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July 23, 2005

Flickr and Incomprehensible Mob Behavior

Here's a mystery for you: When I was down in LA earlier this month, I took and uploaded these two pictures to Flickr:

We'd gone to see the Rembrandt exhibit at the Getty and my dad had insisted on buying me this little poseable dummy from the gift shop. When I got home, I randomly snapped the one on the right and uploaded it to Flickr. The next day, I took the one on the left.

The second one was a little more on purpose. I liked the jokey noir-ish image of the handcuffed pose and the ominous shadow of this tiny little doll. Also, the newspaper article it's standing on is about a murder that took place in the house where I grew up. I also happen to think it's a better photo: cleaner composition, clearer choice of focus, more dramatic use of lighting.

Anyway, within a couple of days the one on the right had gotten more than a hundred views and received a comment. There was a while one evening when everytime I'd reload the page five or ten more views would appear in the counter. The picture on the left, on the other hand, has been viewed ten times and received exactly zero comments.

Now, I didn't do aything to try to draw views to the one picture or keep them away from the other. I added neither of them to a group, I tagged both of them identically. I couldn't find any clues as to why the photo on the right got 100 views (which is a lot for a photo of mine on Flickr -- it's my 11th most viewed photo, above all but pics related to my Guest Check PDA, which got linked to from 43 Folders).

There's really just no explanation. Sometime the random mob of Flickr users just jumps on something without explanation or cause (just like every other group of people in the world). There must be something to be learned here about the social network, or something, but I can't figure out what it is. I'm baffled!

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Posted by Greg at 5:56 AM | Comments (2)

July 21, 2005

A Brief History of Music For Dozens, Part 1

Last week, I set out to write a history of one of the major projects on which I've spent my time in the last couple of years: Music for Dozens. I'd never really written about it here, I thought it would be kind of a good way of introducinng myself to all you knew Urban Honkers, and we were about to undergo an exciting flurry of activity (which is currently underway and which is part of why this post has taken me so friggin long).

Anyway, this introductory story grew to a larger scale and greater level of detail than I'd expected (I mean, geez, its got its own introduction at this point) and so I decided to break it up into a couple of serial chunks.

So, without further ado, here's Part 1 of A Brief History of Music For Dozens. . .

Sometimes, the beginning of something big happens quietly. You can be working on something for years, preparing for it to take off, struggling to get it to, and then, when it does, you barely notice.

My senior year of college, I was asked by an art history professor to shuttle around a visiting speaker for a conference they were holding on censorship. I think he even promised to pay me out of conference funds. All I knew when I got to the airport was the guy's flight number and his name: Jim Griffin.

When I arrived at the gate fifteen minutes before scheduled landing, I found Griffin waiting at the gate, tall, solid, constantly in motion. He was early. The flight was early, he'd gotten his bag, he was ready to go. He barely waited for me to reach him before he started walking full tilt through the terminal towards the exit, talking the whole way, telling me about himself, starting in asking me questions. I hurried to keep up with him. By the time we were wondering around the parking lot looking for my car (the conversation was going at such a quick clip that I was struggling to find a spare mental cycle to remember where I'd parked it; he didn't seem to notice that we were wandering aimlessly) he'd found out that I was in a band.

For the next forty minutes of the drive to campus and the walk to the conference room, he talked in an uninterrupted stream about the music industry and the things facing a band starting out. He told horror stories about major labels wooing bands on expense accounts that are then charged against the band's earnings and how almost all bands that sign a contract end up with their records held or released into obscurity and then find themselves left in crushing debt from all the costs the label seemed to be covering but was in fact, contractually just floating the band as a loan. He talked about successful bands that refused to sell their CDs at their concerts because it took away from the t-shirt and concession sales from which, unlike the CDs, they'd actually see some profit. He talked about bands that weren't allowed to play their own songs live because the labels held the publishing rights to their songs and would actively litigate and defend them even years after they'd dropped the artist without releasing their record. He said that live shows and digital distribution were a band's only hope.

It turns out he knew a thing or two about the topic. In the early nineties, Griffin worked at Geffen Records. He created and ran their technology department during their golden years, when they signed Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Nirvana, almost single handedly ushering in the era of alternative rock. Griffin pioneered the commerical distribution of music online, leading the team within Geffen that offered the first mp3 for sale (it was an Aerosmith song). Since leaving Geffen, he's become a kind of roving expert on the digital distribution of art and music, testifying in front of Congress, running a discussion group, and working as consultant and at a number of startups. In 1994, he was about 9 years ahead of the curve (the iTunes Music Store opened in May 2003). When I met him, it was only about two.

We arrived at the conference and I walked him to the room where his panel was taking place. The panel turned out to be about technology and censorship in the arts. Most of the panelists were talking about how powerful interests were going to be able to use the techno-panopticon to keep track of our cultural activity and regulate it. Really paranoid-conservative stuff. Griffin's argument was simple and kind of stunning: right now (that is pre-internet distribution of culutre), big media has a complete stranglehold on how we get our culture. Not just in terms of outlets where we buy it, but, most importlantly, in how it is given away for free: that's where the power of the major lables really comes from, there sole control over the media for giving music away: radio, promo copies to reviewers, etc. What's really scary to them about digital distribution is not theft of their music via file sharing, but the way it democratizes the ability to give your music away. If you can get your music to fans on a channel they pay attention to (free downlaod, for example), then you don't need the big expensive record label promotion machine, which is their whole reason for existing as the lumbering monsters that they are: giant expensive national and international promotion campaigns. So, to him the danger of technological sensorship really came from DRM (avant la lettre) and the ways in which big media would try to crackdown on the free distribution of all music, using a perceived threat of theft of intellectual property to hinder the growth of a new chanel which would democratize their core competency as businesses: promotion via giving music away.

After the panel, he headed off to lunch with the other speakers and I wandered around campus a little. Maybe did some school. Let it all sink in.

. . .Stay tuned for Part 2. . .

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Posted by Greg at 3:29 AM | Comments (0)

July 15, 2005

Stewart Butterfield at WebVisions 2005

"Why We (Still) Love the Web"

First got on the net as a Phish-head
-tape-trading: rec.music.phish
-got in an argument about earthquakes, went to a gopher site through dial-up to, eventually, answer the question
-#why: random discussion group, community
-learning html
-myForm.theTexArea.value = "holy shit!"
-found a community amogst web-heads

5k web award:
-design within constraints (5k for the whole site)
5k is: 250x160 pixel static
-850 words of english
-smaller bit map image
-a possibility space of size 2^40,960 (more than the number of milliseconds since the big bang x the number of atoms in the universe)
==> network of relationship makes a small number of things much richer

ASCII is the first system of constraints on top of the possiblity space
second one is HTML (. . .CSS. . .JavaScript. . .), etc. Possibility space starts to get smaller, the scale of chess moves

more constraints (human level):
-what makes sense (linguistically)
-what is useful
-what is beautiful

"Design is the successive application of constraints until only a unique product is left." -- Richard Pew

History of the web:
-post for a fixed document
-dynamically rendered content on the screen from criteria
-->started simple, gradual step by step removing of constraints

Constraints that people create for themselves
-music: meter and key
-architecture: engineering and client demands
-poetry: meter
-experimentation: friction against conventional constraints
-Christian Bok: a book using only one vowel per chapter

Flickr:
-tags
-slide shows
-squared circle animation
-fibonacci sequence from squared circle "pixels"
-giant high res poster (limited number of images from each user: collaborative)

Children's play:
-spontaneous: one person runs and then the other runs
-with rules: role playing, 'I'm the mommy you're the daddy'
-children can't stop playing
-adults only play when given permission
-children play at edge of what's possible for them, testing pain, fear, etc.

"The web is our playground"
-Flickr social network diagram
-"our" means a bunch of different things: your local (1st gen.) social network, whole larger 'community of interest', or whole web
-web is a possibility space in 2^n dimensions where n is reaaaaaaaaaaaally big
-that's a big playground

Question: Game Neverending?
-orginal Ludicorp project
-light weight web-based game
-instant messaging type tool that allowed you to move an avatar around
-client side interface got ahead of the server-side, used it to make Flickr in their spare time, Flickr took over the company
-"massively multiplayer photo sharing"

Question: what makes a person get hooked on Flickr?
-unpredictable: United Arab Emirates has a super-large percentage
-photos are an excuse for social interaction (like golf or bridge)
-arbitrary rule set within which 'purposeless play' can take place

Question: why beta? will the real version be totally awesome?
-the original version was radically different
-only constant was the profile page
-orginally you had to swap photos in real time over an IM client (from Game Neverending story)
-once we're sure it's stable we'll take beta off

Question: What do you do with Flickr?
-watch photos from contacts (300-400)
-aggregation of other people's lives
-improved relationship, knowledge of their lives
-presence tool
-get Nikon D70 photo tips

Question: Talk about the history to open the API?
-create a venue for interaction through whatever tool you desire
-to do a lot of tactical stuff (organizr, inline editing) we had to refresh individual chunks rather than a whole page, therefore they got api hooks, and so, why not make them public?
-trust that people can get their photos back without having to develop the desktop tool
-couldn't make all the apps we wanted but didn't have times, so let users do them
-airtightinteractive.com
-25% of the site traffic is from API calls

Question: video?
-yes.
-still figuring out how to do it: short form video from web cams and cameras
-it's a pain in the butt (format war)

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Posted by Greg at 4:30 PM | Comments (0)

BJ Fogg at WebVisions 2005

Why Simplicity Matters (and Why It's So Difficult to Achieve)

Drive to Sea World got in a major car crash
-louder and more physical than you expect
-happens quickly and slowly
-first thought: cmd-z
->digital tools we use change us: cmd-z became an instinct

->ex: ballerina's toe shoes deform their feet: tools deform us

-Past: Leaders/Royals established rituals
-Present: first adopters first enounter new tech: establish rituals, culture

Persuasive Technology:
-originally, we thought people adapt their behaviour through using the computer:
-now, we see that Computers can "manipulate" people

Fire Metaphor:
-power vs. torture
-enabling new tasks vs. having to spend our lives maintaining tech

"the digital products we create will determine the future of this planet"

Bongo Get Nagged by His Computer
-Bongo (monkey doll) want to check the weather
-has to run updates
-interrupts to tells him he has a message (spam)
-tells him he has to backup
-tells him he has to check for viruses
-finally gets weather
-weather website offers to make itself his homepage

Frustration in the context of Bongo
-feeling of something being harder than it should be
-feeling of benefit being lower than expected
-causes: resentment and sense of powerlessness

Satisfaction
-meets expectations

Delight
-unexpected ease
-unexpected benefit
-sense of growing competency (video games)
-gratitude

Why to design for simplicity:
-we're lazy (cognitive misers)
-we have limited abilities (40% of american adults are illiterate or semi-literate)
-we're busy (opportunity cost)
-it sells (consumer goods are way ahead: solve concrete problem in a simple effective way)
-inclusivity (low barriers to entry)
-get out of the way (let them do what they actually want ot do)
-no one else is doing it

What brings costs of doing a task down:
-familiarity
-entertainment value of process

Why is it hard to design for simplicty?

Handstand vs. Handwalk
-stand is easier to view (changes less)
-walk is easier to do (can balance by making small adjustments)
"easy to use is harder to make"

Tvoli Alarm clock
-on the box over in real life:
-larger difference between hour and minute hand
-larger size of clock face
"Simplicity is brittle"

Cost and Benefit equations are different for each person
-benefit: people want different things
-cost: people have different limited resources: time, monet, congnitive bandwidth

Techniques for designing for simplicity:
-research
-boil abstract questions down to concrete ones
-watch real life users
-empathy
-how do you get inside someone else's head
-->shorcut: make something for which you are the target user
-courage
-don't add features without supporting data

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Posted by Greg at 3:10 PM | Comments (0)

Podcasting Panel at WebVisions 2005

Podcasting

Panel:

Eric Rice
ericrice.com
audioblog.com
What I do: Internet talk-based radio from pre-automatic delivery.

Gregory Narain
sparkcasting.com
beercasting.com
(hosting a beercast at the after party)
What I do: getting people drunk and getting them to talk

Matt May
StaccatoMusic.org
corante.com/podcasting (podcast about podcasting)
What I do: perfect storm of podcasting and creative commons-licensed music

Eric:
What is podcasting and what could it be?
-talk radio for (by) everyone
-RSS automatic file delivery capacity
-software service to make linked media files into subscriptions
-iTunes: CBC Radio 3 Podcast episode #6: Canada Day edition
-Association of Music Podcasting (podsafe music)

Greg:
Barriers to entry/quality:
-being good at telling a story
-learn how to have a conversation
-technique comes later (editing and interview)

Matt:
Lack of The Radio Voice
-Larry Maggid : no slick voice but gets great guests and gets the best out of them
-have something to say

Eric:
"Not Real Radio"?
-international reach
-no regulation
-more human
-the way people sound when they're passionate about what they're talking about
-audio is multi-taskable

Question: resource for learning audio storytelling?

Greg:
-focus group
-watch people listening to an audio-only version (visual clutch)

Queston: work flow for portable recording?

Greg:
-microphone, portable recording device
-brute force production method: as long as you can hear it and it's intelligible people will listen to it
-automatic metadata

Question: what's success? who's the audience?

Matt:
-how many people have I reached?
-is it personal? does it come from the heart?

Greg:
-the ego factor: everybody wants an audience, whether or not they pay

Eric:
-like car restoring: you're doing it for yourself, then you share, then people get interested
-no such thing as bad content (for your mother and your best friend, at least)

Question: What are people willing to pay for?

Eric:
-not much: niche content, super stars

Question: Is there profitability in Segmenting? Added value at smallest unit level?

Greg:
-transcription in a business context

Matt:
-metadata needs to catch up
-"fanscription": based on fan-created subtitles of anime
-audio search may never catch up (audio is always in real time)

Eric:
podscope.com: search based on automatic transcription of podcasts

Question: What was the value in the name? What caused the breakthrough?

Eric:
-It's sexy

Greg:
-Link up with blogging once it went mainstream

Question: Legal Do's and Dont's?

Eric:
-don't play major label music, don't play indie music without permission
-even Clear Channel can't get permission

Matt:
-something's gotta give
-too many different types of permission: publishing license (one time fee) and mechnical royalties (pay per download), which are much more expensive (pay per user download)

Question: How do you find the best podcasts?
-podpickle.com
-podcastalley.com
-iTunes Music Store

Question: What software?
-Adobe Audition
-Audacity: free
-Garageband
-Audio Hijack Pro and Skype-enabled phone for interviews

Question: RSS to manage (or create) playlists? Aggregating small mp3s into one longer unit?

Eric:
-WebJay

Matt:
-keeping mp3s as individual units is really powerful: smallest distributable chunk
-Microsoft support for RSS in Longhorn

Question: Live 365? Real time?

Eric:
-need for time shifting for convenience
-real time is cool for randomness

Question: How is podcasting effecting commercial broadcasting? Time shifting?

Eric:
-forced to let us pick and choose from their content a la carte
-like Onion online, let's people everywhere find it

Question: How does the early entry of big money affect how participatory podcasting will end up being? People feeling enable to get started?

Matt:
-blogging has the advantage of easy feedbacks through comments
-podcasting takes more effort to make and more effort to consume
-you have to have a blog to be a full net citizen, not same with podcasting

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Posted by Greg at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

Peter Merholz at WebVisions 2005

Designing for the Sandbox -- Peter Merholz
peterme@adaptivepath.com

photos to web?
-Cannon Powershoot S60
-iPhoto
-to blog
-need hosting
-difficult
->flickr
-no assumption towards prints
-uploadr
-Frasier Speers: api
->plugin for iphoto
-better than flickr's own tool
-20mb bandwidth limit
->buying an account
-api usage-created app resulted in increased usage, resulted in sale
-reliquishing control
-What Flickr is: relation between databases of Images, People, and Tags
-they supply one (lean) interface and let other people provide other (richer) ones for other applications

-What is the sandbox?
-sand: information/content (images, video, sound, real objects [amzn], data)
-people: folks doing stuff online (value increased by connections between people)
-tools: allow people to manipulate info in a way that is valuable to them
-->old: clikcing a link, form elements (shovels)
-->new: AJAX, flash, rich media (earth movers)

Philosophy:
"Let go, Luke!"
-let other poeple create experience that are meaningful to them with our material
-sandboxes are open (all there is is sand)
-designers HATE letting go
-specifying to the nth degree
"design reaching out into environment"
http://www.knemeyer.com/dk.cfm?a=cms,c,292,1
-->scary: like a theme park or a casino
-Getty sitting in the middle of LA

Portals:
-search engines found value in page views
-tried to control behaviour by cluttering home page (keep you on their site to increase page views)
-lock-in vs. providing value: "stickiness"
-"stickiness" is user hostile
->Google ("a white light appeared")
-one page view with no ads on it, but they've got revenue
-value in not dictating behaviour
-fits in the context of what you're doing

Theme: "When you relinquish control, you receive value"

The Five Planes
(Jesse James Carrot (sp?) The elements of user experience)
-Strategy (business plan)
-Scope (direct objects: content and functionality)
-Structure (info architecture)
-Skeleton (interface design)
-Surface (visual design, brand expression)

-Web as software interface v. web as hypertext system
Surface
-don't take over the screen
-not too much graphic design
-allow skinning

Skeleton
-CPK map
-too much gui (scroll bars, etc.)

Structure
-simple hierarchies (top down)
-a bunch of metadata orgainzed into parallel hierarchies (faceted classification)
-->TAGS (Flickr, del.icio.us)
-user-created structure

Scope
-the Long Tail
-no curatorial filter
-Google Maps v. Craigslist Mashups (Paul Raddobocher [sp?])
-->commerical value from api implementations?

Strategy
-how businesses approach the market (relinquishing control)
Netflix:
-created new market in documentaries
-no late fees
Craigslist
-What eBay could learn from Craigslist
-->1/5 of of ebays traffic with 18 employees
-->letting community decide business model

What Is Your Sandbox?
-Barnes and Noble attempting feature parity with Amazon
-->not utilizing physical presence
-Blockbuster late fees fiasco (v. Netflix)
-Wallmart dropped rental DVDs attempt (made an agreement with Netflix)

What about convergence?
-we don't know what else is going on when someone is using our product
-don't try to provide some kind of monolithic experiec

Posted by Greg at 9:34 AM | Comments (0)

July 1, 2005

Return to the Cabinet of Wonder

This week, I'm down in LA on vacation visiting family and friends for the Fourth. Coincidentally Sonya is down here simultaneously for a job interview so I volunteered to take her to that and show her around a little. Since we were already at the Sony lot, for Sonya's interveiw with a reality TV producer, I thought we should head over to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is right near by, on Venice.

Having nothing whatsoever to do with dinosaurs, the MJT is a tiny, dark, storefront museum in the style of the cabinets of curiosities and mixed princely collections of art, crafts, and natural wonders that were the predecessors of the modern public museum. It's exhibits, ranging from a collection of letters sent to the Mount Wilson Observatory to microscopic collages made with butterfly wings and dragonfly scales to a series of illustrations of traditional folk remedies to a display on the allegorical meaning of the work of the great sixteenth century engineer Athanasius Kircher.

I first heard of the place in a class on the History and Theory of the Museum I took my junior year in college. We read Wren Weschler's book on the museum, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders.

The summer after that class, when I was back home in LA, I paid my first visit. I was wandering around The Garden of Eden on Wheels (an exhibit on mobile homes), when, thinking it led to another gallery, I walked through a door that opened into a combination storage room and repair shop, lined with metal shelves teetering with all manner of junk and mechanical sections of the innerworkings of various exhibits splayed out on work tables, a room I would soon learn was nicknamed "stinky hollow" because of its former use as a forensic lab and its lasting formaldehyde stench.

After poking around a bit, I went back out into the museum proper, finished my visit, went home and wrote them a letter in which I included my resume. I ended up working there for the rest of the summer as a grant writer. Because of the museum's tiny size, I worked directly with the it's founder, David Wilson, his wife Diana, and their assistant Kelly who managed much of the museum's practical affairs. Almost immediately, I was researching and writing grants for potential exhibits, like a series of vectorgraphs David wanted to make of stereographic x-rays of flowers made by a local dentist named Al Richards, and even helping to brainsorm and plan new ones, specifically an exhibit on string art traditions from around the world. The following fall, when I returned to Reed, I helped bring David up to speak at RAW, the school's annual arts festival. Though I tried my best to keep in touch with Kelly and the Wilsons by helping out with a couple of grants via email during the following year at Reed, we'd graudally fallen out of touch during the last couple of years.

So, when Sonya and I entered the museum, I had no idea if David would remember me or if Kelly still even worked there. After showing Sonya around all the exhibits, we went upstairs to the newly completed Russian Tea Room (which was still part office part construction zone in my last memory). It turned out that a group of staff and interns from the Natural History Musueum were there on a tour and had simultaneously gathered in the tea room to talk to David. When he came in, he turned out not only to remember me, but he knew precisely the things I'd worked on (including the portraits of cosmonaut dogs about to arrive for the lobby of the movie theatre), was (overly) effusive in praising my work to the gathered group, and invited Sonya and I to stick around afterwards so he could show us the currently under-construction string art exhibit (opening September 15th), which I'd worked on.

The best part was something he showed us that I'd missed while walking around downstairs. Passed the door through which I'd once accidentally wandered on my first visit now lay two new exhibits: one of decaying cellulose dice donated by magician and actor Ricky Jay and the other: Al Richards' x-ray flowers, the first project I'd worked on durng my internship, now real. Vectography is a process invented by Polaroid whereby a seemingly three dimensional image is produced by printing two slighly horizonyally separated images on sheets of differently polarized material and then affixing both of them to reverse sides of a common clear substrate. The result is plates that look a lot like dentist's x-rays. But when you look at them through 3d-glasses with properly polarized lenses the the images explode with vertiginous depth.

Sonya and I slowly walked around the room with 3d-glasses on long poles like costume ball masks as each of the flowers lit up in front front of us one by one as we passed, diaphonous, transparent, and real.

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Posted by Greg at 1:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack