matt.geek.nz

If Day 1’s topic was community, Day 2’s topic was data and hardware. Big, messy stacks of data, measured, unmeasured, captured by all the things around us and coming to the web. On Day 1, I took an average of one page of notes per speaker. On Day 2 it was closer to three pages. I remembered a couple of things I forgot to mention on Day 1. Jane McGonigal’s latest game is the Signtific Lab, a massively multiplayer thought experiment that was played throughout the conference, and Ze Frank’s youngme/nowme project is just plain cool.

Russell Brown kicked things off with a quick chat about s92a and why we should really be paying attention to the Draft Code of Practice (PDF): because what’s in there will actually be the implementation of the law. He then talked about the state of television, and how the biggest problem they have is the old-style distribution networks: it’s the reason why you’re not allowed to watch TV on Hulu in New Zealand (the Alec Baldwin superbowl ad is worth a watch), or why an American can’t watch TVNZ on Demand. That said, sites like NZ On Screen and Radio New Zealand are getting it right with no DRM and no geo-blocking. He believes traditional TV still has a role (after all, it’s infinitely scalable), but that the content has a long way to go if it wants to still be relevant: people (and particularly kids) just aren’t watching the style of programs they used to. Oh, and Media 7’s doing great, thanks very much: particularly via the web.

Derek Featherstone discussed accessibility, and was chiefly interested in the differences between standards and accessibility: meeting standards is no guarantee that your site is actually usable. Without some knowledge about how your users actually interact with your site, or without at least thinking about it, you run the risk of creating something that validates but nevertheless sucks. I’m a fan of the Cooper process, and I found Derek’s insights underlined a lot of Alan Cooper’s ideas. He talked about making maps and flash movies usable by embedding buttons instead of overlays and putting controls outside a YouTube clip that controls the clip via the YouTube API. He showed us a cool accessible crossword, and professed a lot of love for Ubiquity, a command line interface for the web, which, among other things, is an accessibility tool on steroids.

Annalee Newitz of Wired was awesome. She talked about science fiction metaphors and the vocabulary established in films and books like Tron and Neuromancer and The Matrix and Battlestar Galactica, and the fear that people have about computer interfaces that interface back. She discussed how we can surmount those fears through education and by being mindful of the resistances that people have, because when it comes to new and scary interfaces people have internal narratives that end in having their brains sucked out: even when it comes to things like Facebook. She talked about superheroes and super villains and how the internal development team of Google Android switched from a Cylon-styled booting screen to a more friendly R2D2-style brand when it was about to be introduced to the public. And she presented some cool work on gestural interfaces, wearable computers, exoskeletons and Brain Computer interfaces, referencing Iron Man and Batman Begins along the way. It was nerd heaven.

I was really inspired by Toby Segaran’s talk. As web developers we rely a lot on the relational database, and he took as through some of the technologies that are trying to improve on the database paradigms we’ve depended on for the last 35 years. He discussed the graph data model, which is the model of the semantic web: object-predicate-subject relationships, and how it is organic and allows for schema changes because it doesn’t really have a fixed schema. Storing data in this way with tools like Sesame and Exhibit allows us to use SPARQL to do efficient queries that in RDBMSes take dozens of SQL joins. If data is presented in this way on the web, through standards like RDF and others, it means we can get answers to queries that are not only accurate, but also smarter.

Matt Biddulph of Dopplr talked about hardware hacking, which is a quiet ambition of mine, and he showed us some cheap electronics that we can use to create cool stuff. He directed us to Make, and showed us the current standard microprocessors and wireless connectors in hardware hacking: the Arduino, the XBee. He believes that if you can’t open something, you don’t own it. He pointed us to some cool hardware projects: a pot plant that tweets when it needs water, the tea/no-tea teapot, both built out of cheap hardware components that were just wired together. He recommended Everyware and Making Things Talk as good texts about the craft and the culture.

Matt Jones, also of Dopplr, talked about the cities that we live in, and how the spaces that we inhabit are becoming augmented with information: he pointed to the early ideas of Archigram, Project Cybersyn and Sir Richard Rogers. The end result of this is that our environments are becoming spaces that are robot-readable: machines can navigate the world by the nascent data-ness of things. Riffing on Matt Biddulph’s earlier example of the twitter-powered pot plant, he pointed to James Chambers’ Has Needs, a pot plant that will put itself on a site like Craigslist if it’s neglected. But people are walking architecture, mobile data sources, and our interaction with cities gives us a whole swathe of psychogeographic information (cf. Guy Debord) that we can play with. He presented a lot of interesting ideas, the street as platform, the Sky Ear, the Helsinki laser cloud, situated software. How do we enable all of this? In the words of Eliel Saarinen: always design a thing in its next larger context.

Tom Coates of Fire Eagle was hilarious. He was a good follow-up to Matt, as he talked about personal informatics, and how we are beginning to see a world where people can (if they want to) record every miniscule detail about their lives and view the information as the wish, using personal sensors. FireEagle, as a geolocator, is a part of that, and he thinks we will see an explosion of services that manage other pieces of data (think last.fm, Twitter, Flickr, 23andme, Skydeck, Mint, Google Health, Nike+iPod, Google Power Meter … besides being tools to explore and store personal information, they’re data gatherers, each gathering a single slice of data). Mobile is key to this stuff because it’s the most ubiquitous sensor we have. And real-time really excites him. Technology like XMPP is enabling this, but Tom’s view is that it’s data that’s driving new products, not technology. As more data comes available, more products become possible. Aggregators crop up, like Socialthing and Friendfeed, and for devices, Pachube. (We had our own Webstock example of real-time data aggregation: the SuiteSpot.) Tom pointed out the difference between personal information and private information: although we might talk about what should be personal and what should be private, the smartest thing to do is to put that decision in the hands of users. And a big privacy policy or terms of use doesn’t help. Be up front.

Bruce Sterling was next, but I’ll get to him in a second.

Damian Conway, the bossy little schoolgirl of web design (his words), talked about designers and users, and how we tend to think about the differences. He compared the relationship to that of Elois and Morlocks, and then to Elves and Orcs, but actually thought it was more helpful for us to think of ourselves as more akin to doctors. He proposed a Hippocratic Oath for web designers:

1. To learn and share knowledge
2. To always do your best work
3. Don’t kill the client’s business
4. Know your limitations, and get help if you need it
5. Always have the best interests of your clients in mind (often the best interests of your clients are the interests of their clients)
6. Be professional, keep your clients confidentiality.

He showed us some sites that have really got it wrong, told us most shopping carts suck (how much information do they really need to collect, six steps worth?), and was hilarious throughout. He also showed us a couple of pictures of some guys holding cats.

Bruce Sterling spoke before Damian, but I wanted to talk about him last because his presentation was something that stood alone. He was electrifying. He presented one slide, Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 meme map, and tore it to shreds. It was a deconstruction; a wake-up call, he was trying to shake us out of the fog we were in. This isn’t permanent. We got here because creative people are attracted to places that lack rightness, and the web lacked a lot of rightness, and still does. Web 2.0 had a few useful ideas, but some of those ideas (the ideas that lacked technology) were just attitudes. It’s not a platform: you can’t build a platform on a web, just like you can’t build a castle on a cloud: it’s a fantasy. The whole thing rests on an economy that is in a state of collapse. Web 2.0 is a structure built from the bones and ashes of Web 1.0 technologies: it’s bricolage. JavaScript might be the glue that holds Web 2.0 together, but if a freighter runs over our cable across the bottom of the Pacific, that glue isn’t going to hold. Ubiquity is a long way off, we may have the concepts but power sources and bandwidth hasn’t kept up: it’s an art scene, it’s a hack scene. Permanence is a fiction: the sites he linked to years ago are all gone, in 404-land. We can’t trust the so-called collective intelligence like we can’t trust the invisible hand of the market: it’s not our benefactor; it’s a force of nature, and it could turn and flatten us at any moment. With the economy in freefall, we’re about to see a Web with great big holes in it, the Transitional Web, a cyberstructure that is poverty-stricken but that we will use to keep the rain off. He encouraged us to grow up to the scale of things, see the culture for what it is, and to simply be, but be aware.

To some, he would have appeared as a ranting preacher, raving that the end is nigh. To me, it was a welcome shot of realism. We work in the best industry in the world right now, no doubt, but permanence is by no means guaranteed. We should enjoy it while it lasts, for however long that might be. Sterling’s talk was a great end to the conference (thankfully tempered by Damian Conway’s positivity), and it played on my mind as we walked out into the rain and the darkening day. Maybe it was just me but the party, awesome as it was, felt Gatsby-ish: beautiful geeks, industry celebrities, a red carpet, a band played by robots. I had a great time, but it felt of-a-time, and I wonder: what happens now?

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Wellington. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.