new markets

(or, damn boomers, still.)

NYT article on CC’s & retirees.

most people won’t be retiring. he’s including volunteering work as work.

the usual demographic stuff: americans are getting older. 30-ish% of Pac NW population will be boomers. fewer younger workers.

[okay, just so y’all know where I am on this…. I am 32 years old, right in the heart of Gen X. I have been hearing about the boomers for my entire life. it’s like living in the vicinity of a gravity well.]

values of boomers. “entitlement”! heh.

missed something. programs that are more holistic, for people planning the next phases of their lives. not just jobs, but also civic engagement. interesting. pointed out handout photocopy of brochure.

financial calculator. opportunity to sit down and think about finances, actual readiness for retirement, because most people haven’t done it. most workshops have a vested interest in selling something, and they don’t. good point.

they use a “loaned executive” program, like United Way!

lots of partnerships.

used by some companies to get people to retire early. hm.

“libraries for the future”?

don’t have the money to offer it to the public; now just through employers. looking for $$$ through foundations.

place to gather — build social networks. (as an alternative to the workplace.)

25% of 77 million people (over 65? boomers?) will go back to school at some point.

every 8 seconds, another boomer turns 60. 2 weeks ago the 2nd presenter hit that number himself. “maybe you had had this experience too” getting AARP letter when turning 50. [oh, no, of course a boomer couldn’t be an old person. ::rolls eyes::]

“how elders will save the world” (recent book title)

separate initiative from their existing senior classes or community education.  (do the folks working in that feel snubbed?)  again, using outsiders.  new classes charge twice as much. “workshops”  focus on luxury education, as far as I can tell.  (of course rich boomers get better food than the plebes.)

“high touch” — so…what this morning’s presenter was talking about, with the needs of students getting out of generational poverty, but who gets that treatment? people who have time and money to take these sorts of workshops.  I find that troubling.

one-day: $120; half-day: $60.  (usually)  concludes with reception.  since viticulture center, includes wine.

marketing: schedule, incl. CE; direct mail; web; email newsletters becoming more of their primary marketing; and of course word of mouth.  branded separately from the rest of the college.

q: where do they get email lists? students on registration, so building slowly.  students want to be connected in this way.

q: who do you see as competition? willamette u is doing something similar.  (I almost went there.)  elderhostel.

q: “our class schedule, while we still have it” — go further? he’s not in charge anymore.  somebody will be talking about it at the roundtable.  (I’ll be at that and hopefully have a good summation.)

ranting on writing

this guy sat next to me at lunch. spurred a good chat about legalese & forms, etc.

not going to be as formal or professional as anything else. “the jello of presentations”

writing is like talking which is like breathing. (if you skip the talking bit, I feel the same way.)

why don’t more admissions/higher ed marketers write like people?

HUMAN.

mention of Cluetrain Manifesto. “way we should be thinking right now.” conversation, etc.

1st ever powerpoint “proud to leap forward into the mid-90s”

liebling quote. funny.

noel coward. “never bore the living hell out of it [the public]”

linus pauling “best way to have a good idea is to have lots”

robert altman “playing it safe isn’t even playing”

have you ever looked at lots of admissions publications at once? totally rocking “suck factor” graph.

all sound the same. selling the same thing. you have 15 seconds to say pretty much the same thing as everybody else.

but also not taking risks, over-reliance on focus groups.

exercise: You’ll get the classes you need for not too much money without having to travel too far. (no use of the trite phrases)

the research you’re getting tells you that people want just information, no hype. problem is most research is crap. good at telling what people say, but not what they mean. most people haven’t seen enough good stuff to know what good stuff is.

myspace, youtube. making connections. [Ken had an incredibly good idea just before lunch, which I think we should give a shot.]

“excellence”? Icky. what’s a human way to demonstrate excellence?

some examples.

stuff he wrote for Reed. (very Reed-ish, definitely. hyper-clever. sort of the opposite group from the stories this morning. also: holy crap, is he going to read all of that?!)

great design is more important for capturing; then the writing can involve. interesting point. cute piece. (is it terrible for me to admit that the super-typical UPS viewbook of brick buildings & leafy trees was what propelled me to apply there? oh, and their then very-late application deadline.) dean (? pres?) threw them into the wall.

using 1st person. nobody does it, but it’s the most authentic voice.

“you don’t need to give a roadmap to someone who already knows the way.” (hmmmm.)

OSU text in 1st person; interestly, sort of a fiction-like anonymous narrator. Pretty good stuff, really. I like the idea. he used their tagline stuff well.

line fed through the audience. silly. but useful: what does all this have to do with US?

Portland CC. mentions the hell that is our incredibly broad audience. again, sharp clever writing. we have some sharp clever people, maybe we should use that more.

a story that’s more about your partners in the conversation than it is about you.

what do the humans attending your school hope to find?

“the complete secrets of creativity, free of charge”

emergent properties (koestler?)

points where the lines intersect, where lines are everything you’re working with.

bad writers borrow great writers steal; the hemingway classic

to explain is to destroy – goethe

wc fields to finish.

q: how do you deal with administration that gets scared by wacky ideas? compromising photos? everybody thinks they’re a writer.  if you have an edgy written message, don’t show it to anybody until it’s been designed.  “big dramatic stupidness helps too”

q: writing for OSHU foundation?  very easy because so much cool stuff was going on.

[if you liked this, you’ll like Attack of the Zombie Copy!]

reputation mgmt

on the break I thanked the previous presenter, talked to Ken and (?) from Kwantlen, called C on the phone.

came in late while I got another cup of tea.

I’m feeling sceptical about this presentation, because the schedule made it sound like this might turn into a vendor pitch.

hathaway shirt guy 🙂 is talking about crisis mgmt, starting with Tylenol, which I just barely remember. and now nobody trust any damn corporation.

“gut feeling” — he talks about people getting it from TV, print, radio. (our research has said person-to-person. and what about the web?!)

information gathering preferences by age. the kids nowadays don’t watch tv, read the paper, or listen to the radio (at least not for news). and he uses “echo boomers”

ah, now we get the web. um, his numbers on the screen contradict his spoken words.
“blogs have become huge in the last several years” — wow, look at me. 🙂 being all huge & sh!t.

in crisis mgmt: “nothing like this is going to happen to them” pretty typical psychology, really.

proactive approach to crisis communications? ah, so that’s the idea of where reputation mgmt comes in.

issue identification, proactive response, rules of behavior, social dues strategy, communications mgmt.

his slides are lousy. way too many words, and he reads from the slides too much. (despite having a pretty little macbook)

example of Tillamook cheese people. 24 areas of interest, from customer trends to manure & odor control; prioritize.

and CHANGES based on that research, getting ahead of what people might freak out about in the future.

do practices match stated values?

missed some stuff while I was checking work email. of course, if he distributes slides, it’ll be pretty much the same thing.

imagine that: listening to people who you effect, and taking actions based on what you hear, gives you a better reputation.

q&a now or later? ::crickets::

cuter presentation (to go with blond woman) — media fragmentation.

ad effectiveness declining & cost is going up.

trust in media is really low, esp. in Oregon apparently. people get through fragmentation & lack of trust by turning to people they know & trust.

HBR paraphrase: make your loyal customers into your marketing dept.

value of word of mouth has gone up insanely since the last 70s. (67% to 92%)

stats she shows look a lot like our survey results.

she skipped what looked like a really interesting slide.

WOM works when product is exceptional (passionate users), when client has means to engage with others, and when supported internally.

trusted communicators (does that map to one of the tipping point categories?) – subject masters, love product, tell others proactively, sought out by others.

WOM is mostly about voice (face to face or phone)

oh, hey, this like that guy that used to volunteer at the BG Clubs, the camera nut.

“friend” coupons. samples (what would a CE “sample” look like?).

be careful about internet coupons. 🙂

“tillamook park cleanup” — building a lot of enthusiasm among community advocates.

5 questions to decide whether to add WOM efforts

  1. current effort exceeding expectations? [no]
  2. is product unique/exceptional? [hmmmm]
  3. are people talking? (even negative is starting point.) [dunno]
  4. is there communication infrastructure? [not really]
  5. do we have passionate support of internal groups? [hmmmmm]

q: effectiveness of enewsletters? varies a lot, but you should use it if you have great info to share. too much blasting reduces effectiveness. way to include an “offer”? (student pricing at event?)

missed a question while making notes.

find programs that have most WOM and “invite a friend” — to sit in on a class or activity?

what are we doing that’s great? [awards, strong registration, kick-ass grads]
PCC was running a radio ad for CE, if you register early your friend could register half-price. how did that work for them?

q: disheartening info about reach. what about using testimonial approach in mainstream media “best of both worlds”? (is it best of both worlds? something to chew on for later.) not entirely dismissive: just not the best/only/most effective tool.

“if I were using new tools I would use the internet” ! and again with the blogs.

q: example of successful use of blog in educational setting? doesn’t have an example.  I should go find her and point her towards some of the resources I’ve been gathering.  he talks about influencing leaders, and research you can buy (!) — someone else in the audience talked about instructors using blogs.  woman talked about Susan G Komen offering expertise on breast cancer to answer questions on other people’s blogs.  (now THAT is a good idea.)

opening remarks & keynote

yes, the program is broken. (I noticed that yesterday; I almost pulled it apart, but stopped when C rolled his eyes.)

blah blah blah while I get my space setup.

and now the MC, who of course jokes about how they screwed up the program on purpose. ::rolls eyes::

“Education for All: Interrupting Poverty Barriers”

speaker was single mom who got it together with a start at Mt Hood CC.

“you know you need to know your audience”

family was migrant farm workers, cotton & fruit, moving from Arizona up through to WA. “houses that were condemned or should’ve been”

people in poverty are least likely to become education, continuing trend.

study in the 40s, replicated in 2000. 4 of five barriers diminished (geography, religion, race, gender (perhaps “problem” with boys in ed is more about race & poverty?)). some pretty egregious examples of educator attitudes re: race, altho it’s gotten better. no noticable progress on increased education among poor.

“who all’s talking to you about college?” complete silence followed by “don’t you know you’re at the alternative school?” from a student.

“you get an attitude from a lifetime of not having your needs met”

making information more known about financial aid. we could continue to do better on that.

(wow, my class on race, class & gender back at UPS gets me *something* 🙂 as in, I’m the only person in the room who learned anything in school about history of poverty in the US)

the meaning of school pictures in the context of poverty: the lack of personal history, no one cares. (we did almost always get the smallest possible set of pictures, when I was a kid.)

she’s the only person in her family who hasn’t been incarcerated (“and not because I haven’t broken the law”) — brother: “those two people in that great big house with all that stuff didn’t need it” 30k year/person for prison.

poor people interact with 4 groups of people who are making it: judicial people, educators, social service, health care…who are all trained not to get personal/close with the people they interact with. (mmmm…folks like Mom….)

most empowering thing to people in poverty is to learn about poverty.

350 families a day get their water shut off everyday in Portland.

the rotten teeth effect. (don’t get me started.)
ability to cope with social/personal problems (drugs, alcohol, child abuse) all stunted in cases of poverty.

women in poverty in US: same infant mortality rate as Malaysia.

structural causes of poverty.

basic literacy issues. personal story of the GREs, and those word comparison problems. (SATs were much the same, as I remember them. of course, I did absurdly well at them, but they don’t have much bearing on a whole hell of a lot.) brother is very well read, but can’t pronounce anything, and she used him as a resource to comprehend her texts. and the problem of phonetic spelling. (like Elizabeth!) and she used her daughter to help her take notes. (like me grammar-checking mom’s college papers.)

every country teaches it people what they need to belong. as explanation of buying shoes, phones, tvs, etc. vs other stuff that has an opportunity to increase long-term success. “might as well get it and we’ll figure out how to pay for it somehow”

problems finding research on generational poverty (vs immigrant, temporary, working-class) — most people studying are looking in from the outside.

her book: “See Poverty: Be the Difference” — stories, research, activities.

comparing dire/generational poverty to people’s perceptions of being poor, esp. temporary middle-class poverty. (which was my experience.) it seems like the big difference is whether a person knows people (well) who have benefitted from education.

what is the meaning of a “job”? horrible hard work that takes you away from your family vs. stability and financial success. a different kind of conversation, one that takes a lot more time.

68% of people in her research, when they deal with professionals, walk away not knowing what they’re supposed to do next. THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT.

she keeps having trouble with her computer, but her talking doesn’t really need the visuals.

generational — working poor — immigrant — depression era — situational: differences in attitude, locus of control, internalization, barriers.

got $408 in welfare, $395 for rent. when she got evicted, was sent to money mgmt classes! wtf.

did exercise at Mt Hood, write down everything you do in a week, and then matches things from that list to professions.

professional titles are intimidating.

“you’ve got to become bilingual.” — from one of her college teachers. started with reading the paper. seems like the struggles with black english; having to go from a “home” language to middle class English. “siop”

her pilot group got housing, which was an important difference. (material reality matters a hell of a lot more than anything else, really.) build partnerships with orgs that do other things.

she had never heard a middle-class person’s life story. helped to externalize the poverty. it sounds like the approach was very much like my experience with getting out of depressive states: start where you are and take very small steps. way more help than you’d think someone should need. and recognizing visible improvement, no matter how small.

“human beings who stepped outside of their job description” (also VERY important point)

“the question is: did she get educated?”

the increasing class separation in America is going to send us to hell.

(find her site)

q: how do siblings regard her? a lot of research says you have to leave family behind, but she’s very close to them. 2 brothers have gotten BAs. lots of family have gone through exact same degrees; brings people into the comfort zone. other 3 can’t read & write, but want to. “education meant stress” (getting there on time, being right, wearing right clothes) seems a lot like other middle/upper-class attitudes with tearing people away from “less than” backgrounds.

q: how large a population is generational poverty? what’s the distribution? $19k+/year for family of 4, doesn’t include transportation, child care, health care as costs. (one estimate is it should be $30k) 37 million from census, could be double. “little katrinas going on all over the nation” data isn’t sorted that way.

q: what do you see that’s successful? [missed some of this because handouts were coming through] she has a poverty comprehension assessment tool.

q: what do we do to educate policy makers? she speaks regularly at an elite private school, asks about attitudes (pretty lousy) towards people in poverty, and those are who are going to be the policy makers & professionals.

the communications handout would be good to distribute through advising, financial aid, other front-line staff. outreach?

q: within families, how old are kids usually when they see their poverty, believing they don’t have any options? at all ages; shows progression of facial expressions in school pictures. terrible education story. (some teachers just suck, esp. with students who aren’t “good” students.) her son brings her kids in trouble all the time.

fire alarms: 2 for 2

I’m at the NCMPR (community college marketing people) regional conference in Portland today and tomorrow.  (C came with.)  I will, hopefully, be liveblogging, for those of you in the studio audience who enjoy that sort of thing.  (And for my own recollection, of course.)

We got in yesterday afternoon; the conference is being held at McMenamin’s Edgefield, which is a poor farm that was converted into a hotel, plus 3 bars, two restaurants, a winery, and a movie theater.  It has a feel of a Disneyland for grownups, at least in terms of the fussy little details.  Everything is covered with art.  (Photos to come later.)  Our room is a little garret on the 3rd floor; like most of their rooms, it’s a “European-style” room, which means shared bathrooms down the hall.  Which is less annoying than I thought it might be.  There’s a cluster of private bathrooms, including a couple with big Victorian bathtubs.

We wandered around, I got signed in, we had a bite to eat.  (Spendy but tasty.)  Then I went off for “networking” while C went off to read a book.  Ran into one person I know, got to meet a few others, had a drink.  Then I was ready to head off to bed.

I was just dozing off when…the fire alarm went off.  Since I was not as asleep as when this happened in Austin, I had the presence of mind to review all our belongings and to grab anything that seemed valuable.  Although, alas, I was preoccupied enough with that not to get dressed; instead, I just pulled on the robe that came with the room, grabbed gear, and headed down the stairs.  The alarm stopped when we were most of the way down…never did find out what happened.  And yes, the people I knew saw me in my white fluffy robe clutching my laptop bag.

We went back up to the room…and just weren’t ready to go back to sleep.  So back downstairs, all the way down to the “pool hall,” for drinks and some really excellent conversation.  (Even if there were too many “air quotes.”)

This morning, however, my knees were killing me.  Up and down all those stairs, followed by sleeping in an unfamiliar bed, just knocked me for a loop.

It looks like there’s a few interesting sessions, so I’ll be trying to take good notes.  Keep your fingers crossed for me: I’m hoping that there’s wifi in the conference hall too.

little tiny lightbulb

Today I wrote my first bit of AJAX, although there wasn’t really any “X” involved, just a little nib of text to say whether a username exists.

This article got me to my first lightbulb moment, where I really GOT what I could do with all this wacky stuff.  Today, it was, as could be surmised, calling to the database while setting up a new user for our online book exchange to see whether the requested username exists.  I still have some work to integrate my work into the live application, but it was definitely a happy-dance moment to get it done.

You know how some things are just really simple, once they sink all the way in?  This was like that. :)  I had the same experience when I was first learning multidimensional arrays in PHP.

And in this case, the existing script already does the same check, once the form’s been submitted, so it works even w/out JavaScript enabled.  (the $64,000 question: is it really accessible?)

On a tangentially related topic, I am definitely addicted to caffeine.  ::sigh::

post-conference notes from WebVisions 2006

It’s been almost a week, and I’m rereading my liveblogging notes. Following are some final notes, by way of summary and/or things-to-do. All in reverse-chron order of sessions. (I’m not quite done: I still need to add links to all the presenters and their slides, etc. online.)

Day 2

Jared Spool keynote

[Jared’s slides]

I missed a big chunk of this because of (a) a phone call and (b) diverted attention. However….

redesigns are dead, or at least they should be; the best way to improve a Web site is with small iterative improvements, well-tested.

he had some fantastic comments on implementing design, and design guidelines, throughout an organization. “educate and administrate” is the theme, which means to use design problems as teachable moments, rather than throwing the book at people. It also means making good design the easy default.

similarly, the best way to get at better experience design is to make testing easy and inexpensive. (there’s a typo in my original notes!) I love the idea of having a regularly scheduled usability test session every N, and just testing something, anything. to find test subjects, go where they congregate, online or in person.

social metadata & the relevance revolution

[Gene Smith’s presentation]

on the topic of social information architecture: how sites come together through user-created content. at work, the only thing we have like this is the book exchange. in the rest of my life, this applies to OlyBlog. it could, theoretically, apply to the ENA site, but I don’t have time to go there right now. (make this a placeholder for that thought!)

the 3 ingredients for social IA: way to capture user actions; way to aggregate & display; feedback to change the system.

in a ranking system (one form of aggregation), you need multiple rankings to call everything that’s interesting about a particular set. for OlyBlog, maybe different (custom?!) views?

there are, apparently, open source libraries for collaborative filtering (people who liked X also chose Y), including in PHP.

thought experiment question: what are the feedback systems that exist by default on OlyBlog? how do they effect the site content and people’s experience of it?

a question at the end that I’m going to leave alone for the moment: the use of social IA in intranets? (what is scuttle at IBM?!)

accessible design w/out drama

in general: “Don’t praise the machine” — where the machine is the rules and (especially!) the validators (or the DJ-bot 5000, for that matter).

lots of crazy stats about how many people are (insert disability here). something that overlaps with work issues: fastest growing demographic is the oldsters.

a to-do for work: still need to train people using WordPress and/or Drupal on some of the basic accessibility issues.

improving front-end architecture

[Garrett Dimon’s slides]

very inspirational with lots of head-nodding. he focused quite a bit on the long-term issues of web design, which is a place where I have a lot (5+ years!) of experience.

markup as a craft — THE underlying craft of web design. can I get an amen?

plazes was a really nice example of accessibility issues changing the overall conceptualization of a site. for work, this might be something to consider in reworking the maps section of the site, which is something we plan on doing.

keep an eye out for his work with Derek Featherstone on accessible forms.

and his slides were very cool; well worth a look just for some of the grids.

designing for community

this presentation brought OlyBlog front & center in my brain.

“never lose sight of what your product is separate from the social networking aspect.”

90% of visitors are passive users of the site. the 10% — creators, commenters, etc. — need the 90%. who are the passive users on OlyBlog? what do they want/need? why are they there?

remember to send a link to newsvine to C.

idea for book exchange: use ajax to do on-the-fly checking for available usernames.

how do you create a system that rewards good long-time users w/out punishing new/untested users?

Day 1

the new community

general impressions? Derek is a lively and friendly speaker, who has a good turn of phrase & concept, and happens to be insanely optimistic.

a good definition of community: the ability to use voice in public/immediate way, forming relationships over time.

I think I’ll find myself using the term “company town” quite a lot from now on, because it captures a certain aspect of community sites so perfectly. (And because I remember my grandfather explaining the concept of the company town as we drove through mining country in southeastern Arizona, when I was a kid.)

two contrary-wise positions that are worth mentioning here:

  • Joe Clark on the death of privacy
  • Ralph Brandi on weblogs (not) as conversation

a note for OlyBlog, as a company town: treat your folk well, and acknowledge their diversity of online selves.

mobile phones & the mobile web

[Brian Fling’s slides]

great slides, especially the combination of the originally presenter’s and those of the guy who actually presented.

telcos suck.

Americans don’t carry PDA phones, nor do they (over 18) particularly use the mobile web.

there are way too many devices, but some basic commonalities apply. to find the most popular phones, look at what’s being given away with new subscriptions. also the razr.

most screens are 120px wide.

at this point, SMS reminder service might be the hottest possibility. I have this idea kicking around in my head for a “send my schedule on the first day of class” service.

rapid dom/ajax development

stuff to look up & understand later: anonymous functions, closures.

keys to rapid development: maintainability. finding bugs, managing the work of others. extensibility. flexibility.

I do, finally, need to learn and understand OOP. nothing else to do for it.

he recommends using libraries, in part to avoid reinventing the wheel. I still wonder if we have actually invented the wheel yet, metaphorically speaking.

I’d like to create a click-to-expand FAQ in a few spots around the main site…or at least convert the SOS FAQ (say that 5 times fast!) to click-to-expand.

go back and look at the comparison chart for all the libraries.

JSON sounds intriguing, but the idea of XSLT-style syntax makes my brain hurt from here.

I like the idea of a “premade HTML shell” — I’ll have to tuck that away in my head for future reference.

[I skipped all the morning sessions on Day 1 to instead have breakfast & go to the Chinese garden with my sweetie. Plus I missed one session on Day 2 while I was trying to help him after he lost his glasses in the Columbia River.]

overall, it was, as usual, a great experience. (as usual, it was too hot in Portland, but that’s neither here nor there.) I always get a lot out of WebVisions.

keynote: experience design

totally ignoring all the intro stuff while I work on Paula’s site.

jared has started. focusing on the nature of experience design and what it means. sandisk — they think they have an ipod-killer. #2 in the market. “I guess they’ve got their work cut out for them then”

he’s very funny, cult of netflix, dissing sharepoint intranet. redesigns destroying value.

(now that I have got cyberduck working, I’m frantically working on Paula’s site as promised.)

phone call from C. came back to wackiness with trip planning on travelocity.

multidisciplinary nature of experience design …hey, that’s *my* job!

the fema graphic that was on the daily show. what was the person who did that design thinking?! usability testing is about seeing a design through someone else’s eyes. cultural difference.

(okay, internet is really, really, really slow.)

good communications, clear focus on vision “a stake in the sand focused on the horizon” what should the experience be 3, 5, 10 years from now? the right people,

missed some stuff while another page loaded (personalized google is teh suck on safari).

redesigns are dead. small continuous improvements. we haven’t caught up to that point.

ugh, I have too many tabs/windows open, and I can’t track with the presentation.

approaches to facilitating experience design. guidelines documents. seriously, it took us 5 years to get to a draft that is still not official!

educate & administrate. that’s how I want to implement the guidelines.

use of asterisks inappropriately. 🙂

educate includes having a clear vision of success. disseminate user knowledge & feedback quickly. use design problems as a “teachable moment” — in the other model, problems involve punishment. (hmmmm, how would that work, exactly.)

160 sites that they “know of” — want to hold a conference. I think the UW has this problem, hell, we probably do too. “build communication paths to all the design agents” let them know what the goal is, and how what they do effects that goal.

make collecting feedback on new design ideas incredibly expensive. some company has a usability test scheduled every wednesday, w/out knowing what will be tested. makes it EASY.

sharing lessons learned. and then making good design practice the path of least resistance. (which is why I LOVE using templates in WP.)

uietips newsletter, uie.com, uie.com/brainsparks

maybe THIS is where my career is going.

q: does it have to be expensive? no, not at all: netflix success vs. walmart, blockbuster. just throwing money at a problem makes it worse. takes thought, skill, and attention to detail. constantly ask: what are we trying to do? doing small things is working better than doing big things. (that certainly gives me hope!) creating the vision is best done with a couple of beers. (hey, maybe I should invite the intranet gang out for lunch.)

q: how to find users? can use surrogates, but users also congregate in like groups. (like this event!) (somebody tell jared to take his hand out of his pocket!) “discount usability movement”

q: how to overcome beurocratic (sp?!) sclerosis? this is the reason why they’re so excited about apple, netflix, et al, because they become an example of how to succeed. turn this (experience design) into that (shareholder value, increased revenue, etc). steve jobs like a virus: he infects businesses. 🙂

back to our regularly scheduled programming

Okay, so C decided to stay at the beach as originally planned; we’re going to back to our original plan, which involves staying one more night at Tom’s and then driving home tomorrow morning. (“blazing,” as C describes it.)

So while I was sitting here, sucking up electricity, Jonathan Snook wandered by and reminded me that we had met at the SXSW closing party. (I know I took a picture of him, but it’s not online, and it’s not on this computer.)

I’m going to go to the closing party for WV, too, at Greek Cusina, because it was SO VERY tasty last year. We were thinking about seeing Ferris Buehler at flicks on the bricks, but I doubt we will. (Kind of a cruel thing, watching a movie like that w/out glasses.)

One final note: can somebody tell me how to get FTP working right in OSX?!

social metadata, relevance revolution

I may be somewhat distracted. I have my phone in my pocket on vibro mode, waiting to hear from C when he gets back from the beach. (per the whole glasses thing) And if this doesn’t grab me, I’m going to bail.

harness user actions to make site more relevant. he’s from the middle of nowhere, aka Edmonton Alberta Canada.

blah blah blah about his company. he does IA, mostly. has been a metadata nerd. take what users are doing to create architecture of sites.

emergent information architecture -> collective intelligence -> information architecture 2.0 🙂 or social IA.

get a better understanding of social systems
practical ideas for tweaking your own systems
feedback loops as part of design process

he’s tweaked to fit with some similar presentations.

structural design of shared information environments “fancy term for websites” interested in systems where users are co-creating the environment. less structured, more organic.

social IA: user actions create some or all of the environment. use wisdom of crowds to solve problems of IA.

examples: amazon, starting with “customers also bought”, highlighting listmania, combining algorythms with user-generated data. wikipedia, not just creating the articles, but also the connections between them, created by contributors. flickr. not just tagging, but contacts. (I rarely view by tags, but I like the contacts stuff.) delicious. “canonical services” digg.

range of uses, from augmentation (amazon, ebay) to co-creation (delicious, wikipedia).

“contrails in the great database in the sky” and nobody seems to mind. ah, yes, how the information we throw out into the universe can be mined to serve us more and better ads.

“whoever has the most friends wins” (re: linkedin)

the new yorker cartoon, nobody knows you’re a dog. vs. a new cartoon “Ogle Earth” — the shift in expectations. web as part of our social infrastructure. (hi, guys!) people expect to be part of the conversation, and to get the most relevant stuff. (thinking again about personalized home pages?)

3 ingredients for social IA: way to capture user actions; way to aggregate & display; feedback. today less concerned about why (from our POV or users) than how.

user actions: the things they do that we can track. understand popularity, community, reputation, etc. for the moment, put aside higher goals & motivations.

speculative graph…low to high engagement vs. social intent (personal to participatory). automatic, personal, low intent: pageviews, clickthrus, downloads (server log stuff). personal but more engaged: purchases, tags (boundary-crossing), bookmarks, linking to something. more participatory: posts (flickr, youtube, blog), ratings, buddylists, comments/reviews, wiki-ing (nice coinage). trackback is off in its own little corner: low engagement but more participatory. (I wonder if that is part of why trackback is broken. it’s really easy to fsck with other people.) plus mentioned not on his chart: last.fm.

as moving to the right & up, identity becomes more important, including its persistance over time. how many of these actions involve an “object” (a virtual or real).

topographies of services. delicious (blob in middle right), amazon (a line of sort heading up and to the right), youtube (a blob similar to delicious, maybe a little higher up, with the anomolous dot of pageviews).

on to aggregation & display. bringing together user actions in a relevant way, and then displaying them. coming up with a set of rules for both.

lots of kinds of aggregation (5 (of N), he’ll talk about 4): listing, ranking, clustering, collaborative filtering, and other stuff.

ebay example of listing and prototagging. men’s apparel category; used to shop there before there was a banana republic in edmonton. 🙂 new pants or used pants? evolved conventions in the subject line. NWOT: new without tags; NWT: new with tags.

listing friends.

youtube and ranking. counting & ordering actions. the essence of popularity. a bunch of different axes of popularity. worst rated: “the cesspool of youtube, but that might be redundant” — getting different videos with different qualities.

yahoo most recommended photos. girls in bikinis: never show up in most recommended, but always in most viewed. reveals something. need multiple rankings to call everything that’s interesting about a particular set.

collaborative filtering: comparing your history with those of others to find stuff you might rate highly. amazon, also netflix (yay!). open source libraries for collaborative filtering (?! in php?!) — kewl.

examples from amazon: new U2 album links to a variety of stuff, but Joshua Tree only to other U2 albums.

digg shows up under “other algorthyms” 🙂 a whole bunch of factors are included. number of votes, source of the story (original or repost), history of submitting user, traffic of category, reports on the user.

feedback experiments. “okay, that was not very successful” “I tricked you into [the wave]”

feedback loops in social software. positive feedback in Digg. influence wanes over time. plus the feedback loop on the individual users and their ratings. “Top 100 Digg users control 56% of Digg’s home page content” how do those other users feel? do you really want to participate? is it really democratic? “but we’re just going to talk about the hows”

5 (of N) places to intervene: introduce delays (moderation of blog comments), modify strength of feedback loops (imagine adjusting the rules), access to information (cliques on digg: what if you couldn’t see who had posted a story until after you voted for it?), adjusting incentives/punishments, change the system altogether.

examples: the emergence of tagging with flickr & delicious. google’s aggregation of links as votes.

mefi cover charge: another intervention point, through limiting membership. or gang initiation. recommended by a member, etc.

danella meadows, list of 12, based on big systems: economies, but they work great for smaller systems. look on wikipedia.

challenges. spam, gaming the system, achieving balance, relevance (do your users find it valuable? talk to real people!), unintended consequences.

his design principles. allow for different levels of engagement (that connects to something earlier today, about the 90%), monitor & tweak feedback loops, participate in the larger ecosystem (ala Powazek & the company town), design new actions, aggregators, displays.

atomiq.org

q: when tweaking, don’t you run the risk of alienating the user? yes, absolutely. (I think I remember some discussion on this topic in the new web apps panel at sxsw.)

q: ???? basic thing is figuring out what people are doing that you can do something with and doing that. wary of talking about systems that need high level of participation to get off the ground.

q: inside the enterprise. scuttle (what is that?) something at IBM.

q: what did you not talk about? myspace, consumating.

q: is there a site that lists them all? no, maybe on wikipedia? questioner has found all of them really boring.