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Category: ETech 2006

  • Shut Up! No, *You* Shut Up!

    Clay Shirky introduced a pattern language for moderation strategies, using Slashdot as a case study:

    • Freedom’s just another word – with increased freedom to publish, the level of annoyingness increases and mechenisms are required to mitigate increased noise.
    • Slashdot’s defenses – members defend readers from writers by ranking comments on individual posts…around 20% of comments are therefore hidden (those below a certain threshold).
    • Tragedy of the Commons – Move comments to a separate page, treat readers & writers differently, let users rate posts and include defensive defaults.
    • Who Will Guard The Guardians – Treat users and members differently, measure good behaviours, enlist comitted members – judges can’t post.

    Shirky went on to describe Bronze Beta, where there aren’t ‘features’ as such, comments are central to the content base of the site and logging in is an optional interaction, removing a barrier for user contributions. Shirky’s ITP students at NYU have made available a wiki and mailing list to foster collaboration and discourse on patterns for moderation.

  • Attention Focussing Strategies

    Jon Udell‘s session on Attention Focussing Strategies was framed around four key concepts:

    • Heads, decks and leads – drawn from print publishing metaphors, giving people the abilty to scan information at multiple levels of detail.
    • Active context – resources that are self-updating and queryable, rather than a static list of information (wishlists, feeds, linklists, blogrolls, podcasts).
    • Canonical names – URLs, ISBN and other namespaces are a powerful source for focussing attention.
    • Multimedia storytelling – examples like locative mashups, the iPod-by-Microsoft YouTube clip and others illustrate the potential for attention grabbing content, being created at the grassroots.

  • Rich Local & Social Experiences

    Jointly presented by Meetro and PlaceSite, this session explored various locative media developments. The central question posed, ‘Who are you NOT meeting right now?’, is particularly appropriate to the conference environment.

    Location as a principal factor is deconstructed as one of the driving factors in community. Regarless of the mediated nature of networked communities, physical presence and location largely shape our participation in the places we work, live and play. Interestingly, realtime social networks with a community dimension were seen as a critical carrier of locative media in the future.

    Interestingly, IBM’s experience of collaborative media in the enterprise has been very successful, but organising locative meetings, even in the same city, required ad-hoc organisational mechanisms that didn’t exist – Meetro addressed this need for IBM.

    Meetro has become a ‘neighbourly’ tool, enabling people within proximity to share resource – can i borrow your vacuum?

    Amongst the lessons learned by PlaceSite and Meetro in launching their services:

    • User’s options to represent themselves through photos or avatars.
    • Proximity drives meetups, particularly serendepitous, spontaneous meetings within a few blocks.
    • Absolute location shouldn’t be revealed; abstracting to a radial ‘aura’ around an actual location is more desirable.

    Where Meetro is tied to the person, Placesite is largely linked to actual locations – this is a useful distinction in models pursued by various locative media.

    Placesite’s location-centric approach enables existing social boundaries to be extended into locative media and ensures an intrinsic community is related to an actual location. Placesite also offers router code which can PlaceSite-enable a WiFi hotspot; partnerships are in place with wireless providers Sputnik and Wavestorm.

    Longer term plans for PlaceSite include plans to address housing developments, conferences, muniwireless zones, an open API and the general transformation into a platform and network provider.

    As we consider FON-enabled Wanadoo Liveboxes to create a public wireless network for Wanadoo broadband subscibers, a Livebox+FON+PlaceSite combination offers a more compelling user proposition. Each Livebox could be transformed into a hub for local users, advertising, organisations, media and companies.

    A Wanadoo Placebox could illuminate neighborhoods with connectivity and information – a digital lamppost!

  • The New Community

    Communities occur when people have the ability to use their voice in a public and immediate way, forming intimate relationships over time.

    Web 1.0 communities were the era of company towns. You can use you voice, but only within the format and rules of the bossman…The Well, Salon Table Talk, Builder Buzz. The new generation of communities are increasingly self-powered and independent…Dooce, Kottke, BoingBoing. The differentiator is no-one can turn the new generation of communities off.

    There is a connective tissue that is powering distributed communities – blogs, comments, trackbacks, tags, APIs, blogrolls, referrers and links. Third party aggregators such as Technorati, Bloggies, Photoblogs.org and ORblogs also have significance in the connectivity between communities. Indeed, this tissue forces better behaviour of all particpants in an extended community.

    Memes are increasingly the fabric of communities online – where user contributions might lie buried within a forum post, connective tissue is enabling memes to spread further and wider, outside the constituencies where they would previously have remained…SelfPortraitday.com, Whiskerino, BlogThis quizzes.

    However, with no centralised authority, moderation, community scale that exceeds the personal and complex tools, the new generation of communities are creating their own problems.

    Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal, Typepad and Last.FM are the reference examples of the new generation of communities, with a mixture of 1.0 models which have evolved and pure models fashioned from current thinking.

    The session closed with some guides to community building…

    • Treat your community well, don’t prevent them from leaving.
    • Go to where your community is – create a group in Flickr rather than a new photo service.
    • Decentralised community mirrors real community more closely.
    • Move towards a community afiliation cycle, grow up in your parents house then move out on your own and buy a house.
    • Blogs have forced older closed models to interact with the rest of the world.

  • Playsh, the playful shell

    Playsh is a ‘narrative-driven "object navigation" client, operating primarily on the semantic level, casting your hacking environment as a high-level, shell-based, social prototyping laboratory, a playground for recombinant network toys.’

    More literally, playsh is a command-line interface that uses MUD and text adventure conventions to navigate and manipulate the web. Features include:

    • looking for patterns in source code.
    • navigating URLs geographically through ‘rooms’ or as a deck of cards in your hand (!)
    • opening feed items as ‘doors’.

    Superficially, playsh appears to be a command-line interface for the web, though lacking the intuitive nature of YubNub, though Yubnub does lack the ability to pipe data from one silo into another. Though Webb’s motivations for exploring recombinant interfaces and playful metaphors are appropriate and valuable, playsh itself doesn’t seem to address these motivations.

    Maybe I’m missing something, but it’s difficult to see the value here…

  • The Future Of Interfaces Is Multi-Touch

    I read about Jeff Han’s work on multi-touch screens just a few days ago, but seeing the technology demonstrated live indicates that a transformative paradigm in UI experiences may be unfolding.

    The multi-touch screen is essentially a touch screen that responds to simultaneous touches at multiple points on its surface, This enables users to form more intuitive, expressive and sophisticated gestures as well as providing an inherently multi-user interface, as different parts of a screen can be used by each user. The touch surface itself is based on the total internal reflection properties of the glass above the screen itself.

    Han indicates that the social, intuitive nature of the multi-touch screen, takes computing away from the historic WIMP direction of interfaces and opens computing culture to children and older users. Certainly, the playful, unintimidating nature of the technology appears to lower the usual barriers of complexity that those unfamiliar with computing environments face.

    Han’s demonstrations included:

    • Navigation of a 3D globe using gestures for panning and zooming.
    • TV channels displayed as individual scalable ’tiles’ and windows.
    • A scalable, translucent, virtual keyboard.
    • A sock puppet, animaed through gesture, created by a drawing simple strokes on the screen.
    • Puzzle games with users using different parts of the screen to solve their puzzles in a time-trial.

    Han’s technology seems eminently useful for highly interactive, manipulable visualisations of complex data, but it’s not difficult to imagine versions of Photoshop, fabrication control interfaces, 3D design and sculpting applications being crafted from the same technology.

  • Simple Bridge Building – Ray Ozzie

    Ray Ozzie, founder of Groove Networks and creator of Lotus Notes, now one of Microsoft’s many CTOs demonstrated LiveClipboard.

    Coincidentally, Ian and I were just last night speculating on a network enabled clipboard that would allow users to copy and paste from other screens to their own. It seems Ozzie’s work on Windows Live has yielded a similar, yet more sophisticated application.

    The clipboard is the original mashup mechanism, enabling data from one application to be re-used in an another – Ozzie began his talk with the premise ‘Where is the clipboard of the web’ and ‘Why isn’t this just the regular clipboard users are already familiar with?’. Ozzie speculates that such a mechanism would become a lightweight mechanism for connecting the data silos of the web.

    LiveClipboard uses the native CF_Text format (the original microformat!) of the Windows clipboard and simply inserts a piece of structured XML data, rather than plain text. This isn’t disimilar to the way content can be copied from an IE web page and pasted into Microsoft Office applications, preserving the original pages’ formatting. In this case the content of the CF_Text construct is HTML.

    Ozzie’s examples of LiveClipboard included:

    • Copying event information from and Eventful.com web page and pasting into an Outlook Calendar.
    • Copying RSS feed data from a web page and pasting into an aggregator – simplifying an otherwise onerous process for new users.
    • Copying a live location feed from a Windows Mobile / MSN Spaces field to a Facebook.com profile.
    • Copying a Flickr image from a web page and pasting into a desktop folder.
    • Copying and pasting a Flickr photostream feed into a folder populates the folder with live Flickr content. Is this a pre-cursor to WinFS functionality?

    Ozzie closed out his session with an invitation to help proliferate LiveClipboard support by helping to shape a common set of microformats, conceding that the success of LiveClipboard depended on collaboration between Microsoft and the wider web.

  • The Internet of Things

    Introduced of Cory Doctorow, science-fiction author Bruce Sterling, spoke on the themes of ubiquitous computation. Now based in Belgrade, Sterling continues to blog and write fiction as he observes the rehabilitation of a failed state. The Internet of Things, predicts Sterling, will take around thirty years (as did barcodes) to emerge fully…also predicting that at age eighty-six, he’ll be needing an Internet of Things…

    Currently, the field is still defining its vocabulary and terminology as experimenters begin to tinker with the technology. By ‘freezing’ the terminology of artificial intelligence and thinking machines, Sterling contends that AI’s potential was funneled into narrow directions. Google appears to be intelligent, but is not presented as a thinking machine like Microsoft Bob and Ask Jeeves…a linking, ranking and sorting machine, not a classical ‘AI’ – Turing vs Google! Artificial Turings and Feynmans may not be able to efficiently compute the cheapest local plumber…perhaps talking about sorting machines rather than AI would have produced a Google in the 1980s…

    The socially generated knowledge of the Internet is not about intelligance, but changing our relationship with the physical world through laptops, phones, PDAs and cameras. Objects can be labelled with electronic tags that can be sorted, ranked, located and connected…objects that are auto-Googled?

    Sterling goes on to describe spimes, fabjects and blogjects as the artefacts of an Internet of Things – our posessions are no longer inventoried in our heads, but by machines around us. Google my shoes! Trackbacks to my car! Interestingly, at ETel, Peter Cochrane spoke ot logistics and things as a large global economic growth area; Sterling seems to underline the potential here and reflect the timescales noted by Cochrane.

    After introducing ThingLink as a generic term to encompass identifiers for objects, Sterling contrasts spimes with Blogjects, with the latter providing a near-term realisation of the potential of Things. Evocative Knowledge Objects, Ubiquitous Findable Objects,

    BTW, I wrote about Sterling’s fabjects a couple years ago as part of a rif on fabbing and P2P….the napsterisation of things? Things 2.0…pick your meme 🙂

  • From Coder to Co-Founder: How to Move from Engineering to Entrepreneuring

    O’Reilly’s Marc Hedlund has run a number of how-to sessions on startups and entrepreneurial skills at ETech and ETel. Today’s tutorial, Entrepreneuring for Geeks, covers the technologist who wishes to build a business from an idea.

    Hedlund began with twenty amusing and useful proverbs for seeking VCs and investors:

    • it’s good to be king – entrepreneuring is fun, lets you explore all aspects of work and yourself.
    • losing sucks – the risks of personal finance, health and relationships can suffer from unsuccessful ventures and are heightened.
    • building to flip is building to flop
    • prudence becomes procrastination – by thinking & talking to too many people can lead you to be discouraged from taking a risk and ignoring confidence in your ideas.
    • momentum builds on itself
    • jump when you are more excited than afraid – just make sure you’re more excited than afraid.
    • the idea – pay attention to the idea that won’t leave you alone…if you have to convince yourself to work on it, then it’s the wrong idea.
    • whom should i tell my idea to – potential customers YES, other entrepreneurs NO…don’t keep your secrets from the market or the market will keeps its secrets from you.
    • immediate yes is immediate no – run away from the ideas that have instant support, if you read about it in the NYT ideas section in December, it’s time has passed!
    • build what you know – easy to focus on things for people who live in front of computers, but also build from your own experiences in life.
    • give people what they need, not what they say they need – think about the answers your getting and ensure you have confidence in the providers of answering.
    • your ideas will get better the more you know about business – a hard pill to swallow for technologists, but like anything, you’ll perform better the more you know about anything.
    • people…three is fine, two divine – two people leads to a good dynamic, one requires strong motivation, three+ can lead to crippled decision-making.
    • work only with people you like and believe in – advice from Eric Schmidt…if they’re good at their work and you like them, hire them. Equally, work with people who like and believe in you, just naturally.
    • great things are made by people who share a passion, not by those who have been talked into one
    • cool ideas are useless without great needs – SETI@home proved there were few customers for grid installations and hence no enterprise idea. Is there a great need that people would pay for … even people who don’t like me or know me! del.icio.us – selling companies limits your customers (maybe five big acquirers), selling services can yield millions of customers.
    • build the simplest thing possible – don’t build for perfection…race to a working product and make the simplest thing that addresses the need.
    • solve problems, not potential problems – you only have to solve a scale problem when you have scale!
    • test everything with real people – grab Starbucks customers! Customers make the obvious mistakes and help you to correct.
    • start with nothing and have nothing for as long as possible – idea>got VC>started company, this is unusual as VCs usually only come to a running company. Use your salary to fund your startup – you can then ask yourself after days and weeknights ‘should I quit my day job’.
    • the best pitches are plainspoken and entertaining (not in that order) – businesses that can be explained simply are usually the most powerful.
    • never let on that you’re keeping a secret – your secrets will be shared, so better to be open and honest but direct unwanted questions to questions you really want to answer.
    • no means maybe, yes means maybe – keep giving VCs an investors updates regardless of outcome…they may eventually come around.
    • for investors, the product is nothing – market size, team, competitors are more interesting. Don’t do twelve slides on the product and one on the team…say more about the team.

    When questioned on best practices for ‘entrepreneuring from within’, Hedlund found it difficult to generalise but suggested that it’s down to convincing company leadership to exchange part-ownership for the freedom to spin-up a new company.

    Moving onto fundraising, Hedlund covered a lot of the same ground from ETech 2005 in outlining the behaviour of VCs and the patterns to look for when seeking investment.

    • VCs don’t start new companies – for initial funding go to customers, consultancy, angels, loans, grants and yourself (you can invest some of your money at a trusted online trading platform).
    • focus on the business first – if VC funding is available, you can go faster, but you must be prepared to fund a business.
      • Build the product
      • Get users
      • Make money
      • Don’t spend it
      • Get to break-even
    • VC provides money, credibility, guidance & review, some introductions and advocates for the company.
    • The best way to get VC is not to need it (!)
    • Think of investors as a continuum, not a YES/NO boolean…try and understand their level of enthusiasm plus what worked for them and what didn’t.
    • Funding is more than a full-time job – someone needs to be present consistently at all investor pitches in order to see the patterns and act consistently.

    Hedlund sought to conclude his advice with a series of questions that the entrepreneur must consider when seeking to startup or indeed seeking investment:

    • Will customers care about this product?
    • Are they high-margin customers?
    • What has changed to allow a startup to grow?
    • Are there enough customers willing to pay?
    • Is there a sales channel that will be profitable?
    • Do want to work with these people for five years?
    • Are the numbers believable?
    • How much to get to profitability?
    • Do they know the competition, how well are they positioned?
    • Do I believe these people can win?

    Hedlund went on to comment on the idiosyncracies of recent startup flips, including Bloglines, del.cio.us, FeedBurner, Flickr & Odeo, before leading into a case study of a startup proposed by Hedlund himself. GripeJuice was collective bargaining site for consumers hit with bad customer service.

    GripeJuice did fulfil a need, for people stuck in call-centre interactions, addressing poor user experiences. Users that shared a bad experience with others could collectively leverage the service provider. However, the service required some significant effort from the user, also the correlation between service frustration and the desire to pay for that resolution was disconnected in that payment didn’t solve the customer’s original problem immediately. Also, ironically, the best customers will be those that complain the most and are likely to be most critical of GripeJuice!

    In the closing Q&A Hedlund took questions on internal entrepreneurship in large organisations – I spoke briefly with him about potentially bringing some of this expertise in France Telecom, perhaps through our upcoming User 2.0 conference.

  • A (Re-)Introduction to JavaScript

    Simon Willison‘s tutorial on Javascript is very timely – a number of other Web 2.0 services have brought JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest and the DOM once more to the fore of web development. AJAX-based rich internet applications, such as Gmail, Google Maps and Flickr, have come to characterise current web development paradigms, with JavaScript overtaking Flash as the RIA toolkit of choice.

    After a brief history of JavaScript and it current renaissance at the core of AJAX development, Willison proceeded to review the core features of the the language – types, data structures, object design, functions, exceptions sequencing & control – describing best practices learned from over a decade of real-world usage.

    The session is a good review of a powerful language and reminds me how simple JavaScript development can be, However, some hands-on examples, case studies, how-tos and deconstructions of contemporary RIAs would be very welcome…I want to Flickr my work!

    Willison did name check a few interesting resources and frameworks for Javascript development – MochiKit, Prototype, Yahoo UI Library, script.aculo.us and DojoToolkit. One of the more interesting tools was a JavaScript shell which allows live scripts to be run within the context of the currently loaded browser page.

    Finally…

    • Phil Windley has a very comprehensive set of notes from this session.
    • One of the books recommended by Willison is available in an abridged edition (four chapters as a PDF) from SitePoint.
    • In the course of this tutorial, I came across inetWord, an AJAX-based word processor.