Russell Beattie: Delineating Devices
April 22, 2003 - 2:44pm — bmann
Russell Beattie sits down and sketches out a categorization of different types of smartphones. I always find this incredibly useful for both explaining to myself and others different concepts that have a spectrum of capabilities.
Delineating Devices: Current Generation, Multimedia Mobiles and Intelliphones
I was struggling to explain to my wife recently what I was working on and the devices I was targeting. In that discussion, I ended up coming up with a sort of categorization that I'll talk about here. It's really helped me understand what I'm working on and for who.
The other interesting thing about this post was that it was also pointed to by Marc Canter, who is also on my "feed list", and his comment in turn about Russell:
I now think of Russ as our 'mobile guy.
Similar
Postings and comments are owned by their authors. What Boris says here doesn't necessarily apply anywhere else. You can subscribe by email if RSS isn't your bag, baby.
Comments
Persistence?
(In reference to Gsoo's comment) one of the problems with blogging is the lack of persistence. The intertwingling exists as a link, but
the dicsussion often does not have a conclusion, something that old-world documents have.
In the old-world, the author started of by introducing a point, backing it up with fairly rigourous research that often spanned months or years and in many cases decades of study, and drew implication about the point under discussion. This often demanded high standards from readers, and insisted that they follow the presentation and examine their experience rather than make arbitrary comments. This gave documents a "meta" value, which became a means for negotiating technical and social interactions.
Classical computer science papers are very good examples of this. If one reads Djikstra, one can get deep insight all subsequent notions programming language design and not get distracted by a variety of clutter that seems to get generated these days. Knuth's papers on algorithms are excellent too. Combined with Djikstra and Knuth, papers such as the Reed & Clarks "End-To-End Functional Design paper" allows one to understand a variety of apparently distinct subjects such as "micro-kernel OS's", "PBX-vs-Centrex", "Congestion Control in Frame and ATM" as well as "exception handling" in programming languages.
Disintermediation is fine, but in some cases I do want a reliable intermediate.
Ramps
in the usage, persistence
is merely the continued accessibility of a document... through time.
True but blog entries aren't often meant as scientific/technical papers, merely journals of passing thoughts.
Whether mediation is desirable or not is different issue and a value judgement, I was just noting this attribute of blogdom... the ability to backtrack across blogs to sources of thoughts.
The bundle of attributes...
which makes blogging different from prior types of publishing is the confluence of disintermediation, accessibility, intertextuality and persistence. It realizes dreams of human discourse which visionaries from Vannevar Bush to Marshall McLuhan have foreseen. It delivers on a promise people like Berners-Lee saw in the web. Those attributes enable intertwingling.
Greg?
Have you been drinking?
I don't drink anymore, Boris...
so, no.
Long ago while I was running my ISP, I studied the then-emerging field of 'CMC' (computer mediated communications) to understand the internet better and be able to do my own forecasting. This is just a CMC view of blogging. It's a road well-trodden.
Not me!
That was Dave. As per my response, I tend to agree.
sorry, Dave. You sounded like Boris ;o)
Here's another blogworld observation, and it's anti-rant.
You can see that chart already....
a grid of cell phones models laid out in hierarchy of features and classified in that taxonomy. That would indeed be useful. Why doesn't he post that?
He did post it
Check the link to the original article. Or, are you thinking more a true grid, with features checked off?
I think the first part was really just getting the "levels" down, and trying to figure out what fits and what doesn't.
But go and bug him on his blog if you want a grid! :p
I bet you anything...
he's made that chart but you'd have to hire his services to see it. I'm OK with that, if I was Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung or Motorola.
Have you noticed how....
many blogs are written by technology consultants? who refer heavily to each other? Try classifying bloggers by motives:
Those who:
- are industry consultants, authors, or freelancers who want/need/intend to present an expert's profile.
- are doing it for fun & profit, making a business of their 'nanopublishing'.
- are news aggregators aggregating news.
- are academics presenting their work/play.
- are CEOs and VCs massaging their networks.
- are doing it as pamphleteer.
- are doing it as diary of their work & play.
- are doing it purely for fun & satisfaction and staying in touch with friends & family.
A couple of reasons
My reasons are sort of diary-like, and certainly "for fun". As long as people publish interesting information, I don't care about their motives. Of course, it's good to think about their comments in context, about their "biases", in order to better understand where they're coming from.
As Robert Scoble said, the size of your audience isn't what matters -- it's the quality. BTW, his links don't show up in the "interesting blog" lists at right anymore because his were "hogging" it. Somehow, whatever tool he has kept refreshing the dates, so on every fetch, all of his items would get pulled again, meaning his were always "newest".
I don't trust many bloggers' motives
Feels like I'm eating pre-chewed food.
I had an identical discussion with my friend Andrew a decade ago September (1993, just before officially launching my ISP) about ours and other people's personal websites and what would happen to the fad. I was super-enthused then, now I'm more skeptical. Wish I'd kept archives of my old sites.