and their commercial interests sometimes collide – badly.
This week a big spat has broken out between Macmillan Publishers and Amazon over the low balling of certain book titles.
The result is that the several important books including the blockbuster on the John Edwards story Politician is currently not available as a Kindle like title.
Another factoid – with another great post by Gerry McGovern http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2010/01/31/when-do-you-have-too-much-information/ - has got me thinking about the use of data and information.
We can now communicate faster than ever before – but are we communicating better? I have this core belief that there is a standardized progression of Data > Information > Knowledge > Power.
However all too often people confuse data with information and even knowledge. We are literally drowning in data.
Just because we can we push more and more of it out there. (And, yes, guilty as charged), doesn’t mean we have to and nor should we be so arrogant as to think we have to.
The benefit that Mavis Beacon gave to a generation on how to type allowed us to have a voice to our unique or processed data.
The quality and the synthesis of this data, however, is still a lost art.
This may be a long way round to the issue of how travel content is being manipulated.
I wrestle with two major aspects of travel content.
The first one is the honesty/trust of the content. There is so much “untrusted” content out there today that our user communities have a low opinion of the content we are pushing at them.
The second aspect is the way we deliver content. It is still far too explicit. We need to make the data easier to absorb and more useful.
Context is a word I find myself using consistently. I have an analogy I use to illustrate my point.
The state of the art of DOS-based word processor was WordPerfect 5.1.
People who had been able to master its complexity and printing, like markup language commands, loved it. Idiots like me had to wait for Word to come along and free us. Now we don’t think about things.
I am using Office 2010 to type this and basically I don’t have to think about the process of what I prepare. It’s fast and relatively easy. I can ignore much of the functionality to deliver my message.
So here is my plea. Let’s find better ways to deliver content.
Let’s stop forcing the user to wade through useless content and forcing them to repeat over and over again inputs that are known and well accepted.
It should be automated and less explicit. Let’s simplify the user experience. And please stop spinning the data into meaningless twaddle.
Way back when the internet was new and DOS titles were giving way to CD-ROMs and Windows 95 based software (not apps as we now call most of them). there were a number of staple products.
Flight Simulator for games, John Madden’s Football, and Mavis Beacon’s typing program (now in its 20th edition!).
I never learned to type properly - in other words, formally.
Believe me, I tried really hard – I even joined a typing course (mostly because I thought the girls were cute on that course) and I qualified at the princely speed of 28 words-a-minute - my father who was a solid 50 WPM person on a typewriter was mortified.
I can now type much faster using the not-quite-right but-definitely-not-bad Professor’s patent typing method with five left hand fingers and three on the right.
I have timed myself at 70 words a minute on a very good day. But normally it’s about 40-50 words a minute – that’s me thinking and typing at the same time!
Now, I love libraries and where I live we have a brand new one. It’s all open space and fireplace and an area for kids - except, its layout for books is really poor.
The ability to find information easily is perhaps confounded because finding information via Google and other search tools has become ubiquitous. We don’t really have to think about it.
But information and access to content is a sacred trust. The owners of content and the purveyors of same both have an obligation to do a good job.
However they don’t always and their commercial interests sometimes collide – badly.
This week a big spat has broken out between Macmillan Publishers and Amazon over the low balling of certain book titles.
The result is that the several important books including the blockbuster on the John Edwards story Politician is currently not available as a Kindle like title.
Another factoid – with another great post by Gerry McGovern - has got me thinking about the use of data and information.
We can now communicate faster than ever before – but are we communicating better? I have this core belief that there is a standardized progression of Data > Information > Knowledge > Power.
However all too often people confuse data with information and even knowledge. We are literally drowning in data.
Just because we can we push more and more of it out there. (And, yes, guilty as charged), doesn’t mean we have to and nor should we be so arrogant as to think we have to.
The benefit that Mavis Beacon gave to a generation on how to type allowed us to have a voice to our unique or processed data. The quality and the synthesis of this data, however, is still a lost art.
This may be a long way round to the issue of how travel content is being manipulated.
I wrestle with two major aspects of travel content.
The first one is the honesty/trust of the content. There is so much “untrusted” content out there today that our user communities have a low opinion of the content we are pushing at them.
The second aspect is the way we deliver content. It is still far too explicit. We need to make the data easier to absorb and more useful.
Context is a word I find myself using consistently. I have an analogy I use to illustrate my point.
The state of the art of DOS-based word processor was WordPerfect 5.1.
People who had been able to master its complexity and printing, like markup language commands, loved it. Idiots like me had to wait for Word to come along and free us. Now we don’t think about things.
I am using Office 2010 to type this and basically I don’t have to think about the process of what I prepare. It’s fast and relatively easy. I can ignore much of the functionality to deliver my message.
So here is my plea. Let’s find better ways to deliver content.
Let’s stop forcing the user to wade through useless content and forcing them to repeat over and over again inputs that are known and well accepted.
It should be automated and less explicit. Let’s simplify the user experience. And please stop spinning the data into meaningless twaddle.