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Lots of smart thinking in this from Clay Shirky's presentation at the Web 2,0 conference and therefore, plenty to steal, or use and build upon, depending on where you stand.





Posted by Ed Cotton Interesting data visualization exercise from the folks at Current TV.

It's a technique that fits the brand.

In 48 seconds they cover the 500 most popular images on current.com.

The length of time the image stays on the screen represents its popularity.

Done as an experiment for the Web 2.0 conference and spotted here.




Posted by Ed Cotton Notes from Web2.0 Expo 2008 (SF) (37.78502894901508 , -122.40164279937744) This year felt a lot less hectic than last year. Crowds were noticeably smaller than last year, probably because of the economy. Discounting the crowd size as a factor, the buzz seemed more controlled and thoughtful than last year. The question has shifted, thankfully, from how do we make a mashup and put it on Facebook to how do we make the cloud smarter, easier to use and the same regardless of how you access it. Open standards are the rallying call of the day.

Tim O'Reilly’s keynote was nothing short of inspiring in my opinion. The takeaway: we are at a critical juncture in human technological advancement and we should all concentrate on how to use any and all of the various inputs around us in new and unthought-of of ways to get people useful information in real time, without regard to desktop vs mobile vs refrigerator. He’s encouraging us to all look at the big picture and do something amazing with the mountain of technology that surrounds us. Obviously O’Reilly loves the open source methods for doing these things, as should we all.

 
From Joseph Smarr’s Web2.0 presentation

Most exciting new technology (stack): OpenId, OAuth, OpenSocial, Google Social Graph API. I attended a great session hosted by Joseph Smarr of Plaxo where he talked being able to login to a site that you’ve never been to before using OpenId and having the site auto-populate your profile with content from your friends already on the site based on your social graph. The need to maintain a spreadsheet full of username and passwords goes away. The need to manually find your friends on the 27th social site you join is gone. The need to give your google login to an application so it can scrape your contacts is gone. You maintain control over how much of your information the site can use via OAuth. Permissions to use your data can be revoked at any time. Eventually everything works this way - one cloud working seamlessly from the user’s perspective with complete control over the profile data. There’s been a lot of coverage about OpenSocial and OpenId already this year, but to brainstorm about what these technologies could actually do together is exciting.

Mesh from Microsoft makes your data available 'anywhere' you want it and should be interesting. It was kind of funny how much prominence the mac user had in the promo video they showed though. Can’t wait to have my files synced everywhere I go. The little bit they talked about the smarts built into the technology sounded interesting as well.

How to make money by the pallet: Dash’s ability to glean (and then sell) specific search queries from in car GPS units to companies wondering where they should build their next franchise as demo’d with aggregated Starbucks searches along an Arkansas highway.

Posted by Josh Brewer Some great thinking from Clay Shirky on the real threat to established media content, the idea that people start doing something useful with their cognitive surplus.

"And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads....

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you? "

It's a great new way to think about the 2.0 world and consumer generated content, at last!

From a version of the talk Clay gave at Web 2.0 last week.




Posted by Ed Cotton Matt Jones, one of the founders of the hip, travel-based social network, Dopplr, spoke at last night's IXDA event in San Francisco.

His presentation was a sort of biography meets sources of inspiration ramble, but it was good.

Jones, worked for three years (2003-2006) in Nokia's design research team spent a lot of time talking and learning about play, a core project he'd been involved in for a couple of years.

Nokia started by searching for universal human experiences something that required no research, just a book, Human Universals by Donald Brown that lists all the commonalities that exist in the human world. Matt and his team discovered there was a lot of global commonality in play which suited Nokia because at the time, it was searching for its own space in gaming.

While Jones and his gang came up with a lot of trend-right directions/themes (social networking, hacking, just-in-time situationalists, reclaim the streets,mundane is the new fun, etc) it appears the only thing that Nokia had on its mind was the doomed N-Gage.

This play project seems to have informed Matt's philosophy for design, he used the idea/quote of Play= Improvisation + Exploring, to make the link back to the design world.

He suggests that most people don't take play seriously, but play is the best way people learn and is all around us. It's the thing that can make experiences sticky and compelling, if you know how to use it right.

He had some nice examples;

The Prius dashboard "makes MPG, the new high score"

Dopplr's brand identity that is personalized for each user and changes as their behavior changes

Playfulness in copy on Dopplr- "July, no trips, we envy you."

As a distraction, Jones talked about his sideline projects for Welsh clothing company, Howies; a computer meets printer meets conveyor belt thingy that spits out Flickr images tagged with Howies. (Russell Davies is a co-conspirator on this).

Another project revolves around creating a map chest for the Howies London store complete with bugs, mid wind speed monitors and web cam feeds from Welsh surfing breaks. His inspiration was to stop the Howies people from becoming homesick for their roots when they were in Central London.

He ended with an interesting thought about the current vogue for the Big Idea, which he doesn't really believe in, instead he feels it's much more about the details and nuances, which are hard to get right and hard to copy.


Posted by Ed Cotton HTC is a company that up until recently manufactured products for other brands in the handset world.

HTC now wants to break out on its own and is looking not only to develop its own brand, but also position its products as viable alternatives to Apple's iPhone.

That's tough.






Posted by Ed Cotton