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.

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. MIT’s 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.

The speakers and audience will be a mixed industry and academic crowd, and the diverse topics grouped together will give the conference both broad coverage of the new media and entertainment space and deep engagement across industries and disciplinary boundaries. 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 properties, franchising and world building, comics and commerce, social and spreadable media, and renewed discussion on how and why to measure audience value.

The conference is on the 21th and 22nd of November at MIT. It works around a talk-show style model with panelists participating in a moderated discussion. Over the last two years this produced great, thorough treatments of the subject matter, getting industry and academic speakers together but avoiding product pitches. For a sense of what to expect, you can check out the site from last year’s event.

This will be the third conference of this kind.

Confirmed speakers for this year’s conference include: Javier Grillo-Marxuach (The Middleman), Alex McDowell (Production Designer, The Watchmen), Kevin Slavin (Area/Code), Donald K Ranvaud (Buena Onda Films), Amber Case (Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant), Mauricio Mota (New Content [Brazil]), Alisa Perren (George State University), Amanda Lotz (University of Michigan), Sharon Ross (Columbia College Chicago), Nancy Baym (University of Kansas), Alice Marwick (New York University), Vu Nguyen (VP of Business Development, crunchyroll.com) with more to come.

Thanks to Joshua Green of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium for hooking me up with this excellent opportunity!

New marketing is the creation of events, experiences, content, products, and services in collaboration with the consumer. It is the creation of products and services that fill an actual need while creating a community that shares that need.

Google, Twitter and Facebook were initially created by people to fulfill a need. Google was created to manage information, Facebook demographics, data and connection, and Twitter, conversation. Software and hardware review sites emerged to protect consumers from false advertising. Blogs emerged because traditional corporations didn’t listen to their customers, leaving them to fend for themselves. Because of this, it’s much more difficult for traditional corporations to have a voice. It’s been drowned out by more valuable services. And the traditional communication channels have been severed.

In the new web there is no longer one platform to speak from. Social, economic, brand, and lifestyle realities are constantly fragmenting, reorganizing and combining in new ways. Products are easily adopted and easily thrown away online. Additionally, each culture is constantly creating its own dialect, and unless a business understands that dialect and is extremely diplomatic, an online community will be able to see right through a marketing campaign.

There are tools out there that can be used to dive deep into these content networks such as Facebook and Twitter to secure information. Consumers have the power - both to create and destroy. But they also have a very helpful voice, and it’s important to listen to them. Often, they can’t create the products, services, and experiences they need. But companies can, and consumers want to help.

Web vs. Brick

In the brick and mortar world, most businesses have a front door and a loading dock, as well as finite hours of operation. Web designers originally built websites in the same way. But a website is always open, and every page a front door. Thus, each and every page on a site counts. Each page is a representation of the entire company, and must hold its own if accessed out of order and context.
One might think of the Internet as a vast ocean of noise with islands of content on it. Search engine optimization is a process that can bring an island closer to land…often close enough so that visitors can walk onto it. Visitors will generally use a website as a solution if they don’t have to navigate an ocean to get to the data they need.

Search engines can bring in traffic, but there is no guarantee that the content on a site will match what the user searched for. This can be helped along by having a site display items similar to what the user searched for. For instance, Amazon.com and the New York Times both have related posts and products that appear on almost every page.

Interfaces

As more and more companies turn to online software solutions, user interfaces become increasingly important. This is especially true when online collaborative software is used across great distances.

To quote the Urban Planner Paul Elek,

“The point is that 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”.

A principle to follow in designing an online experience is the time and number of clicks it takes for visitors to access data. If there is no flow, no calls to action, and no relevant content, then the user will generally move on — and click “no”, or the “back” button.

Users will generally take a route with the least interface changes to fulfill their needs. A good interface blends into the background while maximizing relevant user actions. The interface should also compress together similar steps so that actions do not have to be repeated uselessly by the user. Flickr’s image uploader and title/descriptions fields do an excellent job of this.

A website should contain no unnecessary code, styles, or content. A speedskater has different muscles developed than does an tennis player. There is no “one social media strategy fits all”. A website’s content/structure/links should be developed according to the type of products/services it provides. Conversation, community building and ease of use minimize consumer effort and can be achieved in different ways. It is imperative to pay attention to what communities/demographics need the services/products a site provides. Which avenue is best to play in - is Twitter more appropriate than Flickr? Examining the social media sites a community is drawn to says a lot about how they interact the most comfortably.

The ratio of good vs. poor content online makes filtering necessary. A website can only stand out among the crowd if it offers new and consistently reliable content. Additionally, that content must be accessible by both humans and machines (search engines). The online landscape only allows consumer’s limited time to make decisions. In these kinds of environments, one must alway focus on data accessibility, calls to action, and extremely clear direction. Information that is buried too deep into the site’s structure is more difficult to get to, and runs the risk of not being indexed by search engines. Products should be focused on providing value.

PR 2.0

Some of the first industries to capture digital data real-time were hedge funds and other financial firms. They used something that I’ll call an intelligence dashboard — where different streams of data were needed to make complex decisions. The dashboard allowed users to see many different stocks at once, and companies were able to create a sort of proto-feed that showed many different ecosystems of data at once.

Data Mashups

Services like Netvibes and Yahoo! pipes can be mixed together to offer companies real-time intelligence feeds that show what their competitors are posting on their blogs, what people are saying about them on twitter, and their overall online presence — all in one place.

Making these intelligence dashboards takes time and research, but the value added (not to mention the time saved) by the implementation of a centralized data source is immense. Also, it’s powerful enough for agencies that manage multiple clients, because the entire system fits into one browser window with a series of custom, labeled tabs.

All brands have an analog version of this, and some have a digital one — but all brands need it. Google Alerts is a quick and Intelligence dashboards are capable of handling the data generated by global and local brands as well. They can monitor Flickr photos, news items, blog posts, ect. Anything online, and anything in motion. Companies who do not monitor their own brands run the risk of their brands

Community

A websites’ user base should be voluntary - it should be providing a comfortable nesting ground for user actions. Youtube allows its users the space for their communities to interact, and does not force them to interact in a specific way. New tools should be created to move forward the voluntary community’s ability to reach their goals. In doing this, the creator must be able to understand what the user’s needs are, and then help the user to get there step by step. Instead of major site redesigns, tools should be being found by the user during normal routine actions. This will allow the user to ‘discover’ that tool for themselves and then determine, over time, the best use of that tool.

Explicitly stated actions or rules for the user to follow are confining and dictatorial. Suggestions are better (See Tumblr - a user-based and created space to post quotes, pictures, and videos (a sort of microblog with media…but with less interconnectivity than Twitter). The database/user experience must expand more from the side of the users and the system must be mutable enough for the to move with the space of the user.

About

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media consultant living in Portland, Oregon. You can find her on Twitter @caseorganic, or may contact her via E-mail at caseorganic at gmail.com.

photo credit: Martin Pettitt

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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

The first ever Refresh Portland occurred tonight from 6:30 to 8:00 Pm at Jive Software in Downtown Portland.

Tonight’s speaker was Tyler Sticka, an award-winning designer, artist, speaker and educator specializing in identity-driven new media. He was extremely well prepared and engaging.

Micheal Sigler @sigler began by introducing the concept of Refresh.

“Cities have been Refreshing for a while,” he said, “if you visit RefreshingCities.com you’ll find that there are Refresh events everywhere.”

Refresh events serve bring people together who are really intereted in standards based design. The events help them exchange best practices and knowledge. As Sigler said, “towards a portion of design you can walk away with something and use it in your daily lives”.

We just felt that it was time to bring a little design love to Portland.

“We”, being Michael Sigler, @michaelsigler, John Weiss of 5 Edge Media, Josh Pyles @pixelmatrix of Pixelmatrix Design, Carlos @eedorre (a system admin with a background in web development), and you probably Bram Pitoyo @brampitoyo from Twitter.

We really want to make this a community where you provide us comments. Also, we are looking for speakers. Feel free to contact any of the organizers if you know of someone who would be awesome for the event.

“Tyler Sticka is now going to take us through the looking glass,” Sigler began….and we were off.

Through the Looking Glass - How the Web is and Ought to Be

“I work at US Digital from Monday through Thursday”, Sticka said.

“But on Friday though Sunday I design logos, icons, and websites.

“This is because I’m really addicted to the idea of creating something out of the vacuum. Unlike art on a all — art stuck up on the walls.

“Communication is one thing, but conversation is the idea of the dialogue — something that’s been absent from the world of fine art for a while.

“The idea that the Viewer is also able to impart part of their experience into the work fascinates me.

New media is the first to take this concept in completely literally.

Spine Tingling Adventures of the Early Web

Sticka picked two people from the audience and gave them scripts:

“Sam, you’re going to be playing the role of website”.

“And the other will stay the part of the user”.

Website: Would you like to talk about our product, our company history….ect.

User: Umm….talk about our product?

Website: Sure…would you like option 1, 2,3,4,,5,6,,457,,8,67,87?

User: Return to home?

Sticka: Do you see how short and unfulfilling that was?

The companies that weren’t having conversations were dying out.

“In reality, users benefited in the end.

Early Innovation in Experience Design

“I like to show Amazon.com when I talk about early innovation in websites. Their recommendations features is one of the best out there — still one of the best out there.

It’s like a sort of Nerd-tastic natural selection happened.

“This sort of word they gave it afterwards was web 2.0. I don’t like it very much.

The revolution in the computer industry had Three Basic Parts

1. Visual — websites before based on the constraints of html

2. Directly from graphic design. pretty, but only a thousand people card.

3. Thematic - we’re catering to the community and the conversational aspects. .

Example:

Flickr’s Upload Tool.

“Some might say we’re in a renaissance of information.

“But they’re wrong.

We’re not in a renaissance of information, we’re in the pupae stage.

“We’re now just starting to construct the cocoon that will allow us to emerge as something triumphant.

“The idea of this moving into the mainstream is more important than us understanding what’s going on.

(At this point I realized the screen that Tyler Sticka’s Powerpoint was being projected on was made of 8.5 by 11 sheets of white computer paper stuck to the wall. Way to innovate, Refresh Portland

“In essence we are just becoming more understanding of the customer and the customer more understanding of the creator.

Lets go back to 1995. A Simpler Time.

The browser wars between Netscape and the powerhouse Internet Explorer began to emerge.
There was this sort of idea that there should be one victor, that there should only be one IE, or Firefox.

He then showed a slide with 12 different browsers, ranging from the most known and used, to the least known and used. Starting with Firefox 3, then IE and eventually flock and Epiphany (for Gnome).

He said that he posted pictures of browsers that were used by people he knew. Even Epiphany.
“Because I know people who use Epiphany.
“Well, I don’t know them; they’re online; but its practically the same thing now.

He pointed out that Flock and Songbird are both browsers that are augmenting the browser experience in ways that really help the users.

Android

“Hopefully more agnostic choices will emerge for mobile browsing.

“Google has an open source Android emulator — they’ll subsidize the cost of the phone if people put ads on it.

“There is this blurring argument about what is application design and what is web design.

“Adobe Air (adobe integrated runtime). Chrome + Prism (both taking a browser-like approach)
All are trying to bridge the gap between web and desktop applications.

Confusing the Medium with its Voice

“We’re confusing the medium with its voice.. the medium of distribution.

“We need to realize the web is only distribution. It’s just distribution. As long as it remains open - a community of people developing things, it’s a thing of freedom — a whole pasture to run in.

We need to stop designing websites, and we need to start designing experiences.

“What were we really doing here ? Why was web design all one thing? There are many things. We are designing experiences.

Tip #1: Make Sure You’re Solving a Problem

“I have so many clients come to me. They have funding, or a team, or whatever, and we sit down over coffee and they tell me “all right, I want a myspace killer”.

“So I ask them, “Okay, what are you doing that’s different than Myspace?”

“The thing is, they don’t tell me anything different from what Myspace already is. I tell them that they have to do something different, or there’s nothing there.

“Google killers. There’s a new Google killer every day. Make something that solves a problem.

Tip #2: Try to do Straightforward Before Clever

“Google was straightforward. The Microsoft Office paperclip guy was clever.
But everyone hates that paperclip. Be straightforward.

“You want to say, “okay, we’re doing social networking — but we’re solving a problem”.

“That’s why LinkedIn was started, because nobody in the professional world wants tom as their first friend and hear about movies he likes.

Tip #3: Embrace Web Standards

“If you don’t know what these are, here’s a link to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

“We’re going to have these browsers, and all of these mobile mediums. Do you really want to spend all of your time worrying about whether your thing works on one thing and not the other?

“I didn’t use web standards before. Once you get your feet wet into CSS - it just frees you up. Working in CSS is a wonderful experience for me — I look forward to it.

“We came here so that we could design these experiences for people to enjoy.
“And it will help you not get sued by those who are disabled.

“The State of California recently ruled in the victim’s favor on a Target usability case. It treated Target’s website as if it were an actual brick and mortar store. Target was penalized because it could not be accessed by those with visual disabilities.

Tip #4: Decide Which Distribution Suits you the Best

“Then you can use the master medium as a promotional or auxiliary arm to your business.

“We’re such a new medium, and we have such small visual language to ourselves right now.

“Give your site personality — people will have more and more relationships with their websites and their users experiences. If the enjoy the experience of your site, they’ll visit it.

Example: Ubiquity, by Mozilla Labs

“Web mashups and API’s used to reduce the distance between two points.

“Use open API’s. Google will release ways for you to join in a symbiotic relationship with its data.

“If you use a company’s API services, you’re benefiting from their design/development team, which may probably be larger than yours.

Ubiquity is a great example of a service that uses API’s to reduce user action.

“For instance, I can book a flight or search for pet care by simply writing a sentence to Ubiquity that tells it what I want to do. I can write that I want the information sent to my mom, dad, and sister by simply typing it.

“Ubiquity will parse out the language of simple sentences and combine the conventions that established in those to get things from multiple places done in one place.

Tip: #5: Remove Obstacles

“The conventions that should be broken are those that are obstacles to user interaction.

I like sites that allow me to try a service before I sign up.

Tip #6: Evolve with Your Audience

“One of the best examples of this is Twitter.

“Twitter started as micro-blogging: it was something between a blog and mass messaging. It was like mass chat.

If there is demand/audience — people will make a business plan around it, because there are people who need to use it.

I love the idea of users using something and evolving my product through their use of it.

“This could all be turned into television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who decide what we see and hear, and there’s a lot of precedent for that.” - Jamie Zawinski.

“We basically need to peer through the looking glass at the way users see our websites.

“Tyler finished the following quote:

Lewis Carroll said, “It’s poor sort of memory that only works backward — so here’s to the future”.

———-

That was it. Lots of applause. Really nice turnout. Very enjoyable experience.

Enough said. Tyler Sticka is brilliant. Check out his Website Experience at TylerSticka.com, or follow @tylersticka on Twitter.

And if you’re interested in the next Refresh Portland event, it’s tentatively scheduled for October 7, 2008. But check the Refresh Portland Blog as that date arrives for more information.

Refresh Portland on Upcoming! Other Exciting Events!

Refresh Portland will also be posted to Upcoming and is part of the Silicon Florist Upcoming Group headed by the awesome Portland Tech blog Silicon Florist, of course. If you join that group on Upcoming, you’ll really know what’s going on in Portland. And if you have an event that relates to Portland Tech, you can send it to the Silicon Florist group in Upcoming and reach an awesome audience.

———-

OakHazelnut.com is written by Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland who enjoys documenting innovative events such as this one. She’s generally findable on Twitter as @caseorganic.

To a user, every click is a time-value liability. Every tab is a waste of time and space. The key is to reduce the amount of clicks needed .

Mozilla’s Ubiquity is concerned with reducing the time and space it takes to transfer user relevant information.

Do I trust that Mozilla will reduce the time-value liability incurred by the many modern managers of heavy data flows? Maybe.

The project is headed by Aza Raszin, Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs and founder of founder of Humanized, Inc., and  Songza. As an interface showcase, including habituatable pie menus instead of linear menus; few icons; a high density of content and a correspondingly low amount of interaction[1]; undo instead of warnings[2]; and transparent messages [3] designed not to break the user’s train of thought. In the week after launch, Songza was used to play over 1 million songs.

Raskin is also the creator of Algorithm Ink, a port of the Context Free Art to Javascript. It has had artwork created by such computer luminaries as Ward Cunningham. Yesterday Vihn showed me Algorithm Ink at Aboutus.org (where Ward Cunningham currently works). It was very curious and elegant.

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds?

Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers. But Portland’s own event, Ignite Portland, will be happening soon, and it is a chance for locals to make short presentations on anything they are passionate about.

When?

November 13, 2008. On the Ignite Portland Blog, Josh Bancroft urges Portlanders to Save the Date.

Ignite History

Local tech legend Raven Zachary told me that Ignite Portland was founded by Brady Forrest of O’Reilly. He was initially inspired by Japan’s rapid fire presentation method of Pecha Kucha and did an adaptation of that for technology. If you haven’t heard of Pecha Kucha before, it is Japanese for the sound of conversation. Attendees watch a speakers that have only 20 slides, with 20 seconds per slide.Portland Pecha Kucha Night was just last week.

Ignite Portland

Portland, Oregon has had some of the largest events in Ignite history. Ignite 2 packed the Bagdad Theatre with over 750 people, and many waiting in line had to be turned away.

Ignite Portland at Gnomedex

Several alumni of Ignite Portland will be presenting their five minute topics at this week’s Gnomedex 8.0, an annual social media conference organized by Chris Pirillo. Rick Turoczy has a list of the presenters on his blog, Silicon Florist, and Portland Ignites Gnomedex on TinyScreenfuls, the blog of Josh Bancroft, who points out that “The idea for Ignite Portland was hatched at last year’s Gnomedex.”

Ignite Portland Planning Begins Now

November 13th may seem like a long time away, but Ignite events take a tremendous amount of effort to pull off. Want to be part of the event and meet some really cool people in the process? The Ignite Planning Committee is always open to dedicated, passionate volunteers. Help make this Ignite Portland even better than the last three.

The Ignite Planning meeting that occurred at Cubespace tonight was there primarily to deal with a system in large demand. The first major thing discussed how the online ticket reservation system would function. Then, volunteer teams were developed. Currently, they are as follows:

The Presenter Team

Raven Zachary, Mentor iPhone developer and recently of Raven.me, an iPhone development blog. You can follow Raven on Twitter. He’s also a Legion of Tech Board Member.

Tasks

• Review and sort through all Portland Ignite 4 proposals.
• Ensure that all presenters submit 20 images, a Powerpoint, or PDF by the final deadline.
• Ensure that AV equipment does not FAIL upon deployment.

The Marketing Team

Josh Bancroft, Mentor of Intel, Kindle Evangelist, and author of the TinyScreenfuls Blog, and Legion of Tech Board Member. @Jabancroft on Twitter.

Tasks

• Spread the word about Ignite Portland 4 through writing on the Ignite Portland Blog
• Designate an Official Ignite Portland spokesperson to ensure uniform information gets out to local media connections.
• Monitor the Tweetverse for Tweets about Ignite Portland. Tweet from the official Ignite Portland blog, and answer questions as they are asked.

The Sponsor Contact/Site Team

Todd Kenefsky, Mentor CEO of Connect Interactive Media, an interactive marketing company, and Legion of Tech Board Member.

Tasks

• Convert Sponsor logos from .eps format to .gif or .jpg and place them on the Ignite Portland sponsor page.
• Help create sponsor slides

The Ignite Event Setup Team

Dawn Foster, Mentor, Consultant, FastWonder blogger, Legion of Tech Board Member, and recently, of Shizzow, an micro-geolocation released last Monday (a review of its beta release is here).

Tasks

• Help set up the venue during the day of the event.
• Organize attendees and help line flow.

Other Organizers

Adam Duvander also has a hand in organizing Ignite Portland events and has presented in past Ignites. Check out his blog, Simplicity Rules, and Adam’s Twitter profile.
~.—————–

For more information, check out the Ignite Portland Website.

Ignite Portland 4 will be on November 13, 2008

Bagdad Theater
• 3702 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd
• Portland, OR 97214
• 7:00 - 10:00 PM
• Ticketholders get in at 5:30 PM
• General Admission at 6:15 PM
• Admission is always FREE

~.—————-

Please let me know if I missed anything in this post. Feel free to contact the Mentors via Twitter if you’d like to add to the volunteer efforts.

You can follow me on Twitter @caseorganic. I’ll be on the Marketing and Sponsor Teams.

Thanks for reading Hazelnut Tech Talk! We’re proud to bring you event coverage from a mix of creative and tech worlds.

Before Carolynn Duncan’s Lunch with a VC Presentation, we all met at Pho Green Papaya. I sat across from David Kominsky, cofounder of Cubespace and Rick Turozy of Silicon Florist. On my right was James Whitley, CEO of GoLife Mobile http://golifemobile.com/.

About halfway through lunch, the conversation turned to the future of the mobile phone.

Advanced Mobile Controls

“I want mobile to interact with the world around me”, James Whitley said.

“The mobile experience is one that is very personal. The Mobile experience is not about where you’re going; it’s about where you’re headed. It’s more of a contextual search.”

It’s become more of a sociological interaction than a removed, technological one.

“For instance, online I’m a hub in areas that I know”.

He gestured to Turoczy, “And you’re a hub that connects hubs”.

“And when I walk into a bar,” he continued, “the bar should know that I drink one type of drink more often than another type, and should show that drink higher or larger on the screen”.

Spatial Limitations

“There are real estate limitations on the screen of a mobile phone. And thus it all comes down to efficient data management”.

Contextual Search

I am not sure who brought it up first, but there was mention of a search where as you go by, it keeps grabbing the RFID’s of local objects.

Intelligent Gaming Environments

I pointed out that an intelligent gaming engine loads the environment as it goes. Once an object is loaded, a character can interact with it.

The World is Your Operating System

He agreed, adding that once this happens, “the mobile device becomes a remote control for the world around you”. I realized that this made the local world a sort of operating system, with the cell phone being the control point involved in the resolution of processes.

“Standard computer applications seek to eliminate questions of “ok” or “cancel”, because they are annoying and inhibit the flow of interaction and information. However, mobile computing environments need just that. One must be prompted to interact or dismiss a real-life object with the cell phone.”

“Everything these days has data with relevance to what you’re doing here right now.” It is about connecting that data with your cell phone, and allowing the flow of real life to be augmented and streamlined by the mobile device.

“The mobile device then becomes your tricorder, your universal device for interacting with your environment.”

Smarter Machines

“We’re used to devices being used for certain purposes, but not understanding our purposes” Rick Turcozy added, “We’re used to them being ‘dumb’, and not interactive.” There’s the washing machine, the car, the refrigerator. We apply settings to these devices, but they do not detect whether our cheese has expired (an RFID tag on the cheese could communicate with the fridge and an mobile phone, alerting the user of what has expired), and a washing machine could detect the RFID tags on clothes and automatically choose the appropriate, non-destructive washing process for that object.

Moving Towards a Micronism

We discussed that differences between the heavy machines of the industrial revolution and the light, almost liquid machines today. The iPhone, for instance, has liquid buttons. A machine during the industrial revolution had heavy cogs and gears.

Sociologist Emelie Durkheim wrote that as societies become more advanced they evolve from a mechanical, non-organic state of a more fluid, organic one. Mobile devices must be designed to allow for mutations and flows of multiple data systems.

“Now we’re moving toward a Micronism — an interaction between entities”, James Whitley said.

The whole system is like the cells of an actual circulatory system.

The world of marketing is experiencing a great transition into the digital realm. It’s been digitally created and shared, but now the user can come into a new experience online. The digital self (the mental removed from the digital), already compressed for maximum download speed, can change places in digital more quickly than ever before.

The mind online is reached more easily by ads, and the distance from the monitor to the user is many times closer than that of a television. It is this distance alone that makes a difference. An active user of the Internet can easily run out of energy and be attracted to information sources that need the least input (youtube). Admist the medley of choices, it is easier for the user to have the choice made for him. On Youtube, this is done by others. On Facebook, social history is written automatically, the only input being clicks from the user.

If we go back to the General Theory of Relativity and apply it to social space, we can see that the shape of space makes people move, and the gravity of the social shapes space. Thus, people have social gravity, and when they congregate, more people are drawn in by this social gravitational field. Sometimes people from blurred areas can experience this social gravity field and congregate on an event from different idea economies. For instance, a Linux programmer can be drawn into the same Youtube video clip as a law student and a fry cook. I consider areas of great social masses to approximate black holes. Widely adopted products are black holes of attention, with event horizons of being “keeping up with the Joneses”. The event horizon of the event can be relational in real life or in digital life. A link can be provided by a friend online, (via a blog, instant message, or e-mail). A piece of hardware can be envied and researched outside of digital space, or the digital space can be used to learn about and purchase the device.

A friend of mine who is an engineering student and electronic musician coined the the term “if I just try a little harder” syndrome to explain what is affecting the hyper-modernized individual. They try a diet, and it fails, and then they tell themselves they will try even harder. “If I were just to try a little harder” on a photo, or an essay. Of course, trying hard is a future event, or a past event. It is a self-referential event that, because of its detached reflection, can never manifest in the present moment.

Media is creating forced creativity by putting digital cameras in the hands of individuals. Forced creativity makes people increasingly digitize their lives because media takes up space, and people like to share digitized bits of their lives. By allowing consumers to upload images, a panopticon of creativity is formed.
Talent is not encouraged to develop except in small groups like Photoshop competition forums or networked groups.

The group development aspect of the net intrigues me. It is because I’ve noticed that ‘expert groups’ are forming that I decided to research one for my independent study, which I’ve titled SOAN 490 - Corporate Power and Information

I found SEM PDX, an online society of Internet Marketers and Businesspeople who were concerned with studying and making use of social networking sites, search optimization techniques, and better ways to reach greater numbers of Internet users. In essence, they were a group of information architects and space time compressors. Everything has become a competition, or death. Those who run on breaking ice behind them. And all consumers (and producers) are holding themselves up to increasingly one dimensional standards of beauty and success.

My experiment was to check out how websites advertise themselves — how companies are forcing these sorts of organic connections — how they are widening event horizions to approach guaranteed consumer purchasing habits (and thus limit their marketing costs and liabilities). Mental real estate is easily acquired and redistributed in the digital world. With real estate also untethered, space and time of the mind are what matter.

It’s been a big week in Portland Tech, and it’s still going strong tonight with the Demolicious/Portland Web Innovators event at Cubespace. What is Cubespace? Rental office space for start-ups, consultants, and freelancers. What is Demolicious? 5 project presentations, 10 minutes per project. It basically means that a bunch of innovative people in the room, watching, sharing, and presenting prodigious pre-beta/beta/live web projects. Good stuff. Gone is the era of stale doughnuts and flatlined agendas. This stuff is groundbreaking, interactive and sweetopian.

There’s also beer here, provided by MyStrands, a social/community/aggregator startup based on music sharing (currently in Beta edition, but I can send you an invite).

There’s probably about 50 people here. A lot of faces from last night’s Gary Vanerchuck event at Portland’s ad agency Weiden+Kennedy, and W+K’s Monday Lunch 2.0 Event.

If you’re curious about what’s going on in the Portland Tech scene, and want to join in on some of these events, check out the next events at Yahoo’s Upcoming! website. (The next Lunch 2.0 Event is on July 16th at Souk!)

Presentation Map:

* Kevin Chen, Metroseeq
* Don Park, Do-it-yourself Friendfeed
* Matt King, Interface Content Management Framework
* Mounir Shita, GoLife Mobile
* Lev Tsypin, Green Renter

The first presenter is Kevin Chen of Metroseeq

“Metroseeq is a location-based search engine that aggregates offline deals,” says Chen.

The ability for users to be able to find information from both offline and online sources effectively is the difference between Citysearch and Yelp.

But there’s more - the website also digitizes coupons. Chen tries to demonstrate this with a manila envelope full of paper coupons, but accidentally drops them all over the floor. It’s great, because shows his point even more. Then Chen navigates to the screen, where coupons for each listed business have coupons available for online users. It’s very nice.

Number two: Don Park, with Do-it-yourself Friendfeed

He’s working on solving the problem that everyone faces when they join social networks and have to re-enter all of their social connections. “When you’re joining a new social network,” he says, “you want to bring your friends with you.” Everyone’s data is locked up in different silos. There’s the Twitter silo, and the FriendFeed silo, and the Digg silo.

The key is to drain the silos and bring the dis-separate user data into one place. Use an RSS reader to to it to conveniently track it, and you’ve got your own personal mini-PR system at your fingertips. Brilliant.

Park’s XFN Spider project utilizes the attributes attached to a user’s friends on Twitter, Digg and Wordpress to map out other connections and links associated with those users. The spider can show the blog, Facebook profile, news sources and other pointers that contain the user’s profile/identity attributes, and consolidate them in one resource list.

“Your friendview in Twitter only allows 50 ids to display at one time,” says Park.  “A spider can index all of those ids…far past the 50 it allows in its display.” Attach an RSS reader to this process, and you’ll be able to read every RSS feed that your friends are reading.

The spill-over of extensive blogroll links on Wordpress and other Blogging sites can be put to good use by using attributes to track data.

He then uses Firebug to “inspect” one of his friends in Twitter. The whole sequence of links becomes a fractal. If someone The RSS does the updating. “You don’t have to depend on any other location to do the updating.” The speed at which you gain information is And it can go infinite levels deep. That’s a lot of Web 2.0 fractals. The downside? It’s kind of slow. But what is slowness compared to a social media site that’s often fail whaled?

Try it out at: http://donpark.org/spider/

Presenter numero tres: An Interface Content Management Framework, presented by Matt King

“I’m going to show you a content management system that builds content management systems.” he says. He then states that he’s going to build a fan site about the A-Team, because it rocks, and that he’s going to build the website in the next 10 minutes. He then brings up barebones interface. “Just to show you that I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve…” he points to the projection screen, “there’s no pages here”.

So he starts by adding a page. The audience watches.  Click. Click. This page is done.  “Lets hit save,” he says, “then we’ll add a page about the show, I guess.” He points out that you don’t have to assign a slug or a template. The site will do it for you.

The he does a pages about the A Team’s Van, because “the van warrants a page in and of itself, because it’s so cool.” Users can use templates to pull content in from the CMS.

The structure of the pages is easily modified, with the database automatically updating the url structure. Pages can also be infinitely nested.

King begins to add some dynamic content for the episodes and the characters. He does it this by adding models. “You can add as many as you want,” he states, explaining that “Models are the dynamic content of your site.”

There’s more. You can add as many fields to your content types as you like. You can upload images if you want.  Add a location and the database will automatically give you an address and will geocode it. (this system reminds me of an ultra-fast, ultra light version of Drupal).

Once the page structure has been created and set, one can instantly start adding content to it. Models can all be associated with each other. This part is kinda meta-style.

Season:

Associations: “has many”

Volia.

Like some sort of computer chef, King previews the site. “And then we’ll go to the page here,” he says, and “out pops a really nice page.” Watching King make a website is like watching a chef make something, put it in the oven, pause the camera, and take it out again, completely finished. Except there’s no baking time.

“Okay, I cheated. I did the templates beforehand”. The audience laughs.

“Go to seasons,” he says, ” and Pick a season. We’ll actually get to see what episodes are associated with it.”

Lastly, when you add content it instantly gets an API. King says that they used this for a few flash-based websites. The websites didn’t even need to use html, “just our API”. Nice.

Q+A:

“Is this internal only?”

“We’re trying to make this a base camp-type setup for it, so that you can sign up and get an instance of this development”.

“As long as we can get a website setup for it”, says King’s partner.

Matt King’s website is here, in case you feel like checking it out. He’s done a variety of other tech experiments. Perhaps you can use Don Park’s spider to find them all.

Four: Mounir Shita, from GoLife Mobile

He’s presenting a mobile application platform for mobile applications. He shows a Traffic Camera Widget.

He accesses the platform on a sort of mobile device emulator. Then he swaps out the data source object without changing the code. “You can tie these UI components to different devices,” he says, “like switching one component traffic feed (Oregon) to another (Arizona).”

Simplified overview of the platform:

A widget contains UI components. UI components are attached to sources.

Platform layercake:

XML (standard Internet), SMS Vado (cell phone), HTML (iphone)

(Gateway)

(Virtual Widget Layer)

Action Layer (Show lists) (Show traffic information) (View article) (Write article)

(Personalization layer) (Content enhancement layer)

(Data Access Layer).

Simple use case: Person x wishes to find closest Starbucks. But a mobile device should also figure out where friends are. Mobile device will go and figure out where friends are and recommend a location on the basis of nearness. The device will then tell you where location is, how to get there, inform your friends of your trajectory, and smoothly handle any details, should they arrive.

A mobile device should also show you the menu options, deals, and drink selection of the location as well.  Dynamically. You shouldn’t be telling every single application what you like and what you don’t like. “it’s very very semantic”, he points out, “you’re plugging in very very small semantic codes that plug and play together”. On the whole, these semantic codes help mobile nomads get together on the fly.

It’s as semantic as a roving a meeting maker that negotiates meetups across dynamic time and space, as if the entire geography were a mobile, roaming office.

The website meta tag states that “GoLife Mobile is erasing the barriers between the physical and electronic worlds. We let your mobile device get to know you, so it can…” Well…you know. Here’s the website, if you’re intrigued.

Finally: Green Renter, presented by Lev Tsypin

Green Renter is a database of Green buildings available in the Portland area. Tsypin states that this database is location-agnostic. It has data values for the Portland area because it was birthed here, but should expand to encapsulate every real estate area.

There’s a featured building, and a cetegory for renters and owners. A real estate site that satisfies a eco-niche. A nice feature of the site is that it provides a list of features like:

The Building’s surroundings…

Community resources (i.e. libraries nearby)

Services (i.e. grocery stores nearby)

Public transit nearby

Car share vehicle nearby

Bike lanes/paths nearby

Park/open space/wildlife areas nearby

The same type of list is available for building materials, like non-toxic concrete mix, and bike racks.

All of these categories and feature layers aggregate together to form the context of a ‘Green Score’, a scoring system similar to Google’s Quality Score or Page Rank. Over time, this will hopefully spur the community transparency and ethics which will lead to more green buildings.

Something Green Renter wants to include in the future is a glossary for their green categorization system. Including this glossary allow the side an educational/resource component for those who with to learn about how to find/develop increasingly sustainable and environmentally friendly buildings. It’s like the etiquette of a website that’s been correctly structured according to W3C standards or SEO code.

Visitors can utilize an aggregate map of all buildings in a given area and filter out which buildings have vacancies or not, or which buildings have LEED certifications for green building.

The site also has a blog that links to green events that are happening around town. In this way, Green Renter can bolster the education and awareness of its community of readers, but can also connect those readers to other individuals who are also interested in living in sustainable architectures.

The add building feature allows users to  add commercial or residential property to the site, with property details, contact info, pictures, and renting or leasing information. It’s like a social network for the buildings themselves. Each building with its own avatar and characteristics. Pretty nifty.

The founders also own greenowner.com and are looking into develop that, but feel it is more important to really nail down a niche before going on to develop other things.

When addressing the massive market share that Craigslist holds over the rental/leasing market, Tsypin says that “if you post your green building on Craigslist, you can provide a link back to the site so that your viewers can see all of the green features and details of the building.” In this way, Criagslist and Green Renter can form a symbiotic relationship with one another. A Craisglist listing for a Green Building can function as a starting point into a extended database full of information about the given property, hosted by Green Renter.

And yes, the site supports OpenID.

GreenRenter is alive and well at http://greenrenter.com.

In Essence…

There is, of course, much more to say. I’ll leave you to analyize the nitty gritty stuff and add details. I left out a lot of important things, but it is late and there are only 110 hours in my workweek to get things done.

As always, I am blown away by the things that are happening in the Portland Web Community. Something amazing is happening in Portland. I’ve never seen anything like it. Everyone I meet is always working on something so interesting, and has an positive and innovative mindset on their shoulders. I’m eager to see what’s next.

Special thanks to Portland Web Innovators, Cubespace, and all those who presented. Impressive awesomeness. Bram Pitoyo inspired me to do this write up, but this pales in comparison to his precise assemblages of brilliant journalistic data.

Thanks for reading, and please excuse any inaccuracies incurred based on my Strands-sponsored state.

If you’re on Twitter, I’m @caseorganic. I’d love to follow and meet more of you.