The last Portland Data Visualization Meetup occurred way back in March 2009. That’s way too long to go without a good data viz meetup, so there’s going to be another one. We’ll have five 10 minute presentations and a bunch of networking time. Webtrends will again graciously host us on their top floor.

The event is open to everyone interested in or working in the field of data visualization. This means designers, programmers, information architects, data miners, anthropologists, ect. We’re expecting a similar amount of people to last time, but the presentations will be limited to 10 minutes each or less.

Bring business cards and an excitement to connect with others in this field.

The second Portland Data Visualization Group will be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 from 7:30Pm-9:00Pm at Webtrends.

851 SW 6th Ave.
Portland OR 97204
(map)

RSVP on Upcoming or view this event on Calagator.

Agenda:

The second meeeting of the Portland Data Visualization Group will serve as an introduction to what’s going on in the world of data viz. There will be five presentations of 10 minutes each. There are three openings left, so if you would like to demonstrate something you’re working on, please E-mail me or comment below.

If you’re interested in Data Visualization, please come to this event.

Google Group:

Ed Borasky started a Google group called pdx-visualization. As the name implies, it is a group for Portland-area people interested in languages and techniques for visualization of data. http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization

Flickr Photos:

I’ve been collecting interesting data viz photos for a while now and posting them to Flickr. They’re all accessible on my Flickr account in this set. Most pictures contain descriptions and links to the viz sources.

I hope to see you all there!
——

About

Amber Case, (@caseorganic is a Cyborg Anthropologist studying the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way we think, act, and understand the world around us.

On July 8th, the Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (CHIFOO) hosted Cathy Marshall of Microsoft Research at Jive Software (CHIFOO’s new location). Marshall’s presentation, titled Reading and Collaboration in a Digital Age: or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Screen, was a mental tour de force that reexamined assumptions of how we read, annotate, and look at text.

Approximately 60 people were in attendance, and the audience and speaker discussion was lively and relevant. There was never a dull moment or boring segment. I sat there furiously trying to capture every piece, as you will see evidenced below.

A Short History of eBooks

Marshall: I know lots of you are thinking, “what does reading have to do with collaboration?”.

eBooks have really been around for a long time, since around the 1980’s. The first generation was really about hypermedia and multimedia. Kind of the excitement of having these things on the screen, to be able to do things that you couldn’t do before. Peruses was a site about ancient Greece — the reason people loved it was that you were able to look up words in Greek and have them available immediately.

Generation 2 had P-books, or portable books. This turned out to be a bad name. There were multiple jokes about it. There was even a Zippy comic that made fun of it.

The comic shows Zippy and his friend flying through the city on the back of a book. Zippy’s friend says, “I head that the E-book trend never really took off, sales of the things are tanking.” and zippy says, E-books will never replace P-Book!”.

There’s some more text discussing the comparative values of books over electronic media, and the cartoon ends with Zippy saying, “E-books are spineless”.

Marshall: I think there’s a real sort of cultural anxiety about the end of books, and the death of text. And there was also skepticism about reading on computers, Like Sven Birkerts, Richard Harper, who wrote about how paperless offices didn’t work. There were also people in library science who said that these things wouldn’t work out well eighteen.

Marshall brings out a slide of an old cell phone displaying a partial sentence from Moby Dick on its tiny, pixilated screen.

Marshall: For many people, their worst fear was of having to read something on a cell phone while being trapped in the airport.

But there is no reason to laugh about this anymore because people in Japan are actually reading and writing novels on cell phones.

In Family Circus…by the way….does anyone think Family Circus is funny? I think they must have some hidden message or something , and that’s why people keep publishing them.

Audience: I have some friends who carefully cut out Family Circus every day…and then replace the captions with something else. Then they’re funny.

A Family Circus comic shows up on the screen. The kid is talking to his mother. “I’m never going to start reading eBooks,” he says, “it’s too hard to curl up with a monitor”.

And one last point was from Clifford Lynch in the battle to define the future of the book in the digital world. He said, “Try to think of eBooks as personal libraries instead of books” First Monday, 2001. “>First Monday 2001.

Generation 3 - 2006-2008

By the time Generation 3 happened, the generations were getting closer and closer together (as they say in future shock).

In this generation, we asked ourselves, will eBooks somehow renew the social side of reading?

Why was it so hard to see what’s coming?

Reason 1: Changes aren’t always in technology.

There was a very famous article written by Vannevar Bush about a system he called a Memex (portmanteau of “memory extender”). It’s heralded as the introduction to the hyperlink, that you could go from one place to another and record that hyperlink.

“The advanced arithmetic machines of the future…will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions form a whole roomful of girls armed with simple keyboard punches and will deliver sheets of complicated results every few minutes”. - Vannevar Bush in As We May Think, 1945.

I took typing class too, on those big clunky computers. And there were no boys in the class. You weren’t a boy in my class unless you were in drag.

An audience member nods.  “Were you in drag?” Marshall asks.

“Depends,” he responds, “what year was that again?”

Why is it hard to answer this question?

Answer: Because it is often difficult to see the whole cost/benefit analysis side of the picture, like this panel I cut out from the back of a box of Shredded Wheat that says,

“Dear NABISCO Shredded Wheat Users”.

Reason 3: Reading is Invisible

“Nothing is more commonplace than the reading experience, and yet nothing is more unknown. Reading is such a matter so common that at first glance, it seems there is nothing to say about it. ”
Tzvetan Todorov, quoted by Nicholas Howe in The Ethnography of Reading.

Marshall: I’m kind of a feral Ethnographer. Sarah has worked with me and knows that I like to have principles.

I was sitting there on the airplane and I was sitting there watching this man read his magazine. There he was, reading this magazine. I thought I was so discreet. And at some point he got up and went to the restroom.

And he looked over at me and said, “you stole my magazine”. and I said, “I did not!” and he said, “Let me look in your briefcase”. And so reading is invisible. And it’s very dangerous to watch people read. And people think it’s creepy!

But in this talk I’m trying to summarize 15 years of studies on cooperation, and reading tech, to really find out what reading is. So you’ll have to bear with me as I tease out a definition.

I starting looking at intelligence analysts - how people gathered and collected things, and then how people annotated things, and found that they aren’t quite the scholarly things people see in the margins, and then looked at it in law offices and law school. Those also who came in and talked to the Vice President and President and briefed them every morning. And I actually got to be there when President Bush got the Osama bin Laden briefing.

I went to work at Microsoft and looked a Microsoft reader, and then I looked at shared annotations, and then how people clipped things out of magazines and how they read. So we looked at reading in some detail. Then I worked with some people t Microsoft at the New York Times Reader application. Does anyone have one of those?

One audience member raised his hand.

Well then, it was a tremendous success! The photos in it are really nice. You don’t really notice how nice the photos are in the Times until you view them in that reader.

Then she showed a photos of a guy sitting on the subway reading a newspaper seated next to a guy who was sitting there with a tremendous cathode ray tube monitor and keyboard on his lap, the computer unit on the ground underneath his feet. It was making fun of Reading, of course.

How Do Most People Think About Reading?

We think it’s private, individual, stationary and passive. We think it’s something as immersive, and sometimes soggy (she shows a picture of a guy reading a newspaper in the bathtub).

But what we found instead was that reading is mobile. That’s why reading on a screen was so dismal at first, because nobody wanted want to carry around a screen with them everywhere. Because reading was so mobile. What we found at first was that mobility overwhelmed many things at first.

“If I’m going home to Colorado, I have to be really sure I’m going to read something if I’m going to bring it. Otherwise, why should I bring it [if it's large, heavy]. [The Pocket PC] is small, it’s handy.”. Quote from a college student talking about a Pocket PC with his course texts.

Marshall: Note that he actually didn’t end up reading his coursework on over the break.

So reading is mobile, material, passive.

In The Places of Books in the Age of Electronic Reproduction, Geoffrey Nunberg of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford University said this about eBooks:

“Reading what people have had to say about the future of knowledge in an electronic world, you sometimes have the picture of somebody holding all the books in the library by their spines and shaking them until the sentences fall out loose in space” (Representations 24, Spring, 1993). Also in Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse, eds., Future Libraries, University of California Press, 1994.

“You get this little screen, so you get no sense of even how long the work is…but you have 600 pages, which means what? No one knows. So I definitely don’t see it as a literary experience”. An English Lit Grad student talking about reading on the Jordana Pocket PC.

(Note from Amber Case: This is what I continually think about when I encounter a computer, because no matter how much data I stuff into it, it never gets heavier. A book weighs the same as a leaflet – nothing).

Marshall: Navigation is fundamental to the material of paper.

“Something else that I think I sometimes do when reading an article: I’ll be like, ‘boy this has been going on a long time, and sometimes I’ll even flip ahead and think, how many more pages do I have? And if it’s going to end on this page, then I may just read it. But if I see it’s three more pages, the…I may just either give up. Or just go into scan mode, where I just flip, you know, see what grabs my attention”

Marshall: Reading has a basic physicality.

(Note from Amber Case: Here, the materiality allows scanning, weight, and thickness).

“I usually read in one of the chairs in the living room. That’s partly because I don’t have a desk in here. The chairs are very comfortable. There’s a occasionally much too comfortable, that’s why I have blankets around every chair in the house, so I can always be prepared to go to sleep.” - An English Lit major talking about where she reads.

Then Marshall shows a quote from the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.

“I can’t read this without a French accent,” she says, “else I can’t get away with it. Does anyone have a French accent?”.

No one in the a audience had one.

“The compact disc,” says Baudrilliard, “It doesn’t wear out, even if you use it. Terrifying. It’s as through you’d never used it. So it’s as through you iddn’t exist. IF things dont’ get old anymore, then that’s because it’s you who are dead”. Jean Baudrilliard, Cool Memories II.

Marshall: Maybe you don’t want the pristine copy - you want the one that is like the one you first bought in the 70’s. The one that is used. The one that is well read.

You think about how interact with books online - you don’t have to think about that with a paper book. You don’t have to think about how to annotate.

Audience: The medium of the book is to have it be as transparent as possible. But when you have these different mediums that have types of media placed, you can’t read them anymore. You’re inhibited by the medium. You notice it.

We’ll get back to that later - I have a big rant about that too.

People interact with text far more than they own up to. People don’t remember making the annotations, they idealize them, they make far more than they actually remember. And when you show someone their annotations from a few days back, they don’t know what many of the annotations were referring to.

Audience Member: Have you ever heard of the book as a sacred object? Because I’m a librarian and I can’t annotate a book. I buy one copy for me and another to annotate.

Marshall: And what about the Ebook? Do you value the Ebook?

Audience Member: There’s nothing sacred about an Ebook because it doesn’t have a material embodiment. And I know I’m not going to pass it along to anyone else.

Marshall: Not unless you violate the DRM you won’t!

Audience Member: Is that sacredness of the book genetic, do you think?

Audience Member: Well I don’t know.

Librarian: Well, I was one of those, “Matchbox car collectors, a ‘never open the package’ kind of person.

Audience: What about the notes taken by college students?

Marshall shows the image of a page that’s been completely highlighted.

Like this? Or some people carefully save all of their college notes and them look at them later, or think they will look at them later. Or value them highly, but never look at them.

Literally, though, this highlighting goes on for pages. If you find that at the beginning of a math book, it means that the person’s going to drop the class.

Audience: I could never buy a book that was already annotated, because I’d go through the book and be like, “that’s not worthy of being annotated! or that section is not important enough to be highlighted!”.

Audience: Can you tell me the context of this study? How it was formed? Where you got the information?

Marshall: I’m smushing together many years of research here, but I can tell you about a few experiments.

For instance, for the highlighting, annotation one, I staged myself in the Stanford bookstore and pretended that I worked there, and I stayed there 2-3 weeks, looking through 1000’s of textbooks, watching people buy used and new textbooks, eavesdropping on whether or not they would buy what kind of book, and interviewed them about f they would by

And a lot of them would look through books to see what had been outlined before they decided on purchasing them.

This was a study I did a dozen or so years ago. It was one of the first studies I did, and it was just to get an idea of what people did when they purchased textbooks.

Audience: Did you ever find out the answer, “why did you highlight this entire text? Like why so much?

Marshall: Well, I think it happens in instances where there’s really complex information placed in front of someone who doesn’t understand it. The highlighting becomes more of a tracing of general attention. Sometimes it is from multiple readings.

In Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s How to Read a Book, there’s a whole section on active learning. Sometimes I see those results. One time I saw a book with multiple different colors and I found a student who said, “Oh, I do that!”. I asked why, and she said, “Oh, I just change colors when I get bored”. Evidence of why it is important to ask.

Annotations May Quickly Lose Their Value or Be Forgotten

“Some of them are absolutely ridiculous and I can’t believe that I actually wrote this in pen in the book. Some of them are - I have no idea what I’m talking about. Some of them are really interesting, and it’s something I’ve forgotten. It just depends on the notes….when I did Milton, we were doing the epithets about Satan or something, so I underlined all of them. And when I was going back through it, I’m like “what on Earth!?” A grad student talks about annotations she made as an undergrad.

Marshall: The reason I found out about the subconscious stuff is that I’d go back with them through their notes a week after they’d done it and ask them about it, the notes, the diagrams, and some of them would say, “I’m sure it had some meaning at the time”. So annotations have more meaning than we think.

Reading is Interrupted and Variable

I think this is at the root of “what is reading”. It’s not this image of a little girl in the window seat and she’s totally engrossed in a book, uninterrupted.

“We do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as ‘boring’) in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote…” - Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text.

Marshall: Reading is not a single, undistracted stream of concentration. Has anyone read all the words of Proust, or War and Peace?

Audience member: Yes. But it was not normal circumstances.

Marshall: Right, most of the time, reading is fragmented.

Turning a Page as a Complex of Lightweight Navigational Acts

A series of actions: Constance is reading the first page of a review, but halfway through the article she turns the page halfway over, so she can see the next article while still reading the first one.

She looks at the cartoon before she goes to the next page because she thinks it’s funny.

She goes through the next page, which looks like a lengthy review, looks at the ads, because the likes to look at the ads.

She successfully flips over the magazine so that she can read the next article.

She changes the orientation of her hands so that she can comfortably read again.

I have so many videos of people moving their hands to their face or moving them when they’re

I’m going to claim that reading is social. Not that it is intensely individual, as many people may think.

“It is also worth noting that solitary reading always was, and still is, inherently social: how we read is ultimately determined by social convention and community membership”. -David Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age

Marshall: Now I’m going to bring up our old friend, the CSCW matrix.

When, Where, same time, different time, Same place, different place. It’s been around so long that I couldn’t figure out how to source it.

Audience: Stands for Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

In the upper left: reading together, same time, same place.

We were watching students read on the web and we seated each one in front of a computer. We just told them to ‘go and browse the web’. And very quickly they had organized themselves in twos or threes around the computers instead of individually exploring the web alone.

And then we did studies with an early Web TV, and I thought, “ ‘ho hum!’ big deal, the Web on your TV!”

But then I watched as one kid was messing around with the Web TV, and another kid joined him. Before long, they were negotiating about where to go next on the web.

And then there were situations designed to read socially, like reading groups.

One of the things I noticed is how people stayed together while reading together. One of the problems with some books is that people go to the used bookstore and buy different editions, and people all have to align in class on the same class. They’re all different ways people use to get to the same page. Chapters, indexes, page numbers, ect. What we noticed is that people can be productively engaged in the discussion but not actually on the same page. This sort of things people would get punished for.

Audience: Was it established why it was important to be on the same page? Reading together: on-the-spot research enhancing discussion or digression?

Marshall: Well, we did some studies where there would be a line in the reading like “Did they really hang dogs a witches?” This was an interesting quote so all the kids reading on their pocket PC’s began to look it up. Some teachers found it to be good, and others a distraction.

But a problem with sharing reading materials occurs when one tries to share them electronically, especially with a Kindle.

Audience: You can share books on a Kindle!

Marshall: Even DRM ones?

Audience: You can share them if they’re in the public domain.

But that’s not the same as sharing a book. The problem is that you have to have an ID or account to share that data. You can’t just pass it to the next person, like you would with an analog book. You can’t share the data itself, or annotations, or things you’ve torn out.

Speaking of tearing out data; we all have experienced this. Tearing out data makes us this of our mothers, our mothers or brothers or sisters, tearing something out and mailing it to us.

H3>A Few Questions About Sharing Encountered Information

How important/ubiquitous is the information? Do people cut out things to annoy people?

It’s kind of like, you buy a magazine because of the things you might find in there. But you don’t know what’s going to be in there.

Audience: I now look at people’s Twitter feeds to see what I should look at.

At this point, @brampitoyo said (on Twitter) “@caseorganic Twitter is made for sharing artifacts encountered everywhere else. RT is one of the forms.”

Marshall: What are some of the reasons people share?

1. Sharing for mutual awareness.

2. At work, in customer-focused jobs.

3. At home, keeping up with friends and family
short of a way to keep in synch.

4. Sharing to educate or raise consciousness. Valued by sender — perhaps not by receiver.
Mostly occurred for personal topics/home

Audience: I was thinking with Twitter how funny it is, how the more boring Twitter users just send out links, and we don’t get to know them as person.

Audience: Well, I like those people!

5. Sharing to strengthen social ties
“I’m thinking of you”
“We have common concerns”
“We have the same sense of humor”.

Audience: Or sometimes you’re sharing to make people think you’re smart

Yes, we just notice it because it’s so obnoxious, but it’s rally not that prevalent. Just sharing knowledge to show off.

Audience; Or sharing to “hint”, like “I’m thinking about getting a camera”.

P2, a high school student, receives links to online article from her dad sometimes as often as 2 or 3 times a day. She usually reads he article son the screen and doesn’t keep them. For example her dad recently sent her an article from the NY Times. “Sending these articles is nice. I don’t know how we started doing it, but it feels nice to know people are thinking about you. It’s our way of keeping in touch.

Marshall: Here’s an example of sharing to educate.

P15 has a pre-adolescent son has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of high functioning autism. The mother found an article on educating children with Asperger’s syndrome and photocopied the “really good” article from Time. Then she told the her son’s teacher that she should read it.

The Social Role of Sharing: Myth Busting

All four participants in our study shared information. None of them dominated in sharing the inormation, and none of them were the single sharers of information.

This busts the idea of people setting themselves up as “information brokers’ not many people just
send out completely, or one-way. Everyone sends out a few links.

Audience: There are some people on Twitter who Retweet. I don’t really like that.

Audience: Tell them!

Marshall: I’m worried about you and Twitter. We should talk later.

Audience: I work alone, so it’s my water cooler that I check every few hours.

Marshall: Still, I think you’re spending too much time on it.

It’s more complicated than that!

Riox looked at why people share or don’t share data.

Do I have the recipients email address at hand?
What will it look like?
Will this seem impersonal?
Will the Email look like spam?
(Riox, 2000).

Form is important.

A technological solution for sharing should:

-Present a sense of layout and article boundaries.
-Allow the sender to limit or expand scope or context (compare sending a photo plus text vs. part of text).

Modes of Sharing are Important

“My plan is to actually give a hardcopy of an article from nature to him and talk to him about it, rather than just put it in his inbox because he’d kind of wonder where it came from or why he was getting it. And I’d rather say, hey, I saw this online and it’s pretty interesting. Check it out”.

Because he wants to get this higher into another person’s attention instead of the low attention the recipient might give the article should he receive it through a digital source.

“I have come to view margins as a literary commons with grazing room from everyone - the more, the merrier”. - Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris : Confessions of a Common Reader, London : Penguin Books, 1998.

Of course, sharing annotations is more complicated than it looks.

See, for example, Shipman et al., ECDL 2003.

I was working at Microsoft Research and a guy on my team said, “wouldn’t it be cool if the annotations you wrote would be sent to the author of the book?” and I said, “No! I’d be dead!”.

But, I thought, is there a way to take multiple highlighting, annotations of multiple copies of the same book and see commonalities between them, in order to deduct the most useful pieces of text — a sort of wisdom of crowds sort of boil-down?

Annotations in the Aggregate

Consensus is significantly more common than predicted by strict probabilistic calculations of overlap.

Annotators converge on important text that is different than the text that the authors and publisher designate as important.

Annotation; collective effects. If you had dozens and dozens of books, could you use a ‘wisdom of crowds approach to zoom in on something that was important? Something that many different people underlined across all of the books? Some essential passage?

Audience: The Folksonomy of Cliffnotes? Is that what you’re getting at?

Marshall: Maybe… Kind of.

Audience: Or like a Wiki?

Collaboration and reading technologies; What of displays - are we thinking enough about “looking on” or shared focus?

How do social expectations interact with restrictions introduced by Digital Rights Management?

Which collaboration architectures will work for people using the same collections (i.e…annotation, reading rooms, bookmark servers)?

Are there new modes of collaboration enabled by digital devices?

Collaborators:

XLibris studies: Morgan price, Bill Schilit, and Gene Golovchinsky at FXPAL.

About Cathy Marshall

Cathy Marshall is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley; she has knocked around in both the product and research divisions at Microsoft. Cathy has long worked in the disciplinary interstices of computer science, information science, and the humanities, with occasional collaborations in the arts and the sciences. She was a long-time member of the research staff at Xerox PARC and is an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University. Cathy won the ACM Hypertext conference’s best paper award in 1998 and 1999, and the best paper award at the IEEE/ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 1998 and 2008. She has delivered keynotes at WWW, Hypertext, Usenix FAST, CNI, VALA, ACH-ALLC, and a variety of other CS and LIS venues.
MS Reader study:
Contact info: http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall

cathymr [at] Microsoft [dot] com.

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist studying the effects of technology on the way humans think, communicate, and act. She can be reached at caseorganic [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter @caseorganic.

Let me preface this blog post with this simple phrase - “We had to do this”.

Hence, the following sound byte.

 

 Grmfwklsnaxp [0:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (214)

History

Grmfwklsnaxp is a concept that is becoming increasingly important. Since its first incarnation only a week ago, it has increasingly grown in the field of AWESOME.

As Grmfwklsnaxp reaches a plateau of importance, it may begin to enter the vocabulary of everyone around you.

Grmfwklsnaxp is VERY Important

In this case, it would be best not to look ignorant.

This is why It is important to understand how to pronounce the word Grmfwklsnaxp. But we need your help. Well, specifically, we need @mettadore’s help. But since he’s not here right now, we’re left to our own defences.

Thanks for listening.

This is the first of six blog posts by guest writer Russell Dauterman. They will discuss how the Internet is downsizing the economy and how this will make it much more difficult to overcome the current recession. These posts will also show how the Internet is making a major contribution towards improving our environment. “When the recession ends,” he says, “it will not lead to the recovery of our way of life before the recession; rather the Internet and other advances in technology will create a new civilization”.

The other five posts will cover Retailing Physical Goods, Retailing Digital Goods, Transportation (Email and Bill Paying), Teleportation for Business, and Teleportation for Personal Use.

Advertising

The Internet has created a new advertising venue that offers lower ad prices and delivers better results. This gives the Internet a superior competitive edge over other companies. As a result few of these other companies will survive.

The companies most affected by Internet advertising are newspapers, magazines and TV stations.

Newspapers and magazines can eliminate their high costs of paper, ink, printing and distribution by becoming online only companies, but just as they have not been able to retain their print advertising, most of them will not be able to acquire enough online advertising to survive. Advertisers have already developed their own successful online advertising programs.

Many companies currently advertise products on their own sites. They also use the resources of other online companies such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and online retailers. They can list jobs on their own sites and use online job listing companies like monster.com. They can work with online retailers to provide the product information consumers need to make purchases. As a result, they no longer need to rely on the old media.

Consumers can advertise items and services on eBay, Craigslist and many other sites at lower costs and get much higher readership than they can in magazines and newspapers.

The Internet is gaining ground as a news source. It has recently surpassed newspapers as a source of news. Nicholas Carlson, writer for Silicon Alley Insider reports, “40% of 1,489 respondents in the December [2008] survey identified the Internet as their leading new sources. 35% said newspapers and 70% said TV.”

As the Internet gains news readership, TV stations are in danger of losing their advertising revenue they can no longer get by using interruption ads that break the continuity of their programs. If consumers want to see a movie or documentary that doesn’t contain advertising, they can download it or watch it on cable. TV advertisers have lost their monopoly.

Even though the Internet utilizes computer monitors that are like TVs, the Internet is not a form of TV. The advertising techniques that used to work on TV and the print media will no longer work because the Internet provides a viable alternative.

As David Meerman Scott points out in The New Rules of Marketing and PR, “The Web is different. Instead of one-way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.” Scott continues, “Forced to compete with the new marketing on the Web that is centered on interaction, information, education, and choice, advertisers can no longer break through with dumbed-down broadcasts about their wonderful products”.

The animated, blinking ads that prevent Web viewers from seeing what they want to see will no longer succeed as viewers switch to sites that don’t interrupt them and hurt their eyes.

It’s worth noting that Google has been the most successful at delivering product information. It doesn’t have to use blinking lights and animated ads to force viewer’s attention because they come to Google to find what they are looking for. Companies that insist on the old, obsolete forms of advertising such as Microsoft’s msn.com are struggling.

The Internet’s new advertising capabilities will force the newspapers, magazines and TV stations to downsize or close.

Within the next three years, most newspapers and magazines are likely to close as they continue to lose ad revenue. Those that survive will do so as downsized companies that are online only. The primary news providers have the best chance of continuing if they can obtain enough ad revenue.

TV stations will either have to downsize or change their formats if they hope to compete.

As newspapers, magazines and TV stations downsize or close, hundreds of thousands of workers will lose their jobs. This will reduce spending and make it more difficult for the economy to recover from the current recession.

Fortunately, the environment will benefit from this because it means millions of trees won’t have to be cut down to make paper, and millions of gallons of gas won’t have to be consumed to transport trees, paper and print media.

—–

About the Author:
Russell Dauterman has taught philosophy, humanities and logic. He has extensive experience selling books and computers. He currently writes blog posts and designs databases.

Looking for something to do this week/month/season in Portland? Itching to get to know more people/minds/ideas? Look no further. I’ve created this list for you of a bunch of Portland tech events for your convenience. Hopefully it is a useful resource.If you want to connect to more Portland Tech resources, check out the AboutUs.org Wiki for Portland Tech. There’s an RSS feed of Portland Tech Events there, as well as a very robust Portland Tech Twitter directory. Events are updated every two weeks, and there are areas for event reviews. And if you need to add something to it, you can edit it—as it is a Wiki.

And, of course you can always follow me on Twitter for more up-to-date event reviews. If I’ve missed anything, please let me know in the comments and I’ll add it to this list. Please include the date, time, a short event description, and a link (if applicable).

There’s also the awesome Portland-based Calagator and Yahoo’s! Upcoming, which was created by Andy Baio, a Portland resident. Hooray for awesome event databases!

Portland Tech Events for the month of October, November, and Beyond

Oct 27, 2008: Introduction to Google Android — Mobile Portland at AboutUs offices

A year after making a splash with the announcement of the Google Android platform for mobile phones, Android-based phones have finally hit the market. The G1 from T-Mobile and HTC shows an early version of what is possible on this new platform. Sean Sullivan will be talking about what Google Android is, what it means for the market place, and how developers can start building solutions for this new mobile phone platform. Sean will also demonstrate his latest Google Android project which combines OAuth and…

Renewable Energy Finance Forum-West

Renewable Energy Finance Forum-West Monday, October 27, 2008 at 8:30am through Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 4:30pm Grand Hyatt Hotel 721 Pine Street Seattle , WA 98101 US ( map ) The Renewable Energy Finance Forum-West (REFF-West) will unite investors, financiers and project developers in the renewable energy sector, with a particular focus on the Western U.S. The conference builds on the success of the Clean Tech Investing in the Pacific Northwest conference and REFF-Wall Street. Attendees will…

DorkbotPDX Meeting

DorkbotPDX Meeting Monday, October 27, 2008 from 7 – 10pm Lucky Labrador Beer Hall 1945 NW Quimby Portland , OR 97209 US ( map ) Come join us for an evening of socializing, talking about odd hacks and poking around with other people toys. Bring things for show and tell if you like, or just bring a willingness to share your interests. We’ll be the kids with all the coolest stuff on the table. Hope to see you there. Links Website Tags dorkbot, electronics, hardware Download to iCal You…

PDX Critique monthly meeting

PDX Critique monthly meeting Monday, October 27, 2008 from 7 – 9pm CubeSpace 622 SE Grand Ave. Portland , Oregon 97214 USA ( map ) Share your creations and get constructive feedback Links Website Download to iCal You can edit this event . This item was added directly to Calagator Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 10:37am .

Oct 28, 2008: Microsoft Brings Free IT Expertise to Portland, Oregon at Oregon Convention Center

The Microsoft Across America team will be in Portland, Oregon delivering three seminars demonstrating how to drive your business. These educational events are free of charge and specially designed for business owners. Through demonstrations and face-to-face interaction with Microsoft Technology Specialists, attendees will learn how to save time and money while driving efficiency and profitability. TS2 – Target Audience: Microsoft Partners Microsoft’s TS2 seminars teach attendees how to increase revenue…

Science Pub: Science Circus - The Physics of Fun

Science Pub: Science Circus - The Physics of Fun Tuesday, October 28, 2008 from 7 – 9pm McMenamins Mission Theater 1624 NW Glisan Street Portland , Oregon 97209 ( map ) Come see physics in action! Jugglers, acrobats, and other circus artists often base their acts on simple Newtonian principles of motion and balance taken to extremes. How does gravity’s constant rate of acceleration affect the juggling of bowling balls? Why would a Nobel Laureate beg a vaudevillian to spin a ball on his finger?…

AeA: Going Green

AeA: Going Green Tuesday, October 28, 2008 from 7:30 – 9am Oregon Zoo 4001 SW Canyon Rd. Portland , OR 97221-9704 US ( map ) Human Resources Networking Event Date: Oct 28, 2008 Going Green Going Green is one of the hottest topics in business today. It is not just good for the environment, Going Green is good for business. From your facilities to your business processes to your people, there are easy and inexpensive ways to truly improve your company’s Green quotient. Join our industry panel to…

Smalltalk Users Group meeting [tentative]

Smalltalk Users Group meeting [tentative] Tuesday, October 28, 2008 from 6:30 – 8:30pm GemStone Systems 1260 NW Waterhouse Ave # 200 Beaverton , OR 97006 US ( map ) pdx.st is the Portland Smalltalk Users Group. The group welcomes programmers interested in the Smalltalk language. Members interact through a mailing list and meet regularly for presentations, demos and discussions. Links Website Tags programming, smalltalk Download to iCal You can edit this event . This item was added directly…

Oct 29, 2008: Portland Open Coffee Club - October 2008 at Backspace

Portland Open Beer Club and Portland Open Coffee Club are monthly meetups offering a low key, agenda-free format centered around meeting like-minded individuals and talking about technology, the web, and startups. The Portland Open Coffee Club meets the last Wednesday of every month at Backspace at 10 am. Read more at http://portlandopencoffeeclub.com/

Portland State Aerospace Society: General & Team Meetings

Portland State Aerospace Society: General & Team Meetings Tuesday, October 28, 2008 from 7 – 11pm Portland State University, Fourth Avenue Building - FAB 155 1900 SW 4th Avenue Portland , Oregon 97201 US ( map ) Links Website Download to iCal You can edit this event . This item was imported from http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/r… Saturday, October 18, 2008 at 4:49pm and last updated Sunday, October 19, 2008 at 12:41am .

Oct 30, 2008: OEN’s Venture Northwest at Portland Marriott (Downtown)

It starts with a simple seed. But from that seed grows strong, vibrant and sustainable companies that are ripe for investment. Venture Northwest (formerly Venture Oregon) is the premier forum for new and emerging investment opportunities in exciting companies from Oregon, Washington, and throughout the Pacific Northwest. Learn about the region’s growth segments, explore exciting new technology and research, and connect with entrepreneurs from the area’s hottest emerging companies including nanotech,…

Nov 1, 2008: Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex Install Party at Backspace

Celebrate the release of Ubuntu 8.10, the Intrepid Ibex. Get a copy of the .iso file without waiting for the long download. Get a burned CD or burn one of your own and pass on the free software love. Get installation help and talk to local linux experts.

Nov 5, 2008: Social Network Spaghetti - Portland Web Innovators at Vidoop

Scott Kveton will tell us where he thinks we with the state of current social networks and how we’re actually on our way to the promised land. Kveton is a digital identity promoter, open source contributor, and VP of Open Platforms for Vidoop.

Nov 5, 2008: Lunch 2.0 at the Eclipse Foundation at Eclipse Foundation

The Portland Lunch 2.0 saga continues at the Eclipse Foundation in downtown. Come join your old Twitter pals, meet some new people, learn about what the Eclipse Foundation has going on these days. Did you know they had a Portland office? Worried about parking downtown? It’s probably going to be raining by then. No worries, the Max Oak Street stop is right in front of their building. Lunch 2.0 is a Valley phenomenon that you can read about at lunch20.com, and we’re putting a PDX stamp on it. Are you…

Nov 6, 2008: The Smart Grid and the New Electricity Economy at The Nines Hotel

The Smart Grid and the New Electricity Economy Date: Thu, Nov 6th Time: 4:00pm-6:30pm Location: The Nines Hotel 525 SW Morrison Portland, OR 97204 Cost: $35 for non members $10 Discount for walking or taking mass transit Registration Deadline: 11/06/2008 Topic: The Smart Grid and the New Electricity Economy Register for this Event Back to Event Calendar The Clean Technology Alliance is proud to present a special event hosted by noted expert Jesse Berst of GlobalSmartEnergy to chronicle the rapid growth of…

Nov 10, 2008: The semi-un-not-so-official Wordpress Upgrade Party at CubeSpace

We saw the demo at WordCamp, now lets get together for the grand launch of WordPress 2.7!

Nov 12, 2008: Refresh Portland at Jive Software

Refresh Portland is a monthly talk (held every 2nd Wednesday) about design, front-end development, usability and web standards. We’re in the process of finalizing the speaker. Please watch this space and our twitter account ( http://twitter.com/RefreshPDX ) for future developments. Refresh Portland is part of the Refreshing Cities Movement.

Nov 13, 2008: Ignite Corvallis at CH2M HILL Alumni Center

I hope you’ll join us for Ignite Corvallis in November at High Tech After Hours. Ignite Corvallis Thursday, November 13th, 2-3pm CH2M HILL Alumni Center, Corvallis, Oregon (Across from Reser Stadium) NOTE: Submission deadline for presentation proposals is Tuesday, November 4th. email proposals to ignite [DOT] corvallis [AT] gmail Ignite is coming to Corvallis! Share burning ideas. If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15…

Nov 13, 2008: Ignite Portland 4 at Bagdad Theater and Pub

Save the date! Ignite Portland 4 will happen on Thursday November 13, 2008, at the Bagdad. Same venue. Same format. Even more burning ideas. More details to come - stay tuned! http://www.igniteportland.com http://twitter.com/igniteportland http://friendfeed.com/rooms/igniteportland

Nov 15, 2008: Cre8Camp Portland (@SOUK)

Cre8Camp Portland is a BarCamp-like unconference with a creative twist–it is for creative industries professionals. Saturday November 15, 2008 from 10:00am - 3:00pm Participants drive the session topics and lead the discussions. Registration required. Ticket Info: 10.00 Buy Tickets. Visit the web site for more information. To see photos from the last Cre8Camp, click here. Cre8Camp will be at SOUK 322 NW 6th Avenue, Suite 200. Portland, Oregon 97214. Website: http://www.cre8camp.org/Cre8CampPortlandAdd to calendar.

Dec 6, 2008: CyborgCamp 2008 at CubeSpace

[[Note: The date of this event has been changed to Dec. 6th]] CyborgCamp is a simulcast unconference about the future of the relationship between humans and technology. We’ll discuss topics such as social media, design, code, inventions, web 2.0, twitter, the future of communication, cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. CyborgCamp’s aim is to have many communication channels such as Twitter, Flickr, UstreamTV, Video and Audio recordings and live chats displayed on the screen.…

Jan 4, 2009: The Ethics of eWaste at Westminster Presbyterian Church

Electronic waste or “e-waste” is broken or unwanted electrical or electronic devices. Many components of e-waste are considered toxic. Due to the difficulty and cost of recycling used electronics as well as lacklustre enforcement of legislation regarding e-waste exports, large amounts of used electronics have been sent to countries such as China, India, and Kenya, where lower environmental standards and working conditions make processing e-waste more profitable. Oso Martin, President of Bear…

Jan 14, 2009: Lunch 2.0 at the New OTBC Office at OTBC in the Beaverton Round

For the first time, Portland Lunch 2.0 will happen in the ‘burbs, Beaverton to be precise. The OTBC is moving into new space and partnering with the Beaverton Round Executive Suites . So, to showcase their new digs and introduce Lunch 2.0 to the suburbs, the OTBC will be hosting Lunch 2.0 on January 14, 2009. The Beaverton Round is right on the MAX line about 20 minutes from Portland. Just jump off the Blue Line at the Beaverton Central stop, and you’re 90 feet from the new OTBC office. Lunch 2.0 is…

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. She goes to lots of tech events because they are fun to go to!

Convergence culture has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape.

The speakers and audience will be a mixed industry and academic crowd, and the diverse topics grouped together will give the conference both broad coverage of the new media and entertainment space and deep engagement across industries and disciplinary boundaries. This year’s conference will work to bring together the themes from last year - media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution - with the consortium’s new projects in moving towards an increasingly global view of media convergence and flow.

Topics for this year’s panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia properties, franchising and world building, comics and commerce, social and spreadable media, and renewed discussion on how and why to measure audience value.

The conference is on the 21th and 22nd of November at MIT. It works around a talk-show style model with panelists participating in a moderated discussion. Over the last two years this produced great, thorough treatments of the subject matter, getting industry and academic speakers together but avoiding product pitches. For a sense of what to expect, you can check out the site from last year’s event.

This will be the third conference of this kind.

Confirmed speakers for this year’s conference include: Javier Grillo-Marxuach (The Middleman), Alex McDowell (Production Designer, The Watchmen), Kevin Slavin (Area/Code), Donald K Ranvaud (Buena Onda Films), Amber Case (Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant), Mauricio Mota (New Content [Brazil]), Alisa Perren (George State University), Amanda Lotz (University of Michigan), Sharon Ross (Columbia College Chicago), Nancy Baym (University of Kansas), Alice Marwick (New York University), Vu Nguyen (VP of Business Development, crunchyroll.com) with more to come.

Thanks to Joshua Green of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium for hooking me up with this excellent opportunity!

New marketing is the creation of events, experiences, content, products, and services in collaboration with the consumer. It is the creation of products and services that fill an actual need while creating a community that shares that need.

Google, Twitter and Facebook were initially created by people to fulfill a need. Google was created to manage information, Facebook demographics, data and connection, and Twitter, conversation. Software and hardware review sites emerged to protect consumers from false advertising. Blogs emerged because traditional corporations didn’t listen to their customers, leaving them to fend for themselves. Because of this, it’s much more difficult for traditional corporations to have a voice. It’s been drowned out by more valuable services. And the traditional communication channels have been severed.

In the new web there is no longer one platform to speak from. Social, economic, brand, and lifestyle realities are constantly fragmenting, reorganizing and combining in new ways. Products are easily adopted and easily thrown away online. Additionally, each culture is constantly creating its own dialect, and unless a business understands that dialect and is extremely diplomatic, an online community will be able to see right through a marketing campaign.

There are tools out there that can be used to dive deep into these content networks such as Facebook and Twitter to secure information. Consumers have the power - both to create and destroy. But they also have a very helpful voice, and it’s important to listen to them. Often, they can’t create the products, services, and experiences they need. But companies can, and consumers want to help.

Web vs. Brick

In the brick and mortar world, most businesses have a front door and a loading dock, as well as finite hours of operation. Web designers originally built websites in the same way. But a website is always open, and every page a front door. Thus, each and every page on a site counts. Each page is a representation of the entire company, and must hold its own if accessed out of order and context.
One might think of the Internet as a vast ocean of noise with islands of content on it. Search engine optimization is a process that can bring an island closer to land…often close enough so that visitors can walk onto it. Visitors will generally use a website as a solution if they don’t have to navigate an ocean to get to the data they need.

Search engines can bring in traffic, but there is no guarantee that the content on a site will match what the user searched for. This can be helped along by having a site display items similar to what the user searched for. For instance, Amazon.com and the New York Times both have related posts and products that appear on almost every page.

Interfaces

As more and more companies turn to online software solutions, user interfaces become increasingly important. This is especially true when online collaborative software is used across great distances.

To quote the Urban Planner Paul Elek,

“The point is that our daily existence is normally filled with short walks and passing through interfaces. It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them”.

A principle to follow in designing an online experience is the time and number of clicks it takes for visitors to access data. If there is no flow, no calls to action, and no relevant content, then the user will generally move on — and click “no”, or the “back” button.

Users will generally take a route with the least interface changes to fulfill their needs. A good interface blends into the background while maximizing relevant user actions. The interface should also compress together similar steps so that actions do not have to be repeated uselessly by the user. Flickr’s image uploader and title/descriptions fields do an excellent job of this.

A website should contain no unnecessary code, styles, or content. A speedskater has different muscles developed than does an tennis player. There is no “one social media strategy fits all”. A website’s content/structure/links should be developed according to the type of products/services it provides. Conversation, community building and ease of use minimize consumer effort and can be achieved in different ways. It is imperative to pay attention to what communities/demographics need the services/products a site provides. Which avenue is best to play in - is Twitter more appropriate than Flickr? Examining the social media sites a community is drawn to says a lot about how they interact the most comfortably.

The ratio of good vs. poor content online makes filtering necessary. A website can only stand out among the crowd if it offers new and consistently reliable content. Additionally, that content must be accessible by both humans and machines (search engines). The online landscape only allows consumer’s limited time to make decisions. In these kinds of environments, one must alway focus on data accessibility, calls to action, and extremely clear direction. Information that is buried too deep into the site’s structure is more difficult to get to, and runs the risk of not being indexed by search engines. Products should be focused on providing value.

PR 2.0

Some of the first industries to capture digital data real-time were hedge funds and other financial firms. They used something that I’ll call an intelligence dashboard — where different streams of data were needed to make complex decisions. The dashboard allowed users to see many different stocks at once, and companies were able to create a sort of proto-feed that showed many different ecosystems of data at once.

Data Mashups

Services like Netvibes and Yahoo! pipes can be mixed together to offer companies real-time intelligence feeds that show what their competitors are posting on their blogs, what people are saying about them on twitter, and their overall online presence — all in one place.

Making these intelligence dashboards takes time and research, but the value added (not to mention the time saved) by the implementation of a centralized data source is immense. Also, it’s powerful enough for agencies that manage multiple clients, because the entire system fits into one browser window with a series of custom, labeled tabs.

All brands have an analog version of this, and some have a digital one — but all brands need it. Google Alerts is a quick and Intelligence dashboards are capable of handling the data generated by global and local brands as well. They can monitor Flickr photos, news items, blog posts, ect. Anything online, and anything in motion. Companies who do not monitor their own brands run the risk of their brands

Community

A websites’ user base should be voluntary - it should be providing a comfortable nesting ground for user actions. Youtube allows its users the space for their communities to interact, and does not force them to interact in a specific way. New tools should be created to move forward the voluntary community’s ability to reach their goals. In doing this, the creator must be able to understand what the user’s needs are, and then help the user to get there step by step. Instead of major site redesigns, tools should be being found by the user during normal routine actions. This will allow the user to ‘discover’ that tool for themselves and then determine, over time, the best use of that tool.

Explicitly stated actions or rules for the user to follow are confining and dictatorial. Suggestions are better (See Tumblr - a user-based and created space to post quotes, pictures, and videos (a sort of microblog with media…but with less interconnectivity than Twitter). The database/user experience must expand more from the side of the users and the system must be mutable enough for the to move with the space of the user.

About

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media consultant living in Portland, Oregon. You can find her on Twitter @caseorganic, or may contact her via E-mail at caseorganic at gmail.com.

photo credit: Martin Pettitt

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds?

Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers. But Portland’s own event, Ignite Portland, will be happening soon, and it is a chance for locals to make short presentations on anything they are passionate about.

When?

November 13, 2008. On the Ignite Portland Blog, Josh Bancroft urges Portlanders to Save the Date.

Ignite History

Local tech legend Raven Zachary told me that Ignite Portland was founded by Brady Forrest of O’Reilly. He was initially inspired by Japan’s rapid fire presentation method of Pecha Kucha and did an adaptation of that for technology. If you haven’t heard of Pecha Kucha before, it is Japanese for the sound of conversation. Attendees watch a speakers that have only 20 slides, with 20 seconds per slide.Portland Pecha Kucha Night was just last week.

Ignite Portland

Portland, Oregon has had some of the largest events in Ignite history. Ignite 2 packed the Bagdad Theatre with over 750 people, and many waiting in line had to be turned away.

Ignite Portland at Gnomedex

Several alumni of Ignite Portland will be presenting their five minute topics at this week’s Gnomedex 8.0, an annual social media conference organized by Chris Pirillo. Rick Turoczy has a list of the presenters on his blog, Silicon Florist, and Portland Ignites Gnomedex on TinyScreenfuls, the blog of Josh Bancroft, who points out that “The idea for Ignite Portland was hatched at last year’s Gnomedex.”

Ignite Portland Planning Begins Now

November 13th may seem like a long time away, but Ignite events take a tremendous amount of effort to pull off. Want to be part of the event and meet some really cool people in the process? The Ignite Planning Committee is always open to dedicated, passionate volunteers. Help make this Ignite Portland even better than the last three.

The Ignite Planning meeting that occurred at Cubespace tonight was there primarily to deal with a system in large demand. The first major thing discussed how the online ticket reservation system would function. Then, volunteer teams were developed. Currently, they are as follows:

The Presenter Team

Raven Zachary, Mentor iPhone developer and recently of Raven.me, an iPhone development blog. You can follow Raven on Twitter. He’s also a Legion of Tech Board Member.

Tasks

• Review and sort through all Portland Ignite 4 proposals.
• Ensure that all presenters submit 20 images, a Powerpoint, or PDF by the final deadline.
• Ensure that AV equipment does not FAIL upon deployment.

The Marketing Team

Josh Bancroft, Mentor of Intel, Kindle Evangelist, and author of the TinyScreenfuls Blog, and Legion of Tech Board Member. @Jabancroft on Twitter.

Tasks

• Spread the word about Ignite Portland 4 through writing on the Ignite Portland Blog
• Designate an Official Ignite Portland spokesperson to ensure uniform information gets out to local media connections.
• Monitor the Tweetverse for Tweets about Ignite Portland. Tweet from the official Ignite Portland blog, and answer questions as they are asked.

The Sponsor Contact/Site Team

Todd Kenefsky, Mentor CEO of Connect Interactive Media, an interactive marketing company, and Legion of Tech Board Member.

Tasks

• Convert Sponsor logos from .eps format to .gif or .jpg and place them on the Ignite Portland sponsor page.
• Help create sponsor slides

The Ignite Event Setup Team

Dawn Foster, Mentor, Consultant, FastWonder blogger, Legion of Tech Board Member, and recently, of Shizzow, an micro-geolocation released last Monday (a review of its beta release is here).

Tasks

• Help set up the venue during the day of the event.
• Organize attendees and help line flow.

Other Organizers

Adam Duvander also has a hand in organizing Ignite Portland events and has presented in past Ignites. Check out his blog, Simplicity Rules, and Adam’s Twitter profile.
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For more information, check out the Ignite Portland Website.

Ignite Portland 4 will be on November 13, 2008

Bagdad Theater
• 3702 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd
• Portland, OR 97214
• 7:00 - 10:00 PM
• Ticketholders get in at 5:30 PM
• General Admission at 6:15 PM
• Admission is always FREE

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Please let me know if I missed anything in this post. Feel free to contact the Mentors via Twitter if you’d like to add to the volunteer efforts.

You can follow me on Twitter @caseorganic. I’ll be on the Marketing and Sponsor Teams.

Thanks for reading Hazelnut Tech Talk! We’re proud to bring you event coverage from a mix of creative and tech worlds.

Today at 2Pm, all of the members of Portland Advertising Federation’s Colaboratory program presented their final marketing plan to Sameunderneath, a local sustainable clothing company.

Team Lattice showed a 5 minute video about their experiences before delving into the presentation.

The Lattice Presentation

• Research and Strategy
• Digital Brand Experience
• In-Store Branding
• Spreading Awareness
• Experiental

The Types of Sameunderneath Buyers

• Change Agents
• Enlightened Rebels
• Movers and Shakers
• Established Pioneers

Some of the brilliant ideas they came up with were as follows:

• Consumer Education: hangtags with information about the company’s values and the clothing ingredients and creation process. This will allow the consumer to really interact with the history of each piece of clothing.
• Stickers that can be written upon, to generate content for ideas — to spread the sameunderneath brand. Biodegrade nontoxic stickers.
• Chalk wall poetry can then be put on the walls of buildings with the sameunderneath.com logo at bottom - generated from Stickers #colab
• Projecting comments from a live Twitter feed about the Sameunderneath product on the catwalk of a Sameunderneath fashion show in LA. Sponsored and attended by socially-conscious, high-profile musicians.
• Branding on the inside of the clothing, so that wearers can lift their shirts to show, indeed, that they are wearing Sameunderneath. (Serves as an advertisement for photo opportunities, and a chance to show off nicely toned Yoga-abs?).
  • Flyers
  • Website relaunch
  • Outdoor wallscapes
  • Magazine
  • Documetnary Series
  • Sameunderneath Film Festival
  • 30 second Promotion
  • T-Shirt Challenge
  • Banner Ads
  • Pioneer Square Gallery

The Sameunderneath Target Market:

“People who give a Damn”
And for people who love music——>Advertising on Pandora.com”

Audience Interaction

Lattice team members ended by handing out stickers to everyone in the audience, saying, “Please, finish the statements on these “biodegradable, non-toxic stickers” and place them in locations that are poinigiant (and

Ryan Christensen, Founder of Sameunderneath said, “this idea is genius…(holds up the stickers with fill-in blanks) …when I first began Sameundenerath

An LA Resident Responds to the Sticker Idea

I was live blogging the Colaboratory Presentation as it happened, and I received a reponse to the stickers from @willtorres from Los Angeles, California.

@willtorres: “@caseorganic yeah, i love the stickers idea a lot. i was going to imitate a project i found with stickers throughout the city.”

Looks like their idea will be a great success.

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Team Kiwi Presents

Luke Rolka:
Sameundeneath started as an educational curriculum…an idea. Now it has transformed into this business model. This socially responsible business.

“What we want to do is take this and make it big — move it national”.

“We want to take Saemunderneath and turn it into a model of super awesome success”.

Bryan Davidson: Even as Samunderneath grows, there are certain values that must stay the same.

Bryan Davidson’s words were, true, charismatic, thoughtful and provocative, which mirrored exactly the bullet points on the screen.

“You’re not just selling clothes, you’re selling a value system.”

“It is important to keep things small while thinking large. So we propose a new role of Community Director, because the world needs more Ryans.”

Luke Rolka: Consumers these days are really looking for ways to engage in a brand.The director is taking the Sameunderneath values and living and breathing them…becoming the representation of the brand. here in Portland. Then they can take that knowledge and adapt it to a city that they’re going to be running, and see how they can do it there.

Christine Vo: Sameunderneath is known very well in portland right now, but we want to take that internationally.

The T-Shirt Challenge

A way for designers to really get their name out there and show off their work.

Film Festivals, Lecture Series, Art Shows, and a Magazine

This was a decidedly different take then the music /urban street appelation basis of the Team Lattice presentation.

Founding of a Corporate Magazine, each zine with region focus, showing what each of those locations are doing with their local community and the Sameunderneath brand.

Then Unveiled a New Website: in which each of the pages have great design, Documentary Series, Philosophy, Community. “Get Involved” tab.

“What would you say to the world if you had 30 seconds to speak your mind?”
Rebels are encouraged to speak their minds on any subject and submit the video to the Sameunderneath website.

Flyers Embedded with Seeds

In order for you to grow, you have to engage with the customer. How better than by growing pieces of paper? Flyers embedded with Wildflower seeds. They can be buried in the backyard and have the words, “grow your paper and your ideas”.

“Each city’s flyer will have a different skyline, and we will try to get local artists to do the images for them. At every point, it is important to get local artists to do things for the compay…all these things create sustainable organic growth frr your company.

Then at the end presented a marketing plan roundup which included:

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Now Ryan has to choose. It is a very intense decision. He leaves to use the restroom.

Sameunderneath had a 1.5 million growth revenue last year. The company is interested in affordable and efficient marketing methods for growth.

It all comes down to the customer base. Are they artsy and into film? Are they into music? The marketing plans seem to target slightly different demographics. Lattice presents an urban grassroots music-base, and Kiwi defines the demographic as a more thoughtful, artsy, film-loving creature.

The success of either marketing plan all comes down to what best fits the true demographic of Sameunderneath consumers.

To Team Lattice: One of your best points was the paper; that pamphlet that has the story that goes into the stores to educate the people. Something that each floor sales staff can read to better understand the product.

To Team Kiwi: We’ve been doing flyers since the beginning of the company, but now we’re starting to do personal invitations. It’s a way to say, we don’t want to waste your time with pieces of paper. With a private invite, people have to go out of their way to ask their friends to attend an event, and it is more word of mouth than objective and detached.

Ryan: This is a really difficult decision. They’re two different plans.

I really liked the fact that Team Lattice had the fill-in sticker that told the story of the brand. At the end of the day, it’s a new version of “hello my name is” Things like that are so personal and so engaged with community. It could go anywhere and be filled in with the culture of that community, that space.

To Team Lattice: I thought you ladies did a great job and restrained it to what really matterned.

In addition, your presentation’s marketing recommendations started small and then went big, just like how Sameunderneath should be growing. If you had shown me the magazine in the beginning, I would’ve discounted it right from the start. Do you have any idea how much it costs to publish something like that?

To Team Kiwi:What I really liked a lot was Bryan. You were kind of the leader of the pack. It wasn’t a presentation—you were being you.

The Decision

Ryan buys enough time to think, and then makes his decision. It is Team Lattice. But he points out that he doesn’t want to make a decision at all, because both teams came up with exceptional ideas.

“I would like each and every one of you to E-mail me,” he says, “and each of you to come to visit my creative team. I want both teams to be there to put in opinions and voice their two cents.”

The Colaboratory Sameunderneath Discount

Ryan added that, “Between now and the end of the month—everything in the store is $20 from now until the end of the month. Just let the store staff know that you’re a member of Colab and this discount will be available to you”.

Final Thoughts

According to Malcolm McCullough, author of Digital Ground, “Design is the Product”. Design is what people experience, what they see…all text, all seen and unseen material. It is that Psychology of space that design induces that makes a person feel positively or negatively about a space or thing. Online voluntary communities need a base under which to interact. They cannot be forced into acting voluntarily. They must weave themselves into the brand’s story.

I believe Team Lattice did this the best, because they created three distinct and affordable ways in which consumers could weave themselves into the brand’s story while helping to tell that story. The hang tags describing each piece of clothing and the company’s philosophy, the fill-in stickers, and the concert were all integrating factors that weaved the brand into the lives of the consumers.

It has been an amazing experience watching the #Colab members interact with each other and their agencies. I can’t wait to watch how they develop in the future. I’ve never seen such a dedicated and intelligent group of designers work so hard on a project before. Kudos to everyone. Team Lattice and Team Kiwi will go incredibly far, and soon.

~.—————————————

About the Colaboratory Internship Project

Sponsored by the Portland Ad Federation, the COLAB project believes that “Interning at 1 agency is so pre-millennial”, and takes a different route in inspiring the creativity and professional education of its interns.

From the Colaboratory website: “COLABORATORY takes place over 6 weeks in Portland, Oregon. 10 participants are selected and individually paired with 3 of the 11 agencies based on their strengths and interests. Interns spend 2 intensely focused weeks at each agency learning from all disciplines”.

Interns:

• Allison McKeever
• Bryan Davidson
• Christene  Vo
• Heather Schwartz
• Kim Karalekas
• Luke Rolka
• Melissa Casillas
• Mary McPherson
• Megan Nuttall
• Whitney Bard

Agencies:

• Ascentium
• eROI
• Anvil Media
• Fish Marketing
• the|new|group
• Grady Britton
• CMD
• Asterix Group
• HMH
• Livengood|Nowack.

Also check out the Team Lattice business card: It grows with their ideas.



Hazelnut Tech Talk is proud to play a part in reporting the COLAB experience, and is dedicated to connecting COLAB members with local networks, people and events that are moving and shaking the design world.

All of the members of COLABORATORY have been blogging about their adventures since their first day. Bram Pitoyo built a way to follow all of the action at once. It also checks the latest Twitter conversation that’s hastagged #COLAB, so you do none of the work and get all the results. Check out Bram Pitoyo’s COLAB Feed Aggregator from Yahoo! Pipes.

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