Try it at http://mytwee.com. You’ll need a Twitter account.

Here’s mine:

What is MyTwee?
My Twee is a living, breathing, interactive painting of your Twitterverse.  This project started as a visualization for a Dorkbot art show last year.   It’s since evolved into an online, flash-based interactive art piece with a few gaming mechanics thrown in and a (not so) secret mission to encourage people to be more green!

It’s a Painting of your Twitterverse:
Your “Twee” is generated based on activity in your Twitterverse, including your own messages and the messages of the people you follow.  Grow your Twee by nurturing activity in your Twitterverse.  The more activity, the more leaves, plants, clouds, flowers, fruit and little forest critters you’ll see. Mouse over individual items or click on the “Guide” button to learn what they represent.  Check out what Barack Obama (@barackobama) or Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) look like!

It’s a Lightweight Game:
Based on green things you say and do using Twitter, you can earn “Green Scout Badges”.   All you have to do is talk about it through your tweets. This way, not only do you earn your badges, all your friends get to hear about the cool green things you are doing.

Print, Post, or Share!
Help us spread the Twee forest around the world! You can download a picture of your Twee, embed a live Flash animation in your blog, or print a poster.

Got ideas for badges, or other ways to improve the experience? Email us at mytwee@wagglelabs.com.  You can also go to our MyTwee Facebook page to add comments or upload a picture of your Twee for others to see.

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 application platform should be conceptualized as an information operating system rather than platform of devices or technologies.  See his recent article on O’Reilly Radar to learn more.  The main concern he raised was the ongoing tension between large companies’ desires to dominate the web as an information platform (one ring to rule them all…) versus a more utopian, Internet-style, democratized version where services from multiple providers are “horizontally integrated via open standards”.  Applying this thinking to the social space, he argues that the real power is in developing applications and APIs that allow third-party developers to leverage the social data that companies have produced through years of supporting communication and networking technologies.

Aside:  This kind of thinking is one of the reasons I love the O’Reilly crew and their events.  Because they don’t create their own technologies, but are rather a publishing company specializing in books and events for technology innovators, they are in a unique position to serve as trusted, impartial advocates for a future that best serves the needs and interests of individual users.  I only wish they could run events without any sponsorship at all….I’m sure it introduces some bias.

I was happy to see a lot of the event focusing on the social space – themes included:

• Helping user focus on content they care about.  Users are overwhelmed with a fire hose of information on the Web, so a few talks/technologies focused on how we can help users focus their attention on content they care about.    
  • Social aggregation. that is integrating content from multiple social streams such as Facebook and Twitter is one such method.  Both Spindex.me from Microsoft’s Fuselabs and Strings (presented in the LaunchPad session) had social aggregation tools, allowing users to incorporate their various social streams into one location.  I’m often dubious of social aggregation tools, because I’m not convinced the average user really wants all their content mixed in one place — plus it’s been tried (e.g., FriendFeed, Strands).  However, I thought Spindex.me had a compelling use case: layering smart search over the socially aggregated content to help users find content their friends care about, and focus on emerging trends in their social sphere.  T
  • Social curation.  There were also a couple of social curation projects: that is, allowing users to select the best online content, either your own content (again, Strings), or content around a search theme (Montage from Microsoft’s FUSE Labs) and then share with friends.  Pearltrees.com had personal content management social curation with a network based visualization.   pearltrees.com. 
• Managing user generated content.  User generated content allows technology companies to leverage large amounts of information.  But with the advantages are many pitfalls, because when everyone has a voice, and everyone can share, sometimes they say mean and inappropriate things.  A few talks provided basic “how-to” information, including Randy Farmer’s discussion of reputation mechanisms.  He said sometimes the best reputation mechanisms are not shared:  don’t share negative evaluations publicly, because some people will use them to gang up on others, but rather use them on a hidden level to prioritize content.  At the Web 2.0 Expo/Bay Area Ignite a few talks discussed not abusing social media and user generated content.  Listening to these talks you got a sense of a UGC backlash:  you shouldn’t force people to over share (Avoidr and The Forgiveness Engine by Jesper Andersen) and you shouldn’t waste people’s time with contests (Jen Bekman).
• Building on a culture of social participation and sharing.  A couple of talks explored issues around building large scale pro-social participation and sharing.  See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21842, nothing too surprising here, but if you’re new to using social media a good overview.  Perhaps the hardest lesson for big companies is giving up control and being accessible to community, practicing what you preach with openness/sharing.  A similar theme emerged in a discussion of open leadership by Charlene Li.  (This talk seemed to be more about open, social media marketing than leadership – in the modern web 2.0 world…marketers should engage with consumers.) 
• Designing for rich interaction applications.  A few talks addressed the fact that there are increasingly rich internet applications online, and the existing tools and methods for designing web applications need to be updated to address new online interaction models.  E.g., Chris Griffith argued that you need to actually prototype your more complex interaction sequences as a part of the design process before handing it off to developers — or, he warned, they end up designing for you.

Other highlights:  Location location location was everywhere.   So to was Twitter as a central part of the web 2.0 information operating system, e.g. see bing twitter www.bing.com\twitter.    For a fun example of the power of large scale access to user generated content, see the One Million Giraffes project, where Olla Helland trying to win a bet collecting a million giraffes drawn by 2011 using social media.   Social, casual games and game mechanics were appearing in everything social.    Generally seening people getting increasingly excited about augmented reality, esp. in mobile,  e.g., Microsoft Tag tech embedded in the event:  http://emergingexperiences.com/2010/05/rockstar-on-tour-web-20-expo-san-francisco/

Other cool technologies worth checking out:

Rhomobile – won the launchpad award, converts apps to work on multiple platforms

Ocarina – iPad application  where you could play music, but also see other people playing and *play with them* around the world

HTML5 – everyone was abuzz about HTML5, Alexa Andrzejewski gave an entire talk comparing it to Flash.  I didn’t go to this talk but my developer buddies were all abuzz about it, saying HTML5 web sockets will make the real time web happen by enabling push data that currently web sites inefficiently pull for.  They expect it will replace Flash – companies using Flash are moving to html5.  

Stupeflix – dynamically generated video, they demo’d its use for advertising, showing how you can create a sort of photostory for entire catalogs of ads with updated prices.

What seemed notably absent relative to last years’ web 2.0 events?  Facebook applications.

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 out in my own life. Over the past ten or so years, I’ve been actively involved with community based creative projects on many levels: technology innovation teams, Dorkbot, throwing elaborately decorated fundraising events, large scale art installations, Burning man theme camps.

I decided to share some of the lessons I’ve learned through my reading, and working with community collaborations, for the Ignite audience because it is comprised largely of people for whom creativity or innovation is an important goal in their lives. Here is the verbage that went into the talk:

****** IGNITE April 2006: “Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers.”

Raise your hand if being creative or innovative is an important goal in your life. [many raised hands]. Welcome to the creative class! Today I am going to be talking about how you can use your community to increase your creative powers. [Intro slide 1]

What is community? Community is a web of relationships with an ongoing exchange of information and support. Communities are characterized by a feeling of belonging or identity with the group as a whole. [Slide 2]

You don’t tend to think of community from a sociobiological perspective, but just as the feeling of love can lead to babies, so can a feeling of community lead to social capital — your access to social resources that help you thrive. [Slide 3]

Community groups are unique because they enable transitive relationships. That is, whether or not you know someone, by virtue of your common membership in the same community they are likely to trust you and share resources. [Slide 4]

Similarly, they can help you with the creative process. Creativity is much more social than you imagine. Think of it as taking a whole bunch of different ideas from the people around you, throwing them all into the air together, and then seeing if they land in an interesting pattern. Which leads me to the first tip. [Slide 5]

Tip #1. Seek diversity! To really leverage your community, you want to find people who are NOT LIKE YOU, they are groups or individuals with very different ideas or approaches to things. [Slide 6]

Tip #2. Seek a high rotation in weak social ties. It is usually through the social weak ties that you’ll be exposed to new ideas. Make a hobby out of continuously meeting new people. [slide 7]

Tip #3. Develop friends and colleagues with good “flow”. These are people who engage and challenge you, but are not threatening. You can completely lose your self-consiousness and immerse yourself in the creative experience. [Slide 8]

Tip #4. Get a whiteboard, and put it in the most social room in your hourse, which is often the kitchen. Stick to the #1 rule which is that anything can be erased at any time. You want to always leave room for new ideas! You can document by taking pictures. [Slide 9]

Tip #5. Play different roles, whether it’s passive observer, active participant, or leader. You will always get so much more about of a community by playing the role of leader, but you don’t have time to be a leader for more than one or two groups or projects. Nonetheless, you want to participate at least at the level of learning observation with a few groups. [Slide 10]

Tip #6. Play nice! Information spreads like wild-fire through community groups, so if you don’t play nice you’ll sour the whole community experience for you. It’s okay to be less active, but don’t over commit and then flake out. [Slide 11]

Tip #7. Hang out a lot in bars. Seriously. Conversation is the vehicle to innovative ideas, but you need conversation over time. Give yourself the opportunity to build on ideas through relaxed, casual conversation over many occasions. [Slide 12]

Tip #8. Give Away Ideas and Knowledge Freely. Tim Sanders wrote a book called Love is the Killer App, and suggests we all live the Love Cat Way. Essentially, the point is that the more you share, the more you get back, and you get it back exponentially as you empire of relationships grows. [Slide 13]

Tip #9. Play the “Yah and…” generative idea game. This is the game where you are brainstorming ideas, and rather than trying to replace or better the previous idea, you *build* on it. It is through the unique *combination* of ideas that innovation happens. [Slide 14]

Tip #10. Generate many ideas, but pick only the good ones to execute. You have been actively engaged in generating a lot of ideas, but while fun they are not always feasible to execute. Pick the ones that really combine your skills and passions in a unique way. Pick the ones that take into consideration your time and resources. [Slide 15]

Tip #11. Have a place. Once you have picked an idea, figure out a place where you can work together to make it happen. There’s a special magic, and an acceleration of ideas when you are in the room together. [Slide 16]

Tip #12. Have a project day. These are regularly scheduled days when you will all be there at the same time. You can’t rely just on serendipity to make sure you see each other often enough. I had one group called “art day”, where each month a new person would host an artistic medium in their house: we rotated through painting, wire sculpture, electronics, and so forth. It was great! [Slide 17]

Tip #13. Give up control. If you are successfully leveraging your community’s creativity, the ideas and projects will evolve in a direction you would never have developed in isolation. Embrace it! [Slide 18]

Here are some suggested groups and event as the intersection of creativity and technology. My favorite (aside from Ignite, of course) is Dorkbot. I highly recommend going to Burning Man at least once, think of it as a “creative communities boot camp.” [Slide 19]

This summer, we (dorkbot and friends) are hosting a one day event called FrayedWire: a mix of presentations, workshops, and discussions for people at the intersection of art and technology! This will be a great opportunity for you to meet and be inspired by the creative tech community. [Slide 20]

My first exposure to differences in attitudes was someone in the hallway saying to me “well, we’re not trying to make money”. Soon thereafter I accidentally stumbled into a rant against the term “Web 2.0”, rendered meaningless, it was being argued, as the new buzz word in the popular media. When I tried to defend the term, clearly defined I thought by Tim O’Reilly and readily available in his blog, my assailant said to me “yes but no one *knows* what it means”. My weak attempt to say “well, I do” were soundly overspoken.

It is true that the majority of the crew at E-tech is comprised of practitioners who work in the context of companies trying to make money. Yet, they have a strong open-source aesthetic, an undertone of the moral imperative that the world is a better, more innovative place when you make knowledge and code freely available. My picture of that crowd is of a bunch of well-meaning technology creatives stumbling over themselves hurtling collectively towards The Next Big Thing.

At CHI, the pace of innovation is more deliberate. They are a solid year behind in awareness of what’s “cool and new”. For example only the younger graduate students are trying to nudge Twitter into the consciousness of their advisors. (Although I am happy to report the emphasis has clearly leapt off the desktop and into more mobile and embedded devices.) Yet, they are making forays in directions not seen at e-tech, because academic research *is* less constrained by the need to make money.

In addition, I have to say I am appreciating the greater intellectual rigor that is here, and this is what I think it comes down to: the main difference is in the measure of quality. At an event like e-tech, presenters are selected based on who’s a prominent blogger, who’s making the most money, who’s likely according to some big picture thinkers to have big picture impact. This makes for flashier presentations that are more entertaining to listen to. At CHI, for the most part presentations are selected by peer review of papers submitted for publication in the conference proceedings. This makes for extremely well thought out work that builds on the twenty years of history in the field, documented across these years through research publications. Everyone here is an originator of new knowledge and/or new technology, no one is rewarded for an ability to synthesize other people’s work. I love E-tech, and I don’t think the academics should dismiss the important role the O’Reilly crew has played in accelerating innovation in their own field. However it’s nice, to be surrounded by people who think more like me, people who are a little suspicious of technology fad-ism, who want to see design grounded in theory, and who want to see the data.

Mostly, though, I’m just amazed there isn’t more cross over…