everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: events

  • Netsquared Mashup Toolkit

    net2-logo.JPGThanks everyone that was at the mashup session today at the Net Squared conference. If you’re here because of the session, the url where I’ve gathered some starting links to get you started on learning about mashups is on delicious under the intersection of the “net2” and “toolkit” tags. If you tag anything on delicious with these two tags, they’ll end up here.

    Delicious is a great way to pull together a list of links for your community. Instead of emailing your members a list of links, get in the practice of keeping your links in delicious and emailing them a delicious url instead. The url will never change but the links behind the url will always be fresh and up-to-date. You can also add a delicious linkroll to your site to always keep your visitors up to date on the latest links you’ve added to your collection.

    For those who did not go to the conference, Net Squared is doing great work promoting the use of technology to non-profits as a way for them to do more with less. Much of today’s discussion was around the use of social networking tools, tags, blogs, rss, and the apis to broaden the reach of non-profit organizations. The Net Squared site is a great source of information and community for folks at NGOs that have some pretty specific needs (open source fund raising software anyone?).

    It was also interesting to listen in on the Social Software session and hear questions on how to interact with communities and debate the question of if an organization should set up a MySpace profile to try and get in front of the younger generation that no longer uses email. It sounds exactly like the conversation PR professionals were having at the New Communications Forum 17 months ago – how to inject yourself into a conversation without coming across as disingenuous.

    We all know the answer to that question. Be yourself but listen first. The most convincing conversationalists have the best listening skills.

  • What I learned at ad:tech

    What I learned at ad:tech

    What a difference a year makes! Last year is seemed as if blogs were only given a polite nod and tolerated as something vaguely interesting but mostly for the geek fringe. The majority of the attention was given over to the SEO black arts. This year blogs are a given while the social media darlings of YouTube & MySpace are the focus of everyone’s attention.

    Worth the price of admission alone was one of the panelists (I think it was Dave Evans of Digital Voodoo) who defined Social Media as, “communication and media that doesn’t require interruption.” That is so true! Successful advertising in social media is not a pop-up ad for an irrelevant product – it cannot get in the way of what I want to do or who I want to reach. Successful integration of a brand into social media is going to facilitate the conversation. It’s going to be that funny clip that I can use to reach out to someone, it’s going to be images that I want to associate with by adding them onto my blog sidebar, it’s going to be a service that allows me to connect or communicate in a way that I couldn’t before.

    Other notables:

    Garrick Schmitt from avenue a/razorfish said that, “the tag cloud will become the mullet of web 2.0.”

    This was funny because I ran into the father of the term “folksonomy” a couple of days earlier and he was going off on how tag clouds are overrated (he’s now posted about it).

    Shawn Gold from MySpace on perspective, “To us, the refrigerator is the refrigerator. To our grandparents it was technology.”

    It may seem strange to call MySpace a messaging platform but that is exactly how it’s being used. I heard of one music promoter who has so many friend requests that he has hired someone to manage his profile for him. This doesn’t sound so strange if you think that people hire others to answer & screen phone calls as well. I also met someone who has a 500 friend profile and he was asked if he would sell his profile. This did seem odd to me – I never thought I’d see a social network commoditized as if it was a World of Warcraft character being sold on e-Bay.

    Shocking stat of the show: World of Warcraft has 5 million users as of Sept. 2005 and currently something north of 6 million today. The typical user plays 27 hours/week and most of these users will stay on the platform for over two years.

    Cool mobile app: Mobot – turn your camera phone into an image recognition device. I saw a demo where a guy took a picture of a Coke can and it recognized the logo and went to a special landing page on the phone’s browser.

  • eTech Day Three Roundup

    I’m going to harness the community to sum up today’s sessions.

    Tim Bray sums up the various product pitches.

    Something has been bothering me about the format of the conference. Each session is so rushed that there is little room for Q&A following each presentation. As a result, you don’t often get a chance to hear the audience’s point of view. The only way to get at this is if you force yourself on strangers in the hallway but, depending upon how you strike up a conversation, it can be hit or miss. Especially when both of you are rushed to ge to the next session. Chris Lott writes about the geek clique and how it limits viewpoints from the edge.

    As the buzzwords fly it was bound to happen sooner or later – bingo cards for Day Four.

    Sean Bonner (I hope I get a chance to finally meet him) posts a juicy chunk of the irc backchannel. We all ooh & ahh over the beautiful graphical representation of the activity put together by the folks at Stamen Designs.

    Tim Appnel bangs the Atom drum.

    Isn’t it ironic that this year’s theme is around Attention with a sub-theme being "less is more" yet most of the product announcements are about further atomizing content so that instead of getting doused with a firehose you’re sprayed with peppershot? Very few companies are presenting technologies that help cut back and focus with the exception of Boxxet which had the unfortunate timing to have to present at the same time as the overflow session nextdoor on The Data Dump

     

  • eTech Day Two quote of the day

    Email is an attention chipper/shredder – think "Fargo" – very graphic image.

       

        – Linda Stone

     

     

  • Multi-touch Interface shown off at eTech

    Totally cool – they had Jeff Han showing off his touch screen interface. I got a pointer to this a couple of weeks ago and was blown away – someone at Yahoo called it “web 5.0”

    Here’s a page with a video showing it in action – must be seen to be fully appreciated.

    UPDATE: so many people have been hitting this entry that I thought it best to upload my own video clips taken from the eTech presentation.

    1. Playing with virtual lava
    2. Sorting photos
    3. Channel surfing
    4. Zooming in on San Diego

  • Ray Ozzie at eTech

    RSS is the DNA wiring the web, the connecting tissue between active web sites. Part of the current excitement around mashups is that it’s moving these "composite applications" up to the level of the scripting programmer. The closer you get to the user, the closer you get to real domain expertise.

    Cut/Copy/Paste – these commands are used everyday by PC users, to the point where they don’t even think about it. Ray asks, "Where is the clipboard of the web?"

    Enter Live Clipboard (screencast examples on Ray’s blog)

    Action button that can cut events from an events site (he used eventful.com) and paste it into your calendar. Ray showed examples of pasting the event into Windows Live Calendar and the Outlook client. In both cases, the clipboard already knows the date so the paste action automatically puts the event into the right day.

    The clipboard can store multiple items. Shows example of copying address and credit card information into commerce site (shows example of mocked up Think Geek order checkout page). It appears that this can also write to a cookie file because pasted information moves from one screen to the next.

    The cut/copy/paste action button can be used to consolidate the multiple RSS subscription chicklets. Single copy action then moves the RSS url over to RSS reader (in this example he uses Bloglines).

    Copy GPS location information and paste it into Facebook profile. New "sync" action button makes this link into an updated version of the old "dynamic data link" that we saw in Excel. The link will update automatically via RSS.

    Copy a list of friends from Facebook, all with locations updating real-time. Paste this into a Windows Live Contact Map widget and you get a map showing real-time location of your friends. You can paste this into Excel to get a different view of this data.

    Copy a Flickr thumbnail and the action button pulls the data so when you paste it into your Windows My Pictures folder, it will then pull down the hi-res version of the photo. Expand this to a photostream, you can then sync it and do things like have an automatically updating folder that will change out something like your desktop wallpaper at set intervals. 

  • eTech, Day One Keynotes

    Lots of stimulating discussion today. If I can boil it down to themes I would say that the both the tutorials that I went to earlier and the keynotes I attended tonight asked us to center back on the individual. Flashy applications and rounded corners are all well & good if they contribute to the community you wish to create but one must never lose sight of the community that is central to the success of your service and the people that make up that community. This includes both the user and the people that run the service.

    The other major theme is Attention which is the theme of the conference. How to manage it and the challenges and technical challenges and social implications of the explosion of information and data that is available to us today.

    Rael Dornfest talked about the next evolution. People will pay for a service that can properly "attenuate" or filter information down to the core of what’s necessary. 

    Tim O’Reilly had an interesting point about the dangers of the desire to simplify. Pointing to the past, he talked about the flurry of memory resident applications that were written to take up the computer’s extended memory and how this jumble of competing applications drove the need for an operating system that could manage, unify, and simplify all these services. We essentially gave up our freedom to sample this variety in the pursuit of conveniences and order. He warned that history may repeat itself in the web services world.

    Bruce Sterling elevated the limitations of language as a construct. Labels such as "web 2.0" are powerful in their organizing framework but also dangerous because they limit the imagination. How can we classify current web development as Web 2.0 when we’re still in the middle of developing it? Don’t wallpaper the wall when it’s still under construction. He had an intersesting point in that the universal rollout of barcodes as an information tracking device for objects in the physical world took over 30 years so it is premature to think we’ll get to a world where this is the case for the virtual world any time soon.

    The nirvana of an architecture of participation is still a long way off. All the mashups (he calls them "lashups") that are available today are not really "open" in the sense that my mother is not participating in this mashup culture in any meaningful way. The open web is disintermediated by the developer elite, the high priest hacker class.

    Bruce riffed on something he calls, "spime," objects that are trackable in space & time, manufactured objects that are so rich in metadata that they are virtual objects first, physical objects second. He then went meta and called the concept of "spime" as a "theory object" which, when you search on it, is a rough collection of associated ideas that he has thrown together and get added to each time he speaks or writes about it and others (like this post) expand upon it. 

    (more…)

  • eTech, Day One Tutorials

    Today I went to the tutorial sessions here at eTech in San Diego. I attended:

    Highlights following: 

     

    (more…)

  • SD Forum Search SIG – Demos

    Product demos for edgio.com, oodle.com, and googlebase

    (more…)