Webstock ’09: Day 1
I had a great time at Webstock today. I am getting the sense that this year’s event is primarily about online communities: attracting them, keeping them, inspiring them and moderating them. Last year was more about design and frameworks, so this was something quite new.
Jane McGonigal spoke about her work with AvantGame and the Institute for the Future, how games make for a happier humanity and the role of games in making futures, not just predicting them. She talked about how we’re all creating games, and if we’re not creating them, our competitors will. Good games are structures that make people happy, and help people feel and become more awesome. How many websites do that? In what ways can they do that? I’m heartened by Jane’s ambition to have a game developer win a Nobel Prize by 2032. And Top Secret Dance Off (which featured on Close Up tonight) looks fun!
Nat Torkington of O’Reilly talked about the scientific method and the idea of a feedback loop (in science, in evolution, in the political process), how it applies to web and software design and development and how we don’t actually get anywhere without allowing failure to happen. If it happens in small, testable increments, failure is a tool for innovation. But too small, and we risk any chance for serendipitous innovation. He talked about how big companies suffer from the Inventor’s Dilemma: they’ve got too much to lose to innovate their most successful products. This is exactly why they can be beaten by small companies. But, on the side of corporates, it brought to mind an article I read in Idealog earlier in the week about the Black Room concept.
Derek Powazek spoke about the wisdom of crowds: what it’s good for, and how it can be woefully misused. His insights about relying on selfishness and the double-edged sword of using game tropes – winning the game has to help the community, or you’re screwed – were worth the price of admission. He talked about the ways in which communities can be encouraged and the methods you can use to keep them flourishing. He spoke about trolls – who they were, what motivated them, and what they wanted – and how to diffuse them. I really liked the idea of the cone of silence: this is where a logged-in user who is an identified troll sees their contributions within the stream of comments, but they are the only user who sees them. Their attempts at baiting are ignored by those that can’t see them, and they eventually leave out of boredom. Sites he mentioned that are worth a look: Favrd, Hot or Not!, and his own site, Fray.
It was heartening to see Meg Pickard from the Guardian UK speak about community participation as something that fundamentally changes a content producer’s offer: it’s not about a content producer putting out authoratitive comment and then everyone picking it to pieces in a completely separate (and largely ignored) silo, it’s about bringing that content into the conversation to create something completely new: something better than simply authoritative content with comments tacked on. To me it seemed like an obvious leap, but the reaction of others in the room suggests that a lot of people really aren’t there yet. It’s nice to know that the Guardian is willing to meet the challenges of the new media, I hope there were people from APN and Fairfax in the audience.
David Recordon of Six Apart talked through a number of technologies that support the social web: he discussed the growing recognition amongst people that walled gardens on social networking sites suck, it’s our data, and we need to find ways to make it easy to share the data that we want in the way that we want, and it’d be great if we didn’t have to complete a sign-up process for every site on the web either. There’s a whole bunch of open source tools that could fix this: Microformats, OpenID, OAuth, XMPP, Open Social, FOAF, vCard, DiSo. There’s a great Django-based product that builds on top of a lot these tools: Pinax, and it sounds well-worth investigating further. He also mentioned the SocialWeb TV, a video podcast. I’ve subscribed already.
Adrian Holovaty impressed the hell out of me. I’m a Django fanboy to begin, but Django didn’t actually figure much in his presentation. He talk about data, and using data in exciting and interesting ways. His latest project EveryBlock gives you an RSS feed for what’s happening in your neighbourhood: crimes, property sales, new businesses, restaurant inspections. His presentation was quite detailed: talking about URL schemes and mapping technology (he recommended an article in A List Apart about rolling your own maps). He suggested we encourage our government (national and local) to not waste time building badly thought-out sites for displaying data: give out the data in an API and let the public use it as they will. It’s our data after all.
Heather Champ is the community manager at Flickr. She spoke about the ways she’s found effective for shepherding her community. She talked about some of Flickr’s most public challenges: the YahooID switchover, the masturbating subway pervert, laptop thieves accidentally uploading their photos to Flickr, and solving downtime issues with a colouring competition. Heather talked frankly about the mistakes they’d made and the lessons they learned, and how they’ve become much better at managing the community as a result. A great talk.
Michael Lopp of Apple took the entertaining route. He spoke about nerds, geeks and dorks, showed us a Venn diagram of the three and how they intersected. He talked about his observations on how geeks think and work: they’re systems thinkers who go deep in interesting ways: they’re obsessed with understanding the rules of things. He believes that everything’s just a beautiful mess, but that you can fascinate a nerd by pulling bits out of that mess and getting them to make sense of it. His talk was perhaps lacking in information, but nerds love hearing about themselves, and hearing someone who seems to be explaining the rules about understanding themselves, so he was very well received.
I really didn’t know what to expect with Ze Frank, but I was impressed. He talked us through some of the projects he’d been involved in over the years, and some of the strange and wonderful moments that have happened as part of his many projects: Atheist Game, Flowers, 52to48, Facebook me=u, Earth Sandwich, and Remixes for Ray. He was funny, and he was smart, really smart. He understands the internet in such a fundamental way, and more than that, he knows how to participate in it in ways that really inspire others and go out of their way to do some really silly things. I’m a total fan.
Tomorrow’s speakers have a tough job ahead of them to live up to the standard set today. There wasn’t a single session where I wasn’t completely fascinated. I just wish I could have seen the other break-out sessions. Full credit to the Webstock team!
February 19th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
That was perfect Matt. Wish I was there, keep up the commentary.
p.s. Che and I are well aware of that mapping article on ala already – some great stuff there.