Good single-function design is the secret

In a competitive and crowded market a trap for new entrants is the temptation to try to do all things well. This goes against the timeless design principle of cohesiveness. Cohesiveness is about ensuring you do the main thing better than the competition. Cohesiveness is particularly important in today's market for high tech products such as portable digital devices and web-based applications.

The owner of a business in the Channel Isles has successfully used a new anti-spamming law, The Directive on Privacy and Telecommunications, to win out of court damages against a UK company who sent him spam. The spammers ignored him when he wrote asking for an apology and claiming damages under regulation 30 of the privacy regulations according to Court victory hailed as spam stopper (December 28, 2005). This legal action is thought to be the first of its kind under the directive and may be a landmark case.

Imagine a scenario a couple of years from now where our governments and commercial enterprises discover that 99% of their documents are stored in a proprietary format (Microsoft) and some serious legal or technical issue has arisen which threatens their long-term accessibility. Fortunately this scenario is now much less likely due to an important international standards initiative known as Open Document Format.

Microsoft Research tool sorts your email inbox by importance

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best – in this case automatically ‘triaging’ inbound email by user defined importance. SNARF allows the user to design their own personal email importance criteria such as the "number of emails sent to me in the last month". Such metrics can, in turn, be combined to create overall importance criteria for sorting your inbox.

Collaboration2.0 - a new generation of virtual collaboration products or just slicker marketing?

A hot topic at present on the web is the suggestion that we have now reached a new level of products, services and suppliers. Some are calling it Web2.0 and others such as BusinessWeek are calling it WebSmart.

Always on mobile devices need supporting etiquette

The Economist (Jan 2003) in a short article “Think before you talk” reports on how Ideo (the designers behind the Palm Pilot and Microsoft Mouse) have developed 5 prototype “social mobiles” known as SoMo's which modify their user’s behavior to make them less disruptive. Click here to view an excellent web presentation on the 5 SoMos. Other technologies like VoIP and IM can be equally disruptive and intrusive - its prompted me to develop a draft POLite Intrusive Technology Etiquette (PoLITE for short) a discussion starter of which you can find here.

The Delphi Technique is a proven way to harness collaborative group intelligence (popularly known as the wisdom of crowds) in a wide range of applications. Delphi has been around since the 1950’s with a large body of support material, case studies and tools on the web and should be part of any virtual team, community or network leader's toolset.

We really value your call, so much so that we are answering it by computer!

If bioteaming is about making organisations and teams more alive then the current generation of Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRs) must be the complete antithesis of bioteaming.

Schtuff and Writeboard provide good wiki functionality for free

The wiki market is maturing nicely with the arrival of some excellent hosted wiki services which are totally free within average levels of usage. Two of these free wikis which caught my attention are Schtuff from JanRain Inc and Writeboard from 37 signals.

Perhaps I am being harsh or even uninformed but the whole area of Web Accessibility seems to have been largely ignored in the blogosphere. Just try doing a google search on web accessibility and blogs and you will see what I mean.