I don’t often write about microblogging. I’m not a road warrior and I have a strong preference for my desktop with its big keyboard and monitor. The limitations of microblogging also don’t fit my concept for this blog.
Ok, so it’s not for me. In spite of that, I see the potential usefulness to some people or in some situations. So I was interested when a colleague brought this site to my attention. It had been sent to her by Dr. Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, whose blog I know. His use of the site suggested it was worth checking out.
The first thing I found was that you can post to many other platforms from Utterli. If you can recognize the icons on the home page, they include all the major blogging services, Twitter, YouTube and others. You can also follow friends on Utterli as you can on other sites like Twitter.
When I looked a little further I found an interview with Dr. Levy himself. He’s talking with WBUR about everything from preventing medical errors to the impact on philanthropy of the Bernard Maddof financial scandal. As a radio station, WBUR is essentially producing podcasts, and they have posted many of them on Utterli. Interesting.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Robust Microblogging Tool
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Covering the Coverage
It takes me a while to catch on to some things. It’s that phychological mechanism again—selective attention? I had written a post about touch screen technology earlier that day when I sat down Tuesday evening to watch the marathon coverage of the Super Tuesday primaries. I always surf around a bit just to see if any other news organizations have discovered anything new, but mostly I watch CNN because I like their coverage.
Sometime after midnight my foggy brain realized that John King was
pulling up maps,zooming in and out,
but mostly drawing on the maps with his hands to illustrate his points about who was voting how, where. I was reminded that I see this every day, especially when Internet reporter Abby Tatton pulls up items from all over the net. Must be the same multitouch technology, right?
When I looked around I found that it is not. It’s still called multi-touch, but, unlike say the iPhone, the CNN screens react to multiple objects and users and they are pressure sensitive. CNN debuted the technology on Wolf Blitzer’s huge Situation Room wall in January.
The uses of the technology are well explained by developer Jeff Han who gave a demo at the 2006 TED conference. In the demo he mentions data vizualization but he doesn’t give an example. There is a more recent video on the home page of Perceptive Pixel, Han’s company, but it isn’t as informative as the earlier conference presentation. His presentations give a lot of ideas about applications, and suggest that CNN has so far just skimmed the surface.
Jeff Han’s presentation reminds me of early computer scientists who predicted that someday most everyday devices would have computing power and they would be genuinely easy to use. Multi-screens look like the closest we have yet come to the early concept of “ubiquituous computing.”
What are the marketing applications beyond broadcasting? At about $100,000 per screen (before customization, one presumes), the military was the earliest user, and they aren’t talking although one can remember the wired glove application in Tom Cruise’s “Minority Report” and make some guesses. Data visualization appears to be an attractive possibility as marketers look for an easy, user-friendly way to deal with their data avalanche. Killer presentations are another. However, it will take awhile for the cost to come down to the point where any except the best-funded organizations can use this technology. But stay tuned for the rest of the political season. I’ll be looking to see what else CNN is able to do with their screens and when and how other broadcast networks implement the technology.
Sphere: Related Content
