shelly
Web 2.0 Expo Highlights and Emerging Themes
Web 2.0 Expo Highlights and Emerging Themes
I attended Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this past week. Brady Forrest (co-chair) invited us to have our H.E.Ai.D. installation (large scale, collaborative play space with lasers, generative sound, and a tinge of augmented reality) in the Expo. Aside from the joy of watching Tim O’Reilly dance in our installation, it was great to get up to date on all things Web 2.0. Here’s my report:
Tim O’Reilly framed the event very well during his keynote speech, essentially giving a report card on the state of Web 2.0 – arguing that the web as [...]
Better Privacy or Better Sharing?
I got a twitter (thanks @lindastone) about danah boyd’s SXSW talk on Privacy and Publicity, and read it online. A couple of days later it was summarized by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/13/privacy-publicity-sxsw/. It’s a great talk, worth the read.
I’ve been doing very related research recently so I have been thinking quite a bit about the topic, one thought being I don’t really like the word “privacy” and I’ll explain why.
First, some background. This problem has grown due to several recent trends in social media. Social networking systems tend to provide tools for only a unified identity, reflecting the assumption that one identity fits all [...]
Yahoo, powerpoints, and presentations on slideshare
I’ve been finding Yahoo is a very ppt deck centric company. People will say “send me the report” and what they really mean is “send me the slide deck”, because, well, that is the report. I have mixed feelings about the impact the paperless office is having on how we share information. It is certainly the case it’s a lot easier to page through a lot of powerpoint presentation pages than pdfs of written papers on the desktop screen… The problem is that how you optimize for an actual presentation, where you are in the room talking about the slides, and how you optimize for a powerpoint [...]
Shelly’s Working at Yahoo!
Well, the big news is I have taken a job at Yahoo as a senior researcher in social media (sitting with applications teams). It was a really tough decision, but with the recession independent consulting projects were hard to find, so I decided it was time to find a get a “real” job.
My new buddies are all the Yahoo communities/social applications – Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo, Email, Flickr, Delicious, Profiles, Y!OS etc. There’s a lot that’s social that’s happening here, so I’m pretty excited to sink my teeth in. I’ve spent the past few weeks really “studying” Yahoo, meeting people from various groups [...]
Social Networking at StartupDay
Marcelo of Seattle 2.0 asked me to speak at an upcoming one day conference he’s organizing: StartupDay, an event for people considering taking the leap into the startup world. Looks like a good speaker line up! I’m giving a talk on the importance of networking, and I was looking at the other speaker list, thinking “ayep” I guess I’ve been doing my job “networking” because I have met a number of them and know who most of them are. I’m imagining a room full of folks thinking about taking that entrepreneurial leap, and, well, i have lots to say….
Pics from Frayed Wire
Frayed Wire went great! I had so much fun, even though I was running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off (I was producing the event…). It’s an amazing experience, to be in a room FULL of technologists who are also artists and vice versa.
I posted some frayed wire pictures on flickr here.
Introductory slides for Frayed Wire are here, provides some background on who was there and our goals:
We had a *great* set of speakers and workshops, and people had a lot of fun making stuff out of the items from Junque Exchange in the open lab, and there [...]
Communities and Technologies 2009
I gave a talk at Communities and Technologies 2009 on June 25. Just got around to getting my slides online, Pathable: Leveraging Social Software for Social Networking and Community Development at Events.
Here’s the abstract of the paper described in the talk:
Professional networking is a primary goal of people attending conferences and events. Over the past year we developed a social networking and community tool for events, Pathable, to help attendees meet the right people. Pathable provides an online directory of profiles, communication tools, and a recommendation system optimized to help people meet based on commonalities. We performed a deployment study [...]
Community Genius: Tips for Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers
I gave a talk at Seattle’s sixth Ignite: Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers. The text for the talk is below. A few folks were asking about the slides so I put them up on SlideShare here.
I read a book a while ago by Scott Berkun, Myths of Innovation, where he noted that inspiration is much more social than you might expect. “Group Genius” similarly reviewed recent research highlighting when groups can perform collaborative creative feats beyond the possibility of any individual.
That really got me thinking about how creativity plays [...]
CHI vs E-tech
I am at CHI this week, and last night I found myself in a conversation about the differences between CHI and e-tech (O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology). These two events have very different crowds, but they tend to focus on the same topics – innovative “human-computer-interaction” technologies. The comparison between CHI and E-tech has been very much on my mind, because I “grew up” so to speak in the research community represented by CHI, but have spent the last couple of years more immersed in the startup community represented by E-tech.
My first exposure to differences in attitudes was someone in the hallway [...]
Frayed Wire, July 11th
Yay! Today I sent around emails to interested parties announcing our “Frayed Wire” event this summer. I’ve been wanting to organize this event for a while, but all the stars aligned to have it this summer. It’s a one day event bringing together people at the intersection of art and technology, with the goal of inspiring, educating and building community through presentations, workshops, and discussions. We (in this case I mean Dorkbot Seattle) are collaborating with 911 Media Arts Center and Youngstown to make it happen.
I think the Northwest is ready to push to [...]
