connecting*the*dots

How’d this wild and crazy guy get an interview from BusinessWeek?

Congrats, Dan, on both the new book and introducing the mainstream to IxD. As soon as the book drops below $20 I’m all over it. ;)

WashingtonWatch (feed | page)

Why? It’s about time we have a real-time feed for bills on the floor of Congress. A few early concerns with the service:

1. the methodology for generating cost/saving figures is very weak flawed
2. public incentive to participate is nil
3. if public participation is nil, Congress won’t pay much concern to the echo chamber of comments

In my long-term quest to become more localized with my business ventures, I recently partnered up with John Ford at Aldenta to design a web strategy for one of his clients: Louis’ Healthy Breads.

Louis is a local entrepreneur who pours his heart and soul into his amazing line of health food products. Prior to our initial meeting, John mentioned that he was passionate about his product, and after meeting him, I have to say that he’s as authentic as they come.

Okay, a gear clicked.

After speaking with his daughter, Ann (his soon-to-be-hired editor and marketing person) and hearing about his son, Grant (the Chief Chef of the operation), my original plan began to grow some serious legs.

Yep, we’re going to create a Louis’ Healthy Breads blog.

Logistically speaking, Louis’ hip to email, but he’s not technically savvy and he’s always on the go — visiting stores across the east coast and beyond, trying to land retail deals for his product. The best thing about his day to day is that he’s constantly meeting interesting people who are always sharing personal stories, ranging from pure testimonials to insight into their health issues and fitness goals. Hey, he’s a salesman from the heart; a great candidate for simple posting, but not necessarily the archival aspects of tagging or the community aspects of linking out.

Louis is already doing the conversational work of a blog, but his “interface” doesn’t have built-in permalinks, comments and trackbacks (heh). Our job is to figure out the best way to corral his conversational personality and guide it into a realm with a searchable past and a participatory interface.

As a next step, I sat down with Ann last week to discuss a blogging strategy for the company. We both realized that Louis’ strong suit is writing, so we’re going to play to his strengths and limit his role as much as possible, keeping his publishing responsibilities focused by sending emails to Ann for editing and posting. We applied the same thinking to Grant, who will be able to provide a “behind the scenes” look into the baking process, leads on new ingredients, etc.

By heading down this road, Ann has implicitly agreed to become the blogger, editor, curator extraordinaire. Essentially, she’ll be editing posts from Louis and Grant, applying structured tags to the posts, linking out to related conversations across the blogosphere, participating in related conversations, managing comment threads and tracking related information in her RSS aggregator.

The idea that I’m trying to impart is that we don’t need to “segment” people into groups or “target” them like they’re deer in order to “push” product. We already know that the majority of people who are drawn to Louis’ Healthy Breads share certain interests, desires; call them attributes if you will. Health enthusiasts gravitate toward the product, yet their reasons for doing so could be as diverse as a fear of heart disease and diabetes to wanting nutritious fuel just prior to a marathon.

Ann is going to make it her personal mission to explore these existing communities, enter the fray of their current conversations and build relationship with actual people (not segments). Once she finds these resources, she’s going to start tracking them for interesting conversational nuggets to point to and contextualize from the LHB blog. Then, and only then, will she (and LHB) come off as credible participants in the communities they wish to serve.

Checkout the above workflow (228k | .pdf) that I put together to help get them off the ground. Can you think of anything that I might have overlooked?

When I heard through the grapevine last year that Adaptive Path’s secret project was an AJAXy blog analytic tool, I was psyched to see what was going to hit the market.

The alpha release didn’t disappoint. It was powerful, yet simple to understand/use and had a few features (most notably, the mapping feature) with a bunch of potential. I ended up writing a glowing review and a follow-up post with a few suggestions for improvements. I’ve been using the service ever since… well, to be completely accurate, I’ve been trying to use the service ever since.

The above is the message that has greeted me every time I’ve attempted to sign on for the past few months. I’d post the problem to the MM message board, but that thing is about as helpful as a Republican in a hurricane. If I were a jaded human being, I’d say that MM was a thesis project for Jeff to become acquired by Google and there were never plans for long-term support or development of Measure Map.

But I’m not jaded…

So, I’m now looking for another analytics tool. I’d like for it to have a sweet interface and a bunch of ways to slice and dice my readership data. Mint has always been an option, but I’d rather not install anything on my server. Does anyone have other suggestions?

UPDATE: I’ve installed Mint (with some tweaking assistance from John, thanks man!) and I’m lovin’ it! The great thing about MM was its clean interface — really simple to understand — but conversely, the experience was akin to using a ladder, as I had to travel up and down the interface categories to get to the details of my data. With Mint, all of my data is presented in one simple to understand interface. No navigation necessary. Great job, Shaun!

Autoblog
Tesla Roadster unveiling in Santa Monica
by Sebastian Blanco

[…]

“The car is low to the ground, and smooth in all possible ways. But this vehicle isn’t just a sports car. It’s also a green car. There are zero tailpipe emissions. There isn’t even a tailpipe. Tesla Motors is working to provide purchasers with a photovoltaic panel that will turn the driving experience into an actual net producer of energy, according to Tesla Motors chairman Elon Musk.”

[…]

The initial sticker price is $80k - $100k, with the majority of the profits earmarked for further R&D efforts. In five years, this might just be the better option to Hybrid vehicles (with a similar sticker price). It’s definitely the sexier version. I wonder if there’s a way to reserve one for my mid-life crisis in a few years…

(via TerraBlog)

BarCampRDU came and went this past weekend and I completely missed out. With the stress of moving into the new house, completing my proposal work and working on the number of scattered projects I’m on, I just couldn’t find time to make the trip. But truth be told, as much as I wanted to check out the BarCamp experience, I was much more amped about spending some quality time with the Bonnie and Clyde of Web 2.0 themselves: Chris Messina and Tara Hunt.

We stumbled into connecting last year through one of my posts, followed up by chatting a bit via email and Skype and eventually met in person in a group lunch at SXSW in March. Since I couldn’t make it to Raleigh, I pinged Chris late last week with an offer to crash at my spot if they needed a place to stay. Low and behold, they did.

(shot at Finnegans, before we realized they didn’t serve breakfast and split to Jimmy’s Corner Cafe)

So… what do you do with a couple of uber-progressive, multi-tasking, San Fran geeks in Greensboro, NC with 18 hours on your hands? Keep it simple, stupid; beer, grub and talk shop.

Once they arrived and got settled in, we ended up walking downtown, settling in on MCouls rooftop and chatting about our latest geek ventures over Fish ‘n Chips and pints of Guinness (Tara, you’ve got to get the Guinness tolerance up).

Even though we all share a bunch of the same philosophies regarding business, marketing and technology, it’s still kinda amazing how much overlap our latest ventures have with one another. Both Citizen Agency and dotmatrixproject are efforts to:

• support our passionate desires to consult, design and build technology independent of a full-time gig
• work smarter (not necessarily harder) with great clients and interesting projects
• network with loosely connected, brilliant talent instead of building a salaried bench
• using collaborative blogging to generate credibility, trust and thinktank-like conversations — across our own teams and with the community of folks that participate in the resulting discourse

I’d like to say something grand, like, it’s the sign of how we can all work in the future, but I know that’s not true… at least not yet. Major props to Chris and Tara on that front though, as they believe 1000% in documenting their every success, failure and step along the way with the hope that their efforts can provide building blocks for others on a similar journey.

I completely share that philosophy and enthusiasm, but aside from transparent blogging, I’ve yet to implement it in tangible ways across my everyday (note to self: do that).

We ended the evening with a pretty intense conversation about geo-specific social networking, the digital divide and citizen media, or to be more specific, The People, Yes.

In a nutshell, Chris and I started off with slightly different perspectives of community. The concept of a geo-specific network didn’t seem to register with his quixotic stare, but I think we both nudged a bit closer to each other’s thinking by the end of the conversation. I’m all about working with people who’ve been there and done that, but I’d like for the majority of the grass-roots work and business and technology development to run through the people in this community.

Tara seemed to get my desire to work specifically with the people of Greensboro to build out a Greensboro-specific social network — as the more we work together as a community, the more we’ll come together as a community. Essentially, I want to start local and focus on the needs and strengths of the entire community of Greensboro to flesh the project out.

I mean, who knows what nuggets we’ll find in these fields and streams and underpasses and buildings?

In any event, I’m sure it wasn’t the last conversation we’ll have on the project. Both Tara and Chris are revolutionary thinkers, with their heads constantly spinning about with progressive ways to use technology to help us work, play and function better with one another. I’m only in the embryonic stage with The People, Yes, so I’m looking forward to many more chances to imbibe and share knowledge and perspective.

This weekend came and went way too fast.

Back in February, NBC made a completely bonehead business move by making YouTube take down the hugely popular video short Lazy Sunday. My instant response was to fire off a salvo at NBC for being old media ogres (NBC: We Get Web 2.0… Sike!) and not working within the limitless parameters of the web to strike a business deal that suits their needs to protect their copyright, while allowing us to continue to enjoy their content when we want and how we want.

Well, today NBC announced that it’s embracing a few of the ideas I previously lobbed into play:

[…]

“Under the deal, YouTube will create a separate channel for NBC video, so that visitors can easily pull up the half-dozen or more items that NBC plans to offer at any given time. It will be similar to channels that other companies, filmmakers and everyday users create.

[…]

NBC and YouTube officials acknowledged the possibility that fans will reject the clips if they appear simply as promotions, but YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said fans would likely embrace the video if it is compelling and not available anywhere else.”

[…]

Promotional video is somewhat of a start — I suppose you can’t expect major change from a major television network without them testing the water first. Give the experiment a few months; if uptake begins across numerous types of unbundled content, I’m sure they’ll be banging on YouTube’s door, attempting more creative ways to “let” people upload their content.

Affecting The Interface

In terms of the user experience, I only ask one thing of YouTube: please refrain from creating a pulldown of “channels” on your interface.

Asking people to assign ripped video to a “media channel” in the upload process makes sense:

• It alerts you (YouTube) to content that needs to be assigned a “shared monetization flag” and
• It automatically assigns network metadata to the video object to help people finding content they desire

Balancing the two-way participation of a user base with the business opportunities of old media is a difficult conversation to manage and execute, for if you transform your main interface too far towards the navigation of paid-for, primary channels, the entire participatory, community vibe will begin to deteriorate.

Remember, your brand is YouTube.

Evelyn Roth, TV Trap (1973)

Joe Malia, Memoirs of a Computer Obsessive (2006)

(via BoingBoing)

Dave Winer has expanded on his “It’s the users, dummy!” statement and I couldn’t agree with him more:

There’s actually a neater solution, especially if you’ve put a piece of software on the user’s desktop to facilitate uploading and editing of the data — keep a copy of all the data on the user’s desktop, and just mirror it in your web app. There goes the problem (or is it an excuse) that your competitor would be using your CPU cycles to grab a copy of the user’s data (with the user’s permission, I should add, you need a username and password to get access, so the argument that they’re protecting against scrapers and abusers doesn’t hold water).

Following the Beyond Broadcast conference in May, Nate Aune and I began jamming on a similar concept; something we loosely called myTag.

(click for entire .pdf)

The major difference in our approach is that we’re trying to create a “piece of software” (actually, an online service) that can work across all online services, serving as a meta-data hub for all personally tagged information objects — blog posts, photography, video, audio, social bookmarking and possibly service metadata, such as Amazon tagging.

Unlike Dave’s example, we would scrape external services for newly updated, tagged objects. The goal is to centralize people’s meta-data and provide ownership of said meta-data, not to interfere with people interacting with these decentralized services. The scraping would only occur when a person accesses myTag to review their current tag universe, so the impact on external server CPU cycles would be innocuous at best.

Dave’s idea focuses specifically on the data editing and management issues that exist when users attempt to move their data across existing services:

With a local copy, the user can point any service at the data, and it can suck up a copy, and the competitor’s app would run on the user’s desktop too, using their (abundant) CPU cycles. The vendor’s server (in this case Flickr) wouldn’t even know that a copy of the data has been made, and since it’s the user’s data, that’s exactly as it should be.

Yet another reason to use rich clients. I use Flickr Uploadr, always. It’s just a bit easier to work with than the browser-based method of uploading, and that bit of easiness has proven to be worth it. Then of course the competitor has to offer a desktop tool as well. We do it with the OPML Editor. The server components, the directory browser, blog renderer, work with a copy of the data, the originals reside on the user’s machine. It also protects against a system failure, or a company failure.

I completely agree with his ownership point regarding meta-data, and his perspective of safeguarding information objects from system or company failure is extremely valid as well.

So how could we extend his concept of locally managing data (both the information object itself and its meta-data) across same-type services (flickr, zooomr, riya, etc.) to include culling meta-data across different-type services that leverage tagging (del.icio.us, YouTube, flickr, WordPress, etc.)?

See, the reason we’re sketching a thin client is because our primary goal is to enable individuals to be able to review and curate various slices of their own concept terminology — meta-data or tags — as they’ve been applied to information objects over various services and periods of time.

The way I look at it, an aggregate of tags can serve as a looking glass into the personal linguistic structure of each of us, as we make explicit choices when applying specific concept terms to our objects. As competition to flickr and YouTube enters the market, our POV’s will undoubtedly become further dispersed across the web, increasing the findability of our objects, yet conversely affecting our own understanding of our perceived output.

If we’re going to arm citizens with media tools, then we need to provide intuitive, smart representational interfaces for accessing and modeling our own strategic output. Why? Well, we need to be on-point, constantly iterating our understanding of our own perspectives and biases as we venture further into producing our own media.

Otherwise we fall into the same trappings of the mainstream media.

An example… take the limited nature of my tag cloud on this blog as an example. Click on a term, such as Greensboro, and a narrative will unfold over the period of time that you choose to explore and read. While it’s useful to understand more about my relationship with and perspective on Greensboro, the cloud doesn’t include my photos tagged with Greensboro, nor my video clips tagged with Greensboro.

Citizen media operatives need an centralized interface to access decentralized information objects. From my perspective, the value of these interfaces is huge — both to the content creators and potentially to the content consumers.

The first two scenarios I mapped out in the above sketch were for searching and browsing ones existing tag library. Any other primary scenarios jump out at you?

The day that AOL/Netscape reduces their decade-long focus on squeezing profits from dial-up deals with web newbies long enough to compete with a niche, early adopter site like Digg, is the day that online, participatory communities will have reached the ROI tipping point.

Eh-hem! That day is here.

Michael Arrington frames the move nicely:

[…]

The fact that AOL is launching the new service under the Netscape brand instead of building out a new property says how serious they are about the space. According to statistics provided by AOL, Netscape serves a whopping 811 million monthly page views - far more than Digg today.

Putting this kind of audience in front of a Digg like service could spell trouble for many sites that ultimately make it to the top of the site. A Digg or Slashdot story can send tens of thousands of visitors to a site in a matter of minutes or hours. With Netscape, this effect could be many times larger - possibly resulting in outages at sites headlining the new service.

There are a number of other notable features of the new Netscape. Story submissions can be tagged by the submitter along for easier search in the future. Every category, user and group of friends has their own RSS feed. Also, category anchors will follow up on many stories and post their own editorial content on those stories (see below)

With all of the recent moves, one has to be wondering where the participatory news space is heading:

• Newsvine is already an “all category” user-generated article space
• Digg is rumored to be expanding from a niche site to an all-encompassing domain
• Netscape is launching a full-force, broadly targeted, participatory interface into the mix

At first glance, the long-term benefits of this growing industry and competition seem to land in the laps of the end user.

In the real world, industry competition drives quality standards while the invisible hand of the market usually corrects pricing issues (except for oil and other lobbied industries, but that’s a whole other article).

If you follow similar logic within this segment of the internet economy, the domain with the most intoxicating experience design and participatory incentive programs should retain the largest share of the participatory market (and I’m not talking about the bread and circus returns of shiny AJAX widgets and karma points).

Interfaces that are primarily designed for an optimized, ad sales, click-through scheme and not unique, behavioral, user experiences, just won’t survive in the long-run. Domain competition will force top notch user-centered interaction design, reducing opportunities to implement old school, bean counting advertising schemes to piggy-back user behavior.

Even more disruptive; in order to increase sign-ups, retain customers and increase degrees of participation, one would think that revenue generated from these new user-centered, advertising paradigms will have to be efficiently shared with this new workforce of virtual attention laborors.

While it’s true that these particular industry domains are already branding the very idea of 2.0 community — essentially “soft-locking” people into committing to a domain as with neighborhoods — without certain concessions (such as revenue sharing) I’d imagine that tactic alone to be short-sighted. I mean, wouldn’t corporate abuse of our participatory nature by these enabling domains drive us to be quick to change our attachment to these particular 2.0 communities?

I have to profess, this is where my faith in the many falters.

Honestly, my “fear” is that the masses of early-adoptor geeks who are driving the emergence of this participatory economy are just as self-centered as the capitalistic drivers of the attention economy itself.

Let me rephrase and explain my thoughts more clearly.

Are we more interested in participating as authentic medic creators and information contextualizers from afar, while being left alone to receive our timely, customized, community-centered, topical information? Or do we believe in standing together as a workforce of developers of this information revolution and as personal, information contextualizers to create change in our overarching financial system itself, ensuring a greater diversity of fiscal opportunities for people living on the other side of numerous socio-economic divides?

This is where the rubber hits the road, just before the fork.

We Don’t Have To Follow The Same Path We Used To Get Here

Big business is just beginning to view participatory systems as an obvious line extension of the profit vehicles that mass production provided in the industrial age through financial capitalism. If you understand the underlying principals of the first go-around, the evolutionary patterns of the second pass make themselves quite obvious:

• In the 20th century, capitalists leveraged cookie-cutter product design, simplified mass production assembly lines, ensured low-wage labor systems and implemented hardcore, mass marketing and psychological advertising within an imbedded entertainment mass media to drive product consumption
• In the 21st century, capitalists have the advent of collaborative filtering and personalized interfaces, running on the movement, interactions and contextualization of data and perspectives of the people who use them, driving contextualized ad placement, resulting in both revenue and product consumption with much less overhead

VC’s drool over the possibilities of the attention economy, because they see exactly how to take advantage of the situation, turning passionate information junkies and connectors into ad sales generators, which is fine, because it’s in their nature.

(photo by illmatic)

The question I desperately want to ask “the masses” is do we, the designers, the developers, the content creators and authentic media generators, care about this pure, capitalistic leeching or is it truely in our nature to provide a free ride, no matter the potential for being used as residual generators of capital?

For if we do care, we — the schitzophrenic creators and consumers of this new economy — are in a unique position to take a slice of the proverbial pie, whether through better positioning in a buyer’s market or as compensated content creators in a participatory, user-generated, contextualized media system. Either way, we can completely alter the model of managed capitalism and move one-step closer to to realizing Doc Searls’ intention economy.

Let the capitalists finance the infrastructure and reap their fair, residual returns, but let the people drive the costs of the market based on our desires while sharing in the residual profits that we generate via digital forms of word of mouth advertising.

In today’s parameter-passing, unique-identifier, permalink world, both notions are completely feasible. The only question is whether or not they will take this revolutionary change lying down.

On Tuesday night, Lex Alexander held a Citizen Journalism meeting at the News & Record. Eighteen-months into the paper’s internet community-centered initiative, Lex is looking for suggestions as to how the N&R can extend farther into the community and develop stronger relationships with residents, giving them a platform for community reporting.

I’ve spoken with Lex a few times regarding possible ways to advance citizen journalism within the walled garden of the N&R and to be honest with you, I’m feeling like the conversation is going in circles.

I don’t blame Lex. I completely realize that his hands are tied by a small technology budget and limited development resources, but I do think there’s more to it than these constraints.

Once our conversation went beyond the really progressive ideas (read: costly) — such as participatory interfaces and scraping domains for repurposing topically tagged content — we ended up discussing simple, community building concepts, like linking out into the existing blogging community or designing a homepage (Town Square) module to automatically display recent, local blogger post titles. Yet even that conversation downshifted, as Greensboro101 was brought up as the existing local model covering linking out to local bloggers and a partnership seemed out of bounds (just my impression).

Today, John Robinson announced a new editorial feature — a page called Blogging The News, with semi-daily updated links out to local bloggers that are extending the conversation from N&R articles and linking back. But the current feature is completely manual, as it’s an editorial feature — someone is deciding which posts are worthy to show up within the N&R.

It’s a step forward, but a conservative one, focused more on retaining an authoritative N&R voice than supporting active, dynamic, community discussion (such as with Greensboro101 or with Newsweek’s Blog Talk module and blog page). Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati jumped into John’s comment thread, offering a dynamic solution that could even make the N&R money, so I guess we’ll wait and see where it goes from here.

Here’s a short video I took of the Tuesday night meeting. You might need headphones to hear the audio and a heads up: the second half of the video is much more on point than the first (I think I told Sue Polinsky that I’d moon her community webcam concept ;).

(that’s not John)

John Ford — founder of the local software development firm Aldenta and former kidnapper of my The Inmates Are Running The Asylum book — is running tomorrow night’s free Web Design Meetup to help us hacks with our HTML and CSS techniques.

And I gotta tell you folks, after looking at some of the templates of the blogsboro community, I’d say that we all could use some help (disclosure — John has tweaked the presentation of this blog, as well as the Greensboro’s Child theme).

From John:

A number of our meetup members have requested a more detailed look at HTML and CSS. I’ve decided to do a multipart series on HTML & CSS to help everyone get a better grasp.

People who will benefit:

• Those totally new to HTML/CSS
• Someone using Dreamweaver, GoLive or other web page design tools who want a better understanding of the website code that is being created
• Current developers wanting a better understanding of proper web page creation and coding standards (these concepts are helpful for search engine optimization)
• Bloggers wanting to learn how to tweak their site template code
• Anyone wanting to brush up on their HTML and CSS skills

When:
Thursday, June 8, 2006, 7:00 PM (sharp)

Where:
The Scene on South Elm
604 South Elm St
Greensboro , NC 27406
336 510 1472

RSVP & Questions:
info@aldenta.com
336 547 9004

Hope to see you there!

In 1997, at the age of 93, my grandmother — Reva Patrick Coon — asked me to design the cover for her first book.

Ties & Tales is her personal story of Dunsmuir, California — the place she’s called home since the early 1920’s. While much of the content focuses on our family, the book also provides interesting context to mainstream American history.

Bill Readings introduced me to linguistics back in my undergraduate days at Syracuse University. It was a low-level Critical Theory class, not enough knowledge to rest a proper degree upon, but that wasn’t Bills concern. He just wanted us to listen and think.

Bill had a wonderful way of illustrating his teachings — placing our 19 year-old minds into comfortable arenas where we could casually move towards comprehension, eventually grasping the core concepts of deconstructionalism and linguistics he tossed about with ease.

After choosing Blade Runner as an explicit assignment for visual deconstruction, and his daily, illustrative call-outs of us numskulls to apply a “bit more apperception to your day-to-day existence,” I’d have to say the strongest, most visceral lesson that stuck with me was his conversation around the English word “tree” and the Spanish word “arbol.”

An Attempt To Share Knowledge

To monolingual, English speaking folk first exposed to the authority of the Spanish translation, the inherent belief is that the two terms (English and Spanish) are perfect representations of the signifier, “tree”… which is wrong.

The signifier of “tree” is more akin to your personal mental model of the physical representation of:

original photos by icathing and Melete

Viewed through the lens of semiology and linguistics, we cannot absolutely assert that tree = arbol, because the signifier of “tree” has a unique representative interface to each of us, as does the percept of the translation of “arbol.”

Our individuality is too explicit to absolutely relate to explicit terminology.

Or put into political terms, in this society of modern constructs — one that consistently nudges us towards silos of absolute knowledge, relationships and definition — we are presupposed to assign relative constructs of our world to get by, based on what, in essence, is an aggregate misunderstanding of our own individual cognitive processing.

Back to the tree example; Roland Barthes on Saussure:

Until he found the words signifier and signified, however, sign remained ambiguous, for it tended to become identified with the signifier only, which Saussure wanted at all costs to avoid; after having hesitated between some and seme, form and idea, image and concept, Saussure settled upon signifier and signified, the union of which forms the sign.

Nowadays, whenever I stumble upon a conversation about knowledge and structure — such as Are trees natural? over at David Weinberger’s blog — the information architect within me rests in a state of nirvana, coaxed into releasing control by his neighbor, the experience designer.

Each day we rely on our own trees of knowledge — branches of immeasurable directions and depth, overlapping and crossing one another to form meshed nests of position. The common faith we tend to hold regarding knowledge, is in the strength to overlap our individual trees with one another; the more the overlap, the more the homogenous culture, driving civil movement within this complex ecosystem and jungle we’ve created for ourselves.

Well, some people seem to prescribe to such theories.

In the midst of this information revolution, when we engage in the practice of tagging our information objects, we’re not only engaging in an activity to increase the discovery of our position via the use of common signifiers, we’re implicitly participating in a form of expression — painting our personal mental model of our signified constructs onto the sign itself.

In turn, the degree of shared context an individual holds on the receiving end, determines the degree to which her reception of the sign becomes explicit communication.

Enabled by technology, we can now easily add descriptive tags to the aggregate objects of words, colors, sounds and movement delivered more directly to the branches of each other’s trees. In this flip scenario of retrieval, we now rapidly stumble across these additions, assigning them as variants of welcome or disruptive bits of information.

In any case, our common trees of knowledge are being affected… they are evolving.

To this day, these particular words of Ferdinad de Saussure cannot escape my purview:

In the lives of individuals and of societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain soley the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs. In practice, the study of language is of some degree or other the concern of everyone.

photo by heather allison

If Bill hadn’t stepped into the wrong plane at the wrong time in the fall of 1994, he would’ve witnessed rapid advancements of the inner-workings of the web — specifically the participatory meshing of topics, interests, desires and perspectives via individual and social tagging through citizen blogging, vlogging, podcasting, etc.

The post-modern, knowledge craving, subversive side of Bill would be beaming right about now… just about as brightly as the multinational, career for-hire professor.

In the name of knowledge, and a hat-tip to my mentor, I think I’ll be busy late into the evening this October 30th.

It’s been a while since my last update on the progress of The People, Yes!, so here’s my May report (yes, that’s me trying to become more organized):

Legal
Yesterday, Jordan Nance sent me the paperwork to apply for non-profit status in North Carolina. There’s one last thing I need to do before I file; put together a small staff of officers and directors.

Identity
Anthony Piraino is knee deep in round three of designing the identity for The People, Yes! Here are a few versions from round two:

I’m digging the gritty contrast, but we’re going to play with the typography a bit more. I think it’s coming along nicely. I’m going to head out into town this weekend and take some photographs that might work with the identity in the header. Down the road, all imagery on the site will be people-generated.

Platform
Sue Polinsky (of TechTriad) is now hosting the domain, while Jonathan Daniel and Nate Aune have expressed interest in helping me develop the actual platform. Phase One will concentrate on simply implementing a collaborative WP blog with an overly simplified publishing interface. Phase Two is classified information, unless I decide to leak it to the blogosphere. ;)

Grassroots
Cara Michele and I haven’t had a meeting in a few weeks, but she has already introduced the concept to a handful of her friends in the homeless community and apparently there is solid interest to participate in the project. Once we get the platform running, both Ed Cone and Jay Ovittore have offered their services to run a blogging 101 workshop in order to help acclimate the people to the technology and the pro’s and con’s of transparent blogging.

We’re still a ways away from operating on all cylinders, but we’re getting there a bit more each day. I can’t fully express how overwhelmed I’ve been by the outpouring of support within this community and across the country, friends both new and old.

The People, Yes! is about the people. Yes, it truly is.

An extra optical inch? Brilliant advertising.

Now, please excuse me while I head out to, er, uhm, pick up some groceries. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

(via Mike Davidson)

World 2.0 seems to have raised it’s periscope within our culture almost 5 years ago, in the immediate post-9/11 world. Who would’ve thunk it possible?

Brad Neuberg on October 21, 2001:

The world seems to be hungry for an ideological alternative to capitalism. I don’t know if this is a rational or simply emotional need for something to challenge what is now the dominant ideology of the age, but I predict that as soon as a semi-credible ideological alternative to capitalism arises that it will spread like wildfire and produce another Cold War type situation. Communism used to be it, but is now defunct and dead, while fundamentalist Islam semi-fills this need in parts of the world. I’ve noticed this need to challenge capitalism while traveling; I can even see it in myself.

I’ve never met Brad — as a matter of fact, I was only introduced to his blog tonight via Messina’s post — yet I dropped a similar perspective on the state of capitalism on the other side of the planet just two weeks later in the fall of 2001.

Coincidence or…?

The collective unconscious has always been a powerful concept, but before blogging, it wasn’t a tangible construct. It took the invention of the permalink and intra-day personal publishing to even begin to generate enough trails of human expression to expose Jung’s concept of unspoken, shared realities and archetypes.

While The Cluetrain gang introduced the concept of a global conversation to netizens back in 1999, what I find so interesting about the blogosphere since that time, is that the very notion of a conversation has the potential to become explicitly amplified and extracted to become findable across new dimensions of length and density.

The web is now chock full of meshed thoughts and dreams, connected explicitly by hyperlinks, loosely by tags and conceptually by discovery. With a shift in search result interface paradigms, the possibilities for more complete, immediate research queries are endless.

Topical themes — or memes — shift intra-day and can last as conversations either as sporadic and finite bunches (Jill Carroll’s abduction and release over a three month period) or prolonged variants (George Bush’s presidency). Imagine what types of conversational connections will become possible when interfaces, such as a Technorati search result, leaves the conservative constraints of separated permalink results based on latest entries or authority, and instead focuses on the clustering of such conversations through visual metaphors across other dimensions.

And no, I’m not talking about a folder paradigm.

I’m talking about dynamic, visual representations of conversations, with the ability to shift in real-time, using attributes such as tags and language co-occurance to drive groupings within oppositional variants such as the length and density of the conversation.

The day our thoughts and dreams stop getting lost in the cracks of time and authority, we’ll be one step closer to the knowledge revolution, leaving information in the dust with data. Then the decolonization of cyberspace can begin with earnest.

How rude of me… What’s up, Brad?

Blogger gal vs. Newspaper guy!

Well, not quite, but it makes a great lede, eh?

Sue, Lex and I met over lunch yesterday to discuss potential strategies for evolving the News & Record’s citizen journalism efforts. And no, we didn’t have a stare off.

Man… Lex is in a tough position; he’s completely open to forward-thinking ideas (I mean, his title is Citizen Journalism Coordinator), but he also seems to be up against a bottom line business that’s very adverse to risk. Apparently, changing the approach to meeting a historically profitable bottom line is a tough sell, even within an industry that’s on shaky ground.

It’s amazing how palpable sand can become to the heads of industry during innovative times.

That’s not to say that the N&R hasn’t been progressive with their citizen journalism efforts to date — they have — but Lex knows that in just a few years the N&R (both print and online) will have to directly compete with new forms of dynamic, community-based, participatory, online news applications (e.g. Newsvine), which will be free of legacy organizational overhead and be able to react with agility.

And you can’t forget those pesky bloggers.

The N&R needs to step up their game.

So we chatted. And ate. And chatted some more. And by the time our conversation came to a close, we had a number of interesting ideas on the table:

• Personal Relationships - Lex is looking to develop relationships with members of the Greensboro community, offering them the opportunity to use N&R resources (legal, photography, journalist feedback, etc.) to craft substantive citizen journalism. To me, this approach perfectly fits the future of print newspapers, as time-based news is dead on paper. They’ll have to compete as daily magazines (more depth, less coverage).

• Real-time Blogging Input - I suggested promoting a tagging schema that matched the classification structure of both the paper and the site:

  For example, identify and promote a unique set of “greensboro[xxxx]” tags, for anyone to use on blog posts, flickr images, etc. when generating Greensboro specific news, events, opinions, etc.

  Internally, the N&R editorial staff would then set up RSS aggregators with subscriptions of each tag search result.

  The real-time input of potential stories and assets would increase exponentially, while the N&R would continue to have editorial control, as the aggregator would serve as the queue into the publishing process

• Representation Across The Community - Sue focused on the concept of encouraging participation along the lines of community diversity (her connections with Uplifter is right along the lines of my focus with The People, Yes!). We talked about ideas ranging from developing blogging 101 material to share with a non-computer literate demographic to grass roots representation within sub-communities (e.g. school board meetings) to encourage live-blogging with the unique tag identifiers

An interesting start, but there’s still one major component that we’re skirting: Revenue incentives.

Lex made it clear that creating a participatory revenue model doesn’t fall under his charge, but the N&R is open to ideas. My perspective is that without incentive, participation will be lighter, with less quality and dedication. Any revenue generated out of these relationships should be viewed as found money, so share and share alike:

• To tap into the wisdom of the blogosphere by republishing the original post or an edited version, a buisness needs to develop a revenue model that fairly represents such a relationship.
• To partner with individuals from the community to generate community-based journalism, a business needs to develop a revenue model to encourage such a partnership.

It comes down to this: Pony up or we, the citizens, will simply get together and form collaborative blogs, creating relevant identities, gain a better footprint in Google over a 3 month period of time and, eventually, sign up with BlogAds to support our own voice.

That’s not a threat. ;-) I’m looking forward to our next conversation, folks.

UPDATE: Six months after the fact, in the NORG session at ConvergeSouth, Ed Cone backs up my philosophy regarding partnering with local bloggers/writers in a revenue share program.

Andrew Baron and Amanda Congdon are Rocketboom.

“We are in an interesting time, as production tools for mass communication are dirt cheap and accessible.”

Rocketboom: “An interesting intersection of blogging, TV over IP, radical advertising, etc.”… “The art of the possible.”

• Personal filters (media, people they meet, events, etc.) - always on the lookout for more information.
• Design - “One of the most important aspects of Rocketboom is… interface design; making the interface comfortable and easy to use.” The simplicity of the interface equals the experience for all viewers/users.
• Global - “Audience is scattered all around the world. Correspondants are in Kenya, Prague, all over the States.” Very interested in global stories. Rocketboom.jp just launched to communicate from Japan, presenting video stories which isn’t language-centric.



• Time - “Time is power.” Whoever has information before another will have a huge advantage. Large organizations cannot be agile enough to move fast. Rocketboom is daily, so it becomes habit-forming. “Simple concepts, but so important to us and our success. It’s worth considering them in-depth.”
• Consequence - Unlike other business models built on one, two year business plans, Rocketboom deals with consequences in the moment. They’re able to shift their approaches in the moment to take advantage of emerging opportunities. Being open to change is huge.
• Interactive - 25% of Rocketboom stories are user-generated. Then there are comments, emails with viewers, etc. They feel very strongly about the communities this interaction with viewers build. This medium is interactive, so even though a user is digesting video, it’s not TV.

The show is already available on cell phones (thanks to a fan hack), TiVo viewers, PSP and iTunes.

Peter Morville, Information Architect.

Morville classic quote: “Information Architecture: A balance of art and science.” Risk taking, creativity, listening, trial and error. Designers, writers, developers, etc. are all practicing information architecture techniques (i.e. Microformats)

Different types of domain and users need different types of information architectures.

Search is a System

• User query ->
• Search Interface (Query language, builders) ->
• Search engine ->
• Content (metadata, CV) ->
• Results (Ranking and Clustering Algorithms, Interface Design

Searching is not only finding, but learning (discovery)

Findability
Can people find your web site, find content in your web site and find content despite your web site.

Shifting Gears: “One foot in the past and one foot in the future” What are the longer term trends?

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” - Herbert Simon

You know what? Peter is too eloquent for this live-blogging crap. Go buy the book; it truly is a great read.

Moderated and kicked-off by Tantek:

Microformats Process:

• Pick a simple problem and define it. No frameworks.
• Document what existing web pages are doing and find patterns for a specific microformat
• Trying not to create standards or formats.
• Brainstorm a set of fields to define microformats
• Post findings, get feedback and iterate.

A Microformats Exercise

• Create your own hCard
• Publish it to your site
• Add a link to hCard examples

Mark Norman Francis, Yahoo! Sr. Developer London, wants to create semantic meaning without the delay of us building the Semantic Web. hReviews will return 7 figures of results in local European searches (for restaurants, films, etc.), while the current Yahoo! film reviews have 4 or 5 figures of results.

Jeremy Keith, web developer, wanted to get his SXSW plans up on his page and add geo-coordinates, so he created a microformat page and mixed it up with the Google map API. I think I speak for all non-developers when I say “holy fuck.”

I copy and pasted my plans into a blog post and manually linked them up from my iCal feeds. Anything more that that would’ve made me nutso. But the point here is the microformats themselves, not this particularly geeky application (Jeremy, you soo outrank my geek factor).

Chris Messina, flock, sees the web as an event stream, a social space and an actual data-storage space. When you build in microformats to search, flock (and outside developers) can leverage “round-trip attention:”

• Blog posts with links to people
• Lists of people and their blogs
• Your contact info and favorites
• Concerts and movies reviews
• Upcoming events

flock can use these semantic information to create relational experiences in results. The more times a flock user comes across markup information about specific people, places, things, etc., flock can capture and present back to the searcher a filtered picture of that person, place, thing, etc.

Q&A

- claimID is gathering individuals publishing service spots and generating centralized hCards.

- Structured Blogging has a Wordpress plugin that supports a ton of microformats

- “Roach Motels are so 1.0″

Jim Brazell moderates this panel and kicks off the discussion

The X-Box 360 costs $300. In 1995 the same computing power would have cost $100M.

Ubiquitous computing is the fourth generation of computing; a system on a chip. Cooper’s law says that the capability of wireless computers is doubling every year. The convergence of science and technology is driving this technology.

Dude, he just said that they can control the movement of a mouse, just like a remote aircraft. The tipping point of creepyness?

Serious games are serious. The US Armed Forces, the UN, foreign countries, they’re all creating games for training, social changes and then remixing them with the industry to create n number of emmersive, narrative experiences.

Irwin Kaplan

The Army is redesigning their training corriculumn from level 1 (books) to level 3 (interactive), SCORM Conformant (has to run across a network). They upped their interactive traing from 0 of 150 hours to 82 of 150 hours. They’re trying to equipt soldiers to react in the midst of battle with necessary information available from everywhere.

They have simulation centers as large as the ACC to train soldiers on games. Warehouse sizes.

MLT is Medical Leadership Training. They build realtime scenarios based on field exercises and import them into an interactive narrative, running on the Unreal engine.

He considers himself an educator… and recruiter.

Dr. James Bower

Whyville teaches kids how to eat right based on an avitar/persona thats responds to good or bad choices. There are 1.5 million kids on the site and they stick around (one kid has visited 2000 times over six-years, that’s one visit per day). They play with the social/non-social curve of the game’s narrative to watch boys and girl’s interests shift.

The kids have been writing articles for six years now. They’re running their own government online. They’re replicating democracy.

Now marketing is interested, and smart firms like Toyota, are dipping into Whyville to understand the concept of interactive engagement. They offered Nestle to get involved, but they only wanted to get Purina involved; healthy choices meant more to Nestle in relationship to dogs than kids.

New marketing will enable people to design their worlds and affect mass production.

Michael Whalem

Ignite Learning has developed Reality, Inc., which creates emmersive storytelling games for middle-school students, based 100% on state curriculum. The virtual head of the reality space (Mortimer Gravitas) presents the goals for moving through the interactive curriculum. (very similar to a project I worked on in 1996, “Simon Fefher’s Junkland Jam”)

It’s a linear progression through different activities, such as a game full of levers, which must be moved, created, put in motion to feed some monkeys bananas. If you mess up, it’s ok, try again (the army guys smiled when he said that).

Quote of the day: Bower: “The more games tap into the chemical changes of the brain… the more we will learn.”

Disclaimer: This is live blogging; all quotes are paraphrases.