And I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

Collecting my notes from Monday - I made it a more techie day than Sunday, when I attended more panels about personal blogging, and about personal interactions on blogs and elsewhere on the web.

On my schedule for Monday:
Craig Newmark Keynote Interview, with "Mr. Wikipedia" Jimmy Wales conducting the interview. Excellent conversation ... Craig Newmark is very funny. He has this clever dry geeky sense of humor that I enjoy mightily. He said a lot of interesting things about setting up and maintaining Craigslist, and he kept repeating that one of the most important things was getting out of the way. Makes a lot of sense to me ... you want to enable the users to do what they want to do, without hindering.

Both Craig and Jimmy pointed out the trust they place in their users, and mentioned that the "crooks are early adopters", and the longer the sites have been online and the more users have joined, the percentage of bad faith users and trolls has decreased. That was encouraging to hear, that most people are basically good and want to do the right thing and help each other. You could think that working on a big user-based site like craigslist or wikipedia, it would be easy to lose faith in humanity. Apparently, this is not the case.

After the keynote, I strolled over to Peter Morville's presentation on Ambient Findability, where I sat with Buzz and Alicia.

Morville spoke about the challenges of information architecture, goal-based design, and how we put more and more and ever more information online, and while it is theoretically possibly to find out almost anything about almost anybody, it is getting harder and harder to find what you're looking for, to hone in on the signal amidst all the noise.

A few notes and quotes and URLs from his talk:
- He asks his clients these questions:
• Can people find your website?
• Can they find their way around your website?
• Can they find what they are looking for, despite your website?

- "Every architect, whether they build houses or web sites, must have one foot in the past and one in the future".

- Quote Herbert Simon: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

- More and more info coming from different kinds of devices and in different ways, such as Ambient Devices. Podzinger uses speech to text technology to transcribe podcasts and lets you search, so you could, for example, check in which podcasts your name or the bird flu or Elvis Costello or Donald Rumsfeld is mentioned. You click on the word in the transcript, and it plays the podcast for you from that very word. How cool is that?

- Location awareness is a challenge.

- Books:
David Brin, The Transparent Society
Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn

After Morville's talk, I checked into the "What people are really doing on the web" panel, but I left again because it was too many slides with numbers and percentages, and the pollsters didn't explain what the numbers MEANT. Which would have been the part I was interested in.

So I left and set up shop right outside the room, which was good, because Rox Populi stopped by to say hello. What a treat to meet her!

And then I ran off to a couple of parties with the aforementioned Rox Populi and Grace who loves me (it's mutual) and badgerbag who joined us later. Bumped into Alicia and Buzz again, and got to shake hands with Halley Suitt and Evan Williams, the man who started blogger.com. Me blogging is all his fault; he made this entirely too easy.

Comments

[Roxanne]

It was terrific meeting you, too!

[whump]

I remember meeting Craig at ConJosé in 2002. I think it was his first SF convention, and he was genuinely flattered that people had been thanking him for Craigslist. It's the first place I look if a show I want to see has sold out.

Thanks to him, I managed to get tickets to Rufus Wainwright and Elvis Costello.