August 19th, 2008
An Event Apart 2008: Day 2
The second day of An Event Apart will feature plenty of web standards jargon. I will be posting photos and notes from today’s events.
Unfortunately, the slides are reserved for attendees only, but I will try to gather as much information as possible.
8:23 a.m. Jeremy Keith, Derek Featherstone, and Jeffrey Zeldman discussing today’s presentations:
8:29 a.m. Keith is taking a souvenier photograph of the AEA crowd:
Patterns in the Process
Jeremy Keith, Clear Left
There are different phases of design patterns: discovery, content, information architecture, visual design, templates.
We have a client worksheet that people can download if they want to see how much it costs
Copy writing is interface design. Setting a tone of voice and sticking to it can really impact the user’s experience.
It’s okay to be silly sometimes too. Humor makes people feel comfortable.
Post-it notes are a great tool. You can easily move them around or modify them. Using paper and pen is the most natural form of design. Clear Left makes wireframes in HTML and CSS because you can sit down with a client and interact with it.
Visual designers take these wireframes and draw on top of it. It’s more fun when you use LEGOs actually:
We see many patterns in forms, tables, and microformats. What is the best way to mark up a form? Everybody has a different way of doing it. Your way is right.
Web development is a mess; we are all making it up as we go along. But processes are good. But as you go through different projects, you will always be tweaking things. We’re all flying byt the seat of our pants in this industry.
Cool links from the presentation:
- Edenbee
- Elf Cartel
- Dean Edwards’ IE7. This is like a browser tax for IE6 users because they have to download one extra file.
9:25 a.m. The room fills up as the morning progresses:
9:34 a.m. CSS king Eric Meyer prepares for his presentation on debugging:
Debug / Reboot
Eric Meyer
Great tools for debugging:
In the process of building debug stylesheets, I’ve uncovered some dusty old parts of CSS.
There is an :empty pseudo element that lets you see which elements are empty.
You can use img[alt==""] { border: 3px dotted red; } to see which images in your pages don’t have alt atributes.
Use a[href=""], a[href="#"] { border: 3px dotted lime } to identify bad links.
Eric Meyer finds all the little invalidities of HTML and calls them out with bright colors in his debugging styles.
His reset.css script continues to be the industry standard when resetting browsers.
Stay away from the universal selector (*). It applies to every element, including form elements. So even the default “submit” text in a form element would have no padding, thus making it really close to the borders.
10:59 a.m. The xylophone dings and it’s time to get back to your seat:
11:15 a.m. Derek Featherstone is speaking about accessibility. I am taking some notes, but I also have to publish a new video on ZDNet. CIO Session with Dan Farber and CIO Brian Shield fromWeather Channel if you want.
Accessibility Beyond Compliance
Derek Featherstone
Accessibility is definitely part of the user experience today.
Raised lettering is now complementing braille. The cool thing about this is the angle of the sign. The disabled person can read the raised lettering with their fingers, and optionally read the braille with their thumb.
This is a useful alternative.
In web browsers, there are plenty of accessibility features built into languages now.
A small barrier can become a big one for a person with a disability. When using a tabbed keyboard interface, make sure that after an action is taken, you don’t bring the user back to the top of the page.
To make it accessible, the keyboard or voice-recognition software needs to be functional.
Google Maps has a custom set of tools for panning around the map and zooming in. They have a voice-activated mouse grid that lets the user zoom in on certain parts of the screen in a very detailed way. Since GMaps’ tools aren’t accessible with a keyboard, you can use this.
Flickr has an alternative interface for their “click-to-edit” titles and description fields. In their search bar, they use <label> correctly so a deaf person could easily tab around.
12:01 p.m. ZDNet’s technical production team is attending An Event Apart:
12:11 p.m. Eric Meyer talking with an attendee:
12:15 p.m. Google has a wall of cubes to give out:
12:17 p.m. They are giving away prizes: an iPod Touch and some copies of Adobe Creative Suite CS3:
Better User Experience Through Microformats
Tantek Çelik
What is a better user experience? Less pain, faster surfing, more empowering (”Wow, I just performed magic.”), and overall happiness.
If you could install one piece of software today, it should be Operator for Firefox. When using Google Maps, it runs through all the hCards on the page and allows you to add them to your address book easily.
There is a magic search engine now that scans the social web for your hCards called Dosi.
The hListing microformat would be huge if Craigslist implemented it.
GetSatisfaction uses microformats to pull in your social data from your services right in the signup screen.
The ideal signup screen of the future would only have one line and one submit button.
Social networks are using your handle on one site to find friends on the other site. A social network dance is when you meet someone and add them on one site, and then try to add them on every site.
1:14 p.m. Lunch time! The dessert was great:
1:42 p.m. Jeffrey Zeldman is spotted wearing pink shoes:
2.0 Workflow: Merging Agile and UCD
Kelly Goto
The big ball of mud is a “haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, spaghetti code jungle” was coined by Joseph Yoger in 1997.
- Quickly release your 1.0 junky code
- Deliver a 2.0 versino of the system, and you rjunky code slows you down a little bit
- As you attempt your future releases, your code gets so bad that you have to do a total rewrite.
The cure is a flexible, adaptive, feedback-driven development process.
There is a rich application environment now that bridges the gap between design and developer.
In the 2.0 world, this layer of the corporate structure is upside down too, so the lowly developers are teaching the CEO about new technologies.
Agile programming isn’t just about getting software up there quickly; it’s about planning and production.
We want to be more ‘user-centric’ but lack time, budget, and expertise. We have inconsistencies in processes. We don’t have the right team or resources.
When you goto a restaurant, you do a bunch of things; sit down, order, eat, pay, etc. The overall difference than eating at home is the novelty of eating out. Try to sit in the user’s seat at the dinner table.
An integrated design process goes from concept to build to testing to release. During this process, think about the user’s needs all the time.
Many AEA attendees use the SCRUM software development process. Others just do cowboy coding (someone who does their own thing).
Focus less on documentation and more on communication.
Think about the user experience quotient. Practical vs. emotional. What are people thinking about doing? How satisfied is the user?
Designing The Future Web
Jeffrey Veen, from Hotwired to Adaptive Path to Google
There is data everywhere.
How do you make it engaging? Don’t make me think, just tell me the story; give me access. I need to know what’s actionable.
Start with the raw data:
Dress it up with some color:
Add some better visualization:
Then use your imagination:
Think about the penny. There is $2,000,353,186.72 worth of pennies in the world. How would you visualize that?
“Our country uses 2 million bottles every five minutes. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning.” -Chris Jordan
Instead of designing the experience, give the user tools so they can define their own experience
Assign different visual cues to each dimension of the data. Remove everything that isn’t telling the story.
The data itself becomes the navigation to change the data.
Cool sites from this presentation:
August 18th, 2008
An Event Apart 2008: Day 1
The antique Palace Hotel in San Francisco houses An Event Apart, a collaboration of interactive presentations about web standards, user experience design, and best practices. The two-day conference features well-known speakers from around the world, including AEA’s hosts Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer.
In this post, I will be showing you pictures from the event, and summarizing each presentation. If you are in to HTML, CSS, and overall web usability: pay attention.
8:01 a.m. Zeldman mixin’ it up with the attendees. Breakfast is being served until 8:30.
Understanding Web Design
What do designers need? Empathy. It’s rough out there for a web designer.
If you are in this field, the technology is always changing, and you always need to keep yourself educated. There are some really good resources out there for you.
Just because you know how to use Photoshop and Illustrator doesn’t mean you are a designer. Good information is hard to find.
Never stop learning.
“At a university, you might be a webmaster. In Silicon Valley, you might be a user experience director. You might be doing the same job in both places though.” -Jeffrey Zeldman
If you website’s structure in any way resembles your organization’s structure, you fail.
Who speaks for web design? Who talks about web design easily enough that the public understands? The groups who do speak for web design may have some biases.
Great web design is a template that can be shaped into anything and look natural. We need to get away from the idea that design is something heroic. It’s not something you should be really impressed by. It should be a design that you can live with for 20 years, and something that represents your brand. Designers do have an urge to make someone’s jaw drop though.
Ajax is cool, but maybe your grandmother just wants to pay her parking ticket and be done with it.
Good web design is about the character of the content, not the character of the designer. The old Facebook was a very comfortable place to do those silly Facebook things. Now everything has changed about the layout; new and unfamiliar navigation, too much whitespace, “boxes” are now apps.
12 tips for good design:
- Start with the user. It’s about your taste.
- Know yourself, know your own weaknesses.
- Find the right clients. Find an environment where you can thrive.
- Sell ideas, not pixels. Don’t show them all the colors and mockups that you have.
- “I don’t know” is okay.
- Build trust. Meet with your clients even if you have nothing to say.
- Bring out the big guns.
- Create a paper trail. Remind people what they already agreed to.
- Never underprice your work.
- Say no to SPEC.
- Say no to rush jobs.
- End with the user. When in doubt, go back to the user.
9:23 a.m. Setting up for the next presentation. This year, AEA is in the big conference room.
9:34 a.m. Every person in the room has a laptop.
9:35 a.m. Metaphotography with Meyer and Zeldman:
The Lessons of CSS Frameworks
There is nothing wrong with templates, but you don’t create your company’s home page based on a cookie cutter template. It’s okay to take ideas from them though. Create a foundation for your projects.
What can we learn about the frameworks already in place? Need to focus on support for reset styles, colors, fonts, forms, layout, print, and hacks. The only framework out there that has solid support for all of these is Blueprint.
When choosing a body size, about half of the frameworks use percentages on body sizes and the other half use pixels. Oddly, most use 13px as a default body size. Heading sizes vary greatly among frameworks too. HTML 4’s default heading sizes are the following from <h1> to <h6> respectivelly: 2em, 1.5em, 1.17em, 1.12em, 0.83em, 0.75em.
Class and ID naming conventions are spread out across the board. Some people use “content”, others use “container”. The most consistent element names are #header, #main, #footer.
There are really two ways to include styles: Pointing to a single stylesheet that imports other stylesheets, or use <link> tags to just include them all in your <head>. Internet Explorer will cache the first file you point to, but not any of the files that stylesheet links to. That means they have to be reloaded every time.
Frameworks do a good job with clear-fixing, pseudo-padding, and IE hacks. Some frameworks automatically add external linking icons for you (If a link begins with mailto:, the framework adds an email icon).
A framework called 960 comes with sketch files; PDF printouts that you can use to prototype your designs.
11:03 a.m. Google handing out cubes:
Storytelling By Design
Jason Santa Maria, Happy Cog
When you think about design, think about the message behind it. When we talk about just how we build something, we miss the message sometimes.
From an early age, we look at picture books and make stories in our head. This is called graphic resonance. Translated to web speak — the designer is the narrator.
More and more “web 2.0″ icons and layouts look the same. Why are we plagued by this sameness? We’re all capable of telling a story, but we are having trouble communicating that with our designs.
Get a handle on your viewport. When we look at a book, we can easily identify the length and height of it. But what about a web page? It can go on forever. We have a license to talk as much as we want. Books have a defined cover, an about page, and a table of contents. On a web page, we have to squeeze that into one place.
“Golden” ratios rely on predictable dimensions. So much graphic design has been based upon these ideals. Most of the web runs on a fixed dimension: width. If we can’t depend on these things, what are we left with?
Tell a story with your design.
Awesome links from this presentation:
- Fray Magazine
- noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com
- A Brief Message
- Principles of Beautiful Web Design
- ESPN E-Ticket
Web Application Heiracrhy
Luke Wroblewski, Yahoo!
How are people using the web? Are we actually reading every word on every webpage, or are we quickly scanning around the page in a zigzaggy way?
Things to consider when designing:
- Presentation: How does you application appear to the audience?
- Interaction: How does your app behave in response to user actions?
- Organization: How is your app structured?
The presentation layer can estabilish relationships between content and provide situational awareness.
Visual organization and personality make a great presentation. It’s important to communicate the brand essence of the product.
If you understand proximity, continuance, and closure you can understand perception. You have about 1.6 seconds to grab a user’s attention.
Contrast is important. Use visual relationships to add more or less visual weight to objects. Text is parsed quickly, so it has a very low visual weight.
Symbols have a little bit more, and detailed photos and graphics have the highest visual weight.
How do people access content these days? Think of it as a web ecosystem rather than a site heirarchy. There are a bunch of sites like Digg, Twitter, and Delicious that aggregate content through a popularity filter. More and more, people are seeing your content in a way that you didn’t intend them to. Make sure you balance content, non-content, and navigation.
When something is blocking your progress, it should have the most visual weight on the page. We have to design for speed too. Don’t make people’s eyes travel all over the place. Keep their eyes going in a straight line.
Cool links from this presentation:
1:03 p.m. No one is asking questions because it’s almost lunch time. If you know my style of blogging, you know I will have some pictures of the food. BRB!
1:10 p.m. Short line at lunch. They had similar food last year:
2:02 p.m. The Palace Hotel in San Francisco is a beautiful venue for a conference on design:
Shepherding Passionate Communities
Flickr is a small photo sharing site that launched in 2004. It’s grown up a little bit since then:
- 3 billion page views a month
- 2.7 billion photos
- 52 million monthly visitors
- 28 million members
- 5,000 new uploads a minute
It’s easier to see world news through Flickr more than ever. People all over the world are uploading, and with geo-tagging, we can keep up with it in real time.
What is a community manager?
“Being a community manager is like being in a pinata. People beat you with sticks and you still have to give them candy.”
A community manager is a bridge between the community and the team. Being active in a forum, post on the community blog, and plan events. Basically talk in a soft, pleasing tone of voice.
At Flickr, we try to blog as much as possible. We have a strong forum and a solid community guidelines. The best thing you can do is build tools and put them in the hands of your members.
When things go wrong, don’t try to whitewash what happened. Be honest with your community.
Don’t create super-villians. Sometimes you have to make tough decisions, but you will always have people who won’t stop harrassing you. If you keep respecting your community, then everything should even out.
3:19 p.m. This is the sixth year of An Event Apart. They made cake for us 
3:23 p.m This collaboration wouldn’t be possible without the amazing dedication of the event producers:
3:25 p.m. Attendees from Apple, Automattic, and CBS Interactive are in attendance:
3:30 p.m. Details about the afterparty are announced:
3:32 p.m. Coach Zeldman is prepping Happy Cog’s Liz Danzico before her presentation:
3:52 p.m. Liz Danzico from Happy Cog is speaking. Taking notes now.
The Age of Frameworks
Liz Danzico, Happy Cog
Uninscribed and detectable cues that loosely govern a set of actions or interactions. These types of frameworks that shape our behavior are much more important today because we have to improvise new web systems all the time.
The web from classical to jazz. As designers, using things like Twitter, we don’t understand the rules of social ettiquitte. Interfaces are no longer dictating user’s behavior. There are new rules.
In the book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, content on the web looks like publishing, but it’s just the same oral patterns that have been passed down through the years.
If you say “yes, and…” instead of saying “no, but…”, you never shut down an idea.
Leave your own needs behind and be exquisite in your simplicity. Involve the audience.
Sometimes the designers have one idea, but the users overrule it.
Actively involving users in your design is important.
Bulletproof Design A-Z
Dan Cederhold, Simplebits
A product labeled “Made in Vermont” is worth 10% more than products made elsewhere.
When something is well-crafted, it reflects that a human is behind it. Craftsmanship is implementation.
The A-Z of bulletproof web design:
Anchor links with meta information. Make sure the whole row is clickable, not just the text. If you have a meta number, put it after the most important information.
Border-radius (progressive enrichment), a.k.a. rounded corners. In CSS3, we will have the ability to set the border radius of an element. There are vendor specific rules that already work today (-webkit-border-radius, -moz-border-radius). Note: vendor-specific properties should be placed in a separate style sheet (enriched.css). This is great for prototyping before carving out images.
Color transparency with RGBA (progressie enrichment). You can use opacity: 0.7, but it will also set that value for all the children. To fix it, use background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.7).
Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser? No! D is for decision makers who get that.
Easy clearing of floats. This is not a fun topic, but it’s very important.
Frameworks. You might already be using one, especially if you have your own little CSS template setup.
Gridlasticness (from Latin gridius lasticus nessinus = grid layout using ems). Em/pixel values make more send when using the 62.5% method. Adjusting text size may throw off the grid. Think modularly from the outside in.
Horizontal grid? Sure. Vertical grid? Sorta.
“Do you ever get a comp where EVERYTHING is lined up perfectly? It reminds me of those people who put the pillows perfectly on their bed.” -Dan Cederholm
Use classes for main columns.
IE8 Beta still refuses to resize text in pixels. A pixel is a pixel and it shouldn’t be resized. This means we still have to use relative units to resize text.
jQuery. I hate Javascript, but I love what it does.
Kitty. Don’t ask.
.last class. Use this for elements that are the last element in a section. Using jQuery, you can even do this programatically.
Must skip a few letters…
Shiftin backgrounds, or parallax scrolling for the lazy. An awesome usability project called SilverBack allows you to resize a screen and have it look perfect during the process.
A testimonial for reset.css. When redesigning MTV.com, I found over 150 references to margin:0; padding: 0;
UR stats. If your main userbase is IE, you might be in trouble.
5:57 p.m. Packing up for the day. Will be back tomorrow.
August 16th, 2008
Wordcamp 2008
In the quiet flats of University of California San Francisco Mission Bay campus, bloggers, thinkers, journalists, developers, and inventors melt together for a full day of lectures and learning. The goal of Wordcamp 2008 is to figure out the future of publishing on the web.
Last year’s event was two days long, but this year it’s crunched into a 9-hour multi-session jam.
8:00 a.m. Checked into UCSF. Automattic’s Marianne Masculino set me up with badge, a free tee shirt, and pass for tonight’s after party.
8:15 a.m. Wordpress schwag everywhere!
8:32 a.m. The badges use Gravatars, globally recognized avatars. This is the newest product from the makers of Wordpress. Once you set it up, every time you comment on a blog, your avatar will show up.
Wordcamp is broken down into two separate sections today: the user track and the developer track. Since most of us are quickly becoming “users” of this type of software, I will mainly cover that part of the conference.
Schedule for the user track
- 9:00 a.m. The Future of Education and Wordpress -
- 9:30 a.m. SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make - Stephan Spencer
- 10:00 a.m. Open Source Business Models - Stephen O’Grady
- 10:50 a.m. Andy Skelton - A musical performance
- 11:00 a.m. LOLcats and the Secret of Virality
- 11:30 a.m. Wordpress & Microformats
- 12:00 p.m. Lunch
- 1:00 p.m. Switching to Wordpress Painlessly - Lloyd Budd
- 1:20 p.m. 450 Wordpress Power User Tips - Lorelle VanFossen
- 1:40 p.m. Hassle-free Upgrades - Sam Bauers
- 2:00 p.m. State of the Word - Matt Mullenweg
- 3:00 p.m. Get Friendly with BuddyPress - Andy Peatling
- 3:20 p.m. Democratizing the Web through Global Voices - Jeremy Clarke
- 3:40 p.m. An interview with Om Malik
- 4:00 p.m. Riding the Crazyhorse - Liz Danzico and Jane Wells
- 5:00 p.m. A musical performance by Chuck Lewis aka SEO Rapper
- 5:10 p.m. Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users - Kathy Sierra
8:56 a.m. Matt Mullenweg welcomes the crowd and gives logistical announcements. He announces the after party; they will show a movie at the bar.
“The idea behind Wordcamp is to set the tone for the following year. It’s sort of a nice milestone. We want to expose you to the ideas that Wordpress has been thinking about over the last year. In turn, it’s the audience’s chance to connect on a personal level with Wordpress. It’s 100% user-driven, so here’s your chance.” -Matt Mullenweg
9:00 a.m. Let the games begin.
The Future of Education and Wordpress
Allen Levine, New Media Consotrtium
The powerful thing about blogging is that it’s personal. It’s the most important subject: me. My first blog was Movable Type, and my recovery time was about ten minutes. One of the best templates I’ve used is Vertigo Blue by Brian Gardner.
Edublogs - UMW is doing something amazing with Wordpress multi-user installations. They’ve had about 15,000 users sign up so far.
University of British Columbia is getting ready to launch a hosted blog service for their student community.
University of Calgary is doing something similar. The Discovery Channel has an “educator network”.
Al Upton teaches third grade kids in Australia. They have a class blog where the kids are paired with external mentors around the world, where they could get comments and criticism about their writing. The state department shut him down for about a year. He got about 300 comments on his blog from educators around the world about how wrongly he was treated. But he is back up today.
An elementary school in Illinois is showing off student art projects on a simple Wordpress install.
ChickSpeak is a website designed for women at college to help them deal with issues they may run into.
A blog is a great tool for publishing. It has a calendar, it archives your posts, and is searchable.
ScholarPress develops specific plugins catered to educators. Courseware, WPBook, and there are more in development.
9:29 a.m. Sitting next to SocialTNT’s Chris Lynn:
SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make
Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts
My 16-year old daughter makes about $1,000 a month on a blog about NeoPets.
August 15th, 2008
Office Tour: Twitter
Twitter recently relocated their headquarters from South Park to larger space on Bryant Street in San Francisco.
(Photo by monstro)
One of my former co-workers who now works at Twitter gave me a tour of their new spot. I was really impressed with the laid back feel and comfortable atmosphere.
August 14th, 2008
MySpace Data Availability at Lunch 2.0
This afternoon, Fox Interactive Media invited the tech community to its new San Francisco headquarters for free food, and an opportunity to network.
Max Engel, product manager for the Data Availability project, spoke with me briefly about the new service.
Facebook did this a while ago, but MySpace has an advantage because they can use Google’s OpenSocial. The demo being shown was for Eventful.com, and users could import friends, photos, videos, and other data. I’m interested to see how this pans out. One thing for sure is that developers will be able to leverage the MySpace social graph and integrate the world’s largest social network into their site.
August 13th, 2008
You pick the panels at SxSW
Two years ago, I first heard about South by Southwest. 2006’s event was dominated by Twitter, which, at the time was a new social messaging system that connected people and ideas. In Austin, Tx. that year, everybody was Twittering. Everyone had a voice, and it was easy to pick and choose which voices you wanted to follow.
That openness has spread directly to the panel selection for 2009 at SxSW. Now you and I can help decide on the content of arguably one of the biggest community-driven events in history. Enter the SxSW Interactive Panel Picker:
Even if you don’t have to vote for every panel, you can search for topics and explore which talks are related to those topics. You can search for a speaker’s name or a company’s name and get multiple results.
When you click through the panels, you can read a description of the panel, see who’s speaking, and read any comments that other voters have left.
Even if you can’t make it to SxSW in Austin this year, it’s still fun to see what’s going on.
August 8th, 2008
Apple Store finds new ways to make iPhone customers wait
Waiting in line for a 3G iPhone is old news these days. The Apple Store in San Francisco is handing out vouchers to eager customers guaranteeing them a phone if they can make it to the store by 6:00 p.m.
Sure beats waiting in line for hours on the city streets.
August 7th, 2008
Rejaw launches, but seems a little Twittery
If Twitter is a busted old ‘66 El Camino, then Rejaw is a Toyota Prius. The new kid on the block claims to be better, but it’s more fun to ride around with your friends in a classic car with the windows down and the breaks squeaking.
Here are the main features of Rejaw that Twitter doesn’t have:
- Updated in real time — no refreshing needed
- No 140 character limit
- Anyone can comment on your posts
- You can post rich media like audio and video
- Comes with home-grown desktop app
This reminds me of a more mature Pownce, but with a worse design. The background color of the site is brown.
The only real advantage Rejaw has over Twitter is user interface. People that are accustomed to using Twitter will have no problem using Rejaw. And it’s slightly more advanced. The follow someone, you click ’start following’. To send a private message, you click ’send whisper’.
Rejaw would be pretty cool if the Twitter audience moved over, but I just don’t see the two competeing. Twitter’s following is just too strong right now. Plus, Rejaw’s 404 page isn’t nearly as entertaining as Twitter’s.
August 7th, 2008
The Digg toolbar for Firefox 3
Yesterday afternoon, Digg launched a new plugin for Firefox 3. I immediately installed it.
Right away, you notice a new toolbar in your browser and a button next to the address bar to toggle it on or off.
How does it work? It passes hashed URLs to Digg to check if it’s already been submitted, and then returns the number of diggs and comments.
The best feature is notifications. As a story on Digg becomes popular or one of your friends diggs a story, a little popup window interupts your browsing session in the bottom right corner of the screen with a link and a chance to digg it.
It only stays up for about 5 seconds; just enough time to read it and quickly digg it if it’s interesting to you. You can also choose which Digg categories you want to recieve notifications from.
After about 12 hours of use, I haven’t uninstalled it. Normally, a Firefox addon lasts about 4 minutes on my computer. At the top right of the toolbar, there is a button labeled “Zzz…” that lets you turn off notifications.
The Digg toolbar not only adds value to Digg, but also to web as a whole. As you are browsing, you can see how popular a story is with a convenient link to comments submitted by Digg users. Don’t go removing the Digg button from your website though, because this toolbar is very new.
Have you tried the new toolbar? If so, how do you like it?
I wish Delicious had one of these.
August 6th, 2008
Zittrain explains the future of the Internet
Oxford professor and Harvard pioneer Johnathan Zittrain came to the CBS Interactive offices in San Francisco on Tuesday to speak and sign copies of his new book “The Future of the Internet… and How to Stop It“. His presentation was called Civic Technologies.
We can actually carve our technologies into one or two categories: civic or non-civic.
A civic technology is one that invites people to contribute to it, and the success of it depends on how many people choose to be a part of it.
When the Internet was conceived back in the 80s, they didn’t need to have a business model. They didn’t have to worry about moving data around.
But today, moving data around is like trying to move someone around in a mosh pit.
Back in the 90s, companies tried to use the Internet as a business model; Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy, among others.
“You cannot build a corporate network out of TCP/IP” -IBM, 1992
With these civic technologies, you often run into a common problem. People say, “There goes the neighborhood…”
When AOL first built that land bridge from their isolated network to the Internet, people were like, “Oh, there’s the AOLers”. They don’t share the ethos of the original network.
Email is a shared hallucination app with nobody at the top running it.
Civic Defense
There is no single map of the Internet. Instead, every router on the Internet sees through the fog and looks for it’s nearest peer. The routers all trust each other. We trust every router on the net to tell us where it is.
In February, Pakistan tried to block YouTube. One small Pakistani ISP advertised exactly where it was, and then other routers around it said they were two clicks away. In less than 120 seconds, most of YouTube was blocked around the world.
What if 20 ISPs around the world, as a practical joke, decide to publish false routes for 20,000 sites? That would probably bring down the net, and NANOG would go nuts.
Wikipedia is definitely a civic technology. The idea of having articles that anyone can edit is actually a crazy idea. It’s not perfect though; it still has the same, “Oh, there goes the neighborhood” feel. What is their civic defense model?
They have an administrator’s notice board, which is an editable page itself. It’s just a big pile of problems. There are people obsessive-compulsively reloading the noticeboard and they are solving the problems faster than they are coming up.
If all these people attended a Battlestar Galactica at the same time, Jimbo’s site would be in trouble. Wikipedia is always about 45 minutes away from utter destruction.
Another example is the Apple II computer. Years ago, it was just a plastic box with some microprocessors.
Now, we are presented with task managers and lists of processes that we don’t understand. What do alg.exe and lsass.exe do?
Is there a civil defense model for computing? Short answer: no.
The Internet is a polyarchtical, bottom-up civic technology. When the neighborhood goes, you either have to come up with your own self-defense, or get help from the commons; or join the commons.
We will see the end of the personal computer. “Here are the five approved applications you can use with this machine, and here are the five sites you are allowed to visit”.
We will see a new generation of devices. Linux inside the TiVo is dying to jump out, but it can only be controlled with a dinky remote. The Amazon Kindle, the iPhone…
Steve Jobs said it himself in January of 2007, “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC.” But he still has control of it. His SDK is not “open”. You cannot put chocolate and peanut butter together without piping it through Reece’s.
Let’s look at Facebook apps. They reserve the right to see if your apps make it onto the site. The new “Great Apps” program gives preferred app developers higher priority on their platform. They can throttle your app if they think it’s being too active. They can pull some oxygen from it. Is this fair?
New non-civic technologies
Soon your stove-top kettle will have an IP address, and that might not be a good thing. Think about a toaster in a SaaS world.
You come down for breakfast and you see the message, “You have just gotten the latest update: you have a third slot”.
Next morning, they rollback the update because the toaster heats up too fast.
You start to ask yourself, what did I buy? You bought a “breakfast-oriented relationship”. Instead of owning it, you are a subscriber.
Back in the 19th Century, there was something called “the posse”. They would deputize the public to help enforce the law. The police in the north would announce, “all able-bodied men must report slaves back to the south”. This was the last thing able-bodied men wanted to do. I was dead-letter on the books; it wasn’t the civic ‘umph’.
How do we create and reinforce new civic technologies?
Digg is a hybrid civic technology. What’s popular is a function of how many people think it’s popular.
This gives hope to a site like Subvert and Profit, a service that accepts payment for diggs.
The Wikipedians wouldn’t go for this deal.
Another example: couchsurfing.com - a social network for people looking for a place to sleep.
There was a time when hitchhiking was a civic technology. Now it’s a dangerous thing to do. Then a guy named Craig starts a list in San Francisco, and hitchhiking is back again.
Can we embrace the civic moment of this time, or is it just cash and carry?
The bad guys have already decided that they wanna be bad guys. It’s their job, that’s their advantage. Our advantage is numbers and good will.
Zittrain’s projects
StopBadware.org is a community of software experts that will tell you if it’s safe to run certain programs on your computer.
Herdirt Network Health - A distributed model for online threats.
Pick up a copy of his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.
Andrew Mager is an associate technical producer at CBS Interactive Business. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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