The Secret World of Lonelygirl is a pretty interesting summary of much that happened with this YouTube phenom. But separate from that, a passage caught my interest.

When the show started in June with a two-minute YouTube posting by Bree — played by actress Jessica Rose — Flinders would rearrange his room after each shoot. He’d take down the pictures of Rose as a baby, stash the stuffed animals, and swap out the girly bedspread for his more masculine blue-and-white-striped blanket. Now, three months into the project and with hundreds of thousands of regular viewers, he doesn’t bother. It’s too much work, even though it has blown some great opportunities for him. Last week, he spotted his neighbors — two Playboy playmates — and invited them in. They glanced at his room, got suspicious, and quickly left.

That playmate bit…do you believe him? I don’t.

It reads strongly like bluster reported as fact.

I’ve done enough ethnographies over the years to know that often you can tell when someone is embellishing or making up a story. It’s fine that people do that; the goal as an ethnographer is try and filter for that; to try and understand why. But what about for a journalist? Do they have a sensitivity to veracity? For non-hard-news, do they have an ethical journalistic responsibility to question or seek corroboration? Or do they simply need to type into their story, presented as fact, whatever their subjects tell them?

I have been running some in-home discussion groups for a design project recently. The ebb and flow of context is just so interesting to me and highlights the challenges of getting “all” the information.

[none of this is verbatim]

Q: If you and your wife own one iPod, how do you determine who is going to use it?
A: Well, for commuting, it’s either the iPod, or the New Yorker.

Two scenarios are likely:
1. She takes the iPod on the train and he drives their lovely car, a New Yorker.
2. Whoever takes the iPod gets music, and the spouse gets to read the most recent issue of the New Yorker magazine.

There’s always the clarification question: “When you say ‘New Yorker’ are you referring to the car or the magazine?” but in this case, we didn’t get to ask that, and I was confused at the time. It’s clearer looking at the video that they are talking about the magazine.

Later on, the same guy (still talking about iPods) tells us “Well, when you do that, it looks more Zen. It actually looks like the competition.” and moments later another participant adds “Yes, it’s like he says, very Zen, very Japanese, very spiritual.”

But that’s not at all what he meant. He meant another type of MP3 player, the Creative Zen.

I understood what he meant, at the moment, but the other person, didn’t. And it wasn’t possible in the flow of things to clarify (and maybe not even necessary).

I have powerful memories of being in Mr. Collison’s grade 6 class, and seeing him do this sort of thing all the time – missing a word or a piece of context of what someone said and riffing on it, in entirely the wrong direction. It really made me squirm in my seat to see all this miscommunication around me and have to keep quiet, or at best, wait to offer my insight. I wonder if other people notice this stuff and are as stimulated/aggravated/curious as I am?

This NPR story looks at the “interview coach” at ESPN and their attempts to bring a high level of quality to their interviewing. Page links to the NPR program and an exemplary interview and critique.

Now, every single editorial employee at ESPN is expected to attend a three-day seminar, where they encounter a lanky, slightly awkward 58-year-old man with little flash. In his efforts to illustrate what he considers the “seven deadly sins of interviewing,” John Sawatsky methodically eviscerates the nation’s most prominent television journalists.

“I want to change the culture of the journalistic interview,” Sawatsky says. “We interview no better now than we did 30 years ago. In some ways, we interview worse.”

There’s a lot to be learned from journalists; not everything applies to other forms of interviewing (say, interviewing users) of course.

I haven’t listened to this yet; checking it out will be first up tomorrow.

[via kottke.org]

Dina has a bunch of great tips for people wanting to be better at user research/interviewing.

# reading between the lines — dont just go with what they ‘say’ – look for non-verbal cues that really tell you what they ‘feel’. Also, try and understand the rationale behind what they say – laddering down to end values is something that always helps. It doesn’t pay just to know that a Toyota Corolla = Amitabh Bachchan – we need to understand why the analogy is made
# agility – you’ve got to be so quick in your mind – pick up cues from what respondents say – and take them forward. Listen well and react quickly – you should never feel when you listen too your tapes – oh how I wish I had probed this a little more.

Design-It-Yourself is a new Ellen Lupton book to help plain folks like me avoid the unnecessary time and expense of working with skilled designers. I’m especially amused by how poorly written and badly laid out (Hello? Typography? Punctuation? Caps? Bullets?) the page is. Hey, wanna look like crap? Buy this book!

simple ideas on how you can “think like a designer”

clear and coherent explanations of design technologies, from silk-screening to web development
what materials you’ll need to get your job done

where to find and buy them

Echo Memoirs creates custom coffee-table books for Pregnancy, Travel, Bar/Bat Mitzvah, Anniversaries, Engagement, Wedding, Family History, Pets, Friendship, Business, Retirement, Birthdays, Mother’s Day, Graduation, Showers, and more. To create your book, they take about 150 hours to interview relevant stakeholders, transcribe, write, copy-edit, design, and print. First copy is $6,000, with reprints about $200.

Here’s a nice bit of rhetoric from my local library (sent via email – a nice feature)

Subject: Courtesy Pre-Overdue Notice from Your Library

94037 PORTIGAL, STEVE L

The item(s) listed below are due back soon. This courtesy notice does not list everything currently on your record, just those items thatare due in the next few days. http://catalog.plsinfo.org For questions, please call your local library.

Pre-Overdue? That’s just ludicrous. And insulting. It places the customer’s actions into the category of prohibited, suggesting you are already a violator.

Are we pre-violating the speed limit by driving 2 mph under? Are airline travellers potential terrorists?

For all the protestations about protecting liberty in the face of the Patriot Act we’ve heard by librarians, you’d think the library culture would be a bit more sensitive to the impact of their language choices (being a library, and all that, dealing with words as their primary item of exchange). Screw you, library, for telling me I’ve almost committed a violation. My books aren’t due until they are due, and don’t treat me like an overdue-book-holding-patron until I reach that point.

(chances are this is an automated feature of some IT purchased by the library system by some vendor, where neither the customer (the library) nor the software company gave any thought to thinking about design, brand, communication, customers, etc. but They Love Infstracture and Cost Savings, so off we go. Yuck).

Today I was at the library, and so I picked up The Dark Tower, the 7th book in Stephen King’s long-running series. A 770 page tome.

I’ve chewed up the previous books quite happily, as they’ve grown longer I’ve managed to make quick work of ’em, even. I have memories of reading this series going back many years (I could tell you when the first book came out, but I see that Amazon lists the 2003 edition so if they are going to make it tough for me – whatever – suffice to say it was probably in the 80s).

The amount of complexity and jargon jammed into the first 30 pages was overwhelming and hard to take seriously. And of course I remember very little from the last book in the series from about 2 years ago. Anyway, I see that Mr. King himself is a character in the book.

I put it down. No thanks. Not only is there an attempt to combine dozens of mythologies from previous books into this super-story, but the author himself is appearing? How daring! How circular! How post-modern! How poorly executed and frankly…annoying. And you sir are no Charlie Kaufman. Heinlein did something like this when he was well past writing anything good but was still marketable. Blecch.

It’s a drag that I won’t have the sense of completion that I imagine could come from having “read ’em all” – but I guess life’s too short to put the time into this. There’s certainly no shortage of stuff that I’m more eager to read.