Tag: feedback

Blog du Paléo [en]

[fr] A quick feedback I gave about the blog of a local (but very popular) festival.

Une fois n’est pas coutume, je vais essayer de faire court. (Je soutenais hier à mon examinatrice de demi-licence de philo 😉 qu’on pouvait faire très court sur un blog, qu’il suffisait d’aller regarder, par exemple, le mien… ahem. Oui je sais, je suis la reine de la tartine.)

J’étais au Paléo hier sur invitation de l’association CIAO (je suis leur partenaire pour le thème internet), ce qui tombait bien, car j’adore les feux d’artifices de ce festival. Bref, avant de partir, j’ai fait un petit tour sur le site du Paléo et j’ai découvert qu’ils avaient un blog. (Je l’ai appris plus tard, une expérience “assez à l’arrache” (sic), donc tout à fait pardonnable qu’il y ait des choses à redire.)

Vous me connaissez, je suis à peu près incapable de la fermer. J’ai donc laissé un petit feedback concernant ce blog dans leur forum, qui a d’ailleurs été fort bien reçu. Je le reproduis ici:

  • dans l’ensemble, le blog part dans la bonne direction. Infos un peu “coulisses”, je crois que c’est la direction à donner à un blog de festival.

  • côté ton, par contre, ça varie selon les rédacteurs. Nombre de billets sont trop “journalistiques” (pas un compliment en l’occurrence, les journalistes font parfois les pires blogueurs). Un bon truc pour trouver le ton: parler en “je” (ça aide à être un peu “personnel”, sans pour autant que ça doive faire “journal intime”) et choisir comme public-cible de ses écrits un group d’amis qui nous apprécie.

  • dommage que le blog ne soit pas plus mis en valeur ailleurs sur le site (e.g. intégrer à la page d’accueil un flux RSS avec titres des derniers billets, voire — au secours! — le blog entiter?) L’année prochaine peut-être?

  • les commentaires… quel dommage de les rediriger vers ce forum, où il faut s’inscrire, cliquer dans l’e-mail de confirmation, se connecter! Le plus gros risque avec un blog, c’est de ne pas avoir de commentaires — pas d’être débordé. Tout ce qui rend la conversation facile est bienvenu, et tout ce qui pourrait être un obstacle est à proscrire (jusqu’à preuve d’éléments nuisibles parmi le lectorat).

  • quelques détails concernant la maquette: liens “haut” un peu désuets, pas de permaliens (si je veux faire un lien vers un article depuis mon blog, je fais comment?), pas de flux RSS pour s’abonner… etc. On dirait que le moteur de blog a été “fait sur mesure”, ce qui est une solution que je déconseille absolument, à moins d’avoir des moyens considérables à disposition et une bonne connaissance des outils de blog (on ne s’improvise pas créateur d’outil de blog, même si on a une grande expérience dans la fabrication des sites web). Histoire de ne pas réinventer la roue, WordPress est un excellent outil, gratuit, et facilement intégrable à d’autre composantes d’un site.

Voilà! J’ajouterai juste, à nouveau, que si faire un blog est facile (tant du point de vue de l’installation de l’outil que de son utilisation), les aspects stratégiques et rédactionnels de ce média ne vont pas de soi. J’en profite pour vous envoyer regarder la vidéo que j’ai enregistrée il y a quelque temps déjà, et qui tente d’expliquer cet apparent paradoxe: bloguer c’est super facile, mais se former pour le faire correctement n’est pas superflu.

Twitter: We Love Our Partial Conversations [en]

[fr] Twitter cache maintenant les conversations partielles, ce que je trouve très dommage. C'était une porte ouverte pour découvrer des amis d'amis -- et en plus, l'implémentation actuelle nous prive d'une partie du vécu de nos amis, simplement parce qu'ils ne nous l'adressent pas.

I noticed this morning that Twitter is hiding messages addressed (using @username) to people one is not following. You can still see them by looking at a friend’s page, but they don’t appear on one’s home page anymore.

Example: on Faruk’s Twitter page, you can see many messages addressed to people I don’t follow, using the @username syntax.

Faruk's Twitter Stream

If I look at my homepage, now, only the messages which are not addressed to a recognized username I’m not following (follow me there?) are visible in my home page:

My Twitter "Friends" View

This twitter, for example, is invisible on my home page. I only get this unaddressed one.

This means that we do not see what is commonly called “partial conversations” — ie, conversations the people you are following are having with people that they are following but you are not. While some people will rejoice, because they found that annoying, I find that it’s a damn shame. And I’m not alone.

Why do I think it’s such a shame? Well, yes, twitter is mainly for keeping in touch with people you already know. But it’s also a really great place to get to know the friends of your friends — and partial conversations are the doorway to this. Partial conversations have drawn me to people I didn’t otherwise know on Twitter, because I’ve found them involved in conversations with a friend of mine, or even, a few friends of mine. Curiosity, went to check on them, ended up adding them.

With the current implementation, this would never have happened.

And even if you don’t think meeting knew people is interesting — there are many times when I have discovered that an existing friend of mine had finally got a Twitter account only because I caught a partial conversation between him and somebody else.

So, please, Twitter: give us back our partial conversations. Make it an option to hide them if some people really hate them. But don’t shut me out of what’s going on in my friends’ lives just because they happen to be addressing it to somebody I don’t (yet) know.

Update, July 25, 2007

Another reason why this is broken: I never saw this twitter, though it was addressed to me (too), because I don’t follow neilford.

Twitter / Faruk Ates: @neilford @stephtara thanks...

Dopplr: More Fuzziness Wanted [en]

[fr] Dopplr est un de ces "social tools" (si vous avez une meilleure traduction que "outils sociaux", qui franchement, ne traduit pas du tout l'idée, faites-moi signe) qui permet à chacun d'indiquer quels sont ses prochains voyages prévus et de les partager avec ses contacts. Là où Dopplr ajoute véritablement quelque chose, c'est qu'il va informer l'utilisateur s'il se retrouve dans la même ville au même moment qu'un de ses contacts.

Dans ce billet, je parle de deux choses qui pourraient à mon avis rendre Dopplr encore plus utile: un peu de "flou spatial", pour que Dopplr "sache" que Genève c'est tout près de chez moi, et que je ne veux pas seulement être avertie quand mes amis viennent à Lausanne, mais aussi s'ils sont de passage à Genève (et pourquoi pas quand ces villes seront dans le système), Morges ou Yverdon. Et deuxièmement, du flou possible dans les dates, que je puisse indiquer si ce sont des dates "fermes" ou déplaçables -- ou encore si mon voyage est sûr ou bien en projet.

I really, really like Dopplr. I does something rather simple (from a user point of view) and does it well. It lets me know if my travels are bringing me in the same town as other people I know, either because they live there or because they’re travelling too. It also allows people to keep up-to-date with my travels, maybe in a more user-friendly way than my Where is Steph? public calendar.

My Dopplr Page

Having said that, there is a way in which Dopplr could improve its usefulness for me quite a bit, by introducing some amount of temporal and spatial fuzziness. Huh? Let’s start with the shortcomings I’ve found, and hopefully I’ll explain things more clearly. (Ugh, feeling clumsy with English today, not sure why.)

I have set my hometown as Lausanne, Switzerland, so when Dopplr-contacts of mine travel to Lausanne, I’m informed. Great, so far. But what if a normally US-based Dopplr-contact of mine comes to Geneva? Geneva is about 40 minutes away by train. If somebody I know, and who lives on another continent, is coming to Geneva, well, I would definitely want to know. Even if the destination was Zürich, for that matter. It’s as good as if they were headed for Lausanne.

See where I’m headed? Of course, this is a complex feature to add. For the moment, I imagine Dopplr matches trip coincidences based on location names. This would involve computing distances between various cities. It would also involve determining what level of geographical fuzziness makes sense in which situation. For example, I’m going clearly going to be interested in knowing when people who live really far off are coming less far away — hell, I might even go to Paris to meet up with some of my friends who live on the other side of the pond. I might not be that interested in knowing that a friend of mine from Geneva is travelling to Paris, when I haven’t got any plans to go there. Maybe we could have sliders somewhere to change location fuzziness easily.

The other shortcoming I’ve bumped into has to do with time (hence “temporal and spatial fuzziness”). For some of my trips, the dates are set. It’s the case with my upcoming trip to Denmark, for example. I got a special priced flight with “no changes allowed”, so the dates are set in stone. (And yes, of course, I’d like to change my return flight. Gah.) My upcoming trip to Paris in November, however, is very fuzzy. I know roughly what dates I’m going to be there, but I could head there earlier or hang around a few days once the conference is over. It would be really useful for me to be able to indicate how “hard” my travel dates are.

Another type of “time fuzziness” I’d like to have is for “not sure yet” trips. I’d like to go to India next winter — not quite sure when, not quite sure where exactly.

Of course, having said all that, I’m going to play devil’s advocate a bit (am I really?) by reminding everybody that “less is more” and that it’s often better to “do one thing, and do it well”. I feel the same about Twitter: I feel it’s missing features to make it “really great” for me, but on the other hand, I fear that adding too much to it will make it lose what makes it special and turn it into a tentacular monster. I’ve seen that happen, to some extent, with coComment — at the beginning, a rather straightforward comment tracking system, now with many layers of icing and social goodies which make me feel a bit lost when I look at it. (Disclaimer: coComment were a client of mine, and I encouraged them to add certain features to it at the beginning — like tagging, neighbours — but now I wonder if pushing in that direction was such a good idea after all. Future will tell, I guess — version 2 is due out soon.)

So, what’s missing to make your Dopplr “perfect”?

Merci Lausanne [fr]

[en] Lausanne has free wifi. Not absolutely everywhere, but almost. Unfortunately all my attempts to connect to this day had failed ("There was an error connecting to the network Wifi Ville de Lausanne"). This time, I decided to do something about it and headed for InfoCité (Place de la Palud). They were very helpful, rung up the multimedia guy and let me talk to him. He was very nice too. My wifi magically started working, but now I have the number to call next time it doesn't.

So here I am, sitting on the steps of the Place de la Palud, typing a blog post. Lovely.

Tout d’abord, merci pour le wifi gratuit. Aux Etats-Unis, tout le monde s’extasie devant le fait que San Francisco est en train d’offrir du wifi gratuit à ses résidents. Ici, dans le petit village de Lausanne, on est tout connectés dans divers endroits de la ville.

Et ensuite, merci pour l’excellent service clientèle: InfoCité à la Place de la Palud. Ils m’ont mis en contact avec le service multimédia (un très gentil monsieur) pour mon problème de wifi (qui s’est résolu tout seul, mais maintenant j’ai le numéro à appeler en cas de problème — 0213158282), ont appelé “M. Piétons” pour ma requête concernant une carte piétonne de Lausanne (pour la future-ex-automobiliste que je suis, et qui réalise que les chemins pour les pieds les plus efficaces ne sont pas ceux que l’on emprunterait en voiture), et m’ont même gentiment informée lorsque j’ai demandé comment faire ajouter un choeur à leur liste.

Me voici donc assise sur les marches de la fontaine de la Palud, en train d’écrire ce billet. Merveilleux.

Donc, merci. Ça fait plaisir quand les services fonctionnent et que les gens sont gentils — et ça arrive malheureusement assez rarement qu’il vaut la peine de le relever.

Geeky Frustrations [en]

[fr] Quelques râlages (comme quoi je ne fais pas ça qu'en français) au sujet de certains outils que j'utilise quotidiennement.

Right, so, just so I can get it off my chest, here is a list of little things that bug me with the tools I use daily. If I save them for a “proper write-up” they probably will never be posted, so… here goes.

  • Twitter: let me see a differential list of those I follow and those who follow me, both ways. I need to know who is following me that I’m not following (maybe I missed somebody out) and who I’m following but they’re not (to keep in mind they won’t see stuff I twitter).
  • Twitter: let me tag my friends, or sort them into buddy groups. Then let me activate phone alerts for only certain groups. One-by-one management is just impossible with 100 or so friends.
  • Adium: let me turn off Gmail notifications. I have Google Notifier for that. I hate having to click “OK” on that window all the time.
  • Google Reader: let me drag’n drop feeds from one folder to another.
  • Facebook: let me import more than one RSS feed in my notes.
  • Nokia 6280 and Macbook: please sync with each other each time I ask you to, not once out of three.
  • Nokia 6280: gimme a “mark all as read” option for my text messages, please!
  • Nokia 6280: I’d say something about the really crappy camera, but there isn’t much you can do about it now, can you.
  • iPod: let me loop through all episodes of a podcast instead of having to go to the next episode manually.
  • iTunes: let me mix playlists as a source for Party Shuffle (30% My Favorites, 30% Not Listened in Last week, 40% Artist I’m Obsessing Over These Days… for example)
  • Google Reader and del.icio.us: find a way to allow me to automatically post Shared Items to del.icio.us too.
  • Flickr: let me link to “My Favorite photos tagged …” so I can show my readers what I’ve found.
  • Added 18.02.07 0:10 Google Ajax-y Homepage: let me Share Google Reader items, not just star them.
  • …

Certainly more, but these were those which were bugging me badly just now. Well, they’re off my chest, now I can go back to fretting about all the stuff I need to get rid of in my flat and which is still lying around because I haven’t quite figured out the optimal way to dispose of it.

Why I Got Lost in LeWeb3 Videos [en]

[fr] Petit tour des problèmes d'ergonomie qui ont été la source de mon billet précédent concernant vpod.tv.

Right, I’ve somewhat figured out how I managed to get lost in the LeWeb3 videos and not find things like permalinks or slider bars.

When you’re on the fullscreen page, no controls are clearly visible. Where is the pause button? There is “launch your TV” (tried that, but never go the answer to what it does, too slow to load for me) but that’s about it. When you click on individual videos, the URL never varies from http://my.vpod.tv/channel.html. Well, I poked around as I could, and gave up.

One thing I had overlooked was the four little icons near the bottom of the video which is playing (you can click on all the photos I’m showing here to access notes and extra info):

20070121-vpod-fullscreen-navigation

Which one would you click on? Well, after I really started to suspect there must be a way out, I tried them all. The third one was the most interesting to me:

20070121-vpod-fullscreen-menu-buttons

To be fair, when you mouseover the buttons, some text is displayed. For example, text for the four buttons in the first photograph is “Sound”, “Video Greeting”, “Menu”, “ShowHide”. Unfortunately, you do have to mouseover to get to that information, as the icons themselves are not all self-explanatory. I definitely do not expect to find a menu listing of useful stuff I might want to do under the vpod.tv logo.

One shouldn’t expect a site user to drag his mouse over every portion of the screen which might be clickable to see what it is. Scanning available options is a job meant for the eye, not the hand. To make matters worse here, the mouseover text takes roughly twice the time a normal “title” tooltip would take to appear (on my system). A good two seconds. Who knows — I might even have mouseovered those icons and come to the conclusion there were no tooltips, when they didn’t appear after the expected delay.

The problem repeats itself. Look at the vertical bar of icons in the screenshot above. Have a guess. What do you expect them to do? Well, here is what the tooltips say, from top to bottom: “Share”, “Get link”, “RSS feed”, “Info”, “Flag it”, “Help”, and “About us…” — you’ll notice that the same vpod.tv logo is used for the “About us…” link as for the “Menu” one. It makes much more sense for “About us…”

In short, rather poor usability for essential navigation items and functionalities on a page like this.

Now, I’m still hunting for a permalink to the video I’m watching, remember? “Get link” sounds like a good one, though “Info” is tempting too (chances I’d click on that directly if I start mouseovering from the bottom, which would be logical as that is where my cursor was).

20070121-vpod-fullscreen-getlink-dialog

Bingo! There’s my permalink. Let’s click on it.

20070121-vpod-video-page-info

Well, that worked as expected. I get to see the video, I can display useful information about it, and I can even download it. Nice. The only sad part is that the URL in the address bar has changed from http://portal.vpod.tv/leweb3/69391 to http://portal.vpod.tv/#page:player. What a pity!

A slider bar appears when I put my mouse over the video, and there is a pause/play button. I’m still not sure if such features are available in the fullscreen version and I couldn’t find them, or simply not available. The slider works, but unfortunately doesn’t tell me which moment of the video I’m aiming for, so it’s a bit hit-and-miss if, say, you want to jump to minute 8 of my video to hear me try to talk (hint, hint).

So, I started watching my panel. The sound is good, and that’s pretty cool (as I heard that it was almost unintelligable during the conference for people who were listening in on the stream). Unfortunately, somebody must have been a little overenthusiastic about compression and the small amount of key frames, because LeWeb3 speakers seem to all have contracted a really horrible skin disease which makes unsightly blemishes appear on their skin at regular intervals:

20070121-vpod-compression-illness 20070121-vpod-compression-illness-scott

Seems like Scott Rafer and I should both go and see a dermatologist pretty quickly, doesn’t it?

Flying Home Tomorrow With Easyjet. Or Not? [en]

[fr] Vu la situation (brouillard) à Londres et l'impact que ça a sur les vols, je crains un peu de me retrouver coincée à Londres demain soir. Surtout qu'Easyjet est injoignable par téléphone entre 20h et 8h et que leur site web refuse de reconnaître l'adresse e-mail que j'ai utilisée pour réserver mon vol.

I’m supposed to fly home tomorrow from Gatwick. If you’ve been anywhere else than under a rock these last days, you’ll know that flights out of London have been severely disrupted.

This morning, I called Easyjet to see if there was any chance my flight would be delayed or cancelled. Their website didn’t yield much information besides the standard arrivals page, which told me that one flight to Geneva yesterday afternoon had been cancelled.

Anyway, the lady was very reassuring. She took my flight number, and told me that the flight yesterday had arrived on time, and that I should be fine.

Tonight, I checked the arrivals page again, and saw that both flights to Geneva this evening had been cancelled. Ouch!

This is where it gets bad. I tried to call Easyjet again, but all their lines are closed after 8pm. Great! Even the one you reach after spending 10 minutes in the menus, where you choose “if your flight has been cancelled, please press 2”. They just tell you to use the website if you want to cancel or change a flight. Well, that’s fine with me, except… For some reason, Easyjet doesn’t recognize the e-mail address I used to book the flight. They’ll send me a newsletter to the address, sure, but will say they’ve never heard of it when I try to use it to log into the website.

And the technical support line is £1/minute.

If I know there is a good chance of my flight being cancelled, I’d like to know about it so that I can make other plans. Change my flight, go back to Leeds, take the Ferry, whatever. What I’m worried about is that my flight is after 8pm. What if it’s cancelled, and I’m supposed to “contact my airline”?

All this is making me somewhat grumbly. I’d really like to get back home for Christmas.

Update: I sent an e-mail to Easyjet about the e-mail address issue. I’ll receive a response from them withing 20 working days. How’s that for an SLA on e-mail responses?

Le Web 3: Recap [en]

[fr] Résumé (sans les liens, cliquez dans le corps du billet):

Positif: atmosphère et gens sympas, bon réseautage, excellente nourriture, voir des anciens amis et en faire de nouveaux, Hans Rosling (et danah bien sûr), bon choix du lieu de conférence, en-cas dans le hall, et un compliment concernant ma brève prestation sur scène.

Négatif: mauvais wifi, fête trop bruyante, récupération politique (même si je pense que Loïc pèche plus par excès d'enthousiasme pas toujours bien placé, et par manque de "sensibilité clients", comme lors de l'épisode Ublog), niveau un peu "grand public" des présentations, pas de fête de clôture.

En somme, contente d'être venue malgré les déceptions, mais pas certaine que je remettrai ça la prochaine fois.

Right, in telegraphic style, here’s a wrap-up of how my LeWeb3 went.

Positive: overall nice atmosphere and people, good networking, excellent food, saw old friends again and made new ones, was blown away (like many others) by Hans Rosling’s presentation (both by the numbers he gave and the software. I liked the venue, thought the sizing was right (small enough to encourage people to communicate, without being cramped). Break food/drinks were nice (even if there was no bottled water). Somebody said something nice about my brief panel contribution. Impressed at Loïc organising something this big in so little time.

Negative: bad wifi, noisy party, political takeover (though I do believe that Loïc messes up more by excess enthusiasm and some lacking in customer care skills — like with Ublog — than because he’s a “bad guy”), not being in the target audience (topics were a bit too general for me), and not having a good-bye party or some chance to say good-bye to people (people left little by little and I hardly got to see anybody before they left).

Overall, I’m glad I came, but I’m not sure I’d come to this event again.

Bad Sector in Memory [en]

[fr] Je recherche un billet sur lequel je n'arrive plus à mettre la main, qui disait (ou en tout cas me faisait penser) que le blogueur-consultant qui fait du "consulting gratuit" sur son blog par moment (critiquant tel ou tel service) est en fait en train d'encourager ses clients potentiels à lui donner un mandat avant qu'il ne l'ouvre en public (enfin, si son blog est assez connu), puisque son feedback sera ainsi traité en interne.

Quelqu'un voit lequel c'est?

Maybe you can help me. I read this recently but unfortunately did not file it in either my shared reading items or my del.icio.us links. It was a piece, written by a blogger who is also a consultant (I thought it was Euan or Stowe, but I can’t find the post on either of their blogs)), which basically said that one possible (perverted?) effect of giving “free consulting” on one’s blog (like I’ve done a couple of times) is that if your profile as a blogger is high enough, it could be an incentive for prospective clients to bring you in before you start blogging about their flaws/faults in public.

This was based on the realisation that as a blogger/consultant, one tends to not be so public about stuff the client has to improve, as the input goes to them internally and gets treated there. I’ve clearly noticed that since I’ve been working for coComment.

So, can anybody tell me where I read this? What is my source?