ETech Day Three Notes March 8, 2006 Contributors: Leon Chism -- leon@chism.org Daniel Smith - dls@daniel.org Gabe Hollombe - gabe@avantbard.com - http://avantbard.com/ "Attention Focusing Strategies" John Udell ========== thesis: we all seek attention. we all have things to promote and agendas to push. we all place claim on attention. how can we make the best use of other's time. four patterns: 1. heads, decks, and leads 2. actvie context 3. canonical names 4. multimedia story telling Heads, Decks, and Lead allow people to scan. context switching is expensive. it's hard to write titles in the world of web publishing, you get an odd effect. the title of the page is the title of the blog. google uses the blog title, not the blog entry title. leads to useless google summary. recommends structured data in the page title. author. date. etc. we should use the html doc titles to hold more metadata the data carries over to google results, etc. thinks the search results shold include the titles and subtitles in a page as a means of context. the tradgedy of discussion threads showing the nesting, the message titles are all the same. what if it showed first sentences? you could understand the convo without opening. in gmail, it doesn't even show the subject for editing. Pattern 2: Active Content answers to questions to john can get a url to a doc or a url to a delicious collection. that is non-static. that url is a promise that is will keep updated. they can tap into future learning. john's blog uses private microformats for querying at the subdocument level. I'm done in 4 minutes? Shit! An active wish list. Amazon list integrated with bloglines news reader. Greasemonkey script. an animator of edits to wikipedia pages. wikipedia diffs. concept assembly. influential words: spime, podcast, ajax, screecast (?) Pattern 3: cannonical names urls are hard to keep constant advocates url with index into an audio stream. Pattern 4: multimedia story telling audio with text. video and audio with demonstrations of source code. attention to a url over time. pizza call: http://aclu.org/pizza/ -------------------------------------- "Shut Up! No, *You* Shut Up: A Pattern Language for Moderation Strategies" Clay Shirky poposes a pattern language for moderation systems pattern language is a way of speaking in a moderate amount of detail - description of problem/solution pair - detailed enough that you can see how to do it, but general enough that you can apply the solution to other things, too we'd like to have apps with some amount of communal communication freedom, but big social problems (trolls, flames, etc) arise with the ease of communication in the system slashdot survives because a small number of users care to an unusually high degree about the success of slashdot. these members defend readers from the comment writers - average reader doesn't see the extremely low moderated comments (about 20 percent) despite the availability of the slashcode source, /.'s success is not easily replicated problem: the tragedy of the commons - each comment poster wants to get attention of the readers patterns 1. move comments to seperate page 2. treat readers and writers differently 3. let users rate posts 4. defensive defaults once you allow one group of users to pass judgement on another group of users, how do you make sure the guardians are not abusing power? 1. treat users and members differently 2. measure good behavior 3. enlist commited members 4. judges can't post the bronze beta (buffy vampire slayer fan site) - pretty different from /. - fill in your name, email, comments. when you submit a comment, it just goes into the comment stream instantly - seems old skool (circa '96) but the users specifically ASKED for no complexity - patterns: 1. don't have features 2. make comments central (comments _are_ the site) 3. make login optional - community is central instead of ansilary like /, pattern language for moderation wiki and list - social.itp.nyu.edu/shirky/wiki/ - moderation_strategies@yahoogroups.com -------------------------------------- "Rich Internet Applications and the Service Oriented Client" Kevin Lynch new macromedia flex allows: - vector graphics api - javascript/actionscript bridging, e4x - local storage - binary sockets, cross domain access policy seealso: AFLAX and Dojo.storage downloads: labs.adobe.com flex let's you PUSH data to pages (cool!) -------------------------------------- "When Do We Get the Events We Want" Brian Dear ebdb = events and venues database mission: maximize event discovery rest api: api.evdb.com portal: eventful.com ------------------------------------- "First you google, then you what?" Hans Peter Brondmo there _is_ intelligence on the web: the collective contributions of all authors can we rely on imperfect humans? plum.com lets you collect anything online (bookmarks, people, etc) ------------------------------------ Joel Spolsky Blue Chip Products 2006 concept of blue chip prods vs off-brand prods - julia roberts vs sandra bullock - ipod vs creative zen forumla - make people happy by giving them control - obsess over aesthetics reddit.com - likes the alien mascot, big eyes bald head, baby-like - it changes poses every once in a while, fun to watch daily - good control, good emotions, decent aesthetics = grade a motorola pebble phone - people like to fondle it - control sucks, but good emotions and aesthetics = grade b airset.com - good web calendar with phone support - good control, decent emotions, average aesthetics = grade b 3 styles of web design - ugly, ugly, ugly - all web sites = f