Atomiq

Squeaky roar

Evan at Halloween:

He makes a good lion (and he's a Leo, too).

Ramping up for CanUX 2008

In two months we'll be hosting the fourth annual Canadian User Experience Workshop--CanUX--at the lovely Banff Centre. The event runs from November 16 to 18, with an optional pre-conference UX Bootcamp.

We've got an excellent line-up of speakers--Dave Gray (XPLANE), Brandon Schauer (Adaptive Path) and Luke Wroblewski (Yahoo!)--with a couple of slots yet to be filled.

The great thing about CanUX is that it's more like a retreat than a conference. The people who come to participate in all the activities (like the artist-led workshops, the design slam, the show-and-tell reception and, of course, the drinking) have a great time.

As always, we've worked to keep the price low and all-inclusive. A mere $899 gets you into the event, plus two nights accommodation and meals. The price goes up next week, but it's still cheaper than a lot of other events.

The full program, speaker bios and other details are available on the CanUX website.

Melbourne Aquarium

I'm so far behind on my things-to-blog list. Anyway, until I find time to catch up, I thought I'd throw up (ha!) this short video I made at the Melbourne Aquarium, home of the world's largest oceanarium:

Evan at 1

I took this a couple of weeks before Ev's first birthday, but I like the look on his face here--eyebrow raised and cagey.

Holidays

gsmith http://atomiq.org genesmith@atomiq.org Miscellanea

Best button ever: "Create an imaginary friend"

I like FriendFeed. It's simple and useful, and it brings the utilitarian-but-well-engineered feel of Gmail to social media (several prominent Google/Gmail alums developed FriendFeed).

FriendFeed has one great and, I think, unique feature called "Create an imaginary friend." It lets you track people from other social media sites who haven't yet signed up for FriendFeed.

This is a smart and useful way of dealing with problems like cold-start and social network migration. Your friends don't need to move to FriendFeed for you to get value from it (and them).

But--honestly--the real reason I'm writing this post is because this button just makes he happy. It's an unexpected reminder of a time when I didn't need to keep track of the people I knew, when my relationships weren't a measure of my value, and when I used to hang out with Evel Knievel all day long, jumping Snake Canyon.

But I know all of this will be spoiled once I click the button. So I don't.

Australia bound

Next week I'm headed to Australia to do some speaking, have lunch with some dignitaries and take a short holiday.

I start off in the south and head north where it's warm:

July 18 - 23 - Melbourne for KM Australia
July 24 - 25 - Sydney for lunch at the Canadian Consulate and a couple of meetings
July 25 - 30 - Cairns for sightseeing

I'd love to meet up with any Australian IA/UX/IxD/web design folks while I'm there. Please drop me a line if you want to get together.

Mostly unrelated but possibly interesting to long-time readers: this trip involves about 60 hours of travel both ways, so I'm going to try finish Infinite Jest while in transit. Based on my average reading speed I should be able to read two Infinite Jests in 60 hours. But I think sleep, eating, in-flight movies and other distractions will make this a challenging goal. I will report back.

Book Excerpt: Seven Business Benefits of Tagging

I posted a link to this on our company blog a few days ago but thought I should share it here as well: Peachpit.com has a short excerpt from my book called Return on Investment: Seven Business Benefits of Tagging Systems.

The excerpt is taken from Chapter 2, which was the hardest chapter to write and, if I remember things correctly, the very last thing I submitted. I used Jess's value-centered design model to frame this chapter, so the excerpt is part of larger discussion on balancing users' needs and motivations with business benefits (a core concept of our consulting practice at nForm). Still, I think the article is a good roll-up of the concrete benefits tagging can bring to an organization.

(If you want to read more, you can buy the book on Amazon or read some of the supplementary on the book site.)

I'm shuttering Tweeterboard

Last fall I built a site called Tweeterboard. Tweeterboard was an experiment in using conversation (specifically @username messages) to measure influence within Twitter.

But this week I realized that I no longer have the time, energy, interest or technical abilities to maintain it. So I'm shutting it down.

Tweeterboard started as a fun diversion. At the time a lot of people were using follower counts as a way of finding influential people on Twitter. I thought I could do better by tracking conversation between twitterers. I started scanning people's twitter streams, and adapted Google's PageRank algorithm to produce a influence score. (If you think of @ replies as one-way links between people, you'll understand why PageRank works as way to analyze Twitter conversations.)

There were lots of good things about Tweeterboard. I learned a great deal about PHP and MySQL, and it exercised the little bits of my brain that weren't fried from dealing with a book and a baby. It had a few thousand followers on Twitter, and was a decent success by the standards of Twitter aggregators. A few people even wrote some nice things about it.

Most importantly, Tweeterboard occasionally confirmed my intuitions about who *should* be popular--like Susan Reynolds on Frozen Pea Friday and Barack Obama after he secured the democratic nomination. While Scoble and Jason Calacanis and others who make a point of collecting followers occasionally made it to the top, they weren't there consistently. So I take some satisfaction in creating something that rewarded people for conversation rather than just promiscuous friending.

Tweeterboard also had its downsides, the big one being that running an aggregator is no fun. It's difficult technically and it only makes sense at scale--it has to be big before it's really useful. I'm a decent amateur programmer, but I have to admit that I find this scaling stuff a bit dull and, actually, hard. It's the kind of thing best left to professionals. (I think the folks at Summize could do a much better job with conversation analytics.)

On top of that, there aren't all that many rewards for building things on top of Twitter. Sure, there are tons of active Twitter users. But with all the outages and the arbitrary changes in the API limits, I just haven't been feeling the love. Tweeterboard's gone from a fun diversion to a distraction.

So as of tonight, it's done.

I'll continue to use Twitter (you'll find me there as gsmith). I really hope the Twitter team is able to get that application back on track.

(With comments by drcrazy4, Susan Reynolds, ...)

Nashville!

Last week I was in Nashville, Tennessee speaking at Voices That Matter, a fine web design conference hosted by the folks at Peachpit.

The conference was great, of course. Some amazing people worked on (and around) my book and I was happy to have a chance to meet and thank them in person. That's you, Michael Nolan, Wendy Sharp, Nancy Ruenzel and Glenn Bisignani.

I was also really excited about digging into some of the culture of Nashville, paying a visit to the Hatch Show Print shop, looking at guitars and eating barbecue. So what follows is a short photo tour of my 2.5 days in Nashville.

Visting Hatch was the highlight of the trip for me. My first stop there, with Dan Brown and Jeremy Keith, was a disappointment. Here we are loitering outside the shop:

Turns out that everything cool in Nashville closes at five.

I took a cab down the next day to make sure I'd have time to look around and soak up Hatch's inky greatness. It's not a huge place, but its long history is all over the walls:

I bought two prints, Rodeo and Exclamation (pictures coming sometime... no promises), and a coffee mug.

A couple of blocks away, just across from the Country Music Hall of Fame, there's a Johnny Cash mural on a long, low purple building. It was torn up and distressed, and a lot more interesting because of it:

Here's a picture of the whole mural:

And then back on Broadway, there's the Ernest Tubb Record Shop. It looks authentic in every way except for the domain name on the marquee.

And inside the ETRS was this vaguely creepy display of fancy suits worn by yesterday's country music stars. (Not that I wouldn't love to have that Marty Stuart embroidered horseshoe number on the far right.)

Finally, not far from my hotel was a full-scale replica of the Parthenon:

I wish I'd gone inside; it looks impressive.

Overall, I really enjoyed Nashville. I hope to get back there sometime to visit the Gibson outlet store and, of course, make another stop at Hatch.

links for 2008-06-19

What's in a Word - ip.Blog

Nice, short review of my book.

(tags: tagging book reviews)

Debunking the Atheist's Nightmare

If you haven't seen "The Atheist's Nightmare," it's a short video where Ron Comfort and former TV star Kirk Cameron use a banana to prove the existence of God. It's that ridiculous, but I'm posting it here since no one I know would be persuaded by this anyway. Enjoy:

The audience for this video is clearly not atheists, skeptics or even someone who might head over to Wikipedia to read the bananas article (full of interesting facts that contradict every point in the Comfort-Cameron argument).

This video is for Christians who want to believe that atheists are fools.

But what got me interested in "The Atheist's Nightmare" was the active community on YouTube debunking this and other Kirk Cameron videos. Here's one example:

And in this video PotheadPundit fisks Cameron's appearance on the O'Reilly Factor:

I'm reminded a bit of talk.origins, the UseNet group that generated a vast amount of discussion on creationism back when UseNet was the place for conversation. The TalkOrigins archive organized much of this material into an encyclopedia of arguments against Creationism (e.g. the Index to Creationist Claims).

The archive, FAQ and jargon file were essential because the same arguments kept coming up again and again as new people joined in the talk.origins discussion. You'll find extensive refutations (with sources) on intelligent design, the watchmaker argument, transitional fossil records--Kirk Cameron invokes all of these in the O'Reilly Factor interview.

Even though this is the same conversation we were having 15 years ago on UseNet, it's interesting to watch how people adapt to new tools like iMovie and YouTube. I love the exhaustive and annotated TalkOrigins archives. But the YouTube videos make the same point in a funny and irreverent way--and that kind of suits an argument based on a banana.

Explaining the Flip video camera

Charles Wyke-Smith explains the appeal of the Flip video camera:

Charles is the author of Stylin' with CSS. We were hanging out at VTM in Nashville. And I took the video with the engraved Flip camera that I got for speaking at the event (which was a ton of fun).

The Boston Celtics on strategy vs. opportunity

At work we often talk about opportunistic growth--when you're able to expand your company because you land a big project or a long-term contract. As a professional services firm your growth is pretty tightly bound to your opportunities; unless you have a strong sales focus it's hard to plan growth.

That was on my mind when I came across this article on the Boston Celtics and their GM Danny Ainge. The Celtics, who are making their first NBA finals appearance in 21 years tonight, are a great example of the tight interplay between planning and opportunities.

After losing an early pick in last year's NBA draft--a pick that was key to their long-term strategy--Ainge worked with his number five pick to put together a trade.

Ainge tried to trade the No. 5 pick and developing big man Al Jefferson for Garnett, but Garnett didn't want to come to a losing team and the Celtics didn't want him unless he'd agree to an extension. So Ainge sent the first-round pick which, other than Paul Pierce, was his most valuable commodity to Seattle in a package for Allen.

Suddenly, Garnett was interested. Ainge picked him up from the Timberwolves in an unprecedented 7-for-1 deal and the Celtics were on their way to 66 wins the biggest turnaround in NBA history and a return to the finals against their archrival.

If you're a basketball fan, you've probably heard this tale a hundred times.

But the backstory is essential to understanding how the Celtics ended up in the finals:

The owners are effusive in their praise for Ainge not just for making big trades, but also for drafting the "chips" that he cashed in for the All-Stars.

Without picks such as Al Jefferson (15th overall), Gerald Green (18th), Delonte West (24th) and Ryan Gomes (20th in the second round), they wouldn't have been able to acquire Garnett.

"Look at the players he's drafted, down the line, who are going to be fixtures in the league," said Irv Grousbeck, Wyc's father and another member of the ownership group.

"Our strategy was to try to hit the longball, to win a championship, not to sign some midlevel players and get into the playoffs. We had to have the patience to build those chips up," Pagliuca said. "We recognized that time was an asset for us.

"We were younger. It would have taken a little longer, but I think we would have been a contender," Pagliuca said. "The second we got Garnett, we felt there was a legitimate possibility we could contend."

And so did other players in the league.

Once Allen and Garnett signed on, free agents came out of the woodwork hoping to join the team. Eddie House, James Posey, Scot Pollard, Sam Cassell and P.J. Brown all said they were eager to join a winner.

"I don't want to make it seem like this was our master plan. But our strategy was to build assets and remain opportunistic be looking for what you can do and build, build, build," Irv Grousbeck said. "If you do nothing else over time, you'll build a good team.

So there you have it: The Celtics were opportunistic, and they definitely got lucky with their free agent acquisitions. But everything flowed from their basic strategy of drafting well. It's worth noting that as two-time NBA champion with the Celtics, Ainge might be better than other GMs at assessing draft picks.

The challenge for a professional services company is that you're forced to be opportunistic all the time. In that environment, strategic planned growth is a lot more difficult.

My Webvisions Slides

Last Friday I gave a talk on tagging at Webvisions in Portland. I thought the session went well--the audience was interested and had excellent questions. Here are my slides:

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I've spoken at Webvisions twice now, and I've enjoyed it immensely both times. And even though this trip was a little too quick, I had a great time reconnecting with Bill, Dan and Rashmi. (Sorry I missed you Nick!)