 Sure don't know what I'm going for, but I'm gonna go for it for sure |
Posted a thought via mobile that popped into my head driving to work this morning, part of an ongoing imaginary argument:
This blog, this domain, and all of my other Mediajunkie domains are going offline for about a week. We are retooling our server, migrating from RHL to Ubuntu, and generally tightening up security.
If I have a burning need to blog while this site is down, I’ll do it over at Vox.
See you in about a week or so.
Or should I perhaps have found an anecdote with a bazaar in it for my title? I’ve been enjoying watching a lot of my fellow Y!OS cow-orkers “decloak” if you will and proudly announce to family and friends that yes, this Yahoo! Open strategy is what we’ve all been working on:
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:
A leaderboard, viral, breaks email (one-way only), reputation game pattern from the Circle of Trust app on Facebook.
When I saw someone was using twitter to send out quotations from Buckminister Fuller I was all over that. Getting this email message was just kind of an unexpected side treat.
Now, if Bucky Fuller really was following me on twitter I might feel a little more pressure to be brilliant and cosmic. Like a dweeby Merlin Mann.
Next Tuesday (April 8, 2008) I’ll be speaking at BayCHI on the topic of social patterns in a talk called Social Design and the Yahoo! Pattern Library:
Social networking sites are proliferating. New social media aggregrators appear every day. Venerable old sites are adding social features or trying to activate the social profiles of their users and members. A number of the interaction patterns that drive social relationships online are becoming clear (as well as a number of nasty “antipatterns”). Christian will talk about social patterns, previewing some that are in the works for the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library as well as others that he has noted “in the wild.” The newly redesigned Yahoo! Developer Network site is the host of Yahoo’s open design pattern library. Over the next few months, Yahoo! will be rolling out a series of open and social APIs and the pattern library will be gathering and sharing best practices for social web design.
I’m still trying to figure out what I can share and what I can’t, so I may focus on social design patterns observed “in the wild,” as well as my current favorite topics of presence, identity, and attention.
BayCHI talks typically have two speakers back to back, and I’m really looking forward to hearing Amy Jo Kim from Shufflebrain, who is speaking before me on the topic “Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software”:
Over the past few years, we’ve seen an explosion of interactive services that harness the collective efforts of users. On the web, services like MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr, and Digg are providing hours of entertainment to millions of people. These game-like services are changing the face of networked entertainment, and rapidly displacing television as a leisure-time activity. They share three key elements: user-generated content, community infrastructure, and game mechanics. In this talk, I’ll review the psychology and system thinking behind game design, and explore how to use game mechanics to create interactive experiences that are fun, compelling and addictive.
I don’t want this blog to turn into just a litany of upcoming speaking appearances, but then again it would be foolish not to post these announcements, right?
Hey, I wanted to notify everyone who blogs using the Mediajunkie service that our server is in need of some serious upgrading and maintenance to deal with security issues.
This isn't a trivial fix, and it will require taking all of our blogs offline for up to a week.
I apologize for this and wouldn't do it if it weren't necessary.
If you'd like to post a blog entry letting your readers know your blog is going offline for maintenance, please do so soon. Thanks!
-mgmt
Anil Dash blogged recently about adapting the embedding method used for rich media on personal / blog / social sites (most common use case: embedding a YouTube video on a MySpace page) to simple text quoting. He has added an embed code to each of his entries and I’m going to paste it in, inside a blockquote tag pair, at the end of this post.
His commenters talk about how re-blogging hasn’t really taken off. This was one solid feature of Radio Userland, although I didn’t like the way it would quote directly, with no offset, which led to people naively presenting quoted content as if it were their own.
This may be technical overkill or a brilliant way to take advantage of existing folkways and habits. For now, I’m just participating in the experiment:
Started off Saturday morning with Kick ‘08.
Namedropping: Talked to George Kelly, Erin Malone, Anil Dash, Jessamyn West (yay!), Simon Willison, Owen Thomas, Hugh Forrest, Micah Alpern (briefly, passing on the escalator), Janna Hicks DeVylder so far….
If you’re interested in interaction design patterns or in the elements of social web design, then come on down to Miami in April for the IA Summit and either sign up for one of the two pre-conference workshops I’m helping teach or see my presentation or panel in the main program.
Here are the basic facts about the two workshops (more details in the title links):
Design patterns: from interaction to design to build is a full-day workshop I’m teaching with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, colleagues of mine from the user experience design team of the Yahoo! Developer Network. Erin founded the pattern library and has captained it throughout its entire existence (going on four years) with the help of three curators, me being the third. Lucas is the lead designer on the YDN redesign project and works directly with the Yahoo! User Interface library team, so he’s intimately familiar with the development challenges and issues involved with implementing design patterns in the real world.
Design and architecture of social web experiences is a full-day workshop I’m teaching with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter. Christina is a director of product management at LinkedIn, a co-founder of the IA Institute, founder of Boxes and Arrows (the leading online user experience design magazine), and founder of Cucina Media, the makers of PublicSquare, the publishing/community software B+A now runs on. Joshua Porter is a former associate of Jared Spool’s UIE and writes the popular Bokardo blog on social web design.
And here are the basic details about the presentation and the panel:
Designing with Patterns in the Real World is a presentation I am giving with Austin Govella, a senior information architect at Comcast Media. We both have plenty of hands-on experience with the trials, tribulations, and occasional triumphs that stem from applying design patterns to real world interaction, information, and interface design problems and we plan to let it all hang out.
Presence, Identity, and Attention in Social Web Architecture is a panel I’m moderating featuring a “murderer’s row” of some of the leading thinkers in user experience and social web design: Christina Wodtke of LinkedIn, Andrew Hinton of Vanguard, Gene Smith of nForm, and Brian Oberkirch of Small Good Thing. I’ve been talking to all of these folks for some time about my latest hobbyhorse (presence) and the rest of the “human OS” stack that social web applications are built on. I plan to run a tight ship and am expecting a great multi-perspective dialogue to ensue.
I’ll devote a whole blog post to each of these items as the Summit gets closer, but wanted to mention it now while there’s still time to sign up for the conference at early-bird prices.
See you in Miami?
If you’re interested in social web design, how to model identity, presence, and reputation, and how to create and align incentives with the behaviors you wish to encourage in your online community, then join Ted Nadeau and me for a Core Conversation on the topic of “Online Identity: And I do give a damn about my bad reputation” at South by Southwest interactive this March, in Austin, Texas (of course).
UPDATE: Alex Lee in the comments asked me when my talk is scheduled for. It’s on Tuesday, and I think it’s in the morning but not sure about. Will update with exact info when I have it.
UPDATE II: It seems that we will be doing our core conversation in a late slot (5pm) on the last day (Tuesday, March 11) of the interactive portion of the conference. I say if the conversation is good, let’s continue it into the evening over food and libations. Maybe we’ll even launch a startup over beer and barbecue.
Now I know how the Sabine women felt.
I’m having second thoughts about Notchup. The other day I checked my mail in the morning, as is my wont, and found an invitation to Notchup from a friend who left Yahoo a while back to work with venture capitalists. I wondered if this was something he had had a hand in, but I didn’t ask. I went and signed up because it sounded interesting.
A few years ago I had some interviews at LinkedIn for a position that didn’t work out (didn’t work out for me, at least) and they asked me at the time for suggestions and ideas about additional businesses or products they could build on top of their existing platform. I was gung ho at the time about the idea of a reverse-auction style site for hiring. Just as Priceline reversed the polarity on hotel and plane bookings by having customers bid what they are willing to pay and having vendors match that, I figured that job searches could also work in reverse.
Instead of applying for a job, you could advertise the sort of work you are willing and qualified to take on and prospective employers could apply to you and try to make the case that you should “hire” them to be your new boss. The LinkedIn guys suggested that that’s what they were already doing but I thought there was still something missing from that model.
So Notchup seems to be somewhat in that same ballpark, which was why I thought I’d check it out.
Next, I saw that they had a way to import your personal info (effectively, your resume) from your LinkedIn account, if you have one. That sounded a lot better than entering all the data myself, again, so even though I had qualms about this violating LinkedIn’s terms of service, and even though it’s generally not a good idea to give your login credentials for one site to another site (even if “all it’s going to do” is scrape some data from the screeen), I went ahead and did that.
So then Notchup offered to enable me to invite my LinkedIn connections into their beta, saving those people the trouble of applying. I started that sequence and went through my list of contacts, which is long so this was tedious, unchecking the folks I figured are either definitely not looking for a job, or whom I don’t actually know that well, or whom I believed would have no interest in the latest social network thingamabob.
I assumed I would have the chance to write a personal note, something along the lines of
Hi! I’m checking out this new site called Notchup. I don’t know much about it and I don’t necessarily endorse it, but I thought you might be interest in checking it out too.
Unfortunately, before I was given an opportunity to write a note or even review the boilerplate they were going to sign my name to, I was notified that the invitations had been sent. This is not as bad as what Tagged.com and some other sites have done, tricking people into virally inviting their entire address books, but it still rubbed me the wrong way.
All that morning and the next day I got email notifications of friends joining Notchup, and a few personal notes from people asking me if this was for real - because we’ve all gotten spammy invitations in the past. When people asked I told them the gist of what I would have written in the invitation, but many people just joined, apparently trusting me. By now I wasn’t sure what the person who had invited me was thinking.
Then, the other day I saw a message from Russell Unger on the IA Institute members mailing list establishing that he had done more (that is, some) due diligence and actually read Notchup’s terms of service, and that he had uncovered some troubling clauses in the user agreement:
9. NotchUp reserves the right to offer third party services and products to You based on the preferences that You identify in your registration and at any time thereafter; such offers may be made by NotchUp or by third parties.
10. Without limiting any of the other disclaimers of warranty set forth in these Terms, NotchUp does not provide or make any representation as to the quality or nature of any of the third party products or services purchased through NotchUp.com or any other NotchUp Site, or any other representation, warranty or guaranty. Any such undertaking, representation, warranty or guaranty would be furnished solely by the provider of such third party products or services, under the terms agreed to by the provider.
As Russell pointed out, this sounds a lot like signing up for Notchup means agreeing to receive spam.
He also pointed out another pair of clauses:
18. You understand and acknowledge that you have no ownership rights in your NotchUp account (“NotchUp Account”), and that if you cancel your NotchUp Account, all your account information from NotchUp, including resumes, profiles, cover letters, network contacts, saved jobs, questionnaires and email mailing lists, will be marked as deleted in NotchUp’s databases and will be removed from any public area of the NotchUp Sites. Information may continue to be available for some period of time because of delays in propagating such deletion through NotchUp’s web servers. In addition, third parties may retain cached copies of your Information.
19. Your email and other data that you submit as part of the resume will be made available to our recruiters and employers. NotchUp.com doesn’t have any control over how that data would be used. If you don’t want any such data to be displayed your only remedy is not to post any resume.
So now I’m really concerned, particularly about seeming to vouch for a site and luring a bunch of best contacts into it. I’ll keep an eye on Notchup but so far I don’t like what I’m seeing, and to those I invited in before researching the subject further, I apologize.
Radio Free Blogistan was a group weblog published by Christian Crumlish (xian for short), and written by xian, filchyboy, Andrew Bayer, Liza Sabater, and Rayne.
The purpose of this "web blog" (that's a joke, son) was to discuss the realm of blogs, personal publishing, microcontent, nanopublishing, syndication, online community building, and related topics.
Since the heyday of blogging about blogging the authors of Radio Free Blogistan have neglected their duties here and in a palace coup the founder of the blog, xian, has turned it into an aggregator containing more or less the same content as xian's running monolog, wrapped up in the familiar crusty old RFB design. This way folks who were subscribing to or visiting the site can get all the boring, er, interesting new blog posts from xian without having to poke around to see where he's doing his occasional blogging nowadays. I, I mean he, will look for ways to incorporate RFB content as well, but the first cut may limit it to just xian content. All the old stuff will stay, and the sidebar will get mangled, no doubt.
