blog.msurveys.com

I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at WARC's "What next for online research" conference yesterday. I enjoyed hearing from a number of interesting people, and it was nice to meet some folks in person that I've previously only known by name, as well as catching up with some older existing acquaintances..

WARC have written up a summary of the conference and papers. Worth a read if you couldn't attend in person. I don't know where that reference to a "44D avatar interviewer" came from though... some glimpse into the private fantasies of the writer perhaps?

Hey man, check out the RLF... cool yeah?

"The RLF is not associated in any manner with the following groups: ELF, ALF , CIA , FBI, KGB, the Peoples Research Liberation Front, The Front of Liberated Researchers, MRS , END, THE, YAZ, ABC, CAD, PVC, HSA, ICE, INS , WAY, AND , NOW , NRA, IRS , COD , GIN, GAS , SUX, SAX, SEX, BBC , PIX , PIC , PLC , TLC, TOP, TIP, TIF , GIF, JPG, BNP , BUS, ZIP, WEB , LAW, TAX, DOC , APG, IPA, ESOMAR or RAD."

This has to be one of the funnier MR related sites I've seen in recent months - although with a more serious message somewhere in there, as the story tells. They are also running a fringe meeting during the MRS conference in Brighton next week.

Way to go, comrades!

This just in via 3pointD:




"Before you do anything else, watch the trailer above, which just went up on GameTrailers.com after being shown at GDC. It shows a PS3 service from Sony called “home,” which is, yes, a free 3D online space where you’ll be able to customize your avatar and your own private home, hang out with other users there and in various common spaces, stream your media into your virtual pad (as in Kaneva), and chat via voice, emotes, short pre-loaded phrases or with a USB keyboard, as well as hook up with other people and follow them into PS3 games. In terms of pushing the metaverse out to the mainstream, this is pretty huge news."

It certainly seems like a big step towards the mainstream, as well as potentially making the PS3 appeal to whole new demographic. I wonder how extensible this service/platform will be. I feel the in-game survey concept, or at the very least the in-game-console survey concept, is about to take a big step forward..

Update: Alice over at Wonderland has notes on Phil Harrison's keynote speech on "Game 3.0", part of which was about the "Home" service. From the sounds of it, they will be providing extensibility - the service is built using Maya, and Sony will provide SDKs to developers.

Full 20-minute video of the speech/demo, worth having a look:

James Governor is thinking about using twitter as a light-weight polling tool:

"So I am looking for 1000 followers to the RedMonkRSVP twitter id. The idea is that we will be able to run instant polls according to our, and your, research ideas. Sort of a lightweight yougov poll. Twitter was never intended for this but I would like to try it and I need your help. Please get people to sign up and lets start twittering the wisdom of the crowds. I don’t have an infrastructure in place to aggregate and query results, but when did that ever stop anyone from achieving cool things?"

[If twitter means nothing to you, this post from BBC backstage has some useful introductory info.]

I've been thinking about this too, given the popularity of twitter (my BBC twitter bots currently have more than 3000 followers), and the way twitter can be used as a simple platform for delivering content via web, IM and SMS messaging.

While I can't quite see James' idea working as it is, given my previous experience with IM bots and survey technology (see also my IM survey bots), I think something along these lines may work:

• survey invites are easy - you can easily get a list of your followers in XML and JSON formats
• rather than using the public timeline, everything should run via direct messaging
• an IM bot can send a direct message to each follower, using the twitter bot and IM lingo
• as long as respondents reply with a direct message back, and I configure my twitter account to deliver direct messages to IM, the same IM bot can catch responses and aggregate them in the survey backend, as well as sending out the next question to be asked
  

This process would be confidential (no-one else can see questions and responses), while still making use of the twitter infrastructure both for survey notification and multi-channel survey delivery via IM, SMS or web.

In addition, this would mean that entire surveys, not just simple one-question polls are possible, given that the IM bot is communicating with a fully fledged survey backend.

Much of this functionality is already implemented in the existing survey bots I worked on previously, so I'm just waiting for the twitter IM functionality to become more functional again before setting something up (at the moment, there seem to be some problems around twitter, e.g. I can't even see the twitter@twitter.com bot online).

I'll post here again once the twitter IM functionality is back up and in a reasonably reliable state, and I've had the time to put together a simple prototype.