connecting*the*dots

Randi Rhodes laying the smackdown on Janet Parshall, October 7th, live on C-Span…

… me jamming on a mini-design project…

…which is now preserved in time as another Monday morning vessel of a pick me up.

(via blather)

Update: If it isn’t clear from the title of the post, this is from the October issue of The Nation, titled "Perp Walk" by Joe Wezorek of American Leftist

what?
you don’t know how to step?
no, not omega, man…
walk tall.
walk straight.
walk proud.
nothing half-baked,
straight up into the crowd.
in comes the left
to cushion the drop of the right
put it back down…
bang!
the gavels brings on the sound
of purpose
of confliction
of ceremony
of wealth
an intelligently evolved design
kansas has nothing on this stealth
y
means of operation
man, it’s twisted beyond belief
you got corrupt politicians
doing their shit live on cable TV!
so while heads drop accapella type shit
with no delay
i’ll drop gangster type shit
like tom delay
there are…
two sides to a coin
the same flip property on a bill
how you think this shit keeps spinning?
how you think they get up on top of that hill?
drilling deep for your consciousness
stepping through your field of vision
handing out my flyers
of truth be told derision
left and right
price the hike
shit
stand to the side
i’ll rock the mic
like
when i go to sleep i know where my head is at
like
when i lay down for good i’ll know that i gave it back
like
when i walk down the street i know you don’t know my name
like
when i was a child i lived for the dearth of fame
like
politics is a sport, a vice, a betting man’s game
like
i gotta put this shit to bed as my girl puts this shit to shame
hold these fucks accountable
get your congressman to know your name

So I tried out Google Reader today after reading of its demo at the Web 2.0 conference (another event where I refuse to drop $3,000). If Google truly believes that Reader is 2.0 because it has a bunch of superfluous Ajax, well, they’re spot on. It probably won best in show.

Now, in terms of using/sharing data across a collaborative Web 2.0 network, they’re still playing by proprietary rules. RSS, by definition, covers the using part of the recipricle data equation. As for sharing?

Why can’t I blog a feed directly through my blog tool of choice? (as with flickr) Yes, I know Google owns Blogger, but opting to proceed with a business decision (to close the gates), instead of running with a user need (to keep them open), says a bunch about the Google temperament. Similarly, the goal of sharing feeds via email is a closed venture as well, with that task relegated to Gmail. This isn’t a personal complaint, I use Gmail, but this is a Web 2.0 critique of the application. Where are the open hooks? Where are my choices? Where is the metaphor to my personal, home network?

Google Reader fits the Web 2.0 mold only in that it is a product that leverages other smart aspects of its own network. Presenting a varied use of features from search and Gmail in the user experience (e.g. filters and labeling) doesn’t project Reader over the Google wall and into the world of Web 2.0. Iterating a domain with progressive, interoperable features isn’t 2.0; it’s really good 1.0.

To borrow a term from peterme, Google is still playing within their own sandbox.

UPDATE: It looks like at least a few other people agree with this review. I think the rest have imbibed the “forever beta” Kool-Aid.

UPDATE II: Let me make my position of labeling clear. Assigning attributes, in any file management system, is absolutely the way to go moving forward. The old school, developer-centric, folder-in-a-folder paradigm is completely backwards if the system has a search engine that can properly retrieve and presents object attribute tags. Google’s overall implementation of labeling is very forward thinking, but managing the same degree of a personal label universe found in a flickr or del.icio.us is an interface challenge that hasn’t been tackled in this alpha-beta release.

Al Gore is not fucking around.

Gore’s latest venture has him stepping up to the plate with an innovative approach to changing the stagnant nature of civil discourse in America… and he’s doing it by swinging for the fences and at the establishment. Here are a few quotes from his keynote address at The Media Center’s We Media Conference:

"I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled ‘marketplace of ideas’ now functions."
…

"The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the World Wide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.

We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy’s future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom."

Did Al "My Wife Wants To Censor Hip-Hop" Gore just come within a few words of quoting Malcolm X, not to mention one of the most revered hip-hop albums of all-time? Take a few moments and dig through his speech. It’s completely laced with philosophical principles espoused by Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent, the propaganda model, etc.). Good old Noam can’t get even get on public access in America. With his political power behind him, Al Gore is coming correct.

What’s going on? Well, Current TV (Gore’s new venture) is going to try to change the way people watch TV; they’re going to make them get off the couch. Take this quote from the Newsweek article, "Do-It-Yourself News" as a glimpse at their approach:

"The network’s broadcasting approach takes heavy cues from the emerging world of Internet news, eschewing traditional half-hour broadcasts in favor of two- to seven-minute "pods"—short-subject features submitted, in many cases, by Current’s own viewers through a screening process on the network’s Web site. Programmers maintain that the jarring subject jumps—from street violence in California one moment to street performers in Colombia the next—allow the network to cover the broad scope of world news. Interspersed amid these features are brief headline roundups from Google News."

Web 2.0 begins to describe the concept, but you have to throw in some Convergence 2.0 for good measure. This goes way beyond my call for Google and Yahoo! News to index blogs alongside traditional news publishers (even though I still think that is an imperative next version).

While the majority of Americans will probably surf this channel like any other, a concentrated group of early adopters will dive into this interaction model and extend the concept even further. Of course, only 20M people have access to the channel and I’m not one of them.

Did I say something about looking at a skyline from afar?

(Gore speech via Hip Hop Blogs)

Two days ago, Bill O’Reilly ran a 10 minute segment dedicated entirely to blasting Media Matters for America for "making stuff up about me… everyday of my life." And in order to validate his position, he stoops to pulling a bait and switch on David Klein to passively defend his position.

No class. None.

Well, apparently on the very same day, O’Reilly moved over to the radio mic and delivered his perspective on slavery, making the case that the Irish flight in the 19th century was the equivalent to the capturing, shipping and selling of African slaves.

Now, I’m a proud 25% Irish and happen to know this particular aspect of the history of our struggle. Beyond a shadow of doubt, O’Reilly is way off base.

The Potato Famine of 1846 - 1850 was horrible on numerous levels. In a nutshell, when the potato crops (which were the Irish peasants only form of food, barter and payment) became diseased and non-edible, absentee British landlords who owned most of the Irish land took advantage of the situation by running the tenant population out of house and home, driving many into starvation or to cargo ships heading to the New World, all in order to establish eminent domain in a foreign land.

2 million Irish men, women and children died — about 25% of the total population.

For the Irish who decided to undertake the many month-long trek to America on huge cargo ships, they fought disease, rape, murder and famine in the bowels of the vessels for the chance to make a new life in the new world. Upon landing in New York City, they were treated terribly by the established ethnic groups, beginning their uphill battle for a place in society, though already numerous steps ahead of generations of African slaves.

There’s a terribly beautiful and moving monument to this injustice and struggle located in Battery Park, Manhattan called the Irish Hunger Memorial. And if you want to read a stirring blow by blow account of the Irish potato famine, pick up a book called, “Paddy’s Lament, Ireland 1846 - 1847: Prelude to Hatred.”

While the book will open your eyes, it cannot excuse O’Reilly for his historically inaccurate portrayal of African slavery in this country.

As terrible as the circumstances surrounding the potato famine were, the Irish fled to America; bringing our names, our history and our culture along for the perilous ride.

Irish immigrants supported new arrivals of family with earned money, helping pay for their escape from the clutches of mother nature and British rule.

Africans, on the other hand, were dragged out of their villages by colluding terrorist states such as the Portuguese and the Dutch (two other parts of my ethnic DNA) and sold into slavery as a possession — like cattle — in The New World (Order). They lost their religion, their customs and their namesakes.

There is no comparison.

So I guess congratulations is in order, Bill. You poked your historically inaccurate paws into the bee-hive of Media Matters and then smeared their honey all over your face… all in the same day.

And you wonder why you get stung?

Chump.

This post was meant to see the light of day a few days ago, but in the process of researching, I became completely caught up in some of the ideas surrounding shared data and a micro/macro analysis by using flickr’s blog interface. The damn thing sucked me in and I ended up with another Web 2.0 thread all together.

In this post, I’m going to pull back a bit to refocus on some of the meanings behind the term Web 2.0, touching upon aspects of the meme that have driven it to a certain tipping point within the web development community. And no, that doesn’t mean everyone is on board — as dedicated professionals are either embracing the moniker or slapping it down as a marketing gimmick — but one can’t deny the lexicon has begun to reach the mainstream business world.

The Way We Were

Each year, over the past 10 years or so, the internet has progressively behaved less like a mass of disparate domains — hooked into each other via simple hyperlinks — and more like a functioning network. If you can’t remember 10 years back, 1996 was practically the McCarthy era of the web. There was a good chance you’d be sued if your web site linked to a corporate site without permission. Seriously.

The behavior of the web as a macro entity wasn’t very smart as well. It essentially stagnated as an enabler for people (including developers) to interact (publish, reuse, etc.) with individual sites. The two-way web was there on paper, but an infrastructure forged across a critical mass of domains had yet to be accomplished.

Then along came Amazon, blowing the roof off of e-commerce by implementing collaborative filtering. Skip over a few other ingenious domains and Google completely changed the definition of information retrieval within both its own domain and others. The IQ of the web jumped as its big players became smarter, but across a majority of domains, the web was still more of a parking garage for individual vehicles, with individual owners and drivers. Carpooling hadn’t begun yet.

The Definition Of A Smart Web

Take my home office network as an example. Each day I easily share data between three machines in order to accomplish a multitude of different goals and a subset of numerous tasks. If I’m using my PC and want to alter an image found on my PowerBook, I simply use Photoshop on my PC to grab the data from across the network, manipulate the image and save it back to its original location. I perform similar operations when marking up HTML and CSS on my PowerBook, then hopping on a browser on my PC to view the data in a rendered form.

This is my personal realm of shared data; a collaborative, transparent, usable space called a network. It stitches together my various personal computers, allowing my software to access data openly and freely. The label isn’t fancy, because the concept is finite and comprehensible. I own everything, from the hardware to the software to the authentications allowing access throughout. I am the network.

I Am Not The Web… Yet

A transition to a user-centered web will only occur once we, the web development community, take the well established premise of a finite network and extrapolate its underlying philosophies of connectivity, transparency and usefulness across a potentially unlimited amount of “networked” domains — each with varying business objectives and often at best, a subjective understanding of user goals and tasks.

In doing so, the rationale for the 2.0 label will start to become clear, as we’re dealing with an enormous number of variables in a potentially limitless value equation.

We’re living in an entrepreneur’s dream world.

Web 2.0 is a useful moniker to latch onto. Without a set of guiding principles, progressive domains that eat, sleep and breath collaborative, transparent and useful user experiences might end up functioning within a bubble, as opposed to influencing the adoption of industry-wide hooks of shared data by less insightful domains.

As Amazon and Google previously raised the bar in the late 90’s and challenged their competition to innovate or fold, this philosophical approach is a rallying cry for the entire industry.

The Micro/Macro Example

I’m going to stick with my current favorite example from around the web. A subset of interface features on flickr reads like this:

• the ability to share images
• the ability to tag images with (potentially) common identifiers
• the ability to view other people’s images through contextual navigation of tags
• the ability to comment on anyone’s image
• the ability to save a shared set of favorites
• the ability to leave notes on images themselves
• the ability to quickly create a blog post of an image

Each of these features within the flickr domain could be studied to find analogous patterns from the macro arena around the web (e.g. posting images is the equivalent to publishing a podcast), but by focusing on one feature, user commenting, we can blow out the possibilities for usefulness across a Web 2.0 environment.

While commenting isn’t unique per se, flickr does provide a commenting feature that is very useful. In order to help a user keep up with discourse surrounding their posts, flickr provides a “Recent Activity” screen, which not only presents user comments in context to the images, but notifies you when your image was added as someone else’s favorite. There’s also an elegantly designed page which documents the history of comments that you’ve made across the domain. flickr makes this so easy to track, they even provide an RSS feed for peripheral awareness.

Now take this concept from the micro space of flickr and extrapolate it across the macro space of the web and you have the means to track numerous conversations you’ve either started or joined over n period of time. Blogpulse has a similar interface with its Conversation Tracker, but that relates more to trackbacks and the movement of a topical conversation across posts. Interesting, but not personally interesting.

The captivating aspect of the localized, recent activity screen from flickr is through the exposure of an involved conversation, not an uninvolved and evolving perspective.

The image above is a quick sketch of how I perceive the web around me as I open my browser. There are applications that I use to stay connected and informed, a small, somewhat rotating, network of sites that I consider to be daily reads and an infinite universe of daily new finds.

I add to the discourse of the latter two types of sites on a somewhat daily basis. When flickr was without the recent activity feature, I was never able to remember what images I previously commented on, so in turn, my participation level was much less. With the feature, I comment much more often, as the connection between me and other people’s information objects is now tangible.

Now, apply that same concept to the web. What would a recent activity interface centered on your comments from around the web do for your continued contribution to public discourse?

This is only one idea for how the concepts behind the Web 2.0 meme can change the way we look at the web, moving from a centralized group of branded domains to a functional network of decentralized, shared data, information and applications.

What are some of your ideas?

Yesterday on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly invited two guests onto his program to whine about being held accountable by watchdog web sites for the things he says on-air. Number one on his “smear list” is Media Matters for America.

Personally speaking, I couldn’t have been more delighted.

You see, I’m in the midst of finishing up my part as the information architect on the next version of the mediamatters.org web site. When the site launches, it’ll be even easier for Joe Q. Public to provide media misinformation tips to the Media Matters analysts. The information retrieval system will be advanced as well, improving direct navigation and contextual browsing to topical items of interest. All in all, it’ll be a more educational, interactive and intuitive user experience.

Media Matters for America has a noble charge; to frame conservative misinformation as it occurs within any aspect of the American media ecosystem. Bill O’Reilly should be scared… as should Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and the entire mainstream media establishment. Media Matters is not about smearing, they’re about accountability.

If you don’t report the facts, Media Matters will point you out.
If you present a racist or immoral opinion, Media Matters will expose you.

The American press is supposed to operate out of principles of integrity and ethics, serving as the fourth estate, the public check and balance of government. That isn’t happening, as the media ecosystem has turned for the worse, pimping information for advertising dollars. So Media Matters, and thousands of blogs, now have a role in contextualizing the reported news, providing perspective and keeping the paid professionals in check.

If the American news machine actually cared more about exposing the truth of a story, and not constructing their format around an advertising model — placing a burden on editors to choose between the news and fact checked news — Media Matters wouldn’t exist.

So put on your seatbelt, Billy Boy. If you don’t stop spewing misinformation from a projected position of news, your rough ride is going to continue to get worse.

UPDATE: It turns out that O’Reilly and his producer goons baited David Kline to come on to discuss political blogging in general, and then switched format midstream to whine about Media Matters. Typical O’Reilly. Well, I’m sure Media Matters will thank him for the unpaid advertising. I would’ve thought that FOX learned their Marketing 101 lesson after hitting Al Franken up with a lawsuit. I guess not.

… what would we call this incarnation other than 2.0?

About 10 minutes ago, I was in the midst of creating a post about Web 2.0 and how its principles can be viewed from both a macro and micro perspective when I paused briefly to research a few of the features within flickr to help illustrate my point. Lo and behold, I immediately trip right over a classic example.

This particular post was created via the "Blog this photo" feature in flickr, which interfaces with TypePad (my blogging tool), enabling me to easily share data and information while in the context of my current mental model: exploring photographs.

Web 2.0 Yellow Pages Case Study
Originally uploaded by spcoon.

I was reviewing my “Creating Humane Experiences” presentation image on flickr, and I switched right to blogging the image itself. How dope is that?

Before you shout out “super dope!” check out the feature for yourself and try to imagine which missing interface requirements would’ve make this feature even more “2.0″ dope. I’ve got one, modeled after the persona of a seasoned blogger (me):

How about a TypePad API which allows flickr to display my TypePad list of categories (tags) within its branded interface, providing me with the ability to tag my flickr generated post with one or many of my universe of tags and the ability to create new tags and add them to my current tag universe?

The decision to implement such a feature would be an even more concise example of domains working together to satisfy user goals and tasks. Interaction design 101, yet modeled across multiple domains and stakeholders. Without this tag feature, I had to jump over to TypePad to assign the tags separately, which greatly reduced the usefulness of the flickr blog feature for me, the potential, archetypal blogger.

If these domains were both open source, and if I weren’t so technically challenged, I guess I’d be able to whip up some code to make this feature a reality. Yet as much as I buy into that philosophy, that shouldn’t impede flickr from doing their due diligence in putting out the most useful and usable product, first and foremost. Yes, I know, flickr is in quintessential beta mode (another 2.0 principle) and will probably iterate to include the communication of tag libraries across both domains, but this example of a partially useful feature is why user research is so important when modeling the scenarios for useful experiences. Agile development and interaction design can live hand in hand.

Another example of cross-domain, data sharing needs can be found within Yahoo! 360. Most bloggers like having their own branded domain, so why not follow flickr’s footsteps in accessing any number of blog tools topost in the user’s own domain? Similarly, why not allow a member to access their blog feed from 360’s "Make your own blog page," instead of having to use the "Share feeds" area on the main 360 page to present their blog?

As a blogger, I appreciate RSS, but don’t make me retrofit my "blog" into a ill-labeled feed box in my own Yahoo!  360 environment, leaving the blog area unused. That says to me, "use our blog service or screw off." While Yahoo!, the behemoth corporation, has their finger on the pulse of the web, this particular approach is not very 2.0.

As for the viral aspect of Web 2.0, if you follow the top image to flickr and click the link within the description area, you’ll fall ever deeper into the rabbit hole of the Web 2.0 conversation. flickr provided the features for tagging personal photographs and creating HTML laden image descriptions; users extended that context scenario by leveraging the existing interface to accomplish other goals—in my case, the unabashed promotion of a user experience presentation.

Enjoy!