August 1, 2008

Great way to showcase a redesign

I love this animation Delicious designer Bernard Kerr made to introduce the user interface improvements incorporated in the design of Delicious 2.0:

July 15, 2008

Apps I've downloaded onto my iPhone so far

twitterific.pngTwitterific would like to use your current location!

Shazam didn’t recognize John Cage last night.

Facebook is slick.

OmniFocus is my new Obama.

Google app is weak (brings up a tiny serp?) but at least it exists.

Pandora would be perfect if faster and also not crashy.

You had me at NYTimes.

Loopt does what now?

July 7, 2008

...and we're back

Holy Christ that was a giant pain in the ass.

On the bright side I may have gotten a whole chapter for my book on presence, all about what it’s like to have a longstanding web presence offline for six weeks or more. As far as the Internet is concerned you might as well be dead.

Maybe I’ll get some more blogging in now that I am alive again.

Did you hear me?

I… AM… ALIVE !!!!1!

May 6, 2008

Playing around with Utterz

Posted a thought via mobile that popped into my head driving to work this morning, part of an ongoing imaginary argument:



Mobile post sent by xian using Utterz Replies.  mp3

May 1, 2008

System going down in 10 minutes. Please finish up....

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.

April 24, 2008

I'm helping Sir Christopher Wren build this here cathedral

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:

April 23, 2008

Ignite was fun


My Ignite talk, Grasping Social Patterns
Originally uploaded by duncandavidson.
Here are my slides.



Audio when it’s available (video too).

UPDATE: and here’s some YouTube video shot from the audience (the very beginning of my talk is cut off):


April 22, 2008

Three talks for the price of, well, none

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

April 17, 2008

Social design patterns slides from BayCHI last week

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.

April 7, 2008

Talk back to presenters with Ted Nadeau's patented* Reaction Deck 1.0

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:

April 5, 2008

These are your most powerful and trusted friends


These are your most powerful and trusted friends
Originally uploaded by xian.

A leaderboard, viral, breaks email (one-way only), reputation game pattern from the Circle of Trust app on Facebook.

April 4, 2008

Great, now I have to keep up with Bucky


This made my day
Originally uploaded by xian.

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.

April 3, 2008

Social design patterns talk at BayCHI next week

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?

Mediajunkie blogs to go offline for about a week

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

March 17, 2008

Testing Anil Dash's text-embed idea

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:

March 8, 2008

If I have to appear in Valleywag this is the way to go

team' return of the cobra kai' poses for its photo opp at Kick '08 at SxSW

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….

February 21, 2008

Talking patterns and social design at the IA Summit

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):

And here are the basic details about the presentation and the panel:

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?

What is
Radio Free Blogistan?

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.

Recent Entries
Great way to showcase a redesign
Apps I've downloaded onto my iPhone so far
...and we're back
Playing around with Utterz
System going down in 10 minutes. Please finish up....
I'm helping Sir Christopher Wren build this here cathedral
Ignite was fun
Three talks for the price of, well, none
Social design patterns slides from BayCHI last week
Talk back to presenters with Ted Nadeau's patented* Reaction Deck 1.0
These are your most powerful and trusted friends
Great, now I have to keep up with Bucky
Social design patterns talk at BayCHI next week
Mediajunkie blogs to go offline for about a week
Testing Anil Dash's text-embed idea
If I have to appear in Valleywag this is the way to go
Talking patterns and social design at the IA Summit
I'm speaking on presence and reputation with Ted Nadeau at SxSW
insert Microsoft overlords joke here
Notchup invites a cock-up?
Etymology of monk dimin'?
Help me write my book about presence
Question about OpenID data policies
The twelve-month review
Calendar made of people
I am not Spock
Community site responds to homicide epidemic in Oakland
Voice over iPod?
Nevelson revisited
As promised, my pattern library talk
Finding my bliss
A message to you, Rudy
Discovering Louise Nevelson
Things to done
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The day the blogging died
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On this day in 2006
Paper-prototyping graphic resources: Nice kit for putting together paper prototypes: Paper Prototyping Graphics (Design Usability Resources) from Information & Design, for the arts and crafts crowd.... (user experience)
Designing data tables: LukeW (from Yahoo) explores some ideas for Refining Data Tables at UXMatters. (Nice illustrations, too!)... (Design)
DHTML drag 'n' drop folder tree: Check out this Folder tree with Drag and Drop capabilities based on unordered list tags.... (Coding)
The web is inherently social: Karl Martino says “paradox1x: Social software can’t be a fad since the WEB is social software”: The fact is the most successful web services - since the beginnings of the web - were social software applications. The Web’s participatory architecture lends itself to them. It’s always been a Two Way... (the power of many)
On this day in 2005
Katrina PeopleFinder project: Over the long weekend I witnessed a flurry of email messages from the network of activist techies and techie activists I'm connected to since the Dean campaign and the work on this book. Some of this coalesced into the PeopleFinder project to help cross-correlate all the missing persons and I'm... (the power of many)
On this day in 2002
Best Song Title of the Moment: My Human Gets Me Blues ...if it's this nice in newyork tomorrow then the beach is going to be great. my sibs and i are (all four of us) are going to jones beach. we may even rent one of those orange and red umbrellas you drive in to the... (bodega)
Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: Staying at a friend's place near west 11th and west 4th. The weather is here. Wish you were beautiful.... (bodega)
I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords
Steenkin' Batches
blogchalk: xian/Male/36-40. Lives in United States/Oakland/San Antonio and speaks English. Spends 60% of daytime online. Uses a Fast (128k-512k) connection.
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