Category: Professional

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so you wanna write a tech book

dori, knows a lot of people; about 1/3 of audience has written a book.

why? differentiation. better job. higher profile as consultant. to be a writer. (I got singled out.) missing: you have a thing that you’re passionate about & want to teach/share. dearth of material about a particular subject. then why not put up a website? convenience of a lot of material in one place; the one they wish they’d had. (I’m loving the audience participation.) wendy sharp. dori loves having written. 🙂 the “I did this” factor. and mom!

“that’s why I thought yr name was familiar. I have yr book”

I think she’s talking about http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5669097.Styling_Web_Pages_with_CSS_Visual_QuickProject_Guide

can u make a living? she can, sort of, but helps having husband doing the same. also: teaching, training, consulting. doesn’t mean that u can. (obvs.) very few do. (like almost any kind of writing, honestly.) another author, don’t know name, says books are anchor/opening for other stuff. way to make $1mil in tech book business: start with $2mil.

I can’t hear this guy. quantity not making up for quality? gotta have all the other stuff, blog or whatever. revising books.

someone talking about making a living writing manuals? internal stuff? this room has a noisy vibe.

consulting vs. writing. pick yr niche.

simon st l just walked in, looking dishevled.

pyramid: stupid & dummies books sell in quantity. “secrets of the javascript ninja” doesn’t sell well. but those type of books bring in consulting work. (coming back to this, other guy disagrees)

economics pretty forbidding. lucky to make 85 cents on a book.

iphone book as app: at $4.99 sold lots, $9.99 not.

sentence that I could better explain as a venn diagram.

someone asking how many want to BE writers, vs write about a subject they want to be expert or whatever in. “designing the obvious”

do you have to be compatible with word? lots of disagreement. peachpit is all word templates. simon disagrees. wrote Learning Rails that way, but most of o’reilly is docbook underneath, but most run away screaming. trying to figure out using gdocs. (which is how I took all my notes for head first, but they didn’t actually want me to write on the draft itself) also experimented with wikis, etc. change-tracking conversatin is central. “word will explode” “but these are all incredibly low-level questions”

feeding editors: they like chocolate. chapters on time: better. delay is deadly. “abstinence is best too, but….” communicating. (which is true with any communicating. also: one of my personal flaws.) clean copy on time. natural programmers, teachers, etc not always natural writers. (no kidding.)

“you’re 16 steps ahead of me […] are we going to get there?” yes.

standard contract. mmmm, lawyers. each co may have standard contract, but not same as others. dummies contract used to require giving up broadway show rights?!

no standard (across industry as a whole) royalty rate, advance, timeframe, pagecount, format, etc.

aquisition editor = who u sign contract with. (oreilly aquisition ed = development ed, good 2 know)

page count divisible by 24 is good.

cross accounting, avoid if you can. cross collatoralized (?) generally good?

(missed something) returns. “publishers never definitely sell books, as I understand it.” ok, this is way technical, I think this might be tackling it all backwards. jargon where you can get screwed. no ebook that explains this.

who pays for indexing? all depends.

all beg dori to jump to proposals.

proposal has to be good, take it seriously. care about typos: tells what it would be like to work with. template!

3 things to figure out first: who wants it & why, what’s going to do that in the book, and why you? (sounds a lot like writing grant apps) “we should go into business together” sample chapter: how you write. not always required: seems like writing on spec. 🙂 if you have a good blog. (arg gnarg.) demonstrating that you CAN write, and your style.

someone self-publishing on lulu asks: what’s the benefits of approaching mainstream publisher? reach & marketing. what’s your strength? also: editing, illustration. textbooks sounds like almost a requirement. is there much jumping from one to the other? sounds tricky. plenty of disagreement here. stretching into a new product, or sequel, extension, etc. the identity question. self-publishing as vanity press? maybe less so. (why all the mocking of the poets?!) depends on the goals? crazy niche market story.

nimble books

story about agent out kicking ass re: contract.

no agents in the room, apparently. is the field dying? a couple of stories that probably shouldn’t go on the interwebs. agent as sales rep. imbalance of supply & demand. tech industry very different from fiction. (kinda cool, honestly.) different experiences with the same agent, even.

wendy wasn’t really done w/proposals: never say “easy to understand” #2 cliche “writing next version of don’t make me think” #3 mixing up publishers #4 there is no competition #5 everybody else sucks. if you don’t hear w/in 30 days, ask again. lots of internal process.

series vs stand-alone. look at existing books. tell story about why you fit in the series. no control over title, cover. (again, sounds like there’s a lot of exceptions)

lots of people are not writers, but you do need to string together coherent thoughts. 🙂

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nate silver interview

In the alternate room…did we just lose the sound? no, it’s back.

538 was originally procrastination? plus frustration. “esp fox news”

“not a big fan of polls” bcause over-interpreted.

what were early polls/coverage missing? oversimplification, reductive. from a data geek’s perspective best natural experiment.

race? it’s complicated, can’t treat any race as monolithic: hillary’s success with latinos, but obama in the final still got overwhelming support from hispanics.

in advertising, they say demographics is dead; spotlight analysis, dividing into tribes based on “life perspectives” (that got a lot of mention in The Big Sort) voters as individuals, falling into clumps. some explanation of baseball stats experience, no “typologies” short-sighted (missed name, hillary’s campaign guy?) not seeing forest for trees. most americans don’t like to think abt politics issue by issue? american public underestimated in its sophistication. interesting idea for qualitative project: what really motivated you, esp people who went against type.

had always been thinking about politics in the background. 80/20 is the rational thing to do if you’re a normal person, but he’s all about the crazy meticulous detail. again relating to baseball; differences in the margin v important, millions of dollars, etc. “puzzle comes together a little bit at a time” over a long season, baseball or election. “you kept me kinda calm during the election” (which was, yes, my experience.)

appalachian, ancestry discussion “american” as equivalence for “redneck” defining difference between poor white in kentucky vs. (missed other state, am subbing in oregon)

how much is (baseball guy) worth this year? blah blah blah 🙂 more blah blah blah re:baseball.

economic crash & voters? haven’t had this situation in the modern era. fearful, 9/11-type even in terms of pessimism but also high approval of prez. at some point will be an intersection. better get moving! what’s the grace period before he starts getting blame…august 2010? right before midterms! but public is even more pessimistic than economists, so

polling zip codes with high foreclosure rates? some states might not be gaining reps in the next census. lowest migration in non-wartime. unemployment is key variable for the public. “jobless recoveries” gdp could be positive, but could still get blame bcause of unemployment. (which seems fair to me)

missed part of the q. how do you compare ’48 or ’32 to now with all the changes? ref to Black Swan. have to be aware of shocks that aren’t in yr datasets. bubbles seem like they should’ve been obvious. none should be that shocked, a few economists, but otherwise “worries in the back of your head” “making up explanations when we see random noise”

missed question again. guy writing about experience on a campaign, fieldwork/organization stuff. (and that was absolutely fascinating on 538) where candidate is not being more important. who’s working, who went home. (I remember seeing those, loved ’em.) reporter was breaking up w/girlfriend, driving from SF to St louis, then went all over the country w/photog. oh, so that’s what the story was. some things you just have uncertainty in a range and then the qualitive to see whether you should look at the top or bottom of range. (I think i mangled that paraphrase.) chance & luck & personal crap (in baseball), human factors.

ibm analysis of workers, like his baseball stuff. are you going to go into HR? no, kinda sckeptical. how you evaluate job performance. gates (foundation?) and eval of teachers. suspicious that poorly executed objective eval is worse that well executed subjective, counter-productive in the long term.

computer science, wouldn’t have to hire a programmer. economics? (his BA) in a lot of fields, master’s doesn’t help. if i knew how to write some of my own code, a lot of improvising, a lot of time with bad tweaking of blog templates.

would you put genome on the internet? (MOST RANDOM QUESTION EVAR) surprised at how mcuh people are willing to share every detail of their life now. kinda in email generation (is 31), avg 15-yr old girl sends 2500 txts/mo. if i actually spent time on fb, would never see light of day bcause obsessive.

what’s yr strategy going forward, given being most notable political (???)? trying to work out funding, would be nice to have more infrastructure. him & shawn and some pro bono programmers. would be nice to have actual designer, better presentation of data. (veen tackling this would be rad) tried some oscar predictions, ny mag making the generalization “you can predict anything” looking at variables over 30 years. like a poll with a very high overlap. (not really paying attn, oscars for me is almost as blah blah blah as baseball.) computer confusion of designing model, “keep working on your fucking model”

tell us abt yr book. on forecasting & modeling in general, going to talk to people in different fields. including fashion design “quasi-scientific” extraterrestrial, with only one data point. at the stage where he has an outline, has’t written anything “will be interesting, I hope”

statistical probability of being a terrorist? baseball is easy because it’s been recorded 99% accurately, and no cost in being wrong (or low cost), real world not so much, like looking for one needle in a pile of needles.

epidemiology, including crime, drug use, will probably put terrorism in that group for writing purposes. (oh, that slate series on reasons why no attacks)

twitter question: predicting whether flight will be later. jet blue punished because of flying out of jfk; relative to airports you fly out of, context importance. another good dataset?

huh? oh, another baseball question. issues of motivation in re: structures of sports.

audience question: how did you face challenge of collecting data thruout country? not terribly complicated, steal off other polling sites, then got results directly from polling co’s. problem of evaluating whether a poll is real. also lots of data at us census site, but with clunky interface. “fundraising primary” data publically avail.

q: what do you read? how much time? why 538? number of electoral votes, could be 539. reading a lot about the markets irrational exuberance. nixonland. (that was FABULOUS. read it mostly laying on the beach on the river last summer.) read a lot of books halfway thru, but that’s ok.

q: dealing with bad data? try to balance with regression based on demographic data. at a point where you have enuf good data that bad data doesn’t add anything at all. 7 or 8 national tracking polls, dozens of state polls, everyday.

q: if mccain had won? netflix challenge? smaller stimulus, more tax cuts. more interesting if hillary had won. email doesn’t work in the white house, and they’re trying to solve the economy!

q: have you read richard finnow’s book? how to look at unquantifiables? look at dems in repub states & vice versa; “overperforming” like sibelius in kansas

q: what part of business community could most profit from his type of analysis? if he knew, wd be working for a hedge fund or something. data not that grate akshully, because co’s not entirely honest. the way inflation is calculated, basket out of date; unemployement, most basic metrics not very precise. deal with that before getting “cute.” interviewer: one of the challenges of media is figuring out how to do what nate is doing. who is not interested in doing econometrics unless he took a year off to actually learn it. baseball & political polling in a sweet spot, solvable, complex but not THAT complex.

q: prediction markets? is the electoral college an abomination? not a huge fan of prediction markets. electoral college is good for his website. 🙂 (missed a bit looking at a cool graphic on someone else’s screen)

q: missed it. somebody who runs a prediction market? frustration with journalists. “blame data when things go wrong” referencing bradley effect.

q: basketball data, not recording all the good stats. how does his analysis improve data capture? creating a market for the application of all that stuff. sports data geekery.

q: thoughts on impact of young political bloggers? have to have some impact, just because of traffic. make people more accountable. problem of groupthink. mccain folks surprised at how negativity didn’t work, thinks one reason is pushback of blogs.

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user experience team of one

the design aspect of being a user experience team of one.

for all other aspects, we’ve got lots of techniques/tools. but not so much for design, still a big question mark. still just you & the blank page/screen. what am I going to make out of all of this stuff?!

before she went to adaptive path, she was at a financial firm as ux team of one. (she still had a “development team”)

forrester customer experience model: interested -> invested -> committed -> engaged -> embedded (how it gets propagated thru an organization)  her redrawing of the model, in which most are just interested, and invested is the sticking point. no authority, no agency — mostly time spent concocting defences. “doing a lot of great work, but we gotta keep ’em in line”

and that’s why she went to adaptive path. but had to “show my work, be flexible, etc” missed a bit in scooting around. room is FULL.

forcing herself to have more ideas. (she has a library sci degree!) it looks a lot like that diagram in scott berkun’s book, the diamond of getting ideas, then winnowing down, combining & so on, to get the actual design.

1) brainstorm, a lot

2) assemble an ad hoc team “harvest their brains” nom nom nom

3) pick the best ideas

example: evite; she has love/hate; explaining how you (now) create an invite. (I’ve never actually done that, just been the person accepting)

how she used to design: one idea, sitting at the computer

6-up template: when you hit a wall after idea #2, you have to keep going all the way to #6.

conceptual frameworks

spectrums, places along a dimension to explore design ideas. in the example: first timer to expert.

2×2 (2d spectrum): adding the dimension automatic to manual. and that generates a couple more ideas.

then all the way to a grid, where you pick some arbitrary intersections to play with ideas.

word associations. (missed a bit again)

inspiration library. screengrab plugin for firefox. in the example, vox homepage inspiring new design.

(honestly, seriously? I still don’t feel like the new homepage is quite what it could be)

but not enough! get other people involved. project manager, developers, anybody else with stake. (in my world, “anybody else” is (most of the time) all there is. like, who should I be working WITH on refining that idea?!)

sketchboards. not so much about the tool, but as a guideline for discussion, more dynamic. cute video. inputs, then sketching (6-ups, etc), then take it to the team, have the discussion & mark it up, and all THAT stuff goes to the wireframe.

open design sessions. (srsly? yipes!) “pizza is important” also don’t do at 9am.

run template-based workshops.

decorate your space. (I did this with all those post-its when I was processing the usability testing results. It was actually helpful.)

tips for getting good feedback.

pass the pen, esp in sketchboard. layer of abstraction in describing in words.

refer back to the inputs. “which of these sketches most closely support [that stuff]”

black hat session. apparently is good for quiet grousers or people stuck on one thing they hate/are obsessed with. good for getting complaints heard. (i fear that i may, in fact, be too much of a special snowflake to deal with appropriately.)

special designer artsy person idea = bullshit. anybody can be.

how to figure out what ideas are the right ideas. back to the generate/refine diamond. star to sail yr ship by. high in the sky clear objective. it’s not quite business requirements, exactly. tend to be lists of features. not quite user needs, either. something about what we love that transcends.

design principles! 5-7 basic ideas about what the thing is. personality and quality of experience without neccessarily specifying any particular features.

tivo, gcal (they’re not quite there ime)

quiddity: the essence of the thing. design principles should have quiddity.

business needs + user need (+ ???) = design principle

and use those as a measurement against the (now) huge stack of concepts.

yipes, the feature request! “Where’s that scrolling news ticker I asked for?” if you have the design principles, it’s easier to say “no, but this might work”

if you want to try this stuff at home

start sketching, right away

schedule some workshops

draft design principles (even if you don’t share them!)

workshop in SF in April. (folb reg code) sigh.

originally got the feedback that generalists are going away, she disagrees 🙂 field is growing, web has finally established as real concern for more organizations. companies are focusing in innovation. (not as bad as ’01? srsly?!) still thinks of herself as team of one

join the cause! buttons!

q: how to incorporate with remote teams? tablets, scanners, making the time to be organized doing it. something about there when you see the ideas as they happen.

missed the q, but the answer said that wireframes are obsolete, or going there. prototyping with sketches scanned/photoshopped, then put in powerpoint.

dropped out for a bit.

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web & feminism

The real title is hella long.

Heather Gold who I’ve always liked. palmolive theory of feminism: you’re soaking in it! explaining 1st wave, etc. to those who do not know. her descriptions crap me up. “not have to sue everybody to do stuff” (3rd wave)

co-founder of gender studies program at UT, betty flowers. discussion about suing and anger. cold anger?

I missed some injoke from a session last year.

what she learned abt web from feminism

the personal is…

everything’s connected

gossip make the world go around; entymology of gossip. people who attend the birth of something.

julia (???) works for WSJ, author of stealing myspace. soap opera of business. “as long as there’s money involved, the guys don’t realize they’re reading as the world turns” (I’ve had that sense of 24 as well.) in reporting on myspace, that the whole movement of myspace was about catering to girls. (like little kid girls) guys at a widget co paging thru 17, cosmo girl, trying to figure out what glitter would go over best. (glitter recently hit our intranet, which I find terribly baffling.) a real part of the economy? (how is this different from teen girl mags?) types of macho, programmers, suits.

danah boyd (who gets applause) — strong ties, weak ties and gendering, and social media doing both simultaneously. [missed a bunch of stuff here] places stagnate because they’re (the networks/sites) not good at managing boundaries.

what is the boundary between personal and public on the web? asked by betty

what is too personal to be public becomes smaller and smaller, is heather’s response.

can’t ask a teacher to engage in the classroom in the same way they engage in their personal lives (i think thats what she said)

don’t see a public space that’s genuine engagement AND disagreement.

culture of the american workplace: creative and passionate for one day, the rest of the time lock-down, control employees at all times. “a privilage to be able to live in public” thank you. not easy to be able to tune all your identities. exactly. I’m going through this angst about whether to unprotect my twitter feed, because of that lack of fine-tuning.

“please put everything that might be embarrassing” and audience member has very unique name.

audience member: twitter debate being labeled as “a catfight”

about half the audience want to spend at least part of their online time in a protected space. (exercise for later: how does that work in the context of zittrain’s arguments & the walled garden problem)

switching register. does that sound like lying when mashed together?

wow, this is actually making me kinda depressed.

unitary identity problem.

big long ramble, follwed by “do you know how to solve this problem”

metaphors of place

being ourselves doesn’t work if we’re not protected. it’s a chicken-egg thing, the act of being yourself, etc. “places where you can take the fight, and places where you can’t.” (I love danah.)

naked teacher controversy in Austin?!

(disruptions ho!)

tipping point is never coming, because our kids are already embarrassed that we’ve revealed their entire lives.

working class kids don’t have that angst, since they’re just in the low end service economy, nothing to protect.

betty says, i want to get to the guy. 🙂

counter-publics? michael warner (book, queer theory guy), mmm, big long philosophical ramble. heather falling over saying “hegemonic” and “normative” — universal public vs. niche public.

big word guy. white neo-liberal identies. “where I traveled; what I bought” Heather challenges that, at least the class aspects. danah talking about different webs. chinese, etc.

ok, brain is kinda falling apart, too tired, plusa little more philosophy than I can handle after lunch. want to go to bikehugger thing.

I am totally in love with danah, though; strong speaker, willing to disagree but thoughtfully.

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change (v2)

Lessig, not introduced, oddly enuf.

lonely planet policies. money breeding mistrust.

wikipedia, leaving $100 million dollars on the table. asked jimmy wales about it: the one thing people don’t say about trust is that it’s all advertising fluff.

anti-vaccination crazies; parents ignoring doctors, because of trust gap. the character of the context of science and the effect of money.

issue of an anti-stroke drug, company sponsoring drug gave AHA $11 million, appearance of dispassionate review brought into doubt. conflicts of interest. video of rfk jr invoking “classic tobacco science” — can grab onto the meme and promote an idea (that’s INSANE).

film Maxed Out (which made me cry, honestly); bankruptcy abuse prevention statute, making it impossible to escape credit card debt thru bankruptcy. (vs bethlehem steel or enron) Clinton originally in favor, but then Hillary read something in the NYT and spoke against it helped keep it from being passed…then. As senator, after contributions, voted for it, said it’s not about the money. he believes her, but what do other people believe? can they trust that she’s given the right answer for the right reason? and will people even listen to.

not that money is EVIL, but that it poisons trust.

does money change the actual result? “even gifts like pens & coffee mugs affect prescription decisions” !!!!

sonny bono copyright extension act. does that advance the public good? (ah, the case he lost. so sad.) milton friedman would only sign if the word “no brainer” was included in a whatever by a bunch of nobel prize winners.

world health organization established standard no more than 10% of diet shd come from added sugar. sugar council got congress to write  & complain. actual govt standard here is 25%

consensus around global warming. big gore quote. study of 1000 articles from 93-03, 0 not in agreement with basic consensus, vs 53% in popular media.

either they get it wrong because they’re idiots or because they’re guided by something other than reason.

is this anything new?

framers obessed with this problem. 1785, people beginning to think america was a failure; extraordinary spread of corruption. lovely jefferson quote, tl;dr. then, constitutions.

19th century cesspool of corruption. stern stern daniel webster, employed by bank of the us. bribery not a crime in congress until 1853. same now? abramoff, cunningham, series of tubes guy, rod b (lego hair man). a different kind of corruption, mostly. actual integrity greater than at any time in the past. conyers crazy anti-OA bill. no publishers in detroit, mainly foreign publishers. so, why? “good souls corruption” don’t have to believe that anybody is actually cheating/bribing. money to secure tenure, dynamic of constant attention. 30-70% of time spent raising money. 6th sense of how actions will affect fundraising. an addiction. book: so damn much money. economy of influence. since 2000, # of lobbyists doubled, price also doubled. so must mean increase in productivity on the part of lobbyist. “farm league for K street” no one has any interest in fighting against that system.

costs, from the right: title VII of telecom act(?) “how are we going to raise money from the telecoms if we deregulate?” intentionally regulating as a form of extortion. if you are anti-regulation, ask how much of that is there?

from the left: econ disasters; single thread: poor regulatory oversight, campaign of deregulation, follow the money. ah, enron.

the point both sides are missing: problem is not big govt or deregulation, but mistrust. 9% of public believed that congress was doing a good job last year; now has doubled, but dude, under 20%!

want to believe. that it’s not because of money.

digression about what he had been doing with internet/copyright policy, realizing that the corruption/dependency thing was under everything. restore trust? by removing improper dependence.

increasingly convinced that only way to do this: citizens’ funding of nation’s elections. cap of $250/person, or indirectly thru dept of the treasury (or whatever). isn’t there a move for that in city of oly elections? as way of taking doubt out of the picture. change congress (.org?)

easy to get people to do what they want to do on the internet. 🙂 asking people not to give money until politicians agree to public financing. strike4change.org? ah, it makes sense if you have actually given money, which I can’t say that I ever have.

email between him & fundraiser guy.

(I’m not impressed, frankly. Not that I have an alternative.)

man-crush on al gore. excerpt of ted lecture. in changing behavior, sometimes leave out the citizenship part & democracy. “democracy crisis” side joke about counting votes. democracy as a tool for solving public problems. (why is he reminding me of emmett right now?)

everybody can understand the problem of dependency. no one who hasn’t been affected in some way by alcoholism. have to solve alcohol problem before dealing with probs with job, family, health. so too with us.

call to action! privilaged passive people, do something for crying out loud. standing ovation. (srsly?)

(things to chew on here. starting to wonder if starting this on the local level instead is the way to go.)

q about k street, what to do! lobbyists not neccesarily the problem, but the money is the underlying issue. joking about lawyers.

q from baratunde abt the conyers thing, and fun with stats! he has enormous respect for conyers, last guy around who voted to impeach nixon! doesn’t actually believe that he was bought off. lego hair & series of tubes (actual corruption) vs this other thing. no quid pro quo, but the PERCEPTION and the breeding of cynicism. (he should be going back to the vaccine thing, and how doubt is bred by the introduction of money.)

ok, gonna take off now.

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future of the internet

came in 15 mins later after dropping by barcamp.

pakistan blocking youtube.

NANOG (no longer for north americans only!) (north american network operators group)

“the staging area becomes the live thing” stir-fried wikipedia with pimentos? you would think it shouldn’t be working. wikipedia civil defense: administrators noticeboard. “a long story” people throw their problems into a heap. people solve them, and why? economists are studying this now! price of freedom is eternal vigilance and all that. at all times 45 minutes away from total destruction. (all this reminds me of mefi.)

cats that look like hitler. (with the right angle, I think boingo could be on that site.) it starts out goofy and then gets serious. global voices. blog spam! (even the ENA site gets that crap fairly regularly.) civic defence again: captcha. for a while that keeps the barbarians away…we’ll come back to that later.

21 yr old Jobs introing apple (IIe?). 10 print hi 20 go to 10. ah yes, I remember 7th grade computer class & the trash-80s. “businesses around the world were like holy fucking shit.” (re: visicalc) the 66 light, and TURBO mode! hamster-powered paper shredder. I so f-ing need one of those.

you give it the executable code, and it runs it. vulnerable to the same problem: what if someone wanted to do bad code. and for 20 years, that actually was a damn good question, and nobody, really. smart word processor, grandpa had one of those when I was in high school. loved it. wrote a huge chunk of fiction over a 2 week vacation there.

bizarre & absurd state of affairs: the screens of what the hell is running on your computer. unpatched windows pc can be p0wned in 4 mins. storm worm that fights back! speech recognition bug in Vista. (srlsly? [update: zdnet blog post. googling seems to indicate that it hasn’t been patched/changed]) existential debate with yr computer?!

huge pile of advice of how to avoid being taken advantage of.

the cap’n crunch bosun whistle. I’ve never actually seen a picture of one! free long distance back in the day. General Mills as the “3rd party app”. and AT&T could just change the whole damn network.

but now…who gets to control those instructions get to control the future of the internet.

what will we do?

1) locking down, at the cybercafe, library, etc. can’t just install the flying screensaver.

2) revenge of the brother word processor: blackberries, tivo, kindle, ipod/iphone “perfect poster child for this phenomenon” “we define everything that is the phone. you don’t want your phone to be like a pc (etc)” but the demand so strong (jailbreaking), SDK released, if you write the next visicalc you can’t release it yourself, but have to be approved to sell at the store. (what if I WANT porn on my iphone?) takes a long time to get approval. the i am rich app, and 8 people bought it. box office app pulled for no apparent reason. what if netscape just didn’t work on windows one day? windows still (oddly enuf) a civic tech. freedom time app rejection. “what’s the point?” huge seachange in the kind of innovation that we can do. not just about phones. because it addresses the security problem.

3) facebook. all the stuff that people in other rooms are so excited about. if you right a new app, facebook reserves right to yoink or take a cut or charge for access. “if you don’t like it go somewhere else” but almost anywhere you turn is there’s a custodian. toaster: web 2.0 toaster. “we apologize for any toast crushed in the interim” “you entered into a breakfast oriented relationship with a service provider” and then the gov’t! kindle reading the text. and the publishers wigged out, felt betrayed. (not yet feeling the gov’t aspect) onstar system. (got freaked out in the work impala once when the facilities guy called!) ah here we go. fbi glommed onto this feature, turn on the mic in *that* car at all times, and they just do it. The Company vs United States of America. srsly. the company wins on appeal, thinly, because if bad guys need help, wouldn’t get it because all audio went to fbi. orwellian? akshully, even more so, that was just a screen in the living room! counting people at stadiums via cellphone signals “we take privacy very seriously. we only give this information to the govt” the strange phenom of the posse. sheriff could summon you. fugitive slave law. “i’m sorry, I’m shampooing my cat that day” because citizens didn’t want to help enforce that law. non-civic technologies, enforcement without the acceptance or even knowledge of the citizenry.

yearn for a way to buttress the civic technologies. is involved with stopbadware.org & open net initiative. using the herd to evaluate code, use our own risk preferences. herdict project. “possibly the worst name ever for a project” am i blocked or not? so many technologies that start playful and become significant. egyptian twitterer “arrested”. couch surfing “that’s a real bee” evolving civic defences.

innocentive, solve challenges for cash. liveops. mechanical turk. liberating and scary. free porn for solving captchas. aaaaand we’ve come back to that topic. digg leading to subvert & profit.

there was a time when it was totally rational to hitchhike. comes back as craigslist as rideshare. “evil people don’t think ahead?” cameras that detect blood to try to defeat carpool cheaters.

in north korea only 3 channels. in south korea they try sending solar-powered radios over by balloon. worst of both worlds? best of both worlds?

might need to get his book. [“future of the internet – and how to stop it” – avail in full online, also at my library!] fast and interesting.

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ecosystem of news

steven johnson at a panel table. 🙂 wackiness with technology!

old-growth media: a good thing. a 1st person account of his experiences. (you know, being an author and all) macworld mag in the 80s, obsessing. information imbalance. what life was like before. one channel if you were obsessive about macs/mac software then, and news a month late, at that. compuserve, macweek uploading articles once a week on friday nights. ala must-see-tv? 🙂 beginning of the webzine culture (salon, feed). then apple site, etc., etc. “teenage self would be amazed by the technology that failed me” but also by the instantaneous news available. thousands of words.

metaphors we use tell us a lot about obsessions of society: nervous system, then ecosystem.

1987 mac news ecosystem = desert

2009 = jungle

future of the news itself, not current businesses. 2 key endangered species: war reporting & investigative journalism.

investigative journalism future may be seen by looking at the past of technology news. the “old-growth forest” of the web, just because people who were on the web early were more interested in tech than anything else.

now, to politics: his obession with the ’92 election (Newsweek, NYT, Crossfire, New Yorker, debates on TV) — then compare to 2008: (“I’ve been waiting for a reason to show the flame effect!” with the death of crossfire) same stuff as before, but also TPM, Kos, Huff Post, Sullivan, 538, watching debates collaboratively with Twitter, Stewart/Colbert on the web. what would’ve happened to “the race speech” in 1992?

old line: new media folks as parasite. but no, not all!

2nd wave of blogging came in politics.

more perspectives, more depth.

lost focus for a sec while going out to look at the Olympian. the long tail in news? local deli closing as news. 1000 blogs about brooklyn. outside.in, his current thing. issue of scale, precision of interest.

do what you do best, link to the rest. old news focusing on that big stuff that they do best? (funding?) TPM Muckraker.

important concern: just way more stuff, hard to navigate. he think he gets better (Mac, say) news than 20 years ago, but he considers himself very savvy. does that expand to everybody?

if not…newspapers as organizing & editing forces? growing online audience. (elephant in the room: $$$) “all the news that’s fit to link”

crazy graph, describing his imagined ecosystem. “diy city” (need to look that up) “every city will have its own api” (thinking of oly & their website: hahahahaha.)

news – commentary – curation (twitter as curation? also, I’m hungry. and: metafilter?) – distribution

a whole other talk we could have about how we pay for this, how money flows thru the system. (that would be important.)

he’s bullish on the future of news, but not what’s happening now in newspapers, bad and getting worse. should’ve been a 10 year evolutionary process, instead a sudden collapse. (asteroid!) bad for 2 reasons: hurts actual individuals, and also distracts from the long-term possibility of evolution.

Q&A

Dylan in re: no news is bad news group. came out of it: journalists angry & in denial, academics have no idea, bloggers just doing their thing but not getting paid. (except west seattle blog) he sees the business model as the main problem that needs to be solved. what happens to the communities away from “traditional” (ie white upper/middle-class college-educated) blogging?

advertising online. local spending that hasn’t migrated online (yet). yes, it is going to be turbulent. start telling people what it will eventually look like, a model to hold in yr head to go forward with.

someone from Mizzou? what’s the position of media at the top? (I’m not sure I got all that) digging, fact checking.

(oh, tired.)

kindle: he’s paying for stuff that he used to get for free. (how odd. also: class distinctions at work here IMO.)

overhead going way down: fewer journalists, lower print costs. I’m wondering how this connects to stuff Dorothea’s written about in re: OA. Will have to look. [update: I think this “OA brings savings…in typesetting?” is what I was thinking of, although I know she’s written more on similar topics.]

Death of long-form? Snack culture articles in Wired, he wrote the contrarian POV: huge books, 9-minute songs, ginormous story arcs in TV. not shorter OR longer, but both!

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everything u know abt web design is wrong

oooh, video. (Le voyage dans la Lune, which I love) how much of the innovations that he talks about as coming later in film are actual technical innovations. ok, in comparison to Birth of a Nation, I see his point. (reminds me of mom’s film class lo these many years ago.)

cross-cutting — he’s been talking about different techniques of film. I’m a little too distracty. Hitchock & the close-up.

“I don’t know what transcendent web design looks like” but he has some candidates for elements of its grammar

random voyeurism: flickrvision, found magazine

self-aware but uncontrollable content (these are starting to seem like exactly the things about web-ness that freak people out.) ambient findability, googlebombing.

user-created context. missed something here.

ambient awareness. each tweet is the dot in a pointillist painting. I can see that.

experiential content. when this thing becomes what it’s going to be, it’s not just going to about pictures & blocks of text (static) — like the experience of a rollercoaster. (huh?) putting the elements in place and then the users do everything else.

going back to the benjamin (hotel) website. (I smell bacon. I think that might be me, actually, BLT from lunch nom nom nom.)

“experience economy” with side mention of being a service economy now. (so what happens when all this house of cards collapses, as it seems to be doing now? anyway…back to yr regularly scheduled whatever.)

sleep concierge? (wow, how gilded age II.) oh, webchat. which I will say that CU members seem to really like that particular service.

inverted pyramid as an artifact of technology. slicing and dicing the article? metadata & chunking. so…who is DOING thing. the user? srsly? would hate to think of commenters in the Olympian doing that. :\

clip of the ring video. evolving and extinction as part of the same thing. (what about evolution as accruing change, not wholesale replacement?)

“that look & feel thing”

“print in disguise […] will win awards […] this week” heh. beautiful as means to an end, solving problems.

I am STILL musing over ways to improve the CU homepage, as well as the ENA site. think there might be a nugget in all this.

mmmmm, jambalaya. I love that brand, with sausage. Great for leftovers for lunch.

both exploit AND protect expertise. something inbetween free-for-all and rigid compartmentalization.

cross-discipline teams. well, hey, team of one! 😛 OTOH, there is the coordination with all the other aspects of both marketing AND customer/member/student service.

design for specific users; embrace your ignorance. (let’s just try stuff & see what works!) AND the things that you think you already know: maybe not.

don’t be distracted: by business models not user-centered, by technology as itself, by failure. Personally, me: I am terrible about that whole try, fail, pick up & try again. I’ve had a major learning experience (!) at work, and getting some support while failing was incredibly important. I guess I need more practice. Or something.

uxcrank.com, www.dswillis/sxsw/everything.pdf

very long question, can’t hear. 10% of people accept it: that’s success.

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micro-notes from the rest of drupal minicamp

overheard: interesting note, survey of CMS users at UW, drupal users had the highest level of satisfaction.

flex & drupal? services module.

mahalie has notes on ldap integration.

I thought I had more notes, but maybe they went away when I shut down the laptop on the bus. Stuff from drewish’s presentation on files & images in D7. From what I remember, it sounded pretty good, some obvious stuff (like being able to manage uploaded files w/in Drupal!) being added. Oh, and learning how to use IRC. 🙂

I was a little spacey/logey in the afternoon, probably because I had a little too much Indian food with Kat at lunch. So much so that when we got together for “dinner,” it ended up being walking around downtown followed by a slice of fruit tart & a mocha. Gorgeous, gorgeous sunset, and a great time sitting in the window at La Panier and crowd-watching.

More than anything else, I left minicamp feeling more confident about my Drupal project(s), and more aware of the other people out there doing this stuff. I’d love to pull together an event down here…maybe bring in both the Portland & Seattle communities?

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General discussion Q&A

what’s up with all the checkboxes on roles & cck?

“hooks” — hook form alter, any module that uses drupal forms api (which shd be any)

3 drupal statements: there probably a module for that, somebody should write a module for that, patches welcome. 🙂

bad open source naming! (fck, gimp) discussion of xinha, tiny mce, tiny tiny mce, fsck.

serialized data in database: module to pull it out? (I know nothing about serializing), use hook_form_alter to create an extra table?

wysiwyg api will be built into future core (maybe 7, probably 8). licensing issues related to GPL & Drupal, jquery became dual-licensed in order to be included in Drupal core. glad I haven’t yet installed a wysiwyg module.

drupal & xss? where does the coding happing? filter on output. (srsly? hrm.) text filter in D7. and then formats. (module that turns everything into pirate-speak?!) for security, lullabot has some podcasts on security? mahalie went to their training in portland, said they spent a big chunk of time on security issues. apparently was a good training all around. (if I ever get to go anywhere again….)

anti-spamming module mollom. like akismet? yes.

always wrap input if writing modules. handbook entry called “writing secure code”

discussion of hosting, in which I kinda drifted off, mostly about media temple. some serious harshing on GoDaddy “we charge extra to work with them”

custom error module vs htacess? is it best to have your 404 page in the CMS? if using core feature, blocks don’t get built. (I gotta go deal with that at some point.) use Excel to build the redirect thing when I switch over? I like that. also, path redirect module.

stuff about pivot tables (SQL, not Excel) & taxonomy? not sure I understand.

tables to know about re: nodes — nodes table and node revisions table. that 2nd one actually stores the node’s content.

conceptualizing a node: page, unit of content, database record, bucket. (somebody needs to make an LOL with the bukkit walrus.)

is there an ERD (database design) for drupal? well, bicycle factory: especially, cck. brain-bending talk about how cck works in re: the actual database.

theming node add with cck? (vs custom node) can be done, might take more time. (form_alter?) pre-render hook? custom code on top of cck. hrm. but benefits outweigh probs. “display:none [css] is your friend” ok, so she’s using form_alter to move around stuff like taxonomy, workflow, that are hard (impossible?) to move using weights.

best way to import legacy content? (I think I have some notes.) Katherine wouldn’t use node import for complicated sites. 1st 2 lines of index.php will run drupal bootstrap, stick them in a separate file, pull data from wherever, mock up a node object, use node_save and/or node_submit. webchick on IRC freaking out abt trying to import nodes. just not a clean process. SQL to SQL? not recommended, because touching so many things. (ugh.) omg this all sounds crazy. so not looking forward to that part. but HTF do you “mock up a node object”? but give node import a try, esp for not-so-complex stuff. (seems like people don’t submit their patches back, because people use it in a panic situation.) but edge cases have big edges. 🙂 sometimes it’s cheaper to hire an intern. if you are a programmer, not *that* hard to mock up a node object.

sorta segue into discussion of ubercart.

eta for drupal 7? might see a lot of leapfrogging people upgrading directly from D5.

going to go get a snack, restroom break. then decide where to wander. 🙂