March 2006 Archives

Robin Hunicke has posted GDMag's interview with the creators of Guitar Hero -- which for me was a good follow up to Tom Armitage's talk (notes below).

They address some of the questions about emotional connection with the act (even simulated) of performance I've had ever since giving Guitar Hero a shot myself:

We've gotten tons of feedback from musicians and non-musicians alike about how much the game feels like actually playing rock guitar. In its most successful moments, Guitar Hero crosses the line between gameplay and actual performance.

And yes, I do think it's valuable that to keep a distinction between the two.

Right now, I'm participating in the Breaking the Game symposium, in the Overclocking the City track. Here's a (slightly revised) version of my proposal:

"Overclocking is the practice of making a component run at a higher clock speed than the manufacturer's specification. The idea is to increase performance for free or to exceed current performance limits, but this may come at the cost of stability." {Wikibooks}

As a sociotechnical practice, overclocking emerges from a desire for success by the terms of technology marketing: the newest, the cheapest, the fastest. On the one hand, overclocking emerges from an obsession with speed and a desire to stress a system to its limits. Overclocking is an ambivalent act, bringing instability along with speed. On the other hand, overclockers deny the authority of the manufacturer to control the use of the hardware. Overclocking can be seen as creative misuse, voiding the warranty in an excess of imagination (which can include submerging computers in liquid nitrogen or heating oil). What would an overclocked public look like? A sped-up, fast-forward version of the present, with social connections made and dropped at ever higher rates? Ever more noise and ever less silence? Play not as pleasure but as highstakes test?

In game culture, overclockers are not necessarily the best players. Instead, they delve into the infrastructure that makes play possible. Overclockers are the plumbers of the infrastructure, tinkering with the cooling and heating mechanisms of a little city called the CPU. And as the Electronic Frontiers Foundation reminds us, "architecture is policy." And policy regulates action.

Looking at games and public spaces, overclocking appears as both a warning and an inspiration. Online games cannot be "public" in the old civic sense of public - they run on servers owned by individual or companies, using software licensed or bought. There is always a gateway to their entry. In Second Life, an online virtual world, inhabitants forced change on Second Life's owners by "publicly" protesting - setting their avatars on fire in locations frequented by newbies. They were able to do so because Second Life built that freedom to act into the architecture of their code. When we discuss the policies and actions in spaces that extend from the digital to the physical and back again, overclocking reminds us to look more closely at the infrastructures underlying play spaces, and question more closely the freedoms granted within their architectures.

There was a lot of talk at Etech about buzzwords - what they were, who was saying them, what they said about the state of the world. All very meta. Here, forthwith, are the words and phrases I liked best:

Verbs
Linking and tracking and ranking and sorting.
playing in parallel
spying on yourself
Showing fuzziness
wrangled and mustered

Nouns
sense and sensibility
conversational conversation-piece
Live clipboard
alien abductions
The “ing” behind the Thing
demand aggregation

Descriptions
a vast slow, terrific thing that is trying to emerge
Not everyware but patchy and limited
She is a real person – she can be tagged, ranked, sorted.
the stale primordial soup of passive thingness that rots in our biosphere. We are burying all that is dead within us.
The network leaks into the world
Debris becomes legible

Epigraphs
acronyms are the small change of the tech world.
The words misled us. I think we could have done better words.
You need to feed the critics.
“We were everywhere, except where we actually were.”
it’s so much funnier on DSL
Members defend readers from writers
Not having features is also a strategy
Controllers are weighed down by the expectations of genre

Note: Regine's notes are much better, with pictures!

Tom Armitage
Videogame controllers
History of interface (NES, SNES, Playstation2)
Modern handhelds – simpler controls
<- less processing power – but simpler control with touchscreen
<- afford more and have lower cost of development
Opposite of Xbox
- if you’re not a gamer, it’s scary
- it’s obvious how you hold it, but there are so many choices. And you can’t look at your hands while you’re playing
“Complexity lost the casual gamer” – Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari
“People are interface-phobic”
- not afraid of interfaces, but afraid of interfaces that are opaque
desired goal: “I forgot the joypad was in my hands”
interaction design about communication of intent: if you can’t communicate your intent, you get frustrated
people aren’t afraid of play or games
- but they aren’t playing on gaming devices – they’re playing on iPod, cell phone, blackberry
Current-gen joypads are very complex
Longterm test with someone who was familiar with early consoles, but skipped lots of years – and now is coming back
- girlfriend wants to join in – photos of her frustration, puzzlement, anger
- too much to do – she had to look at her hands
Is it that controllers are scaring people off?
- console takeup in the US looks good over the past generations
- but if you map those consoles over people buying more than one on a per household basis, mapped against population – it should be accelerating away from population, but it’s actually equal to the same proportion as had them in the 8bit era
controllers assume too much of their audience
Current joypads are aesthetically uninspiring – they don’t motivate game designers to speak through the controllers – the game must feel like it’s in your hands
Controllers are weighed down by the expectations of genre
Sometimes conventions are good – but sometimes they replicate legacy ideas
Ex: Singstar (like Karaoke Revolution): people know what to do with the microphone
Karaoke: friends, beer, casualness
Ex: Buzz – a quiz game with individual controller – not about the buttons, but about everything else – nonthreatening, to be played with family.
Ex: Donkey Konga – played with drums that feel like drums
Not always familiar, not always nonthreatening – but they don’t say “game”
Ex: Guitar Hero w 5 buttons vs Konami’s version w 3 buttons – Guitar Hero has movement and expertise built in
- simplifying and approximating both interaction of guitar and rewards of learning how to play – you can feel like you’ve made real progress – challenge/reward structure
- super move: play around in the correct manner
Ex: Steel Battalion for Xbox
- absurdly complicated – but all buttons are dedicated
- and it tells a lot about the universe of the game – a big working tank in the future
- interface reinforces what we know about big machines of the future, from our knowledge of pop culture
- and there’s an eject button!
But people tend to copy Halo because the target market (gamers) can play it…but you raise the barrier to entry.
A different ex: Metroid Prime, which makes you relearn the controller – it looks like an FPS, but it’s actually an exploration game and is about being lonely.
- but as a developer, you can be very sure about the pacing – everyone is at stage 1
Ex: Killer7 – equally crazy stripped down controls
- walking is very easy, because this game is not about walking.
Ex: Micro Machines 2 cart, where you have to share joypads
But we’re mostly seeing the same idioms in next gen products
Dealing with handedness
- controllers are biased towards righties
- looking for entirely symmetrical
- Revolution “nunchuk”
Legacy interfaces mean no interface to use them well…the market is not advancing
Need to get out of making interfaces FOR GAMERS – controllers are the only limiting factor left
Games in the living room are stuck with the basic controller, but everywhere else the interface is moving on
“A videogame is something you play with controls, usually but not always using your thumbs” Tom Langston
The controller is the game – is this what we want to represent games? Generating whole new verbs for gameplay.
Think about films
This is not the end of the evolution

Julian Bleecker
Physical environments as computational grid
Looking for play structures in the physical world – formations and opportunities for social computing to happen – where social groups come together and exchange ideas
The network leaks into the world
Paths are the interface to gameplay – how people navigate the city, how movements can become elements of gameplay – city as gameboard and grid
Debris becomes legible
Inscriptions create semantics – give us fresh perspective
Infrastructure is ludic – using parts of the environment as gamepieces, roles, powerups
Annotation rewrites rules
Movement = powerup – finding new problems to solve beyond console games – more kinesthetic experiences
What is weird? Sitting around staring at a screen.
How social beings can be wrangled and mustered
Trying to create a different way of seeing and understanding the world – to make it more habitable and sustainable – play for play’s sake, but also play as a vehicle to understanding the world around us
Ex: area/code “The Big Urban Game” – ConQwest
Ex: area/code “Tokyo Superstar”
Pervasive performance
Ex: Blast Theory – Uncle Roy All Around You, Can You See Me Now? – mixed reality
Ex: Geocaching
Ex: Go Game, Fiasco – bringing people outside of themselves, turns external world upside down through performance – changing perspective
Mobile phone games
Ex: Julian’s game clickr!
Ex: Flirt – Stampede
Ex: Twitcher – phone captures birds that fly around – have to run away out of BT range to defeat any “poachers”
Ex: Julian’s Viewmaster of the future
Ex: Human PacMan
Ex: Catch Bob!
Ex: Feeding Yoshi
Ex: Piedimonsters – part of service design
- nutrition and fitness
- pedometer combines with tamagotchi
- check status on computer

Noam Lovinsky
Any Plans This Weekend?
Need to create the situation in which the user doesn’t have to do anything different in order to tell you what they’re doing.
Invites to everyday plans
Voting with their feet
Skobee
Social view of upcoming plans – all plans visible to all members – very few people (under 1%) change their plans to be visible to only their friends because there’s enough [pseudonymity]
Trying to do discovery about what’s going on nearby.
Easily iterate on plans – change time, place etc
The crowd this week – where are “people going” – ie, showing the male to female ratio
Showing “fuzziness” of plans – start general and get specific
This is a new behavior – so trying to integrate older tools such as email – add semantic data to email, and Skobee will send email when things are ready to go. Also add to mobile phones.

Salman Farmanfarmaian
Evoke TV
Americans are watching more and more hours of television/day
How will media be delivered?
- antenna, cable, satellite, ‘iptv’, internet, cellphone/ipod
how will you find the content?
- newspapers, tv guide, online listings, *search, *community/social media
semi-structured data platforms
mapping services (google) = tv listings (evoke tv)
who will pay for it? How?
- the annoyance of interactive ads
evoke tv value proposition
- help tv viewers with similar interests connect to each other online for a shared viewing experience
- connect tv to users’ existing online activities
Q: is this atypical? Do most people watch tv with their laptops?
A: well, the alpha geeks tell us how the world will be in the future [this is, once again, the alpha geek fallacy]

Regine Debatty
Art as a test drive of the future
Emotion and computing
- in(security) camera
- needies
- DogLab – France Cadet (based on experimental animals)
- The table that tries to charm you
- Animal Computer Interaction – James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau
- The RoachBot – Garnet Hertz
- PigeonBlog – Beatriz Da Costa
Social and cultural insights
- Faraday Chair - Dunne and Raby
- EM Shelter Booth – Philip Hirschfeld
- Floatable Jellyfish - Usman Haque
- Wearable Warnings – Philip Worthington
- Modes for urban moods – Teresa Almeida
Space for debates
- audio tooth implant – James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau
- biopresence – Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel

George Dyson Turing’s Cathedral
HG Wells – world’s brain idea, 1938
Alfred Smee – invented bitmapping and postscript – if you can tell the difference between reality and thoughts, you are conscious – 1851
Turing – 1936 papers – build a universal digital machine
Liebnitz and his idea for what became shift registers
Von Neumann – actually building computers
March, 1946 – the first progress report on the computer
Paying for electricians, office space (computer started in Godel’s office space)
And Godel contributed the key idea: addressing and storing instructions in the same matrix space as the data
A cube of 5k of memory
our world is a Von Neumann matrix because Von Neumann wanted a matrix…
Barricelli’s biology papers
Von Neumann dies – The Computer and the Brain
Ulam: how are processes not just lifelike but life itself?
Meaning less and less in code and more and more in relationships between – like pageranks
? Bigelow
More and more recently, software is “floating in the computational soup” – doesn’t replace Von Neumann but floats on top – more like biology
Irving Good, 1958
Ashby, design for a brain (which is looks a lot like Google)
Nathaniel Hawthorne:
search engines are a way that computers are searching us

Michael Goldhaber
2 changes of level

Feudal -> MMI -> Attention economy

Feudal
Success: security
Openings: land
Lack: material goods
Goals: loyalty, fiefdom, security
Roles: knights, serfs
Moves: winning battles, pledging loyalty

MMI
Success: material abundance
Openings: high school, broadcasting, publishing, internet
Goals: material goods, money, jobs
Roles: owner, worker/consumer
Cycle – work -> earnings -> goods

Attention Economy
Goals: attention from others
Roles: Star, fan
Cycle: attention -> memory -> more attention

What is attention?
Economic identity: scarce and desirable, but nothing limits the amount of attention you could get, if you could absorb it
Paying attention: heeding, listening, serving, waiting for or on, recognizing, etc
Who owns your attention?
Attention owning is a kind of property, located in the minds of those who have paid you attention [mindshare]
Meaning in life is important: you can only share meaning and derive meaning if you have some of their attention
Developing new tech tools as a way of getting attention in geekdom

Kevin Lynch – Adobe
Connection of Ajax with Flash graphics

Brian Dear – EVDB When Do We Get the Events We Want?
Events and Venues Database – inspired by collaborative databases
Mashup: Podbot
Known events – performers
Expected events – prospective search, notification/alert
Dream events – events you WISH would happen – “eventful demand”
- demand aggregration
- tools for fans
- tools for performers
- notifications/alerts
- like Amazon wishlist – you want fulfillment, you want the promise to come true
- not to sell the data – turn control over to fans and performers
- a marketplace for experiences

Hans Peter Brondmo – First You Google, Then What?
Plum
How do we rely on imperfect humans
Collect – share – connect/discover
Plum – collect almost anything [digital] from everywhere
- cache webpages
- photos on desktop
- email
- music
[trying to do too much…Flickr just does photos, last.fm just does music…del.icio.us just does links. Mike says: collecting everything in one interface when you could just get the feeds from all these other places…or mix n match]
Open set of APIs

Joel Spolsky – report card
His rules:
- Make people happy
- Think about emotions
- Obsess about aesthetics
The cuteness of the reddit alien – which he finds appealing
Motorola cellphone with unnecessary latch  razr
[… something I didn’t catch]
Contemporary web design aesthetics – cargo cult of Google aesthetics

Clay Shirky – Pattern Language for Moderation Strategies

Pattern language – problem/solution combination that describes how to build but is abstract enough to applied in many different places
Reason: problem growing in developer communities
Freedom’s just another word…
Measure: communal freedom – how much does the software catalyze group communication? – vs annoyingness (susceptibility to bad social behaviors)
Want moderate freedom for moderate problems…but problems cascade quickly with more freedom
How does Slashdot do it?
Members defend readers from writers
Slashdot is not easily replicated – you can’t work from the code
Slashdot – tragedy of the commons
Not having features is also a strategy
Patterns derived from Slashdot
A pattern language for moderation: social.itp.nyu.edu/shirky/wiki
Moderation_strategies@yahoo.groups
Longer term reason: Hobbes and Rousseau argue about Dave Winer
The story of Dave Winer – what duty did he have to his users when he turned his mailing list into a moderated one
Hobbes: humans need monarchs
Rousseau: social contract
Moderation design as experimental philosophy because we are encoding explicit goals into the tools

Jon Udell – Attention Focusing Strategies [for the Web]

From newspaper publishing – heads, decks and leads
Writing titles is hard
Google doesn’t see titles of blogs – just the titles of pages
Advocates structured titles to focus attention
The tragedy of discussion threads – threading based on titles so titles don’t get changed
Active context
- active resource collection (related tags, people, graduated scoping)
- “future proofed”
- Queryable
- Need resources identifiable at the subdocument level
Exploring tag space
Showing edits on wikipedia through animation
Act of naming creates focus of attention

Paul Bragiel, Sean Savage
Meetro
Using Meetro to borrow a vacuum in Palo Alto – beyond finding dates and business
Age/Sex/Location: a/s/l – meeting people at a more comfortable level
Meetro – now meeting people through IM comes with a face and a profile
Traditional services based on handle – no face, no profile – “we are facial creatures”
Launched 6-7 months ago, growth – human beings are very lazy
“we had never designed user interface software like this” [it’s so often that way…developers designing software, and then relearning old lessons]
Location: the farther away someone is, the harder it is to meet up (ie, ¼ mile to 2 miles can enable meetups)
Don’t give away absolute location – that feels odd – they abstract information into a radius, aura, or presence
“You have some time, so you could start talking to each other”
Their designer is from Chile – talked to newspapers there and no lots of growth
Like Orkut – Brazilian population “they infiltrated the network. They’ve overweighed the community from one locale” – while Meetro keeps it local “not going to take over another market” [wow – that really betrays the assumptions of the creators!]
Good experiences in Chicago and San Francisco because they talked to the media
Trying to let it grow by word of mouth in New York
[Again, the big problem] trying to get people excited when there aren’t a lot of people logged on around you – there must be a sense of community around the service
Need core connector types
User adoption: been able to hire people through the application

Sean Savage: PlaceSite
Unlike Meetro, tied to place, rather than person
In cafes – open up browser and shows you how many people online at the place
Take advantage of social boundaries people already use
Thinking about kinds of encounters – from cozy in tavern to globally exposed on TV
Wifi and public places where people gather to use it.
Router plus free firmware that talks to PlaceSite’s servers
Online for just over a month in 3 cafes, but more than a year of R and D
Releasing router code under GPL
Partnership with two wifi infrastructure companies – Sputnik and wavestorm
They provide infrastructure for places – launching PlaceSite with these companies customers
What about beyond cafes?
Plugin framework and open API -> mashups, maybe?
PlaceSite as platform and network
Revenue: ultralocal advertising – customizing placesite for venues – user-approved location feed licensing
PlaceSite – trying not to kill the conviviality of cafes

Maribeth Back
Human experience of reading
Human experience of the built environment
Not about the usual suspects – blogs, IM, ebooks, SMS, email
The “ing” behind the Thing
The Thing behind the thing: Platonic ideal
The –ing behind the thing: human experience
We read for different reasons
Text is image
The geometries of reading: physical and conceptual structures
- social geometries of reading, embedded in surroundings (such as the built environment), creates a compelling, immersive experience
Unspoken social fabrics – the relationships created and changed by reading together [remember Jeff Han’s “playing in parallel” Jeff points out his TraceEncounters]
Experiments in the future of reading, tech museum of innovation, san jose

Matt Cottam and Mike Kuniavsky
Mike Kuniavsky
Tools for designing hybrid experiences right now are very poor – like the tools for designing software in the 1960s with debug lines
We need new design tools
All development consists of analysis, synthesis and evaluation, iterated. Sketching is the first place where that happened. The heart of iterative design.
Prototypes are sketches – you are moving towards a place in ever greater iterations
What are the interesting parts of sketching?
1) Fast – preserves focus rather than having the technology interrupt you
2) Provisional – “everyone knows it’s a sketch” – you don’t get into rat holes – like non photo realistic rendering – communicates through physical appearance
3) preserves history
Drawing ranks very high in those metrics…”hardware really sucks”
From capability (what something can do) to functionality (what needs it satisfies)
Ie, Ajax – new functionality, not new capability
Question: How do we help people tie the world of information to the world of tools for everyday living that exist in the world

Matt Cottam – runs Tellart and teaches at RISD
Remembering being a student and working with students
Remembering iterative furniture design – wants that experience working with sensors and actuators
Sensor kit systems – didn’t want to use Max/MSP because designers already knew Flash. And engineering students didn’t want to use Flash, they wanted Java.
NADA as glue in the middle between sensors, toolkits, and computer
Now, a demonstration!
Uses NADA component in Flash to demo

Derek Powazek
Connective tissue – how do we get people talking in the post-company town world?
Distributed community
Ex: measure map: showing relationship between saying something and people coming
Blogs, comment systems, trackbacks, tags, APIs, blogrolls etc
Third party aggregators [remember the sugar house – so close together you can borrow sugar by sticking your hand out of the window]
Awards, photoblogs.org, location-based weblog aggregators (like ORblogs)
“it’s so much funnier on DSL”
Signs of life: linking to the same memes…things spread [attenuated sociality]
Pros (of self-owned spaces like blogs instead of centrally owned “company towns”)
- self ownership, fewer bozos (as with the Web 1.0 list servs), human scale
- like “real life” – I moved out of my parent’s house and now live in my own
Cons
- no one’s in charge, no moderators
Modern company towns
- flickr, youtube, myspace (public/private), typepad (renters), last.fm
What this means
- treat your community well…but don’t be bummed when they leave
- go to where your community is. You can’t create “community.”
- Ie, creation of JPG Magazine – they created a group in Flickr instead of creating a stand-alone silo – or like tivocommunity, which is not run by TiVo…but TiVo visits.
Community affiliation lifecycle
- dcentralized community mirrors “real” community
- blogs have forced company towns to interact with the rest of the world

Q: What about blog spam?
Trackbacks incentivize smartness, because you’re “commenting” in your own “house”

Linda Stone
Check on experience of always on lifestyle
Aikido: the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth
World may be noisy, but value may come from stillness
Sweet spot
Since 1988 the art of continuous partial attention building as an adaptive behavior
We are adapting beyond it
Not multitasking – motivated by desire to be a live node on network – feeling part of something larger
Optimizing for best opportunities for connection
Thinking about the 1960s – motivated by self-expression – me as center of gravity
But the backlash happened: being all about self-expression is lonely – we miss being part of something larger
1985-2005: network as center of gravity – moving from productivity to communication
Always scanning for the new thing, trying to make the most out of every opportunity
“We were everywhere, except where we actually were.”
“Disarm at the door” – cell phones, pagers, etc
Disengaging from networks strategically
Anywhere era has created sense of constant crisis
Email not effective for decision-making – yet we continue to use it.
Communication needs are different – high bandwidth, low bandwidth etc – need meets
Crisis management, conflict resolution best done with certain methods
We get instructions on physical tool use…shouldn’t we get instruction on virtual ones?
Email is an attention chipper-shredder
On edge of next shift past connect-connect-connect – now we are overstimulated and unfulfilled – yearning for protection, meaning, and belonging
Usability is no longer good enough – the new mantra is improving quality of life – the only way to differentiate going forward
Protect, help, filter, help create a meaningful connection, discern, use information wisely
Noise -> data -> information -> knowledge -> understanding -> wisdom
From knowledge to being understanding and wisdom workers

Dave Sifry
Attention Economics: A 15 minute course
Attention is about time directed to a purpose by people
Taking advantage of economics
What is scarce?
CPU cycles are cheap and getting cheaper, as is storage, as is bandwidth
Imagining that money is NOT scarce [well, maybe for some people, but money or lack thereof is one of those things that can be wished away only hypothetically]
Meme-orandum
Talks about all the work he used to have to do to figure out what people were saying…about him!
Make it easy to create and express attention
Like Second Life: “they’ll go and create the world for you!”
Hyperlinks are votes of attention
Create opportunities for economies of scale

Cory Ondrejka
Second Life
Attention in virtual worlds
“20% of adults identify as residents of virtual worlds”
“35% of adults more time online than ‘working’” [where do these stats come from?]
10-15 million people worldwide playing MMPORPGs
- very explicitly assoc with Metaverse and Otherverse
Pay for permits model – $0/month - $16,000/month
Pay for p2p transactions – average price $1
So people are paying for user-created content
Unanticipated consequences
- “alien abductions”
- Political protests against taxation – destroying newbie experience
Power from the people – haven’t seen rate of creation drop
15% of residents have written original scripts in the last 7 days
The “magic wand” – selling well for $25 – creator sends updates
UCD virtual hallucination project
Game created, tested, marketed in Second Life that will be coming out on GameBoy Advance
Through the magic circle – internet watch that tells user when someone is coming onto his virtual land so he can decide if he wants to login and stop him
Demographics
- gender neutral by hours of use
- top ten lists dominated by women
- lots of stay-at-home moms
“virtual worlds embodying good learning practices”
Amateur-to-amateur teaching
Legitimate peripheral participation – learning by being around people who are good at things
Performance before competence
Heterogeneous learning
17 university classes
Play vs work.

Felix Miller – last.fm – “the musical myware”
Attention data – stuff that people pay attention to
Use myware – inspired by spyware – but not that same
Act of someone spying on themselves
Why should people spy on themselves? And why should they share that data?
Why is last.fm doing it?
- Napster – what SHOULD you be listening to, if you can get anything you want
- Harnessing the knowledge of the crowd
Audioscrobbler – only reports stuff you listened to – not stuff you skipped
Processing 8 million submissions/day – over a billion in last year
Self-populating catalogue created by submissions
Lots of noise – but through working with users 8/25 million tracks are clean
The “long tail” – they have the longest long tail.
Collaborative filtering  base layer for recommendations layer
User to user similarity and artist to artist similarity
Why do people use last.fm?
Creates personal music recommendations – filter from more popular to more obscure
Taste is complex – introduced tagging to help people filter.
Listening to personal radios in streams  personalized radio
Personalized radio feeds back into attention data stream
Level the playing field for musicians who don’t have record label contracts
Why spy on yourself?
Provide a compelling service
In control of data

Dick Hardt – “Who Is the Dick on Your Site”
Identity 2.0
How do you know who people on your site are? How do you know which persona this person is using? How do you know anything about them? How do you manage disclosure and privacy?
1980’s Identity 1.0
Later, LDAP  Microsoft’s ActiveDirectory
But provisioning and deprovisioning took a while, and corporate acquisitions made management of directories different
Security Assertion Markup Language
Federation terminology
- identity party
- service providers / relying parties
user-centric models – Identity 2.0
Microsoft has InfoCard – WS-*
IBM/Nobel supports Higgins
And Dick does sxip
Released last night, Ning did a membersite in 12 minutes
Called sxore – manages identity w/o trust between authoritative site and member site based on user’s computer

LF Cabrera Artificial Artificial Intelligence
Amazon uses lots of software…but can’t use software to write item descriptions, for example.
Amazon mechanical turk
Web services API for computers to integrate artificial artificial intelligence directly into their processing by making requests to humans
Had at one point 43,000 humans working on projects at once.
Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs)
Means
- for software developers: solves problem of building software that requires human intelligence
- For workers: Revenue stream
Uses
- high quality, inexpensive, massive scale image clean up (“which picture is better?”)
- quick, inexpensive answers (market polling and research – or “should I shave my beard?”)
- high quality, inexpensive translation and transcription (castingwords.com)

Jeff Han
NYU CS
Rear projected drafting table as multitouch sensor
Most touchboards can only register one touch
His solution: low cost, high resolution, scalable.
“it just does the right thing – there’s no interface – you can ask as if this were a physical thing”
Multitouch=multiperson - but interface disappears (Rael comes up and plays with display too)
Good for child, grandparent, people new to computing culture – especially when we’re introducing tech to people
{Jeff is manipulating photo application}
Take advantage of kinesthetic memory
Zoom in and out and move around  a real infinite desktop
Then Jeff does the same thing with video – all 186 channels of Time Warner video
Vs Minority Report – that’s a gestural interface [not tangible] so you have problems differentiating between surfaces, which is disturbing to user [which is why the theremin is so hard to learn and play!]
Jeff shows the earth and mapping interface – tapping into different data sets
Jeff shows emulated keyboard – “but it’s dangerous to start emulating right away” -- there are more possibilities
Lots of entertainment applications, but Jeff is more interested in creative
Like “virtual puppeteering” (lots of math underneath to do what’s physiccally plausible)
Create “playing in parallel” behaviors

Ray Ozzie – “bridge building”
Where is the clipboard of the web? Where is the thing that lets us get information easily from one site to another. Why isn’t the clipboard for the web the clipboard?
Demo – trying for simplicity
Live clipboard – simulates a button control – right click to copy, right click to paste into another button
Implementing a clipboard on the clipboard
Some data structures
Copying in a non-geeky fashion – just copying from page to page
Also uses an applet to augment windows clipboard so that you can save items in standard formats in standard programs to and from web
You can also insert feeds
Representing data in microformats so that users could wire up websites.
Also can help maintain profiles live – provides “live updates” function that links to rss feed from one piece of information to another
Easy to create programmatically chained feeds – so that one feed feeds into another very simply – that’s wiring the web
He has also enabled live clipboard icons on images in Flickr, so that copying image also copies what the page wants to tell him about the image – which could be a very complex data structure
So copying to hard drive points back to website with full res image and information
So you can also copy an entire Flickr feed to a desktop folder – and later, once you paste into a folder you can create an ongoing subscription.
Tested on IE, Firefox, Safari…probably bugs in other browsers
Instructions on blog on how to get involved – need to agree on common set of data formats

interlude with Tim
Flickr as a template for good application behavior [it’s kind of like Montessori: "Flickr is a good neighbor. Don’t you want to be a good neighbor too?"]

Rael’s keynote

About sniffing out new ideas
"tension between externality and affordance"
Data mining
"sense and sensibility"
Goes over history of Etech
Proliferation of media
Overproliferation of alpha geeks and lifehacking
[using alpha geeks as canaries in the coal mine, if canaries could suddenly engineer oxygen tanks for themselves when the air quality got bad]
Attention: aggregation != attenuation

Tim’s keynote
"telling stories about what our core audience is doing" [Michele: stories vs findings]
"this is not new" – homebrew computers, technology in snowboarding etc
Technology on track with longterm trend
disruptive
technology uptake is accelerating
is bottom-up, grassroots
inspires passion
deeper social implications
better information makes a difference in adoption and use
pattern recognition
harnessing collective intelligence – getting users to add their own data
slide with “"top sites on the internet" and number of employees – craiglist has 18! [where’s myspace on that list?]
metaphor: Von Kempelen's Mechanical Turk
- 1770 – 1830: chessplaying machine with man hidden inside.
Now a literal "mechanical turk" at amazon
Like castingwords.com – humans to do transcription
Tags on del.icio.us [Mike says, “But it’s not very useful! Liz says, “But tagging works great on Etsy]
And then digg
Bionic software – "taking user empowerment to the next level"
Public access to Alexa web crawl.
Conversation with a VC: "IA, not AI" intelligence augmentation, not artificial intelligence
Hacking the physical world – make and diy hardware
Ex: Natalie Jeremijenko and feral dogs
Instrumenting the real world
Ex: Kelly Dobson’s work "someone who’s just doing it for fun" [no, she did as part of her art practice, which is very serious - but that's part of the cultural division between cs geeks and artists.]
Getting better at documenting how to things
Ex: instructables.com
Like the code sharing culture in software, version control?
Version of make magazine in second life
Another physical computing hack: phone booth at Burning Man (Brad Templeton’s project) – it’s a wifi phone booth connected to satellite phone in truck using skype
Ex: Last.fm
Projects blending real and virtual interaction
Zimbra: demo of collaboration suite w zimlets [terrible, terrible demo! Very long. A colossal waste of time.]

Cory Doctorow introduces Bruce Sterling
"a machine for inspiring geeks"
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Free text on Internet
His blogs as commonplace books
Shaping Things

Bruce Sterling’s talk: The Internet of Things
"a vast slow, terrific thing that is trying to emerge"
About 30 years away, which is how long barcodes took to permeate society
Web 2.0 – you can point to the people and examples
Mark Weiser – the top guru has been dead for several years now – people are trying to find a grab bag
The Internet of Things
"you don’t want to freeze your language too quickly" "you don’t want to freeze a technology into the shape of today’s language – limits people’s ability"
Ex: artificial intelligence and referring to computers as "thinking machines"
Computers are not "smart" in any useful sense; they don’t "think" or "know things"
Computers are just sitting there "ordinating" – we should try to figure out what that is instead of trying to make computers "think" like us
Look at Google: Google is kind of like what the 1960s vision of artificial intelligence is, except that it’s not presented as AI (unlike ask jeeves)
It doesn’t cling to the words invented by the past –
Pay attention to the things on the ground. What works? What matters?
Do I want a classical artifical intelligence? Or do I want Google?
Or rather, if you have one company with Alan Turing’s AI machine or Google, which company wins?
"The words misled us. I think we could have done better words."
Imagine back in the days of mainframes, some genius tech commentator had showed up…
We might have produced Google in 1980.
Internet of things – words come from present day, not from past – because the past didn’t get certain things.
Things that serve us because we physically move around the world, social interaction, etc.
Not about intelligence – but it can change our relationships to physical objects, physical spaces, in the real world. Linking and tracking and ranking and sorting.
1)with interactive chips and unique identities
2)local and precise positioning systems which sort out where you are and where things are
3)powerful search engines
4)cradle-to-cradle recycling and transparent production
5)3D virtual models and CAD/CAM – objects that are virtual before they are real
6)Rapid prototyping – fabjects, blobjects – manufacturing directly from virtual plans [ah, but Bruce is not a designer, so he misses the problem of moving directly from the virtual – misses the value of the physical in producing thought]
He calls these objects spimes – trackable in space and time. Manufactured objects that are material instantiations of informational systems. Begin and end as data. Information objects first, physical objects second.
Primary advantage of I of Things: I no longer inventory my possessions inside my own head – they are inventoried by voodoo, a host of things. I no longer bother to remember where I put things…I just ask, and then I am told. I have an Internet of Things with a search engine of things. I no longer hunt for my shoes in the morning. I just Google them! I am at ease in materiality in a way that people never were before. [oh, this is so sad, and so beautiful that Bruce Sterling believes in the myth of ease-in-the-world, of immanance.]
Spime: an attention pointer. A verbal framing device. He also wanted it to be googlable.
A new word is a new tag. What Julian Bleecker calls a "theory object" – a cloud of associated commentary and data. Passed around and linked to.
Every time he goes to a conference, the word spime grows as a "theory object," because of the work that the audience is doing. It is accreting attention. The word "theory object" is itself a theory object, with trackback, and links, and a website and an FAQ, and a database and some user-centric graphic web apps!
[Mike: Jim Mason is so excited. He actually is]
New words can sound silly or dangerous.
Hype is a system call on your attention. Hype is only bad if you drink it by the barrel and case.
The opposite of hype is not the true. It's argot. Jargon is not reality. Argot is not the truth. It’s a geek cult language. It has no traction in the real world. A small knowledge-clique does not have enough people in it to successfully name its own inventions and practices.
Adam Greenfield: "Everyware, the Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing"
Interviewer asks Adam, why coin a new word? Adam says, all the words already in use is contentious. Associated with one or another viewpoint/institution/funding source. Wanted people relatively new to the ideas to have a rough container for them so they didn’t get bogged down.
"I kind of admire this term Everyware; it’s more elegant than Ubicomp, which is a verbal disaster." Somewhat confusing in verbal speech because it’s a pun. Not sure it carries enough new freight with it – too much of the old with it. Will this word scale upward?
Bruce thinks internescine definitionary struggles are good! Healthy! They mean we have escaped a bog.
For a technologist the bog is bad – makes it hard to sell things.
For a writer, the bog of disciplinary struggle is the wetlands of language, the most fertile area.
Don’t destroy the wetlands because you like the highways. Compares it too New Orleans.
It will not be ubiquitous or computation.
Not everyware but patchy and limited, like phone cells and RFID tags.
Not a Ma Bell, Bruce thinks. Time will tell.
You don’t want to avoid the contentiousness of those definitional struggles [so why did Bruce invent his own word, huh?]
The words are a signifier for a clash of sensibilities that really needs to clash.
Web 2.0. Tim O’Reilly: "network as platform"
Bruce thinks Tim’s definition is not prolix. If you are a techie, it can be exciting. But break it down, it’s a roll call of people Tim considers important as a contemporary class. [Awesome]. With the accomplishments Tim can point to in public. There is room for verbal improvement here.
Alan Lew “The laws of cool.” – not language-centric; too much of a techie banner ad. “I am highly skeptical of Web 2.0”
1)Web 2.0 – generational change looking at what is happening right now, not looking at what was happening – not sure we can describe while in the midst of it.
A wagon train is not a town
Serious semantic problems of not knowing yet what we are talking about
Not certain if open content platforms align with decentralized control. “A priesthood of backend and middleware coders”
Bruce says that Alan is saying: Web 2.0 is actually just a ploy to return Internet’s technical power to geek clique that built Web 1.0. “They stole our revolution, now we’re stealing it back…and selling it to Yahoo!”
Lew: People who make a big deal of Web 2.0 are trying to take a shortcut to understanding the social economic political and cultural changes underlying it.
Lew: Very few people are trying to understand those deep implications before building or trying to evaluate success.
Bruce doesn’t think that we EVER get a full assessment of the technology. The Victorian Internet, which just gives up and tries to recast that experience with the words we have now.
Web 2.0 is a lashup – that might be considered its virtue.
We don’t get clear divisions these days – we get “theory objects”
I go on about this because it matters – it’s part of the work of the technology. Like naming. Verbal incantation that turns the baby into a social actor. She is a real person – she can be tagged, ranked, sorted.
The victory is to make new concepts everyday and obvious.
Simpson Garfinkel – RFID Applications Security and Privacy.
RFID printed on film – threatening in many interesting ways.
ThingLink – a version of Everyware and Spime
Ulla-Maria – "ThingLinks are unique identifiers, ID codes for things"
Bruce says that Ulla-Maria is an expert in handicrafts…[what was the point]
Wiki is another good neologism
Julian Bleecker’s blogjects – conversational conversation-piece that contributes to discourse because they spew information that makes some difference in the physical world – Bruce likes it because it is "semantically legible"
[Ironic – Matt and I just spend a dinner talking about how awful spime was as a word]
Blogject is a word for the today – you can get grants to do it.
A spime would be like a blog that emits objects.
Because spimes are blah blah blah. They will tell you how to make themselves.
EKOs – evocative knowledge objects
"acronyms are the small change of the tech world"
An ecology of things – classes at Art Center College of Design
Fabjects
Data shadows
Nice adjectives
Verb: to instantiate
Spy chips
If no one thinks what you are doing is dangerous, you have no power to change the world.
You need to feed the critics.
Object of the past: emerging tech that is now receeding – still a presence – trash – the stale primordial soup of passive thingness that rots in our biosphere. We are burying all that is dead within us.

reading of blogs brought to memory this quote from Infinite Jest.

Winter BS 1960 – Tucson AZ

Jim not that way Jim. That’s no way to treat a garage door, bending stiffly down at the waist and yanking at the handle so the door jerks up and out jerky and hard and you crack your shins and my ruined knees, son. Let’s see you bend at the healthy knees. Let’s see you hook a soft hand lightly over the handle feeling its subtle grain and pull just as exactly gently as will make it come to you. Experiment, Jim. See just how much force you need to start the door easy, let it roll out open on its hidden greasy rollers and pulleys in the ceiling’s set of spiderwebbed beams. Think of all garage doors as the well-oiled open-out door of a broiler with hot meat in, heat roiling out, hot. Needless and dangerous ever to yank, pull, shove, thrust. Your mother is a shover and a thruster, son. She treats bodies outside herself without respect or due care. She’s never learned that treating things in the gentlest most relaxed way is also treating them and your body in the most efficient way. It’s Marlon Brando’s fault, Jim. Your mother back in California before you were born, before she became a devoted mother and long-suffering wife and breadwinner, son, your mother had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie. Her big moment. Had to stand their in saddle shoes and bobby sox and ponytail and put her hands over her ears as really loud motorbikes roared by. A major thespian moment, believe you me. She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son. Who? Who. Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it looks like two whole generations’ relations with their own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them. No? Well it was because of Brando you were opening that garage door like that, Jimbo. The disrespect gets learned and passed on. Passed down. You’ll know Brando when you watch him, and you’ll have learned to fear him…Brando the new archetypal tough-guy rebel and slob type, leaning back on his chair’s rear legs, coming crooked through doorways, slouching against everything in sight, trying to dominate objects, showing no artful respect or care, yanking things toward him like a moody child and using them up and tossing them crudely aside so they miss the wastebasket and just lie there, ill-used. With the over-clumsy impetuous movements and postures of a moody infant. Your mother is of that new generation that moves against life’s grain, across its warp and baffles. She may have loved Marlon Brando, Jim, but she didn’t understand him, is what’s ruined her for everyday arts like broilers and garage doors and even low-level public-park knock-around tennis. Ever see your mother with a broiler door? It’s carnage, Jim, it’s to cringe to see it, and the poor dumb thing thinks it’s tribute to this slouching slob-type she loved as he roared by. Jim, she never intuited the gentle and cunning economy behind this man’s quote harsh sloppy unstudied approach to objects. The way he’d oh so clearly practiced a chair’s back-leg tilt over and over. The way he studied objects with a welder’s eye for those strongest centered seams which when pressured by the swinishest slouch still support. She never…never sees that Marlon Brando felt himself as body so keenly he’d no need for manner. She never sees that in his quote careless way he actually really touched whatever he touched as if it were part of him. Of his own body. The world he only seemed to manhandle was for him sentient, feeling.

"The world he only seemed to manhandle was for him sentient, feeling." Beautiful.