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

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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.

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

You can also follow @cyborgcamp on Twitter for updates.

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!
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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.

It’s that time again. After taking a break from posting events (due to the amazing Portland weather we’ve been having), it’s again time to post all of the interesting events in Portland that are amazing opportunities to go to. There’s a ton happening this month and next, which means plenty of opportunities to connect with great people, new and familiar!

With a list like this, there’s sure to be something you’ll enjoy. If not, let me know what you’re interested in, and I’ll work on finding an event for you.

Happy networking - and let me know if I missed anything. I can always be reached in the comments below, or on Twitter at @caseorganic. If you’re a fan of E-mail, I’m at caseorganic at gmail dot com.

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Mobile Love, Android Style #15

Monday September 14, 2009 at 6:00pmLucky Labrador Brew Pub

915 SE Hawthorne Boulevard
Portland, Oregon 97214
The Google Phone, the Open Source Mobile Operating System. The one and only Android.

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4225653/

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HTML-PDX Meeting

Monday, September 14, 2009 from 6:30–8pm

Nedspace Old Town
117 NW 5th Ave. Suite 210
Portland OR 97209

Website http://groups.google.com/group/html5-pdx

Description: Reid Beels @reidab is going to cover webkit 3D transforms.

See full event on Calagator: http://calagator.org/events/1250457669

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IxDA Portland: Meetup / Design Practice

Tuesday September 15, 2009 from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

About Us
107 SE Washington St. Suite 520
Portland, 97214

Join us for a design practice session! We will start with a description of the design problem followed by work in small groups on design ideation and solution sketches. At the end, the small groups will present their ideas and sketches back to the rest of the meeting attendees.

This is a casual, non-sponsored workshop. Feel free to bring your own snacks or dinner.

IxDA Portland is the local chapter of the Interaction Design Association (http://www.ixda.org/).

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4416829/

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PDXPHP September Meeting : Overview of PHP 5.3

Tuesday September 15, 2009 from 6:30pm - 8:00pm

NedSpace Old Town
117 NW Fifth Ave. (btwn Couch and Davis)
Portland, Oregon 97209
Meeting Desc:

High level overview of PHP 5.3 which is a major milestone in PHP releases.
This discussion will center around:
# Support for namespaces
# Late static binding
# Lambda Functions and Closures

Also, Peter Schmalfeldt will give a tour of a project he is working on and looking for developer help.
He is looking for a few PHP developers to help build http://www.localreuse.org,
the next generation of the current non profit site http://www.gigoit.org.
Website: http://pdxphp.org

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4414444/

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Portland Java User Group: Grid Packet Computing for Java

Tuesday September 15, 2009 from 6:30pm - 8:30pm

Oracle
1211 SW 5th Avenue, Suite 800
Portland, Oregon 97204

This month’s topic: Grid Packet Computing for Java (GPC4J)

GPC4J is a computing paradigm that breaks a partitionable problem into GridPackets, which are routed, processed and re-assembled into the solution to the original problem. This presentation will cover the use of the system and design of the project’s web application. The application is built using REST (Jersey), Maven, Hibernate, JPA, MySQL and GlassFish.

Speaker: Lyle Harris

Lyle Harris is a Software Engineer working in World Wide Operations at Sun Microsystems, where he develops internal Java applications for automation and customer-facing web applications.

PJUG meetings start with some time to eat and socialize (pizza and beverages are provided), followed by the featured speaker, then Q&A, discussion, sometimes a drawing to give away swag.

Though we like knowing how many people to expect, you don’t *have* to RSVP, on Upcoming or otherwise. Go ahead and just show up!

Many people also go for a drink and further discussion following the meeting, at a location determined ad hoc (lately, the Market Street Pub at 10th and Market: http://mcmenamins.com/index.php?loc=24 ).

http://twitter.com/pjug
http://pjug.org/
(join our mailing list, linked from the website!)
Website: http://pjug.org/

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1441297/

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Lunch 2.0 at eROI

Wednesday September 16, 2009 from 12:00pm - 2:00pm

eROI
505 NW Couch, Suite 300
Portland, Oregon 97209

We’re headed back to eROI for Portland Lunch 2.0.

A lot has happened since they last hosted Lunch 2.0 back in April 2008, including the launch of their new event registration service, eROI Event.

To showcase their new system, eROI wants your suggestions on what they should raffle off at their Lunch 2.0. So, head over to the Lunch 2.0 event, register and suggest something.

You’ll get a chance to test-drive eROI Event, and the winner will be selected from those who register there.

If it’s not too much trouble, please also RSVP here or only here, if you don’t want to win free stuff. As if.

Lunch 2.0 is a Valley phenomenon that you can read about at lunch20.com, and we’re putting a PDX stamp on it.

You can follow all things Portland Lunch 2.0 an the Silicon Florist.

Are you vegan or vegetarian? Please leave a comment so we can plan food accordingly. Thanks.
Website: http://siliconflorist.com/2009/08/15/lunch-20-erm-201-eroi/

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4230647/

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TiE Oregon - Cloud Computing

Wednesday September 16, 2009 from 6:00pm - 9:00pm

Intel - Ronler Acres Campus Auditorium
2501 NW 229th Ave
Hillsboro, Oregon

Cloud Computing ties hardware virtualization and software innovation to offer economic choices for deploying and scaling software services. Cloud Services are being offered in different flavors and for different segments by a variety of vendors.

TiE Oregon is hosting a Cloud Computing flyby, with a panel of evangelists, experts and entrepreneurs representing the key providers as well as usage and deployment perspectives for a spectrum of service layers including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

Join us on Sept 16th, to learn, explore and get answers to your questions regarding the technical and operational issues, financial trade-offs and business risks and opportunities offered by cloud computing.
Ticket Info: $15 - $30

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4238939/

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Raven Zachary: iPhone applications For the Presidential Election

Thursday September 17, 2009 from 7:00pm - 9:00pm

Note that this event is not in Portland, but it concerns one of the coolest Portlanders around and his accomplishments. Thus, it is worth noting. Raven Zachary is always worth noting.

Michigan League
911 N. University
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109

The brains behind the team that developed President Obama’s official iPhone application for his presidential campaign – Raven Zachary – is at the top of an industry that never existed up until two years ago. Zachary will travel to Ann Arbor in September, to inspire Michigan residents to reinvent and innovate. Ann Arbor Ad Club, in coordination with University of Michigan American Advertising Federation Student Chapter, is honored to introduce this luminary on Thursday, September 17 from 7-9 p.m., at the Michigan League. Active networking, refreshments and cash bar are available. Raven spoke at Advertising Age’s Creativity and Technology Conference in New York where tickets where $395/person.

Last year, Raven Zachary’s iPhone application generated hundreds of nationwide news stories and was quickly named among Apple’s coveted Top 10 List. His application furthered President Obama’s successful social media initiatives, which helped seal his Presidency. Marketing pundits attribute social media’s instrumental role in helping President Obama communicate with his supporters. Raven will discuss reinvention and innovation - themes that touch the heart of Michiganders - from automotive companies to Detroit’s drive to rejuvenate the city.

Today, as President of Small Society, Zachary works with big brands, established companies, investors, and startups on iPhone strategy and product development. He’s impacted Whole Foods Market, Zipcar, Clif Bar, and Air New Zealand, and founded iPhoneDevCamp, a not-for-profit iPhone developer conference. Raven’s iPhone app for Whole Foods is featured in Apple’s “There’s an App for That” TV commercials. As Contributing Analyst with The 451 Group, an IT industry analyst firm, he works with O’Reilly Media on iPhone and mobile technology events and coverage. Regularly quoted by media, he is a frequent speaker.
Ticket Info: Entry into this event is free for members, $35 for the public, and $10 for students.

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4240480/

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SAOpdx: The Act of Making Clouds: What Every Developer Should Know

Thursday September 17, 2009 at 12:00pm

Portland State Business Accelerator
2828 SW Corbett Avenue
Portland, Oregon 97201

The Software Association of Oregon Dev Forum has partnered with the Portland State Business Accelerator and the Portland SIG of TiE Oregon to bring you the most comprehensive and in-depth technical discussion in Portland about Cloud Computing yet.

This program is specifically designed for developers and architects. In one afternoon we intend to host a collaborative best practice exchange aimed specifically at the top things developers and architects need to know in order to make the right Cloud Computing platform evaluation and implementation decisions.

REGISTER: https://sao.yourmembership.com/events/event_details.asp?id=68684

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WordCamp Portland

Saturday September 19, 2009 - Sunday September 20, 2009

Webtrends
Pacific First Center Building 851 SW Sixth Avenue
Portland, Oregon 97204

Note: This event is now sold out, and there are 50 people on the waiting list. However, I’ve listed it here because it is an important event to keep in mind. If you’re feeling like you missed out, try WordCamp Seattle on Sept 26th, 2009. More information on the WordCamp Seattle Website.

WordCamp is a gathering of people interested in WordPress and blogging. Topics will focus on a wide range of audiences from the new blogger as well as those with more of a technical background.

Follow the WordCamp Portland website for details including speakers, sponsorship, and ticket information
Ticket Info: 20.00
Website: http://www.wordcampportland.org.

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LinuxCon 2009

Monday September 21, 2009 - Friday September 25, 2009

Portland Marriott (Downtown)
1401 SW Naito Parkway
Portland, Oregon 97201
1st Annual LinuxCon

September 21 - 25, 2009 - Portland Marriott Downtown Waterfront, Portland, OR

This event is co-located with the 2nd Annual Linux Plumbers’ Conference.

LinuxCon is a new annual technical conference that will provide an unmatched collaboration and education space for all matters Linux. LinuxCon will bring together the best and brightest that the Linux community has to offer, including core developers, administrators, end users, community managers and industry experts. In being the conference for “all matters Linux”, LinuxCon will be informative and educational for a wide range of attendees. We will not only bring together all of the best technical talent but the decision makers and industry experts who are involved in the Linux community.

LinuxCon will feature over 75 conference presentations divided among five tracks and three audience types (Developers, Operations and Business), tutorials, BoF sessions, keynotes, roundtables, a product & technology showcase and sponsored mini-summits, as well as countless networking opportunities in developer lounges and evening events. LinuxCon offers a unique conference experience that encourages collaboration, progress and interaction.

With top notch educational content and collaboration opportunities, those that attend LinuxCon will leave more knowledgeable and better positioned for success in the year to come.

Register on the LinuxCon website: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1746434/

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Portland Open Source Geospatial User Group

Wednesday September 23, 2009 from 6:30pm - 8:00pm

OpenSourcery
1636 NW Lovejoy St.
Portland, OR 97209
[Or, if you prefer: 45.529986, -122.688206]

Monthly meeting of the Portland area open source geospatial user group.

We meet the 4th Wednesday of every month from 6:30-8:00 PM at OpenSourcery in NW Portland. No need to RSVP, all are welcome- our group ranges from the geo-curious to the überhackers. [Please arrive no more than 10 minutes early, as the developers at OpenSourcery are working up until the meeting time.]

RSVP through Google Groups: http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-osgis or Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4409628/.

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Linux Plumbers Conf 2009

Wednesday September 23, 2009 - Friday September 25, 2009

Portland Marriott (Downtown)
1401 SW Naito Parkway
Portland, Oregon 97201
Linux Plumbers Conference
23-25 September 2009
Portland, Oregon USA

The goal of the Plumbers Conference is to solve problems. The conference is arranged as a series of microconferences, each on a topic that is narrow enough to identify specific problem areas and brainstorm workable solutions. Each microconference is led by an expert in the field and organized to encourage discussion and problem solving. Microconferences will be scheduled so that representatives from related subsystems can attend other microconferences. In addition to the microconferences, there will be a general track for discussing issues that don’t fit into microconferences, or come up during the conference.

Register on the Linux Plumbers Conference Website: http://linuxplumbersconf.org

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1857378/.

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SAOpdx: ConnectPDX

Thursday September 24, 2009 at 4:00pm

Blitz bar in the Pearl District
110 NW 10th Ave
Portland, Oregon 97209

SAO ConnectPDX is a new kind of networking, relaxed, open, and the kind that fosters real connections.

You’ve been to enough networking events to know that they’re usually a frantic business card swap, with shallow connections.

ConnectPDX is different. We provide a low key environment, in a fun space, where meeting people comes naturally.

We encourage professionals from different industries to attend, so everyone’s networks can expand.

Free registration + great happy hour + great PDX connections = time well spent!

Blitz (Pearl) is open to minors until 9pm.

Where to park: If you’re lucky, you can get metered street parking, but if you want a cheap garage, use Smart Park.

There is no registration for this event - just show up!

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Refresh Portland

Wednesday September 24th, 2008 from 6:30pm - 7:30pm

Jive Software
915 SW Stark
Portland, Oregon

Refresh Portland is a monthly event (held every 2nd Wednesday of the month at Jive Software) for designers interested in refreshing the creative, technical and professional culture in the Portland area.

Anyone interested in those subjects (not just designers) is encouraged to attend.

Refresh Portland is part of the Refreshing Cities Movement.
Website: http://refreshpdx.com

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WhereCamp PDX

Saturday October 3, 2009 from 9:00am - 6:00pm

Metro Regional Center
600 NE Grand Ave
Portland, Oregon

WhereCampPDX is a free unconference focusing on all things geographical. This informal meeting of minds welcomes all geo-locative enthusiasts, anyone who asks “where am I” or feels the need to “know their place”.

An unconference is a conference planned by the participants, we all convene together, plan sessions, and have break-outs into sessions. This gives everybody an opportunity to bring to the table the things that interest them the most and lets us talk about new topics that are still new and exploratory. Part of what is important to hearing new voices and getting new ideas is lowering barriers to participation – this event is free and it is driven by the participants.

WhereCamp PDX runs all weekend: we’re also having a Friday night opening party and Sunday game day. Check http://wherecamppdx.org for details as they’re announced.
Website: http://wherecamppdx.org

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4409467/

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What’s CHIFOO? (It’s the Computer Human Interaction Forum of Oregon, and it is amazing! ).

CHIFOO Meeting: The Ebb and Flow of Activity Streams

Wednesday October 7, 2009 from 7:00pm - 9:00pm

Jive Software
915 SW Stark St., Suite 400
Portland, Oregon 97205

Ever feel like you’re being hit with a firehose of information?

In the last several years activity streams have infiltrated the enterprise collaboration space. While they promise to alleviate some of the frustrations of email and other communication software, they can also have some interesting side-effects (such as the “fire-hose effect”). In this talk, Joshua Porter will describe the ebbs and flows of activity streams, how they work and don’t work, and how we might design better ones going forward.

Joshua Porter is an interface designer and consultant focusing exclusively on the design of social web applications. Josh wrote the book Designing for the Social Web and speaks regularly at web design conferences and events around the world. Since 2003 he has written the popular design blog bokardo.com.

Ticket Info: FREE for CHIFOO members, $5 general admission, everyone is invited to attend.

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4416668/

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Startupalooza II

Saturday October 10, 2009 at 8:00pm

Startupalooza II is coming. Save the date.
Details later.

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2563394/

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OEN PubTalk™ - Seed Oregon - Round 1

Wednesday October 14, 2009 from 5:15pm - 7:00pm

BridgePort Brew Pub
1313 Nw Marshall St
Portland, Oregon 97209

OEN’s Seed Oregon PubTalk - Call for Applications - Due Friday, September 18 at 5:00 PM

OEN’s Seed Oregon is a unique competition held during four consecutive PubTalk events. The competition is for Oregon and Southwest Washington seed-stage companies who are seeking capital within the range of $100,000 to $2,000,000. One winner from each preliminary round will move on to a championship round, where a finalist will earn a coveted presenting opportunity at OEN’s Angel Oregon, the premier angel investing event in the Northwest.

Nine presenting companies in total will be selected to compete in the 2009-2010 Seed Oregon tournament. Each will have 10 minutes to present their concept to the PubTalk audience, followed by a 10 minute Q&A session. Three companies will compete at each of the preliminary rounds, with the audience voting for the winning presentations to move to the championship round.

Online registration for this event closes Tuesday, October 13th. Please register at the door after that time

Date and Time: October 14th, 2009, 5:15 pm - 7:00 pm
Location: Bridgeport Brewpub - 1313 NW Marshall, Portland, Oregon
Registration to attend: OEN Member: $15, Non-member: $25

Price to submit application:
Member: $75 (includes entry at one PubTalk and the Seed Oregon application fee)
Non-Member: $174 (includes entry at one PubTalk, a discounted one year OEN individual membership {$26 savings}, and the Seed Oregon application fee)

Sign up here through the Oregon Entrepreneur’s Network website.

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Lunch 2.0 at Elemental Technologies

Wednesday October 21, 2009 from 12:00pm - 2:00pm

Elemental Technologies
620 SW Fifth Avenue, Suite 400
Portland, Oregon 97204

Elemental Technologies is our host for the 22nd iteration of Portland Lunch 2.0.

Thanks to Davy Stevenson (@davystevenson) for spreading the love to a new venue.

Lunch 2.0 is a Valley phenomenon that you can read about at lunch20.com, and we’re putting a PDX stamp on it.

You can follow all things Portland Lunch 2.0 at the Silicon Florist.

Are you vegan or vegetarian? Please leave a comment (here on Upcoming) so we can plan food accordingly. Thanks.

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4409951/

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Refresh Portland

Wednesday October 22nd, 2008 from 6:30pm - 7:30pm

Jive Software
915 SW Stark
Portland, Oregon

Refresh Portland is a monthly event (held every 2nd Wednesday of the month at Jive Software) for designers interested in refreshing the creative, technical and professional culture in the Portland area.

Anyone interested in those subjects (not just designers) is encouraged to attend.

Refresh Portland is part of the Refreshing Cities Movement.
Website: http://refreshpdx.com

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Craving more events? Check out the Calagator.org.

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About

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist, consultant, writer, and analyst from Portland, Oregon. You can contact her at caseorganic at gmail.com, or on Twitter at @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.

The first ever Refresh Portland occurred tonight from 6:30 to 8:00 Pm at Jive Software in Downtown Portland.

Tonight’s speaker was Tyler Sticka, an award-winning designer, artist, speaker and educator specializing in identity-driven new media. He was extremely well prepared and engaging.

Micheal Sigler @sigler began by introducing the concept of Refresh.

“Cities have been Refreshing for a while,” he said, “if you visit RefreshingCities.com you’ll find that there are Refresh events everywhere.”

Refresh events serve bring people together who are really intereted in standards based design. The events help them exchange best practices and knowledge. As Sigler said, “towards a portion of design you can walk away with something and use it in your daily lives”.

We just felt that it was time to bring a little design love to Portland.

“We”, being Michael Sigler, @michaelsigler, John Weiss of 5 Edge Media, Josh Pyles @pixelmatrix of Pixelmatrix Design, Carlos @eedorre (a system admin with a background in web development), and you probably Bram Pitoyo @brampitoyo from Twitter.

We really want to make this a community where you provide us comments. Also, we are looking for speakers. Feel free to contact any of the organizers if you know of someone who would be awesome for the event.

“Tyler Sticka is now going to take us through the looking glass,” Sigler began….and we were off.

Through the Looking Glass - How the Web is and Ought to Be

“I work at US Digital from Monday through Thursday”, Sticka said.

“But on Friday though Sunday I design logos, icons, and websites.

“This is because I’m really addicted to the idea of creating something out of the vacuum. Unlike art on a all — art stuck up on the walls.

“Communication is one thing, but conversation is the idea of the dialogue — something that’s been absent from the world of fine art for a while.

“The idea that the Viewer is also able to impart part of their experience into the work fascinates me.

New media is the first to take this concept in completely literally.

Spine Tingling Adventures of the Early Web

Sticka picked two people from the audience and gave them scripts:

“Sam, you’re going to be playing the role of website”.

“And the other will stay the part of the user”.

Website: Would you like to talk about our product, our company history….ect.

User: Umm….talk about our product?

Website: Sure…would you like option 1, 2,3,4,,5,6,,457,,8,67,87?

User: Return to home?

Sticka: Do you see how short and unfulfilling that was?

The companies that weren’t having conversations were dying out.

“In reality, users benefited in the end.

Early Innovation in Experience Design

“I like to show Amazon.com when I talk about early innovation in websites. Their recommendations features is one of the best out there — still one of the best out there.

It’s like a sort of Nerd-tastic natural selection happened.

“This sort of word they gave it afterwards was web 2.0. I don’t like it very much.

The revolution in the computer industry had Three Basic Parts

1. Visual — websites before based on the constraints of html

2. Directly from graphic design. pretty, but only a thousand people card.

3. Thematic - we’re catering to the community and the conversational aspects. .

Example:

Flickr’s Upload Tool.

“Some might say we’re in a renaissance of information.

“But they’re wrong.

We’re not in a renaissance of information, we’re in the pupae stage.

“We’re now just starting to construct the cocoon that will allow us to emerge as something triumphant.

“The idea of this moving into the mainstream is more important than us understanding what’s going on.

(At this point I realized the screen that Tyler Sticka’s Powerpoint was being projected on was made of 8.5 by 11 sheets of white computer paper stuck to the wall. Way to innovate, Refresh Portland

“In essence we are just becoming more understanding of the customer and the customer more understanding of the creator.

Lets go back to 1995. A Simpler Time.

The browser wars between Netscape and the powerhouse Internet Explorer began to emerge.
There was this sort of idea that there should be one victor, that there should only be one IE, or Firefox.

He then showed a slide with 12 different browsers, ranging from the most known and used, to the least known and used. Starting with Firefox 3, then IE and eventually flock and Epiphany (for Gnome).

He said that he posted pictures of browsers that were used by people he knew. Even Epiphany.
“Because I know people who use Epiphany.
“Well, I don’t know them; they’re online; but its practically the same thing now.

He pointed out that Flock and Songbird are both browsers that are augmenting the browser experience in ways that really help the users.

Android

“Hopefully more agnostic choices will emerge for mobile browsing.

“Google has an open source Android emulator — they’ll subsidize the cost of the phone if people put ads on it.

“There is this blurring argument about what is application design and what is web design.

“Adobe Air (adobe integrated runtime). Chrome + Prism (both taking a browser-like approach)
All are trying to bridge the gap between web and desktop applications.

Confusing the Medium with its Voice

“We’re confusing the medium with its voice.. the medium of distribution.

“We need to realize the web is only distribution. It’s just distribution. As long as it remains open - a community of people developing things, it’s a thing of freedom — a whole pasture to run in.

We need to stop designing websites, and we need to start designing experiences.

“What were we really doing here ? Why was web design all one thing? There are many things. We are designing experiences.

Tip #1: Make Sure You’re Solving a Problem

“I have so many clients come to me. They have funding, or a team, or whatever, and we sit down over coffee and they tell me “all right, I want a myspace killer”.

“So I ask them, “Okay, what are you doing that’s different than Myspace?”

“The thing is, they don’t tell me anything different from what Myspace already is. I tell them that they have to do something different, or there’s nothing there.

“Google killers. There’s a new Google killer every day. Make something that solves a problem.

Tip #2: Try to do Straightforward Before Clever

“Google was straightforward. The Microsoft Office paperclip guy was clever.
But everyone hates that paperclip. Be straightforward.

“You want to say, “okay, we’re doing social networking — but we’re solving a problem”.

“That’s why LinkedIn was started, because nobody in the professional world wants tom as their first friend and hear about movies he likes.

Tip #3: Embrace Web Standards

“If you don’t know what these are, here’s a link to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

“We’re going to have these browsers, and all of these mobile mediums. Do you really want to spend all of your time worrying about whether your thing works on one thing and not the other?

“I didn’t use web standards before. Once you get your feet wet into CSS - it just frees you up. Working in CSS is a wonderful experience for me — I look forward to it.

“We came here so that we could design these experiences for people to enjoy.
“And it will help you not get sued by those who are disabled.

“The State of California recently ruled in the victim’s favor on a Target usability case. It treated Target’s website as if it were an actual brick and mortar store. Target was penalized because it could not be accessed by those with visual disabilities.

Tip #4: Decide Which Distribution Suits you the Best

“Then you can use the master medium as a promotional or auxiliary arm to your business.

“We’re such a new medium, and we have such small visual language to ourselves right now.

“Give your site personality — people will have more and more relationships with their websites and their users experiences. If the enjoy the experience of your site, they’ll visit it.

Example: Ubiquity, by Mozilla Labs

“Web mashups and API’s used to reduce the distance between two points.

“Use open API’s. Google will release ways for you to join in a symbiotic relationship with its data.

“If you use a company’s API services, you’re benefiting from their design/development team, which may probably be larger than yours.

Ubiquity is a great example of a service that uses API’s to reduce user action.

“For instance, I can book a flight or search for pet care by simply writing a sentence to Ubiquity that tells it what I want to do. I can write that I want the information sent to my mom, dad, and sister by simply typing it.

“Ubiquity will parse out the language of simple sentences and combine the conventions that established in those to get things from multiple places done in one place.

Tip: #5: Remove Obstacles

“The conventions that should be broken are those that are obstacles to user interaction.

I like sites that allow me to try a service before I sign up.

Tip #6: Evolve with Your Audience

“One of the best examples of this is Twitter.

“Twitter started as micro-blogging: it was something between a blog and mass messaging. It was like mass chat.

If there is demand/audience — people will make a business plan around it, because there are people who need to use it.

I love the idea of users using something and evolving my product through their use of it.

“This could all be turned into television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who decide what we see and hear, and there’s a lot of precedent for that.” - Jamie Zawinski.

“We basically need to peer through the looking glass at the way users see our websites.

“Tyler finished the following quote:

Lewis Carroll said, “It’s poor sort of memory that only works backward — so here’s to the future”.

———-

That was it. Lots of applause. Really nice turnout. Very enjoyable experience.

Enough said. Tyler Sticka is brilliant. Check out his Website Experience at TylerSticka.com, or follow @tylersticka on Twitter.

And if you’re interested in the next Refresh Portland event, it’s tentatively scheduled for October 7, 2008. But check the Refresh Portland Blog as that date arrives for more information.

Refresh Portland on Upcoming! Other Exciting Events!

Refresh Portland will also be posted to Upcoming and is part of the Silicon Florist Upcoming Group headed by the awesome Portland Tech blog Silicon Florist, of course. If you join that group on Upcoming, you’ll really know what’s going on in Portland. And if you have an event that relates to Portland Tech, you can send it to the Silicon Florist group in Upcoming and reach an awesome audience.

———-

OakHazelnut.com is written by Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland who enjoys documenting innovative events such as this one. She’s generally findable on Twitter as @caseorganic.

Note: Dates and venues are pretty much set for CyborgCamp!

You can now:

• RSVP for CyborgCamp Portland
• RSVP CyborgCamp Vancouver

I never saw it coming

CyborgCamp occured at around 10Am from a shoutout by Kris Krug and Dave Olson of RainCityStudios. I met them both at Gnomedex and we got along really well.

The only problem was that they both lived in Vancouver B.C., and I live in Portland, Oregon. Normally, it is difficult for me to travel unless there is a conference. So I told them that.

To which Dave replied “just have a Cyborg Camp!”.

And CyborgCamp was born.

Once Kris Krug retweeted the news, 30 or so people immediately jumped into high gear. Nate Angell built a Wiki with all sorts of capabilities, and more people got on board to discuss all aspects of Cyborgs.

Meanwhile, the Twitterverse was coming up with all sorts of speaker and venue suggestions, and by 6Pm that night, the first planning meeting for CyborgCamp 2008 occured as an offshoot of an Android Developers meeting at the Lucky Lab Pub SE.

…Whew.

That was only two days ago. Now we have a venue, a sponsor, and some potential speakers. Also a @cyborgcamp Twitter account, which Bram Pitoyo has been handling amazingly, as well as a preliminary poster design.

Now what?

If you think this sounds like something you might be interested in, Sign up —> CyborgCamp2008 for Wiki access. Or follow the @cyborgcamp Twitter account for updates, general inquiries, speaker suggestions and sponsor ideas. Or you can directly E-mail caseorganic if you don’t use Wikis or Twitter.

What is a cyborg?

A cyborg (shorthand for “cybernetic organism”) is a symbiotic fusion of human and machine. Join in our pre-conference discussion about what is a cyborg?

What is CyborgCamp?

An unconference dedicated to exploring cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.

Who should come to CyborgCamp?

Cyborgs, hybrids, androids, robots, and the people who love them!

When is CyborgCamp?

Nov. 21-22 2008

Proposed Topics

• Space and Time Compression
• Cybernetic Organisms - The emergence of technological systems, control and feedback in biological life
• Online Presence and Boundary Extensions
• What is Cybernetics?
• The Future of Mobile Technology
• Artifical Intelligence
• Technology and Culture
• A Brief History of Cybernetics
• Cyborgs Around & Within - How humankind takes for granted our lives as, and among Cyborgs
• Top 10 Modifications you can make to be a better Cyborg
• Cybernetics and Morality
• Wetware Hacking
• Pimp My Avatar

Hyperorganization

This should be an interesting event. It needs a lot of film and audio coverage, as well as live casting and projection screens. As many channels as possible so we can exist in as many places at one time. Our minds can supply the rest.

You can follow along at CyborgCamp.org or on Twitter by following @cyborgcamp.

Urban Grind North West is, I think, the predominate manufacturer of Twitter synchronicities in PDX” - Jeremy Wilkin, via Twitter.

An amazing discussion happened today between a number of Tweeple, namely Gabriel (@sirgabe) and @jerwilkins of Tinderbox Creative. Of course, @brampitoyo was there, and @donpdonp & @pdxflaneur also stopped by. Also, @xtalwiese was there for a bit (but had to leave for Psychology class in the middle).

I wish I could have typed more about what was said during this encounter, but it was too loud at Urban Grind to use a tape recorder. The following is a brief recap.

A Discussion Begins

The conversation started with various subjects, business cards were exchanged, and favorite websites were visited and recommended. But quickly the conversation turned towards the future of technology. A bit of Cyborg Anthropology was discussed (as @jerwilkins knows a classmate of mine who took Cyborg Anthropology a year before me), which morphed into a discussion of the new physical and sensory boundaries Internet access has given humans.

Amber: With a cell phone, the capability of your ear has been expanded thousands of miles. With a computer, your hands can take you to Japan and back in seconds. With the profiles you’ve created, you can literally be in 400 places at once, while others interact with the pieces of yourself you’ve saved different times and spaces.

Bram: What is that called? Omniscience.

Amber: Omniscience, Omnipotence. There is such a great extension of the self/senses occuring!

A Short History of the Telephone

Amber: There was a lot of controversy when the first phone came out. Some people couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that one would enjoy going into a closed room to talk at the walls. To disembody a voice, the essence of one’s character, and pipe it through a device, seemed literally insane!

Then came the cordless telephone. There’s a story behind this one. Innovation comes in amusing ways.

I met the grandson of the inventor of the cordless telephone at an SEO conference in February. He told me that his grandfather was sitting in a comfortable chair while watching television when the phone rang.

He said that he didn’t want to make the effort to get up and answer it. (In reality, he was a WWII veteran and had lower back pains from his time in the military). George Sweigert actually used a part from his washing machine for the invention, and in doing so created the cordless telephone to releive the efforts of the handicapped (more on this on the Wikipedia article on George Sweigert).

And with the arrival of the mobile phone on the scene, speech suddenly became mobile. The ability to talk in virtually any segment of time and space became available (provided reception existed).

The Rise of Mobile Communities

And now, communities also becoming untethered from time and space. As time and space compress, so does the amount of space it takes to represent community. People are coming back into social interaction from the formerly fragmented, private world of the suburbs. The current economy simply cannot withstand the amount of luxury and waste an expanded and separated social reality takes to run smoothly. I was reading a book at the Library of Congress on Urban Development that had a diagram of the back and forth flows a city makes when it expands to suburbs and then contracts back into itself. It’s a natural cycle, and we’re seeing a move back in with the help of mobile technologies and mobile communities.

With Twitter, it’s like having a mobile social group on hand at all times. Little friends in the palm of your hand or on your screen. An entire community that goes with you, wherever you are. A lot of people can Tweet with friends and family and stay connected across vast distances while at conferences. Formerly the speed of E-mail and Letters did not afford a level of real-time response that signifies belonging to a community.

Technology as a Mediating Vector

Jeremy: Technology I’m curious about the effects of these mediating vectors.
The cell phone instantly appearing, and then the fact that suddenly every has this amnesia about living before the cell phone’s existence.

The Emotive Epoch

Gabriel brought up the concept of the “Emotive Epoch”.

“Have you heard of it?” he asked us. “It’s a set of Emotional Hotkeys. You can send hot keys to any sort of emotional brain signal you sent out. You can use these to control games.”

Amber: Cool, so if you get really angry in Photoshop, a new file could be created!

Gabriel: (laughs) Yeah, it might be a little tricky for applications that aren’t games.

Jeremy: Using EEG readings and biofeedback mechanisms as interfaces is really starting to blur physical and mental boundaries.

Gabriel: There’s also The Audeo. It’s a voice box for people with Lou Gehrig’s Disease that helps people create queries via thought and then spits them back out as text to speech.

In the tests, they had people thinking a question in their minds, and then getting the feedback as text to speech in their headphones.

It’s incredible. Imagine thinking a search query to Google and then getting the response back in speech.

Jeremy: Yeah, (pauses) …”thanks Wikipedia!”

Amber: It’s interesting that these technologies are emerging because of a human pain. The fact that there is now a lot of money pouring into charities that support research to eliminate/solve human pain and suffering.

Jeremy: It’s kind of like Buddhism, really. Suffering is almost a vehicle of expansion.

In the beginning we start with the idea that something is inherently something that it should not be, and we ask ourselves, “how do we make it something that should be?

That plays really well into the hands of technology.

Amber: And in the Tao, there’s the concept of oneness and wholeness. Humans have always had this idea that they are separate from others, especially in suburban areas, where space is privatized, and personal vehicles abound. And there’s the moment when a child first recognizes the image in the mirror as a reflection, or an ‘other’, or of the mother as ‘other’.

Jeremy: The concept of ‘I’, instead of the idea that we’re all just extensions of this same basic thing.

The saddest thing is the words I, Me, Mine, like “this is the space that is me”.

Gabriel: There’s this norm that exists in identifying things by boundaries, but the box is just in our minds and we don’t realize that this box is inside out.

Jeremy: I think transcendence is about dissolving this box.

Gabriel: Then perhaps technology is a vehicle — we persue transcendence through technology.

Amber: What we’re experiencing right now is like a replica of the industrial revolution. The beginning of the 20th century saw massive amount of patent filings and new technological developments. It also saw the carving up of minor roads and the construction of massive buildings and highways.

Today we’re seeing all sorts of patents are being filed, but they’re being filed for ideas — for intellectual property. All sorts of new roads and buildings are being built, but they’re being built online. The difference is that tearing up a highway to make a redirect in the past cost millions of dollars and many months.

Now the time and space it takes to reroute traffic can be done by the simple implementation of a 301 Redirect, and this probably takes the relative equivalent of $20 of time and skill to pull off.

Jeremy: So then these redirects are protocols — symbolic protocols, of a more literal construction of highways. Data highways.

Amber: Yes. We’re becoming a more organic society as this happens. Traffic can adapt to changing conditions, and roads can change to accommodate new locations. The shape of space makes users move, and the direction and number of users shape space.

Sociologist Emelie Durkheim said that as a society matures, the whole of it changes from a mechanical state to an organic one. Things begin to flow more smoothly.

Cell Phones as Biological Cells

Amber: A cell in the human body has a phospholipid bilayer that keeps things out while keeping the important cellular organelles within its center. At the core lies the DNA of the cell, while the more temporary RNA that the cell uses to duplicate information has more mobility, especially in times of the protein manufacturing that goes on inside the cell.

In computing, the DNA is equivalent to hard drive memory, and the RNA the Random Access Memory, as RAM is more temporary memory. But there’s also the channel protein, which lets information in and out of a cell (on a cell phone this would be the imput keys), and the identification protein, which allows the ID of the cell phone to relay to cell phone towers. So cell phones really function like cells. The macro and the micro are self similar. We’re a self-similar universe.

Jeremy: Everything is based on organic data. Lots of machines are based on things that only animals can do. Airplanes, helicopters, ect.

——–

A Brief Note on E-mail and Twitter

Amber: In biochemistry, chemical reactions are helped along by catalyst. It takes a certian amount of activation energy for a chemical reaction to occur, and if there is not enough activation energy, the reactor halts and never happens.

The activation energy to author an E-mail is often higher for the user than a short tweet in Twitter, and thus a user, once acclimatized to the Tweet-space, will find that the profile to interaction ratio is higher than one’s E-mail list. The reduction of time and space that exists in the world of Twitter acts as a catalyst for greater communication.

Greater communication leads to smoother and more enjoyable conversations in real time and space, as Twitter members are used to conversing quickly about a number of things. Bram Pitoyo and I also noticed that everyone we meet from Twitter is highly involved with a particular interest, be it a company or a project or talent.

15 Megabytes of Fame

One of my coworkers told me that social media was no longer about having 15 minutes of fame, but having 15 megabytes of fame. And those 15 megabytes can be unevently distributed across many sites and times.

Next time there will be a better portrait of the discussion. I am slowly practicing towards an adequate representation of events.

 

 Hazelnut Tech Talk Episode 5 [43:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (430)

Click to Subscribe

Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo.

Our fifth episode features Craig Schwartz from toonlet, wherein we talked about how the web bubble burst helped form FooCamp, why San Fransiscans are dastardly good at spotting werewolfs, history and future of the button, BlackBerry camp, ribs breakage due to excessive laughter, online comic that shares the same spirit with SPORE, and text adventures built on HyperCard.

Let the Comic Making Begin!

If you’re interested in making your own comics really, really quickly, head on over to Toonlet, where you can do pretty much whatever you want. (And the replies to comic posts are in comics too, making it an amusingly spam-free environment!).

Digitally Yours,

Hazelnut Tech Talk

Before Carolynn Duncan’s Lunch with a VC Presentation, we all met at Pho Green Papaya. I sat across from David Kominsky, cofounder of Cubespace and Rick Turozy of Silicon Florist. On my right was James Whitley, CEO of GoLife Mobile http://golifemobile.com/.

About halfway through lunch, the conversation turned to the future of the mobile phone.

Advanced Mobile Controls

“I want mobile to interact with the world around me”, James Whitley said.

“The mobile experience is one that is very personal. The Mobile experience is not about where you’re going; it’s about where you’re headed. It’s more of a contextual search.”

It’s become more of a sociological interaction than a removed, technological one.

“For instance, online I’m a hub in areas that I know”.

He gestured to Turoczy, “And you’re a hub that connects hubs”.

“And when I walk into a bar,” he continued, “the bar should know that I drink one type of drink more often than another type, and should show that drink higher or larger on the screen”.

Spatial Limitations

“There are real estate limitations on the screen of a mobile phone. And thus it all comes down to efficient data management”.

Contextual Search

I am not sure who brought it up first, but there was mention of a search where as you go by, it keeps grabbing the RFID’s of local objects.

Intelligent Gaming Environments

I pointed out that an intelligent gaming engine loads the environment as it goes. Once an object is loaded, a character can interact with it.

The World is Your Operating System

He agreed, adding that once this happens, “the mobile device becomes a remote control for the world around you”. I realized that this made the local world a sort of operating system, with the cell phone being the control point involved in the resolution of processes.

“Standard computer applications seek to eliminate questions of “ok” or “cancel”, because they are annoying and inhibit the flow of interaction and information. However, mobile computing environments need just that. One must be prompted to interact or dismiss a real-life object with the cell phone.”

“Everything these days has data with relevance to what you’re doing here right now.” It is about connecting that data with your cell phone, and allowing the flow of real life to be augmented and streamlined by the mobile device.

“The mobile device then becomes your tricorder, your universal device for interacting with your environment.”

Smarter Machines

“We’re used to devices being used for certain purposes, but not understanding our purposes” Rick Turcozy added, “We’re used to them being ‘dumb’, and not interactive.” There’s the washing machine, the car, the refrigerator. We apply settings to these devices, but they do not detect whether our cheese has expired (an RFID tag on the cheese could communicate with the fridge and an mobile phone, alerting the user of what has expired), and a washing machine could detect the RFID tags on clothes and automatically choose the appropriate, non-destructive washing process for that object.

Moving Towards a Micronism

We discussed that differences between the heavy machines of the industrial revolution and the light, almost liquid machines today. The iPhone, for instance, has liquid buttons. A machine during the industrial revolution had heavy cogs and gears.

Sociologist Emelie Durkheim wrote that as societies become more advanced they evolve from a mechanical, non-organic state of a more fluid, organic one. Mobile devices must be designed to allow for mutations and flows of multiple data systems.

“Now we’re moving toward a Micronism — an interaction between entities”, James Whitley said.

The whole system is like the cells of an actual circulatory system.