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What We Learned Watching Kids with Homemade Flamethrowers
#homemadeflamethrowers
#flamethrowr
Mega secret homemade flamethrower music video on YouTube
Hwang (founder ROFLCon, @timhwang, tim at timhwang.com, brosephstalin.com)
Jacobs (@underwaterpeeps, sawyer at underwaterpeoples.com, underwaterpeoples.com)
  • Micro-genres: bodies of content that are specific yet enormous – they just haven’t been seen by anyone
    • A cluster of related work, the majority of which receives less than 50,000 views
      • Examples: slap the bag (drink an entire bag of wine, then slap the bag), dance the whip (2,850 videos), fire in the hole (10,000 videos), kids doing drugs (13,700 of salvia alone)
  • Flamethrowers (1,500 videos: 25.2 hours of video)
    • Kids are building stuff to shoot flames onto other stuff
    • Mostly kids, mostly amateur — yet the flamerthrowers get huge. Enormous flames.
    • Outside in the backyard, outside on the patio, in a forest, indoors, out the window of a car
    • Team Bonesaw: lighting a cigarette with a flamethrower
    • We’re not seeing a community here (because the same questions get asked over and over again)… just a lot of independent interactions.
  • So What?
    • the flamethrower example is the dark matter of youtube. 
    • 100,000,000 videos on youtube
    • what is actually going on inside the long tail of content? Who really looks at it?
    • micro-genres are the primordial soup of internet culture
    • ambient, historical archive on our time: continually capturing ourselves in a very genuine, amateur way for the foreseeable future. 
      • How valuable would it have been for researchers to have ambient, historical archive of videos of human behavior for the last 200 years?
    • And yet… Under Threat
  • What’s the threat?
    • Who pours the money into support platforms like YouTube?
      • The Platforms themselves. They provide the supply space for micro-genres.
      • Brands and Businesses: they use the platforms to spread their message. This is the demand element that supports the aggregators.
    • Platforms
      • We’re increasingly surrounded by devices to capture, collect, and put online data. It’s easier to transfer it, can be done at a higher rate (2G -> 3G -> 4G). This is causing an exponential growth in content
      • The monetizable content is growing an a linear rate, while all the rest of the content is growing at an exponential rate.
      • It takes a lot of resources and time to generate the monetizable content. It’s easier and easier to get the other content.
    • Brands and Business
      • Internet Celebrities
      • brands and businesses are moving into this long tail content
    • Enter the micro-genre
      • Some of it just can’t be monetized. Some is dangerous (no one wants to sponsor flamethrowers), or illegal (same for drugs), and some of it is just nothing (kids hanging out and eating McDonalds)
      • The stuff that is most culturally interested is the hardest to monetize.
    • But is there a limit?
      • Brands and businesses can sponsor down to a certain point. But somewhere there is a hard stop.
      • And the cost keeps rising.
      • There’s no love for the micro-genre. Business doesn’t sponsor based on cultural value.
    • There are potentially profitable content, and non-profitable material
      • The two live together now in places like YouTube
      • The non-profitable side is going to grow much faster
      • At a certain side, the profitable side is going to stop subsidizing the non-profitable at a certain size
      • We will lose the historical archive, the social enhancement, the primordial soup of internet culture
    • We’ll end up with something like TV
      • The profitable realm will dominate
    • Making This Stuff Culturally Sustainable
      • What is least valuable in the business realm has the most value in the cultural realm
      • So if we’re concerned about depending that space, about keeping that value, we have to do something
    • But what?
      • Create “Flamethrower Studies” – convert from a cultural curiosity to cultural study
      • Infrastructure – create infrastructure specific to it
      • Cultural Sustainability – make the case for the value so that business will accept the additional cost
      • Conservation – users of the web, as users, can make efforts to direct the web where they want it to go, influence for conservation of the resources they care about.
  • Questions
    • What about the questionable nature of the content? Don’t videos about doing drugs promote drugs?
      • The costs of going through and deciding what fits and what doesn’t fit, exceeds the costs of not allowing this content.
      • The cultural value of the open medium exceeds the cultural value of filtering out some content
    • Do we need to retain everything? Is that just an assumption from our imperial past? We need to retain every species, we need to retain every video of eating mcdonalds? Isn’t some of this just useless stuff we should just let it die?
      • It’s an over statement to say that web would die if this content goes away… It’s hard to quantify the value of any one item going away. (Will: it’s especially hard to know the future value.)
      • Sometimes the value is the community that forms: the red headed kid who made a video about being persecuted because of being a redhead, but then he found a community of supporters through followers.
    • What are the specific threats out there? net neutrality? FCC?
      • Specific case recently… chatroulette… mass media said that it was the worst thing ever, full of perverts and predators. We did some studies… Only about 8% had explicit content, which compared to the internet as a whole is really not very much at all.
    • Are there really significant marginal costs to supply and distribution? Is there any evidence to support this?
      • It’s difficult to collect data on it. (Will: no evidence)
      • The real issue may be the human bandwidth to process it… how much is coming in versus how much we process it.
    • As a teenager who did these activities, even without the internet, we still had these kinds of pranks… they just spread person to person. “How did you make that flamethrower?”
      • The main value of these videos is not that they propagate the activity, it’s that they are a snapshot in time of human behavior.
      • These things just happen… at a certain age you want to blow things up. The value is that you can capture. To compile the 25.2 hours of flamethrower video in VHS would take some serious curation. To do the same on YouTube is trivial. 
    • Any thoughts on the future of the infrastructure?
      • Holden camera has a huge community around it, even though it is a weirdly defective product. When you search on Google, you want to get the one thing you want.
      • There are good products that always do you want, bad products that never do what you want, and weird products that sometimes do what you want. 
      • If there was a random way for people to occasional be exposed to flamethrower videos, this might be useful. (Will: And this is what Rebecca Blood has been saying for years… http://www.rebeccablood.net. It’s the newspaper reading experience. You are exposed to articles you didn’t know you were interested in.)
    • Businesses always want niches. Someday “Bob’s Burn Cream” will find out about these flamethrower videos and want to advertise on them.
      • At a certain point, once the behavior is more accepted, then the advertising might be more OK. Things that are Taboo may become less taboo.
      • Why not have some disgusting snack food sponsor videos of kids getting stoned.
      • But at a certain point, do the costs of going even further niche with advertising outweight the benefit you can get. How many niches can McDonalds support or target with advertising?

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Disclosure: I work for HP.

140 character customer support
Caroline McCarthy – covering social media for CNET news
Frank Eliason – Comcast Frank @comcastcares
Toby Richards – Microsoft. Everything that’s not phone support
Lois Townsend – @ltownsend, HP’s Social Media Strategy
Jeremiah Owyang – altimeter
  • Recently in the news Kevin Smith, getting kicked off the Southwest plane. He twittered about it.
  • Is twitter really the best place for this?
    • Frank: It’s the customer’s platform. They can use it to affect policy.
    • Lois: It’s a way to connect with the customer, but not necessarily converse. Ideally you would reach them before they get so angry (like with Kevin). Our goal is to get a hold of them and get them to help. Like a virtual concierge. 
    • Frank: I disagree. It is a place for a dialogue. Kevin Smith’s problem could have gotten resolved right at the airport over twitter. But we don’t want to do different things just because someone is being loud. That isn’t customer service, that is just PR.
      • Everyone would like their cable to be free. But we can’t do that. But we can have a discussion about why it is what it is. We can become more transparent.
  • Does your PR department or your customer service department manage your twitter connection? How much should they be communicating?
    • Jeremiah: They should be wearing the same shoes. Customer support is PR. Customer’s don’t care what department you’re in, they just want their problem solved.
  • Is anyone from other parts of the company watching over you, telling you what you can and can’t say? (directed first at Toby)
    • Well, I was just part of the panel on “don’t be sued”. The attitude we have now is to be as transparent as possible. It doesn’t always mean saying yes to the customer. There’s no oversight on how we engage in customer support in the public domain. But there are core principles, and there is a conversation. You can create a harmonious working relationship with the different departments.
  • What happens if you get Kevin Smith’ed? He’s got millions of followers, and even fanboys. He can motivate a lot of people.
    • Frank: We’ve had it happen. We have some people who are very loud about it. But the biggest hit to the Comcast brand are two videos on YouTube that still show up first. They didn’t come from 1M+ followers, just regular people.
    • Frank: We had an issue with nudity during the super bowl. But we were talking about it and telling people what we knew in real time. It quickly become boring, which diffused it.
    • Toby: We’ve had lots of people come to forums with issues. One big issue, we were able to respond quickly, get a patch out, tell people about it, and issue was resolved in a week.
    • Lois: We had one, where our product appeared to be racist (referral to the webcam face detection), we responded quickly, we explained the limitations of the technology. Many of our things are pretty boring… People were frustrated by lack of drivers, we explained what goes into getting a driver released and why it took time.
  • Q: What are the listening tools?
    • Toby: We use blue ocean. We have an internal process for escalation. We have call monitoring, community forum monitoring. We have a process to get an issue to the right person fast. Some issues are really hot and require immediate respond, some are more systemic issues that we drive over time.
    • Lois: The listening tools make our jobs so exciting. We can get this information from our customers, and bring it to our colleagues, and it is extremely compelling to be able to bring customer words. HP, Microsoft, we’re big companies, and there’s tons of metrics and reports, but they are dry compared to customer words.
    • Frank: We use radiance. But you can start with twitter search, google mob search.
    • Jeremiah: We just published a report on social CRM tools. Social media is not scalable. Frank has how many managers… (10 community managers)… You can’t scale in real time.
      • Frank disagreed: it can be scaled. not all 25M customers are saying comcast, comcast, comcast all day. If so, phones wouldn’t scale either. At one time Legal said it wouldn’t scale, but Legal doesn’t review everything that goes out.
  • Q: How large are your teams? Are they spread out or in one location? How do you manage expectations of responsiveness?
    • Lois: my direct reports are very small. 11 people. But beyond that, there is an incredible virtual network… we call it the HP Ambassador problem… We have about 75 employees who are very active in responding to customer problems. It ranges from a dozen to up to a 100 people, depending on how you count.
    • Frank: We have 10 people, plus a manager. We review about 10,000 blog posts a day, about 2,000 twitter posts a day, about 200 facebook posts, about 600 forum posts a day. The bulk of the word my team is to put an email address in forums, and we get about 6,000 emails a month, and that is the bulk of what we do is refer.
    • Toby: (missed some of the data…) we have about 200 people in low-cost labor markets that are present in various online communities. We connect with people in social media… the community influencers. We can get scale, and reach by working with these community influencers.
  • Q: How do you bridge the gap between the online world and the real world (e.g. with Kevin Smith – on twitter, Kevin had received a response, but the gate agent didn’t know about.)
    • Lois: sometimes the front-line person doesn’t have the same knowledge of what can be done for a customer. We had a customer who was in Spain… our twitter person was able to get him an agent who could help him in English, in his motor home, in Spain, with his English product.
    • Frank: but have you changed your process for your Spanish speaking agents, so that they have a process for getting an English agent for a customer that needs it.
    • Lois: agreed, you solve the immediate problem, but you need to use that feedback to make improvements.
  • Q: What about using social CRM?
    • Jeremiah: We need social CRM to be able to tie customer records to these social interactions, so that we can track,
    • Frank: it’s about changing the company culture to be customer service centered
  • Problem: Are you rewarding your customers that the best way to get support is to yell at your friends?
    • Frank: the customer was already doing this before we ever showed up. They were choosing to yell. But by responding, you change these people into advocates when you help them.
    • Frank: regarding spam, we’ll look at it once, and ask if they need help, but we won’t go on forever. We can agree to disagree, and be nice throughout the whole thing. You will have sometimes people that are very personal, hurtful, and angry. You have to have thick skin in this place.
    • Toby: Agree. We have a lot of customers, those customers don’t have access to Microsoft people, they don’t see us as people. But if we can engage, that changes things.
    • Lois: You’re not being measured on the cost of the phone call in this case, so you do have the ability to carry on more of a conversation. We can learn about what happens when customers have relatively unique configurations, and then share those lessons with other customers.
    • Lois: We are, to an extent, a minor part of the community. 95% of interactions are among the community, without HP being involved. Those community interactions are really rich. People are helping each other.
  • Q: Do you have policies about employees doing social media? Do you have a social media style guide about what those interactions should look like.
    • Frank: We do have a policy. it’s simple: don’t release proprietary information that isn’t available to the public, be nice, be honest, be truthful about who you are. But we don’t center it in one style… Person should be themselves.
    • Toby: The people who are working for you to work in the community become part of the community, they are recognized as individuals. We tell people to let the marketing team make the value proposition for new products, not to tell people what they think.
  • Q: First, when you introduced social media customer support, how did you leverage traditional channels? How did you get them integrated? Second, in a global environment, how does this play out in other countries where you might have support? Third, from a b-to-2, what kind of social channels are you planning for that?
    • Jeremiah: tell people on phone hold about your community, show it on your website. on the website, it shows that there is a thriving community.
    • Lois: We did forums early, but they were very agent focused. Not much of a true community, just a different kind of agent support. When we relaunched, we worked hard to foster the community.
    • Toby: When we start a new community or venture, we have a dedicated team at first, and after the kinks are worked out, then we diffuse it into the rest of the organization. We believe in having a center of excellence, in making sure we have the skills to engage with customers online.
    • Lois: We started with English, then did six additional languages. Now we’re focused on improving those forums. When you do language localization for official support, it has to be perfect. When people communicate in forums, they are very forgiving of 2nd, 3rd levels – it just has to be helpful, it doesn’t have to be perfect.
  • Q: How to deal with dissonance of excellent customer service via twitter versus torturous customer service by phone.
    • Frank: we have to put it in the face of executives to show it. We’re measuring on the number of customers we help, not how many emails we send. So we work to do something with the feedback we get. Not overnight, but we are changing. Comcast’s credo is now centered on best customer experience. 

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AI 2010: Wall-e or Rise of the Machines?
#ai2010
PRESENTERS
 Mason Hale
 Doug Lenat
 Bart Selman
 Natasha Vita-More
 Peter Stone
  • Presentation started with history of AI from the Mechanical Turk through Vernor Vinge writings, from Deep Blue in 1997 through Ray Kurzweil’s Technological Singularity in 2029.
  • Doug Lenat
    • founder of two AI companies
    • Whatever Happened to AI? (title of an article he wrote, came out about a year ago)
    • You can’t get answers to simple questions from a search engine: is the space needle taller than the eiffel tower? who was president when obama was born?
      • You can get hits, and read those hits.
      • essentially a gloried dog fetching the newspaper
    • understanding natural language, speed, images… requires lots of general knowledge
      • Mary and Sue are sisters. (are they each other’s sisters? or just sisters of other people?)
    • There is no free lunch… we have to prime the pump: thousands of years of knowledge had to be communicated with the machine
      • At odds with sci-fi, evolution, academia
      • But there has been one mega-engineering effort: Cyc
        • http://cyc.com
        • Build millions of years of common sense into an expert system
    • Today: experts which are not idiots savant
    • 2015*: question answering -> semantic search -> syntactic search
      • answer the question if you can, if you can’t, fall back to meaning search, if you can’t, fall back to today’s syntactic search
    • 2020*: cradle->to->grave mental prosthesis
    • * assumes a 2013 crowdsourced knowledge acquisition
      • it’s a web based game that asks questions like “i believe that clenching one’s fists expresses frustration: true or false”
  • Peter Stone
    • Progress in artificial intelligence: the challenge problem approach
    • Non-verbal AI. 
    • A Goal of AI: Robust, fully autonomous agents that exist in the real world
    • Good problems produce good science
      • Manned flight
      • Apollo mission
      • Manhattan project
    • Goal: by the year 2050, a team of humanoid robots that can beat a championship team playing soccer
      • RoboCup 1997-1998: early robots. complete system of vision, movement, and decision.
      • RoboCup 2005-2006: robots are individually better, playing as a team. Robots are fully autonomous.
    • Many Advances due to RoboCup
      • they are seeing the world, figuring out where they are, working together.
    • Other good AI challenges
      • Trading Agents
      • Autonomous vehicles
      • Multiagent reasoning
    • Darpa Grand Challenge
      • Urban Challenge continues in the right direction – moves the competition into driving in traffic
      • It is now technically feasible to have cars that can drive themselves
      • Awesome example of a traffic intersection with all robot drivers: they use a reservation system for driving through the intersection. No need for traffic lights, just work out an optimal pattern for all cars to make it through the intersection.
  • Natasha Vita-More
    • consultant to singularity university. looks at impact of technology on society and culture
    • Immersion: the fusion of life and interactivity
    • We see a synthesis of technologies that are converging, including nanotechnology and AI
    • We are not going to be 100% biological humans in the coming decades
    • Augmentation
    • 3 complex issues
      • Enhancement: what is human enhancement and what are its media?
      • Normality: what is normal and will there be new criteria for normal?
      • Behavior: will they be familiar or feaful?
    • Enhancement
      • therapeutic enablement
      • selective enhancement
      • radical transformation
    • Creating multiple bio-synthetic personas
      • species issue: life and death
      • social issue: human and non-human rights 
      • individual issues: identity
    • Addressing design bioethics
      • life as a network of information gathering, retrieving, storing, exchanging…
    • Showed pictures of different design/art looking at future humans
    • AI Metabrain: What would it be like if our intelligence could increase? How far could that go? If we could add augmentation to our metacortex.
      • Future prosthetic, attached physically or virtually
      • Would be combination of cognitive science, neuroscience, nanotechnology
    • What will normal be? Will an unaugumented person be considered disabled? How will human thought merge with artificial intelligence? Lots of questions…
  • Bart Selman
    • AAAI Presidential Panel on Long Term AI Futures
    • One example is how to keep humans in the loop. Example, when you have military drones, who should decide to fire? One line of reasoning says humans make the final decision. But there is substantial pressure to take humans out to speed up reaction time, because it is far faster to have the machine make a judgement call than a human.
    • On plane autopilots:
      • “Current pilots are less able to fly the plane than a few years ago because they rely on the autopilot so much”
      • When pilots turn off the autopilot, they (the human pilot) then tends to make mistakes – usually because the autopilot was in a complex situation it couldn’t figure out, but the human is not any better at figuring it out.
  • Questions
    • There are now examples of human+machine playing chess against human+machine. (uh, this is not a question.)
    • Can AI be good at predicting and/or generating beautiful artistic outputs?
      • There is some example of an algorithm doing paintings.
      • Art and human is in the eye of the beholder. 
    • Are we going about it the wrong way – trying to create AI that copies human intelligence, rather than just something unique (will: i think this was the question)
      • With Deep Blue, Kasparov said that he saw the machine play creative moves.
      • Humans are a wonderful existance proof that something human sized can be intelligence, but at a certain point it’s like trying to build a flying machine using a bird as a model. The bird proves it is possible, but a plane is very different than a bird.
    • Bill Joy wrote that science needs to slow down, because it is going faster than we can manage it. What do you think?
      • We’re not, by default, building ethical behavior into robots. But that is something we need to be doing.
      • You give the robot ten dollars and tell it to get the car washed. It comes back several hours later, and the car isn’t washed. You ask what happened. It says that it donated the money to hunger relief. 
        • It’s hard to figure out ethics. You could say that it is ethically better to donate the money to hunger relief than to get a car washed. That has to be weighed against the ethic of doing what it was told to do. How do you judge, prioritize, balance these ethical issues?
    • …
    • One idea is that you can download your conscious onto a computer, and then run it there. What is the feasibility of that?
      • it’s called brain emulation
      • it’s in theory possible, but not in the next 50 years
      • there’s a question that intelligence/consciousness might not exist without being embodied.
      • besides, is it even ethical to spawn another intelligence, and then expect it to do what you want to do? 
    • How can you tell the difference, looking at the RoboCup competition, how can you tell whether behavior you are witnessing is a bug or a breakthrough?
      • It’s a breakthrough if they are doing well, and a bug if they are not. It’s easier in the context of RoboCup because the criteria for success are well defined.

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Given that this panel was pitched as a followup to the missed opportunity from last year’s “New Think for Old Publishers”, I was expecting more out of it. It still felt a little light, and somehow missed the energy of last year’s panel. — Will
A Brave New Future For Book Publishing
#futurebook
Kevin Smokler @weegee
Kassia Krozer @booksquare
Pablo Defendini @pablod, Tor.com/Macmillan (Cory Doctorow’s publisher)
Matthew Cavnar @vooktv Sr. Director of Content, Vook
Debbie Stier @debbiestier (Sr. VP. Associate Publisher HarperStudio, Director of Digital Marketing, Harper Collins)
  • 80% of books published do not make the money back that was spent on them
  • 40% of books shipped are returned unsold
  • Borders may go under, and if they do X% of retail establishments in the U.S. will be gone.
  • Is the iPad game-changing?
    • iPad will be entry point for casual ereader use, people who don’t own ereaders. they will get comfortable with it.
    • Vook: it’s going to allow us to combine video plus a book, and that is going to be very, very compelling
    • Any device that gets book to the reader in the most frictionless way possible is going to be good. 
    • Talk about typical customer: mom, very busy, wants one device, wants it to be easy.
  • Kindle set prices at $9.99. If you buy from an independent store, it’s the same price as a hardcover – $28.99. How can an ebook cost the same as a hardcover?
    • Regardless of what the price is, it should be set by the market, not set artificially. If you put the price control with the publisher, they can experiment to see what makes the book sell.
    • What the market will bear is what the price should be, and it should vary by book. but we think to think about alternate ways about how to bring revenue and profit to the author and publisher. Don’t be locked in by the old model which is out of sync with the world today.
    • The author, the publisher, and the reader all have different valuations of a book. Sometimes even after you read it the value changes…
      • (Will: make it easy to donate to author after reading?)
  • What about the book as just the mothership for a community around the book/author?
    • If you separate the content from the vessel (e.g. memoir vs. published book), then you can figure out the best vessel for the content. Is a book always the right thing? Why is a book publisher any different than a movie studio or a music producer, why isn’t it all just a media business?
    • Movie studios have figured this out. They don’t just make a movie. They make a brand, that has spinoffs, and related products, and toys, and characters.
    • Example book: Breakaway Japanese Cooking: i’m getting some narrative, i’m getting some recipes, and i’m getting some video all from the author. The role of the publisher must change to use all the assets.
  • A New Kind of Author…
    • The Happiness Project: had a huge following, big community even before they wrote the book. 
      • The publisher always wants to know “What’s your platform?” — it used to be where did you speak, what have you published, and now it is “how many twitter followers do you have, friends on facebook, what’s your blog readership.”
    • The Pioneer Woman
    • Certain kinds of authors have the infrastructure in place to do so much on their own. So they can go to a publisher and say “what can you do for me?”, and the publisher has to show their worth.
  • Books as Art Object
    • (photo shown) beautiful editions of previously published books
    • doing ebooks would allow publishers to do more with low print run / high value editions.
    • these special books have value beyond just a vessel for reading.
  • Can anyone compete with traditional publishers…
    • Yes, because anyone could build an empire on their own like Gary V.
    • Yes, and no. Because we could be collaborators. 
    • It would take a lot of blood and sweat.
    • But someone could easily do that on their own.
    • Defendini, who runs a science fiction site, is asked if io9 is his competition. No, they are my colleagues.
    • In the same way that blogging is very accessible to soccer moms today, in five years from now, Adobe will make it just as easy to publish a book
  • Is a book becoming more like software?
    • Yes, it is becoming more of an iterative process. Like a wiki or blog, you can iterate and add to it over time. Editors and publishers need to integrate this… Yes, we took this gold master to press, but we need to keep taking new related content.
  • Questions…
      • Will print on demand really become part of the industry?
        • Yes, absolutely. 
        • Espresso Book Machine: Put in a PDF, and out comes a trade book 5 minutes later. As the price goes down, why not put that into every bookstore?
        • The bookstore of the future will be a coffee, a staff recommendations shelves, and an Espresso Book Machine. You’ll get any book you want.
      • Is the hardcover/software model broken? Don’t the $5 firesale hardcovers eat into the soft cover sale?
        • Some problems.
        • Hard cover sales are very important. When a publisher recoups cost, it usually comes from hardcover sales.
        • Hardcovers do get more credibility for reviewers, even though that is outdated.
      • Transmedia Storytelling… hard to find people in book publishing who is doing it. Hollywood is doing it. Why aren’t publishers doing it more? Random House is doing it a little. There is a transmedia hollywood.
        • It’s a little complicated from a rights perspective. Book rights are very distributed. 

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Scoring a Tech Book Deal
#techbookdeal
Robert Hoekman Jr
  • Five things you need
    • A sellable idea
      • A sellable idea has to be a good idea, but it has to be more
      • it has to fill a need
      • it has to fill a gap that other books don’t fill
    • Evidence that you are the one to author this book
      • Sell yourself to the acquisition editor
      • You have to prove that not only you can write this book, but that you are THE one to write
      • It’s not just qualifications. “I never had the title Interaction Designer”, but it was a huge part of my work.
      • Q: What are qualifications?
        • Do you have a blog
        • Do you have 5,000 twitter followers
        • Other ways you can illustrate that you are listened to
        • Do you participate in forums where you are a recognized leader
        • Your proposal should include your explanation
        • “The first thing I do is Google you”
        • A writing sample. Could be a sample chapter, or something else in the style of the proposed book. Show that you can communicate and that you can educate people on the subject
    • A willingness to change your idea (#4)
      • Your original idea may not be as sellable as what you think
      • Your acquisitions editor will help you shape the idea to something you can use
    • Thick Skin (#5)
      • Your development editor will shred you during the writing. It’s their job. You don’t write as well as you think you do.
      • Your readers will shred you. It’s the internet.
    • A really good relationship (bonus)
      • If you are on the verge of divorce, it will be the end of your marriage.
      • You really need a supportive partner.
      • When you are working on the book, you don’t get your other jobs done… 
        • taking care of kids, taking out the garbage
  • Q: What about agents?
    • Entirely optional
    • Might help you get more money
  • Q: What goes in a proposal?
    • Publisher will document it. You’ll find it on their website.
  • Q: Rapor with development editor?
    • Needs to be good. If isn’t compatible, you could talk to the acquisitions editor, about another editor.
    • On the flip side, the editor is always right. If it’s not working, it’s possible the book will just get killed.
  • Q: What about sending a draft of an entire book?
    • Absolutely not. They will reject it outright. They want the development editor to shape the book. If you’ve written the whole book, they can’t shape it. It’s like writing an entire web application before getting any feedback/guidance.
    • Table of content plus sample chapter is the most you should send.
  • Q: What about title of the book and cover design?
    • Don’t send it. It marks you as someone who will be difficult to work with because you are coming in with hard and fast notions. The publisher might ask you later for ideas.
  • Q: What about things that are not strictly tech. Maybe partly tech.
    • The publisher will talk to sales rep, marketing department, book buyers to see what they would buy.
    • If the book you have wouldn’t get shelved with the tech books, then the book buyer wouldn’t buy it. That’s a different book buyer. They won’t do one-off books. 
      • A little less important on Amazon.com, and critically important in brick and mortar stores.
  • The best reason to go to a publisher is that they have a reach that you don’t have unless your 37 signals.
  • You shouldn’t be in this to make money. It’s just not going to happen. And the publishing business margins are so thin these days, there is no chance of negotiation.
  • Q: What about screenshots and images?
    • Your development editor will say “we need more images here and here”
    • The compositor will work to fit images and screenshots to the space available and made it look the best possible given space available and printing technology
  • Every publisher will have a proposal template for what they are looking for
  • You should be able to explain your book in one sentence, you’re in good shape.
  • Q: What should be the sample chapter?
    • I tell people I need a writing sample. I need to know what your voice is like, your tone. I want the writing sample to match the type of book you are proposing. But it is not essential to be an actual sample chapter.
    • Writing a sample chapter is helpful, we don’t want people to write it just to write it, but it can be helpful
  • “5,000 followers on twitter” — mentioned many times. A magic number for publishers to know you are compelling???
  • Don’t make sloppy mistakes: 
    • If you are writing a proposal to O’Reilly, don’t say “I really want to publish with New Line”
    • Don’t have spelling errors.
  • Agents:
    • Publisher will always low-ball the agent, because they know they are going to have to negotiate. If you are a first-time author, I’ll just offer what I think we would have ended up with.
    • If you come from an agent I trust, then yes, I will look at it more closely. But if it is an agent I don’t know, then it’s no different than coming yourself.
  • You get paid an advance, that’s an advance payment on royalties. 
    • Advance can be around $10K, is not trending any higher over time. 
    • Royalties can be 10% to 12%, for as long as book sells
  • We’re not looking for writers who want to write 20 books. We’re looking for (as an example) an interaction designer who is incredible passionate about interaction design and wants to share that.

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Sorry, I got there about 30 minutes late, and so I have only partial notes for this session.

Andrew McAfee
What Corporate America Thinks about Enterprise 2.0
#corpamericathink
  • How to talk to your bosses about technology
    • Use before and after comparisons instead of demos
      • example: search using MIT’s internal search, versus Google search
        • when i want to find the MIT search site, I use Google
        • “strength weak ties”
        • “granovetter weak ties”
        • 49 search results from MIT research, but not one was the right one
        • use Google Scholar
          • granovetter weak ties
          • first result: the right paper, can download the full text, the list of citations, etc.
      • google scholar put together in someone’s spare time over a few months
    • Present theories and frameworks, not jargon
      • grounded in bullet-proof previous work
      • example: a knowledge worker’s view of the enterprise
        • concentric circles
          • none -> potential -> weak -> strong ties
        • then explain how facebook helps build, strengthen, manage the weak ties
    • Present data, case studies, narratives
      • Not about Google, Amazon, etc.
      • “I make dog food for a living, literally, my company is 60 years old, not 10, college students aren’t running to work here, I’m not Google”
      • Examples:
        • Internal Uses Case Study
          • Access to Knowledge (68% report 30% improvement)
        • “We can’t do it because we have security concerns” –> Really, because the CIA is doing it, and they have some serious security
        • “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive” – Lew Platt, Former Hewlett-Packard CEO
    • Activate Peer effects
    • Anticipate and allay concerns
      • don’t wait for the questions, and don’t appear to be some dewy-eyed technologist. 
    • Show that you understand their problems is very important
    • Don’t treat business colleagues like geeks, or dopes
      • Very few are geeks
      • None like to be talked down to
      • Don’t talk to them like they are part of the problem
  • 2.0 Adoption Council – http://www.20adoptioncouncil.com 
    • Helps people get 2.0 stuff adopted inside corporate organizations
  • Questions
    • How does Enterprise 2.0 related to new leadership inside organizations?
      • The job of a leader is to find the spark of genius inside an organization — Nelson Mandela
      • So many times I have found people inside an organization saying “Yes, I have that data you’re looking for, no one here is interested in”. 
      • The technology toolkit to find these sparks of genius has gone from zero to 60 in just a few years
    • Age demographics of workers
      • The default mode of working has switched from working in private to working in public — at a certain age group
      • It’s a really important shift, and many older knowledge workers have a had time adapting to that.
      • “The world can benefit from some of our point-to-point interactions if they are done in public.” — some undergrads explained to McAfee
      • “Why would I wait until my work is done to share it? Then it is too late to get any help.”
    • Forward thinking executives now understand customer service has shifted, the expectations have shifted. The corporation is no longer driving the customer message.
      • it takes time
      • a technology revolution does not immediately create an organizational revolution
      • the organization needs to get the message from the top. if they think it is just another flavor of the month, then they’ll wait it
    • what about organizations in the public sector: governments, academia, etc. seem slow to adopt.
      • there are more similarities than differences, but one key thing is that business is in competition, and if they don’t keep up, they will fail. government doesn’t have that pressure. 
    • what about the cluetrain manifesto
      • it is very focused on the marketing communication…how to deal with current and prospective customers
      • the marketshare of old things versus new things is shifting, but not as apocalyptic as they described
    • tried to implement yammer in organization, and it failed miserably. now i am afraid to try anything else.
      • if you are a believer, try to address a different part of the organization or a different need.

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Gmail: Behind The Scenes
#gmailbehindscenes
Presenters:
pastedGraphic.pdf Arielle Reinstein
pastedGraphic_1.pdf Braden Kowitz
pastedGraphic_2.pdf Edward Ho
pastedGraphic_3.pdf Jonathan Perlow
pastedGraphic_4.pdf Todd Jackson
Packed room. – Will
  • photo shown: google offices. each person has a ~5 foot long desk, 2 24” monitors. open layout.
  • Jon Perlow: Software Engineer, Gmail Frontend
    • Best known for Mail Goggles: prevents drunken emails by testing you with math problems.
    • Gmail is at it’s best when we start with something that seems crazy at the time. Not necessarily that we know how to do it. But that it would be great for the user.
    • Started with…
      • Email that you would never need to delete anything
      • Spam filters that would just work
      • HTML/javascript interface that felt just as good as desktop applications
    • We didn’t know how to do any of those things.
    • They asked me to implement integrated chat. Browser based chat up to that time was really clunky. if we had limited ourselves to what we knew how to do, we wouldn’t have attempted it. 
    • Think about what is best for the user, and then try to do it.
    • Most of the things we do fail. Lots of false starts before anything launches.
    • Four years ago we worked on stuff like Google buzz.
    • you keep trying until you figure it out.
  • Arielle Reinstein
    • Product Marketing Manager
      • In charge of Gmail blog
      • Gmail sticker set: you could send an envelope and they would send you stickers.
      • Has to deal with outages
    • With scarcity comes demand. People were selling their souls to get a Gmail invite. They thought it was brilliant marketing. In fact, it was just to manage demand. They had never had a free service with so much space.
    • They focus now on how to do word of mouth. 
    • Poll: who in the audience got gmail via banner ad (zero), via signing up at website (almost none), via invite from friend (almost everyone)
    • They work now on generating buzz when they don’t have to manage demand.
    • They have done banner ads, and PR campaigns, but in fact, that is just a drop in the bucket compared to their organic growth.
  • Ed Ho
    • Technical Lead for Google Buzz
    • Was a founding member of Yahoo pipes
    • Building an engineering team culture is at least as important as code quality.
    • He wanted a super engineering team
      • Team to feel like they were on a mission. they could do it, they were one team, they didn’t feel split across front-end and back-end. 
      • Ideas come from everywhere. Someone else might have a might better idea. 
      • I wanted lightning fast decisions, not sitting in for hours in design meetings.
    • Branded the team internally. The people came from all different places. 
      • We called it the Taco Town team.
      • We labeled the milestones after the layers of the Taco Town taco.
      • It was fun, and memorable.
    • Key team things
      • Started the team off by not having a regular team meeting. Didn’t focus on any metrics. Instead we did demos. 
      • Focus team on execution.
      • Not on what you might do, what you say you will do, not what will happen in the future.
      • Open layout, closely together. You can turn to someone and ask a question. No meetings, no IM, no emails.
      • Q: Team is very interruption driven. Doesn’t that interfere with productivity?
        • We want the interrupt driven because we can avoid meetings, and because people can overhear conversations. You can absorb more when the conversations are going on around you. People can quickly in ad-hoc way contribute to conversation and save time.
        • The biggest time wasters are leaving your seat to go to a meeting. It’s less of an interrupt if you your work is still on the screen in front of you.
  • Todd Jackson
    • We do lots of things at Google by consensus. how do you do it well.
    • Product Manager, Gmail and Google Buzz
    • The product managers job is to work closely with engineers to figure out how to put the technology together to make sense to the user. 
      • The ratio of engineer to product managers is 30:1.
      • No one reports to product manager
      • So the only way that the product manager can get anything done is to help build consensus
    • Shit funnel versus for shit umbrella
      • If you are a shit funnel, you funnel all the shit onto your team, and interrupt them all the time.
      • If you are a shit umbrella, you protect your team from it
  • Braden Kowitz
    • user Experience, Google Ventures
  • Work environment…
    • We used to have people split across many different offices
    • We consolidated to fewer offices, but we still have 24 hour coverage
    • Mostly in Mt View, some in Seattle, some in Zurich.
    • By covering Mt View and Zurich, we can cover around the clock – if someone submits a bug at 10pm, people can start working on it right away
  • Gmail scale
    • Google uses Gmail for their mail
    • hundreds of millions of user
    • 53 languages
    • millions of lines of code
    • several hundred thousand lines of javascript
    • C++
  • What is your process like? From having an idea to shipping it
    • It’s pretty chaotic.
    • If you have an idea for something, you do it. You build a prototype or a mockup, and you should it to people, and the idea takes steam.
    • Engineers can push their code changes to a special set of servers, and then the engineers can switch their accounts to those servers. It allows for a tight evolution loop, because all the engineers can start looking at it.
    • Labs is another testing ground, because they can get user feedback, and get a compelling story for why we should release it to the entire world.
    • For example, we released a feature in Labs called “undo send”.
      • debated it for two years because it touched a lot of the stack
      • an engineer, not on the core team, in japan, just implemented it. 
      • it went to labs, and it was most popular, and proved the feasability.
  • We were adding a new feature (drag to labels), but we were fanatical that we would not slow down the user experience. We stopped ship over this. Even though we knew draggle email would be very popular feature, we could not compromise speed. So we worked on a design change — draggable handles, which increased discoverability, and avoided performance hit
  • Buzz Launch — Privacy issues at launch
    • We didn’t discover it inside Gmail, because, to a certain extent, we were in a trusted environment. We didn’t need to be private inside. Once we realized the concern, we made changes.
  • Announcing things before they launch…
    • We usually don’t like to do it, because users want to use it right away.
    • But if we’re going to change the way the system works, then we do need to announce it.
    • We’re doing a little bit more of it in response to user feedback. If people ask us for inbox controls, and it takes us a week to localize it, then we will announce that it is coming so that people won’t worry that it is coming
  • Q: What are your metrics for success?
    • We care about 1 day users, and 7 day users, and “5 of 7 days users”, because we want to focus on our heaviest users. Not 30 day users. We look a lot on users.
    • We have a survey that will pop up in the right hand corner (very low frequency)
      • Look at spam, look at how people rate the speed
      • We saw that people thought Gmail got faster when we changed the color.
  • Q: Do you have user interaction designers?
    • Yes, we do. But our designers are also very technical. Most of them have CS degrees. So perhaps not purely designers.
  • Q: Buzz: personal or business?
    • Millions of people using it
    • We plan to release it for google apps for your domain
    • We find that people can use it to see what is going on inside your company
  • Q: Do you use unit testing?
    • Yes. Not initially, but about 2 or 3 years ago, we became heavily test driven.
  • Q: Any plans to improve Contacts experience.
    • yes, but we can’t go into too much details
    • it keeps me up at night
  • Q: Do features ever get killed for lack of adoption?
    • yes, we’ve killed labs projects.
    • We killed right-side labels, a Labs project, when we introduced draggable emails.
    • We hate to kill anything because there are also some users that love it.
    • There is an online petition to bring back one particular feature.
    • It is hard to get rid of things, but… if it stands in the way of bringing some really useful, we will do it.
    • People complain if we add features, people complain if we remove features, people complain if we don’t innovate and make changes. So we try to do the features that will do the greatest good for the greatest number of users.
  • Q: I’ve never clicked on a Gmail ad. Do they make money?
    • Yes, we can’t go into details, but it is healthy.
    • We are trying to show less ads, but better performing ones.
  • Q: Why wasn’t Wave built into Gmail like Buzz?
    • It was the way it was built. the team was trying to go from scratch.
    • There are some projects that are leapfrog projects: and Wave is one of those.
  • Q: Google Buzz for enterprise – when available?
    • Next couple of months
  • Q: Impressed by framework that allowed them to respond so quickly to buzz launch problems
    • A: Just work really, really hard. We realize the mistake we made, and some people didn’t leave the office until it is fixed. We slept there.
  • Q: How do you feel when you see 3rd parties develop plugins?
    • We love it.
    • We worry that greasemonkey scripts can be somewhat fragile

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Wow, I loved this presentation! Feel like a programming kung fu master… – Will
Revenge Of Kick-Ass Mash-Ups with Punk Rock APIs
Kent Brewster
@kentbrew
  • Notable Mash-Ups
    • Google Maps Mash-Up: first recorded AJAX mach-up, probably inspired most of the state of the modern art.
    • Flickr Blog badges
  • Punk Rock: DIY ethic
    • Other generative things
      • lego blocks, erectors sets, refrigerator boxes
      • original apple //e
    • is your site sterile?
      • users are cows, not customers
      • real customers are coke and GM
      • any unauthorized use is abuse
  • Your existing API
    • you already have an API: HTML
    • you’re already being screen-scraped
      • you know this
  • If you open up an API, you get pinpoint data about how it is being used.
    • Sterile APIs: HTML, RSS
    • Generative APIs: Free.
    • Punk Rock APIs: use generative APIs to turn sterile APIs into generative APIs.
  • Job interview at netflix: asked to review code. looking through real source code, he found that they had cribbed his own code. hired.
  • Netflix Bubble Widgets
    • single line javascript include
  • Pipes.yahoo.com
    • this is why yahoo is still relevant. they are doing amazing stuff like pipes.
  • Some very little javascript can do amazing things because it relies on Yahoo Pipes to do the heavy lifting.
  • YQL: yahoo query language. amazing tool.
    • select * from twitter.search where q=‘earthquake’;
    • This works because the community contributes tables (see community tables) that actually do the fetching/parsing of the data.
  • bit.ly/kb_twit 
  • bit.ly/kb_sxsw
    • used YQL, and a bit of xpath.
    • filtered results, nice presentation, runs fast.
  • Advice for Hackers
    • Go easy on the server. Since every request comes from a separate IP address, client-side mash-ups look like botnet attacks.
    • Respect robots.txt
      • Pipes and YQL respect robots.txt
    • Create and pass an application ID even if it’s not required. 
    • Let the site now what you’re doing. They might hire you. 
  • Advice for Site Owners
    • Build your API first. Build your site on your API, and then open it up to the community. Example: Flickr.
    • Whitelist Pipes and YQL: It’s the right thing to do.
      • They are giving you a free API caching mechanism
      • Twitter has done it. If you are running up against twitter API limits, try it.
  • How to open an API where you work
    • Build an interesting mash-up
    • Write the documentation for the API you wish you had.
    • Don’t write a spec. Write the actual docs.
    • Give it to the back-end guys.
  • To Be Useful for Client-Side Mash-Ups
    • Return Javascript
    • Wrap the requested JSON in the client’s preferred Javascript callback
  • To be useful for repeated calls… (some complicated stuff I didn’t get)
    • something having to do with square brackets
  • Every Javascript reply must have HTTP Status 200
    • If it comes back with anything else, the browser won’t see the response and the calling script will hang forever.
  • Demo the Last: Missing Kids CAPTCHA
  • Questions…
    • What if a call never returns?
      • You have to set a timeout. Probably requires a global variable. 
    • Examples of business mashups? Examples of doing it to correct a company’s bad UI?
      • People are more interesting to me… so not so aware.
      • Don’t surprise anyone in your IT group. If you should it to your boss, and they think it is awesome, you’ve really stuck the IT group in a corner.
    • If you’re a company, and you’ve never done this before, go talk to Mashery, or other companies like that.

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Valerie Casey — Keynote
Designing A movement
Integrating Sustainability Through Systems Thinking
  • despite the fact that the design community has been absent from sustainability up until this point, it is exactly the interactive community that will be critical going forward
  • will talk about using system thinking to create an interaction point with this tech community for them to help in sustainability
  • Kurt Vonnegan: there are a set of archtypical stories
    • good fortune and bad fortune on the vertical axis
    • time from beginning to end on the horizontal axis
    • you can plot stories on these two axis.
    • there is a third narrative you can plot
      • Kafka’s metamorphosis: an already unhappy man turns into a cockroach
  • The Kafka narrative is the prevailing narrative for sustainability
    • Child sitting in an e-waste dump in China. 100M computers a year, 300M cell phones. Families go through these dumps. It is so toxic, people vastly more lead in the bodies, open cuts and sores and rashes on their bodies, vastly more likely to miscarry a child
    • North Pacific Garbage Pack: floating mass of plastic about twice the size of Texas.
      • Albatrosses mistook pieces of floating plastic for food, and fed them to children. Photo of baby albatross, dead, body rotted away, full of plastic where their body used to be.
    • “Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac?”
      • The government subsidizes meat and dairy industries… 73% of subsidies go to meat and dairy. Exact opposite of what is recommended for nutrition.
    • Burn pits in Iraq: big gashes in ground, 24 hours a week, 7 days a week, fueled by petroleum products, used as garbage pits: throw everything in from amputated limbs to humvees to paper waste to human waste. A soldier in Iraq is now much more likely to die from breathing the fumes from these pits than to die in combat. Not just 1 to 1, but many to 1 ratio.
    • The polar ice cap puts enough pressure on the earth’s plates to keep them from moving. If the ice caps melt, the plates will move. Which creates tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanos, which amplifies the corrupt governments that allow/cause people to build building they should never have built.
  • A barrage of negative imagery, negative messages – doom and gloom that paralyzes you.
  • Look at sustainability, environmental issues from a creativity, optimism perspective.
  • Designer’s Accord
    • kyoto treaty of design
    • five guidelines
      • range from personal accountability to collective accountability
        • education myself 
        • share my successes and my failures and compromises. talk about when you’ve made compromises and you just won’t do it again.
    • use townhall meetings…
      • I want the permission to not know. I want to be able to ask questions when I don’t know. So we can work through these difficult things, not by myself, but with other people.
    • Use case studies… each week, to consistently address things
      • About what works
    • Educate a new generation of designers
    • school: by design – pairing up college students with high school students, to take sustainability out of the ghetto of sustainability
    • This movement has growth…
      • 639 design firm adopters
      • 33 educational adopters
      • 32 corporate adopters
    • Magazine covers… all green. Bizarre ways to talk about sustainability. There are much more interesting and complex ways to talk about sustainability.
    • We can’t think about sustainability as something that sits outside what you do everyday.
      • We can affect it with everything we do (analogy of moving a string, every movement causes other parts of the string to move)
  • Systems thinking
    • a system is more than the sum of its part (#1)
      • e.g. hippo roller: women and child walking 5 miles a day to get water. women and children couldn’t work or go to school, because they were just walking to get water.
        • they invented rolling barrel that holds 24 gallons, instead of 5. easier on body, easier to move.
        • but there was a quality problem in manufacturing: for every 75 that got to the end user, 50 were thrown out because of quality issues.
        • and they were very expensive to ship because of the size of the unit.
        • engineers without borders helped redesign it to improve quality, and made a nested design that allowed 3 units to be shipped in the space of 1 old unit.
        • but eco-nazis were outraged because the units weren’t made of recycled plastic. but the engineers had looked, but couldn’t find a sufficient source. the eco-nazis were failing to look at the bigger picture.
    • feedback delays + bounded rationality = design traps (#2)
      • I can only made decisions based on the information I have around me.
      • Example: Dell compact desktop – meets epeat requirements, special ecopacking requirements.
        • by designing for the symption (energy, recyclability), it missed the point that we shouldn’t be designing another desktop computer. (Will: I don’t get it. What should they have been doing?)
      • Bought tacos in san francisco, and tracked ingredients. All the ingredients for the taco had travelled a collective 60,000+ miles to get to san francisco. 
        • prevailing thinking is that local is good, and global is bad.
        • discovered that the salt and cheese was local.
        • avocado from chile.
        • they looked at the embodied energy for each of the ingredients.
          • e.g. tomatoes grown in greenhouse versus those grown naturally and shipped
    • creating the right measurement of success (#4)
      • prevailing indicator is gross domestic product, which measures money in the economy.
        • if there are more car crashes, more money is spent on medical bills and fixing cars, and the indicator of wellbeing goes up, which is counter to actual life
      • ecological standards look at what the land performed in terms of water filtration, air filtration, and ensure that the built environment will do the same thing.
        • different than LEED, which mostly just looks at how to make a building less bad.
    • selecting the correct level for change (#5)
      • people tend to identify the wrong thing to change when they want to make a change
      • in romania they noticed that the birth rate was dropping. they made it illegal for women under 45 to use contraception or use birth control. gave a short term increase. but over time, it leveled out. it not just leveled out, but mother mortality went up dramatically as women got illegal abortion, and tons of children ended up in orphanages. not the desired effect at all…
      • NakedPizza: four guys in new orleans that built a shack, less than 500 square feet, in a place that took 8 feet of water in katrina, and turned it into a lab to make the world’s healthiest pizza. they want to take that concept and scale it. They want to go into the fast food industry as a trojan horse. They want to price it the same as Dominos and Papa Johns. They don’t want to make tons of money, they want to educate people about healthy food. use pizza as a trojan horse to talk about this issue. 
        • but if you add in all the cost of organic foods, recycled boxes, recycle everything, then it would drive the price of the product up so much, that it would not be accessible to the very people you are trying to help. 
    • enabling new models by recognizing the relationship between structure and behavior (#6)
      • Dana Meadows would take a slinky out of a box. She’d pull her hand out, and the slinky would boing up and down. She’s ask why it did that. The class would answer that it was because she moved her hand. She’d repeat with a box, which of course would not behave in that way. The answer is in the innate capabilities of the object… the structure of the object. You can’t change the behavior without changing the structure.
      • HUB: shared space for social entrepreneurs to help cross pollinate ideas. joint help and resources around fundraising and strategy. 24 around the world.
        • Rather than just have NGOs, in which activists live off the excess of the government and corporate donations, they enable people to be entrepreneurs and launch profitable businesses
    • issue-attention cycle: degree of awareness is inversely correlated to the degree of productive action.
      • once people realize the cost of making change, attention peters out
      • when the public starts to get a great passion around a subject, there is a point at which attention peaks, but still nothing is happening. when you get a couple of hundred thousand people involved, no one does anything because they all think someone else is doing it.
        • we already see in the sustainability movement that there is fatigue. people are opting out, believing someone else is doing something about it. (Will: count me in this group.)
    • If you change the purpose of the system – the goal of it’s existence, that is the great change for the system.
  • Architecture
    • LEED
    • Architecture for Humanity
    • Challenge 2030
  • Product Design
    • Cradle to cradle
    • LCA
  • Creative Community…. (didn’t capture in time.)
  • Interactive community creates the architecture of our technology, the architecture of our communication. How can we take on the purpose of cultural sustainability instead of commerce? What is we educated people instead of dumbing it down? What is social media was actually about social impact.
  • Every profession bears the responsibility to understand the circumstances that enable its existence – Robert Gutman

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Building Apps in Your Spare Time
#codingforpleasure
  • Gina Trapani
    • write stuff mainly to procastinate writing
    • Firefox scripts to improve gmail (better gmail 2 0.9.8.1)
    • ThinkTank – ask your friends
  • Matt Haughey
    • Side projects
      • Wrote fuelly: social miles per gallon.
      • MetaFilter (1999), written when blogs were still new
  • Adam Pash
    • MixTape: playlists shared with friends
    • Belvedere 
    • Texter: shorthand for your computer. Like textexpander for the mac.
  • Why should I develop an app in my spare time?
    • Just built a tool for ourselves (and 25,000 other users).
    • Just wanted something as clean as possible. Not an overbearing UI like slashdot.
    • Fill a need… Gmail
    • Want an archive of tweets.
    • Very important to scratch your own itch
    • Ego motivation… opportunity to get users right away, get feedback
    • You can build anything… that is really exciting.
      • Pash: I am not a programmer by trade, and I am not a great programmer, but I can still make anything.
      • Trapani: it’s amazing what you can do now between APIs and the languages available
    • Don’t expect to make money. Metafilter was a success, but it took 6 years before they made money. There can be a huge slog. If your motivation is only money, you’ll shutter the project. If you build an app you use every day, then at least you can still use it every day.
    • “The internet is so ready to give you an answer to any problem” — Pash
    • You can work on stuff that will further your career
    • If you don’t have an idea you are excited about, then you aren’t going to make it happen.
  • All the beloved things… twitter, flickr… they didn’t start as a plan to make a lot of money.
  • How can I do it?
    • You have to dedicate time.
    • If you are really excited about it, you can find the time.
    • The first thing to go for most people is the television. Two hours of veg time at the end of the day is the easiest thing to go.
    • It can be a relaxing time… just enjoy it, watch TV, plan to put a year into it.
    • Use frameworks… don’t reinvent the wheel. Rapidly prototype. Google what you need to do, and copy and paste code. Use libraries and plugins that exist, there are plugins for everything.
    • Collaboration is a big deal
      • it’s so much more fun to work with someone
      • it’s so helpful to bounce ideas off something
    • You really don’t need to be a coder or to hire someone to start. You can go from zero to competent in just about any language about six months. 
    • Dan Bricklan, inventor of the spreadsheet (will: about a billion years ago), was like “iphone development, this sounds interesting“, and went out and bought an MacBook, an iPhone development book, and wrote an app, and put it in the store for $3
    • Did you ever pay anyone?
      • Yeah, I don’t really have the skills or competency anymore in design, so I hire some designers. Same for CSS… I don’t have the skills any more to make this work in dozens of browsers. I sent to it to some kids in (the middle of nowhere), and paid them $100.
      • I’ve never hired anyone because I’m cheap, but I barter with people. “I’ll build something for you if you design something for me.”
    • Open source
      • Trapani: everything I’ve done is open source. At lifehacker, we have this big community of people doing open source. Why not use those resources?
        • There is nothing more awesome than waking up to check your email and finding a code contribution.
      • But you can’t rely on that. It’s a big commitment for someone to get the code, work on it, and submit a change.
  • Pitching your idea to the company… to sponsor them
    • You’ve got to make the case for why to do
    • Google’s 20% time is a good example to cite
    • Or it may be synergistic: e.g. for lifehacker it raises their credibility for their employees to be doing open source
  • Questions…
    • Talk about ownership when you are working at a company
      • Check your company’s policy before hand. Some have weird policies like even what you do on your own time is owned by the company.
      • If you can convince your company to open source it, then it isn’t an issue at all.
    • I am a developer, and I like to build super-visualize things, but I am not a designer. How can i find someone to work with?
      • There are some sites to help. But that is kind of a crapshoot.
      • you network a lot. 
      • Go to an ignite in Portland. 
      • Look up the portfolio of designers you meet.
      • Don’t go to rubycon to find a designer.
      • Go to social events or design events.
    • Talk about programming where you might not want to open source the code. Talk about some successful examples of that.
      • I had security issues – a giant login system with crappy code. I wanted to keep that code secret.
      • One motivation to make your code good is to open source it.
      • But if you can’t do open source… then you have to hire programmers, or find one fan of your work to work with. and still keep it closed.
    • What about liability…worried about being sued.
      • I made a music sharing site that uses mp3s shared on servers around the country. So I made an LLC, and now MixTape belongs to that LLC. 
      • Having a terms of service can help. Lawyers can help you do terms of service and LLC for less than $1k. 
      • Or copy and paste from Google or someone else. Something is better than nothing.
    • Tradeoff with APIs… you are at the mercy of the service. You get a lot, but then the service could go away.
    • How do you get users? I’m the sole user of like a half a dozen apps.
      • It’s not easy. Integrate them into whatever you do. For fuelly, we made badges people could put on their blogs. Talk about it on twitter.
      • Talking to developers about things you made. No one want talks to a PR person. We want to talk to developers.
    • As a designer, I want to learn programming. Where should I go?
      • Google is great. 
    • I’m not hearing why the stuff you make is as awesome as it is. What are the decisions you can make, what are the freedoms you have, that you don’t have to make money off it
      • You are the user. You are the designer. You can make the application what you want it to be. It can be very satisfying.  
    • At what point do you reach break even on the server costs?
      • I’m spending $100/month for the server, and using AdSense will cover the costs. 
      • You can do “donate a dollar” via paypal, but that is sporadic.
      • It’s weird to do a project where covering the hosting cost is considered a success.
      • Amazon referrals, ads, are a passive way to do it.
    • Share a couple of websites that would be good resources
      • prototype
      • jquery
      • open languages have great documentation… documentation plus comments is amazing.
      • free git book online
      • stackoverflow
      • peepcode
      • just google your programming question