User:Jukeboksi/Blog/September2004
6.9.2004
Last weekend I got my move to Tampere mostly finalized though most of the stuff is now around my room in boxes and bags and I have to sort them out and find a place for all stuff. I should be getting ADSL access in one to two weeks time which will help me contribute more
Yesterday I had a meetup with Linkola who is working on his doctorate in http://www.uiah.fi . I'm half way reading through his masters thesis and will write a brief summary of it here. It contains lots of interesting research information about consumer wishes, hopes, fears and practical information about how consumers use the information about products supplied to them currently.
- It's very easy to study what they look at. It's very hard to study how it affects them. Focus on price premium perhaps as the indicator that can be made objective? That is, someone buys the green light product even though it costs 10 Eurocents more than the red light - but if it costs 15 they do not buy either, or, they actually buy the red light product. That's the kind of data you need to determine what the actual willingness of people to pay more to satisfy individual buying criteria is.
He renewed his commitment to become one of the founding members of Consumerium Association of Finland. He was most interested in getting a pilot project hastily off the ground and to get to analysing how and what information consumers use for making decicions, so I'm betting that he would be very interested in link transit data which has been a hot potato around here for quite some while now.
- Yes, clearly it's of even more use to Consumerium Services or other serious wiki missions than to those bogus pseudo-encyclopedists who don't even understand why it's important, or pretend not to (more likely unless they are stupid).
He also expressed his view that we should start with a limited group of users, but I countered that with the fact that we have for a long time been planning for a system that is accessible to everyone without any limitations of scope as to users.
- It is obviously better to have wide-open editorial policy that is troll-friendly and immune to propaganda or takeover by any one faction - else who would trust the data? This is just typical academic belief on his part, that somehow cliques can be made trustworthy. It's fairly obvious that without the wide-open policy, none of the design work would have gotten done.
I understand that having one single group (ie. the members of some association with interest in these things we are to be dealing with) would make for better research material for his doctorate if he decides to include Consumerium in some way in his post-graduate studies. The discussion we had was intense and I found it very pleasing to actually get to talk about these things face-to-face and not via wiki.
- It would be useful to support a doctoral study on moral purchasing but we really need a Research Wiki to actually start to compile intermediate pages on all the things we care about. We are long past due to do that, and other projects are passing us. We can't rely on CorpKnowPedia and Consumerpedia and Wikipedia and Disinfopedia to track these things, though, we might from time to time rely on information from all of them. Wikinfo might be useful to track sympathetic point of view of various movements like no old growth or dolphin free, but, not to track corps, since the Coca-Cola article there must be sympathetic to Coca-Cola! So we have a niche to fill that has not been filled. Perhaps work with Indymedia on this, as they expose corporate misbehaviour a lot?
2.9.2004
Here's an interesting piece of code developed by Magnus Manske some while ago. It's not used on Wikipedia but could be very useful for the Consumerium Process. It allows users to flag some article as validated on a number of issues ie. style, legal, completeness, facts, suitability for "final" release (Publish Wiki in our case)
Thanks to User:TimStarling for pointing out this code. I queried him about Magnuses' code for custom meta-tags such as "no index" (or whatever it's called) because if we could easily and reliably control what gets indexed by search engines and what not we could do with a unified Research Wiki and Publish Wiki where articles flagged indexable would be considered "published" and those with "no index" to be still in research stage. Just a thought. Apparently Magnuses' code does not include tags for robots but according to Tim this would not be difficult to implement. The main problem being that once an article is indexed and then some seedy characters add questionable content how does one get Google etc. to stop indexing it. Apparently there is yet no way to remove pages from search engines on request.
Ericsson and ScanBuy working on including barcode capture properties with ScanZoom technology for Ericsson camera phones.
1.9.2004
I'm currently reading the master's thesis of Jouni Linkola, "Shopping Guide to The Future", which is available (in Finnish) at http://mlab.uiah.fi/5medialaunch/jlinkola_lopputyo.pdf there is also a visualization of some main aspects of it at http://personal.inet.fi/surf/graphic/future.html (in Finnish again). The visualization is quite similar to the original Motivation of Consumerium:Itself. I'm looking forward to meeting up with Jouni to discuss the synergies between his post-graduate studies apparently also focusing on information services for consumers to be more informed and empowered.
Also check out the cool Consumeter shopping bag at http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~antello/designfiction/pictures.htm Watch the associated videos as well if you have broadband.
- design fiction is a Good Thing, that's what visions and best cases are about ultimately; and free circulation of fiction is better still.
- Can Consumerium:We get Linkola to contribute to visions and best cases? Also he might have insight into worst cases, but more likely we have thought through that more. We need one unified design fiction effort to figure out what our priorities are, and where we're going technically in the long run.