as is par for the course, the dreams that disturbed an otherwise peaceful slumber were vivid and troubling. it was good to see my little brother, however, even if it was in the aftermath of our mother star going nova. what followed that (yes, we lived) was the kind of ‘oh now what’ moment usually reserved for cartoons — the nova blast set off all the automated counterstrike conditions for the world’s nuclear arsenals.

boom.

the thing currently stuck in my memory’s craw is my brother tugging at a piece of loose skin (in spite of my warnings) and pulling away most of his shoulder muscle.

first ‘nightmare’ i’ve had in a while.

when waking from dreams of the annihilation of humanity, one’s mind predictably turns to various apocalypses. as i recall from monday school god said to moses something to this effect:

‘this time a boat was for the win. next time wear asbestos.’

this begs the question of other pure elemental destructions. ‘earth’ would be easy to accomplish — massive earthquakes devastate the whole thing, possibly caused by the orange-peel-like crust sliding on its molten bearings and careening willy-nilly around the earth’s surface. it can be argued that this has already happened, resulting in the current position of antarctica, i.e. atlantis.

water is easy, we’ve seen it before. fire is too common a theme, as my mind’s yestereve playtime demonstrates.

what about air? this sat me up in the bed (on the couch). imagine a setting where the previous civilization were destroyed by making the air poisonous? or perhaps removing it entirely? it would leave lovely structure, but no trace of any people. it would betray the usual fantasy convention of gods getting their power from their worshippers, but i can live with that.

now, back to work.

.. was the best host TNT ever had. sure, rhonda shear was cuter, but jbb was seriously funny. example:

“… nothing makes me madder than watching that mint-condition 1971 Hemi Cuda get totally destroyed in that crash scene. What were they thinking? That car, you could just barely touch the gas pedal and that car would make a sound like a 747 taking off. The engine in that thing was so big you had to use a booster seat to see over it. […] That was THE most powerful car ever built. The greatest of all the Muscle Cars. And now we have one less Hemi Cuda in the universe. […] Anyway, that’s just irresponsible. You know, anytime they RUFFLE THE FUR on a poodle in a movie, you’ve got the ASPCA complaining, you’ve got PETA protesting, you’ve got people going to jail for poodle abuse – but you can just TRASH a beautiful machine like that, with impunity. I’m sick. Go ahead. Roll film.” – jbb on monstervision, concerning phantasm 2

‘fetishistic consumerism’

i am guilty of this — maybe not as guilty as some.

when i get a little down, one of my urges is to go buy something. the further down i feel, the more expensive a thing i want to buy. the psychology behind this is easy; i was raised with a siege mentality with regard to finances, and making a big purchase establishes my wallet’s dominance. i feel better about myself because of the cash i have on hand.

this is incredibly stupid, and i feel incredibly stupid for doing it, but it’s hard to overwrite the programming. not impossible, but it’s easier to mitigate than to override. i can mock it out most of the time.

the way i do this? i don’t make any big purchases generally. i know that when i get depressed i’m going to go buy something, so i save up my wants until then. i keep a mental list of these things, and when i start to slide into blackness i haul it back out.

today is like that. this week has been rough. rosetta stone has been jerking me around for a few months now, so i’m a little fucked up about my job, and my personal life is a little on the tricky side at the moment. i’m probably still sick from india, and i have too many crutches to name w/r/t all of this.

so there’s this fender strat at guitar center, new, us model, $650. i’m debating. i want to play more, and get back into electric guitars. it will not be able to compete with the $10 guitar i got from the rev kinesys for playability, because sweet jesus. but i think it will add some tone.

i like the classic body, the classic sunburst stain, the maple tone, and the pickups aren’t terrible. the price makes this a winner. i’m nervous about the financing, but what can you do? i’d rather get this now at this price than wait.

but it wasn’t on my list. this is a depression purchase. i’ve been playing a lot more lately — it’s a creative outlet and i haven’t been getting any at work — and that’s my flimsy justification. it’s possible i will feel somewhat guilty after buying it, and that may lead me deeper into … [read more >>]

meh. small place. golf on the tv. bored.

.. before any of the more rational readers to convince me that i’m not going to change the mind of any über-thumpers: i know that. this is as much typing practice for me as anything else. willful ignorance is a powerful, pitiful thing, but it does bring blissful and unshakeable certainty of belief.

but, concerning the bible as the perfect word of god:

while it has been almost a year since i last looked at the dead sea scrolls, i don’t remember them having been written in english. granted, it was pretty dark.

which version is, in your mind, the perfect version (in english)? wycliffe? tyndale? king james? (and please specify either the 1611 version, which included the books of the apocrypha or the 1768 rewrite which cut them out to reduce printing costs.) niv? is it possible that they are all flawless, despite their difference?

a fact of linguistics: there is no such thing as a perfect translation from one language to another. not possible. as a result, translations are compromised, imprecise, or downright erroneous.

as an example (and one that’s pretty old hat for bible scholars) let’s consider the ‘virgin birth’:

first the prophecy, from isaiah 7 (asv):

14 therefore the lord himself will give you a sign: behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

15 Butter and honey shall he eat, …

isaiah is prophesying here that within twelve years ephraim and syria will fall, and there is nothing about a messiah in this context, but that’s beside the point.

then the event, as told by matthew 1 (asv):

22 Now all this is come to pass, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying,

23 Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, And they shall call his name Immanuel; which is, being interpreted, God with us.

the fact that i have to specify which english version i’m drawing from proves my point, but that’s too easy. the fact that matthew misquotes isaiah and then provides a translation that isaiah didn’t include proves my point as well, but let’s suppose it didn’t.

the english word ‘virgin’ appears in both passages. in isaiah, the hebrew word in question is `almah ( עלמה ), which means young woman. there is another word in hebrew which means virgin (bethulah), and when `almah is … [read more >>]

Barry: i run this from /usr/website/deploy TAG=branches/jp_release cap -f (host) -f sites/jp -a clean_deploy_content
Barry: I do this on (host)
Barry: It gives me a funny error
Barry: REPORT request failed on ‘…/jp/branches/jp_release’
svn: ‘…/jp/branches/jp_release’ path not found
b.vandgrift: that is correct. there is no such branch as branches/jp_release
b.vandgrift: there is branches/release, but that hasn’t been updated in 8 months.
b.vandgrift: the last tag is three days old.
b.vandgrift: the last trunk is 5 hours old.
Barry: I was drunk.

not briefs, you dirty minded bastards.

the past couple of weeks have been me clearing my head and docket so i can be sane. this has been something of an uphill fight.

i am now 17 lbs lighter than i was when i left for the subcontinent. i’ve been trying to maintain this with some hard biking, and watching what i eat to a stronger degree.

i am now driving an 07 civic, which should net me a $3000/year savings in fuel, maintenance, insurance, and payments. with the potential savings, i got a new tv.

i was, it turns out, around $50k over the limit to get a ‘stimulus package’ tax refund. stingy bastards.

wednesday i head back to the burg for another week of covering for a new father, and copying text from word documents into web forms. while a waste of potential, it’s their nickel.

for the moment.

my first impressions of paris: there seem to be quite a few more visitors than parisians.

my second: it’s good not to have to rush to the toilet every half hour. i’m still taking my anti-biotics though. and the malarone for that matter.

i’ve walked quite a long way today, on top of a very long flight. (10 hours.) clay recommended a nice hotel, which is where i am staying, about two football fields from notre dame. i’ve napped already. i’m feeling like i probably should try it again.

found a shogi set in a game shop a little ways off.

there’s a point at which you stop taking pictures. there’s too much. it’s impossible to capture. so i’ve started taking pictures of ugly little corners and details. i’m more comfortable with those things than grandeur anyhow.

i have to keep reminding myself that the value of the euro was intended to be somewhat less than a dollar, and it’s only by virtue of the fact that we’ve spent a good many years fucking our currency over and mortgaging ourself to the chinese that this is an expensive place to stay, eat, and drink. maybe the next guy can bring things back around.

maybe we can do something about energy.

i don’t know. i’m tired. see you all later.

so for the past couple of weeks i’ve been in sunny chennai, india. sunny, as the avg temperature while i’ve been here has been 104°.

i don’t really know where to start. the thing that most recently occurred to me as i was washing my hands was ‘what does it mean to be clean here?’. the water is not drinkable, carrying bacteria which will make me quite ill. when i wash my hands, i transfer them to my hands. someone truly ocd would pull their hair out here.

i haven’t had any regular transportation, since you can’t rent a motorcycle, there’s no way i’m driving a car, and the Madras Club, where i’m staying, is far enough from the nearest taxi stand or auto-gathering corner that walking it is pretty rough. i could call in a car, but after work it’s always dark, so there’s nothing to see really. i can’t go to most nightlife events as i am a single male and won’t be allowed admission, and i neither speak the local language or have anyone to show me around the kinds of places i’m likely to want to frequent.

combine this with an illness that befell me a few days after i arrived and is only letting up now that i’m nearly gone.

i’m not trying to complain, just explain why i haven’t been out to see the country, or driven down to the temples, or anything of the kind. it’s a work trip, and two days off in a row isn’t something that actually happened. i’ve seen quite a lot of the madras club, the lister offices, and the road between the two, but i’ve done little else.

so if there’s a lack of photos, i apologize.

that said, wandering around these places has been interesting. on a couple of days i did quite a bit of walking (dehydrating myself to a dangerous level), and via shopping excursions with vijay, have seen most of the town. i was warned about the culture shock, but i don’t feel it. i think if i knew the language and the map i’d get along just fine.

every weekend when i head downtown, at least one bum asks me for money. didn’t happen here but once, even though i am clearly a rich foreigner. no one has tried to rip me off, or … [read more >>]

Yeah, I am behind the times. But I had to get a new phone anyway so why not treat myself?

the manager at rs that i so respected is leaving the company. good for him, sucks for me. he is like the zen master of the intersection of technology and office politics. easily the best manager i’ve ever had.

if you’re reading, you will be missed.

the house is a mess. feels good to be back in it, however. tomorrow, or perhaps monday i need to get a couple of new shirts to take with me to chennai.

working on getting the feed reading part of this site working with backgounDRB. since this is hosted at dreamhost, i wonder how i’ll be able to keep things running?

it’s been time to move for a long time, but i’m resisting. maybe after jumble gets rolling.

merging agile and ucd processes

host: kelly goto @ gotomedia

the big ball of mud! questions about what’s working for people. not many people seem to have a process that works.

why does everybody end up in the big ball of mud? time, cost, experience, visibility, complexity, change, scale.

the cure, from the BBOM paper: agile and refactoring.

what we’re doing here? finding a best practices toolkit.

i am running out of battery, and hope that i can get the slides for this.

will post the generalized review of the conf later.

using chuck.e.cheese as a way to describe oauth.

what oauth gives you:

signed http requests.

safe, password-less token exchange.

what’s the process?

three actors — user (not me!), service provider, consumer (the app that’s getting the protected data).

three sets of tokens/credentials: access token – (tickets redeemed for prizes, signed), request token – (tokens, fake quarters, etc.), consumer keys – uniquely identifies an application

therefore, you have three urls: request token issuer (token machine), auth page (confirm access by user), access token exchanger.

as a service provider, you have to decide what urls you are going to use.

now, the meat.

building a consumer. (in ruby!) auth.net website has code for many languages. fiddly part: getting signatures correct.

get a consumer key and secret. we register our app with the service provider (not defined how in the spec — get this from the app).

[code] gem install oath [/code]

some code here.

1  consumer = OAuth::Conser.new("key", "secret", {
2    # options
3  })
4  
5  request_token = consumer.get_request_token

step 2.

1  request_token.authorize_url
2  # => http://mysite.com/authorize?oauth_token=XXXX

keep the following token around: it’ll be used to make subsequent requests. the user has control over the access token — they can go into the service provider and revoke the token, for example.

1  token = request_token.get_access_token
2  # simple, right?

and we’re done with token exchange.

1  token.get('/me')
2  token.post('/topics', {})

now, building a service provider. supporting oath in the server side. (this is the easier side of the coin? but possibly more complex.)

data to store: consumers – the thing using the API (key, secret, callback_url), request token (token, secret, consumer, authorizing_user), access token (token, secret, consumer, user)

authorizing user is hard to get your head around. capture that when the user gives access on the server side.

registering consumers: how you want to issue these is entirely up to you. can be anything — a development signup form, for instance. as long as you can communicate this to the developers, you’re in good shape.

verify using only the consumer credential, that the consumer is good, has registered, has a token.

1  valid = OAuth::Signature.verify(request) do |token, consumer_key|
2    consumer = Consumer.find_by_key(consumer_key)
3    [nil, consumer.secret]
4  end

issue the request token:

1  request_token - consumer.get_new_request_token
2  render "oatuh_token=#request_token.token}" +
3    # ...

ask the user to accept the authorization (psdeudo)

1  if logged_in?
2    ask_to_authorize
3  else
4    save_login_return_path
5    redirect_to login_url
6  end

attach the user record to request token. go back to the consumer.

[code lang=“ruby”]
def authorize_token(request_token)
request_token.user = logged_in_user

1. capture the authorizing user and
2. redirect to the callback url somehow. return the … [read more >>]

presenter: mason @ wesabe

(pretty sparsely populated here)

add-ons, introduce them, where they are, and how they differentiate themselves from add-ons a few years ago.

why would you want to go there? the biz argument.

add-on development, jargon, &c. how to build. setting up a development environment. (lightweight overview)

some resources at http://www.wesabe.com/downloads

http://add-ons.mozilla.org – add-ons extend firefox.

personalize your browsing experience, and differentiates firefox from the crowd.

• button or menu item
• toolbar
• sidebar

aren’t limited to firefox — flock, thunderbird .. built into the platform.

the standard:

• google
• yahoo
• delicious buttons
• stumbleupon — a good example of a company that raised itself with its addon.

the innovative:

• google browser sync & gears – deep firefox and web app integration.
• delicious bookmarks — now fully browser-integrated
• glubble
• ebay companion

?:why use an addon?

downloaded apps are a lot of work, with a slow release schedule. add-ons are quick to prototype and build.

• simple tool set
• xul
• javascript

quick and easy to relese

• mozilla add-on site
• push new releases and updates

cross-platform support, easy localization

add-on to app independence: migrate via xulrunner. flickr uploadr, ex.

add-on dev 101

xul – xml based user interface language. worst acronym ever. there is no dana only xul. or use xhtml (add the namespace, tweak)

(i realized these notes aren’t incredibly useful to anyone reading them, but they serve as a reminder for me as to what was talked about, and should provide links to learn from.)

xul overlays: files that describe the extra content in the UI. overriding small pieces of a xul file without having to resupply the whole ui, or reusing particular pieces of it. most add-ons employ xul overlays.

chrome – a set if ui elements of an add-on. content is the xul files, javascript, etc. like writing a big fat ajax client. locale for localized information. (this feels like what i’ve already read on the add-on tutorial sites and whatnot.) skin – css, images.

xpi – (zippy) derived from xpinstall. this is the add-on installation file: chrome (generally jar’d), install.rdf, chrome.manifest.

a hello world. (see the downloads. this is a long, slow tutorial.)

it’s important to sign these, preventing man in the middle attack.

development environment — this is a bit tricky.

1) create a profile. use profile manager in firefox. (firefox -profile) create then quit.
2) find extensions dir.
3) create a file matching your ‘id’ in install.rdf and inside, place the absolute path to your dev area. … [read more >>]

jeremy liew @ lightspeed venture partners

we’re talking about the future of game development and game types with web 2.0.

panelists:

lots of things have changed in the web — mostly the variability of cost. these changes are tricking to the web industry.

aaa games can cost upwards of $30M. marketing driven by print and media advertising. building is about levels, and monetization is through box sales.

changes parallel the web industry.

small agile teams can get in-browser games out quickly.

(really want this slide .. don’t want to record it here.)

web games are multiplayer — not ai driven. no level design. &c.

some numbers:

halo3 $30M, yielded $700M.

powerchallenge < $8m. 1M players.

friends for sale < $1m. 7m players.

marketing:

$30M marketing dollars, 10M copies sold, 90% through retail.

the rest — facebook.

aaa game sales declines over time.

social games are backward — they grow over time.

one of the critical issues for multiplayer games online is asynchronous play.

online gaming revenue: $3.8B 2006, $5.3B in 2007, more in 2008, and growing.

panelists:

seqi chen (serious business)

johann christiansen (power challenge)

shervin pishevar (social games network)

mark pincus (zynger)

warbook — developed in two months by two people.

there have been improvements in play since launch, since it’s server hosted. just launched a sequel.

johann started in 2001, started text-based, added graphics over time.

how import are graphics, given their expense?

not important in management games.

launching early with a text-based game: profitable from the first year. management games develop a loyal user base.

variablized content?

mark: launched scramble as a live game, competition in real time. maxed out at 20K daily active users. spent three months reworking the game to be asynchronous. several tries before it reached a tipping point. thought asynchronous was a bad idea initially.

they come back to an asynchronous play because it’s your turn. there is a social obligation. the live game, though, represents 1/3 of daily users.

seqi: not turn based, but is asynchronous. (friends for sale). success about creating a game where social relationships are embedded into the game.

there is some value in unstructured asynchronicity.

johann: the social aspects of games are critical.

shervin: (gaming graph v. social graph). the emotional connection between people who know each other is quite valuable.

(think about a word scramble type game with continuous scoring.)

a very high accept rate on invitation is key to viral growth.

ghost racer: example of something too hard, yielding a high dropoff rate. ideally, a game … [read more >>]

session 3 was on testing web sites, and was largely a review of BDD and rspec. good, not useful.

—

this talk concerns finding knowledge among social network data — emails/messages, recommendations, tags .. etc.

baysian filtering. once set up with some initial data, it classifies things by preferential frequency.

examples uses: personal ads. built a basic filter so you can detect what city they came from.

interesting breakdown of what people talk about, as separated out by a baysian filter.

distance metrics. could be people, concepts, movies.

preference distances — who is similar to each other? whose tastes are close? therefore, whose recommendations are likely to apply to whom?

(collaborative filtering) weight votes based on preferential distance.

linguistic distance. different are two texts?

valleywag – huffingpost > slashdot – wired. (for instance)

heirarchical clustering. group similar preferences (or whatever), chart in a dendogram. there is a chart with bloggers that’s pretty neat.

decision trees. yes/no characterizations in a graph. can be built automatically from any set of data.

hotornot.com example.

network analysis. PageRank, example. clustering coefficient. (how many of a person’s friends are friends with each other?) generally, social networks are highly clustered.

(network graph created with freebase, board members of major companies.)

(network graph showing twitter. holy cow, tight clustering.)

feature extraction demonstrated via facial recognition. using message boards? still works.

(this is fairly dry and academic.)

the book is ‘programming collective intelligence’.

that’s it for today’s sessions .. now i think i’ll swing by the twitter offices.

coming into this a little bit late.

(with jonah peretti)

we’re talking about viral marketing, and the effects of social influence on people’s choices on the web.

this is mainly based on an experiment with buzzfeed — some users saw the social data, others didn’t. there was a widely different distribution of popularity.

the problem: radical unpredictability.

accidental incfuential hypothesis wiggest that we can’t predict who will make something popular

the music lab experiment suggests we can’t predict what will become popular.

how to succeed anyway?

solution #1 contagious media

forget influentials and make something that people want to share.

make it easy to understand, easy to share, and include a social imperative.

(this moves very fast)

viral math: r > 1

each generation has to increase in repetition; at this point, it becomes viral.

nike ‘sweatshop’ email

he customized a pair of nike’s shoes that were customized with ‘sweatshop’. they mailed to say they couldn’t make the shoe.

he forwarded the email, which led to a viral cascade. it grew out into an activist community and reporters, even though the host wasn’t that into the issue.

example 2: ‘the rejection line’

example 3: blackpeopleloveus.com

hindsight bias — jonah is viewed as an expert in fields he doesn’t really understand, because of the growth of his viral efforts.

key concept: bored at work network — decentralized network that enables media to ‘go viral’ if ordinary people enjoy sharing it.

the problem: most things have a reproduction rate less than 1. contagious media is usually silly or fun. not so for products. the slightest drag or payload will almost certainly result in an R < 1.

solution #2: big seed marketing

sub-viral growth is still growth. small seeds lead to failure. 10 becomes 5 becomes 3, etc.

word of mouth without tipping point

examples: tide cold water challenge.

solution #3: mullet strategy

business up front, party in the back

front of the website is sharp, user-generated stuff in the back. neat front, messy and free backside.

let the good quality stuff bubble up. ex: dig.

contagious media – uses bored at work network.

big seed marketing – good return without tipping point.

mullet strategy – try everything and promote what works.

pimping http://buzzfeed.com – viral and trend detection

?: promotion v. discovery?

allow for discovery.

some pretty straightforward questions ..

?: non-social themes? (ex: recession) can you make anything funny?

almost anything. don’t get distracted from the core mission of the company. how do you tie it into the product? if the tie-in takes the R … [read more >>]

.. needs to be something i add in.

as an aside, textmate has a textile bundle. i’m working offline right now, as the wireless i’m connected to seems to be horked. also, my screen brightness has been turned all the way down to save battery life. will probably charge up over lunch.

(and possibly play around with backgrounDRB, which really needs an installation doc update.)

decided to go with the ‘designing for’ session, with tom coates (tom@plasticbag.org) of y! brickhouse. (who threw a rockin party last night.) was originally going into the ‘censorship’ panel.

on to the panel:

things interesting lately — things that are not sites, but the sites are exploratory interfaces to data services behind the scene.

(listed are flurrie, freebase, twitter, dopplr, google earth, amazon, facebook, veomanes, wikipedia, flickr, delicious)

(back online now.)

five things:

your site is not your product.

you must play well with others.

you can never have too much data.

heirarchies can’t take the weight.

the importance of collaboration.

we are moving from siloed data to aggregate data manifested through api’s.

the web of data: datasources, services for exploring and manipulating data, and ways people can plug them together.

your site is not your product — your territory is everywhere your network touches.

the important thing about twitter is the data behind the scenes. the website is only one way to touch it.

90% of all of the traffic for twitter is from API’s.

flickr — another example.

flickr = photoframe. card prints. widgets, mashups everywhere. the website is just an interface to the data.

last.fm – a music tracking and listening site, but also a desktop radio.

toward the future: ubiquitous computing. the internet as a big database.

the web of data bleeds into the real world:

a physical object responds to or visualizes data from the network, or interacting with changes data, etc.

nabaztag? a network-enabled toy rabbit. a playful object for alpha nerds.

ambient orb. (see http://thinkgeek.com for this stuff.)

wattson (http://diykyoto.com) ambient energy usage. puts information on the network as well.

weather underground. you can buy a sensor array for feedback. last.fm for weather.

next thing: play well with others. design for recombination.

why open the data?

drive people to the service

people will pay for it

as advertising — to put yourself into the middle of an ecosystem

makes your service more attractive with less central development

network effects: every new service can build on top of existing services, and every service and piece of data you add to … [read more >>]

morning announcements ..

giving some thought to adding a live feature to this post.

marc andressen talking about his career, and the internet, how people are approaching it.

media companies are unprepared, telecom companies are enabling.

lots of questions and answers, most rehashing his blog, some conversation about microsoft.

(went ahead and added the live editing during the speech.)

jonathan zittrain — talking about his book ‘the future of the internet, and how to stop it’.

US 1.0 → everybody be really nice, and if that doesn’t work, just move west.

lessons to be learned by the constitutional power-limiting for web platforms. ad-hoc community based models, etc.

mitchell baker, mozilla foundation. reminds me of miller canning. talking about the user experience.

the mobile web shouldn’t be something we have to think about.

‘what can i get to, and what can i do with it’ should not be dependent on the device.

use cases for mobile are likely to be the same as everything else.

while this is all interesting, it’s the kind of visionary-speak we keep hearing here.

some shilling for firefox.

yahoo cto, ari baloch, talking about open platforms. searchmonkey.

‘social’ as a dimension, not a destination.

next speaker — current tv. with torture porn (waterboarding). strange.

steve pearman with myspace.

a few fundamental truths about community online.

117 million unique users. smaller than japan, larger than mexico.

100M rows of data.

85 GB of bandwith.

infrastructure supports > 5 million concurrent users.

11% of all online minutes in the US are myspace.

you live by the goodwill and participation of the community, and will never be as smart as they are.

the community is always willing to tell you what they want, directly or indirectly.

(15 billion public comments.)

i think the last speaker was the most engaging. heading for the next thing.

finally put the updates out in the interwub. clearly i have some learning to do as regards the shortcuts of textile.

ended up leading a panel of sorts on web 2.0 and politics. most of the attendees were politcal operatives and not technical. was fairly useless. such is life.

the keynotes were okay; about 1/3 of the audience got up and left when the microsoft guy showed up. that was pretty entertaining.

someone recognized me from my twitter photo, too. that was .. odd.

there’s some sort of pub crawl later i’m looking forward to. i think i’m off to find some food at the moment.

when i get back to this system — twitter listening, and a few others.

there is an app up on the screen that posts the twitters for the audience to the screen. almost everyone here uses twitter. this is somewhat chaotic.

gregarious narain, jeremiah owyang, stowe boyd, brian solis.

micromedia = twitter and a bunch other stuff.

blogs = essay format.

utters = audio twitter. others.

history of micromedia?

stowe: buddy gopher — you could pull statuses for contacts on aim. users updated their status very frequently.

hollywood folks started using this as a status board for their projects.

with the emergence of the facebook minifeed &c the number of applications and users increased dramatically.

brian: twitter, pounce, tumblr and different micromedias have different communities, little overlap. different than blogging. asks questions, converse, update, talk to communities.

greg: a slightly different mindset to consumption.

- the notion of streams?

stowe: there’s a difference and big chunk consumption and being embedded in a stream of bite-size information.

a partial attention model. don’t have to dedicate your full attention to something.

more like being in a cocktail party — a different mindset.

opportunity to engage in a conversational space is moving off of the blogs and into twitter and friendfeed, alert-thingy, and the comments are happing in these tools instead of on the blogs.

jeremiah: research on microblogging yields that it is real. twitter users are heavy social media adopters. these are early adopters – under 6 million – and can influence how technology is used. very open to advertising, so there’s business options here.

over 50%: owning the best brand is important.

- how can i use this in my business?

brian: good example of how can be used is dell — they use this for customer service.

tweetscan = twitter search. (or something.)

jeremiah: hr block scanned twitter for tax comments – and responded to users. companies are using this more and more – forrester, comcast ..

stowe: you can see the immediate benefit of twitter as it’s used today. potentially very valuable for businesses to monitor the enterprise via micromedia and social networks.

[phatic communication?]

tasks and whatnot streamed to you, as opposed having to go look for it.

stowe: clearly linked to messaging and texting. character limit. there is a compression involved. quick interaction. twitpitch? if you want to pitch, read the blog post and send a twitter. a better cleaner way to pitch. concise.

hashtagging.

a few companies are now looking for these hash … [read more >>]

if you look at what the internet has become, it’s a massive data entry system that people are incented to deliver.

almost everything can benefit from a little game theory.

is it game, a service?

rajat: nitro, bunchball. drive user behavior via game mechanics.

chris: areae

gabe: game design can make people do irrational things without the threat of violence. bringing game design into non-gaming contexts.

so what is a game? where is the line?

the definition is a game, and what is a game-like experience has evolved over the last few years.

3 basic things you add to an app to make it fun:

challenges, leaderboards, and trophies. these things cause people to change their behavior.

does games = fun? you shouldn’t feel like you’re wasting your time. if you get more trophies, for some reason, you don’t feel like you’re wasting your time.

is there badge fatigue? facebook is the ultimate trophy room. whereas your ‘life trophies’ are irritating, social networking has made a trophy room cool and acceptable, rather than irritating.

how to you keep people engaged with the brand of the sponsor, while they’re playing the game?

nbc’s office has a game (dundermifflininfinity.com) — you earn ‘bucks’, by building a dunder-mifflin branch. paying fake money to do real work. redemption mechanism are movement up the ladder, and buying virtual whatsits for your desk.

all of this creates cognitive recognition of the brand.

photosharing site – very game oriented.
and it becomes hard to distinguish between gamers and non-gamers. everybody likes to play — as games are better at integrating into the way people like to play, can you imagine an application that couldn’t be made more fun?

there was a suicide hotline discussion.

?: can you make high school more fun?

founder of atari taking a pilot high school and improving student and teacher performance via game mechanics.

a: absolutely.

gabe: if you start out attempting to do anything other than engage people in a fun experience (i.e., educate), you’re not building a game.

[pmog – browser game, lay treasure on websites. good for syllabi.]

backchannel — the conversation happening in the space surrounding a thing, without directly interacting with a thing.

craig from gaia online: are virtual worlds social networks with game elements attached? does this require its own category?

social networks are 2d virtual worlds. the only difference is the # of d’s. anything above 2d conflicts with the interests of women, … [read more >>]

this session seems to be a shill session for a book called ‘groundswell’. i’ll stick it out.

for large companies, the bigger the company gets, the more they’re adopting web 2.0 strategies. but how to create a good strategy?

focus on the social trend — this is the groundswell. ‘a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than traditional institutions.’

where are you on this scale?

the purists on one side, understand that social networking is powerful.

the corporatists, believe online activities have to deliver business benefits.

the pragmatists: people are in charge, but the corporations can benefit.

the key to a successful community and an effective social strategy is to have concise objectives. know what you’re after.

there’s a four-step approach to groundswell —

p = people. assess the customers’ needs.

o – objectives. decide what you want to accomplish.

s = strategy. how will relationships change in the long term?

t = tech. last.

‘social technograpics ladder’

creators 18%, critics 25%, collectors 12%, joiners 25%, spectators 48%, inactives 44%.

(profile customers at groundswell.forrester.com)

roles v. objectives

research —> listening
marketing —> talking
sales —> energizing, selling
support —> being helpful
development —> embracing? (this requires some explanation) new product ideas, embracing customer ideas.

of course we listen to customers. social networks allow us to listen to customers in a new way.

listening example: delmonte dog community.

speaking example: png, talking about tampons. (beinggirl.com) ‘ask iris’ – driving the conversation. (four times as effective as advertising.)

energizing example: brids.com on myspace. widget countdown calendar.

support example: blueshirtnation.com, for best buy employees.

development example: ‘my starbuck idea’ — the ideas become public, and votable.

roi of executive blog, year one. based on fastlane blog (gm)

cost:
planning and traning 35K, platform 30k, brand monitoring 50k, content production and review 170k. total costs 285k. this is a talking application, most of the benefits related to marketing goals.
advertising visibility 7k, press stories 240k, blog WoM 37K, support savings 69K. total value 335K.

use numbers like this to win over the corporatists.

keys for success —

start with customers, understand the audience. the old comedy adage is valuable here.

choose an objective you can measure.

line up executive backing.

romance the naysayers.

start small. think big. don’t try to change things overnight. one thing at a time.

pragmatists bring the companies and the groundswell together.

(charlene li [cli], josh bernoff [jbernoff], both from forrester.com)

presentation at groundswell.forrester.com

?: blog and forums in … [read more >>]