If you haven’t already, please purchase your ticket for CyborgCamp. This ticket covers food and lets us know you’ll be there.

It’s important that you register as early as possible, the ticket costs $10 person before Wednesday December 3rd, 2008, at Noon. If you register afterwards, the ticket before $20. The form is secure and accepts credit cards.

>>Click here to buy a ticket<<

• The $10 ticket is for food, and because we want to know how many people to order food for.
• Formal conference speakers (BIll Derouchey, Ward Cunningham, Hideshi Hamaguchi, and Lia Hollander) and Sponsors do not have to pay or register, but can if they can if they wish to contribute to the CyborgCamp fund/food items (if you’re a sponsor and have already purchased a ticket, I can refund you if you wish).
• All unconference session speakers must pay.
• 5 student tickets are available. If you’d like one, please contact me (see contact info below).
• The reason we’re charging $20 on the 3 days before the vent is simply to get you to register before then. We’d still like people to be able to register — but we want to know how many people are going to come to the event 3 days before we have the event.
• If you’re tuning into the live streaming, there is no need to register.
• If you’re not registered, you won’t be able to attend the event. Plus, we won’t have a badge for you. This will be sad. Registering on Upcoming is only for approximation purposes and does not count as real registration.

Questions? Extraneous needs? Contact Amber Case at caseorganic@gmail.com, CyborgCamp on Twitter, or Caseorganic on Twitter. We’re really, really excited to have you there, and to have a super-live streamed event with amazing people at it.

Tonight, Microsoft and others kindly sponsored a Silverlight 2 Release Party at North Portland’s North Agency.

North has a beautiful building. If you’ve never been there before, it’s located at 1515 NW 19th Ave in one of the newest and strangest areas of Portland. North is an advertising agency who, according to one of their spokeswoman, “connects brands with people using film, design and music”. North has been occupying their current location for a little over a year.

The first presenter was Tim Heuer, a Senior Program Manager for Microsoft Silverlight. The rest of the program was open, which allowed everyone to walk around to different demo stations featuring Silverlight locals Erik Mork, Kelly White, and Jason Mauer.

Deep Zoom

DeepZoom provides the ability to zoom almost arbitrarily large images in Silverlight in a really nice manner. Jason Mauer presented Deep Zoom for a series of images randing from maps to standard JPEG photos. The scaling mechanism of DeepZoom was very impressive.

DeepZoom allows mutiple images to be displayed at very small and very large scale without affecting performance of the application displaying the image. The only property affecting performance is the number of pixels to be displayed on screen.

Demo

Hard Rock Cafe has a website that uses Deep Zoom, but you have to have Microsoft Silverlight installed in order to use it. I highly suggest checking it out, though — especially if you like super-close-up images of guitar frets.

BizSpark

BizSpark is kind of like Microsoft’s version of Y!Combinator. It is a new program for supporting startups and entrepreneurs. To be eligible for BizSpark, all of the following your Startup must be:

• In the business of software development,
• Privately held,
• Have been in business for less than 3 years, and
• Have less than US $1 million in annual revenue.

To be eligible to use the software for production and deployment of hosted solutions Startups must also be developing a new “software as a service” solution (on any platform) to be delivered over the Internet.

Raffle

There was a raffle at the end for a bunch of books. Jason Mauer made a random number generator in Silverlight in order to choose raffle winners. I found that pretty cool. I picked up a book on Professional LINQ, which I am going to have a lot of fun with. I was also talking to Adron Hall about Yahoo! Pipes and doing a side-to-side comparison of Silverlight’s capabilities vs. the capabilities of Pipes.

PDXUX

The PDXUX group will be meeting the third Tuesday of every month, beginning in January. Visit the PDXUX website for details.

Thanks to North, Microsoft, and PDXUX et al., for a successful and curious event.

—–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Tech Journalist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

Yesterday I attended WebTrends Connect ‘08 in Seattle, Washington with Ryan Summers of ISITE Design.

The event was three hours long, and fast-paced. We arrived at 9:00 Am to find a speaker from WebTrends discussing the future state of news. He asked us to consider what could happen if one used online traffic to drive what is written about in analog newspapers.

As the seminar progressed, the ability to stitch together a holistic view of customer experience became a primary area of concern. One of the first major points was that Marketing and IT need to be working together.

“There is a lot of information locked behind closed doors”, said the next speaker, who was from TeraData. “There is no way to get the data out of the web analytics solutions and into the reporting dashboard.

He proposed the idea of business intelligence tools that could access this online visitor data and put it into an enterprise data warehouse.

He pointed out that one of the current difficulties of using data is that we are making a transition from 2nd Generation Enterprise to 3rd Generation Enterprise systems.

The 2nd Generation is Closed + Proprietary, whereas the 3rd Generation is Open standard-based. You simply can’t inegrate data systems when they are separated by proprietary, closed systems.

As O’Reilly once stated, “The internet is becomnig an enormous database that can be quiried, sorted, and applied to existing models and practices to change things”. WebTrends, TeraData, and other new systems seek to integrate many different systems with Analytics. The only way to streamline the spaces between data and change is to remove the closed doors betwen that data.

He stated that tech solutions should be open source based. These technologies seek to implement solutions that bring the two together and erases the nodes between them. He also pointed out that standards need to be in place that everyone agrees about across the organization.

Data Flow and Analytics

Online data can influence customer marketing, call centers, data warehouses, CRM and merchandisers.

Business Centric
—-
Business strategy
Performance Management
People — Processes
Analytics Processes
Analytics Applications
BI Platforms
Information Management Infrastructure.
——————

The next speaker was Paul Barrett
Global Director, Customer Management and DIgital Advertising

“How does one create one vIew of your customer?”, he asked, responding that the solution was “an Interactive marketing Intelligence across the enterprise”.

“Marketing an IT don’t like to play together — they have completely different mindsets.” A solution is to create Integrated Data warehouses so that the website and the customer service can blend into each other. Bringing that relationship closer together allows a more holistic view of all of the data coming into a company.

One of the most difficult issues is getting the recommended changes implemented in a shorter period of time every time.

It’s not about the data you can get at, but the risk of not knowing the data you’re missing.

The metrics are cheap, bu the metrics you don’t know are not.

Case Study: Travelocity

Tavelocity took the idea of using the CRM to drive customers to offers through the website. They had to avoid things like, “if you get a flight to NY for $500, and you log back out, when you next visit the site you can’t be shown an offer for $300, since you just bought the $500 one”.

They have a lot of dynamic decision making since you’ve already placed an order for $500.

Whne you become able to share the data between these systems, you become able to provide customized experiences for your customers with data that revolves around them.

You can also begin to bring unstructured data, such as the data on blogs into analytic understanding. For instance, when people blog about your website you can bring that data into your data warehouse.

The next speaker was Kevin Bobowski: Vice President, Client Services at Statigent

Stratigent is Partnering with Exact Target to provide a variety of KPI’s, such as benchmarkeing, competitive intelligence, visitor engagement measurement, optimization, proactive reporting and analysis, website testing and optimization.

“Don’t start with strategies that are too high-level that you don’t see value from them in the short term”, Bobowski said.

Primary challenges facing organizations today:

• So many initiatives and not enough time to implement all of them
• Picking and choosing what to do in a timely matter reduces liability
• Intense pressure to produce results
• Increasingly complex demands (coming from your business stockholders — their demand for information, customer insights)
• New marketing technologies create more data and more silos
• Balance to Building out these Capabilities

Strategy + Business Process

Do you have a unified strategy and clear goals that are measurement?

Infrastructure

Is realible and flexible technology in place to meet the evolving needs of ke sakehodes?

Value Creation Tactics

(Any processes a business uses to glean value from your data, testing, campaign analysis, conversion testing, customer segmentation).
What actions are you taking — on a consistent basis - to drive ROI?
Are the building blocks in place for this?

Isolated Successes vs. Long-term success

An organization with isolated successes - look at the successful campaign. This is often an indicator that there’s an executive sponsorship.

Where did you get your data, how did you get your data? instead of how to analyze your data.

Building a ‘culture of analytics’

The organization needs to invest in value creation tactics.
Demonstrate short term results that allow you to gain greater sponsorship and credit for lager projects — with the long term strategy and goals in mind.

He coined the term ‘Stratactical’, which he defined as, “of or relating to a strategy driven-approach using value based tatics”, adding that “while it’s great to have a long term strategy, you also have to balance it with results on the short term. You need to develop reliably, stable success.”

43 Percent of organization say they’ve started the process — but they’re not seeing any value.

How can you get hte results? How can you guarantee that those results will net short term wins

Key Preformance Indicators

It is difficult to show ROI from a seamless cross-channel customer experience with personalization and customization in place.

It is less difficult to Show ROI from a trigger-based communications program with customer profiling and predictive modeling.

4 tactics for a successful business case

-Build an actionable strategy
-Connect your marketing data
-Establish relationships (where are the shared pain points across the organization? Data silos make it difficult to have everyone on the same page).
-Optimize, Test, and Repeat…
-Incorporate resting to amplify the value you generate

Building an Actionable Strategy

-Optimize the Media Mix (return on ad spend)
-Increase the most productive spend
-Increase E-mail spend if cost per acquisition is less than direct mail and other marketing tactics
Reduce acquisition costs and increase profits per customers
Find and understand the total cost per Acquisition.

5 Types of KPI’s

-Outcome/Business driver

Return on Ad spend (Answers the question of”how well am I doing?”

-Diagnostic metrics (Helps you answer the question “how can I do better?”. An example is a conversion rate — click through to a landing page).

-Smoke alarms (Helps you anticipate potential problems that may exist. Example is number of unopened E-mails. That’s an indicator that something might not be right — might be sending E-mails to the wrong audience. Allows you to dig deeper).

-Predictor KPI’s (Allows you to look into the future — Answers the question of will I do better tomorrow? A client may invest in a banner campaign. Customers may need an amount of time to evaluate the purpose. Banner clicks might not convert immediately — in a day, week or month. Some organizations know up front, and they can prepare for revenue and stock — for how well they’ll be doing in 45 days).

-Latent KPI (the most valuable of all. Helps you answer the question of where are my marketing opportunities. Can take the form of customer surveys on the websites. This data sometimes sits solely in the marketing department and is not let out, but the data there should be shared across many channels — because it can help every department understand how others are seeing their organization).

Business Philosophy

Don’t let the KPI’s change every week or month, or else everyone in the organization will have a difficult time synching with each new idea, method, or direction. Focus, and slough off things that don’t match that focus.

Connecting your Marketing Data

The question is where are you as an organization? If your organization is not advanced enough

ExactTarget Email Integration

You can exact a customer’s E-mail address and the Product SKU’s they’ve purchased/looked at, as well as sales funnel abandonment info.

You can use ExactTarget automation to pick a file up, bring it in, and send and email leveraging that data.

Creating a targeted,one-to-one message using our proprietary scripting language.
Press the “Start” button and go about you your daily business.

Promote product A, but you know that customers who purchase product A also purchase products B and C. So you can include those in dynamic E-mails based on their interest in product A.

Promote product B and C automatically, but only if that product is in stock.

Optimization

Optimization is bigger than testing but testing plays a key role in the organization. Testing can drive short term wins.

Optimize emails creatives to increase click-throughs

-Headlines
-Offers
-Message/Copy
-Images
-Call to actions

Try different calls to action — when you begin to use multi-variate testing, you increase the capability to really increase your ROI.

Increase lending page conversion rates by multi-variate testing in the same way

-Headline
-Form field
-Color scheme
-Calls to action

1. Be Stratatical. Make sure that strategy is actionable.
2. KPI’s. Abolsutley essential.
3. Breaking down data silos allows data to flow into larger areas. These data areas combine into one bigger view of the customer. Which allows a richer view of the customer.
4. Optimization testing. It cannot be said enough how important optimization testing is. How else can you know what is successful in the site and wha epople are looking at.

KPI’s can exist on every level.

For copies of the Slides, E-mail:
Kevin.Bobowski@Stratigent.com

Many Ways to Get One View

Barry Parshall, Director of Product Management

The more plugged in the rest of the organization is, the more successful that organization can work together.

We see more and more organizations taking the data out of WebTrends and turning it into their own

Microsoft has categorized all of their key metrics into dashboards.

WebTrends 8.6 Demo

The UI was taken from Microsoft Outlook.

OTBC Drivers

A means for getting direct access to WebTrends data bins with an ODBC-compliant application.

Same driver for WebTrends Analytics and WebTrends Marketing Warehouse

Easy to install and use.

Demo, WebTrends ODBC Driver

-Open Excel 2007
-Click Data from other sources —> from Microsoft query
-WebTrends Demo — the data source for WebTrends already set up.
-Click ‘ok’
-This will connect you to the webtrends backend — select the profile. double click the ones that one cares about. Can grab multiple data channels and pull them into the same Excel data sheet.
Next –> you can sort by anything you want.
-Choose ’sort by revenue’, descending.
-Click Finish.

Limitations

Ryan Summers informed me that, “you can only quiery one time period at a time. You can’t query two time periods”.

Datalinks for Microsoft Excel

From Business Intelligence, Inc. (a Portland, Oregon Company).

You can join all of that data with other data sources. Provides a real simple way to join that data with other data sources. Will also export the data intelligence to Excel — so that you can go to Excel, hit refresh, and Excel will auto update all of the fields.

Webservices API —> can directly implement data in and out of the data warehouse. Bi-directional data transport for WebTrends Marketing Warehouse
Based on SOAP.

TechnologyLeaders (New York)

Dynamic Alerts lets you know when to act — when a variable changes dramatically, you are sent a notification E-mail.
Event envelope based on historical norms. Alerts are sent when activites exceeded historical norms.

DataMind (Seattle, Wa)

They produce a very slick custom scorecard offering the capability to export all of your analytics to one place. There’s also a browser overlay application.

Demo

All Excel based. Data arranged by tabs. Capturing a thumbnail of your website and overlaying the analytical data over it. Consultants customize the scorecard for your business.

Data Scheduler
Allows the scheduling of an export for the underlying analysis tables that contains hundreds of thousands of data sources.

The WebTrends Marketing Warehouse

-A true data warehouse, based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
-Stores and maintains discrete records of visitors, and all “events” taken by them.
-Every campaign click-through, ect.
-Limitless correlations and audience segmentation capabilities
(Get me a list of visitors that met all of this criteria).

The fundamental difference between aggregate web analytics, and customer centric web analytics is the ability to run queries.

Case Studies

Orbitz, a TeraData customer, is using it for:
-Web behavior connected with offline transactions
-Combine data analysis, reporting in its own warehouse.
Polaris
-Web scoring accurately segments diverse audiences
-Use WebTrends Score to assign point values to particular onine actions (as a mean to quickly asses consumer interest in some products vs. others)
-On a nightly basis exact
use this to populate further interaction .

The Microsoft SQL Database is automatically populated with data and assigns each user action with a number.

Polaris Home Page (rule sets)
New vehicle interest: 1 (user clicked here but left after a few seconds)
Racing Interest: 0
Parts and gear interest: 15 (user clicked here and watched a video on parts and gear)
Engaged (how interested is your user?): 10 (video watching)
Total Score: 26

————

Conclusion

While some of these techniques are not new, it was nice to see many of them presented in three hours. It is apparent that bringing data from different sectors into common areas will help many to understand how users and companies are interacting. Analytics are becoming essential for companies to efficiently connect and deal with many customers at once while providing them with customized experiences.

I look forward to watching industries and products that help reduce the data silos that affect many current companies. The technologies are there — it is just an issue of getting these technologies into companies so that more users can be understood. I am sure that interest in these tools will only increase in the future.

———–

About

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and new media consultant living in Portland, Oregon. She likes to attend events and meet people in the industry. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

Tonight was an event associated with Portland Web Innovators called Social Network Spaghetti. It happened at 7pm at Vidoop in Downtown Chinatown.

Adam Duvander started off by explaining that Portand Web Innovators is around three years old now. That makes it one of the cornerstones of the Portland Tech scene.

Scott Kveton told us his ideas on the state of current social networks. His charisma and ability to explain and parse complex ideas, systems, and trends was interesting and enjoyable to watch. I estimate around 30+ people showed up, and many interesting questions were raised from the audience.

Oh yeah…and there was lots of Bacon.

In case you missed it, the entire event was archived. Yes — every moment of the presentation can be viewed, thanks to @brampitoyo and @maestrojed.

Video chat rooms at Ustream

Scott Kveton is a digital identity promoter, open source contributor, and VP of Open Platforms for Vidoop.

>>

Check out more Scott Kveton

Scott Kveton’s Blog
BaconGeek
Twitter Scott Kveton
Vidoop

—-

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland, Oregon. She enjoys tech events and the minds of people who attend them. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

I wanted to write about this before, but I had to wait until everything was secured and verified.

In September, Steve Gehlen invited me to speak about Cyborg Anthropology at Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conference on September 5th of this year. The conference was a refreshing and entertaining look at where entertainment, art, culture, business, and social media are going. The keynote was Joshua Green of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium.

After Inverge, Joshua and I compared theorists and research, and had a great time socializing along with all of the other conference attendees and speakers. A month later, Joshua informed me of a conference at MIT called the Futures of Entertainment, and wondered if I would be interested in being on a panel on social media. He said that my analysis and understanding of both the academic and corporate world would provide a useful bridge between two separate fields.

Convergence culture has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. Futures of Entertainment 3 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape. This year’s conference will work to bring together the themes from last year - media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution - with the consortium’s new projects in moving towards an increasingly global view of media convergence and flow. Topics for this year’s panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia and world building, comics and commerce, social media and spreadability, and renewed discussion on how and why to measure audience value.

I very carefully prepared two forms of submission — one on Cyborg Anthropology from the academic perspective, and another from the business perspective.

However, I feel that what I am doing pales in comparison to the accomplishments of those whom I will be participating with. I am both honored and overwhelmed by this opportunity. I hope to be able to add value to some aspect of the conference.

I’ll be participating on the social media panel, which is described as follows:

“Moving lives online, creating conversations across geography, connecting with consumers - how is social media defining the current entertainment landscape? As people not only put more content online, but conduct more of their daily lives in networked spaces and via social networking sites, how are social media influencing how we think of audiences? Video-sharing platforms have changed how we think of production and distribution, and Facebook gifts point to the value of virtual properties, how are these sites enabling other processes of production or distribution practices. Spaces where commercial and community purposes intertwine, what are the implications for privacy, content management, and identity construction of social media? How have they impacted notions of civic engagement?”

Conference Attendees

Kim Moses - Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer, Lost, Medium, Yochai Benkler - Harvard Law School, The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press), John Caldwell - UCLA, Production Culture (Duke University Press), Henry Jenkins - MIT, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press), Alex McDowell - Production Designer, The Watchmen, Kevin Slavin - Area/Code, Sabrina Caluori - Director, Marketing and Promotions, HBO Online, Grant McCracken - Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture (Indiana University Press), Donald K Ranvaud - Buena Onda Films, Amanda Lotz - University of Michigan, The Television Will be Revolutionized (NYU Press), Gail De Kosknik - UC Berkeley, How to Save Soap Opera: Histories and Futures of an Iconic Genre, Joe Marchese - socialvibe.com, Amber Case - Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant, Hazelnut Consulting, Mauricio Mota - New Content (Brazil), Alisa Perren - Georgia State University, The Media Industry Studies Book (Blackwell Publishing)….more.

Steve Gehlen, Paige Saez (on a grant from PNCA) and Kris Krug will be flying out to join me at the conference. In case you’re in the area too, the conference information is as follows:

MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3

Friday, Nov 21 8:30a to Saturday, Nov 22 8:30a
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): Wong Auditorium, Cambridge, MA

Thanks

A great big thank you to everyone in the Portland Tech community for being supportive and welcoming of interdisciplinary thought. Special thanks to Joshua Green and Steve Gehlen.

—–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media Consultant living in Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

We have everything in Portland. We have Linus, we have biking, we have Open Source, and we have an amazing Portland Tech community. Up until recently, we also had O’Reilly’s OSCON.

Now that OSCON has moved away, the Portland community has taken the baton and is going to launch a new conference to replace the old one. The first meeting of Open Source Bridge was tonight at CubeSpace, and it was attended by around 70 people. Selena Deckelman and Audrey Eschright started the meeting off with a Powerpoint of all of the great things Portland has to offer. Her and Audrey introduced the Bridge team, which is as follows:

Marketing

Rick Turoczy

Finance

Jake Kuramoto

IT

Adam DuVander (which he is going to be calling ‘Technology Experience’). A Technology Experience happens before, during, and after the event.

Logistics (food

Kelly Guimot

Content

Selena Deckelman and Audrey Eschright

How will we get it done?

Well, as Selena Deckelman pointed out, “Portland is known for its DIY spirit — so we’ll get something done”.

Who we want involved:

All of you.
Your friends.
Your Mom.

“The real challenge,” explained Rick Turoczy, “is creating something that attracts not only the speakers around here that are well known, but speakers from outside of Portland as well”.

——

Getting Involved

Please send me any resources you have and I’ll begin to gather and repost them here, as well as expand the post to include any other resources I find relating to Open Source Bridge. Tonight was a good start.

Also, check out the Open Source Bridge website for details as they happen.

Dorkbot PDX is a Portland group that brings together an eclectic group of geniuses with a love of hacking technology. It is probably my favorite group here because of the energy and excitement that everyone has. Every time I go I gain a new respect and excitement for all things electronic. Everyone is brilliant, welcoming and always has something to say or work on.

Dorkbot meets twice a month at Lucky Lab NW (1945 NW Quimby). This week, about thirty people showed up to exchange ideas, inventions, and electrionic hacks. Here, my friend Mario Landau-Holdsworth is testing out a makeshift synthesizer using a Benito [designed and built by Don from dorkbot]. Alex Norman tells me that, “the Benito uses some i2c io expanders to scan the buttons and talks to the computer via midi over USB. It is controlling a step sequencer that I wrote using Pure Data and pdlua. It is triggering one shot samples.. I’m currently using drum samples”.

Ward Cunningham’s Dial-a-Door

“AboutUs CTO Ward Cunningham and his college roommate Rick Wartzok, had better than average audio/visual and beverage capability in their dorm room, at least for 1968. While happy to share with fellow residents, they then faced a dilemma. What about keys? They wanted some kind of combination lock that had a shared code that could be selectively enabled, and a longer, master code for private use. The solution was Dial-a-Door. Now its 2008, forty years later, Ward has located the mechanical technology that decoded the combination, restored it to working order, and prepared a display which he will present at the bi-weekly DorkbotPDX at the Lucky Lab in Northwest Portland,” says Mark Dilley on the AboutUs.org Blog.

More about Dial-a-Door

“I’ve written a web page describing my original application, Dial-a-Door”, says Ward Cunningham on the Dorkbot PDX blog. I found the SECODER that I spoke about last meeting. It was in the bottom of the wrong junk box with old antenna equipment, not old telephone equipment. My mechanically inclined friends helped me get it working again”.  More information is available on Ward Cunningham’s website: http://c2.com/~ward/Dial-a-Door.

BittyBot

Along the way, I had the honor of meeting Monty Goodson of BittyBot. The name explains what he does — which is basically the manufacture of really tiny circuitboards that can be used to make really small robots. They were very, very small. The one pictured is actually larger than some of the others ones that he had with him.

If you like technology, I urge you to come out to Dorkbot and mingle with everyone. It’s a very low-key, wonderful environment where you can let your imagination and expertise run wild. And if you’re not familiar with what Dorkbot does, you might want to look into using the open source Arduino development and prototyping platform. There is an article on Arduino chips from Instructables here.

Dorkbot Resources

Thanks to Tempus Dictum and PNCA, Dorkbot has put together a series of workshops around the dorkbotpdx arduino kits (http://www.dorkbotpdx.org/wiki/dorkboard) called the “Arduino Cult Induction”.(http://www.dorkbotpdx.org/workshop/arduino/cult_induction_rev4).

We will have these workshops on the last Sunday of every month, probably alternating between the Cult Induction, a focused workshop and an Open Lab. The workshops cost ~$25 which includes the hardware being built. The open labs are free.

Schedule

30 NOV 2008 — Sound/Midi Workshop (~$25)

28 DEC 2008 — Open Lab (free)

———-

For more events, check out the AboutUs Portland Tech Events Page. You can also follow me on Twitter, or connect with other members of the Portland Tech Community on the AboutUs.org Portland Tech Twitter Page. You might also want to attend CyborgCamp, which will be happening on December 6th, 2008 at CubeSpace.

———

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland, Oregon. She likes attending events and studying the Portland Tech scene.

This is the PowerPoint of a lightning talk given by Amber Case (@caseorganic) at Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conference in Portland, Oregon on Sept 4+5th. NOTE: This was a 10-minute compressed presentation. From Telephone to Tweetup: an Abbreviated History of Technology and Social Exchange.

Some Theory Behind the Subject

The invention of the telephone ushered in an era of ‘on-demand’ social connection. These conversations were freeing, but were still limited to location and time. As communication technology matured, telephones became detached from their cords and were allowed to travel with their users.This detachment from location allowed conversation to happen in more times and more places. As the amount of time and space between nodes of connection decreased, the intersection of rapid news methods such as blogging, mobile technology, and chatrooms begin to merge. This convergence allowed dramatic increases in the ability to rapidly convey information to others. Instead of engaging with one person at a time, many are now capable of talking at once. No where is this more prevalent than on Twitter. It has found ways to connect communities, stave off suburban isolation, and warn of earthquakes before medical help can access them. The distance between individual and community will continue to decrease, and those products and services which decrease the amount of time and space it takes to create an action will be the most successful. Actions and devices will become lighter and lighter, and the social will continue to become more and more mobile. The convergence of various technologies will result in rapid learning and communication never imagined before. For details on the original event, look at the SlideShare Link.

Slideshow transcript

Slide 1: Every bullet point in this presentation is less than 140 characters.

Slide 2: This is because the text of these slides will also be broadcasted on Twitter at the time of this speech.

Slide 3: In this way, the speech can live in two places at once.

Slide 4: To one audience here at Inverge.

Slide 5: And also to 600+ followers on Twitter. [@Inverge] [#Inverge]

Slide 6: You can follow @caseorganic to see it in action.

Slide 7: [this is a waiting period because the Internet connection here is probably slow] @caseorganic

Slide 8: Hello.

Slide 9: My Name is Amber Case.

Slide 10: I am a Cyborg Anthropologist.

Slide 11: I study the symbiotic relationship between humans and computers…

Slide 12: And the psychology of space that is created by online environments.

Slide 13: Or, how the online experience is “ experienced” .

Slide 14: In Anthropology, one could call this a Digital Phenomenology

Slide 15: …

Slide 16: We live in a community that increasingly transcends time and space.

Slide 17: It is our relationship with technology that allows us extended capabilities.

Slide 18: Right now, search engines and people are interacting with your social profiles and websites.

Slide 19: While you aren’ t there.

Slide 20: And with social networking sites like Twitter, you can watch many conversations at once.

Slide 21: …

Slide 22: Consider Letter Writing, the first Internet.

Slide 23: The message to response ratio was very slow, but it was social.

Slide 24: Enter the Telephone.

Slide 25: Thus began the era of ‘ On Demand’ social communication.

Slide 26: This made the world very small.

Slide 27: You could stand on one side of the world, whisper something, and be heard on the other.

Slide 28: But to those who had never experienced a telephone, the device was as foreign as the Internet once was in 1993.

Slide 29: The fact that a human could speak into a machine and hear a voice on the other side gave the appearance of schizophrenia.

Slide 30: Over time, the strangeness of the new dissolved into formal society and the landline telephone started to get along with humans.

Slide 31: Those living in suburban communities were less capable of reaching actual members of society on a daily basis.

Slide 32: …and the telephone allowed them an escape from the isolation of industrial modernity.

Slide 33: But the telephone was limited by the length of its cord and its proximity to a phone jack.

Slide 34: So along came the cordless phone.

Slide 35: It was free! {yay!}

Slide 36: …to run around the house…

Slide 37: So then the Cell Phone arrived on the scene. {take that!}

Slide 38: While it was the least rooted to place,

Slide 39: The Cell Phone did not offer information transparency.

Slide 40: It only allowed one conversation at a time (excluding 3-way).

Slide 41: Cell Phone + Text allowed decentralized message access and multiple recipients, but limited message transparency.

Slide 42: Then Twitter happened.

Slide 43: It was not rooted to place and time.

Slide 44: It allowed multiple communication channels and recipients.

Slide 45: Users were praised for contribution and helpfulness to those in their network.

Slide 46: Why does it work?

Slide 47: Twitter is a centralized technosocial hybrid that asks a single question that can never be fully answered.

Slide 48: …

Slide 49: What

Slide 50: Are

Slide 51: You

Slide 52: Doing?

Slide 53: The question is asked by all, to all. Socialization is aided by machine.

Slide 54: The time and space it takes to absorb and disperse information is compressed.

Slide 55: Twitter takes advantage of the 4th Dimensionality of the Internet.

Slide 56: [Analog] [Demonstration]

Slide 57: Lets look at some Architectural Theory

Slide 58: “ Our daily existence is normally filled with short walks and passing through interfaces. It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them.\”

Slide 59: “ It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them.\”

Slide 60: “ Interference interchanges must be fast, convenient, comfortable, without undue effort in a controlled environment.”

Slide 61: The General Theory of Relativity

Slide 62: The shape of space makes people more, and people create the shape of space.

Slide 63: The Analog World is full of Friction

Slide 64: The level of Friction in the Digital world has far less.

Slide 65: Online, we are capable of innovating in a frictionless atmosphere.

Slide 66: There are dangers to this.

Slide 67: Frictionless development becomes cancerous if not restrained.

Slide 68: Too many features/innovations reduce overall value.

Slide 69: LIKE FACEBOOK.

Slide 70: Now, lets talk about highways.

Slide 71: Highways are giant projects requiring high levels of funding and cooperation.

Slide 72: To dig up a highway and move it costs millions of dollars.

Slide 73: But rerouting a path online takes a few minutes with a 301 redirect.

Slide 74: People, when compressed, can do more in less time and less space.

Slide 75: Actions flow to spaces with reduced activation energy and barriers to entry.

Slide 76: Humans and Technology Co-create each other through an Actor/Network of technosocial interaction.

Slide 77: “ In the search for itself and an affectionate sociality, it easily gets lost in the jungle of the self…”

Slide 78: “ Someone who is poking around in the fog of his of his or her own self is no longer capable of noticing that this isolation,

Slide 79: “ This ’solitary-confinement of the ego’ is a mass sentence. [Ulrich Beck, 40 in Bauman’ s Liquid Modernity 2000:37]”

Slide 80: [So Technosocial Interaction is about Transcending the silos of Mental Isolation]

Slide 81: Hello

Slide 82: The key to the semantic web is to always reduce the steps in user action.

Slide 83: Twitter engages the user in ways that do not decay.

Slide 86: See SlideShare for image

Slide 87: See Slideshare for image

Slide 88: Husband on Google Street View

Slide 89: Old map

Slide 90: See Slideshare for image.

Slide 92: @caseorganic On Social Sites Everywhere Thesis: “Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagement” Available @:oakhazelnut.com

———-
Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthopologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can contact her by E-mail at caseorganic at gmail.com, or on Twitter @caseorganic.

[display_podcast]

This Podcast has been a long time coming.

Why? Because it’s been almost a month since Gnomedex 8.0, where I went on a fantastic adventure with Chris and Ponzi Pirillo, Robert Scoble, Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb), Portland’s Rick Turoczy (Silicon Florist), Prodigy Mark Bao @markbao (founder of Avecora) , Pete Grillo, Alex Williams @podcasthotel (Iterasi and the Magic Bus), Dave Olson @uncleweed, Chris Brogan, Photographer Kris Krug (k++ on Flickr), Former TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley, Troy Malone (Pelotonics) and Others.

Others like Eric Rice. An incredible individual based in Silicon Valley who has extensive experience in virtual reality, podcasting, and other such awesomeness.

After an amazing post-conference dinner with a bunch of exellent people, Dave Olson was kind enough to lend his excellent podcasting equiptment. I was able to capture a minute percentage of the Sweetopian existence of Eric Rice.

Rice is incredible. I wish I had better adjectives in which to describe him, but I’ll let him do the talking.

I can’t say much more, except for the fact that you should probably listen to the podcast. I miss Seattle a lot, and can’t wait until the next Gnomedex. Chris Pirillo was kind enough to allow me to go on a special Cyborg Anthropologist scholarship. I’m still thanking him.

Enjoy the Podcast! You can follow Eric Rice on Twitter @spin, and Amber Case @caseorganic.

Click to Subscribe

On Sept. 4+5 an interdisciplinary thought-leader event will hit Portland. The name of the Conference is Inverge: The Interactive Convergence.

What is Inverge?

An interdisciplinary event that focuses on the convergence of media platforms, of virtual + physical, content + advertising, and corporate content + consumer-generated content.

The presentations are high-level, informative and conceptual, pointing the way toward the future and facilitating advanced professional development.

How does it work?

Inverge brings presenters and attendees together from a variety of professions and disciplines to explore changes and opportunities presented by the increasing digitization of media, the democratization of distribution and the proliferation of connectivity into new areas.

Cyborg Anthropology

As a Cyborg Anthropologist, I am very interested in this conference. I’ve been studying convergence culture for as long as I can remember. It is one of the most unique and challenging subjects that has ever struck humanity.

Steve Gehlen, Inverge organizer and founder of the Internet Strategy Forum invited me to speak at the event. I’ll be presenting a lighting talk on Friday, September 5th at 1Pm.

A Ten Minute History of Technological Compression

From Telephone to Tweetup: an abbreviated history of technology and social exchange.

Presentation Summary

The invention of the telephone ushered in an era of ‘on-demand’ social connection. These conversations were freeing, but were still limited to location and time. As communication technology matured, telephones became detached from their cords and were allowed to travel with their users. This detachment from location allowed conversation to happen in more times and more places.

As the amount of time and space between nodes of connection decreased, the intersection of rapid news methods such as blogging, mobile technology, and chatrooms begin to merge. This convergence allowed dramatic increases in the ability to rapidly convey information to others. Instead of engaging with one person at a time, many are now capable of talking at once. No where is this more prevalent than on Twitter. It has found ways to connect communities, stave off suburban isolation, and warn of earthquakes before medical help can access them.

Other Presentation Topics

Portland’s Scott Kveton, Chairman, OpenID Foundation, VP of Open Platforms, Vidoop.

You can view the rest of the featured speakers on the Inverge Website.

Joshua Green, Research Manager, Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT.

Renny Gleeson, Global Director of Digital Strategies, Wieden+Kennedy.

Registration

If you haven’t already, you can still Register for Inverge.

All Inverge 2008 paid registrants will receive a complimentary copy of the JupiterResearch report entitled Media Trends: Understanding Change Catalysts, published earlier this year. This represents a $1,500 value. If you happen to be a company, this report will probably be very useful to you.

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Thanks for reading Hazelnut Tech Talk! If you’re interested in continuing the conversation, feel free to comment on this post. You can follow me online through @caseorganic or E-mail.