“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.” Betty Reese [via]

In Clay Shirky’s presentation at this year’s Web 2.0 conference he tells a great anecdote (at 14:12 min) that happily reminds me what great changing times we are facing and living in already :

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.” [...]

It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing— from now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. [via]

Being a huge fan of live music, I finally had the chance last week to tick off one of the top bands on my must-see list: Sigur Rós, this amazing band of Iceland that provided me a perfect soundtrack for great lenghts of my life. Their show in the Schlachthof Wiesbaden exceeded my expectations with such an intense and perfect audiovisual experience that almost surpassed (the memories of) seeing Pink Floyd’s PULSE live in the nineties.

Definately a must see if they are in your area! As an appetizer, here is “Popplagið” the traditional encore of Sigur Rós shows (recorded in Reykjavik).

Last.fm - my favorite source for new music - just posted some behind the scenery perspective how they practice quality control. It’s funny that in a world with fancy high-tech monitoring dashboard solutions the most tangible interfaces are green/yellow/red bear lamps and a simple analogue meter.

In the videos of the “Brave NUI World” talk (IxDA Seattle June 2008 [via]) members of the Microsoft Surface team are sharing their experiences with natural user interfaces (NUIs).

The first talk (left) by Sabrina Boler exemplifies an apparent core characteristic of NUIs: An utmost representation of real life (physics) preferably without any GUI element.

This got me pondering:

- How coherent can such a NUI user experience be when besides interaction with classic tangible artefacts (like the strained photo shoebox demo) also more complex applications from the GUI world have to be available?

- How fast does the balance between pure “naturalness” and efficiency flip in relation to the time prospective users worked with GUI systems?

- Is it really necessary to avoid “GUI baggage” at any cost? The last point raised in the video is a good example: A scrollbar is not just an instrument for navigation, but also a well-known indication if and how much content is available (and out of sight).

The second talk (right) by Dennis Wixon illuminates the design process of Microsoft Surface from the user research perspective. He also offers a short interesting digression into game design, a field where Microsoft is well known for its innovation. The mentioned MDA method (Mechanics - Dynamics - Aesthetics) method sounds interesting.

This new video of the upcoming “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed” game for the iPhone shows (~03:30 min) the disadvantages of having the touch screen as the only way to interact. Although the gesture based controlling seems exceptional, how enjoyable is the gorgeous 3d action when the finger is constantly covering big parts of it?

Interesting concept study by Chris Woebken that extends the current trend (iPhone) of minimizing the (unnecessary) layer of abstraction in interaction. The flexible interface highly resembles physical interaction with artifacts and provides all digital benefits like infinite content. I’d definitely embrace it for lightweight interaction in daily life … [via]

Nicholas Carr from The Atlantic on how the web has changed people’s ability to read proven by a recent study:

“My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

I often can see the described behavior (skimming rather than reading) in my own daily reading habits. The usual suspects (information overload and attention economy) are also resonated in an article by the New York Times [via]:

“A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, … on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day.”

Although being guilty as charged, described counter-measures like Gmail’s “email addict” feature or “zero email” fridays sound too harsh.

Out of the many reactions to Apple’s recent keynote two blog posts in particular reflected my initial thoughts to the MobileMe announcement very precisely.

Lonelysandwich spends great attention to the possible reasons behind the new name “MobileMe” and contrasts it to Apple’s initial title for its webservices “iTools”. There is also a - long stretched but nevertheless appealing - thesis that the omission of the last title “.mac” is symbolic for the creation of a platform-agnostic web OS.

This is also the subject of RoughlyDrafted’s thorough article that discusses Apple’s choice for the JS framework SproutCore in implementing MobileMe. Bottomline is that the establishment of a web with open standards is both Apple’s and Google’s only chance to survive in the future. The “No flash on iPhone” situation shows clearly why Apple’s web experience will never depend on proprietary plugin technology.

Update: Counternotions thoughtfully summarizes possible reasons for the missing flash on iPhone and proclaims the “new UI wars”.

Ever since being a beta tester of K10K’s legendary Moodstats long long time ago, I have to play with every mood based app I can find. Needless to say, I spent hours with the new Moodstream by Getty Images: Just set a couple of moodsliders and the stream of images and videos begins to flow … [via]