Thanks to Brady Forrest and Jen Pahilka for giving me not one but two slots this week in a high caliber lineup. It was awesome to meet and talk to so many folks in just a few days (talking to people is always where the value is). (Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson).

Its been awhile since I’ve been to a big tech conference around a singular theme (web 2.0) during its rise. To see both the promise and the hype swirling around together made for a fun couple of days. Walking the expo floor, where vendors and companies demo and pitch for your pleasure, gave me flashbacks to Internet World in ‘96 and ‘97. Back then, there were a zillion “push technology” companies, services and products. Now it’s “social media” or “web 2.0″, with a zillion companies all throwing the same jargon around and mostly failing to distinguish themselves from one another.

There are certainly good ideas in the mix, and I think Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky’s opening keynotes did more than any company I saw to speak for those ideas, or even attempt to describe what substance might surface from all the technology, energy and money bouncing around.

The problem for me is how infrequently people investing their lives making these things can describe how, at the end of the day, all of the potential described gets transfered into value. Or why the value provided is worth the risks and costs of using whatever they are selling (register for this, buy that, use this, etc.) It’s not a complex question, but it is the primary one I’m sure many attendees were asking: how much substance and takeaways can I fish out of the buzz?

I wasn’t surprised, but I didn’t hear anyone mention how many amazing things are made, in 2008, by organizations with little interest in web 2.0 concepts - namely Apple, Toyota, your favorite film director, or your favorite music band. Not to mention all of the great amazing things the world produced before 1994 (the year the web, even in 1.0 form, was born). That’s not to say this alone proves anything - my point is only this: it is possible to achieve amazing things, without . Thriving communities, tribes, and cultures have existed for ages. If its possible to do well without whatever the new secret sauce is, it suggests there’s an underlying element that’s not being talked about. I’m convinced there is a more refined explanation for what people might gain from buying what the expo vendors are selling, but very few people seemed capable of even suggestion one.

The unspoken nugget / explanation / marketing line that might get me jazzed is this:

We have always been collaborative. Always been social. It’s in our genes and it’s what we have evolved to do well. Good technologies enhance our natural abilities, give us useful artificial ones, and help us to get more of what we want from life. Web 2.0 and social media make the process of collaboration and developing relationships more fun, efficient, powerful and meaningful.

Ok. Now we’re talking. With a statement like this I can walk the halls of the expo, or converse with the greatest web 2.0 pundit, and have a straight conversation. Will this get me more of what I want from life? More of what my customers want from me, or vice-versa? I can make tangible arguments about what I want or my customers need and sort some decisions out. But note that the statement above is devoid of hyperbole like revolution, ground breaking, disruptive or transformative, things that are entirely subjective. If you identify a real problem well enough, you never need those words: the people who have those problems will naturally find what you do revolutionary if you really solve their problems.

Ok, enough industry talk. Here’s some shop talk for anyone that saw me speak: I’d give my performance at my innovation workshop a B and the keynote a C+. The keynote was mostly new material and, surprise, I never found my rhythm. I gave it my best but it wasn’t a great 10 minutes. The other funny thing is that the tech crew warned me the remote doesn’t go backwards - it’s kamikaze style - a warning I shrugged off as I couldn’t imagine in a ten minute talk needing to go backwards. Well, guess what, I did. I could have asked them to go back if I’d wanted but didn’t, it wouldn’t have saved my performance anyway :)

Workshop slides here: How to Innovate on Time

Posted in On Tour, Software/Web development, Web 2.0 / social software | 4 Comments »

Check out isolatr. Currently in public beta. Everything you need to know can be found here.

Posted in Web 2.0 / social software, humor | 2 Comments »

I don’t write about it often but I’m a huge film fan. For awhile now I’ve known about the works at Overcast Media, but they’ve been in stealth mode, under the radar.

Finally, with this coverage by the Seattle Times, I’m free to tell you: If you’ve ever wanted to create your own DVD commentary, or make commentaries for TV shows or other media, you’re in for a pleasant surprise.

Roger Ebert and others have talked about this idea for years, and finally it looks like someone is making it happen.

Their new beta release is invite only - but you can sign up for an invitation right now.

(Disclosure: Richard Stoakley, Overcast Media’s CEO, is an old friend. He had the office across the hall from mine at Microsoft on the Internet Explorer team, circa 1997)

Posted in Innovation, Web 2.0 / social software | 1 Comment »

FOO Camp saw the power combo of two different social software technologies: Crowdvine, a linked-in type system for pre & post conference connection making, and pathable (which I first saw at Bizjam) for guiding people in finding folks to meet.

Here’s a short review:

It works and its fun. Bravo! The premise is simple: weeks before the event log in, list some tags, and ping people you might know attending the event. It’s easy to find people who share your interests (via tags), read their bios, and ping them if you so desire. There’s a comment system so you can leave notes which was surprisingly active, and public: going to the home page for the site shows all activity, from blog posts made by an individual, to comments sent or received. Anyone can jump in on the threads which was interesting (and I wondered if it’d work for a 500 or 1000 person conference).

At a minimum crowdvine helped me match faces to names before the event which is a big deal for networking or meeting specific people. And it was voluntary - had I been annoyed or less social, I didn’t have to participate at all.

Pathable provided the event badges, fueled by their social matching system - based on tags and other magic they grouped individuals by interest (represented by the color of each badge and the color of the crowdvine profile, see photo above) and created the surprisingly popular matches/opposites lists for every person.

Much like at bizjam, the badges got people talking. It made introducing people to each other much easier as being someone’s opposite or match was an easy way to start a conversation.

Gripes:

Only problems were mild integration issues. There was a wiki for FOO that didn’t integrate with anything else, a photo wall, with tagish Q&A, at FOO that had different photos for people than crowdvine, little things like that that I’m not sure need to be fixed. Someone needs to do a user experience analysis on how many different places and systems ask for personal/social info and check that any redundancies are useful or fun in some way.

After the event I noticed it was possible for me to track what sessions I’d been to in Crowdvine, but wasn’t sure why it was worth the time - perhaps to follow up with people I’d met but didn’t grab their contact info? Not sure.

Summary:

Not sure how much these folks charge, but smart conference organizers should be hiring these folks. Conferences talk the talk about connecting people and building networks, but rarely do anything to facilitate it. Crowdvine and pathable are real tools to help make that stuff happen.

Posted in Teaching/Training, Web 2.0 / social software | 6 Comments »

I experienced an innovation doubleheader last week. First, the inaugural Bizjam event in Seattle, where several hundred independents got together to learn and network, jam and mingle. First conference I’d ever seen aimed at this crowd and it went really well - Kudos to Dan, Lara and all the biznik folks.

But one particular bit of cleverness was their hiring of WaggleLabs to create custom conference badges using their Pathable system.

Now mind you, I hate conference badges. They make me feel like a 12 year old in a self-help group, and they’re often so big, ugly and annoying to wear that I often hide them in my pocket - Really, I can introduce myself and meet people without them. But this was new, fun, easy and it worked. Here’s the rundown:

1. Fill out a short form. Could do this online before or at the event. Took about 3 minutes.
2. Pick up the badge. This took another minute or so.
3. Talk to people about their badges. Each badge lists tags, and two groupings: people you have high affinity (Most similar), and low affinity with (Most opposite), based on your answers.

The effect was obvious: it gave everyone something easy to talk about, even if just to compare colors, or to ask people if they knew any of the people on your list.

They had a projector up in one hall listing all of the groupings the colors represented, and I had several conversations with people about that alone.

Posted in Innovation, Teaching/Training, Web 2.0 / social software | 4 Comments »

Much of the current web 2.0 vibe was born by the folks who started the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL (first online community), and Wired magazine.

Well, here in this panel interview are the founders of all three: Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, and Howard Rheingold, talking about how it started, why they did what they did, and what they think of where we are today.

80 minutes long in Realvideo format. Skip to ~15 minutes in to bypass the various intros.

Posted in Innovation, Web 2.0 / social software | No Comments »

Rather than torture y’all with my first foray into liveblogging, I’m writing live comments, insights, and brlliant notes on each and every session.

Check it out here: Ideaconference blog.

Tags: idea2006

Posted in Design, On Tour, Web 2.0 / social software, architecture (real) | No Comments »

Back at the Emerging technology conference I presented a quick and dirty makeover of several popular web 2.0 sites and UI idioms (See slides for my talk: data vs. design). The fun and much loved Del.icio.us was one and here’s a makeover recap.

Step 1. The popular page

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site, and the /popular page shows which bookmarks in the del.icio.us system are most popular - but the layout uses open flow, blue on pink text (eek), and sloppy columns which all contribute to making the page hard to scan.

Step 2. Make a grid

The most basic layout trick in the world is the grid - throw down some columns and check how the stuff in the design lines up. The more things that don’t line up, the more work people’s eyes have to do. In this first photo, look at how the del.icio.us design compares against a simple 3 column layout. Not well.

In the next screen I’ve marked every visual column that the existing layout creates - each one of these lines is a point in horizontal space people’s eyes are forced to track to each time they try to read the next line - that’s a lot of wasted energy (and time).

Step 3. First pass

As a first pass, I’ve aligned all text into 3 columns. I killed the blue on pink, switching to black. I’ve also trimmed all the extra text from the pink brick, trimming its size by half.

Step 4. Second pass

After 15 minutes of experimentation, I was able to pull the data down into two complete, easily scannable columns. I brough back slim color bricks, but forced them into three buckets (light pink = low, pink = medium, intense pink= high) as that’s enough to indicate how popular they are, but keeping them easily distinguishable (And yes, there are better color choices to go with blue/black but I’m lazy in no-frills makeovers).

Step 5. Side by side comparison

Here are the two designs side by side, original on left and my quick makeover on right. My makeover fits more data into the same space, is faster to scan, easier to read, and slightly more attractive. It’s both easier to scan titles and which items are most popular.

Summary

• If you’re a data centric site, be fast, clean and lean.
• Use a grid or basic columns to frame the layout, and speed user eye movement.
• Trim extra text - especially if you’re repeating things every line.
• Use colors to signify and speed understanding, grouping data together (high / medium / low) to speed comprehension.
• (And yes I cheated in some screenshots as the examples don’t match perfectly - but you got the idea, didn’t you?)

What’s next?

Have a popular site you’d like me to throw some design mojo at? Name it.

Posted in Design, Web 2.0 / social software | 5 Comments »

I’ll be speaking at E-tech in San Diego on Data vs. Design: UI design in a Web 2.0 world. I’ve never been to e-tech before, but it’ s largely about new ideas, entrepreneurship and what’s coming next. Should be fun.

Let me know if you’ll be there.

Posted in Design, On Tour, Web 2.0 / social software | No Comments »

Here’s a good short essay about lessons learned from the founder of blink, a 1999 social bookmarking effort.

This really shouldn’t sound too different from what del.ico.us was able to do, and we had something like $13 million to play with to make it happen. Not to mention that there were others with the same idea. Remember Backflip? So (besides the money), why did we fail and del.ico.us and the other Web 2.0 companies succeed?

Kudos to Ari for being honest and open about lessons learned on design, business and timing. Wish there was more of this kind of thing.

Posted in Design, Management, Software/Web development, Web 2.0 / social software | 3 Comments »

News.com has a special issue on the latest generation gap and how differently the current generation of 7-12 year olds uses the Internet. It’s a bit fluffy and positive, sort of like a Time magazine article, but it does quickly hit key points, with some supporting data and commentary.

A recent study from Pew Internet and American Life found that more than half of all teens online–12 million kids–create original material for the Web, whether it’s through a blog, home page or school Web site, with original artwork, photos or video. A large portion of that active group also will creatively “remix” other material from the Web to create something unique.

Taking back the web ( A news.com special report).

But the articles don’t ask questions about about the risks or downsides of these trends. For example:

• In the data sited above: what percentage of all kids are online?
• What about in other countries? Are “the millenials” a U.S. phenomenon? What about Europe and the Far East? ( South Korea is apparently light years ahead)
• Do other (and better) education systems approach/guide youth Internet usage differently?
• Does the amount of time spent online (and on their asses) correlate with youth obesity trends in the U.S (30% of 6-11 year olds overweight, 15% (1 in 7!) obese)?
• The mashup culture is being led by people much older than millenials - why? Which of the trends mentioned are isolated to 6-12 year olds, and which ones cut across age groups (even if only by early-adopters and tech enthusiasts)?

Posted in Web 2.0 / social software | 2 Comments »

It’s hard to find information on web 2.0 that isn’t highly polarized or self-serving. One great resource, currently my favorite, is programmableweb.com. Unlike other sources John Musser, the industry veteran running the site, reports on what’s happening with a focus on what’s being built rather than what’s being said. His references page is the best one stop shop I know for people playing catchup (or are trapped in acronym hell) and his mashup list will keep you occupied for hours. Highly recommended.

Also of note: The Web 2.0 working group.

Posted in Web 2.0 / social software | No Comments »