Beyond the Fat Wire

NISO Digital Preservation Forum: Planning Today for Tomorrow's Resources

2008-03-25T07:24:00.004-05:00

[Note: slides have moved here]

A couple of weeks ago I attended the NISO Digital Preservation Forum in Washington, DC -- an excellent event. There were about 100 attendees, with all sessions in one room and seating at round tables -- perfect for meeting and talking to people, for taking notes or getting out a laptop, and generally more comfortable than rows of chairs.

Presentations are now available for download on the forum agenda page. All were interesting and informative, but particularly so were Evan Owens' "Long-Term Preservation and Standards: An Uneasy Alliance", Lucille Nowell's "The Data Preservation Imperative: A Global Challenge", Katherine Skinner's "The MetaArchive Cooperative: A Collaborative Approach to Distributed Digital Preservation", and Deborah Thomas and David Brunton's "Mitigating Preservation Threats: Standards and Practices in the National Digital Newspaper Program".

Deborah was sitting at the same table I was, and in chatting, she talked about their pilot project putting Library of Congress images on flickr. She said they've had a hugely successful response, judged by hits, favoriting, and commenting. She also said they've gotten valuable information from flickr users, correcting or adding information about the images they'd posted.

All in all, this was a terrific event. Can't say I'd recommend the hotel though.

Posts temporarily unpublished

2006-06-21T20:25:00.000-05:00

I'll republish elsewhere later...

Usability of Usability events

2006-06-19T15:19:00.000-05:00

Last time I was at one of Jakob's events, I complained about usability issues related to the event itself.

This time, the event itself is ok, but the venue is another story.

Of all the hotels in San Francisco, they chose one:

with no casual dining options. In fact, since I brought jeans, knit shirts, and black sneakers, I might not even pass the hotel restaurant's dress code.
without a coffee shop/kiosk/whatever
with a single set of restrooms (which can each accommodate about 5 people at a time for the respective genders -- and that includes those waiting in line) to serve two meeting rooms each with a capacity of a couple hundred)
which is located at the top of a hill, the final grade of which has got to be 45 degrees (and, if there were attendees with mobility problems, how were they supposed to go get lunch within one hour?)

SF again

2006-06-18T21:45:00.000-05:00

I had an easy trip and a good flight, even though the flight was full. Actually, there were some empty seats in the back, so a flight attendant offered a change of seat to the guy in the middle in my row, and he took it. So, my luck with flights is holding and I had one of the very few empty seats next to me.

This event is at the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins -- very fancy, but not my style. Free wireless thanks to this event, but a crappy signal and it's slow. I'm not sure there'll be wireless in the meeting room tomorrow, although maybe... there is supposed to be wireless in the lobby, and the room is close to the lobby, so we'll see tomorrow.

There's a six-page attendee list. Most are at companies we know well (as well as those we've never heard of), but there are some public sector people as well (County of Los Angeles ISD) plus some people at universities, and even a couple of others from libraries.

An ironic moment at the event check-in. They check in people to an online system, and the person who was doing the check-in was complaining about that system. It's apparently got serious usability problems. Hahah.

This hotel is at the top of Nob Hill, at the corner of Mason and California Streets. Steep hill down Mason, and on California towards Powell (where the cable car stop is). Being at the top of a hill, it's very windy. I can hear the wind whistling around the hotel.

Thursday's workshop

2005-10-27T21:14:00.000-05:00

Toolbox of Specialized Usability Techniques
Chauncey E. Wilson
WilDesign Consulting

Thursday, October 27, 2005
User Experience 2005
Boston

He'll set up a bog and/or wiki on this topic. Will send us details by email later.
12 people in this workshop. (Monday's had about 25-30)
Interesting that many people are involved with establishing formal usability programs and usability labs

UTest usability mailing list

email him for: UTest subscription info; tips for setting up a usability lab

at least 3 Canadians in this room

apparently, Jakob asked him to do this workshop

This guy (Chauncey Wilson) is a psych/HCI guy, but more on the Steve Krug end of the spectrum regarding how to view usability. The other person sitting at my table was also in the same Monday workshop as me (Advanced User Testing) and she doesn't have a high opinion of that workshop either.

There is going to be a "World Usability Day" on November 3rd. See the UPA web site for details. They've reserved (? I'll check later when I have an internet connection) the Boston Museum of Science.

I've been curious about Verizon's broadband wireless service ... basically, you get a voice plan and then for like $60/month you get unlimited broadband wifi anywhere within Verizon's broadband service areas, which are pretty much the major metropolitan areas in the US. For example, if I had Verizon broadband, I'd be online right now, even though the hotel doesn't have wireless in the meeting rooms. Assuming, of course, that the Verizon broadband is good service.

Fishbone Diagrams

to review factors that might have an effect on or contribute to a problem, process, or goal
the diagram has a main line (spine) that is the effect you want to examine
"main bones" are cause categories that act on the effect
each main bone is a major potential cause
there is also a root cause that would explain a problem, symptom or effect
Major cause categories
- The 4 Ms: methods, machines, materials, manpower
- The 4 Ps: place, procedure, people, policies
- The 4 Ss: surroundings, suppliers, systems, skills
Common categories for usability
- readability (effect)
  - font size (cause)
  - contrast (cause)
  - language/internationalization (cause)
  - line length (cause)
- navigation
- performance
- accessibility
- organization
- perception/credibility/trust

Question from the audience regarding sorting out cause and effect that is valid, versus apparent but not real cause and effect, and/or cause and effect with intervening variables

Even if you have effects where you have no control over the cause(s), it's useful to understand the effect and its causes

Affinity diagram vs. card sort -- an affinity diagram is a group, social activity, where the group comes to consensus about the grouping/categorization/affinity of a set of concepts (e.g., by moving sticky notes around on a wall). a card sort does the same thing, but it is an individual activity. A group card sort is not recommended -- if you want a group activity, organize it as an affinity diagram activity instead

5-Why Analysis for getting from the proximate cause to the root cause (aka "the deep nagging approach")

technique for moving from symptoms to root causes
move from major categories on a fishbone diagram to root causes

Rapid Analyses for Fishbone Diagrams

vote on the most likely cause
rank main causes on importance, fixability, etc
rank the sub-causes within each main cause
do before and after fishbone diagrams

Tools

SmartDraw
RFFlow http://www.rff.com/
RCA-XPress http://www.rcaxpress.com/

Q-Sorting/Repeated Sorts

(see tutorial booklet)

Tool: WebQ

Cardsorting - Tom Tulles at Fidelity says 25 people. Others say around 40. This speaker says 20-100

Forcing choices (that is, through a Q-Sort, or saying "Spend $1000 in this store" gets more differentiation than if you have people rate on a 1-5 scale such as in a survey.

See WebSort for online versions of cardsorting/Qsorting

P Sorting

Closed vs. Open card sorting

Q sorting (along a dimension)

Repeated sorting

Q-Sort, Repeated Sort:

individual card sort
the person sorts based on self-chosen criteria
after, facilitator asks what that criteria was, etc, records responses, etc
facilitator shuffles the cards/papers
repeat

Another tool: EZSort and EZCalc (from IBM)

you want to see what cards appear with which other cards ... that is where you will find your correlations

Freelisting (a variation on brainwriting, which is a variation on brainstorming) -- to see what comes to people's minds first, for a given topic. this is an individual activity

Brainwriting -- write thoughts on sticky notes, or they write stuff and you collect the papers.

Brainstorming is a social event, and all ideas are supposed to be criticism free. with brainwriting, it's similar, but you write instead of speak out loud. People can write individually, and then the paper gets passed along and others add to it.

"Brainstorming is fraught with peril"

Brainwriting generates a larger quantity of ideas (and, the measurement of brainstorming success is quantity)

Braindrawing is similar, but with drawing instead of writing words

"The Icon Book" - about 10 years old, but has good ideas about iconic images

2-5 minute breaks every 15 minutes makes brainstorming more productive

if you give the brainstorming group a goal of X number of ideas (which will be 10-20% more ideas than you think they can generate) the brainstorming session will be more productive

KLM (Keystroke Level Model)

Like, having read the book by Card, Moran and Newell (1980) is the sign that you're a serious HCI person

GOMS - goals, operators, methods (combinations of operators), selection tools

KLM allows quick estimates of task time with a minimum of theoretical or conceptual background

Fitz Law (Tognazzini) -- you have a screen, a pointer, and a target. Fitz Law says, the bigger the target, the faster you get to it. Tognazzini talks about how big the target has to be to most effiiciently get the user to it.

Interfaces and complexity

2005-10-25T21:42:00.000-05:00

Apart from what I or we might think about Microsoft, MS Office, Jakob, or this conference, this evening's plenary was valuable I think.

There are ways in which our web site is similar to MS Office.

Lots of complexity and functionality
It's hard to find functions in that complexity
People have to be trained how to find and use those functions
People use our site because it's what they have to work with and/or someone tells them they have to use it
(now, if only we had Microsoft's billions of $$ heheh)

Because of that, it seems to me that the design goals and redesign principles he listed are applicable to us.

I go to these events -- Gilbane a year ago, ETech last spring -- and each time, I'm thinking: if only we could really get down to the real thing the library does -- provide access to information -- and recognize that anything else we do is mere "commentary" on that ... THEN we could design the site we need to have, create a brand image that will work, communicate to the university clearly about our value.

Tuesday evening - a preview of the new Office interface

2005-10-25T20:02:00.000-05:00

As a preliminary, let me say that I witnessed a Jakob fan-boy moment. Walking toward the room where the event was to be held, Jakob was walking some paces ahead of me. A guy (who was your typical 30-ish traditional corp tech type (apparently)) passed in the other direction. "Jakob Nielsen", he exclaimed, "I'm a big fan of your work!"

Yikes

This was a talk by a guy from Microsoft who talked about the interface design for the upcoming version of some components of Microsoft Office (particularly Word, PowerPoint, and Excel)

Although both Jakob and the Microsoft guy were billed, in reality, Jakob did a 15 minute introduction and then the Microsoft guy spoke for about 40 minutes. 20 minutes of Q&A followed (thus, it ended at 6:30, not at 6:45)

The idea behind the evening was for the evolution of interfaces, away from "command oriented" actions and toward "results oriented" actions.

Jakob's introduction went through a brief history of the user interface:

batch commands
line mode commands
fullscreen text-only terminals
GUIs

All of which, he pointed out, are command based interactions.

Back in 1992, he said he had predicted that by 1996 interfaces would have evolved into a non-command form. Now he's saying maybe that will happen by 2010.

The idea of a non-command interface is what he calls "agent oriented" task performance, where the interface does what the user intends rather than what the user commands. I presume that the system gets trained by the user to know what that intent is. The idea is that complex commands get performed to the user's specification without the user having to detail those specifications each time. (at least, that's my interpretation. Jakob didn't actually say that. However, I can't imagine he means that software intuitively or telepathicly interacts with the computer user)

So, on that note, he turned the room over to the Microsoft guy, Tim Briggs.

More history, as he reviewed the Word interfaces from version 1 to the present (Office 2003, which is 2 years old already. I hadn't realized it'd been that long).

The point of the review was to illustrate the complexity of the interfaces ... Word has grown to have 300 commands and 31 toolbars. People can't find the commands they want. They asked for functionality that already existed (but they couldn't find it, or didn't recognize its function if they saw it). The UI is hard to browse. Core functions took too long for users to accomplish.

Design goals:

Keep frequent and familiar tasks efficient
Help people discover best practices (that is, help them find the fastest way to do things)
Make browsing for familiar goals (tasks, commands) easier
Let people focus on the output (their end document), not on the UI

Redesign principles:

Streamline the core functionality
Consolidate the UI areas
Apply 3-stage formatting, which means:

gather bundles of features together into, sort of, palettes to apply to a given portion of a document
demonstrate what's possible (that is, show previews of what something will look like if they apply a feature/palette)
dialog access for tweaking (that is, give people access to power tools if they want them)

He walked through some of the interface. The Menu bar at the top of the apps is now a "ribbon" with tabs. So, instead of clicking and looking at dropdowns with flyouts from the dropdowns, you get a big "toolbar" (though it's not called that now) with buttons/widgets. These "ribbons" have "function chunks" (meaning only that all the, for example, text formatting widgets are grouped together).

These "commands" are not organized around a scenario or object. There is supposed to be better labeling and feedback to the user. Basically, this means there are now "super tooltips" ... not only does mousing-over display a label, but it's a super-label that include what the widget is for and what it might be used to do.

Tools will be contextually relevant. This means that, for example, if you insert an image into a Word document, if you select that image, you'll THEN see image editing/formatting tools. Then, when the image is no longer selected, those image tools will disappear.

Finally, he went through what he called "Effect of a new experience". That is, that from their pre-beta testing of the new Office interface, that they expect people will experience a drop in productivity at first. Productivity (and user's perception of his/her own productivity) will stay low while the user keeps using the new UI for the old tasks he/she is accustomed to doing. The user's perceived productivity (though, at this point, he started getting fuzzy about whether he was talking about real or perceived productivity) will start to increase as the user starts discovering how to accomplish new tasks with the app.

Actually, this last part sounded suspiciously like a pitch to partners that MS wants to have buy in to the new version of Office.

Not too much of note in the Q&A. One person asked about Mac users of Office, and the answer was, basically, they are still screwed. Someone asked about accessibility for people who don't use a mouse. The answer was "it'll be better" (but, that's easy to say, isn't it?)

Someone asked how they decide what new features to include. This led him to talk about "SQM" (pronounced "squim") -- system quality management, which originally was to provide MS with information about application crashes. Now, they use it to gather feature usage.

You know that feature/option in MS products to participate in a "Customer Improvement Program" or "Feedback Program", sometimes hidden under "Service Options"? Well, by saying "yes", you are agreeing to send Microsoft information about the commands and features you use in the MS product.

One guy asked a question that seems to me to typify the difference between this event (the User Experience 2005 event) and, say, ETech (O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference from last spring).

The question was, what has the interface done to prevent the questioner's big pet peeve. The pet peeve is people making headings in a Word document by applying text formatting, rather than by applying a structural style. Of course, there's no real answer to this.

And, of course, in the context of html, I also would want my authors to use the markup I specify rather than something else, even if the result "looks" the same on the web page, in the end.

But, the point is, this guy is worried about how to force people to use a piece of software (in this case, MS Word) in a way that HE thinks is correct.

ETech, on the other hand, was all about molding any tool so that THE TOOL does what you want. That the user is the one that rules the software, the hardware, the application, the task -- and not the other way around.

Rain!

2005-10-25T11:55:00.000-05:00

It's raining, 47 degrees, and windy. Hopefully, the weather will be better tomorrow.

This evening there is a plenary with Jakob and somebody from Microsoft, otherwise this is a free day. It's curious to me that they insist on calling this a conference. When it's pay-by-the-day for each day's one-day workshop, and there isn't really anything else here besides the workshops (this evening's "plenary" aside), the fact that the thing lasts for 6 days does not qualify it as a "conference" in my opinion.

Monday's workshop was so disappointing. But, I still have hopes for Thursday's, which is "Toolbox of Specialized Usability Methods". I mean, since he bothered to put his outline up for people to see (or so it seems), maybe he'll actually talk about how to use real methods.

Monday's workshop

2005-10-24T20:35:00.000-05:00

Advanced User Testing
Jill Strawbridge, Symantec

Monday, October 24, 2005
9:00am-5:00pm
User Testing 2005
Boston, MA

exp psych./human factors/indust & systems engg
currently Symantec designing apps
teaches human factors course at a design school (Arts Center) in Pasadena CA
and teaches an upper division pysc class somewhere else

(no wifi in this room. argh. I'm blogging in Dreamweaver...)

Nothing in the conference metadata indicated where registration would be, other than a vague mention of "lobby" somewhere.

So, go to the Lobby level ... nothing. Take the escalator up one level. There is a sign pointing up. Walk up the stairs to the 3rd floor. And there is a registration table.

There was breakfast. (hadn't been told that). Where is the meeting room? Mostly down one hallway. But I saw Peter Morville asking where his was (he's teaching an IA workshop here) ... he'd been down the hallway. Turns out his is on a different floor.

When you get your badge at the registration table, they give you a tacky bag. I'm looking at the handouts on the table with the tutorials and their room locations. ("Oh, there's one of those in your bag").

We get a spiral-bound set of the slides for the workshop -- at the next table. I'd vaguely been pointed there, but it didn't register .. so I have to go back to pick up my booklet.

So much for usability at a high-priced 6-day series of User Experience workshops....

At the morning break they told us they'd set up a wifi room. By noon, the wifi had lost it's connection to the internet.

Now we have the around-the-room introductions...

So far, 2 people in a row who should have been at Steve Krug's workshop, or at least should have copies of his book to give to their managers, since one big problem is getting the organization to truly buy in to iterative testing. I suppose mentioning that (in public in the session) would be bad form, given that this is a Jakob event =)

the usual corporate people. a guy w/ a genealogy site. the guy sitting next to me is w/ a company in Irving, and he's a UTA grad. small world. and a guy at Frost Bank in San Antonio.

Usability Magnitude Estimation (UME) and Master Usability Scaling (MUS), methodology from Mick McGee

UME - strength of rating, degree of difference
MUS - allowing comparisons

Defining Usability

a psychological response to using an interface (intuitive, well-organized, consistent)
... that is evaluated to improve or compare designs
- formative (to identify and solve problems)
- summative (to evalutate with metrics)

Limitations with task-based usability measures

task differences, complexity, etc., make metrics difficult
if people fail, they could fail for different reasons
if people succeed, we can't know why

Types of data

nominal (no value. names of categories of data only)
ordinal (rank order, Likert scales)
interval (rank order + size differences, but not ratio differences)
ratio (rank order + degree of difference)

Usability Magnative Estimation (UME)

developed from the limitations of subjective usability measures.
developed from psychophysics
a psychophysical measurement method for assessing the psychological sensation of a physical stimulus
- interpreting multidimensional stimuli
- magnitude of effect is expressed as a ratio
generates lots of stuff to put into reports to impress management

We got academic research babble

There is a wifi room. There will be lunch "on our own" for an hour and 15 mins. So, I think, a sandwich from somewhere and either go to my room or go to the wifi room

Since this is another conference, I again have the strong urge to shop for a new laptop -- a lighter and smaller one, but, then I'd probably miss performance and battery-life.

Oh, during the break I had a Jakob sighting.

Yikes. Today's session is turning into the antithesis of "Don't Make Me Think". Which is why I don't go to ASIS. Or even read JASIST the journal anymore. Guacala!

I mean, the first warning was shortly into the pre-morning-break part, where she was going through a methodology for establishing baseline, comparable usability metrics with user testing subjects ... not only do I think that's a waste of time for most situations (see below), in seconds I could identify weaknesses in validity. Well, obviously, it's possible to construct some form of statistical validity for that methodology, at least validity that academics will recognize. But, for common sense... forget it.

Also, later, I'll outline all the usability challenges of this event. (sheesh)

Wait til y'all see the script she gave us to use for our first "practice" test. Mannn. Is she serious??

I quote: "Usability is your perception of how consistent, efficient, productive, organized, easy to use, intuitive, straightforward it is to accomplish tasks within a system".

We're supposed to read that to the test subject.

Sheesh

And I won't mention this "rate the proportional size of 10 individual circles, without seeing any circle more than once" exercise that is supposed to be the practice that you have the subjects do before you have them do the real test.

I mean, the usability testing methods are not usable!

Man... now I'm so glad I never studied HCI ... would have been like linguistics ... good in the thinking about it, but ridiculous in practice

After lunch, she skipped "ethnographic testing" and "international testing" and went straight to "Back to Basics". "Usability Metrics" -- a lengthy set of slides outlining "what you can test" but not "how do you test it". Particularly problematic when the "what" is memory burden. Given that this workshop is titled "Advanced Usability Testing", I would have thought that how to test would have been kind of central to the topic of the workshop.

Jeez, I don't believe it. The exercise is "what 4 measures would you use to measure the effectiveness of Google" and one guy actually said, measure heart rate, respiration rate, perspiration rate of the test subjects while they are doing the test. Oh man. Is that guy serious??

Don't Make Me Think: The Workshop

2005-09-30T23:23:00.000-05:00

Just got back from the Chicago edition of Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think workshop (by the way, it's pronouned kroog (as in goog-le) not krug (as in rug))

It was good, I'm glad I went. The main thing from it, for me, is kind of a good news/bad news thing.

One feature of the workshop is that attendees send in a problem URL and Steve does a 12 minute mini-expert review. I sent in our Research Resources page and he additionally included our Find Articles page.

The good news is, we aren't doing much worse than other library sites he knows. The bad news is, even though everybody agrees it sucks, he has no good solution. He thinks it might be, at heart, an Information Architecture problem (that is, he suggested that he and we consult with Lou Rosenfeld). But, while there may be some IA things to do, essentially the problem is that we have content tied up in 250+ silos that can barely talk to each other. And, OneSearch helps only a little. It lets us peek into some of the silos, but the view into those silos isn't that great, not all silos are viewable, and, overall, it takes such effort to get that peek that it's hard to know which is better -- to have the peek or to stick with choosing one database at a time.

He did like our plan to turn the "Find" pages into some sort of research wizard, where we lead people along a decision path that results in suggestions of resources.

But, people outside libraries don't really get the complexity of what we're doing. One guy wondered why we just don't list the 5 or 6 databases, and was dumbstruck at the concept of 250 3rd party licensed databases and 30,000 ejournals.

Another guy wondered why we can't use cookies or something to allow for re-running a search in another database. When I suggested that would be like doing a Google search and then popping over to Yahoo and expecting to re-run the same search, he got a deer-in-headlights look.

I just hope we can build that research wizard app. I've got a sense that task will be daunting.

Otherwise, the workshop was good. He talked some about the major points in his book.

The best parts were the mini-reviews and mock user tests of attendees sites. Along with this, he gave tips and advice on conducting tests and reporting on them. He's a big advocate of simple testing, simple tools, and avoiding the "big honking report". Rather than a report, he prefers debriefing the design team and/or stakeholders. And even more than debriefing stakeholders, he prefers to get them to observe actual tests as a way to get them to "get it".

And, of course, he's a big advocate of testing early and often, and repeating the early and often throughout the life of the site.

While a fancy lab is not necessary, we really do need some sort of facility. Laptop, Camtasia or Morae, some place private where the tester can feel comfortable, some place where there can be appointments to allow notetaking and decompressing on the part of the test facilitator in between appointments, and a way for the test to be observed by others who are not present (audio or audio-video feed, one-way mirror, or something to allow remote observation of the test)

And scripts. We need scripts.

Oh, regarding that person who hated that fact that we provided a custom "Page not Found" page with explanation and site index for the old web pages we can't redirect individually -- he suggested the book Defensive Design for the Web.

He'll have his slides on his site after the 3rd edition of the workshop (he prefers that attendees not read ahead). He does have other downloads though: a sample test script and a video consent form (both are MS Word documents, so right click and save as)

Additionally, about the mini-reviews, attendees whose sites didn't get a review during the workshop are entitled to a phone consultation with him. In our case, even though we got a review during the workshop, since he didn't have any really good advice, we get to have a phone consulation too. We can do this as a conference call, so we'll see what kind of scheduling we can do for that.

Regarding usability testing tips:

Start doing it before you think you can. This is the "sketch on a napkin" stage.
Continue through the "cubicle" stage (showing ideas to people in your organization) and the "neighbor" stage (getting the ideas from someone totally unrelated to your project)
Test limitedly and often. This means, bring in 3-4 people for about 45 minutes each to do a task. Then fix the problems found by those people. Then bring in 3-4 more people to test again.
Plan on testing on a regular basis, for example, set aside a morning a month (in our case, this would be per project if we are testing/developing multiple projects) to test whatever you have going on.
Don't stress about demographics. All people really need is to have used a web browser before. It's best if they don't have a lot of experience with your site.
Be careful with sequencing tasks during a test. Once a person has completed a task, they have learned about your site, and that can mean that they miss problems with the subsequent tasks you ask them to do
At the beginning of a testing session, get the person to talk: use this time to ask who they are, what they do, how much time they spend online, what they do online, what kind of web sites they like. Part of this is to give you context for when they are performing your tasks, but it also is a "warm up" period. It gets them accustomed to talking to you, it shows them that you are interested and listening to them, it helps them trust you.
Record the sessions with Camtasia or Morae. Have the person sign a permission form for recording the session. This is even if we don't do IRB exemption.
Eye tracking software is cool, BUT ... it's really expensive and provides more data than most people know what to do with. At this point, if you need eye tracking data, it's probably cheaper in the long run to outsource the eye tracking tests.
Ignore the people who say "I don't like color [X]" or other design opinions based on personal preference. On the other hand, if you get several people who all express the same strong opinion on a design element, then you should pay attention.
Each test will be task oriented, but you will get non-task things (such as points of confusion, points where the site loses the trust of the user, etc) from listening to the person's talk during the test and observing points of hesitation, etc.
As a test facilitator, you'll be in "therapist" mode: getting people to talk about what they're seeing and thinking, asking what they expect will happen if they do [X], prompting them to say what they're thinking/reading if they have been silent for 15 seconds or so, and, most importantly, not leading the person to an action or statement.
If the real live task involves a completion point (for example, for an online store, buying something ... in our case, I suppose it could be saving a citation, printing an article, etc.) take the person through to the end of that completion point, even if you set up a dummy situation.
Give the person some choice in the task they'll do. For example, if the task is "find 5 articles for a paper", let the person choose the topic of the paper. The idea is to give the person some personal involvement in the outcome of the task. This also lets them do the task within a conceptual space they are comfortable with.
Always pay the people in some way. In our case, we should always give some kind of gift certificate, maybe a $10 JavaCity certificate, a pair of movie passes, etc. Note that in a typical, non-academic environment (i.e. in the commercial or non-profit worlds), the standard rate for paying people to be testers is $50 a session, unless they are a select group, for which you'd have to pay more. We don't have to pay that much, but we have to give people something for their time.

And, as with all things related to web design and development, in the end "it all depends". Test informally or formally, test random people or user segments, depending on what you're doing, what information you're after, etc.

Conference Wrap up

2005-03-17T21:55:00.000-06:00

There are some session presentations available now -- especially "Rules for Remixing" (get the PDF), the conference opening session with Rael Dornfest and Tim O'Reilly.

The most important session for us was "Creating Passionate Users" -- a 1/2 day tutorial presented by Kathy Sierra, who was a creator of the Head First series of books for O'Reilly. And from this session, the most important message was "allow your users to have an 'I Rule' experience"

That is -- in the end, it does not matter what your users think of you or think of your product. (That is, it doesn't matter what library users think of library resources or services). What REALLY matters is how users think of THEMSELVES as the result of their interaction with your product.

There were other themes of note at this conference:

The O'Reilly Radar and remixing
Innovation and creativity, such as at Applied Minds and the Center for Bits and Atoms Fab Lab
"All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites" by Cory Doctorow of EFF and Boing Boing -- if a system is complex, there will be messiness. If you try to "fix" the messiness, you will only succeed at breaking the system and removing the complexity. With maturity in a system, you also have to expect and embrace the complexity, and with complexity you have to expect and embrace the diversity, and with diversity, you have to expect and embrace the mess.

Day Four

2005-03-17T11:02:00.000-06:00

Conference Announcements
Rael Dornfest
Time: 8:20am - 8:30am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

Re:MixMe
Lawrence Lessig
Time: 8:30am - 8:45am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

Conversation with Lawrence Lessig
Cory Doctorow
Time: 8:45am - 9:15am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

Military E-Tech
JC Herz
Time: 9:15am - 9:30am

Location: California Ballroom
Track: Social Software

Emerging Massive Media
Paula Le Dieu
Time: 9:30am - 9:45am

Location: California Ballroom
Track: Emerging Topics

The Economics of the Long Tail
Chris Anderson , Joe Kraus
Time: 9:45am - 10:00am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

Conversation - TBD
Time: 10:00 - 10:30

Putting the P Back in VPN: An Overlay Network to Resist Traffic Analysis
Roger Dingledine
Time: 11:00am - 11:45am

Location: California Ballroom A
Track: Peer-to-peer

VC Funding for Geeks; or, How to Get Your Technology to Emerge the VC Way
Marc Hedlund
Time: 11:00am - 11:45am

Location: California Ballroom B
Track: Business

Remixing the Networking Platform: Hacking Hardware and Adding Services
Nikolaj Nyholm
Time: 11:00am - 11:45am

Location: California Ballroom C

Ask Jeeves Alpha
Rahul Lahiri , Apostolos Gerasoulis
Time: 11:00am - 11:45am

Location: Plaza Room B
Track: Products and Services

Trust Me: Adventures in Social Engineering
Jon Oliver
Time: 11:45am - 12:30pm

Location: California Ballroom A
Track: Social Software

Life Hacks Live
Danny O'Brien , Merlin Mann
Time: 11:45am - 12:30pm

Location: California Ballroom B
Track: Emerging Topics

Odeo -- Podcasting for Everyone
Evan Williams
Time: 1:45pm - 2:30pm

Location: California Ballroom A

It's Not Rocket Science: The Brain for Designers
Matt Webb
Time: 1:45pm - 2:30pm

Location: California Ballroom B

Tech That Helps the World
Lee Felsenstein
Time: 1:45pm - 2:30pm

Location: California Ballroom C
Track: Emerging Topics

Making Web Services Personal
Ben Trott
Time: 2:35pm - 2:55pm

Location: California Ballroom B

From the Garage: Lessons Learned Birthing and Building Web Start-Ups
Mark Fletcher
Time: 3:00pm - 3:20pm

Location: California Ballroom B

Public Documents as Weblogs
Mark Simpkins , Gavin Bell
Time: 2:35pm - 3:20pm

Location: California Ballroom C
Track: Web Services

Maker Fair

2005-03-16T23:28:00.000-06:00

About a dozen people had tables showcasing their inventions at this reception, which also was an opportunity for O'Reilly to promote its new magazine Make

I think the coolest thing there was this guy who graduated from MIT in 2002, who is responsible for the original hacked XBox.

Here is Ben Hammersley again. He wore a kilt the first two days of the conference. I saw him in pants earlier, or maybe last night, but today, he was wearing a skirt.

More Makers:

Another maker ... with interesting head decoration:

Some crowd scenes:

The O'Reilly conference staffer handing out free drink tickets at the door:

The door prize (which you can win if your name is drawn AND you are present at the final session of the conference):

And finally... sometimes you just have to get away from the crowds:

Afternoon break

2005-03-16T17:13:00.000-06:00

one hour break (well, more since the previous session ended early) because the vendors exhibit room closes at 4:30 today

Remixing Culture with RDF

2005-03-16T17:10:00.000-06:00

Remixing Culture with RDF: Running a Semantic Web Search in the Wild
Matthew Haughey, Creative Director, Creative Commons
Mike Linksvayer, CTO, Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Licenses and Metadata

tracking the licesne
format of the work
permissions, requirements
extra metadata

Why use the Semantic Web?

small organization
natural language search not good for plain text metadata
decentralization -- other search engines could use it
existing RDF toolkits could be used

Metadata format

publishers and search engine needs
considered html head elements
considered robots.txt hacks
considered data in extra files/link element
chose RDF in HTML

Metadata format II

ease of use primary goal - copy/paste button and rdf in one chunk
any custom elements automated by license app
(one more but i missed it .... it's hard to type balancing an 8 lb laptop on one knee)

Nutch -- open source web crawler/indexer/query interface, aims to be massively scalable, built on Lucene Java text serach library

lucene.apache.org

Oregon State used Nutch to replace their Google search appliances

osuosl.org/news_folder/nutch

the future of Creative Commons metadata: RDF/A, Semantic XHTML, GRDDL (pron: griddle)

Conclusions:

semantic web lets anyone use the entire web as a db
nutch is a mostly prebuilt app for your domain
domain specific search engines without the infrasturcture of a search engine company
solves semantic catch 22: publishing data/consuming data

Ontology is Overrated

2005-03-16T16:30:00.000-06:00

Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata
Clay Shirky, Decentralization Writer/Consultant, shirky.com

ways we think we understand categorization is wrong. what we're doing to categorize on the web is a leftover from previous models that don't fit now

periodic table of the elements - his perfect classification scheme

library card catalog - the most recognizable classification scheme

of course, he trashes LC, which I sympathize with, but he mistakenly assumes that LC is hierarchical, and he is trashing it because he is looking for hierarchy and isn't finding it.

then, with library problems, he complains about using the classification system as a means for shelfmarking. which is also true

first there was the periodic table of elements, then there was the library card catalog, then there was Yahoo as the first attempt to categorize the web

The idea is -- how do you organize the world -- create a categorization system -- WITH NO SHELF .... that is, with no extenally specified "correct location" for an item

(moving through faceted classification to nothing but lots of links between items -- that is, search rather than browse)

An ontology presupposes a set of users, for whom, the structure and terminology of the ontology are designed

the more you move towards size, scale, nonexpert users, the less useful an ontology is

Voodoo Categorization

most of the world is not amenable to categorization, and when you try to force it you get problems

signal loss (is it Mac, Apple, or OSX) -- you have to create, mandate, and enforce terminology (is it movies, film or cinema? and what do you lose when you collapse terms?)
predicting the future is hard (a book about Dresden goes in the category "East Germany" -- what do you do when there no longer is an "East Germany"?)

Organic Categorization

del.icio.us

folksonomies

======

well, i agree with him but only to a point. users should create their own categories. their own, ad hoc, fully in-the-moment categories are going to be great, at least for them, at least for now.

searching is great, and a massive ontology has problems

but ...

organic categorization is even less useful for finding the UNKNOWN ...

at best, you can only find individual unknown items that are within known categories ... or among the categorizes of people in your network who you trust with their categorization

does the world make sense? if you think so, then you make a categorization system based on that, not regarding those who don't agree with the way you make sense of the world

Day Three PM - Sessions

2005-03-16T15:19:00.000-06:00

Building Communities with Software
Joel Spolsky , Michael Pryor
Time: 1:45pm - 2:30pm

Location: California Ballroom B
Track: Social Software

Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata
Clay Shirky
Time: 1:45pm - 2:30pm

Location: California Ballroom C
Track: Emerging Topics

Python in your Pocket
Erik Smartt
Time: 1:45pm - 2:30pm

Location: Plaza Room B
Track: Products and Services

Lessons Learned While Building Basecamp
Jason Fried
Time: 2:35pm - 3:20pm

Location: California Ballroom B
Track: Business

Remixing Culture with RDF: Running a Semantic Web Search in the Wild
Matthew Haughey , Mike Linksvayer
Time: 2:35pm - 3:20pm

Location: California Ballroom C
Track: Emerging Topics

Introduction to Yahoo! Search Web Services
Jeremy D. Zawodny
Time: 2:35pm - 3:20pm

Location: Plaza Room B

Hardware Hacks from the Far Side
James Larsson
Time: 4:20pm - 5:05pm

Location: California Ballroom B
Track: Hardware

Forgiveness, Not Permission: Retro-fitting the Semantic Web onto British Democracy
Tom Loosemore , Stefan Magdalinski
Time: 4:20pm - 5:05pm

Location: California Ballroom C
Track: Emerging Topics

The Easier, Faster Route to Building Mobile Applications: Using the Best of Existing Approaches and Overcoming Current Limitations
Rodney Aiglstorfer
Time: 4:20pm - 5:05pm

Location: Plaza Room B
Track: Products and Services

Social Robotics, Scmocial Robotics: Feral Robotics and Some Other Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling (what would the opposite of feral be?) Robots
Natalie Jeremijenko
Time: 5:10pm - 5:55pm

Location: California Ballroom B

BBC Programme Information Pages: An Architecture for an On-Demand World
Tom Coates , Gavin Bell, Matt Biddulph, Margaret Hanley
Time: 5:10pm - 5:55pm

Location: California Ballroom C
Track: Web Services

Independent Individuals and Wise Crowds

2005-03-16T14:15:00.000-06:00

Independent Individuals and Wise Crowds, or Is It Possible to Be Too Connected?
James Surowiecki

author of "The Wisdom of Crowds"

Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool

2005-03-16T13:50:00.000-06:00

Tom Hoffman , Tim Lauer

Tim Lauer is an elementary school principal

Networked Objexcts

2005-03-16T13:35:00.000-06:00

Tom Igoe

alzado.net

http://www.alzado.net/intromx.html

a network is at least 3 objects

KU -- a network app where, one user sits with a cry sculpture, which cries when someone in the social network expresses his/her sadness. then when the user caresses the cry sculpture, a "happiness" light illuminates at the place of the user who cried. as a way to express emotion and response over a network

Phone as Platform

2005-03-16T13:20:00.000-06:00

Clay Shirky

Phone as Platform, or "Please, Mr. Carrier, May I Add Some Value?"

it's a class at NYU

PacManhattan -- a game of PacMan played on the grid of Manhattan streets -- came out of a games class

the urban grid and the game grid could be merged in interesting ways. But they learned that GPS doesn't work that well in an urban environment. the class ended up using the phone not for GPS but for two-way voice (hahah). somebody in the control room on the phone with the person running the physical grid. So, the phone was not the platform for the app, the phone was in the app.

ConQwest -- something about moving large inflatable figures around -- a semicode (2D barcode) is captured by a phone, sent to a server, processed by the server, and then a message is sent back to the phone

Dodgeball -- mobile social software. embedding a social software pattern into a real life social network. after housekeys, the phone is the one item that everyone carries. social scanning -- it knows who you want to meet, it messages your phone when the person you want to meet is in the room (whatever), so you can go talk to the person (hmmmm...........)

Mobjects/HeartBeat -- send a hug. a way to say "I'm here, I'm thinking about you" without composing a message or being too intrusive. strip presence from messaging, leaving the presence intact

the potential of the phone as a device is hardly being tapped

check the Nokia 6630

US carriers are a real barrier

server intrstructure is the key

phone number or Bluetooth ID as a universal/foreign key

Voice is underused

Asterisk expands single PSTN line
VoIP allows geographic distribution
SIP

Mesh (multiple network devices) - hardware support is not here yet, and the carriers are still a problem

Morning Break

2005-03-16T12:58:00.000-06:00

The exhibits room is open today. The O'Reilly table says "take one free book". I wonder how many people refrained from taking more than one, if they were inclined to want more than one?

There were some tough choices.... Head First Design Patterns, Firefox Hacks, XBox Fan Book, other books with "hack" in the title. I chose Head First Design Patterns.

Did I choose an additional book, however illegal and/or unethical that might have been?

You'll have to consider all you know about me and then choose your own answer to that question...

Not so many people here today. I guess yesterday was the big deal day, with Tim O'Reilly and Jeff Bezos on the program

By the way, I need to shop for a small laptop. Maybe a tablet. Battery life notwithstanding.

Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess

2005-03-16T12:30:00.000-06:00

Clay Shirky, Decentralization Writer/Consultant, shirky.com
Stewart Butterfield, President, Ludicorp
Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us
Jimmy Wales, President, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

letting people/users create their own categories and categorization

social computing -- resolving conflicts between the individual and the group

resolving conflicts between different people's views of what the categorization of something should be

now that we have tags, can we connect our tags across different systems? technorati might be doing this now

what are you tagging for? your stuff for yourself? your stuff for other people? other people's stuff? -- remember why you are tagging and who you are tagging for

tagging as a part of RDF applications?

Wikipedia

2005-03-16T12:00:00.000-06:00

Jimmy Wales

social computing

wikipedia.org

since January 2001

people sharing information freely

Wikipedia lets people publish on a widely viewed platform, but provides a measure of quality control and avoids the neglected or lost personal sites made by home page creators

The Swarming Web

2005-03-16T11:50:00.000-06:00

Justin Chapweske, CEO - Onion Networks

Large File Support - higher probablility of failuer
justin.chapweske.com/lfs-shame

swarming -- RAID for the web -- looking for an alternative to TCP/IP with large/infinite bandwidth

fault tolerance? load balancers? commodity servers like at Google? (but, scalability, expense)

an array network? a mirror network? -- even more expensive, security concerns, user experience problems

self-healing data transfer -- integrity checks during the transfer. can store data on untrusted systems and still know if the content remains intact

===

Best Practices for swarming:

static elements, composed dynamically (CSS, RSS, Google maps)
utilize http caching semantics
thing cheap servers, cheap bandwidth, and intelligent software: the promis of grid computing delivered

SwarmStream public edition
onionnetworks.com/products/swarmstream/sspe/

Cory Doctorow

2005-03-16T11:25:00.000-06:00

All Complex Ecosystems have Parasites

(he's reading text that he will put on the web later)

email is a sloppy, diverse, complicated ecosystem

you can solve spam -- but the solutions we can imagine right now would break email

an email system that can be controlled is an email system without complexity

a system that is complex can be influenced but not controlled

you cannot create a new DVD player without permission from the one organization controlled by the TV/Movie industry, and they will not give permission if your DVD player has features that the organization does not like -- the things they don't like are things that they think will interfere with their own business model.

simplifying an ecosystem happens when a group tries to fix something they consider to be a problem.

simplification -- suppressing innovation, suppressing openness, suppressing diversity,

why should Hollywood control Digital Rights Management, when they are the smallest player in the world of people who create digital content? when Hollywood itself is controlled by just a few individuals?

all we have spent on spam prevention have been for nothing -- in fact, spam proliferates as though we had done nothing. This should tell us that the approach to spam is wrong directed

parasite elimination programs all fail. the idea that we just haven't tried hard enough is the wrong idea.

forget about: a simple ecosystem where only you are allowed to add value and where you control who benefits

Neil Gershenfeld

2005-03-16T11:19:00.000-06:00

cba.mit.edu/~neilg

Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT

"State of the Art Fabrication"

Shannon - 1940s - there is a threshold below which you can avoid communication signal degradation

"How to Make (almost) Anything" - a class at MIT, and not just for engineers or computer scientists --

Scream Body
a web browser for parrots
garment with protection for your personal space

what is literacy -- liberation of expression.
personal fabrication -- stuff for a market of one, things that make you individual

fabrication as another means of expression

======

Conversation between Neil Gershenfeld, a guy from Squid Labs and another guy from Applied Minds

on one hand, it's hard to imagine creativity and engineering going together. On the other hand, the Applied Minds guy says, how can one be an engineer and NOT be creative?

need a full size 3D prototype as well as the other, mini, virtual ones because there is such a thing as human scale and you can't ignore the tangible level of interaction with the thing

a one-day fab bootcamp?
Gershenfeld -- 1/2 hr to learn to use a laser cutter, rest of 1/2 day on design principles, last 1/2 day making something
Applied Minds guy -- one day to learn how to break something really nicely

nurturing the village tinkerers -- amateur inventors

Day Three AM - Opening, High Order Bits and Conversation

2005-03-16T10:15:00.000-06:00

Conference Announcements
Rael Dornfest
Time: 8:20am - 8:30am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

Bits and Atoms
Neil Gershenfeld
Time: 8:30am - 9:15am

Location: California Ballroom

A Conversation with Neil Gershenfeld
Tim O'Reilly , Dale Dougherty, Bran Ferren, Neil Gershenfeld, Saul Griffith
Time: 8:45am - 9:15am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites
Cory Doctorow
Time: 9:15am - 9:30am

Location: California Ballroom B & C
Track: Emerging Topics

The Swarming Web
Justin F. Chapweske
Time: 9:30am - 9:45am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

Wikipedia and the Future of Social Computing
Jimmy Wales
Time: 9:45am - 10:00am

Location: California Ballroom B & C
Track: Social Software

Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess
Clay Shirky , Stewart Butterfield, Joshua Schachter, Jimmy Wales
Time: 10:00am - 10:30am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

From the Classroom: Phone as Platform: Lessons from ITP
Clay Shirky
Time: 11:00am - 11:15am

Location: California Ballroom B & C
Track: Untethered

From the Classroom: Networked Objects at ITP
Tom Igoe
Time: 11:15am - 11:30am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

From the Classroom: Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool
Tom Hoffman , Tim Lauer
Time: 11:30am - 11:45am

Location: California Ballroom B & C
Track: Social Software

Independent Individuals and Wise Crowds, or Is It Possible to Be Too Connected?
James Surowiecki
Time: 11:45am - 12:30pm

Location: California Ballroom B & C

Mobile Computing On the Edge
Jon Bostrom
Time: 12:15pm - 12:30pm

Location: California Ballroom B & C

The Westin Horton Plaza

2005-03-16T00:40:00.000-06:00

This really is a lovely hotel. Nice big room, big bathroom, chaise lounge as well as an easy chair. The staff is friendly, polite, and professional.

However, apart from the chaise, which is very comfortable, seating is not a strong point here. I think the only hotel room desk chairs I've sat in that were more uncomfortable were straight wood dining type chairs in something like a Super Inn.

Also, Westins like to advertise their "heavenly bed" ... I don't know about other Westins, but the bed in my room is not heavenly. It's hard! I think my 25 year old mattress at home, that I finally replaced last month, was more comfortable than this hotel bed, and that old one was bad -- only saved from replacement earlier by a heavily padded mattress pad.

Still, the rest of the hotel is quite nice.

Building a New Web Service at Google

2005-03-15T18:38:00.000-06:00

Google AdWords

SOAP and WSDL

making it simple. making it so it will work and also be simple

Document / literal SOAP -- think of it as passing XML around rather than as API function calls

but, interoperability is still hard, WSDL support varies by toolkit, SOAP document/literal support varies by toolkit

Good: .NET, Java (Axis)
OK: C++ (gSOAP), Perl (SOAP::Lite)
not gooed: Python (SOAPpy, ZSI), PHP (many options)

interoperability example: sending "nothing" is hard

SOAP interoperability hazards (I didn't have time to type them)

if all else fails you can give up and parse the XML directly

so why not just use ReST? -- low ReST use GETs everywhere, high ReST use HTTP semantics to build APIs

Remixing DNA

2005-03-15T17:20:00.000-06:00

Interesting session but a little more science than I was in the mood for at the moment. I considered going to the "sex laws and technology" one, but I knew it'd be packed with people.

Any engineering of DNA sequences we can do right now results in an inferior manipulation than what we find in nature.

Policy and politics intersecting with science -- more people died of SARS than of anthrax, yet at the merest trace of a possibility of an anthrax spore in an east coast postal service office, and postal service offices close down across a region.

Registry of Standard Biological Parts - parts.mit.edu
this talk -- mit.edu/endy/www/talks/

Tangible Computing

2005-03-15T16:20:00.000-06:00

One of the speakers for this talk is Matt Jones, who was a speaker at IA Summit in 2004 where he talked about things he did at BBCi.

Windows / computer screens -- you lose things. windows overlaop. task bars, app bars, blah blah blah.....

all of that has been an inferior metaphor for interacting with the world in a digital environment

especially --- you can't click a mouse while waiting at the bus stop

Mac app interface as a beautiful but unintuitive thing

Ubiqitous computing IS HERE NOW -- it's just not evenly distributed and the interaction is still a work in progress

As interface designers, we must play to our strengths -- we are situated in space, we are embodied, we have opposable thumbs, we can touch, our senses and our brains are not disconnected.

"Where the action is" by Paul Dourish ...

"Extelligence" -- cognitive economy, social legibility (if i see you doing it in the world, i can copy you)

"Use our intelligence wisely" -- glance-ability, important information is not only in a computer window, important information bubbles up, direct combination (I didn't understand their examples of direct combination)

"Tangible tiredness" -- interfaces are pushing us to our physical limits, we cannot detect constant small visual changes

What's out there now?

tablets
audiopad - jazz mutant
smart furniture: interactive tables, sensitive objects, smart carpets, DDR
all seeing eyes -- cameras are everywhere
digital pens, eyetoy, augmented reality
passive information display: internet toaster, ambient devices, natural displays
smart objects: haptics/force feedback, physical movement, 2D barcodes
NFC - Near Field Communications -- touch technology, tell technology to talk, read write show, 2 major design principles (put readers/writers everywhere -- e.g. covers of phones) real information stored in the (RF) tags, not in a database. works at a range of some centimeters

But what can we do? Tangible computing hacks

computers make it easy to take inputs and manipulate
but now, computers are everywhere
more inputs: knobs, microphones, OpenEEG
more outputs: Dotdotdot. Palm revival, Airport Express -- walk around the house and the music follows you
more programmability: standard protocols, software affordances, programmatic access to internals

anti-mega.com
blackbeltjones.com/work/
we-make-money-not-art.com
tecla.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/

Day Two PM - Sessions

2005-03-15T15:19:00.000-06:00

Endangered Devices and How We Can Save Them
Wendy Seltzer , Jason Schultz
Time: 1:45pm - 2:30pm

Location: California Ballroom B
Track: Emerging Topics

Tangible Computing
Chris Heathcote , Matt D. Jones
Time: 1:45pm - 2:30pm

Location: California Ballroom C
Track: Emerging Topics

Remixing the Network - Getting Cooties Out of Your Data
Kevin Kealy
Time: 1:45pm - 2:30pm

Location: Plaza Room B

How Sex Laws Incite Technological Change
Annalee Newitz
Time: 2:35pm - 3:20pm

Location: California Ballroom B
Track: Emerging Topics

Remixing DNA
Drew Endy
Time: 2:35pm - 3:20pm

Location: California Ballroom C

Building Applications Without Software
Adam Gross
Time: 2:35pm - 3:20pm

Location: Plaza Room B
Track: Products and Services

Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software
Tom Coates , Matt Biddulph, Paul Hammond, Matt Webb
Time: 3:50pm - 4:35pm

Location: California Ballroom B
Track: Social Software

Building a New Web Service at Google
Nelson Minar
Time: 3:50pm - 4:35pm

Location: California Ballroom C
Track: Web Services

Microsoft Research - Turning Ideas into Reality
Phil Fawcett
Time: 3:50pm - 4:35pm

Location: Plaza Room B
Track: Products and Services

Taking Back Television: An Open Approach to the Development and Deployment of Next Generation Media
Tim Halle
Time: 4:40pm - 5:25pm

Location: California Ballroom B
Track: Emerging Topics

"Just" Use HTTP
Sam Ruby
Time: 4:40pm - 5:25pm

Location: California Ballroom C
Track: Web Services

ifabricate: Collaborative Atom Hacking
Saul Griffith
Time: 5:30pm - 6:15pm

Location: California Ballroom B

Amazon.com: E-Commerce at Interplanetary Scale
Werner Vogels
Time: 5:30pm - 6:15pm

Location: California Ballroom C
Track: Emerging Topics

in the research labs

2005-03-15T13:45:00.000-06:00

Microsoft: was talking about turning any surface into a computing environment (e.g. virtual keyboard)

Yahoo: various Yahoo Research Lab beta projects, mostly involving social software/apps
next.yahoo.com
research.yahoo.com
buzz.research.yahoo.com

Google - Peter Norvig

Google Suggest
more personalization
Google sets

Morning Break

2005-03-15T13:02:00.000-06:00

Morning break is almost over.

The size of the audience has grown even since this morning. The room is full and there are still lots of people out in the hallways.

Bag o'Shwag

2005-03-15T12:50:00.000-06:00

Woo hoo. Guess what? I won stuff! There's a drawing of the people who filled out session evaluations the day before, and so I figure, not so many people filled out evaluations yesterday ;p

Anyway, I got an ETech messenger bag (navy, mustard, and olive), JBL on tour speakers, an iTrip (to get an FM signal on your iPod), EarJams (sound enhancers for iPod earbuds), a Bluetooth MacMouse, a MicFlex (USB microphone), an iBreeze (laptop stand with USB cooling fan), and a $25 gift certificate to Weaknees (they sell DVR/TiVO stuff). And I usually never win stuff!

Jeff Bezos from Amazon

2005-03-15T12:30:00.000-06:00

what is global consciousness? it's the guy who decided that decaf coffeepots should be orange

vertical search -- A9.com --

they want OpenSearch to do for search what RSS has done for content -- make it easy, make it functional, make it ubiquitous

Remixing at Applied Minds

2005-03-15T12:10:00.000-06:00

Applied Minds

Applied Minds is a small company that invents, designs and prototypes breakthrough products and services for both industry and government. We are an interdisciplinary group of artists, scientists and engineers, with skills in architecture, electronics, mechanics, physics, mathematics, software development, system engineering, and storytelling. Our projects range from toys to cancer treatments, from buildings to algorithms, and from off-road vehicles to high-resolution displays. Our team of world-class innovators enjoy building the next industry-changing technology ideas from concept to prototype.

robots - what's really cool are making little robots to try things out -- like, what's more stable? a 6-legged or a 4-legged robot?

how about a snake robot?

or a centipede robot?

an approach that says -- wouldn't it be cool if... ?

a workplace where engineers, artists, musicians, and an astronaut work together to develop ideas

"Remixing toys" -- take sections of different toys (ray gun, helicopter, and a car) to make something new

GIS maps that emulate the experience of spreading a paper map out on a table. Including a 3D table that will not only emulate spreading the map out on a table, but add in topographic features in 3D

Random thoughts

2005-03-15T11:40:00.000-06:00

I'd guess there are 500-600 people here this morning. It's interesting that O'Reily, which you'd think of as a book publisher, sponsors all these conferences. It relates to points from the "Create Passionate Users" tutorial yesterday -- things you do might not relate directly to your mission, but they can end up furthering your mission even more than if you hadn't done them

This is a gathering of geeks, but it's one side of the geek world. This is the side of hackers, creatives, anti-establishment, push-the-envelop because it's there and who knows what cool things you'll find after you've pushed

Makes you excited about the future again, being here.

On the other hand, it's all chairs today. no tables. which is fine. my laptop batteries will hold out. However, I'm wishing for a smaller laptop right now.

Day Two AM - High Order Bits & Conversation

2005-03-15T11:30:00.000-06:00

O'Reilly Radar: News From the Future
Tim O'Reilly
Time: 9:00am - 9:15am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

Web Services as a Strategy for Startups: Opening Up and Letting Go
Stewart Butterfield , Cal Henderson
Time: 9:15am - 9:30am

Location: California Ballroom B & C
Track: Web Services

The App is the API: Building and Surviving Remixable Applications
Mike Shaver
Time: 9:30am - 9:45am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

Remixing Technology at Applied Minds
W. Daniel Hillis ,
Time: 9:45am - 10:15am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

TBA
Jeffrey P. Bezos
Time: 10:15am - 10:30am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

From the Labs: Microsoft Research
Richard F. Rashid, Ph.D.
Time: 11:00am - 11:15am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

From the Labs: Yahoo! Research Labs
Gary William Flake
Time: 11:15am - 11:30am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

From the Labs: Google Labs
Peter Norvig, Ph.D.
Time: 11:30am - 11:45am

Location: California Ballroom B & C

Von Neumann's Universe
George Dyson
Time: 11:45am - 12:15pm

Location: California Ballroom B & C

Remixing the Network - Getting Cooties Out of Your Data
Kevin Kealy
Time: 12:15pm - 12:30pm

Location: California Ballroom B & C

Tim O'Reilly

2005-03-15T11:20:00.000-06:00

The O'Reilly Radar

"Design Patterns"

provide source as well as display versions
design for participation
user-centered development

release early and oftern
user feedback
bug reports

syndicated ecommerce -- you no longer need to build or own all the components of your application -- isbn.nu

"The perpetual beta"

acknowledgement that things are continually changing and evolving

Network effects by default

Apps that include sharing features by default -- Flickr

The long tail

the monetizing of niches -- no niche is too small to speak to.

Software abovce the level of a single device

cross device apps -- it's not just the PC anymjore

Social Networking

campture and share the social fabric underlying your applicatoin

social networks are a by product of social applications like email IM, photo sharing, and even book buying

Flickr
del.icio.us
technorati

a realtime flow of info, comments, idea sharing

Data is the next "Intel Inside"

Where 2.0 in JUne in SF -- O'Reilly conference on location technologies

Web 2.0 Conference in Oct in SF

Packets and shipping containers

The key is small packages and containers -- to make delivery successful, efficient, and to make the delivery system last successfully over a long period of time

Remix

when content is digital it lends itself to being broken down and remixed

So: b uild your business model so as to make your living from the smallest atomic unit

SafariU -- OReilly books to let students professors remix to suit themselves

Ajax: Asynchronous JavaScript + XML -- eg Gmail and Google maps

Hardware Hacks

www.rubyonrails.com

Data Visualization

Krazy Dad -- using flickr, gives a color wheel. you pick a color and it finds photos w/ that color
Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager

Voice Over IP

Asterisk, Skype

People

The P in P2P is People -- Dave Winer c. 2001

Opening Remarks

2005-03-15T10:48:00.000-06:00

An example the speaker gave of an alpha geek was an amateur astronomer ;-)

The hacking is "remixing" ... you chop something apart, examine the component bits, and use skill, creativity and ingenuity to make something new from those bits.

Remix your web:

View source
Firefox and Thunderbird
JavaScript

Remix your music:

Rip -- we love your music so much and hate the format so much, we will resort to illegal methods to put things the way we need them to be

Remix your TV:

TiVO obviously

Remix your network:

WiFi
War driving
Hotspots
Airport Express

Remix your movies:

BitTorrent
NetFlix
Blockbuster runs scared

Remix your data:

scraping --: XML
hacks --> standards
syndication
web services

Remix your text:

Blogging

Remix your syndication:

RSS allowed Netscape to compete with Yahoo
RSS reinvented syndication
RSS flows into Yahoo
everyone monetizes RSS

Remix your bookshelf

Project Gutenberg
Search Inside the Book
Google Print

Remix IT

all kinds of IT specialties
"be liberal in what you accept"
Hacks become frameworks become foundation

Remix the browser:

Firefox

Remix brick-and-mortar (and remix again):

Order online, pick up in the store
shop and research online, buy in the store

Remix space:

Spaceship One

The unreasonable man adapts the world to himself -- George Bernard Shaw

Day Two AM - Opening and Keynote

2005-03-15T10:20:00.000-06:00

Opening Welcome
Rael Dornfest, CTO, O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Date: Tuesday, March 15
Time: 8:20am - 8:30am

Keynote

Rules for Remixing
Rael Dornfest, CTO, O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Date: Tuesday, March 15
Time: 8:30am - 9:00am
Location: California Ballroom B & C

Citizen engineers are throwing their warranties to the wind, hacking their TiVos, Xboxes, and home networks. Wily geeks are jacking Jetsons-like technology into their cars for music, movies, geolocation, and internet connectivity on the road. E-commerce and network service giants like Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and Google are decoupling, opening, and syndicating their services, then realizing and sharing the network effects. Professional musicians and weekend DJs are serving up custom mixes on the dance floor. Operating system and software application makers are tearing down the arbitrary walls they've built, turning the monolithic PC into a box of loosely coupled component parts and services. The massive IT infrastructure of the '90s is giving way to what analyst Doc Searls calls "do-it-yourself IT."

We see all of this as a reflection of the same trend: the mass amateurization of technology, or, as Fast Company put it, "the amateur revolution." And it's these hacks, tweaks, re-combinations, and shaping of the future we're exploring in this year's Emerging Technology Conference theme: Remix.

In this opening session, your conference host introduces you to the gestalt of ETech and how the subject matter of past years has woven itself into the fabric of ETech today.

Then Dornfest looks ahead to how the remix culture will impact business and technological innovation, product and service development and adoption, the Internet ecology, and change the way ordinary people interact with ever more tech in their midst.

The one thing to take away from this conference

2005-03-14T20:17:00.000-06:00

Even if I take nothing else back from this conference, the final point from the morning tutorial will be enough. And that is:

"The Secret" to creating passionate users ... What is it that really drives people?

The user has an "I Rule" experience. It doesn't matter what they users think of YOU (or your product). It only matters how the user thinks of THEMSELVES as a result of their interaction with you (or your product).

I would say, we need to understand how to apply this to UTA library services.

When the library interacts with students, faculty, and staff -- or when the library staff interact with the library intranet (for example):

Do they feel smarter than they did before? -- or was searching for articles, or using library services, or translating library jargon, so difficult that we made them feel stupid and inadequate?
Do they feel like we have included them? -- or did we talk in "library-speak", or in terms that are irrelevant to their experience?
Do they feel satisfied? -- or did they have to settle for what they could get out of the interaction?
Do they feel like coming back to us? -- or will they choose another source of help next time?
If they come back, is it because they WANTED to? -- or is it because they feel like they have to: because a professor told them to, because we're the only source even if we are an inferior source, or because it's "college" and they are "supposed to" use the library?

Random bits, part two

2005-03-14T20:01:00.000-06:00

There's a guy here who I think is using an OQO but I haven't had a chance yet to go get a closer look to see if it's true or not.

This afternoon, the guy sitting next to me I think is a well-known blogger. That is, I caught sight of his name tag and I recognized the name, but now his name has escaped me and I haven't had a chance to look again.

I don't know if Jakob is here (Jakob Nielsen). A couple of times now I've seen someone who looks a lot like him.

The morning tutorial today was really good. The woman who taught it is the creator of the "Head First" series of books.

The afternoon tutorial was ok, and interesting, but not as good as the morning one.

Atom API tutorial (continued)

2005-03-14T18:05:00.000-06:00

Documentcentrism

you have input ---> then that input gets turned into content stored as Atom Entries ---> then you send that out to be viewed

An Atom Entry Document can become (be represented as):

Atom Feed
XHTML
RSS
PDF
Atom API

Extending Elemental

More inputs
More outputs
Use Apache and Content Negotiation

Using Atom yourself

http://atomenabled.org
http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage
"Developing feeds with RSS and Atom" (from a book he's got coming out next month, published by O'Reilly)

and ... he is finished one hour early

Build ContentCentric Applications on RSS, Atom, and the Atom API

2005-03-14T16:50:00.000-06:00

RSS 1.0 - uses RDF (even though nobody is using RDF functionality)

3 Formats:

RSS 2.0 - Sinple, ad hoc, temporary, loosely defined data, very loosely defined standard, many many uses. Fantastic for machine readable lists. Useless for anything else

RSS 1.0 - Complex, strict, pre-planned, strongly defined data, strongly defined standard, burdened with the evil buzzwords of RDF and "Semantic Web". Fantastic for complex document mining. A nightmare for tiny ad hoc apps. Used widely in the scientific publishing community.

Atom - simple, strictly defined data, strictly defined standard, with extra architectural loving.

Current Atom users: blogs, particularly blogger; Flickr

5 Atomic facts a machine can know about a document:
what it contains, what it is, where it was made, where it is held, when it was made, who made it

"how" is not an atomic fact -- it is qualitative -- must be human added, not machine added

Key Concept 1:
An Atom Document explicitly states the minimum we can know about the resource AND NO LESS (prinicple of the conservation of metadata)

Once you've lost (or failed to enter) metadata, you can't recreate it -- that is, once the moment has passed, you can only INFER what the atomic metadata would have been, you can't capture the actual, realtime metadata

Key Concept 2:
It's ok to have a lossy representation -- RSS, HTML, whatever -- but the resource itself must conserve the data. Data Entropy Cannot Be Reversed.

Two types of Atom documents:
an Atom Entry Document and an Atom Feed Document

Resuable Syntax of Constructs

Text
Person
Date
Link
Category
Identity
Service

Say, you have an album review, and in the context of the album review you want to display metadata about the album. He would use RSS 1.0 in this case -- which is employing metadata for an external object within the context of a resource (the album review is the resource. the album review resource has its own metadata. But, the album review employs metadata within it)

Atom Feeds

The Elegant Feed - An Atom feed is a collection of documents, topped with its own metadata

Creating a feed - Slice (choose a view), Dice (take the namespaces out), Mash (stick them together)

Key Concept 3:
A Feed is the representation of a Query over Resources

Atom Documents, Revision:

An Atom Document contains at least the minimum that can be said about a resource, whether an Entry or a Feed
An Atom Feed contains the Atom Entry documents resulting from a Query over resources. It's a type of resource in itself.

The Atom API

APIs through the ages:

Blogger API, Metaweblog API
XML-RPC or SOAP
For the manipulation of resource: REST

First Principles

HTTP has verbs - GET POST PUT DELETE
Representations of Resources (however it is you decide to define "resource")
GET and HTML representation of the resource

Manipulating a resource:

Full control means stating all of the data we know
Hence, we're stating (most) of an Atom Entry document

Key concept 4:
An Atom API call is an Atom Entry Document over an HTTP verb

Endpoints:
PostURI - one per system
EditURI - one per resource
FeedURI - one per query
ResourcePostURI - one per system

==========

and ... the afternoon break ...

==========

Afternoon tutorial

2005-03-14T16:08:00.000-06:00

The speaker this afternoon is Ben Hammersley. He is wearing a kilt.

Day One, Afternoon Tutorial

2005-03-14T15:25:00.000-06:00

Tutorial
Build Contentcentric Applications on RSS, Atom, and the Atom API
Ben Hammersley

Date: Monday, March 14
Time: 1:30pm - 5:00pm
Location: California Ballroom C

Use the two Atom standards (Atom and the Atom API) along with RSS to create the next generation of contentcentric internet applications.

This tutorial covers:

The contentcentric conceptual idea behind Atom and the opportunities it presents
The Atom Document model and what it means
How to create and edit online resources with the Atom Publishing Protocol
Using the Atom Publishing protocol's security and network features
How to create a content management system using Atom and RSS
Atom and RSS's place in the internet ecosphere

Creating Passionate Users - part two

2005-03-14T14:02:00.000-06:00

There is a different between pain and stress: pain is bad, but stress is not necessarily bad. Stress at a certain level raises memorability, increases engagement, creates emotion that makes an ultimate success more successful

Book: "The Culting of Brands"

Learning Theory:

Learning is not passive
The learner co-constructs the knowledge they are receiving
FAQs are not learning -- maybe they are a good reference point, but they will not go too far in developing the deep understanding that charactizes a passionate user
Learners have to be engaged, involved, paying attention -- all happening past their crap filter
Learner has to be motivated -- continuously motivated -- you have to constantly revive or refresh that motivation
Involve all senses -- as many senses as possible
The learner has to flex their brain cells -- there is higher level thinking -- you don't clutter the learning activity w/ extraneous things that divert their mental activities to trains of thought that are unrelated to what is being learned (Cognitive overhead / Cognitive overload)

Examples that are so hard to decipher that they divert thought and attention
"Don't Make Me Think" -- Steve Krug's book
Use patterns and chunks to help people process the information you are giving them

Learning theory books:

Roger Schank -- e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, Designing World-Class E-Learning
Kandel

What Do Game Designers Know?

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience -- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The user has to believe that, at every step, they are only ONE (step, click, etc...) away from their point of success
When you are in the flow state you lose track of time. In fact, the flow state is the only time you lose track of time (excluding drugs and alien abduction)
Deconstructing flow:

Challenge
Knowledge/skill to meet that challenger
As the challenge level rises, knowledge/skil rises to meet it
If knowledge doesn't rise fast enough, people get frustrated and quit. If challenge doesn't rise fast enough, people get bored and quit
NOTE: the challenge/knowledge balance is IN THE PERCEPTION of the user
The challenge has to be perceived as WORTH IT and DO-ABLE

Sometimes "Challenge" and "Knowledge" have to be re-defined for the context

The key is the balance, and providing a level of challenge that is what the users want in the context

The experience cycle / how to keep people engaged?

The reward at the end has to be worth it in comparison with the challenge they have to go through to get the reward
Think: game levels -- the superpower you get when you finish a level has to be really good if the level is really hard

Cycle = Activity (playing the level), motivation (the superpower you get when you finish the current level or the activity you get to do when you reach the next level), payoff/resolution (the actual next level)

============

Very good session. Good speaker. It was a day's worth of material, but the handouts provide help for later self-learning

============

I'm enjoying one thing in the handouts. A late 50s/early 60s photo of a girl looking up admiringly at a guy, with her thought bubble containing: "Jen says you can teach me to hack my XBox. That's SUCH a turn-on!")

============

"The Secret" -- the underlying theme

What is it that really drives people in all of this?

The user has an "I Rule" experience. It doesn't matter what they users think of YOU. It only matters how the user thinks of THEMSELVES as a result of their interaction with you.

Creating Passionate Users

2005-03-14T12:15:00.000-06:00

What do passionate people do?

do research on the thing
tell other people
spend money on "stupid" things
get all the accessories
get all the fan things
convert others
seek out community
adopt a lifestyle
try to learn more all the time

Benefits to you when your users are passionate

loyalty and retention
want more of what you have

When "The Da Vinci Code" hit big, suddenly all of Dan Brown's books were bestsellers

more interest in the higher end
Bigger Wake

all the add-ins, plug-ins, third-party accessories that go with your product (when you try to shut down that wake so you can own it yourself, the smaller the wake will finally be)

Things that inspire passion (making people irrationally passionate)

xbox
Mini Cooper
iPod
The Sims
geek gadgets
operating systems
horses
cooking
bands
dancing
(basically, anything)

What will be the benefits of passion for "my thing" (library intranet)?

Loyalty and Retention

staff use the site

staff who said they would never use it, use the site

staff make the site their browser home page

Want more of what you have

ask for additional apps/components

More interest in the high end

comfort with technology

Bigger wake

people think of their own apps

What are the attributes / characteristics of a thing that makes people passionate?

there is gear -- stuff to buy
ways to spend money
you know what a being an expert at that thing looks like -- a concept of an expert level
there is a community of users
there is a wake (third party items)
myth, legend, stories, famous people -- these have developed about the thing
there are collectibles (the eBay effect)
*** there is a lot to learn about the thing ***

there is challenge, complexity
there is some snob appeal
there is the opportunity for continuous learning and growing
there is extensibility

What can we do to develop Continous growth? (help them learn, develop expert level, get them excited about continuing to grow and improve)

it doesn't have to be about the product itself, directly

if your product is trash bags, then you might have a site with environmental tips, activities, community, etc

people send in video of their local clean-up projects

the site becomes a great tutorial site for producing digital video, even though the real product is plastic trash bags

Also... we need to know how to get past users' "crap filter"

sexy
surprise
novelty
shocking
scary
pleasureable
faces -- the brain responds to the human face (see "Mind Hacks")

(and now, the morning break)

Day One random bits

2005-03-14T11:45:00.000-06:00

Elevators did not work this morning

In the conference session rooms -- all seating is at tables (for laptops). There is wireless all over the conference (and my room is close enough to the 4th floor conference dining location that I can get a good signal in my room). The conference session rooms -- there are power strips at each table.

Attendees are 90 % male, as might be expected

The two guys sitting next to me work at the Fashion Institute of Technology of SUNY NYC

Homogeneity in the sense that this is conference full of geeks, but that also means diversity, at least diversity with the range of geek-counter-culture:

Oh... and ... it's RAINING this morning! Rain in San Diego ... who would have thought???

Day One, Morning Tutorial

2005-03-14T10:46:00.000-06:00

Tutorial

Creating Passionate Users
Date: Monday, March 14
Time: 8:30am - 12:00pm
Location: California Ballroom C

What do game designers, neurobiologists, and filmmakers know about creating passionate users? How can we exploit the way the brain works to reach users/customers at a deep emotional level that inspires their devotion, enthusiasm, and most of all--their desire to evangelize your product, service, or cause, to everyone they meet (or blog for)?

The latest research in cognitive science, brain chemistry, and psychology points to a dramatically different way to craft your product, service, and community in ways that are far more important today than they were even five years ago. There's never been more competition for a person's attention than there is today, and the old ways of standing out among the pack no longer work.

If you want to build a community around your product, service, or organization, the research and lessons learned in these other domains will help you do what you need to do to get their attention and keep it. You'll learn to work around the brain's natural filters that keep your message from getting in. You'll learn to give your product or service an almost addictive quality to keep users engaged and wanting more. Most importantly, you'll learn the key secret that will turn their brains and hearts on.

Whether you're looking to drive up the hits on your web site, increase membership in your organization, build a passionate fan community around your brand, help people learn far more effectively, or dramatically increase sales, we'll look at some of the research that defines a path to reaching your goal in the quickest possible way.

Some conference links

2005-03-13T21:28:00.000-06:00

Presentations will be here some time after the session is finished and the speaker has given them the files.

There is also a conference wiki and a news coverage page with links to blogs, photos, and a Flickr egroup for the conference.

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005

2005-03-13T20:20:00.000-06:00

I've arrived for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference here in San Diego, California. It's cloudy this evening -- thankfully, no rain -- but it's supposed to be sunny and in the mid-60s F all week.

The conference in is the Westin Horton Plaza -- very nice!

I've picked up my conference goodies: materials for the 2 tutorials tomorrow, the usual vendor stuff, a copy of Mind Hacks, and nice little note pads from O'Reilly and Yahoo, all in a nifty canvas bag.

There in another conference in town, the American Chemical Society at the Convention Center a few blocks from the Westin. Some 20,000 chemists, I hear, have filled the downtown San Diego hotel rooms.

In-room internet access is $16 a day -- that's the highest I've ever seen. However .... the conference has wireless, the meeting rooms are on the 2nd floor, my room is on the 5th floor, and I'm picking up the conference wireless signal in my room. Woo hoo!

Only one other observation at the moment -- used to be, I'd travel a few or even many time zones and would barely notice a thing. This time, I've gone only 2, and granted I've only been here a few hours, but I'm a little disconcerted at the fact that it's not even 6:30 pm yet.

By the way, the time zone for this blog is now PST.

Conference wrap-up

2004-12-01T20:10:00.000-06:00

This was a good conference. Gilbane seems to have CM events twice a year: April in San Francisco and November in Boston.

Like the IA Summit, this conference was a place where it was cool to be a librarian. Also like the IA Summit, you get the corporate and non-profit folks, though the IA Summit has more folks from academia. And, like the IA Summit, most of the corporate folks are capable of talking in terms other than Business/IT buzz words.

I think it's important for us in the higher ed sector to get out among colleagues from the corporate and nonprofit sectors. While we aren't selling anything in the way that a corporation is, I would argue that we have many of the same issues -- and, maybe, we *could* say that we *do* have something to sell. The question is what are our products, and I would say we have 2: services (e.g., reference/instruction/access services) and information access. If we want our customers (students, faculty, staff) to *want* to buy (read: "use") our products, we have to be able to communicate to our customers effectively -- using language that will attract and hold them, using mediums of communication that they expect and want to receive, and offering that communication in places and times that will maximize customers' attention and our message's impact.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find out what the Gilbane Content Technology Works program is. I was skeptical for some time, figuring, there must be some consultancy selling their services buried underneath there somewhere. But, I don't think that's it.

It seems to be a program, created by the Gilbane Report folks and underwritten by CM vendors, that is really meant to further CM projects. What they do is write case studies and hold webinars, all at no charge, where the purpose is to highlight best practices and successes in CM implementations. It helps the CM workers, furthers the profession, helps make new projects reach success, and, when those things happen, vendors also benefit.

There are conference sessions in the morning (the post-conference workshops are in the afternoon) in the Digital Asset Management and Knowledge Management tracks, but I'm not sure I'll be able to get to any of them before I go to the airport.

Catching up on the day

2004-12-01T17:59:00.000-06:00

Back to the morning's first session... the keynote panel on Content Technology Works, which are case studies representing best practices in content management

Bill Benz, J&W Seligman - "Leveraging Content Using Multiple Communications Channels" - get presentation here (PDF)

found that customers (for them, customers are financial analysts) preferred email notifications
for them, their web site was a tool to enhance engagement with customers
define all your customers, including internal -- identify the preferred communication channel for each -- "How do you want us to talk to you?"
spam is any email that annoys the recipient
maintain fresh, appropriate content in all communication channels
they did deep analysis of site search logs as a source of info on what their site visitors wanted to find. Then, they devised home page promos targeting the top searches.
navigation is key -- it has to be easy
when negotiating with a vendor, remember -- the best customer support you will get from that vendor will be the day before you sign the contract. if customer support isn't good on that day, drop the vendor
mid-size and small companies have all of the same content management needs as a huge, rich company ... they just need a smaller quantity of each

Mario Queiroz, Hewlett-Packard

"adaptive enterprise" is a term HP uses re: how they work w/ customers to build infrastructure

(he sort of rambled on, not saying much of consequence, but it did inspire me to think this:

The problem with the web site, and the library for that matter, is that we are not clear on what we are "selling".

To me: "What do we sell?" ... we sell 1) our services and 2) information access. Until we think of those things as products that we sell, we will not be able to communicate effectively with our library users. We have to design content and presentation to maximize the salability of our products.

Other comments from this speaker:

Begin creating the content for your product before the product is ready to be distributed
Benchmarking vs. characterizing your key competitor
in your project, deliver short term gains while ramping up to a critical mass that will push your project into success

David Liroff - WGBH Educational Foundation

By 2008, all WGBH programming will be distributed via digital files, e.g., as email attachments, etc
preparing for fully on-demand, digital media/entertainment
"Content without rights is NOT an asset"
for info on WBGH digitization projects see daminfo.wgbh.org
Digital preservation is a big thing with them .... "Have you ever tried to get data off a 10 year old floppy disk? PAPYRUS is a better storage medium than any digital format"
most important is the consumer's expectations for media consumption
"TiVO has changed my life ... I can't watch live TV anymore"
Video On Demand - reduces the cable TV subscriber churn rate -- gets those people who unsubscribe because of 300 channels and still nothing to watch

Key issues/trends/drivers:

Moore's Law
plummeting data storage costs
compression
digital distribution through multiple channels including IP
Broadband as an on demand digital distribution method
database management techniques
search tool development
refinement of relationship/recommender engines -- constituency development (that is, "other people who liked this also liked .... " and the development of these communities/constituencies of interests)

Required reading: "The Long Tail" in Wired -- "Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream."

He quoted someone from Intel that said that we are now in a "strategic inflection point" -- a place where fewer and fewer of the old rules apply, but where the new rules have not been written yet

Following these three talks, the moderator added that she believes that a year from now, the big thing in content management will no longer be communication mediums, but rather taxonomy, categorization, and search. (hmm... tell that to the IA's, who've been doing that for content for years now)

The last of Tuesday afternoon

2004-12-01T15:20:00.000-06:00

The final session of the day for me is a CTW case study, "Solutions for Custom Communications", Kosta Nicolopoulos, Rolf C. Hagen (USA) Corp. - get presentation here (PDF)

using digital asset management in a marketing/communication venture

as they learned more about digital asset management, they realized they needed to rethink their project, goals, objectives, etc.

Wed PM

2004-12-01T14:15:00.000-06:00

"Directions in Content Management" (another "speak for 5 minutes and then open for discussion" panel session)

Eric Silberstein, Idiom (?) -- has to do w/ translation
Rich Buckheim, Oracle
Bill , Interwoven

Eric says the directions are:

CM as a term is still being used to encompass many things, even though we know now that these are separate (and maybe better, separable) things, functions, etc

Directions:

all content will be XML
globalization, localization
technology surrounding XML

Rich says the directions are:

CM people who are central but peripheral (e.g., CM systems built using an Oracle DB, putting Oracle in the CM space, even though Oracle is not a CM company)
Also, file server vendors, where the file servers are part of the CM system even though they aren't CM vendors
Data/Info protection, security ... something between ECM and file server/desktop
Growth is in the upgrade, replacement, enhancement in products that are today "just file servers" into something that could be considered an ECM

Bill says the directions are:

an environment where all of the heterogeneous vendors can live together
it's all about integration -- all of the content repositories, etc
how do all the vendors, products, etc., co-exist? management of: email, document content, web content, etc.

SOA - Service Oriented Architecture
Transportability - content reuse, content sharing
Application layer
Rapid application development
Flexibility to bring applications together so they can co-exist

Is it true that ECM is a myth?

(these guys represent vendors ... how can they say it is or isn't a myth?)

(actually, i'm getting the sense that these guys said pretty much everything yesterday and in today's opening session. these guys are starting to repeat themselves)

audience question: so... you guys are offering me all these products, I can't afford any of them, and I don't have the resources to implement them even if I had the budget ... so when will there be something for me?

and the answer ... well, i guess these guys can repeat back the problem, but, how can they have an answer, when they are selling those high priced products

I should have gone to the CTW session at this hour ...

This Oracle guy ... first he admits that the small-market guy in the audience is not in Oracle's customer target, but then he starts talking "future Oracle products" that will help the guy out ... At least the Interwoven guy says they are supposed to be there to speak about directions, not do sales talk, but ...

=======

I moved to the CTW track ... it's the middle of the talk by a guy from WBGH (another guy, not the one from the morning panel) talking about their DAM.

Dave McCarn, WGBH -- Solutions for Leveraging Rich Media -- get presentation here (PDF)

"Digital Asset Management Unified Field Theory"

Experiences deploying DAM:

remember the usual key activities

develop your specifications
clarify what your assets are, what metadata is needed, etc

Do your workflow analysis

http://daminfo.wgbh.org/

Wed AM

2004-12-01T12:04:00.000-06:00

The keynote talks this AM were great.

The panel topic was Content Technology Works

To start, some issues from yesterday:

ECM - myth or vision
Integration issues - database, content management, authoring
Software as a service (see a CTW case study)
Importance of getting unstructured information under control
Close alignment of IT and business goals
Content is not just authoring and managing, it's also delivery and use
Content crosses business domains/goals
Dealing with legacy systems
Multichannel communication -- multi-format, single source publishing, XML

Bill Benz, J&W Seligman "Leveraging content using multiple communicaiton channels"
Mario Queiroz, Hewlett-Packard
David Liroff, WBGH

(I'll post the details later)

=====================

(after the morning break)

"Implementing a CMS - Next Steps and Key Issues, Part 2"

Brendan Quinn, BBCi -- "CMS Impacts on Systems, Networks, Security, and IT Support"

Brendan is talking about technology requirements for a CMS implementation: storage capacity, acceptable amounts of downtime, acceptable levels of non-responsiveness (POV of the content author on a browser based CMS on an app server), getting IT and CMS people to talk to each other, etc etc etc.

Short version: design for your own needs, not what a vendor says or what you read in a book

(sorry, but ... duh ...)

"baked" content -- precreated content
"fried" content -- dynamic content
"flied" content -- fried content where the details of the delivery are determined on the fly

Michael Hahn, Vasont Systems -- "Are DTDs Dead?" -- get presentation here (PDF)

well, the topic is the use of schemas rather than DTDs .. better to try to get his slides

RELAX NG (pronounce: relaxing) ... considered simpler and more elegant than w3c schema
schematron - Rick Jeliffe - projected as part 4 of ISO 19757

Post-sessions, on Tuesday

2004-11-30T20:12:00.000-06:00

Following the last session was a reception in the exhibits area. (of course, throughout the conference, if you want the free food and drink, you have to mingle in the vicinity of the vendors)

At lunchtime, I avoided the vendors, but I decided to take the plunge during the reception. FatWire and RedDot are both here ... I didn't stop to chat. I did talk to this company, Serena -- web content management, Oracle/DB2/SQL Server based content repository, browser based author interface, LDAP/Active Directory aware, I guess runs on a J2EE app server (I didn't ask but I saw "servlet" in a URL from the browser based author interface), and they seem to be focusing themselves on the education market -- their demo site screen was for a university site, with content quoting something from Educause. They have a couple of school districts in Texas as clients, and a handful of smaller universities. Seems like a nice product, but I still think Contribute will do all Serena will do (minus the db-based content repository). Contribute will give us better control over author content permissions and roles I think, and also Contribute will give us better control over the use of styles.

There's another funky web content management vendor here called Hot Banana, but the rep was busy so I haven't talked to them yet.

Most of the other vendors seem to be a mix of content management and XML stuff. There's one saying it does metadata and taxonomy management, but I haven't talked to them yet -- they are SchemaLogic. Oh, Vivisimo is also here for site and enterprise search

The one other I did spend some time with was IXIAsoft which has this product called TextML Server. Along with the IXIAsoft guys was Mark Ludwig, a librarian at SUNY Buffalo -- SUNY Buffalo has used TextML Server to create an XML based web library catalog from their NOTIS MARC records. Here's a Library Journal article. Anyway, he has some grant and is looking for other libraries to join -- I don't have the details but it involves FRBR-ized XML catalog repositories I believe. I have his card to share with Bob and Ramona in case they're interested. Mark Ludwig also did a session I wasn't able to attend. Here's his presentation (PDF).

Tomorrow I'll have to decide between competing sessions. The CMS implementation things will continue, but at the same time there will be CMS implementation case studies. These case studies are done under the rubric of Content Technology Works -- a Gilbane initiative to document content management best practices and success stories.

On the other hand, the morning panel tomorrow is on CTW (Content Technology Works), and the CTW case studies are on the web, so maybe that will be enough.

The rest of Tues afternoon, part 2

2004-11-30T17:47:00.000-06:00

(notes continued)

Bob Boiko says, in a discussion with the w3c guy:
Just because it's XML doesn't mean 2 docs will be interoperable ... and if 2 docs are already interoperable, it doesn't matter if they're XML or not

But then again, he didn't address the question of 2 docs that need to be interoperable now, even though they began life in non-interoperable formats.

My thought was, are these guys hooked into the library data preservation community? I haven't really been too far into the digital preservation issues, but my sense is that probably the library digital preservation people would have a contribution to this discussion.

Then, Bob Boiko had the opportunity to provide the diatribe he'd been waiting all day to give: basically, that the semantic web will be all about:

society
language
world view

in other words, getting people to agree on the ways and means of expressing ... and not ultimately about data format, transfer protocol, or the details of standards

In an audience Q/A, a question had to do with dealing with users (read: web authors) who are unable to separate the display of their content with the content itself. The answer was: don't even try. For people ("regular" people), the presentation of content is PART of the content. This is true for those who valiantly learned html in 1997 and still think part of making a web page is choosing font size 7 for a page headline. But it's also true for those whose authoring is just them writing copy and presenting it to an audience ... part of the communicative process is the display (as we well know), and, for these authors, separating the display-based communication from the word-based communication just is not part of their repertoire of expertise. ... which is fine ... everybody has a repertoire of expertise and no one's repertoire is anywhere close to comprehensive.

So, what we can do is "deliver semantic payload under the covers" ... that is, give authors a chance to feel as though they are controlling display, even though the design specialists are the ones who control the details of what that display is. And give them opportunities to preview their (content) creation in a context that is as real as possible so that they have what they need to evaluate the communicative effectiveness of what they have written.

And so ... we create CSS styles that are as much about semantics as they are are about layout, overall visual design, etc.

At the end of the session -- final thoughts from each of the panelists:

Bob Boiko went first: quoting a little ditty he attributed to some uncle or someone, that started with "nibble nibble little sheep". (I told you he was a hoot) Basically, he is saying, do whatever works and don't worry about it

Next was Tony (with no rhyming couplets, he apologized, explaining he's not that fast): keep it simple, don't be afraid to phase in, don't get sucked into an over-engineered, overly fine-grained solution to anything

Matt (the w3c guy) offered a haiku:
Less complexity
if you want people to read
x h t m l

Jon: "the network is the document"

Tuesday afternoon, part two

2004-11-30T14:44:00.000-06:00

This one is on the topic of document types :

"Open" Document Formats, XHTML vs. HTML, XSL vs. CSS & Other Industry Debates

Jon Udell, Lead Analyst, InfoWorld
Bob Boiko (see below)
Tony Byrne, Editor of CMSWatch, author of The CMS Report
Matt May, Web Accessibility Specialist, w3c

This conference has a nice approach to panels. Each speaker gets 3-5 minutes to make points, and then the floor is open for discussion and Q and A -- audience, panel members, everybody can talk. It's a good format.

European Union - WordML and Open Office's version of native XML

what about when an XML document flows through channels that are disconnected to its schema?
should we really have to worry about WordML, etc?
Do you need XML if you can create extremely disciplined XHTML? Or, rather, was is the point where disciplined XHTML is not enough?

This is a very interesting discussion ... no way I can keep up with notes on this..

"the gravity of the EU talking about this topic" -- the w3c guy says -- in the environment of the EU preparing its constitution., and there are all these issues of text, semantic markup, standards for data and documents. On one hand, with Word so ubiquitous, you have to deal with WordML in some way, but it's not right to just accept WordML as a standard simply because of ubiquity.

Tony Byrne is bringing the discussion back down to earth i think .... so far, it's been pretty abstract. Tony is saying, we can't forget that, no matter the format, it's going to be the document structure and metadata that will let the documents be long-lived, reusable, extensible, etc.

but, then the w3c guy is pointing out, if EU rejects all of WordML ... will there be some poor guy who has to go home to Microsoft Seattle and admit he lost the European MS Office contract ... ?

Tuesday Afternoon, part one

2004-11-30T13:02:00.000-06:00

This session is called "Implementing Content Management Systems - Next Steps" with some familiar faces on the panel. Ann Rockley and Bob Boiko, both of whom were speakers at the 2004 IA Summit, are there. The third person is Ben Martin, who I haven't heard of.

Ann Rockley says -- get presentation here (PDF)

XML is your friend
IA for the content authors / separate from IA for site visitors
Beware the content review cycle

Avoid unnecessarily multiple reviews
Make sure roles and workflows make sense
Don't let authors and reviewers get bogged down in minutiae

Content audit = an accounting of the information in your organization

what do we have
how much of it is there
how is the content used, reused, and delivered to various audiences
how can the content be unified -- how to create a unified content strategy?

Decide the structure of your content repository (beyond the file/folder structure)
First mistake is to choose a tool before you understand your requirements

Bob Boiko (who is a hoot) says:

A new edition of his book is coming out soon
what are good requirements?

important = things with "must" and "should"
durable
doable
just specific enough = with solid direction, but not so restrictive that you'll get into trouble

What sort of requirements?

the ones people give you = i.e., the stakeholders. however, they usually don't know. actually, you're lucky if they even have an idea of what content management is (and probably, they won't have a clue)
the ones you figure out yourself = when you get tired of people giving you crazy, un-doable ideas

because, people usually can't tell you what you need to know
they have their pet ideas, they have what maybe somebody "cool" told them
they give you opinions that may or may not be based in knowledge
the topics they will raise with you will be "hit and miss", often will be irrelevant, often will be contradictory

you still have to talk to people, but talk to them for the skeleton of what you need to know, don't expect them to give you everything you need to know

How do you fill in the blanks yourself?

what are the goals of the system? what are we trying to accomplish? how will we know we are successful?
who is the audience? (are the audiences)
what publication(s) is/are best for those goals and audiences? what content do those people need? what will communicate with them the most effectively?
what methods of transmission to these people want? web? handouts?
who will be supplying the content? (who are the authors -- what do those authors need? what goals to the authors have?)
what will the access method be? what is needed to make that method happen?
access structures means metadata and IA as well as delivery methods

The detailed requirements process -- collect the requirements, manage the requirements, publish the requirements

Documentation .... don't neglect this step. it's how you will communicate to your stakeholders

Understand the expertise of your authors

technical expertise (or not)
content expertise (if not, you're in trouble)

Map requirements to features

Ben Martin, of Industrial Wisdom, LLC, ex of JD Edwards, says in "Multilingual Content Management: Taming of the Shrew" -- get presentation here (PDF)

"shrew" -- in the sense of the animal that is so voracious that it will eventually eat itself rather than starve to death
the web is not a US, English speaking entity any more

Ben Martin really is talking to people whose sites are global, where localization is an issue. This is not our situation -- some would say that as a library at a US university (where to get admitted you need to exceed a minimum TOEFL score) that we should not be in a position to even consider issues related to multilinguality, localization, etc.

However, I believe that we can't forget that a sizeable portion of our audience is a member of that non-US, non-native English speaking, community. We might not offer translated, localized sites, but awareness of what will and will not communicate to that non-US, non-native English speaking community is something we have to have.

"Translation memories" .. a database that holds phrasal level translations
"Up chunking" .. dividing up your content into chunks, so that it can be reused, repurposed, and served up again in different contexts, formats, etc

Basically though:

Tame the source
Tame the change process
Integrate translation processes
Centralize, but allow flexibility to allow for localization needs

2004-11-30T12:03:00.000-06:00

One of the panelists in the opening session was a financial analyst/Wall Street guy who specializes in CMS and IT companies. He thinks that this is the time for CMSs. Apparently, content management is now being seen as the place where companies can grow their business (I suppose, since other areas are tapped out?). But, he also is looking at the fact that Oracle, IBM and Microsoft are entering the CMS space as indicators that CMS is where those 3 think they can make some money.

Anyway, this is the middle of the 2 hour lunch break. The breaks are long -- the morning one was an hour -- so we have all this free time to get hit up by the vendors.

There are about 250 or so attendees at this conference, best I can guess. Maybe 30 or so vendors. Here's the exhibitor list.

Notes, cont.

2004-11-30T10:49:00.000-06:00

Content migration is one of the biggest costs, and one of the most underestimated
Metadata management -- another area where, typically "they all fall down"
ROI estimates with respect to web content management are not to be believed

Conference Presentations

2004-11-30T10:47:00.000-06:00

Conference presentations are here

More notes

2004-11-30T10:40:00.000-06:00

On organizations:

Your organization is dysfunctional. A CMS will not fix that.
Are you unable to manage your current web site? If so, what makes you think you'll be able to manage a CMS implementation? (if you have non-content issues, a CMS will not fix them)
You have to have the ownership, responsibility, communication chains among web content producers before you can implement a CMS
You have to reconcile a good workflow/business process and one that will actually work in the real world.
The only "best of breed" software is the one that matches your organization

Items from this morning

2004-11-30T10:08:00.000-06:00

This morning's presentations included:

Lisa Welchman -- get presentation here (PDF)
Mary Lee Kennedy -- get presentation here (PDF)

=============

Other things from this morning:

1. Imagining that it's possible to implement any Enterprise solution (e.g., WebLogic, ContentServer, etc.) without using professional services is living in a fantasy land. Apparently, the correct budget strategy is to expect to spend at least 50% of the price of the software on the vendor's professional services.

("Professional services" means buying consulting from the vendor to get their software to work the way you want it to)

2. "Enterprise Content Management" is a myth. There are no integrated content management systems. Documentum is supposed to be farther ahead with integrationg, but it's not there yet either.

Rather, if there is anything like ECM, then it should be viewed as a vision, or as a purchasing strategy. Not as a software solution.

3. "Multi-channel communication" -- we need to think about web content from the point of view of information consumption, not information delivery. We need to consider this also in the context of nomadicity - (PDF - 61 KB)

4. Trends in how people work -- currently, about 50% of workers list collaboration as a primary mode of working. The projection is that a year from now, 60+ % of workers will describe their mode of working as collaborative.

It may not be our job as a library to *promote* this, but we must be in a position to enable collaboration and accommodate nomadicity.

Westin Copley Place

2004-11-30T10:05:00.000-06:00

the venue is a really nice hotel by the way.... too bad it's not affordable if you're not attending a conference !

From the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies

2004-11-30T09:54:00.000-06:00

The second session of the day is about to start, so for now, just a word

twice this morning in the opening keynote (more a panel than a keynote), two different people used the "L" word

according to those analysts of trends in the content management space, the future is in Information Architects and Librarians (or at least, those with "librarian skills" as they termed it)

and this audience is not IAs or librarians. I am amazed.