Erin Malone and I introduced some of the fruit of our effort to carve out a pattern language for social user experience design. At the Information Architecture Summit in Memphis this past week we taught our pattern library workshop and then delivered this tandem presentation:
I’m going to name the robots Foo and Bar. We still haven’t announced the musical act that will be performing on this stage tonight.
So far I’ve heard Cody Simms and Neal Sample (Cody and Neal, hmmm….) give a great overview of YOS (with great visuals by Micah Laaker), and am now listening to Allen Rabinovich explain how to hack with Flash and Flex.
At 2pm I’ll be talking about patterns and stencils and how they can help coders build better interfaces.
My Ignite talk, Grasping Social Patterns
Originally uploaded by duncandavidson.
Here are my slides.
UPDATE: and here’s some YouTube video shot from the audience (the very beginning of my talk is cut off):
At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)
I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.
In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.
For now, here are my summit talks:
and
Here are my slides from my talk at Xerox Parc (the BayCHI monthly program meeting) on April 8th:
When I get the audio, I plan to put together a slidecast to synch the slides to the talk, which should be more valuable.
Oh, and consider viewing the slides in full-screen mode. They should be a lot more legible that way. I did my best to optimize the source files.
At South by Southwest, Ted Nadeau and I led a “core conversation” on the topic of reputation, identity, and presence. Ted is great at questioning basic assumptions and had this idea of handing out placards an audience of participants could use to signal their reactions to what was being said to them.
We imagine double-sided signs on sticks to hold up, sort of like the Roadrunner does, but we settled for handing out cut paper. We’re still working on the mechanics of this, *and the whole thing is Creative Commons licensed, derivs-allowed, attrib-required, I think (it’s in the fine print), but even now at version 1.0 of this Reaction Deck, I think Ted’s really onto something:
Michael Wesch, who created the virally popular internet video called Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us (its success drew on a sort of meta-application of the very concepts it discussed), was the keynote speaker at IDEA 2007 last week. As part of his keynote, he previewed two videos he has now released to the web.
The first, Information R/evolution, examines the challenges we all face in this age of information glut and shortening attention spans:
The second, made collaboratively by one of his classes (Wesch is a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, where he is launching a Digital Ethnography working group to “examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction”), looks carefully at how we are teaching today and how out of sync it has become with the lives of contemporary students:
In some ways, for me, the highlight of the conference was Wesch’s story about how he frightened himself one night in the communal sleeping quarters in New Guineau when he thought his own arm, which had fallen asleep, was a snake lying across his body. This story became the kernel of Wesch’s reputation with the people he was studying and living among, and helped him realize that telling stories is a big part of how we gain identities and fit ourselves (and others) into society.
Just noticed there’s a conference coming up in a few weeks here in the valley that seems extremely narrowcast to me: Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook.
A lot of the usual suspects of social network bloviating are speaking (I count two women out of 20 named speakers), including representatives from Facebook, LinkedIn, O’Reilly (Tim himself), Forrester Research, TechCrunch, and of course Scoble, and others.
The conference describes itself as
for developers and marketers on how to build and distribute apps for the Facebook Platform. This event is for both business executives & technical developers who want to learn more about the Facebook environment, and how to reach online communities using social networking platforms and applications.The conference will be held in San Jose, CA from October 7th-9th. Main conference sessions are Monday 10/8 and Tuesday 10/9; an optional pre-conference workshop is Sunday, 10/7.
If you’re interested, you can register at EventBrite.
They’ve certainly populated the conference title well with buzzwords. The term social graph, popularized by facebookistas (and annoying to those who consider it an obscure jargon synonym for social network - oh, and don’t get jonas luster started on how social network software is not the same thing as a social network) seems to be everywhere these days, and of course people love to talk about recognizing and capturing (or detecting, heh) patterns.
For a counter view of the importance of Facebook’s social graph as a platform for application development, check out the truth about facebook apps: most people ignore them:
Once installed, most widgets are ignored.
Slide’s “Top Friends” boasts the most active users: 2.7 million people, or 20% of its user base, use it every day. The app with the highest engagement percentage: “WarBook,” a medieval fantasy game, is played by 18,000 people a day, or 42% of its install base. The “iLike” app, oft-cited as a Facebook success story, may be less popular than we thought: 646,000 people, or 9% of its install base, use it daily.
(via cwodtke’s tweets, who recently noted that she and I seem to be on some sort of convergence path)
Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto.
According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or participate in discussions about portable social networks, identity, design patterns, particularly social-media related design patterns, and the gift economy.
I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk about all of those things but when has that ever stopped me before?
Since the moment that Liz Henry and Tara Hunt tipped me off to this event, I’ve had the feeling that this was an important one not to miss. So soon after my wedding and honeymoon and with a rapidly filling-up fall conference schedule, I could have been tempted to let this one slide by, but I have a strong intuition that many of the people I consider friends, heroes, and inspirations will be there and that I’d be kicking myself if I let another Bay Area BarCamp go by without joining in on the fun.
I’ll blog from there if I can find the time between no-spectatorin’ and schmoozin’ and gettin’ things done.
Here are my slides from my presentation, Mobile Information Architecture: Designing Experiences for the Mobile Web:
(I may update them with a 2.0 version based on some new learnings from subsequent conversations, and a different idea of how to pace the imagery.)
And here are my slides from the panel I moderated, Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs:
In March I’ll be moderating a panel at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas, called “Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online.”
Confirmed panelists include George Kelly, Kaliya Hamlin, Ted Nadeau, and Mary Hodder.
I’m anticipating a lively dialogue tackling how we project and define our identities online, what it means to be present when you are physically remote, and how reputations are earned and maintained in an attention economy.
Come on down and join the conversation.
As promised, here are some shots of last week’s merry-making, courtesy of Elton:
I might wan to attend some of this year’s UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Winter New Media Lecture Series:
Sunday, December 10, 2006 - Wednesday, December 13, 2006 North Gate Hall Library, Hearst at Euclid Avenue, Berkeley Featured speakers are Howard Rheingold, “Smart Mobs” author; Travis Fox, Washington Post; Robert Hood, msnbc.com; Al Bonner, Lawrence.com; Seth Gittner, Roanoke Times; Seth Familian, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business; Joe Howry, Bruce McLean, Colleen Casem and Tom Kiska, Ventura County Star. This event is free and open to the public, and no RSVP is needed.
(Directions to the Journalism School)
I meant to post this a week or so ago, but Peter Merholz has put up the audio from presentations at this year’s inaugural IDEA conference in Seattle on the conference blog, saying
If you have only 30 minutes, then listen to Bruce Sterling’s closing keynote. Honestly, though, there’s lots of great stuff here. Interaction designers will be keen on Dave Cronin, Jake Barton, Stamen, Fernanda Viegas, and Robert Kalin. Brought to you by the IA Institute!
One of the two panels I proposed for SXSW next spring garnered sufficient votes to make the cut. It’s the one on identity, presence, attention, trust, privacy and so on, called “Every Breath You Take.” I’m excited about moderating this panel and I’m in the process of pulling together the other panelists, which I’ll announce as soon as everything’s settled.
Meanwhile, the deadline for proposals for the IA Summit (also next March) just passed and I managed to get in one for a presentation on Mobile IA and another for a panel on Lessons from Failure. Additionally, I’ve signed on as a panelist for two other cool ideas proposed by other people that I’ll discuss here if and when they are approved. As a director I’ll be involved in the annual public meeting of the board of the IA Institute at the Summit as well.
Looks like March will once again be a busy conference / travel season for me, with SXSW in Austin as always and the Summit scheduled for Las Vegas later in the month.
We’re back… now, with less context!
…and, we’re outtie.
The first round of panels proposed for SXSW Interactive 2007 were those proposed by past speakers (I had two proposals in that round). Voting for the first round is now closed.
2007 SXSW Interactive Panel Proposal Picker (Round Two) starts today, featuring panel proposals that were submitted in the last few months.
Go check out all the creative ideas and vote.
I don’t know if I can make it to the IDEA conference, but if not, I look forward to reading about it on the IDEA Conference Blog.
(Self-plug: I hacked the site’s design into WordPress templates to get the blog working for Peterme.)
Hugh Forrest, the indomitable lead organizer of South by Southwest Interactive has announced a public process for voting on and vetting panel ideas for next year’s conference. Apparently it will take several rounds, with the first round narrowing down the 173 panel proposals.
The voting is open to anyone, but the votes of past attendees of SXSW are weighted more strongly and those of past presenters are given even further weight.
Here’s part of Hugh’s announcement:
I wanted to alert you that the online interface for panel proposals for the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival is now live. This page allows users to give us their feedback on which of the many outstanding panel proposals they feel are most appropriate for next year’s event. … Complete directions for the voting process are listed on the site. Deadline for voting is September 8.
I’ve got two panel proposals in the running:
No privacy? Spy on yourself and commodify your attention stream! Countless representations of ourselves flood the net with information daily. What is happening to our models of attention? trust? reputation? Rate my new fighting style unstoppable and I’ll trade you this artifact I forged in Worlds of Warcraft… Expect a lively debate from noted experts on attention and identity and skeptics who think most of the sentences above are content-free.
(filed under blogging and education / sociological)
and
Resolved: the tagging meme has overstayed its welcome. No, tags aren’t going away but they are not a user-experience panacea. Are we folksonomic yet? Some ideas about the next frontier in malleable, emergent information architectures and classification schemes. Plus, how to apply the lessons of the global social internet to more niche oriented web application development projects. Tag pioneers, theorists, and skeptics beat a dead horse.
(filed under social networks and user generated / open source)
Vote for my panels and eight others!
Eric Scheid tells me,
We’ve now announced the conference program, and it’s quite exciting - lots of practical sessions, by practitioners, for practitioners. Over the next few weeks we’ll be expanding the detail on each session. Over the next few weeks we’ll be expanding the detail on each session. Stay tuned for more news, sign up for announcement emails, or subscribe to the RSS or Atom news feeds.
Scott Abel, Content Management Strategist at The Content Wrangler, Inc. alerted the community to a free webinar on Cutting Edge Web Content Management, July 26, 2006 at 2PM EST, to be presented by Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group:
Developing and delivering dynamic, personalized content via the Web for superior customer service. Mountains of content. Multiple websites in multiple languages. How do you ensure that you aren’t recreating content and that the right content is delivered to the right person? A unified content strategy will enable you to save your content in a single place for distribution to anywhere - the Web, email, a cell phone or PDA, etc. Anywhere - as defined by your customer. In short, personalizing your content will drive revenue and improve service to customers and business partners. Identifying the issue is easy enough, how do you do it? In this presentation, you’ll learn how to unify your content strategy to support dynamic publishing across multiple channels to fulfill the ideal of true one-to-one marketing. While the focus will be on the Web as a delivery channel, the discussion will include the need to deliver content via other distribution channels.
Here we go again. Big list this week. Many stolen from the usual suspects:
Eric Scheid, from the IA Institute, announces Oz-IA 2006, a first-ever Australian IA conference, to be held in Sydney:
As well as conveniently following on from this year’s Web Directions conference), this event is scheduled for the same weekend as the EURO IA conference. Keith Instone has already suggested a live link between the two conferences. The retreat is planned to be a semi-formal series of practical sessions on information architecture and related topics, aimed at practicing IAs and those within the broader industry interested in expanding their knowledge of the theory and practice. There’s some great local and international speakers to get the thoughts moving, including Mark Bernstein, Thomas Vander Wal, Dan Saffer, Donna Maurer, David Sless, Steve Baty, and James Robertson. There will be case study presentations; detailed how-to sessions; and general ‘where are we going’ discussions. We will also be organising some group participation sessions and even leaving a slot or two open for some self-organised sessions And there’ll be opportunities a-plenty to meet and mingle with peers and uber-IAs from Australia and around the world. It’s a weekend retreat, so you can relax and discuss the joys, tribulations, and tricks of information architecture with like-minded individuals. More information will be forthcoming in the next few weeks & months, so pencil in those dates, subscribe to the RSS or Atom news feeds, or sign up for email announcements. If you’re in Australia, you shouldn’t miss it. If you want to visit, this is a great reason to do so.
Hmm, I’ve never been to Australia. Maybe it’s time I went.
I’ve been meaning to mention the IA Institute’s upcoming IDEA 2006 conference. (It stands for Information: Design, Experience, Access.) It’s being held at the Seattle Public Library, Central Library on October 23-24. I have a feeling I’ll be too busy to make it, but it looks intriguing and I’ll at least try to follow it via the blogosphere.
Livia Labate, from Comcast, posted recordings of a number of sessions from this year’s Information Architecture summit in her blog I think, therefore IA.
In case you missed it, the Blogosphere was abuzz last week about the apparent trademarking of “Web 2.0” and subsequent cease-and-desist sent to IT@Cork (a non-profit networking organisation) who’d organized a recent conference.
As a recap (clipped from)
[The] upcoming Web 2.0 half-day conference is the target of a cease and desist letter from the legal team of O’Reilly publishers. Basically O’Reilly are claiming to have applied for a trademark for the term “Web 2.0” and therefore IT@Cork can’t use the term for its conference. Apparantly use of the term “Web 2.0” is a “flagrant violation” of their trademark rights!
284 comments later and the controversy exploded onto the scene. Meanwhile, mister O’Reilly himself was away on vacation. He returned Monday and responded with a lengthy post later this week.
I don’t want to spoil the ending by giving too much away, but Tim’s detailed response to the issue puts it all to rest. Firstly, it was CMP Media who sent the cease-and-desist not O’Reilly himself, second, the trademark was specific to conferences that reference “Web 2.0” in their name, third, cease-and-desist is not equivalent to “suing” someone and fourth, many bloggers who posted didn’t even bother to do enough homework to qualify their own opinions.
A fascinating read if you’ve got the time and definitely one of those things that will end up going down in “Best of” 2006 history.
Related reading:
O’Reilly trademarks Web 2.0 and sets lawyers on IT@Cork!
Controversy about our “Web 2.0” service mark
Web 2.0 Service Mark Controversy (Tim responding this time)
Congratulations to Craig for being selected as a judge for the 10th annual Web Marketing Association International WebAwards!
The WebAwards is the standards-defining competition that sets industry benchmarks based on the seven criteria of a successful Web site. It recognizes the individual and team achievements of Web professionals who create and maintain outstanding Web sites. The 2006 WebAward judges consist of a select group of Internet professionals who have direct experience designing and managing Web sites Ð including members of the media, interactive creative directors, corporate marketing managers, site designers, content providers and webmasters Ð each with an in-depth understanding of the current state-of-the-art in Web site development and technology. Judging for this year’s awards will take place in July and August, with winners announced in September.
The venerable user experience webzine Boxes and Arrows has come out with its comprehensive wrapup of the 2006 IA Summit. A few of the writeups there are by me (coverage of a pre-conference session on prototyping with comics that I first wrote about here on this blog, coverage of two presentations, and coverage of a panel on tagging that I first wrote about over at You’re It!.
You can start reading the B+A coverage with the article called Learning, Doing, Selling: 2006 IA Summit Wrapup: Overview and Pre-conference sessions. Then continue on to Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
Dan and I are heading down to PARC this evening for Beyond Search - Social & Personal Ways of Finding Information, a BayCHI event:
Several exciting developments in social search and personalization help users find information: recommendations based on personal tastes, social trends, tags, ratings, popularity, and friends tastes. These methods go beyond the classic search paradigm of relevance and flat lists of results, resulting in different user experience challenges. This panel brings Neil Hunt (Netflix), David Porter (Live365), Tom Conrad (Pandora), Kevin Rose (digg), and Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us) to explore trends in social search.
We’ll report back tomorrow!
I’ve been itching to attend an unconference since I heard about the first BarCamp, but they were mostly very heavily coder oriented and I’m a floaty-on-the-surface presentation-layer kind of guy, but then I read Rashi Sinha’s announcement of DCamp (or maybe I saw the announcement in the BayCHI newsletter first) and I decided this sounds like my kind of party networking opportunity workshop conference. It’s the weekend of May 12-13 and the planning is collaborative, like everything else. Visit the wiki if this sounds like your bag too.
uploaded by erin_designr.
Erin Malone took this nice pic of me at the IA Summit.
The summit was great. Learned a lot. Met very cool people. I’ll probably write up some key takeaways as I digest my thoughts over the next week or so.
tags: iasummit2006, iasummit
I’m headed up to Vancouver tomorrow for my first IA Summit. I’ll be presenting two posters there this time (one was submitted on our behalf by a former colleague). For posterity (and in case I lose the poster tube on the plane) here are links to the Acrobat files containing the two posters.
tags: iasummit2006, iasummit, presentation
Here’s a snapshot of my panel at South by Southwest Interactive (D.I.Y. Media: Consumer is the Producer). Now I’ve got a few days to be productive before I’m off to Vancouver for the IA Summit.
More info at Silicon Valley WebGuild…
The Extractable strategy team has a few conference appearances in the upcoming months.
First, Christian and A’lan are both presenting posters at the upcoming IA Summit (March 23 to 27, in Vancouver):
Also Christian will be speaking at the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association conference in Albuquerque, NM in February and will be moderating a panel on do-it-yourself (DIY) media, called “Consumer is the Producer,” at South by Southwest in Austin in March.
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