connecting*the*dots

Actually, Ofoto was purchased by Kodak a while back, so I guess I’m just being a Web 1.0 romantic. Either way, flickr’s recent announcement of printing capabilities — including partnerships with QOOP (coffee table books and posters), Englaze (photo DVD’s) and Zazzle (customized photo stamps)—just launched them (Yahoo!) straight into the forefront of Web 2.0 business models. The Long Tail possibilities with this service is almost endless.

I had always wondered how an open format like flickr would be able to provide hard prints outside of *your photos* from a legal perspective, but with a simple printing preference setting (the same type of setting you use to make your photos private or public in the first place), to a non-lawyer’s naked eye, it seems like that sticky issue is solved. Of course, you can always still download other people’s “protected” photos, upload them as private images and print them from your set of photos, but that’s true across the web — CafePress provides even more copyright infringement possibilities. I just ran that exact scenario on a photo that I wanted as a poster, but I only did so because it had a “Some Rights Reserved” Creative Commons license attached to it. I’m sure the guy will add a print preference to his images that matches his CC license one of these days.

As for the user experience, the QOOP interface uses interaction elements from both flickr and Yahoo! (great collaboration between teams), making it really easy to use. I had a bit of a problem when I tried to create a poster with multiple images, as the preview seemed to randomly choose which images to use from my selected images, but I’m sure that functionality will be tweaked soon enough as it’s (all together now) in forever beta mode! My only complaint of the service is that the QOOP and flickr logo (above) is automatically appended to the bottom of the poster. Branding an automobile is one thing, branding a poster is a bit tacky.

All in all, it’s some really nice work from Stuart Butterfield and team. I’m eagerly looking forward to more print customization features in the near future.

By simply enabling blog search results from a search query in the Yahoo! News interface, Yahoo! has moved leaps and bounds into the world of Web 2.0. And they didn’t even have to implement a "shiny" Ajax application.

Yahoo! exposed the common man’s opinion and perspective to the common man. How much more people-centric could this move be? First Technorati gets into the article level of closed environments like Newsweek and bubbles up the voice of bloggers. Now Yahoo! jumps up a level in a person’s mental model for searching and brings blog results back before getting to the article level.

I feel like I’m watching one of those amazing scenes in the Godfather, where a bunch of hits are carried out to a violin solo, while yet another Corleone is being baptized.

Chills down my spine good.

As an aside, I do think I need to call up my friends over in Sunnyvale. I got pretty righteous about the need for this feature while I was conversing with the Yahoo! design and product teams this past June… In any event, I just hope the community keeps this type of forward-thinking user experience design in motion, specifically as it relates to the needs of people (not users).

Man, online discourse is about to get really interesting.

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)

For all of the advances our world has made over the past 200 years — from the industrial revolution to the digital revolution — human beings still can’t seem to work together within a world stitched together by sovereign nations… unless there’s a dollar figure attached to the cause.

The reality is that the world is stitched together by corporations — legal representations of people.

Our government, depending on its leadership at any given time, swings from balancing business and human interests while creating a positive difference in the world to leaning hard on the side of business, capitalism and next-day profits — running full stream ahead with Gordon Gecko’s “Greed is good” philosophy.

Because in our society, public officials — from a local mayor to the President — can jockey back and forth between the public and private sectors, corruption has a chance to take hold and dictate policy decisions that affect the entire globe.

After all, we are the super-power of the world; as we cough, the rest of the world sneezes.

State government and congressional representation are also complicit in the lobbyist equation, while the fourth estate — the media — is complicit simply by not developing their presentation format to the degree necessary for reporting the transparent details of our political process.

The American government is the largest corporate business on the planet; in essence, an All-Star team of capitalist legislators, negotiators, lawyers and management. It is this system that all but guarantees that politics remain politics as usual.

This past week, former President Bill Clinton led the inaugural meeting of The Clinton Global Initiative. From what I’ve read, Clinton is determined to spend the remainder of his life in an attempt to band together with global citizens to circumvent sovereign politics and this insipid, self-serving culture we’ve developed, to make positive and necessary changes in how the world functions to support the sustainable future of all mankind.

This is visionary leadership at work.

According to DeWayne Wickham:

“The former president walked about the stage for more than an hour speaking without the aid of notes about the things that should be done to wipe out poverty, end religious conflicts, control climate change and encourage good governance.”

No notes? Heartfelt, passionate vision? I almost forgot how Presidential it is to speak from the heart.

While Clinton is raising cash and cooperative support from around the world, the Internet industry is about to move past the first year of its re-dedication in building the Semantic Web, by developing Web 2.0, both philosophically and literally.

Sometime soon, the odds are that these two disparate, yet symbiotic worlds are going to collide, and when they do, the effect will change how we communicate, network, inform ourselves and make decisions in a global manner.

A few months back, I finally stepped out of my dead bolted existence within Ameritrade and began to digest the current state of this Web 2.0 explosion, and as soon as I did, the Semantic Web seemed so much closer to fruition than it did just a few years prior.

Much of the renewed push and entrepreneurial spirit that has driven this industry-wide rebirth seems to have been driven simply by our economic recovery from the dot-com crash. On the surface, that answer is sufficient, but something deeper is at at play. So, with my newly created free-time, I headed down a 2.0 rabbit hole to take me on a journey for clarity.

What I’ve come to realize isn’t anything particularly shocking (unless you’ve been a corporate slave for the past three years).

We’re living in tumultuous times. The air we breathe is being compromised more and more every day. Poverty around the world is increasing exponentially. Our country is knee deep in another Vietnam, another occupation, another struggle for gaining natural resources at any cost. People are becoming polarized by important and moral, personal and social issues, seemingly on a daily basis. All of this is occurring during the reign of an administration that has even the staunchest of conservatives questioning whether we, the people, are living within the midst of a dictatorial democracy, rather than a thriving Republic, built on the principles of political discourse, government checks and balances, fiscal responsibility, the separation of church and state and the power of the individual voter.

So where does this leave us as a people?

Personally speaking, I’ve decided to refocus my effort to publish my views, opinions, perspectives, experiences, etc., in an effort to make even the slightest dent in the discourse surrounding our roles as American citizens.

What motivates me? Pick your poison: the War on Terror; the Rove/Plame/Wilson scandal; the Bolton push-through appointment; the Cindy Sheehan vigil. It seems that every day a new flow of bullshit only fuels the righteous indignation I’ve come to hold regarding this administration.

Is it even possible to imagine a more visceral description of an Aristocracy at play?

For me, the complete disregard of the intelligence and voice of the American citizen begins to explain the groundswell of blogging that has occurred over the past four years, specifically the political blogs and mainstream media watchdog sites.

Sure, the potential for capital gains plays a large role in the motivation to advance technology or any other industry. The web, though, is a bit different due to it’s low cost of entry, so I believe that moral conviction plays a role in both driving the evolution of technology and the passion to leverage it to it’s fullest degree.

So what’s the connection between geo-political events, blogging and the tactical fervor of Web 2.0? (social bookmarking, tagging, open source, open content, etc.)

In a nutshell: everything.

Without a true social democracy in the real, we’ve evolved to create one on-line — where boundaries can be broken down, hierarchies can be dissolved, control can be minimized, etc.

I blog in order to get my voice out into the ether of this new social construct; I tag my blog posts to provide context and semantic relationships on numerous levels, yet with a similar purpose:

1. On the base object level to provide a succinct description of how I perceive this content from a conceptual perspective, perhaps creating a) a greater connection with the reader on a discernible level and b) connections on associative & relational levels with other objects (within my domain and elsewhere)
2. On the categorization level to establish context within a particularly defined category or across a faceted classification scheme. If I were an actual brand, this would be how I’d ensure my position was reflected within my editorial construct and navigation scheme.
3. On the retrievable object level to allow for more avenues of findability (four, well-thought descriptive tags exponentially increase the odds of object retrieval rather than none or even one, either in straight queries or in contextual presentation on the base object level)

These are tactical strategies in the information revolution.

The same principles apply to tagging even more granular object such as photographs, video and sound files, as well as the macro-level social bookmarking of URLs. The effort, I believe, is based on the desire of individual voices to be heard amidst the shelling of the mainstream media. While technically speaking, Web 2.0 is about the creation of richly defined object models and attributes — the more good data we entrench within our objects (be it content, files or URLs themselves), the better the chance for a semantic web experience — the movement behind it is much more compelling, much more philosophical in nature.

After leaving Ameritrade in April, I spent a month digesting Noam Chomsky’s Understanding Power, which introduced me to the specifics of his propaganda model thesis, which I fully digested by watching the documentary Manufacturing Consent. Recently, Dave Sifry (CEO, Technorati) posted a graph on the Technorati Blog displaying the impact that blogs are making within the once dominated realm of entrenched, funded, mainstream media.

I’m only guessing that if Chomsky has studied the progression of the web, he’s smiling up in Cambridge right about now.

The legitimization of the individual (creative and political) perspective is being sustained in the 21st century by the conviction of the blogosphere, passionate focus on the possibilities of 2.0 revenue models and domains, such as Technorati, taking a leadership position. The concept of social dialog, networking and organization and the elemental foundation of capitalism are beginning to shift in exciting ways.

Imagine a near future where:

• Individual perspectives can be made more readily sustainable through a common revenue model, reversing the big money/power structure of publication and media saturation? How would that impact the politics of our nation? Our wage labor practices?
• Algorithms and interfaces allow for rich, precise retrievals of topical queries, with just as precisely retrieved contextual objects presented within a usable format, based on better clustering techniques and taking richer and more valuable attributes into account? How would this impact the way we learn and connect to one another?
• Information domains allow topically defined objects to be rolled up into navigable concepts by users (through customization) instead of predefined categories by information architects? How could this seamlessly raise the bar for common folk in their efforts to research online? To manage information across numerous domains?
• Mainstream media articles and blog posts are presented on the same level (query or article), ensuring checks and balances of mis/disinformation, without a partisan bias? How important is it for check and balances to be rooted within the last bastion of traditional governmental checks and balances — the media?

And the great thing is that we’re not too far away from this revolutionary existence.

Blogs are beginning to bridge the social and communication gaps between nations. My peers are thinking differently when developing this medium, even in traditional business development circumstances. The tactical approach to producing, managing, sharing, finding and using information objects — defined from the bottom up — is finally getting it’s due.

Yes, these are tumultuous times, but they’re exciting as well.

I want a satellite radio product that meets *my* needs.

I want true convergence, not the usual business of multiple brands, releasing redundant products, creating sustainable profitability and not sustainable satisfaction.

It’s 2005 people; we deserve sustainable product offerings that meet our needs in any environmental scenario.

So what does the current portable, streaming, satellite landscape look like? Forgive the brand choices, but it seems to look something along the lines of…

Aside from the obvious competitive redundancies of the middle products, the feature overlap of any two products is pretty interesting to note:

• Portability (car, home, walking, etc.)
• Song ratings
• Random play
• Library of music to draw upon (satellite, jukebox, server, etc.)

When I see these overlapping product attributes, I also see opportunities for elegant simplicity, for product convergence, and most importantly, for happy consumers. I start to see…

Yahoo! Music plays audio files off a server, leveraging personalization settings, such as ratings of songs, artists, albums, genres, etc. What’s stopping them from striking up a deal with a Sirius or XM to create a completely personalized satellite/internet station?

A biz-dev deal here, a little bit of industrial and interface design changes there, a chunk of engineering and voila!; the physical satellite products could have input devices for rating these same music attributes. So the next time you’re on the beach, in your car, etc., you’re now continuously participating in updating your station to reflect your current passions and interests. Tie these setting into an Amazon or iTunes shopping experience and the collaborative filtering possibilities are endless.

Speaking of Apple, what about the iPod?

MP3 players bring the “tangible” nature of accessing a personal library of ripped and downloaded music. Bring this into the conversation and you now have a device that not only syncs personalization between devices via server/satellite communication, but also allows a consumer to archive a library of music/content for consumption in a more linear fashion (i.e. playing entire albums, setting up playlists, dj-ing, etc.).

Of course that also could be managed via satellite — providing the user a search and play capability — but that’s a bit more tricky regarding music rights and costs. It would also cannibalize owning CD’s and downloading music, although Napster and Rhapsody are already heading down the monthly cost for leasing music.

Once Sirius and XM start a partnership, splitting redundancies in content and sharing technology at a cost (like satellites), maybe, just maybe, we could see a sexy product, with beauty found on levels deeper than it’s original vision…

And yes, I too would rather have Apple lead the industrial design of this fantasy product than myself, but for visualization purposes (and because I’m long on Sirius, remember) I think my rendering will suffice for this conversation.

I smell a Dire Straits song in the works.

Admittedly, it took me a few days to shrug off my last rant. I’m finding myself at a crossroads of my career (what type of IA am I?) and upon hearing the perception of my career choice as not being a creative one, a chord was struck within me. I began my career in a creative capacity, and I plan on ending it the same way. I refuse to dumb it down to another level, as I’ve invested too much effort to do so.

Four years ago I was on a path of becoming a solid interactive designer in this industry. I had worked my way through the multimedia years as a CG artist, dabbling in art direction and interface design, and eventually made the move to the web as a full-time art director in ‘97. After a year and a half at a small interactive marketing company, I became lost. Something was missing. Every project became a battle to produce and it started to wear me down.

I needed a new resume.

That year, I proposed to the president of the company for me to concentrate on becoming a "New Media Specialist." During the course of our conversation I’d unknowingly described the responsibilities of an IA to a tee, but unfortunately, he had never heard of an IA either and couldn’t justify the position as billable. So I was thanked for being proactive and received a pat on the back on the way out of his office.

While trying to cope within those difficult times, I was introduced to the work of three people; Janet Murray, Brenda Laurel, and Bill Buxton. While my day job seemed to work overtime to extinguish the passion I had for the medium, these three people emitted the vibe that something better, more creative, was on the horizon. With Janet and Brenda’s varied take on the interactive narrative, and Bill’s perspective on redefining HCI, from 3d interaction to input device’s, I became exposed to perspectives that blew my visual design goggles out of the water. I had to make a move.

I wanted to practice what Brenda preached, creating a narrative experience in an on-line application; to explore the path of convergence that made Janet’s wonderful dreams a potential reality; to become a participant in Bill’s vision of the next generation of interfaces where an OS and the application layer become as one.

So to make a long(er) story short, I became an information architect. I jumped from the world of communication design and landed right in the midst of this intriguing discipline, with such different contextual career possibilities.

Now, three and a half years later, I’m grasping to find my niche, first and foremost as an interactive designer. While our profession is feeling the backlash of a brutal economy, the last thing I need to do is lose sight of why I do what I do. No matter how you skin this cat, we create temporal experiences through creative thought processes while collaborating with smart, creative people.

And I’d scrap with the biggest bully on the block to keep it that way.