Category: unconferences

Balkan Beat Box, satellite radio, baby, Library Camp East and danah boyd

As you may have guessed from the title, this blog post is a bit busy. Tonight, I am driving up to Brooklyn for the weekend. Luckily, I just invested in a Sirius satellite radio, so the trip should be a bit more enjoyable. Saturday night we will see Balkan Beat Box.

Then, I will drive down to Jersey to meet my cousin’s new baby! I will be away from the web for most of the trip. Consequently, the blog will be silent until the end of my trip when I plan on attending Library Camp East on Monday the 25th. I look forward to meeting some of you there. I will be checking my e-mail when I can, but may be taking a little while on my replies.

I have to head to campus now to hear a talk by social networking researcher danah boyd.

Notes from BarCampRdu,Part 3, Social networking, Social browsing, and Microformats

For sessions 3 and 4, I attended sessions focusing on social software. From the wiki, session 3 was:

Social Networks – Fred Stutzman. We’ll spend a session talking about Social Networking Websites, such as Myspace, Facebook and Linked In. We’ll look at them, figure out why people use them, and share ideas about how businesses can leverage social networks.

It was attended by what seemed like half campers. Unfortunately, I didn’t really take very many notes during Fred’s session because I was already familiar with his main ideas. There are three main aspects of his thought that he discussed:

  1. His Facebook research (It really is fascinating)
  2. Situational Relevance:
    Situational Relevance in Social Networking Website
    Situational Relevance and Facebook’s Summer Traffic
  3. The Network Effect Multiplier, or, Metcalfe’s Flaw

Most of the discussion focused on situational relevance and the network effect multiplier. to get a good idea of the discussion, you might want to check out the discussion on those posts. I would also encourage you to check out my recent responses to Fred’s thought:

Session 4 was on social bookmarking and was moderated by Chris Messina.Chris got the discussion rolling with by explaining his idea of the future of web browsing and his original vision for Flock. He also made arguments for why the future of browsing is currently being developed with Webkit applications.

However, the discussion quickly turned to a discussion of microformats. Fred Stutzman and Terrell Russell or ClaimID (identity management) discussed their implementation of OpenID (universal distributed url login). hCards (like vCards) were also discussed. I had not really understood the idea of XFN before the discussion.

XFN is a simply way to define relationships between people. For example, this is implemented in WordPress when one adds a friend. A typical blogroll implementing XFN could look like this:

<a xhref="http://jane-blog.example.org/" mce_href="http://jane-blog.example.org/" rel="sweetheart date met">Jane</a> <a xhref="http://dave-blog.example.org/" mce_href="http://dave-blog.example.org/" rel="friend met">Dave</a> <a xhref="http://darryl-blog.example.org/" mce_href="http://darryl-blog.example.org/" rel="friend met">Darryl</a> <a xhref="http://www.metafilter.com/" mce_href="http://www.metafilter.com/" >MetaFilter</a> <a xhref="http://james-blog.example.com/" mce_href="http://james-blog.example.com/" rel="met">James Expert</a>

(example from XFN: Introduction and Examples)

It seems like a pretty straightforward evolution of social interaction through the web. It made me wonder why Facebook doesn’t implement this with all of the relationship data they hold. While it might be of limited value in their closed network, the future will (hopefully) allow exporting of data.

We discussed how all of these standards ought to interact in the future. If relationships and identity information were stored as microformats on an OpenID enabled server, it would become possible to export data from your OpenID server to a new service. This advance would make navigating between multiple social applications easier. It would also prevent the need to disclose uneccessary amounts of personal information by uploading ones address book to a new service. This move would both empower the user to take more control of their privacy while automating the more painful parts of joining a new network. My notes for this discussion read:

XFN + OpenID = portable network
XFN + hCard + Jabber + OpenID = ad hoc (open standards) social networks

These formulae certainly stay true to what Chris Messina began by describing as an “Architecture for Collaboration”.

I believe that we closed with a discussion of the privacy implications related to social browsing and microformats.

Technorati tags: barcamprdu microformats

Notes from BarCampRDU, Part 2: “Sex and the Death of Advertising”

For session 2, I attended “Sex and the Death of Advertising”. From the wiki:

My name is Martin Smith [email protected] and I learned to sell soap for P&G and candy for M&M/Mars. Selling soap was harder by the way. Sex & The Death of Advertising will discuss what we, as marketers, do when tried and true market creating strategies cease to work. What are the implications of the death of the Advertising Industrial Complex? Will new tools such as search engine marketing (SEM) eventually end up in the same tangled mess due to pressure from advertisers fleeing now unsuccessful channels such as TV, Radio and Infomercials? Is there something fundamentally different in new “pull” ad models that will prevent SEM from losing reach like television and print? We will discuss selections from The Attention Economy by Davenport and Beck, Gonzo Marketing by Christopher Locke and All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin. If you have a favorite marketing author or new marketing theory, please bring it to our discussion. Our session’s draft goal will be to brainstorm key elements of our new marketing paradigm and identify what’s next.

Martin did a good job of leading a discussion. He began with a brief introduction to his theory. Essentially traditional push advertising no longer works because people have become numb to the overabundance of messages they are exposed to. Generations raised with TV and the Web are great at blocking things out.

Another problem faced by advertising in general is what Martin demonstrated with the example of infomercials. When everyone starts using a certain method of advertising, the price for said advertising goes up while the effectiveness goes down.

After the introduction, he asked other participants to share their current experiences with advertising. We talked about Google AdWords for a little bit. During this part of the discussion, I feel that we hit upon a lot of the major points of the discussion:

  • “Word of Mouth” is extremely important. Martin discussed his experience with magnetic poetry. That was a product that largely sold itself through word of mouth. Martin pointed out that what took him 5 years of marketing then could probably be accomplished in 6 months now.
  • “The Long Tail“: We spent a lot of time discussing the importance of being able to reach niche markets. Why pay for AdWords if you hit the top of the rankings anyways. This also lead to a discussion of ->>
  • “Purple Cows“: Is it purple enough? Am I explaining it in a purple enough way?

In addition to these major themes, the discussion covered a number of other ideas. I am going to outline a few below:

  • Martin was a fan of the saying “Live by PR, Die by PR.” He used a number of examples from his career where a product was successful due to positive editorial press. For example, the magnetic poetry was picked up by the Washington Post. He also gave some examples of how bad PR, or no PR, can then destroy a brand.
  • We talked about the idea of a “Free Prize Inside”. Martin pointed out how the practice of giving away web services and product trials is similar to giving away a free prize in a Cracker Jack box, in that everyone expects a certain ammount of free. A lively discussion about free trials ensued. One interesting point someone brought up was that after six months with one software trial, it was integrated into his life. It seemed that there was a general concensus that we were all at least partially in the “business of giving away”.
  • Customer service is extremely important. Given the speed customers can share bad experiences, wer are only as strong as our weakest link. This is also really important because of so many products are now free that the service is what keeps customers. Furthermore, barriers for new competitors to enter are low. In a later talk on Social Browsing, we discussed how it will become easier to export settings and information from one service to another. This will make customer service event more of a defining factor.
  • We discussed the importance of inventory. This related to the last point: If Amazon and its competitors both have all the books, then customer service is what sets them apart.LIBRARY ASIDE: This made me think about how libraries need to market our inventories better. Everyone at the session seemed surprised that most of the Barnes and Noble and Borders books only sell one copy a year. Libraries have much larger stocks than your typical bookstore. It was pointed out that Amazon has 11 million or so books for sale. We have over 5 million in the libraries at UNC. Of course that doesn’t count what we can interlibrary loan. We need to promote WorldCat more than we do. Open WorldCat at least should help publicise our services a little. If inventory and free are this important, then libraries should be able to perform considerably better against our competition.This discussion of book inventory also tied in well with the ideas behind Lulu.com‘s philosophy (an event sponor) and the discussions of alternative publishing at a later session (I will post on this session later).

Technorati tag: barcamprdu

Notes from BarCampRdu,Part 1: General, Session 1

Yesterday I attended BarCampRDU at the Red Hat campus in Raleigh. Fred Stutzman did a wonderful job of organizing, so everything went smoothly. I am going to take some time over the next few days to look over my notes and blog some of the ideas that I thought of during the discussions. Overall I had a great time and look forward to participating in many more unconferences in the future. It was an excellent way for the local tech community to get together. Now that I understand how unconferences work, I would like to take a more active role in either planning or in leading a talk next time round.

You can see Flickr photos tagged BarCampRDU here and blog posts tagged with the technorati tag here.

The first talk I went to was “Refactoring Your Wetware”:

Andy Hunt of The Pragmatic Programmers likes to talk about how your brain works. Pole-bridging, pragmatic learning, the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, and even a little of Getting Things Done are all fair game.

While this session turned out to be more of a talk than a discussion, it was still very interesting. Andy began by setting forth the following ideas:

Using more of your brain’s horsepower!
• (experts rely on intuition) context dependent > context free (novices follow rules)
• Mastering knowledge doesn’t increase your professional effectiveness
• Problem for certification programs
• So? ->> tweak the brain
• Brain compared with computer model.
• Fast non-linear part, slow linear part but only one can access memory at any time
• 10% analytical, verbal — Geeky
• 90% irrational non-verbal – Artsy

He then went over a number of ways to get take advantage of that 90%. I feel it was a good start to the day as it got people thinking about how to look at things from different angles. Below are the notes I took. They are relatively raw. I think they are all in my own words, but a few phrases may accidently match Andy’s slides. If you get a chance to see this talk of his I would suggest going.

Thus design matters. (iPod example)
• Check out the video of Microsoft iPod – loses the design and good sense
• Drawing on the right side of the brain
• Trace an upside down image, but don’t label in your mind focus on the lines
• Default to symbol instead of reflecting on the deeper meaning

How to engage r-mode processing
• Focus on sensory experience
• Use building blocks like legos during design sessions
• Emphasize cross sensory feedback
• Lozanov Séance — yoga inspired breathing and repetition in dark room with baroque music and foreign words being repeated
• “Write drunk, but revise sober”
• Start with multi-sensory learning and then follow with traditional learning
• Memory stores every input
• Right mode actually scans these memories, but it is hard to transfer the harvested memory to the left mode because it is like trying to verbalize a dream

Image streaming
1. Ask yourself a question / pose a problem
2. Close your eyes for 10 minutes
3. For each image that crosses your mind
1. Describe it outloud
2. Imaging it using all five senses
3. Source of image not as important as interpreting it – rub eyes, look at bright light first

Journaling
• Write three mages a day in longhand, uncensored, never skip a day
• Typing is very L-mode being at the keyboard is a bad place for creativity
• BOOK – A Whack on the Side of the Head.
• Seeing something from a completely different point of view causes the right mode search algorithm to kick in differently.
• Avoid mental locks – Made me think of a book I read called The Eureka Effect that discussed very similar ideas.

Magic of the “oracle”
• is to focus pattern matching by broadening scope
• This made me think of Socrates (because he was motivated by the Oracle at Delphi). Maybe he was using his right brain?

Need to keep track of great ideas or your brain gets lazy and stops worrying about it.
• Capturing good ideas. Andy uses a space pen w/ notepad, index cards
• PDA with a wiki or sticky notes, voice recorder on pda,
• My new idea talk to Bluetooth earpiece while walking home and have the call recorded to my blog.
• Pocketmod.com
• Transcribe and integrate I a hyperlinked space (wikispace)

Context switching is bad and ruins productivity
• Multitasking and interruption like checking email (-10iq) worse than smoking a joint (-4iq)
• Second monitor yields productivity gains of 20%-30%

That was the end of my notes. I will post more notes and ideas later over the next few days.

Technorati tag: barcamprdu