It’s time to recognise the scale of the project we have in front of us, the breadth of the material we have to work with, and the possibilities of design within it. All of human knowledge, creativity—even the planet itself—is our canvas.
Social Networks have been a world-wide phenomenon and their proliferation poses a pressing interoperability and usability challenge to both web users and service providers. Web users have different social networks accounts and utilise them in different ways depending on the context. For example, more friendly chat on FaceBook, more professional on LinkedIn, and a bit daring interaction on Hi5. Maintaining these multiple online profiles is cumbersome and time consuming and locks in the web user to a service provider. Also, sharing information and user-generated content is particularly challenging due to the obscure nature of privacy and rights management on social networks and the lack of awareness and transparency of such policies.
What is driving this accelerating diffusion of networked technologies? How do you really measure or control how “pervasive” something is? Why would you even want to? We’ll introduce you to a practical framework for analysing and measuring your “spatial perception of an activity” and explore what it literally means for an application to be “pervasive”, in both an experiential and business sense. At the end of this session you’ll be able to clearly diagram the key change that’s driving this evolution and how it will impact your strategies for technology and business in the future.
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 4.05pm.
This is what it feels like to be hyperconnected: a new kind of community – pervasive, continuous, yet strangely tense and tenuous, like a balloon inflated to the point of bursting. The limits of the neocortex meeting the amplifier of the Human Network. That creates unique opportunities: we can come together at a word, self-organize around or against a blog post, a live-streamed video, an automated reply from a faceless, rent-seeking organization. Nothing can stop us. We can’t even stop ourselves. But what do we want? And the other thing? You’ll need to be at Web Directions South, for the closing keynote, if you want to find out.
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.
Hear how Drupal, Semantic MediaWiki and other bleeding edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basically all the Semantic Web stuff) to build a distributed social network. The focus will be not on evangelism (I don’t really care about that) but how disparate open source platforms can talk and work together. This stuff actually works and makes development more fluid. These technologies make local development easier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, classic search is still king. How can you leverage this? Newcomers such as Yahoo Searchmonkey can play an important role in the creation of a truly distributed information system.
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 25 11.45am.
With so many social networks blooming, all with different participants and methods of interaction, it can be hard to determine where to invest your energy, time and $$.
The session will provide ideas and a “background briefing” to help you answer the question:
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
You know what blogs and wikis are, and you know your YouTube from your Facebook. But do you know how to make a compelling business case for these technologies? Social media and social networking tools are poised to have as much of an impact on business as they’ve had on the way we communicate with our friends and family online.
Anil Dash, a blogger since 1999 who’s helped thousands of businesses make use of social media through his work at Six Apart, shares real-world examples of how companies are using social media to build their business. Six Apart is the world’s biggest blogging company, behind such platforms as Movable Type, LiveJournal, Vox, and TypePad.
And even more important than where technology has been is where it’s going: Learn about cutting-edge technological initiatives like OpenID and OpenSocial, and how these aren’t just about new ways to poke your Facebook friends — they’re business opportunities.
Finally, no change this big happens without thinking about the social and political realities of the business world. What works in convincing your company, your coworkers, or your boss to spend their time and money trying new things? This session will lead a conversation to find out.
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
Not only are most Web applications going to have (or utilize) social components — they’re also going to have start sharing social information like profiles, contact lists and such with other services. The ’social network fatigue’ users feel and the inefficiencies of keeping this information in multiple spots will drive us to play better with other social apps. This session will focus on using simple building blocks and emerging design patterns to keep it simple for users, for you and for the open social Web at large.
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.
Sometime shortly after Web Directions South concludes, somebody (probably a somebody in the “developing” world) will become the three billionth mobile phone subscriber. Good for the providers, of course – but the effects of the network on human social organization are far more profound. From the dhows of Kerala to the cities of China to the beaches of Cronulla, we’re all coming into contact with – and learning how to master – the subtle skills of spontaneous self-organization which are the essential fact of life on the network. We can get in front of this spree of self-organization – or get run over by it. Either way, mob rules are the new laws of business, politics, and culture.
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.
It’s not just about email and Twitter: industry analysts agree, virtually every online social network application will develop a mobile feature in the next year or two. From Flickr pre-installed on Nokia phones to an up-to-date map of your buddies locations, mobile devices are ready to come pre-loaded with new friends for you to play with. Before you tune out to listen to music tagged and delivered to your mobile by your social network, or press SEND on a stinging critique of the Web Directions dining hall food to restaurant review mobile sites, why not attend an informative yet fun session about the latest and greatest in GPS and location based services connecting online communities on your mobile? For those who want to focus on the business model not the technology.
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.
It seems that everyone is talking about user generated content and online communities these days. But how will citizen journalism, user-generated content, the Blogosphere, tagging, ranking, and Wiki knowledge reshape branding and your business? How do you manage and scale this community and then hand control to your users (and how do you explain to the boss what you’ve just done?). Gain an understanding that dialogue is the new content and learn how to maximise the benefits (and minimise the pitfalls) of creating online communities in this presentation.
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.
The collection of social and information technologies informally known as Web2.0 have created a rich universe of applications – but a scattershot one. We plug lots of our information into websites everywhere – MySpace and Digg, Friendster and Yahoo!, and everywhere, Google, Google, Google. Yet it’s as if we’re spending all of our time building information silos; piles of data which are essentially unconnected. It’s getting dull. How many times do I need to list my friends, or my contact information, or my favorite bands?
We know why it’s happening: commercial interests are overruling the natural pooling and sharing of information that would actually bring some utility to this mountain of data we’re generating about ourselves. Yet the pressure to share is building up: the recent explosive emergence of mash-ups, which juxtapose two or three or more services in unique and valuable ways shows us that the hybrid always trumps the thoroughbred. And that’s just on internet services. Very few of us control the mountain of data we generate as we pass through this world – everyone wants it (for their own purposes), yet we – who are creating it – never have access to it.
It’s time to revisit the entire philosophy of interaction design on the Web, time to move the focus away from the site-as-resource, toward an idea of the site-as-personal-enabler. What we each bring to a website – or rather, what we should bring to a website – is a wealth of information about ourselves. This is the real resource of Web2.0, and the next place the Web is going. The exuberance around social networks shows us that people want to connect – it’s time for designers to build the tools which will truly enable that connection.
I’ve been admiring the Web Directions events for years, and was honored to be part… What a fantastic event!
Ethan Marcotte Inventor of 'Responsive Web Design'
