The keys to design are perception, cognition, design, and mechanics.

He gave a great example of two different vending machines: one with several simple big push buttons with colorful graphics, another with a collection of buttons involving letters and numbers. The second requires several more layers, and the use of memory. The former makes it as simple as possible.

Fitts’ Law, an important factor to consider in design: it’s harder to target things that are:

(more at wikipedia

Showed a couple of menus: one with a left justified, another that is centered. The one left justified is easier to use because it is anchored to the left and your eye knows where to look.

Design 101 (del.icio.us):

He got into a little bit of heat when he demonstrated the difficulty in understanding a graph by Tufte. Someone suggested that if the point was to demonstrate that war was bad, because of the loss of life, then it would be easier to say they went from an army of 1000 to 10. Who knows, but I get Berkun’s point.

Lists are a great way to provide information; “the cockroach of design.”

Remember to ask yourself, “What problem are we trying to solve?”

Berkun provided an example of tag clouds, and took O’Reilly’s Radar tag cloud. He changed it to a list and added a bar showing the frequency of the use of the tag.

Berkun had a very argumentative crowd, perhaps because it’s on the verge of art, and it’s a little subjective. Or perhaps people are a little narked today; it seems that the change of rooms, cramped conditions, bad wifi, no lunch, food, or drink has annoyed people.

How they see the web:
- as an event stream
- as a social space
- as a datastore

He then gave a demo, but because the network connection SUCKED!, he couldn’t provide real-time examples.

They had 25 minutes for Q&A. Which makes me wonder if they just didn’t have the content to fill a session.

It’s standing room only again, although, this time I think it’s because we’ve moved to a new bunch of conference rooms. Given that O’Reilly’s conference only lasts for 3/4 of today, I’m guessing they were shifted to make room for a new conference. Unfortunately, that means we’re all cramped, and the WiFi, if it was lousy yesterday, now sucks grandly.

Powezik is mostly talking about the history of Yahoo! Bit of a shame, given that any ETecher would know it intimately. However, he quickly made it to a point; that Yahoo! now sees the Internet as a social platform (hence the recent acquisitions). Again, not really new information.

He’s now talking ALOT about Flickr: why they bought them, what’s happened since, and some of the features (like the old turkey clustering story, i.e. - there is more than one type of turkey, like the country or the food).

Now were back to search–”In general today, search is about connecting people to a web page.” He shows a really neat feature, that I’ve not seen before–maybe because I don’t use Yahoo! much–that will show you if your contacts have saved a web page that appears in your search results. I’ll have to use Yahoo! a bit more to see if it works for me (though I doubt I know enough people that will search for things that are similar to mine).

Hack Yahoo!, run by Chad Dickerson, is an internal initiative to “Mash-up, or shut-up.” They also run a Hack Day, which provides ideas or features and products. He plans to have a community hackathon.

He also demoed a prototype that takes you Flickr contacts, and displays you, and them, on a map on a mobile phone. They even have private ones, that have maps of internal buildings and can show people within them. Great for conferences, like ETech, so you can track friends and colleagues. It’s not a public product, but he wants someone to build it and deploy (I assume he means someone external to Yahoo!).

Charles is an anthropologist. He spent 12 months on the Isles of Scilly, and set up a social entrepreneur consultancy to ensure he was part of the culture, not just an observer. He discovered that semantic triggers activate relaying behavior.

Several points of note (amongst far too many for me to soak it at this stage in the conference):

• The further away two people or groups are in a social network, the higher the threshold the relay behavior is.
• Electronic information systems are crippling useful social mechanisms.
• Collaborative scoring is good in groups of experts, but not in hetrogenius groups.

His company, Trampoline Systems, produces a “a technology that helps groups of people connect, collaborate and manage large quantities of information.”

Again this tells me that technologists are now the wrong people to be dealing with the high-level operation of the internet. Hard core techies should seek out intelligent people in anthropology, sociology, artists, etc. to help them build meaningful systems.

ETech: Danah Boyd, G/localization, When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide

Everyone wants to hear Danah: standing room only.

Embedded observation, through passion, for example: CraigsList, Flickr, MySpace.

Growth = subcultures, and a splintering of passion. So it’s important to have passionate users who will bubble the information to the top, because a designer can’t scale their embeddedness.

Designing through Embeddedness:

1. Passions is EVREYTHING
2. Protect from burn-out
3. Diversify your staff
4. Enable and empower, don’t control
5. Do not overdesign!
6. Integrate designers and customer support
7. Stay engaged with the community
8. Document cultural evolution

Great presentation. Everyone, who hasn’t already, should sub to her blog.

Seems like goodness. iTags.

However, I’m busy building a startup, so I’ll wait for it to be deployed, mashed and hacked. Then I’ll adopt.

There have been a bunch of people recently that have argued over full or partial content feeds for weblogs.

Eric states that by monitoring Feedburners stats, they have seen full content feeds outpace partial feeds by up to 10x, and that this has not effected the click through rate. That disagrees with arguments seen by professional bloggers.

“Complexity breeds consolidation, simplicity doesn’t.”

“The Feed is you face.”

I’ve heard people rave about George Dyson’s presentation before, but never heard him myself until today. He’s as good as they say. His head is full of the history of computing, and it screams out of his lips at an almost high-pitch-helium-like monologue–not in reference to his voice, more his hyperactivity.

He’s got plenty of visuals and fun information. If I ever get the time I’ll have to search a bit online for more, e.g.: Turing’s Cathedral.

An incredible finishing thought: “Search engines are a way for computers to search us.”

Goldhaber is a thinker. So what he presented isn’t easy to sum up in a few paragraphs–illustrated by how many people were taking photographs of each of his slides. I’ll just try a quick summary, because I’m guessing he’ll make his thoughts available online, or in a book.

“Think of the human world as a Massively Multiple Interactive Game (which it is).” Segments of history include feudal, MMI (exchange of Money, the prevalence of Markets and the dominance of Industrial production of standardized goods), and the attention economy. Goldhaber detailed the aspects of these three levels, and their differences.

He also discusses the concept of attention.

It was all very interesting, but something that needs exploring in more detail. Thankfully, Goldhaber hopes to do a workshop later.

Oooooh. Announcements.

Live.com has some new enhancements. Windows Live search has a new beta.

Why’s he wearing a suit?

They seem pretty excited (they do work for Microsoft), but to be honest they look like old portals that just happen to have an AJAX front end. Not particularly compelling. Microsoft know how to program AJAX–big deal.

OK. So I’m now being really cynical, but the presentation is called “Search and the Network Effect: Sponsored by Microsoft,” and yet his presentation is effectively a product pitch. This is old stuff with a front end that’s perhaps a few months old (I’m not going to say it’s fresh, because there’s nothing new).