Just got my hands on the quite fas­ci­nat­ing “Social Techno­graph­ics” study from For­rester Research. They take a close look at the social and demo­graphic struc­ture of the social web pop­u­la­tion — unlike Technorati’s sta­tis­tics which mostly focus on raw blog growth num­bers and struc­tural fea­tures of the blo­gos­phere. The study is based on two sur­veys includ­ing includ­ing close to 5000 North-American indi­vid­u­als each.

Inter­est­ing facts:

22% of adults now read blogs at least monthly, and 19% are mem­bers of a social net­work­ing site. Even more amaz­ingly, almost one–third of all youth pub­lish a blog at least weekly, and 41% of youth visit a social net­work­ing site daily.

Based on an analy­sis of online par­tic­i­pa­tion and con­sump­tion prac­tices, the authors iden­tify six seg­ments of users, ordered by degree of participation:

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Late fame for a project I was involved with at my old uni­ver­sity: The feel­Space belt allows users to “feel” the north direc­tion via tac­tile stim­u­la­tion. It was an exper­i­ment in hack­ing the senses — can we induce new modal­i­ties by technology?

Thanks to Sunny Bains for the nice WIRED story!

Poster here.

Watch Myths about the devel­op­ing world, a talk by Hans Rosling from gapminder.org Intense, thrilling, pas­sion­ate. 10/10.

Although fin­ished already over a week ago, some words on the Inno­va­tions­fo­rum Inter­ak­tions­de­sign orga­nized by the Inter­face Design Pro­gram at FH Pots­dam (where I hap­pen to study). To put it short: It was a blast!

Espe­cially remarkable:

• The design con­cept of the con­fer­ence itself: excel­lently con­ceived and exe­cuted with love to detail. See monomo for some pic­tures. Props and respect to for­m­dusche

• The line-up was really impres­sive — find com­plete cov­er­age of the talks at wmmna. Lots of pic­tures also on flickr, espe­cially James King’s scrib­bled cov­er­age of some of the talks — here’s the one of the 10 minute talk I gave together with Fabian at the student’s panel:

• Bruce Sterling’s talk was, as expected, “some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent” and he really hit the nail on the head a cou­ple of times:

Never think­ing about it again is the ideal rela­tion­ship of a nor­mal human being and an object. That is the oppo­site of how design­ers think. I real­ized this when I was teach­ing at Art Cen­ter Col­lege of Design. My stu­dents were doing media design, some of them, and very com­monly they would come out with some gizmo on a neck pen­dant. “See, the user wears this large device dan­gling around his neck, and…“ “No,” I would tell them, “your design project is not hung around the user’s neck. The user has other uses for his neck. This project is hung around YOUR neck. You’re the designer, you’re the one who has to obsess about the device, not them.” You obsess MORE. Let them obsess LESS.

Read Shap­ing Things if you haven’t yet.

Other than that, Anthony Dunne, Bernard Kerr and Tim Edler really impressed me.

An inspir­ing event, I wish we could have that every year!