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Pedro Gonçalves

Cultural factors in web design | Feature | .net magazine - 0 views

  • Some cultures are High Context. This means most communication is simply understood rather than explicitly stated. These cultures have a much higher tolerance for ambiguity and understatement. You could say that, in a High Context culture, the responsibility for understanding rests with the listener and it’s left to them to divine deeper meaning from the conversation or statements coming at them.
  • Low Context cultures, on the other hand, are much more explicit and often rely on directness and true feelings to communicate.
  • In these types of cultures, the responsibility for understanding is on the speaker to convey their ideas clearly and without ambiguity.
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  • I propose we use cultural variables to show the appropriate content for specific groups of users in the same way that we use media queries to show content according to viewports or breakpoints.
  • Slow Messaging cultures are more easygoing about the speed at which messages and information travel. Fast Messaging cultures demand that information travels quickly and efficiently.
  • High Power Distance societies tolerate a high level of authority in their leaders, and their orders are often unquestioned. Symbols of this power are important. On the other hand, Low Power Distance societies have bosses that are much closer to their employees in power levels, and instructions can be debated or challenged.
  • How do we make our fellow humans comfortable with our interfaces and site? Start using cultural queries in our designs.
Pedro Gonçalves

Pew: Think Real Life Imitates Twitter? Think Again - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • Twitter is a very different beast than Facebook - one that only 13% of adults report having used at all, compared to an earlier Pew study showing that 67% of Americans who use the internet are Facebook users.
  • Naturally, for those among us who live and breathe tweets, Twitter seems like a realtime cross-section of everyone's thoughts about, well, everything. But as common sense and the Pew report make clear, Twitter is an imperfect zeitgeist at best.
Pedro Gonçalves

How Social Media Forced Turkish News Organizations To Change Course | Fast Company | Bu... - 0 views

  • A popular cartoon making the rounds in Turkey these days shows viewers watching a documentary on penguins on CNN Turk (which is, literally, what the channel broadcast during the uprising). Meanwhile, the other frame shows penguins watching CNN International with live coverage of protests in Istanbul.
  • When the democratically elected Erdogan slammed social media as “the worst menace to society” last week
  • the prime minister himself is an avid Twitter user with over 2.8 million followers.
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  • 25 bloggers were arrested and charged with sedition
  • What explains his rage is that, had it not been for social media, the government would likely have succeeded in hiding the protests from many Turks. Turkey is a country that jails more journalists than Iran, and it is hardly surprising that the mainstream Turkish media, which has been additionally co-opted by the authorities through financial measures, broadcast pictures of beauty contests and cooking shows for several days while parts of Istanbul and other cities were blanketed with tear gas.
  • While international news organizations and some alternative outlets in Turkey played a role in breaking the media’s silence, social media took the lead.
  • Besides arresting and intimidating bloggers, the authorities made several attempts to choke access to Facebook and Twitter, as well as blocking cell phone communications (which your correspondent experienced on June 1 in Istanbul). The deputy prime minister ominously cautioned that “It's possible to shut it [Internet] all down," much in the same manner as the Egyptian government had done two years earlier.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Science Behind Why Content Gets Shared | Fast Company | Business + Innovation - 0 views

  • "meme" as it came into existence: Richard Dawkins, the rabble-rousing evolutionary biologist, coined it in 1976 as a way to describe how ideas are like genes--reproducing by moving from one mind to another, mutating while they're there, and spreading, spreading, spreading into society.
  • the most successful memes (and we can responsibly generalize that to content as a whole) have a certain evergreen quality to them. This has also been confirmed by Bitly data scientist Hilary Mason, whose link-fueled data set acts an index of the Internet's attention: the most enduringly shared articles have a more timeless than timely quality to them, she once told me in an interview, which presents an interesting dilemma to companies in the business of news.
  • "Past research about memes shows two things that should surprise no one, but are worth emphasizing: If you can figure out what someone is interested in, you can predict how likely she is to share a piece of content. And the more similar a piece of content is to what she has shared before, the more likely she is to share it."
Pedro Gonçalves

McAfee: Sneaky Teens Surf On PCs More Than Mobile, Facebook Rules Over All Other Social... - 0 views

  • Going mobile may be the mantra for a lot of tech companies these days, but if they’re in the business of targeting teenagers with their services, perhaps they should think twice: over 37 percent of teens use laptops, and a further 30 percent rely on desktop machines to surf online and engage with digital content, but only 13.5 percent use smartphones and only five percent use tablets, according to a new study out today from Intel-owned security specialists McAfee.
  • By far, the most popular social media site among teens is Facebook, with 89.5 percent of respondents using the site. Twitter comes in second with 48.7 percent and Google+ not actually that far behind at 41.5 percent. Tumblr (33 percent of all teens), it notes, is more popular with teen girls than boys; while 4chan (23%)  is showing the reverse trend: and McAfee notes that both sites are growing faster than other social networking sites.
  • Pinterest is being used nearly as much as Myspace (20%; 18%)
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  • possibly in keeping with smartphone use actually not being as popular as PCs — Foursquare and other check-in services are not so hot, with only 12.2 percent using these.
  • McAfee describes teen usage on social networks as “stalking” rather than sharing: half of teens responding said they mostly observed others rather than posted updates about themselves. Only six percent said they shared “almost everything.” Nevertheless, they are huge social network users: 60 percent check their accounts daily, and 41 percent said they check accounts “constantly.”
  • The study found that 79 percent of teens said they hid their online behavior from their parents: partly to keep private what they’re actually doing online, and partly because they’re online for a lot longer than parents think. Popular activities include accessing violent content (43%); sexual topics/porn (36%; 32%); and watching pirated movies (30.7%). A whole 15% are hacking other people’s accounts. Meanwhile, teens spend about five hours a day online; while parents only think their kids spend an average of three hours a day online. McAfee found that just over 10 percent spend more than 10 hours per day online.
  • Teens hiding what they do from parents has gone up massively since 2010, when only 45 percent said they hid their behavior, and is a disconnect when compared to what parents think: half of parents responding to the study said they knew what their teen kids did online.
Pedro Gonçalves

Definition of 'Cool' May Have Changed - ABC News - 0 views

  • Researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center surveyed nearly 1,000 mostly college-aged students on their perception of cool. The three-year study found that more people believe a person is cool when they are friendly, warm, smart and trendy. Today people are less apt to respond to the James Dean-style of aloof coolness that was once so dreamy in yesteryears.
  • The researchers acknowledged that the study population is limited in scope, since it consisted of "mostly educated, young, Canadian, ethnically white and Asian, [and] predominantly female" in British Columbia, Canada. This is important to note because the idea of "cool" does not necessarily translate between different types of people, experts said.
  • The leather jacketed, cigarette smoking, rebel to authority is still perceived as somewhat cool, researchers said, but the nice guy next door now reigns coolest, according to the study surveys. Those who are talented and smart and striving to succeed also rated high up on the cool scale. Even nerdiness, which was once the antithesis of "cool," has changed its reputation. Geeks are now "under that counterculture umbrella of edginess" Dar-Nimrod said.
Pedro Gonçalves

Why Millennials Don't Want To Buy Stuff | Fast Company - 0 views

  • A writer for USA Today shows that all ages are in on this trend, but instead of an age group, he blames the change on the cloud, the heavenly home our entertainment goes to when current media models die. As all forms of media make their journey into a digital, de-corporeal space, research shows that people are beginning to actually prefer this disconnected reality to owning a physical product.
  • Even in this strange new world, the economic laws of scarcity apply, and they are precisely what's shifting. To "own something" in the traditional sense is becoming less important, because what's scarce has changed. Ownership just isn't hard anymore. We can now find and own practically anything we want, at any time, through the unending flea market of the Internet. Because of this, the balance between supply and demand has been altered, and the value has moved elsewhere.
  • The biggest insight we can glean from the death of ownership is about connection. This is the thing which is now scarce, because when we can easily acquire anything, the question becomes, "What do we do with this?" The value now lies in the doing.
Pedro Gonçalves

Twitter Drives New Insights in the Social Sciences - 0 views

  • a landmark 2009 study by Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard and James H. Fowler of the University of California, San Diego. The results suggested that a person’s decision to vote can influence hundreds of people linked through their social network to head to the polls. 
  • While highly regarded by social scientists, that study, as well as similar research by the same researchers concluding that obese people influence their friends to put on weight, faced the homophily question. Do your friends vote because you vote, or do people who have an interest in politics tend to associate with one another?
    • Pedro Gonçalves
       
      Nervermind the fact that looking only at the universe of twitter users inherently skews the results...
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  • Did your obese friends cause you to become overweight, or did you choose obese friends because they're similar to you?
  • In his own study, Macy analyzed words expressing mood in 500 million tweets sent between February 2008 and January 2010. He found that people’s mood, as measured by their tweets, tended to be elevated in the morning and to decline as the day progressed. Weekends tended to be “happier” days, although mood peak started later in the morning, possibly reflecting twitterers' tendency to sleep in. Most remarkable, Macy said in an interview with Science magazine, was that the tweets showed a similar pattern across the 84 countries where the tweets originated, suggesting that the daily mood curve is fundamentally human rather than cultural.
Pedro Gonçalves

Digital Life Project Analyzes Global Online Behavior - PSFK - 0 views

  • Growth in social networking fueled by mobile: Mobile users spend on average 3.1 hours per week on social networking sites, vs. 2.2 hours on email. Furthermore, consumers expect their use of social networking on mobiles to increase more than through PC.
Pedro Gonçalves

Millennials: They Aren't So Tech Savvy After All - 0 views

  • Even as millennials (those born and raised around the turn of the century) enter college with far more exposure to computer and mobile technology than their parents ever did, professors are increasingly finding that their students' comfort zone is often limited to social media and Internet apps that don’t do much in the way of productivity
  • most Millennials use technology for fun and games.
  • Even as millennials (those born and raised around the turn of the century) enter college with far more exposure to computer and mobile technology than their parents ever did, professors are increasingly finding that their students' comfort zone is often limited to social media and Internet apps that don’t do much in the way of productivity. One professor at the University of Notre Dame, for example, reports that many of his students don't even know how to navigate menus in productivity applications. 
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  • Today’s students face a job market that increasingly clamors for real technology skills, not just the ability to post party pictures on Facebook.
Pedro Gonçalves

Empire of digital chip meets nemesis: the law of diminishing political returns | Simon ... - 0 views

  • The thesis of a knowledge-led enlightenment now faces its antithesis, a menacing, secretive techno-centralism, with as yet no synthesis.
  • This giant revolution in access to knowledge has not dispersed power but rather passed it to new and in many cases sinister oligarchies. In Hannah Arendt's words, these do not appear to be "thinking the unthinkable" but rather just "not thinking".
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