Category: Language
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Talking to Myself with SimulScribe
Illustration from a 1940’s Bell Labs project investigating human speech synthesis and recognition I recently signed up for SimulScribe, a new service which replaces your existing voicemail system with one that: Transcribes the voice message into text (using a speech-to-text (STT) engine)… wraps the voicemail message into a WAV file… and then emails the raw…
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Stop Surfing!
Not me. I’ve had enough of the term “surfing” when talking about “what we do when we use the web”. It was a terrible metaphor when it was first invented, and it’s only gotten worse. This morning on the radio I heard a journalist describe a terrorist using a computer to view terror videos with…
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TV News is Vaudeville
On election night last week, we were channel surfing and comparing the coverage by the various networks. We ended up for a spell at Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert exchanged snappy banter with each other in a kind of parody of network news coverage. Surprisingly, there was a part of me that…
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Going out of Business Spam
Spammers are always coming up with new ideas for how to get by spam filters and new ways to fool people into thinking their messages require immediate reading. And these new ideas seem to come in waves, like fashion or style trends. For example, last week (and all in one day) I received about 50…
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Design = Interior Design
Here’s some news for web designers, interaction designers, graphic designers, information designers, user experience designers, and whatever else you might think of yourself as: New York Magazine defines “design” as “interior design”. And of course the fashion world uses the word “design” to mean “fashion design”. I’d guess that if you asked a hundred people…
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Elegance through Nomenclature
New York design firm Giampietro+Smith hits a little information architecture home run with their design for the magazine the revealer, a very interesting web site about media and religion. The problem of how to structure the presentation of breaking news, current-ish articles, and “evergreen” always-interesting material is something information architects face all the time but…
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Where Writers Can Learn from Programmers
I generally consider myself a capable writer, at least in the technical sense. In particular, I think I have a pretty good understanding of how to punctuate properly in written English. But there are some areas where the language’s “standards” are in continual dispute, some areas where I think the standards are just plain logically…
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Not all Web Sites are Blogs
He has a web site, but he’s not a blogger. It may sound obvious to point that out, but I keep reading news stories and commentaries that discuss, for example, how “blogging” is making traditional media obsolete or something… when in fact they really mean to say “the web” is revolutionizing media and communications. Next…