Category: ETech 2006
Humanising The Enterprise Using Ambient Social Knowledge
Lee Bryant of Headshift, a scial software consulting firm, spoke of the death of traditional enterprise software and the rise of a new breed of social software that is attentuating the torrent of information within large companies. The lost world of IT dinosaurs – legacy systems that are too big and expensive to kill In…
The Data Dump – Fun With Graphs & Charts
The Data Dump has two strict rules: the data must make a larger point about the Internet and its users, not just about the source company since data visualization is as or more important than data collection, it’s gotta look good. State of the Blogosphere – March 2006, David Sifry 30m blogs tracked, doubling in…
RFID: A Case Study of the Risks and Benefits of Location-Aware Technologies
Jen King’s (Yahoo’ Berkeleys Marc Davis is King’s professor) session on RFID began with a review of first principles and the two basic RFID components – a tag/chip/smartcard and a reader, communicating through radio signals. Most current applications aren’t consumer, but largely enterprise logistics, supply-chains and inventory control. The US E-Passport (containing an ISO14443 contactless…
Everybody’s It – Tagging With Identity
Mary Hodder’s session on tagging and identity, builds on some of the work from the Identity 2.0 movement, proposing that tagging has value for annotating rich media. Technorati’s tags provide a partial solution but doesn’t address how people wish to include tags on their own site, but still participate in communities. In usabilities, bloggers requested:…
Feed To The Future
Feedburner’s Eric Lunt opened by presenting the growth rate of RSS subscriptions – ranging from 221’375 feeds in January 2005 to 9’547’171 by February 2006 (source) Subscriptions are outpacing feed recognition. Report after reportt shows that people are unfamiliar with the terms, but subscriptions continue to grow dratically. Subscriptions are becoming more embeddedinto more worlds…
The Language Of Attention – A Pattern Approach
Bill Scott describes Yahoo as a tribal platform, particuarly with the acquisition of various API-based services such as Flickr and del.icio.us as part of the Yahoo Developer Network. Attention needs to be driven by engaging and relevant interactions to create the loyalty neccessary for successful services. The successful interaction patterns Scott outlines include: Immediacy Directness…
Blue Chip Products – 2006 Report Card
Joel Spolsky attempts to deconstruct the winning characteristics of of what he terms Blue Chip products (iPods, Julia Roberts etc.). Spolsky hypothesises a ‘Formula’ for good products and services – making people happy, creating an emotional connection and obsessing over aesthetics Reddit.com – the cartoon mascots and karma points creates an emotional bond with the…
First You Google, But Then What?
Ask and you shall receive (something)…Plum’s Hans Peter Brondmo outlined his views on collecting almost anything, sharing it and then connecting it to others in order to discover. Brondmo sees this as a solution to search results that can overwhelm the user with choice. Plum appears to be a web-based clipboard, where clips can extend…
When Do We Get The Events We Want
Brian Dear of the Events And Venues Database (EVDB) is on a mission to maximise event discovery. Announcing an event is in essence a flyer or an attempt to focus and gain attention. Initally EVDB was considering either building a portal or platform. Eventually, EVDB decided to build both: Eventful.com – let users share information…
Rich Internet Applications & The Service-Oriented Client
Adobe/Macromedia’s Kevin Lynch began with a recap of the AJAX rich internet application paradigm and some of its limitations (sockets, cookie storage, vector graphics etc.) before leading into the announcement of a Flash+AJAX web application model – only recently adopted by the AFLAX and Dojo.storage frameworks. Interestingly, Flash is the most widely distributed client in…