I read about this a few weeks ago, and finally got around to implement and try it. Really interesting method to compensate for Google Analytics poor bounce rate calculation.

http://mindtheproduct.com/2011/08/data-driven-your-bounce-rate-and-time-on-site-are-wrong/

Today I realized coincidentally that cookies between incognitowindows are shared, didnt think about this before, I just assumed that a newly opened incognitowindow from the main window was a new fresh one. It turns out not to be.

A quick googlesearch shows that its not just be, theres several others who came across this a long time ago. Theres even a bug filed for it, although the status wontfix is not very optimistic, see issue 24690.

Some of the comments on the issue refers to the multiple profile work thats beeing done instead, it looks like a good idea, but seems to need some preparations before use. I’ll definitly try this in the near future..

See the user dropdown in the right corner of the window.

Yesterday getting home on the subway, the massive smartphone penetration struck me. Standing up between all those seats, i noticed that, in a group out of 16 seats in car, 12 people where using a smartphone. From the quick glance, more android ones than iphones. Out of the 12 people, 4 where as far as I could tell above 50 yo, all of those 4 where playing som sort of game, wordfeud was on 3, the fourth I couldnt see.

Impressive! Looking at the commercial banners in the car, one had a QRcode, during the 15 minutes I couldnt see anyone trying to use it. Would be interesting to know how much conversion they get from those QRcodes.

Update: This is a nice (american I think) summary of qr-code usage http://digitalbuzz.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Infographic-QR-Codes-Statistics-Hi-Res.jpg

Update2: Found the blog entry presenting the above graphics today, http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/infographic-how-people-use-qr-codes/

Seems like the heat is on in tech, in multiple ways. Most significant as of late is the patent wars. The view from the sideline tells me its energy spent that could been used for something better, like improving products.

And the social platform chaos, g+ is moving ahead, and Facebook seem to be rolling out features faster than ever, allmost all at the cost of privacy of users and headaches of developers.

Makeing a quick demo prototype is always good to get a message across, although can be a bit more time- and energy- consuming than just talking. :)

If you read my previous post “Gameification part 1 - thoughts only…”, you might see where I’m going, getting a simple score for each simple achieved task throughout the day. Scores could be weighed on work amount and or time consumption etc, but remember, this is a quick demo. Its not even beautifully layouted, but perhaps it will be soon.

The data is not very fun, since its more ore less anonymized because details are important for clients etc. But you get the idea. The data will grow over time, I have only really full data from today.

And a monthly highscore on top of this would really add on to it, and push you to achieve higher scores. :) Better watch out not to touch the “Overlearn the game”-problem( http://andrewoneverything.com/the-overlearning-the-game-problem ) that I read about the other day. 

So, tell me what you think? Worthy a pursuit or just information-waste? If it was friend/collegue-sharing only, I would expect it to share some more details. 

How often do you perform repetitive(usually boring) work throughout your workweek? I usually think about this when sorting through my inbox, replying to simple emails that, this is fixed, this will be fixed and whatever else is needed. 

And when done, the inbox is sometimes almost empty, and at other times you only managed to clear out the upper top of the iceberg. No matter what, at both of those occasions, I’ve figured it would be nice with some positive feedback. Something simple, like, “Great, you cleared out 18 emails”. Looking at the mail client, it only shows 534 left to do. :) Not very inspiring… Its the same with task managers, 13 done, 243 to go.. 

Because of this, I’ve been thinking about something of an activity dashboard, on to which you could hook almost anything. Some systems include it, for example redmine or some of those webbased task managers. It really helps you get a feeling of, “Good, I’ve really accomplished something here.”.

Add a level of comparison with your friends to that dashboard, and you should have a really good motivator. Its fine even if your friends doesnt do the exact same thing, you can always motivate each other to work harder.

Pushing the idea even further, you should perhaps be able to setup a race between a few friends. Earn X amount of points before 12:30. And each point is a checked item of your list, a replied email, a fixed bug, a tested functionality or whatever is a tiny action that you can perform in your work. Best thing is if the action can report itself as done, for example a commit-hook, a email hook or whatever.

Hmm..I’ll try to elaborate this and perhaps create a working example in a future post.

Update, if you read this far, dont miss part 2

Then this might be for you, for a while, I’ve been developing a new tool to handle overloaded inboxes and give the control back to the user. To get it going a bit, I’m interesting to see if more have the same issues as I have with email. Just plain to many to respond to, hard to focus on the most important ones and just get the stuff done.

I just recieved an email with the subject above. Whats up with this? I’ve been a subscriber for the past 10 years or so, and have really appreciated the physical magazine.

Sure, I can read a PDF, both in my phone and on the computer, I could even get some sort of tablet or e-reader to get the reading done. But, I already spend 8, if not more, hours / day in front of a screen, the physical magazine is a nice change from that.

The last issue of LJ was sent digitally to me, since they had some problem with the printing or shipping, I havent even read it so far. And I’m guessing thats how the future will be like. Theres more digital material sent to me than I can be expected to read, and adding LJ to it will make it go quite low on the priority list unfortunately. But I guess, this demands I’ll go shopping for an e-reader.

Read more about the switch if you like: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-goes-100-digital

Really interesting post about grids in the user interface of the iphone. I’ve always though of the interface as really good, but he actually makes suggestions for a few improvements. 

http://aentan.com/design/new-visual-proportions-for-the-ios-user-interface/

Still, i prefer android, who could really benefit from some new and improved ui-design, nothing big, just tuning.