Augmented Reality has become more than a buzzword. It represents the next step in human/computer interaction. Interfaces that were once solid have become liquid. With the iPhone, we have the ability to download software from the air. With augmented reality, the interface evaporates from the liquid state into the air as well. Bruce Sterling’s keynote at Layar is a helpful introduction to this field.

There have been a number of applications developed by various companies and individuals, but what’s being done in Portland? As it turns out, quite a lot. I’ve been running an unadvertised Augmented Reality meetup for the past few months (if you’re a developer or Interaction Designer interested in attending this group, comment below), and have found the Portland tech community to be a fertile ground or AR development.

Mobile Portland brings Augmented Reality to you

Starting Monday, you can learn more about what’s going on in Portland AR as well. There will be a meetup at AboutUs.org with two of Portland top AR developers. They’re great people and I highly recommend meeting them. The meeting starts at 6pm at AboutUs.org.

Event Overview

Imagine being able to use your phone to see what that IKEA couch you’ve been considering will look like in your living room. A far-fetched science fiction scenario? No, IKEA has already released an application like that in Europe.

Augmented reality is an exciting and emerging technology. Augmented reality take real life information–typically the video display of a phone–and overlays it with computer information. Augmented reality is something that is completely unique to mobile.

This month at Mobile Portland, we’re lucky to have two speakers who are early innovators in augmented reality. P. Mark Anderson is platform architect for Spot Metrix which provides an augmented reality library for iPhone called 3DAR. Tim Sears created Robotvision, one of the first augmented reality applications for iPhone.

Mark and Tim will share how people are using augmented reality, their experiences using augmented reality, and what the future holds for this new technology.

About the Speakers

P. Mark Anderson

P. Mark Anderson has 13 years experience developing interactive applications. After receiving a degree in Computer Science from University of Colorado in 1999 he started his career as a developer for Sun Microsystems.

In addition to creating several iPhone applications, Mr. Anderson moderates the Helpful iPhone Utilities open source project, as well as My Maps, an augmented reality iPhone app built on top of Google’s personalized mapping system.

Mr. Anderson is platform architect for the 3DAR augmented reality SDK. He enjoys working with both artists and developers, and occupies his spare time with watercolor painting, mountain biking, disc golf and mentoring.

Tim Sears

Tim Sears is a software engineer who works for PR firm Waggener Edstrom by day building web applications, by night creating location-based augmented reality experiences for the iPhone. He created Robotvision, a popular augmented reality browser, for the iPhone in 2009 and currently works with clients to build out mobile geolocation experiences in augmented reality.

His work in augmented reality and social media analytics has been featured in major publications such as ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch and CNET, and has won several awards, including the International Business Awards Best New Product/Service of 2009 for twendz, a real-time Twitter sentiment analysis application.

Date

Monday, January 25, 2010 at 6:00pm

Location

AboutUs Offices
107 SE Washington St., Suite 520,
Portland, Oregon 97214

RSVP on Upcoming.org

Mobile Portland: Augmented Reality on Upcoming.org

Website:

MobilePortland.com

Great News! The next CyborgCamp will be in early May of 2010. That means its time to start planning!

This meeting is everyone’s chance to brainstorm on location ideas, sponsors and speakers. What kinds of topics are of interest to you? How has the idea of Cyborg evolved over the last year? What new kinds of technologies have arrived on the scene?

We’ll discuss volunteers and the wiki too. Come along, especially if you helped make CyborgCamp PDX ‘08 so excellent in the first place. Bring snacks and drinks to share with others.

This planning meeting will most likely be followed by general networking and fun at a local haunt.

RSVP on Upcoming.org

Where:

AboutUs.org

107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520
Portland Oregon 97214
United States

When:

Tuesday, January 19, 2010 from 7–9pm

—

What is CyborgCamp?

CyborgCamp is an 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.
Why May 2010? In March 2010, CyborgCamp will make its way to Brazil and back before landing again in Portland, Oregon for its second year.

—

Questions? Contact Amber Case @caseorganic or MJ @mama_j.

You can also follow @cyborgcamp on Twitter for updates.

Today I was excited to speak at BoCo, a great new conference developed by the Boulder Tech Community, especially Andrew Hyde. Rick Turoczy was there, among other awesome Portlanders, San Fransiscans, and Boulderites. It  was a sunny day and there were beautiful mountains all around. The morning sessions dealt with food and music and were very wonderful to listen to.

I spoke about Cyborg Anthropology, which is the study of human computer interactions and how technology affects the way in which we communicate with one another.

We Are All Cyborgs

When you read this, you are acting as a low-tech cyborg, because you are using a computer to view text that I have written. My writing is stored here in my website, part of my actor network of external technological devices that, when taken together, comprise my technosocial self. As cavemen, we began skipping evolution by crafting spears instead of growing teeth. We began making hammers as extensions of our fists.

My social self is part technology and part human. My technological self does a lot of networking for me through my social networking profiles and my Google search results. So do yours (if you have them). My technosocial avatar of a self networks for me when I’m not there.

Distributed Social Selves

Each piece of my distributed social identity leaves a geological trail of past self that my present self can interact with. These all comprise my future self, which your future self or selves will most undoubtedly interact with. The online optimization of self, when coupled with the analog optimization of self (i.e. real-life networking, person to person) is the creation of a stable identity that is uniformly distributed and presented all over the web.

Technology Resembles Magic

Technology is almost magical. Like the scrying pool of the past (or of fantasy novels), the iPhone or computer monitor allows us to view anything anywhere in the world through YouTube and Twitter, News sites and Facebook. We can summon up an image with a simple spell (a simple text entry into Google search or Twitter search) and we can extend our speech and ears across very large distances in seconds with the mere touch of a button.

Technology Gives Us Superpowers

Technology, when used well, gives us amazing superpowers. We are like gods, until we forget to charge our batteries. We are like gods, until we forget to upgrade our devices to the most recent operating system or device number. Our external prosthetic devices turn against us when they get old. Our old clothes go out of style. Our brick phones make us get laughed at in the streets.

From Physical Transportation to Mental Transportation

In the same way that cars transport our physical bodies, computers and cell phones transport our spiritual bodies. Don’t like the word spiritual? Use the word mind instead. We’re increasingly entering into a world of mental machines - mental transportation devices. These devices transmit our thoughts invisibly to others. They are taking up smaller amounts of space, until vehicles, who require increasingly large highways.

Mental Traffic Jams

We have traffic jams, too. Mental traffic jams. Jams on Twitter. Twitter fails. Rush hour around important events and deaths and wars and crises. We can now have multiple views of the same event.

Telephonic Schizophrenia

When telephone technology first came out, people felt it was crazy. The idea of going into a room and speaking into a machine sounded schizophrenic.

More

There is more: enough to fill up a hour and a half speech, but I’ll leave that to you to see the next time I speak. Until then, you can follow me on Twitter @caseorganic, or you can check out BoCo.

What’s happening with the business of advertising? What will the post-consumer economy look like? What is going on in sustainability?

Jelly Helm is the first to admit that he doesn’t know. But that doesn’t stop him from speculating about it in public, especially to audiences of excited listeners.

Last night, Jelly treated a number of us to a great presentation was full of existentialist introspection, personal narrative, and show-stopping poetry. He also gave us a sneak peek of the new work he’s done with the Oregon Council for the Humanities, and shared his excitement for Wikipedia, his newest client.

It was a fun-filled tour de force that could’ve lasted for a few hours more.

About this Transcript

If you were unfortunate enough to be sitting near me, you probably heard me typing very furiously, first in the audience, and then respectfully (hopefully) off to the side. Transcripts are important because they allow something amazing to be shared with a larger audience, but the resolution of experience decays as one abstracts the essence of the event through a digital means. I hope that this account preserves something of the excellent speech that was given last night.

I’m sorry there are not many images. I didn’t have a camera with me. Undoubtedly, there will be a thousand errors in punctuation and grammar. If it is something you enjoy doing, please feel free to point out any and all of them in the comments below.

Location

The event was held in the Cleaners at the Ace Hotel, a space often reserved for events such as this. Eric Hillerns, of Pinch. A Design Office., organized the event as part of AIGA’s Designspeaks.

“The Design Speaks series was developed as a voice for the creative community”, he began, “It was basically established to be a series of small talks intended to inform and inspire”.

How Eric met Jelly

Eric Hillerns met Jelly after his presentation at the 2008 Creative Conference.

“I knew that he was a high profile guy with arguably the best agency in the world”, said Hillerns, “Though our chat was brief, we had some common realationhips - and we left it at that”.

But later, while vying for the same buisness pitch - Jelly won it. Hillerns wasn’t pleased, of course.

“But I understood,” he admitted, “after all, Jelly was one of the more creartive strategists in the business”.

So Hillerns sent an E-mail.

“And at the end of the E-mail, I said - ‘We’re interested in watchng the brand evolve. We’re rooting for them, we’re rooting for you - don’t fuck it up’ .”

There was laughter from the aduience.

“Needless to say,” continued Hillerns, “he certantly hasn’t fucked up. I’m inspired by his approach to problems. He approaches them in a reverent manner”.

About Jelly Helm

Hillerns explained that Jelly Helm was a writer, designer, film director, creative director, and teacher. His clients include Imperial Woodpecker, Oregon Humanities, Infectious Diseases Research Institute and Wikipedia. He was formerly an executive creative director at Wieden + Kennedy, and founder of W+K 12, an experimental school inside the agency.

Jelly’s Presentation

Jelly Helm arrived at the podium. Behind him was the beginning of a PowerPoint screen that held an image of the word “Story” in a typewritten font. It looked like Jelly had typewritten his PowerPoint and scanned in each slide.

Jelly: Well, that certaintly was pleasant. I’m glad you all came. I didn’t expect you all to come, but thanks.

For me, all of my work, whether in design, writing, film directing, ect. — has been about the narrative; about story.

I left Wieden+Kennedy to take a sabbatical with no clue as to what would happen next. I took six months at first and then took one year because it was good to sit and think about why I do what I do for a living.

Tonight, before I got up here to give this speech, I saw Dave Allen. He said, “are you prepared?” And I said, of course, ‘this is my script’. This is me.

Jelly then tried to turn the slide, but it doesn’t work — it’s stuck.

Jelly: I hope you like this slide.

*laughter*

So, while they’re getting that, are there any questions you’d like to ask?

Audience: Where are you teaching at right now?

Jelly: I’m not teaching right now. I taught in two places, and then started a school at Wieden+Kennedy called 12.

*changes slides*

David Kennedy, who is kind of a crazy guy, has all of these little papers, which he cuts up and carries around with him. I used to be confused about why he did this, but now I’m doing it.

“This slide shows the time humans have been on Earth compared to how long the Universe has existed. It’s taken 12 billion years from the beginning of the Universe, and 5 billion since the beginning of the Sun. And then a tiny dash at the end shows us. Here we are, barely begun - the race of humans.

He showed the next slide, which was a picture of the Earth with the acronym “wtf” typewritten above it.

The Birth of the Story

The beginning of human life is inexplicable. There’s animals chasing you; you’re living in the cold without any clothes; picking foods that occasionally posion you….

And around 30,000 years ago we started doing something. We started telling stories. And people linked this up with the birth of the human spirit.

The reason we told these stories was to understand what was going on.

–

Karen Armstrong writes:

“We are meaning-seeking creatures.
Dogs, as far as we know,
do not agonise about the canine condition,
worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world,
or try to see their lives from a different perspective.

But human beings fall easily into despair,
and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting,
that revealed an underlying pattern,
and gave us a sense that,
against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary,
life had meaning and value”.

–

We still use stories to make sense of the world, to:

-Create order
-To find our place
-To discover meaning
-To determine actions

“I think story is the operating system of being a human being.”

So…

Story.
Story.
Story.

I can’t remember what slide is next.

*click*

The slide changes to read “I am a storyist”.

So I’m a storyist.

I’ve played in a rock band, I’ve been an actor…

[But] underneath it all is a passion for telling stories and how they shape us and what they mean to us.

I Read Poetry

If any of you were at the Creative Conference you know I use poems. I use this particular poem to understnad my role - because, like you, I have the same chaotic experience.

This is the same poem that Willy Wonka quoted from. It is from the time of the Civil War.

—

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

– Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1884-1881)

—

Jelly’s recitation of the poem left a sort of stunned atmosphere in the audience.

“You don’t explain poems, right?” he finally said, “That’s the rule?”

“But sometimes I need help,” he continued, “I think it describes what it is like to experience the endless cycle of us as the leading edge of the universe.

The story that holds togehter for me is the story of growth - unfolding and exploding. And I think that’s what the world is about - unfolding and exploding and exploring new growth.

—

Spiral Dynamics Model - The Theory of Human Development

This graph shows a more analytical way to describe what Arthur said in his poem. This model was created by taking every model and puting them on top of each other. Maslow, and Jung, ect. Is there any pattern to them? This is mappnig human development over time?

At the bottom there is there is this tan area - this is pure terror - this is waking up as humans and having this rude self-awareness. And the next layer is purple. It is the idea that, ‘I exist and you exist - and if we cooperate, we can do things together’.

Red is our development of our sense of power an dominance. The idea that there are others our there and we have to kill them.

The blue layer is order and not letting violence be the top level of culture.

And then the next layer is the layer of science.

Then there’s green - what you think of as green sustainability - we need to protect the least of us. It is about relativism.

And beyond that is yellow. We’re entering this emergent culture and we’ll talk about more of that momentarily.

Sustainability

I’d like to talk about this word and what it stands for. It’s not enough.

The idea that my grandkids are buying the same sustainable couches as me makes me want to gag. I think we can aspire to more than that.

What would more than that look like? Yes-we can understand those values of sustainability.

The emergent culture is the green meme is a little suspicious of technology.

There’s an entire chart here of emergent culture, where multicultural/fairness/equity, technology/science, heirarchy/order, competition/power/ego, and trival/local — they’re all at odds with each other.

So right now we’re merging into this yellow culture which will embrace all of these values.

That’s kind of the typical thing that hppens.

I think we have our first emergent culture that’s happened right now.

*applause*

That’s an easy applause line. But it’s true. We see it here in Portland.

The Zoroastrians’ Visions

So I was watching Rick Steves on PBS a while ago. It was one of those travel episodes where he was in Iran. The first thing he says was, “they’re not Iraqis — they’re Persians!! They don’t speak Arabic, they speak Persian!” Like it was obvious.

I though that was interesting, and I wanted to learn more, so I went to Wikipedia, which is what everyone does now when they don’t know soemthing. There was a link to an article on Zoroastrianism, the oldest religious community of Iran.

Apparently the Zoroastrians had predected that the future of civilization would be so spiritual that humans would not even cast a shadow.

And this is not about IKEA making everything sustainable. It’s about soemthing else.

And it’s a great thing to say. People usually say ‘woah!’, when they hear this. But if you say it too much you begin to sound crazy.

So we seek out, in branding - the things that expand our own stories. The brands I who are successful are the brands who align with who we are and the story of the world.

I don’t know what to call them. People-powered brands. Because they’re not controlled by an agency. Emergent brands. Because they’re not controlled by a style guide. Post-consumer brands. Because many brands are based on a consumer way of happiness while not being actually okay for the earth.

Emergent Brands

-Apple
-Google
-Wikipedia

They allow us to experience our full humanity. Our full creativtiy.

Emergent Brands?

-McDonalds
-PhilipMorris

Are these Emergent Brands? McDonalds’ Stock keeps going up right now. I don’t really go into McDonanlds and I don’t get eat there, but those times when I go into McDonald’s, I find that the menus are a hundred times healthier than they were before. I can go in there and my kid can get celery sticks, a grilled cheese sandwich and an apple juice.

I also hear that they’re the number one distributor of apples in the country. Is this true?

(Someone in the audience confirms).

If you’re working with a company who can’t answe rhte question of ‘Who are you?’ and ‘Why are you here?’, then run far, far away.

Value vs. Profit, Abudance vs. Scaricity

It will never work if a company extracts more than it takes.

I think that successful post-consumer brands create value before they reap it, which is much better than abudance vs. scarcity - which is the opposite process - where a brand decides to reap value before creating it.

See “Conspiracy of Science - Earth is in Fact Growing” on YouTube. It’s a really hilarious video where a guy says, “these continents can’t be moving around over time! What are they moving on? The only solution is that the Earth must be expanding! Check it out. You should really watch this video.

—

There’s kind of a folly of being a human being.

Where do you create value — where is your abundance?

Where is your joy?

I’ll leave that thought with a poem. It’s a Robert Frost — one he wrote towards the end of his life.

This last one was sort of him throwing up his hands at the progression of humans.

“Yet for all this help of head and brain,
How happily instinctive we remain.
Our best guide upward further to the light,
Passionate preference such as love at sight.”

I was so suspicious of Bill Gates in the beginning.

His comment was “when I’m ready to give away money, “you’ll know about it”.

He was really a good person in the world. And he’s really pulled his mind to it.

My frame is growth.

We expand - and we’re an endless source of growth.

We’re all abundant, whether in storytelling or elsewhere.

The key is going to it from that frame of thought. Thinking, ‘Where am I abundant? Where am I good?’

Usually it is the opposite. One asks the self, ‘why am I not like other people? I need to do things like they do!’

This is why I had Philip Morris next to the McDonald’s logo in that earlier slide. When they bought a bunch of food compainies - I said, “good job, Philip Morris - I’d rather you be selling food than cigarettes…”

Large soft drink companies are having a difficult time selling that brown (explicative) any more — becuase it is posion — you drink that shit and you die.

You must instead ask, what is the prupose of your brand?

And if it is to continue lining the pockets of shareholders — then it is not the right purpose.

Audience: Who is your favorite philosopher?

I didn’t do school - so I don’t know many philosophers. I heard Bertrand Russell was pretty cool. I have a lot of people tell me that, so he’s probably great.

I like people who tell the truth and tell a good story so I can read about it.

I like anything that tells me a story that quiets my mind and opens my heart.

So I like Mad magaizine.

Audience: What makes you mad?

I didn’t feel very good today so I felt mad.

I’m not as good at being mad as I used to be.

Audience: What is it you push against?

Jelly: Nothing. I mean - it’s great - what is there to push agaisnt?

Audience: Will there be anything to be angry push agaisnt when we no longer cast a shadow?

Audience: It’s that the Myans that think it is the end of history.

Jelly: It’s hard to look at that slide of 13 billion years and think anything it intense or unordinary. Anything can happen. We haven’t been here for very long.

Growth is natural. How do you connect to it? You just have a good itme.

You know Danial Payne wrote that book Collective Intelligence. He wrote about how incentives dont’t work in this new work. I totally agre. You cannot invent a world voice. It is so counterintuitive. I think joy might be the solution.

Jelly: I dont know if anyone feel a little bit ripped off about ho tey were raised.

So story is how we connect our culture, for sure.

I think of the stories I grew up with. We’ve had 50 stories that have been carved in granite for 150 years and now they’ve all crumbled. I think, ‘these are bad stories!’.

Audience: When was the last time you had your hair blown back?

Jelly: Well, Obama, right? I feel bad about going on about Obama - but it is an amazing story.

Also, I’m a fan of Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell’s stories can be overlapped and they become a pretty good story. They’re about peopel falling down and getin back up…which is what all of humanity is about.

Are you laughing at me or with me?

The Infectious Disease Research Institute

Let me show you some work. I’m working with some organizations right now. One of them is this Infectious Disease Research Institute, which is a really bad name.

But it is a really neat story. Basically it is this guy name Steve Reed in Seattle who made this non-profit institute to prevent disease.

Then there’s a non-profit Biotech. There are some great people. Chris Hornbecker. These scinetists who are great.
And then there’s this company. (shows an image of the Wikipedia logo) And this is it - I cant beleive I’m working with this company.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is written by 150,00 volunteers in the world. They have now assembled the lastest amount of material in the world. Jimmy Wales just wanted to start an online encyclopedia that anyone could write. It was called Newpedia.

He recounted his experience at Wikimania, a conference for wiki users. It sounded like a wonderful time.

“Did you know that inventor of the Wiki lives in Oregon?”, asked Jelly.

Some of the audience shook their head.

“His name is escaping my mind right now. It was…”

“Ward Cunningham!” I shouted from the audience. (Not only does the inventor of the wiki live in Portland, but he’s an extremely kind person too. Wickedly intelligent, approachable, and very involved in the local tech community).

Yes! Ward Cunningham. And Pete Forsyth, another Portland resident, is also a very dedicated contributor too.

Oregon Humanities

Here’s how I got involved with Oregon Humanities. They called me up one day and the first thing I thought was, “woah, did I forget to turn in an essay or something?” But instead they started telling me about what they do.

For instance, they told me about a series they have called “Think and Drink”, and I said, “uhh…”. So they were like, well ‘we’d like to talk to you about what the humanities are’. Humanities are no longer concerned with a white haired dude at the front of the auditorium telling us what to do.

So Jelly worked on the name. It got shortened to O. Hm, which is the sound of leanring a new idea. Oh! Hmm! or, O. Hm. Oregon Humanities. That’s part of the campaign. There’s more. Lots more. If you live in the Portland area, there’s no doubt that you’ll see more of it.

Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam

We were there, and working on a campaign to get people to drink (a certain soft drink which will not be named here) during the holiday. Someone said, ‘how about we associate it with a holiday? Have people opening that drink and enjyoing it during the holidays’. And that campaign was so successful that they said, ‘next year we want to own Ramadan and Passover’. Own! Especially when one reads Joseph Campbell and gets to understand how important these traditional holidays are to the cultures they’re associated with. No one talks about the purpose of the buisness. They just want to make moeny.

I just guessed I looked under a rock a few too many times.

Early on, there seems to be an overview of the aesthetics of what we did visually, but not the purpose of it.
But,

when I work with clients who have a purpose — I LOVE it.

Like Timberland. If it is a good story to tell, I still want to tell it.

Audience: A year ago, at Cre8con, you were really down on Chompsky — and I didn’t read him becuase of that.

Helm: You can read him — I just dont think you’ll enjoy it.

Audience (Crystal Beasley): What do people most often get wrong about story?

Jelly: I don’t know.

What do you think?

I think about it when I watch a movie and they don’t have the heart piece right.

Audience: Some people don’t have a point to their story. In the end there’s nothnig to gain from it.

Jelly wrapped up his speech after that and got a lot of applause. It had been an excellent evening.

There was also some nice wine and beer. Thanks to those who served the crowd, 52Ltd, AIGA, Designspeaks, and everyone who attended.
—-

About the Transcriber

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and new media strategist living in Portland, Oregon. She currently works at Wieden + Kennedy and tries to participate in as many tech and design events as possible. Her clients range from small to large companies, and she can be contacted through Twitter at @caseorganic, or through E-mail at caseorganic [at] gmail [dot] com.

About 52 Ltd.

52 Ltd. is Portland’s homegrown matchmaker of talent and employers in the arena of creative services. They received recognition in the 2008 and 2009 lists of Fastest-Growing Private 100 Companies by Portland Business Journal.

52 Limited provides contract freelance employees, full-time placement and custom project teams to a diverse client roster which includes: advertising agencies, design houses, interactive firms, brand marketers, health care organizations and others. For more information on how 52 Limited can help you find work or find talent, please visit
http://www.52ltd.com

About Designspeaks

The Designspeaks series, developed by Portland AIGA and in partnership with 52 Limited, showcases the most intriguing designers in the Pacific Northwest. Some of our guest speakers in this quarterly series will be stars and some will have mana
ged to maintain a lower profile, but we can assure you; all will challenge you to think a bit differently about design and its impact on community. We’re continually tweaking this series as an intimate venue for the creative community to connect to others, to see what they are doing and how they’re doing it. There is no specific format for Designspeaks. Basically, it’s a series of small talks gathering intended to inform, inspire and engage.

—–
Thanks much. Please leave comments below if desired.

On Wednesday, Jully 22nd 2009, Webtrends hosted a Social Media Club event with Jeremiah Owyang (@owyang) on the top floor of the building. 

Attendees were excited to see Owyang before his keynote speech at the next day’s Internet Strategy Forum (ISF) on Thursday, July 23rd, at the Governor Hotel in Downtown Portland.

Questions and Answers for Jeremiah Owyang

As we drank Widmer beer and pizza, Owyang answered some of our questions - some of which cam through Twitter (through tweeting @SocialMediaPDX).

Note:
If you want to follow along with what was said, you can check out the hashtag #smcpdx.

Can journalists engage the Groundswell and retain their abilities?

Take for example Megan McCarthy of CNET - she’s a traditional journalist but publishes as fast as the bloggers. She publishes a post immediately and then lets people know she’ll be updating the post as the news increases.

I’ll let you know something - Embargoes are almost dead. TechCrunch doesn’t honor Embargoes when they get them from large companies. As soon as that Embargo goes – it gets published. But it’s all real time now - kind of a free-for all. The rules have changed.

What do you think of web companies as long term businesses?

The think is - startups are cheap. It takes 15K -20K to get a startup running And VC’s are going to honor that. There’s still going to be money coming into the space. Because it’s cheap to run a startup these days.

Lets talk about the challenges - they’re focusing on the tools and features, not about what consumers and business want and need.
You can tell whether these companies are going to survive or not by just looking at their homepage. Are they focused on the tools and the features, or are they focused on ‘how can I help you?’

Are there any companies that are doing that well?

I was just over at Jive. They understand that very well over there. Radian6 is getting the hang of that in the startup space. They’re hiring people out of enterprise.

Is Twitter a waste of time for small businesses?

That’s the wrong question. The right question is - is the audience for that small business on Twitter? There are a lot of people out there that should be asking clients this question when they provide social media marketing services. 

Most small businesses and restaurants are Using MySpace, and then Facebook comes around.

At Forrester we have a methodology. The POST methodology. It’s in that order. Not TSOP - that’s backwards, and not even a real word!

First is Demographics, Psychographics, Technographics. How do they use technologies and where are they online? Are they reading blogs.

The O in POST is the business objective. What are you trying to do? Make them do things better, listen to them more?

The next piece is Strategy.
What is social media strategy? It’s not the tools. It’s all the things that happen behind the scenes to make it successful. The policies. The engagement.

 

Then, at the very end, the Tools. The Tools come last.

In review:
PEOPLE
OBJECTIVES
STRATEGIES
And then
TOOLS.

It is better to focus on the long-term piece - what are people doing? And how to work with them?

What are some pieces that people can look to?

Chris Brogan does a lot of good stuff. I’ll just start with the blogs. Razorfish has been doing a lot of good stuff. I think the best way is to go to the companies and pick apart what they’re doing well.

Comcast, Dell, Half-and-half Microsoft, Dell.

And those changing things? Best BUy is tryin to do a lot with social.
Intercontinental Group.

One of the best persons to follow is Obama.

We see corrpoations merge all the time and cultures change all the time. Amazon and Zappos, for instance.

I was with Tony a few weeks ago.

I think the big difference is that the culutes are very difference. What you might expect is that a lot of the inventory will appear on Zappos.

This is important to know. Social media doesn’t scale. If we’re all about building one on one social media with these tools. It doesn’t scale.

Zappos is about one to one relations. You ask them a question and they’ll give you a response. But that means they have to hire one person for every 100 interactions. If you do, you’re going to have to start outsourcing.

One thing you can do to solve this problem is to focus on word of mouth marketing on the customer side, or get the customers to help each other. They haven’t built a tool that has customers help each other yet. Maybe they’ll build a page that lets people correlate certain items of clothing with shoes.

We’re just at the early stages of references and recommendations. Our research on Trust. You should expect your friend recommendations to appear on
rather than being supported by people you don’t actually know.

There was an article in Wired about the Facebook wall. With my friends telling me what to buy and what to eat. That is their exact strategy.

The social networks are Facebook and Twitter is not to be a destination site but to get the content out there. And they know that.

My most re-tweeted tweet was “IBM is afraid of Microsoft who is afraid of Google who is afraid of Facebook who is afraid of Twitter who is afraid of whales”. I know this because each of those companies has told me who they are afraid of.

What about walled gardens?

Consumers don’t think of walled gardens. Most people don’t know or care.

People don’t remember that Email is the biggest social network - and no one has leveraged that yet.

Email does all of those things - Email signing your name, CC’ing, E-mail lists and groups.

Would you say that Email is broken?

No Email is not broken. All the A-List bloggers communicate by Email. I’ve totally seen it happen. They don’t use the tools. They use Email.

Yahoo Gmail, ect. These are the dominant social networks.

Do you think people appreciate Yahoo! and what they’re doing? Like with Yahoo! Pipes?

There’s a lot of innovation at Yahoo!, but we only see it in pieces and spurts.

That’s definitely a trend we’ll see in 2010. Aggregation.
Right now the trend is pollination - that everyone is trying to get things out there. That creates a lot of buzz. Friendfeed, Google Wave - all of these things will be trying to aggregate the signal.

And people are saying –“ is this going to be a tool used in Enterprise?” Well, it’s going to be as successful as Google Docs is in the Enterprise. Google is not an enterprise play. We’ll have to see how that plays out.

Kelly Feller: The goal is to minimize the touch points .We think
“Oh my gosh” Twitter might increase that - Kelly Feller - From Intel social media.

Audience: Is there a cost differential for Twitter vs. calls?

Owyang: If people are Tweeting about Best Buy in their free time or off hours? Should they get paid? No - because they’d be doing it in their free time. This is something that’s not been solved yet.

Here’s something that’s happening. CRM - Oracle. There’s basically a huge database about you and what you do. Lots of companies are pulling in data about you and what you like. And then if someone says, “Arggh! This Sony TV has 4 dead pixels” - they know to send someone out - via a tweet or comment - to help them with that. But if people use a different ID, it is difficult to know where something comes from.

The second thing is that companies are not ready for this – they’re just like “woah”.

Regarding Mobile

Mobile in Japan is big. Did you know they only use the phone for 4% of the time to talk on it? It’s a different type of behavior - it’s a different type of engagement.

Audience: Why do they have two?

UncleNate: One for talking and one for data?

Audience: Youth don’t E-mail. They have E-mial accounts just to set up social accounts and things.

Owyang: One of my relatives in college says she only uses E-mail to talk with old folks like me.

But as the digital natives move into the work force, they’ll be forced to use Email.

Owyang: It’s interesting that Twitter is more skewed towards older people. But youth have been using SMS for years.

About Jeremiah

As an analyst at Forrester Research, Jeremiah is on the cutting edge of all things social media. He authored the recent report “The Future of the Social Web” and is #2 on the “Twitter Power 150 List.”
——

About Social Media Club of Portland Oregon

Social Media Club (SMC) was started in 2006 by Chris Heuer, co-founder and partner at The Conversation Group, and Kristie Wells, Co-Founder and President of Social Media Club, with the core mission to:

• Expand Media Literacy
• Share Lessons Learned Among Practitioners
• Encourage Adoption of Industry Standards
• Promote Ethical Practices through Discussion and Actions

Social Media Club Portland is one of a growing number of SMC chapters across the globe.

Interested in getting involved or would like more information? Feel free to contact us.

About Internet Strategy Forum

Internet Strategy Forum Summit is a way to engage with six global brand executives in a single day at an affordable price and gain actionable Internet strategy insights at the Internet Strategy Forum Summit on July 23 and 24 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Join other Internet executive attendees and our thought-leading presenters from top companies such as Forrester (Jeremiah Owyang), Hewlett-Packard, Intuit, Xerox, Intel, Portland Trail Blazers and WelchmanPierpoint.

These experts will share their experiences and ideas on how to best leverage the Internet and integrate it into your overall business strategy. Register for the Internet Strategy Forum and save 15% with our discount code: SMC.

About the Author

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and new media consultant based in Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

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.

Prior to network culture, traditional news outlets were the first reliable source for news concerning major events. This was because traditional news media outlets have established reputations for providing a certain level of credibility and reliability.

In a global, ever-connected economy, it is finally possible to rely on citizen media outlets to receive news almost as soon as it happens, however, people often have a limited basis on which to determine validity. Online, time and space for information gathering is compressed. This also means that time and space for decision making is also reduced. This is why online social networks try to use online metrics to establish validity in as short amount of time as possible.

Take, for example, critical situations like wars, attacks, accidents or natural disasters:

• In emergency situations, traditional media sources are often too slow in providing clear, relevant information.

• In delicate political environments, standard news outlets are often blocked from transmitting relevant information.

These situations call for non-traditional data points. These data points exist in the form of social nodes in networks. The wired, network of the online world allows anyone close to the news source to have the same power as ones with bigger budgets, bigger political power or better transmission equipments like a traditional news source. Reputation in critical moments like these (such as earthquake reporting, or terrorist attack information and safety instructions) must be negotiated almost instantaneously. Unlike traditional offline news identities, there are no presuppositions of identity.

In a space where news sources are both distributed (in both sense of the word: “distribution of power” and “fragmentation”) and largely anonymous, reputation becomes the sole metric for validity. This is the problem that this paper tries to address.

Reputation is extremely complex. There is no single way to define it:

• It can take the form of a hyperlink between two places, abilities, or powers. In other words, reputation is a way of describing the link between two entities.

• It can be transitory, especially online, where reputation serves as a social construction only as long as it’s needed, depending on data flows, proximity to events, or distance between individuals. In other words, reputation is a dynamic system of situated knowledge that sorts social interactions.

• It can be a handshake, in a sense that both parties must agree to open up and exchange something valuable for a trust-relationship to happen. In the business realm, for instance, this action has been formalized in the act of exchanging business cards.

• It can be measured or tracked as an overlay on a series of data points showing relations and trust.

• It can be measured or tracked as factors that individuals share in common. More shared things will lead to more shared beliefs, value systems and judgment, and generally could better reputation.

Measuring Reputation

A new metric is thus needed in order to quickly determine credibility and reputation in the event of a crisis. Note that this paper does not aim to search for and establish the most accurate metric, but rather, one that provides the user with an idea about the situation, then leaves the ultimate value judgment in her hand. In other words, to be both economically and timely achievable, the metric has to have enough ‘fuzziness.’

“What you want is a durable perception of person”, says programmer Anselm Hook, “one that allows one to quickly understand whether a piece of information from a source is reputable or not in the fastest way possible”. One way is to wait for a backup vote. Robert’s Rules of Order say that a statement must be seconded before it can be voted on by many. But in some cases, waiting for a second is difficult, because there may be only one person next to a data source or event that is capable of reporting it.

In order to determine a valid metric, one must define a few key elements of the online experience:

Interest and Power

Power is created by interest. This is the most easily observed in online environments, where the creation of value and interest is most fluid. The fluidity of value creation and exchange.

Interest Groups

One could call an interest group a demographic. Demographics are those with specific lifestyles that influence interest, and also support those who create products or services that fulfill these interests.

Crises and Social Networks

During a crisis, interest groups tend to converge upon a single topic or news source. The creation of validity in a news source in an online social network is often very fast, and generally not a traditional news source. Network users who were formerly low-level nodes can suddenly become major nodes of traffic if they begin to provide data that has proxemic, relational, or newsworthy value.

Those nodes that can provide the fastest information have tremendous power over those who have recently turned to follow them.

Point A marks the status of normal social network conditions and interest groups.

B marks the first appearance of crisis in the social network.

C signals the ramp-up of information awareness among social groups not in the social interest group of the initial reformers.

At point D, the crisis becomes a topic of collective interest. Networks of trust re-broadcast the news to un-informed groups until the network is saturated with information from all groups capable of absorbing the information.

At E, the discussion of crisis decreases due to crisis resolution of exhaustion of topic. The crisis falls out of common interest and formerly melded interest groups diverge once again.

F marks the final resolution or disappearance of the crisis. The crisis falls almost completely out of social network conversation.

One of the problems with social networks during crises is quickly finding the nodes with the most valuable information a voice in an efficient way, and promoting them to the top of a social network so that all that need that information can find it.

Micromeasurement

On May 11th, 2008, a earthquake that measured 7.8 on the Richter scale hit China. Several of those who experienced the earthquake Twitter user @dtan Tech Reporter Robert Scoble was able to rebroadcast the message to (at the time) approximately 40,000 followers.

But how did Robert Scoble know that @dtan’s Tweets were valid?

Was it the architecture of Twitter? A trust economy, established by the rapid exchange of everyday data on Twitter helped to. But Scoble’s reputation process takes a while.He has to first follow @dtan and through direct or indirect exchange determine the user’s reputation to report on an emergency.Of course, later on, additional reports from other people in China who also experienced the quake arrived. But it took CNN hours later to report on the event. This demonstrates the agility, relevancy and accuracy of non-traditional nodes as news sources.

As an aside, tools such as Google’s translation engine allowed @dtan’s Tweets, which were written almost entirely in Chinese, to be translated into English, and passed on to a more global

Improving Data Flows in Crisis

All individuals have social bases. There are an increasing number of individuals who use social networks as social bases. However, these bases are not necessarily the same. Social networks record relationships in different ways.One who uses the photo-sharing website Flickr as a social base interacts with data differently than a Facebook or Twitter user. Robert Scoble was able to transfer authority and power to @dtan very quickly, but rapid, local news of the earthquake was constrained to Twitter.

There was no system that looked at Twitter as a database and pulled out information. Neither was there a system that added Twitter’s earthquake updates to other relevant information coming out of mainstream news sources and other social networks.

To improve data flows in crisis, there is a clear opportunity to transcend data silos and aggregating data streams into a more accessible and unified databases, so that users of different social networks, or limited social networks, can quickly access relevant information.

This calls for either:

• The establishment of an open standard for disaster reporting across networks.

• The use and appropriation of existing open standards for reporting.

For instance: the DiSo project is an initiative to facilitate the creation of open, non-proprietary and interoperable building blocks for the decentralized social web.

Another other alternative (besides traditional media) is to rely on many ‘Scoble’s’ on each social network who talk to and inform each other on current happening at all times. This is highly impractical and very costly.

——————————

Additional Sources:

For more information and a full analysis of the Twitter Earthquake reporting, please visit: http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/05/12/twitter-and-the-chinese-earthquake/

Search Engine Reputation Management

——

About

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Tech Consultant from Portland, Oregon. She studies the effects of technology on the ways in which communities are built both off and online. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

I’ve been interested in data visualization for a very long time — it intersects with a lot of very interesting things that are going on in the world, and thus is definitely worth studying. Happily enough, we now have whole boatloads of data — because the Internet has given this to us.

We have free tools and programming skills to mess with the data so that we can relatively easily turn it into something useful or interesting without puling teeth or renting computer time from 3-6 in the morning an hour’s drive away at the nearest State University.

It is because of all of these things, and what I feel is becoming an essential next step in the development of trend prediction and the very useful implementation of data and information, that we’ve decided to start having some meetings around this sort of thing.

The first Portland Data Visualization Group will be held on Monday, March 23, 2009 from 6–8pm at Webtrends.

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

View the event on Calagator, Portland’s Tech Event Calendar.

Event Description

Researchers have long said that the material published on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions.

Using his 20% time, a Google employee discovered that during flu season, many ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors. When he mapped this data, he was able to discover where flu outbreaks would strike up to two weeks before traditional news sources were able to report them.

This is an example of a time when merging a specific type of data to its geographical coordinates resulted in a unique insight. However, there is much more to do with data and visualization. What was found at Google is only the tip of a very large iceberg. Now that we have access to so much data on the web, we’re going to see an increasing need to understand and present that data.

Agenda:

The first meeeting of the Portland Data Visualization Group will serve as an introduction to what’s going on in the world of data viz. It will be freeform, so if you would like to demonstrate something you’re working on, please be prepared to do so. Micah Elliott will be showing uGraph and Ed Borasky will do a GGobi demo. I’ll be covering what already exists in the ecosystem and what might become useful in the future. We’re dealing with a rapid communication method here. Something that, if done well, compresses the time and space it takes for us to understand something.

If you’re interested in Data Visualization, please come to this event. It will be the first Portland Tech Event at WebTrends besides Web Analytics Wednesday. It’s our chance to try out the space and see if it is a good fit for this group or potentially for other groups in the future.

Google Group:

Ed Borasky recently 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.

Originally posted on Calagator, Portland’s Tech Event Calendar.

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 (192)

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.

Today was a conference called Business Leader NW. It occurred at the Portland Convention Center. One of the highlights of the day was a keynote by Urban Anthropologist Jennifer James.

 

 Jennifer James - Business Leader NW - Urban Cultural Anthropology [61:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (110)

It is always exciting to meet other anthropologists, and I was introduced to her before her speech. We exchanged a rapid amount of words back and forth. Of all the things spoken, I am able to report that she was very calm before her speech. Evidenced by a lot of practice speaking around the world.

In fact, her speech was pretty memorable. She talked about all of culture being a mythology. It’s a pretty epic look at the reality. I attempted to record the speech, the results of which are below. Apologizes for the clicking noises. I tried to type quietly.

About Jennifer

Jennifer James is an urban cultural anthropologist who was for 12 years a full time faculty member of the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Department at the University of Washington. She left the University in 1982 to follow her interest in international business and community service.  She now lectures to audiences around the world.

Speech Highlights

“Why are all the newspapers failing? It’s because they don’t print the news. They’re not challenging anyone”.

“Let’s not teach evolution in schools — because it is only a theory. They’re right - but so is gravity. I invite someone to the roof of this convention center with me right now to prove me wrong”.

“What is adaptability? The ability to use your critical thinking skills”.

“We’re in the technological age and we still want to use mythology”.

“We’re choosing clients and consultants because we think we’re like them. Because we’ll get along with them. It’s often what we need is the opposite”.

“You must know your myths and the myths of the people you’re dealing with”.

“It’s amazing how much time we waste because we’ve ‘always done it that way’ - that’s what the comic strip Dilbert is about”.

“You have to consider what people need. It’s not just money that motivates, but a work/life balance”.

“In times of great stress/change leadership is no longer complete mastery”.

“You have to match tasks in an organization with those with the strength to do those tasks”.

“The best way to lead through times of great change is through influence — which is by telling a compelling story”.

A compelling story consists of the following things:
• A set of ideas that fit the future.
• Those ideas have to resonate to deeply held values
• The person telling the story has to be believable.

“Now you can go to Costco and buy a gallon jug of Mayonnaise that you’ll have to leave in your will — because you won’t use it”.

“Why do rich people buy seven houses? Because they can’t get over security”.

Your customers — they need a product that makes them feel that they’re moving up Maslow’s hierarchy while still feeling secure.

On the Concentration of Energy by Technology

“The minute you replace a steam engine with a microchip you have concentrated energy”.

“Economics is nothing more than the efficient use of the energy available”.

“Those who have a high amount of productivity in the workplace are those who are most trusted: it relaxes them. They can do more work. They can do better work”.

“We change the definition of intelligence — now you have intelligence retrieval”.

On the Census

“Why are polar bears white? So they can go to better schools? It is absurdity — these census categories. We can handle the economics or we’re going out of business. We understand that diversity opens our business and opens our minds. The last part is opening our systems”.

“If you offer people a business that gives them meaning — people are hungry for lives that have values — they will work harder and take less money”.

Three Parts to Civilization

• Increasing access to information
• Increasing inclusivity - the more we’re wiling to see leadership where it is, the more likely we’ll accept it
• Increasing non-violent alternatives to violence - learning to debate — learning to use soft power

The audience at this conference contained no laptops. Except for the blogging pavilion, I was the only technosocially connected one in the audience. This is one of the reasons I love business conferences. The people to talk to are not the ones that understand who you are and what you do — they’re those who are different. This situation maximizes the potential exchange of ideas between people.

More About Business Leader NW

There was a lot more to do and see than just this one speech. Want to know more about Business Leader NW? Check out the Business Leader NW conference site, or the BLNW blog. Tweets associated with #blnw are available as well. Thanks to Alex H. Williams - @podcasthotel for organizing the Blogger Pavillion which serviced people new to social media with advice on blogging, Twittering and digital marketing. Also check out the website of Jennifer James.