Tags: nat torkington
Sun 22-Feb-2009
What a week it's been at Webstock. I learnt a lot and I'll try to distil it here.
Webstock Workshops
Presentation Aikido, with Damian Conway, taught me to be competent, passionate, entertaining, prepared, stylish, interactive, and to be myself when presenting. Practice helps with all of these.
Data-mining and machine learning for social data, with Toby Segaran, opened my eyes to possibilities of learning more about our current customers.
Managing Humans and Projects, with Michael Lopp, taught me that there are 3 types of meetings: Alignment, where info is conveyed; Creation, where we brainstorm; and Therapy, where nothing useful will occur.He also taught me to state the obvious; it may not be obvious fro someone else; and that it's all about people.
Webstock Conference
Mike Brown's opening of the Conference was a great start.
Gaming Reality, with Jane McGonigal, taught me that predicting the future is less useful than designing possible futures, and working toward making the best happen. She also taught that games make us happy, and that good games amplify our potential.
Better, Stronger, Faster Failures, with Nat Torkington taught me that feedback loops lead to improvement, and failure is awesome because you learn and improve from it. To fail before the outcome of failure gets big.
The Wisdom of Communities, with Derek Powazek taught me that groups get stupid when they stop thinking, that we benefit more from large diverse groups than small groups, and that we should design to appeal to people's selfish nature.
Content, Communities & Collaboration, with Meg Pickard, taught me that people consume, react to, curate, and/or create content; that context has deposed content as being king; and that latent communities exist; that we go from being an audience to being participants to being a community.
Open, Social Web, with David Recordon taught me that social networks are currently isolated; that social application each do one good thing, and that good, interoperable, building blocks are being formed to allow us to easily build good, social sites.
A mashup case study: EveryBlock.com, with Adrian Holovaty, made we think of potential data that could freely add value to current products. (I'd still like to get up-to-date crime information to show in a map.)
Shepherding Passionate Communities, with Heather Champ, gave us rules:
- Respect your members
- Put more tools into the hands of your members
- Don't wait to make changes
- Feedback has a life-cycle
- Own your failures
- Make lemonade
- Embrace the chaos
Being Geek, with Michael Lopp, resonated as it covered how a geek relates to their surrounds, and how we can work with these traits.
The explicit, with Ze Frank, entertained with highlights of his projects. He showed how engaging with users, and showing the results of that, helps build communities and fans.
Content: Who's Doin' It Right?, with Russell Brown, taught us how big media is struggling to keep the reins of control on their information, and that the new generation is sidelining them.
Madame Butterfly On Accessibility, with Derek Featherstone, showed the problems that just meeting the accessibility guidelines is not enough, that we can do thing to make our sites even more accessible.
Your Business Plan Is Science Fiction – And That's a Good Thing, with Annalee Newitz, taught us that science fiction prepares us for the next generation of computers and technology; that it gives us the vocabulary to refer to the future products; and that we need to address the fears expressed.
Why Semantics?, with Toby Segaran, taught us what semantic data is, and how semantic models can give us fast access to data in sparse datasets. This provided additional insight into his data mining workshop earlier this week.
A retrospective of ballet classics Why Chrome?, with Ben Goodger taught us how and why Google created its Chrome browser, and it wanted to achieve.
The Demon-Haunted World, with Matt Jones, taught us how people are starting to build things form the bottom up, and to always design a thing by considering it's next largest context – chair to room to house to city….
Instrumenting your life, with Tom Coates, taught us that dealing with privacy should be used as a competitive advantage, that data, not technology is driving new products, the customers are the ones to decide whether something is personal or private (there is a difference).
The Short but Glorious Life of Web 2.0, And What Comes Afterward, by Bruce Sterling, taught me that attitudes about technology are vague; that sermons, rather than presentations, lose the interest of the audience; that you need to talk with the audience, not at them; that the message (and I believe it was important) can get lost with the delivery. Hopefully when I read it later I will get more out of it.
Web 2.0.1, with Damian Conway, was hilarious as expected. It had some important truths, including the need for a Hippocratic oath for web design.
I swear to:
- To learn and share good design practices
- And then do my best using those practices
- While avoiding the things I know to be fatal
- I will not pretend to be a specialist in technologies I know little about
- I won’t screw my clients (metaphorically)
- I will preserve my clients confidentiality
by 5 steps
- Help them to find you
- Help them to find it
- Help them to read it
- Help them to understand
- Help them to buy (or acquire) it
The standing ovation for Natasha Hall at the end of Webstock was well-deserved. I took a lot away from Webstock'09 and hope to be able to use it.
Other bits
I had a great time meeting people, putting faces to names, drinking lots of good coffee, meeting people, eating tasty ice cream, meeting people, playing the card game, and meeting people.
This was my experience with Webstock'09. What's yours?
Mon 18-Feb-2008
Thursday was the first day of the conference proper, and I started with the welcome. (My colleagues got a central table while I relaxed and enjoyed a latte over the road.)
The first speaker was Nat Torkington talking about Design for the Future. It was a great presentation and if I hear he's speaking again I'll try to attend. I'd love to work for a company that investigates future trends, and resist the effects of future shock. Learning from how others have reacted to change is one of the keys to understanding trends.
Following Nat was Molly Holzschlag talking about Why Web Standards Aren't. Today's talk wasn't any good for me. She detailed how the history of the web was best practices rather than standards. It was all historic and any web developer already knows about the lack of standards. There was nothing in her talk for me to take to the future. One of my colleagues had heard her speak in the past and recommended her. I later met her at the dinner on Friday night and really enjoyed chatting with her. If I'm ever in Tucson I'll look her up.
Morning tea was followed by streaming. I close Rachel McAlpine's Look Ma, No Quills. I read some of her online writing advice years ago. Today's talk included things I'd previously picked up, such as styles, and didn't add much to my current knowledge. I may get more when I review the notes I took and the links mentioned. She covered how content of all writings can and will be used outside of your control. You have no idea what part of your document will be used, or how, or why.
- Graphs should have the captions in the image, and not in the surrounding text.
- Readability should be about 70%
- Plain language survives font morph
- The document title is highly important, being data, meta-data, and link name.
- Titles should have 4 or more words
- Headlines in RSS must tell all, and the first few words of each post are critical
- Links are power
Rachel mentioned problems but not solutions. The new hazards are:
- Virtual: Content is cloned, plagiarised, reformatted, multiple versions, and filed badly. The date should be in the document, not stored as meta-data
- Data: Messages are bit of data. Writing is a synthesis, not simply assembling bits of data
- Toys: Knowledge workers are generally not interested in technology. People are not ready for the document as an application.
I wanted to know which of her books had the answers to these problems, but when I talked with her during the pre-dinner drinks on Friday she explained that she had no solutions. This is unfortunate as I am dealing with some of these issues now, with how content needs to be suitable for its audience. The part about how content is data, and meta-data, related to the following seminar.
