February 2007 Archives

Interesting interviews on JDN économie, a series of bosses who actually want to pay their taxes (text in French)

Thank you joanofarctan :-)

Yay! a bit of a scoopy news-flash, Netvibes just announced the launch of their universal widget API.

Tariq Krim just did the presentation which was (we are assured) embargoed until two minutes ago.

So there you go:-)

Oh, and if you're interested, here is the Flickr set

Well, I've got to do some work so am listening but not taking notes:-(

Look at this!

http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/overview.html

(This is a Textile rendition of my OmniOutliner file)

• Not a niche
• Web authentication sucks
  • Use same password
  • Which account did i use?
  • Email addresses better
    • But which one?
    • What about out of date addresses
  • Too many usernames
  • Too many passwords
  • Too many forms
• Single sign-on will save us
  • MSN Passport
    • But would you trust these men with your identity?
  • TypeKey
    • Ben and Mena - I trust them now, but what if they turn evil?
• OpenID
  • Decentralised single sign-on
  • Identity is a URI
    • Shows zoomr.com
      • types in url --> redirects to livejournal --> log in to live journal --> grant ID validation --> back to zoomr and login with one string!
    • But...
      • openID attributes (not tokens but still breakable?)
• Is this decentralised?
  • How do we own our own identity?
    • I run my own id server (shows link tag)
      • jyte.com
    • Who provides openID?
      • bunch of folk (6A, etc)
    • Other ways to authenticate
      • dyndns
      • jabber
      • rsa keyfobs
      • secure certificates
• One obvious reason to support openID
  • Build some OpenID shit now!
  • Hey, hundreds of early adopters need to create loads of accounts. Give them OpenID
• OpenID is an example, of dumb networks
  • the intelligence is on the edges
  • OpenID conforms to the same model
• What can we build?
  • Shared profile information
  • Use OpenID to extend the lifetime of cookies
  • blog / wiki antispam because it saves readers from creating yet another account
  • Pre-approved accounts
  • Corp SSO
    • OID server behind the firewall
  • OpenID and microformats
    • hCard
    • XFN
      • You can import a user's contact by introspecting their OpenID
  • OpenID site specific hacks
    • Login with 'X' id to grab the services you need
  • Social whitelisting
    • Share the whitelist with your friends
    • Publish the list of OIDs that you trust to comment
  • Jyte
    • Lightweight trust networks
      • Comment on 'id claims'
      • Jyte group export (sort of like social whitelist)
      • Manage an invite only group using Jyte then hook that into another site's authentication mechanism
  • Decentralised social network
• What sucks about OpenID
  • Phishing
    • Example of "more kittens" website with man in middle attack
      • redirect to evil kitten
    • Possible solutions
      • Card space
    • We can defeat phishing with competition
    • Problem can be solved at the edges
  • What happens in the OID server crashes?
    • One for the applications
      • Cascade through multiple OpenIDs with their account
  • Privacy
    • I don't want my boss to know that I'm a furry
      • Use multiple OpenIDs
        • Pro ID
        • Furry ID
        • Gaming etc ID
  • OpenID is hard to explain
    • Ready for early adopters
    • Need to develop this to be able to explain it
• (Mentions Tom Coates twice!)

Well, had to get Clemmie to school this morning so I missed the first talk:-(

I'm taking my notes in Omni Outliner today, rather that just typing away stream-of-consciousness style. Later I'll have a go at generating a mind map or two (mine never seem to be as wonderful as the ones you see on flickr, wish me luck...)

Here is the OO tree for the presentation by the New York Times:

Khoi Vinh: Managing UI

• What we do what we don't do
  • We do not design the news
    • Story visualisations
  • We do design the platform
    • Exremely high volume of publishing
    • Impossible to art direct every story
    • We do slideshows
      • "Explore the great wall"
    • We do templates
  • Exceptions
    • Special editions
    • Editor and techs work together
    • These exceptions are not compatible with template system
  • Make choices about where to put resources
    • News is templated
    • Tools are limited
      • Instant publishing
      • But not instant design
• The future
  • We hope new tech will let us design in real time
• Content and functionality - from delivery to conversation
  • Shift in consumption of news
    • Consume differently
    • Consume with a different mindset
  • From "talk to" to "talk with"
    • (From one 2 many --> many to many)
  • Content begets functionality
    • memeorandum.com
    • digg.com
    • NYT is building discrete apps
      • MyTimes
      • TimesFile
        • Saving and tagging re articles
      • Times Topic
      • Timesreader
    • Dispersing technology through site
      • No ghetto for multimedia
        • Inline audio
        • Inline video
      • Permalinking through pay wall (yes!)
• The design approach - a new paradygm
  • Evolution of the tension between editors and readers
    • Shows evolution of empowering designers
    • Contrasts evolution of empowering readers
    • Consumers love both high and lo quality
      • HDTV -- YouTube
      • Skype -- sms
      • Times reader --- memeorandum
      • Digital SLRs -- Cameraphones
    • The siren call of 2.0
      • Consumers just want what's useful
      • Don't want basic mission obscured
        • What are the basics? avoid featuristis
  • Management - getting it done
    • A definition of management: "the art of getting things done through people"
    • Not the same for designers
  • Establishing design principles
    • The cost of interface
      • Free isn't really free
        • Additional interface bits
        • Additional code
        • Additional testing
        • Long term support
        • Feature noise users need to tune out
    • The cost of expression
      • In traditional media authors bear the cost of expression
      • In digital media the cost of expression is shared with the user
    • Our applications are machines
    • Over determination
      • "All things are overdetermined. For any single thing of importance there are multiple reasons" - M Scott Peck
    • Options are obstructions
    • Offend experts not beginners
      • Shows bell curve - most users are intermediate
      • But most features are used by experts
    • Navigation within reason
      • You don't need to get everywhere from everywhere
    • Test like you mean it
      • Real users
      • Avoid executive testing
      • Test for usability not acceptance
    • Writing is interface design
      • twitter.com
        • "What are you doing?" the label is part of the interface
        • This has a big effect on content creation
    • Make a thing what it is (affordance! yes!)
      • Let tabs be tabs, let buttons be buttons, let links be links
    • Design, don't decorate
    • Context over consistency
      • Variety, not monotonous (change OK)
    • Use a grid
      • Shows a NYT grid (note advertising doesn't fit the grid)

This 'stream-of-listening' feed was provided for folk that couldn't make the event. In the end I'm not sure it's very useful, so today I'll just take notes and publish more structured thoughts after the event.

In terms of getting a better idea of what speakers actually said, I strongly recommend Lars Plougmann and his amazing mind maps which are both complete and accurate, and are of course released on a CC licence.

And that, folks, was day one of FOWA 2007

DIGG "crowd generated media"

Kevin Rose talks about the Digg ecosystem

• Why should the crowd care?
• Create incentives on every level
• Why should people submit content
• Why do people digg
• Content -> Diggs -> Quality --> WOM --> More traffic --> 3rd party site traffic --> Smart Digg buttons

Now we're talking about enhancing Digg (swarming the story, better fact checking, location-based opinions).

Benefits of Flash visualisation, could make tools to help people understand how their shifting opinions interact with others - visualisations of swarms.

Big announcement, support for openID
(applause)

Stéphane from Soocial

The future of contact management

(does demo mmmm...)

Two nice chaps talking about quotes

http://quotationsbook.com

Very interesting stuff, will need to pass on to a few folk who have been working with citation indexes.

The spotlight section, first up, BT's Stephen Stokols

Converged communication online

Stephen promises us that the wifi cloud might be available for tomorrow (audience cheers)

Four online trends driving shift

• Lines being blurred as online cos move into telecoms space
• P2P proliferation (need to embrace it)
• Advertising funds free models
• 1 to 1 voice no longer good enough - 1 to many is emerging

Telcos need to embrace shifting landscape turn threats into opportunities

(Gordon Bennet, no cliché left unturned)

Shows screengrabs of BT Contact. (kind of looks like what I'm currently working on...)

(free sms etc)

See btcontact.com

Bradley Horowitz Yahoo VP of ADD (Advanced Development Division)

"User rehab, a story of redemption"

Few creators, many consumers

Need to lower barrier to entry

Uses Flickr as an example of how to do this:

Talks about "interestingness" (photographs that have been interacted with more than other by analysis of log data)

Talks about tagging (mentions speed) the ease goes to the lowering of barriers to entry.

Mentions folksonomies

Mentions ZoneTag. Not having to remember the tag for an event (system merges cell data and other info from upcoming.com to come up with suggestion)

Clustering by sense

And now we're talking about pipes, as in Yahoo Pipes, very cool:-)

Pipes is sampling, not synthesizing

We're now asking questions...

Werner Vogels, CTO amazon.com

Here to talk about Amazon EC2 and S3

Web scale computing (compete on ideas not resources)

Alternative resource model:

• Increasing uncertainty
• Move from push to pull (socially, industrially, culturally)
• Move to mashing up on the fly
• Co-creative effect of customers (power of the consumer)
• Greater focus on learning and improvisation

(this guy has so totally read CK Pralahad)

Claim and release resources dynamically

(points out that the pull model doesn't let VCs take such a big chunk of you)

Talks about "Getting Real" by Jason Friedman. Chapter 4, scalling is too hard to plan for at the start.

Don't worry about tornados and SLAs

Only pay for what you use

Examples:

• smugmug.com
• Second Life
• youos.com
• Render Rocket

Mentions the mechanical turk as part of the AWS product family

Check it out at http://aws.amazon.com

Google Jason Chuck

Open apis

KLM in maps (channel 4 ticket price)

Sketchup (promoting user generated)

Talks about tomorrow's discussion of the new apps, spreadsheet etc (and their guy will discuss best practise)

Thinkfree (SOA)

• browser neutral
• speaks MS Office

Free mashup mashup api :-) Let your blog visitors view office documents without using MS Office software

Cool:-)

http://viewer.thinkfree.com/html?url=http:domain/file.xls&action=view&pageurl=uri

OK, gotta try this

Lessons from Last.fm Matt and Anil

Connect people to the music they love

Audio-scrobbling (listen -> share -> discover)

• 15M tracks scrobbled
• 175 scrobbles per second
• 10M artists
• 70M tracks
• 700k tracks streamable on last.fm
• 17M items taged
• 145K artist wikis

Matt is talking about the collaborative requirements of developping a sharing application. Keeping it as open as possible, reward participation as much as possible, be realistic with finances, building engagement from your community, be transparent (downtime charts published)

...people sending us money after each server failure to encourage us to upgrade the server...

establishing an open protocol from the start got scrobbling off the ground. Before long, loads of music players supported the protocol.

Anil takes the mike to talk about growth

What happens to the team?

• The changes when you get to 30-40 people
• People trump processes
• Use simple tools and adapt them

Shows irc transcript from their developer channel (osmotic communication)

What happens to the product?

• Plan for going global
• "everyone's going to want a piece of you"
• Embed your service in others
• Make transition from service to platform (think about your service as a platform)

Liking what you've got to say Anil:-)

Matt comes back

Attention data
Scrobbling data is attention data Powered by AudioScrobbler, Myware is 'spying on yourself'

He shows us the 'events dashboard' (gigs near me)

Anil comes back to talk about monetising attention data

Monetising attention

• Sponsored airtime
• Personalise based on attention data
• New attention metrics
• No more cpm - the scrobble is the unit

Dealing with tag cloud spam

• Censorship is not acceptable in a folksonomy
• Attention data does not lie
• Weigh user tags by volume of attention
• Attention earns trust

Matt comes back to talk about what Last would like to do in the comming years.

• Fewer interfaces
• More ambient findability
• Reduce barriers to entry (hard to start when prefs are not established)

Questions session

The VC bit (Danny Rimer couldn't make it)

mmm...

Simon Wardley

From hot stuff to yawn, the commoditisation of IT

(note that Simon says IT not IS...)

Goes through example of electricity

(Simon is a great speaker, he's doing crowd-pleasing things with graphics - big tag clouds with ducks and ponds)

Talks about yack shaving to introduce the idea behind his startup. Build what you want and pay for what you use (zimki)

Tara 'miss rogue' Hunt

What community is or isn't...

(mentions her blog)

What is community?

• co-creation leading to relationships
• sharing profiles
• User benefits, self policing, increased loyalty

(the 'free' wifi turns out to be a solitary OpenZone base station which is currently struggling to keep up...)

Examples

• Lightweight social processes (voting, digging)
• collaborative information structures (YouTube, Odeo, Threadless, Flickr)
• High end collaboration - Wikipedia, open source projects (Lostpedia)

Themes

• Sense of fun
• Keeping the dialogue going
• Simple platforms
• Compelling stories
• Rewarding community members

(what is it about Wordpress that people are happy to wait for messages like "woa, only x comments a minute, slow down cowboy")

Compares yahoo maps to Google maps:

Yahoo experience totally rocks, Google maps v. empty and boring but: developers currently working with mapping apis 51% Google to only 4% Yahoo!
(stats from programmableweb)

Fostering your own - fertile ground

What is sense of community?

• Feelings of membership (inside the boundaries, do I belong here?)
• Feelings of influence (voice heard, learning from the group, feedback)
• Integration and fulfilment of needs (shared values, the feeling of being supported by others)
• Maslow

Be patient! community takes time

Edwin Aoki

Web-based email leading driver of page views

Dissagregation and syndication

(Dug is beginning to daydream about bacon sarnies and a steamy latte...)

Edwin says "drag and drop" arrrrg!!!

Interesting slide about the developer's responsibility to society.

• Tools must be safe, effective and neutral (v. relevant to the work I'm doing now).
• With great power comes great responsibility. For instance, it's our responsability to ensure that the default behaviour of the systems we build is the right behaviour, the safe behaviour

(and break...)

Mike Arrington

On YouTube: 1 Million dollars a month but it didn't burn because it provides an IPTV service (as opposed to user-generated content).

AMIE St. first self-regulated music market.

Buzz Factor - Solve a problem.

Mike is talking about what makes a successful startup (and what to look for in a failing one. One point is: don't raise too much money).

Offline/Online = Apollo. If you don't use it, you're wasting money. Apollo looks to bridge the overhead of bridging the file system and the cloud.

And we've stopped for questions...

Meet BT Contact :-)

Off to FOWA will let you know how it goes.

Billy claims that Issy-Les-Moulineaux is the star of a famous example in pragmatics.

Of course, in classic Billy form he hasn't actually told me what the example was. Is this a test of my Googling skills?

At last! A proper French meal. Meet the "Café des Sports" in scenic Issy-Les-Moulineaux:

1. in your face 'patronne'--check.
2. long, ancient and very battered 'zinc'--check.
3. loud clattering sound (tile floor and cheap cutlery in use)--check.
4. paper tablecloths--check.
5. ample supplies of bread and mustard--check.
6. tongue and tripe on the table--check.
7. everyone smoking--check.
8. shot in my bird--check.
9. several bottles of Gamay at lunch--check.

Very nice indeed, and to boot we had a nice geeky conversation about the relative merits of different widget engines:-)

Her name will forever live on in the halls of justice for her victory in the landmark Supreme Court case Marshall v. Marshall, which struck a blow for the rights of millions of young widows of elderly billionaire husbands.

From Jon Swift: Anna Nicole Smith: America's Princess Di

(Thanks James)

Oh bugger, the fabulous Mom and Pop southwestern restaurant (renowned for snails, duck dishes and cassoulet) which by all acounts was always bustling and well worth the détour changed hands two years ago. Serve me right for not checking the dates on the website:-(

One look at the table setting should have warned me that the owners have only kept the name Les Gourmands out of irony...

OK. I for some reason that escapes me haven't managed to eat a decent meal in Paris recently (and that must take some doing) so I've got a plan. I've asked around and apparently this place is great.

So Les Gourmands let's try your cassoulet:-)

(and as usual, if it's on my plate, it's on Flickr)

I 've recently switched from my shiny new Nokia N73 back to my ropey old Nokia N70.

The N70 was my second Symbian handset and to date, it is by far the best in software terms (the keypad layout on the 6600 was waaaaay better). Over the last two years or so it's experienced loads of heavy lifting use as most of the mobloggin on Donkey was done on it. It runs stacks of software I use everyday and with a bit of configuration it can really compete with the latest smartphones.

Sometimes it feels like Nokia makes a point of taking a step backward for every cool new feature they come up with.

Like everyone else I was really psyched by the N73 and bought one as soon as it became available (I even ended up getting a Vodafone contract to get my hands on one). Anyway, I ended up returning the handset. Twice. The firmware just isn't up to controlling the phone properly and even with the latest update from Nokia, the phone still remains borderline unusable.

The only thing wrong with the N70 was the lens cover. It just opened too easily exposing the lens to fluff. In the process of improving the handset, here are a few of Nokia's bigger steps forward and back.

• The N73 has a Zeiss lens:-)
  Yippee, except the imaging software is crap. The white point default is way to close to 6500K verything comes out with a depressing blueish hue (this on all three handsets and two versions of the firmware). Unless you only shoot in tungsten lighting. The N70's lens is rubbish but the imaging software is great (or appropriately configured out of the box) so quality pix a plenty.
• N73 has a 3 megapixel chip :-)
  But in such a small form factor, the end result is more garbage in the blue channel. Add to that, the increased file size and costlier uploads, and the 3meg chip becomes a complete waste of processor cycles (and bandwidth).

Still, I mustn't grumble, the N73 has a much better lens cover. Yes indeed it does:-)

So anyway, here are the configs I mentioned earlier:

• Go into "tools" and find the "media key" app. Set the key association to "contacts"
• In settings, change the right-hand soft key to your Gmail application

With the Orange home screen app, from picking up my handset to reading my address book I have three actions: scroll, click, click. With the media key configed, that reduces to just a single click (on the talknow/symbian media key key).

The Gmail soft key thing has two benefits. Firstly, with one click to Gmail who needs a Blackberry? Another benefit is you longer launch that anoying web-browser a hundred times a day when all you were trying to do was cancel an action...

Anyways, I think I'll go away and do a usability comparison of the 6600, N70 and N73 keypads now, more later...

So Iain Tait's getting all memetastic on our ass :-)

Well, to answer your question Iain, I seem to be posting from mostly a kind of Diane Arbusy/David Lynchy sort of shitty hotel room situation. Does that influence my blogging? Good question, I guess it might, but mostly because of time restrictions. Information architecture is a job performed 50% of the time in a jacket and cufflinks and the other 50% in one's pants.

In my case, the blogging is mostly in the pants category;-)

I do hate agreeing with what Steve Jobs has to say but I do...

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music.

I wonder if he writes his own stuff or has retired White House staffers to handle his language? I love this passage from the same rant:

Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the "big four" music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world's music.

Without saying it explicitly, he is suggesting that the 'big four' are a bit like an organised crime syndicate. Just change a word or two:

These four families control the distribution of over 70% of the world's [gambling | prostitution | waste handling | internet poker | music distribution].

Fantastic:-)

And seeing as I've come this far, I'll repeat an earlier post because it never ceases to amaze me that the music distribution industry thinks that unlike any other, it doesn't have to change in response to cultural or technological or simply free market evolution.

In 1895, the steam engine manufacturing industry could put any price it liked on its goods. The players in the industry all lived in Hollywood mansions and drove Ferraris (you know what I mean).

By 1985 they had seriously reduced in number and those that remained had lost a lot of weight and focused manufacturing efforts on very specific markets. They specialised in recycled steam technology for engines built in China. The owners of the few remaining companies were still doing well, but no longer lived the movie star lifestyle. In essence they had become more 'normal', more 'average'.

Back in 1895 there was no online content distribution, and music copying was expensive, involving scribes and printing presses. The Victor Talking Machine Company was founded by Eldridge Johnson in 1901 and thereafter, the Victrola would gradually spread disks of recorded music around the world. Those leading the industry did well, and over most of the Twentieth century developed a lifestyle that culminated with TV sets being thrown out of hotel windows, bathtubs full of cocaine and the odd Bentley parked in a swimming pool.

Well, it's 2007 and the reality is that the technology is now in the hands of the people. Copying is cheap and easy and the citizens want a new deal from the industry. We want to pay for our music, but we want most of the money to go to the artists. We want fair use and we want a fair price.

It's time for the business end of the industry to give up the coke and move to China, just like everybody else. OK?

I just noticed Billy's at post number 1111 on our Movabletype installation.

That's a lot of posts, Billy:-)

The helping-corporates-move-towards-standards thing started for me when I did a longish contract at an insurance company and helped them embrace semantic markup and the separation of style and structure. Anyways, I've been consulting with these large corporates for a while now, and I'm pretty sure I can safely say:

Drag-and-drop is to web2 what the blink tag was to web1

Which really doesn't scan that well or seem that insightful really... How about:

Drag-and-drop is the new <BLINK>

Well, Russell's just been hit by his first evil little troll.

I suggested he post the links to the swine so we'll see what happens.

I was reminded on my own Troll, a nasty man (who, well, yes, nonetheless made some very good points but just not in a full-size-human kind of way...) called Andrew MacLaren who left a comment which had me floored for a week or two.

I posted the full text at the time but I'm not sure if that helped. Here's a taster:

...by some unfortunate deep linking i somehow landed at your 'website', having spent a few miserable minutes reading your mostly uninspiring and often self-rightous (pap) posts, it would appear to me that in many ways you come across as a borderline wanker, and although that may seem harsh i've just had another look and to put at nicely its a bag of shite! and from what i can gather this is what you actually do!??

Anyway, not going anywhere in particular with this, just felt like pinging some support to Russell.