Raph Koster (Sony Online)

JC Herz (Joystick Nation)

Philip Rosedale (Linden Lab)

Dennis Fong (Xfire)

Byron Reeves, Stanford Uni

Easier to place a phone call on Skype than to explain what it’s like to collaborate on a World of Warcraft quest. The virtual world is very complex – have to figure out who has which role, what they need to do, what the problem is, and how to solve it. There are multiple chats between different groups of players; there are logistics to be considered. Demographic is not 14 yr old boys – people spend significant amounts of time and money on this.

From a research perspective – why is this fun?

– games are a combination of reality and fantasy

– real people

– Unreal avatars and agents

– empathy for other players despite fantasy context

– activation in right inferior parietal region with real players

– brain region involved in self-other connectedness

Narrative context – story influences interest: more interesting if you know the story.

Failure doesn’t hurt.

Makes bonds with other people.

What if you could do work in this team? Create quick swat teams to handle a problem.

Lessons for work

– don’t underestimate fun

– clear challenge

– progress each time you log on

– rewards

Decentralisation of work

– self-organising and self-managed

[Damn, can’t type fast enough. Very interesting talk – hope the slides are up somewhere because they were very detailed and worth seeing.]

Jane McGonigal, 42 Entertainment – SuperGaming!

Using MMP gaming as a framework for real action – massively multiplayer offline real playing games.

Offline as in in real environments; real as in you are not using an avatar but your real identity.

Trend towards MMofflinerealPGs are

– massively scaled

– embedded in real everyday life

– heightens powers of individual

– sort of like supercomputing

Supergaming is social networking that is ludic.

– shared rules

– known goal

– synced playful behaviours

Spectacular

– public display

– large or lavish scale

– contrast, friction and surprise

Use

– PDAs, cellp hones, wifi laptops, digital cameras

– SNS, blogs, SMS, wikis, tagging software, public message forums

Must be pervasive and persistent.

Examples that happened in San Francisco

Flash mobs

I Love Bees

Go Game (urban superhero game)

Flashmob supercomputer meet-up

[She here describes the experiences of taking part in these events.]

[Other stuff said… but you know the drill by now.]

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Bill Schlough (SF Giants)

Why does wifi make sense for a baseball park? The Giant’s business objective is to win the World Series. Use tech to enable success on the field, including video coaching and scouting app, started in 2000. But more about taking care of the fans in the ballpark, so how does wifi make money? It’s free, and a few other ballparks are experimenting, but no one knows what the business model is but yet various marketing partners like the fact that there is free wifi that the fans can use. Marketing partners want to get their wifi devices in the hands of the fans and they are together figuring out how to use wifi to do that.

Fans use wifi at the ball park for two reasons

– to stay connected, do email, specially when losing 16-3.

– to use interactive services provided by the Giants, such as digital dugout which you need to be at the ballpark to use.

Peter Sisson, Teleo

What VoIP means to telecoms. Billions of dollars of telecoms equipment is about to become irrelevant, but this creates a lot of opportunity.

Old thinking was that telecom was equipment, but now it’s software. VoIP is a computerised device.

Old thinking was that voice is a separate service, but now voice is just a feature, i.e. you can do voice over any equipment. No sense to keep data and voice apart.

Use Teleo to turn Outlook into a telephone. Add a tool bar so you can phone someone who emailed you by a single click (if you have their phone number in your address book). Any phone number on the web – just click and then it makes the call.

New revenue models

– 800: paid inbound calls with 800 numbers

– pay for placement in yellow pages

– pay for search engine placement

Combine those so local plumber bidding for placement on Google, but when you click on it you get put through on the phone.

Stuart Henshall (Skype Journal)

It’s not Vonage who are defining VoIP, it’s people like Skype. User models are different for Skype – people who leave Skype on all the time so that they can just have presence. Allows easy conference calls. Changes the way we think about communications. Can create presence in a simple way.

[Excerpts from the discussion.]

Bill: Chicken and egg problem – how many people bring a laptop into a ballpark? Get 100 – 150 laptops per game, but it’s the wifi PDAs that will be used. They make more sense, the LifeDrives and iPaqs the wifi-enabled Treos. But the business people will bring more laptops on a weekday game than a weekend game. So as these connected devices become more common then they’ll see more uptake.

There’s an issue of ‘cool’ too – here it is cool to have a laptop, but at a game it is not. What if a there’s a ‘fly ball’ that smashes your laptop screen? That’s not cool.

Privacy – if can do replays online, then people will share devices in a collaborative, social way.

There are different demographics that we deal with, but it’s not to much women vs. men, but age. Business people are looking for an opportunity to stay in touch witht he office, to leverage the Digital Dugout, to use that information. Don’t see kids with PDAs, but you will, and we will be ready for it.

Peter: I find it’s impossible to predict what people do with technologies, and if you try you get it wrong. I never wanted a camera in my cellphone, but now I’m sending people pictures all the time. When IM came out, I thought why not send an email, I just didnt’ get it, but now I IM constantly.

There are nuances. IM is right for some conversations, but sometimes email is better, or a phone call. I always fail when I try to predict what people will do with technologies but it’s amazing what people will do with them.

Stuart: One thing to watch is what is going to happen with dual mode handsets, wifi and GSM, so what emerges in terms of linux based. Skype is cross-platform, and have Linux and Symbian, so when they do they will have presence on your mobile phone with your buddy list, so it’ll be a new Plaxo. So if a Skype-like product really emerges and becomes effective in a wifi-centric world, is that the UI and the interface you want to use?

The handset becomes the phone via wifi. It becomes about useabilty and simplicity.

Point from floor: VoIP is by the telecos for the telecos. Skype is for the people.

Question: What if city-wide wifi comes, will that affect your ballpark wifi?

Bill: Not really, if it comes, we’ll embrace it and we don’t care if it’s our wifi or someone else’s.

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Since Anderson published the original Long Tail chart, two things have changed. Firstly, the niche sellers in the long tail are selling more, so the tail is growing as a fraction of the whole. Moving from an era of mass markets to millions of niches.

1990: Explosion of products [numbers, not blowing products up]

Now: Explosion of information about products

Forces in the long tail:

– democratisation of tools of production – PCs make making it cheap

– minimise transaction costs – internet makes selling it cheap

– power of consumer WOM – internet makes talking about it cheap

Three opportunities

– long tail aggregators, reach the head and the tail, e.g. Amazon

– niche suppliers, get aggregated by someone else

– filters, help people find what they want

More likely to find satisfaction in the long tail, but have to look harder for it.

Have always had filters, but these are pre-filters, like editors of a mag who decide what goes in. Now we have post-filters, e.g. peers who review after publication.

Flattening the long tail affects which business models are viable. Long tail distributors can supply more different products.

[Anderson then goes on to show a bunch of graphs, not many of which I agreed with, but without them it’s hard to make notes. This guy talks at a speed which makes me look like an amateur. This talk is a repeat of a workshop that was on yesterday which I missed, but which Nat wrote up on his blog.]

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Lili Cheng (Microsoft)

Caterina Fake (Ludicorp)

Amy Jo Kim (SocialDesigner.Net)

Mena Trott (Six Apart)

Evan Williams (Odeo)

Evan: The speed with which people are adopting podcasting compared to blogging is surprising. The idea that normal people participate in media has reached a tipping point. It wasn’t obvious 5 years ago when we started blogging, but podcasting is a continuation of the same thing.

Mena: One of the biggest things is that smaller audiences really matter. Mena has an internal blog that talks to a small number of people, and it’s a different conversation than say, Jonathan Schwartz blogging to several thousand.

Caterina: One reason Flickr has traction is that a lot of work that Ev and Mena did with blogging and social networking made it possible for people to contribute their own content to the web. They felt more comfortable posting things about their life, themselves, etc. My Space and Friendster got people used to the idea that a digital id wasn’t a weird thing to have. What is going to be very important is trust networks, and this came to the fore with social networking, which exposed that there are networks of people we trust with our content and it makes things possible on the net.

Lili: One of the interesting things about this media is that we used to use comm tools to explicitly talk to people, to interrupt people and people feel cautious about that so dont’ say things because they dont’ want to bother them. Blogging is more of an implicit method, so it’s more informal and allows you to communicate without interruption.

Amy Jo: Coming out of the games industry. Interested in social apps that reach a lot of people, and the opportunity is the reinvention of what entertainment is and how that merges with communication. Blogs are a form of entertainment and coming out of the games industry, it gives us an opportunity to think about what entertainment is. What’s exciting is user/player-created content, which is an important expression of identity online whether it’s a blog or playlist.

Caterina: Data-sharing is a social activity, and if you could see two sources of data, such as a grocery list and a musical playlist, you could figure out a lot about a person.

Amy Jo: Building trust is another theme. Throwing a bunch of crap up doesn’t build trust. Blogger and Flickr is a way of building trust, and there are different layers, and it’s contextual.

Mena: With blogs, people who are reading get this perception of who you are, which you are responsible for because of what you write.

Caterina: Given the option of making your photos public or private, 82% of photos are public. In Snapfish or Ophoto the photos are all private, so this is really new. When the default was private, they still had 50/50.

Kids don’t expect privacy these days, they put everything up there. We are all aware that the computer doesn’t’ have the same kind of memory as humans have, it archives things whereas people forget. So what’s going to happen in 20 years when they are going on job interviews?

Lili: Self-moderation evolves over time. And it’s cultural, so different countries evolve differently.

Mena: There’s going to be a point where there are going to be more complex permissions, so you can control who sees what.

Amy Jo: When people get a phone for the first time, they get very excited about it, and they go through an arc. Start off over enthusiastic and then they moderate themselves. Same with social networks. So often opening everything up is often a phase, not somewhere people stay. And it’s a function on where you are in your life and what you are doing.

[more was said but i had backchannel duties to attend to]

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[Again with the patchy notes, sorry. Too many channels to monitor.]

Collaborative content.

The next step is that you don’t pay for services/content.

The step after that is that they pay you.

We’re not leaving behind old models, just adding new ones.

Driven by customers, not producers.

Everyone has an email, everyone is on the network, so it won’t be long before every leader has a blog.

Authenticity is absolutely paramount. Hiring people to write your blog is like hiring someone to write your email.

Traditional way of communicating with employees is to pass the message down, but it’s like Chinese whispers. So need a more reliable way to talk to employees.

Wants to only talk through the blog, and doesn’t want to deal with conditional access through the firewall, so wants to externalise internal communications, and dissolve the intranet and extranet. Legally some things can’t be discussed, but if someone sends out an email, you can bet someone will send it out of the company.

Some aspects of corp. strategy are sensitive, but the distinction over time between intranet and extranet is a joke, it’s all the same over time.

Future issue is authentication, and laptops will be authenticated like email can be. But that should be a choice of the individual.

Evolution of the network into a vast, participating network is big news.

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Janice Fraser, Adaptive Path

The new internet embraces openness, relinquishes control – large shift in philosophy.

Most online services assume the publisher provides value: difference between Citysearch.com with content and events calendar decided by an editor, and Upcomming,org which shows events that friends are interested in. By relinquishing control over content and opening content up to users, increased value, more relevant.

Disintermediation adds value – best e.g. is Wikipedia. People take responsibility for publishing content which is accurately and valuable. Becoming asymptotically more correct – so are going to be 95% accurate.

Implications of collective wisdom in enterprise. What if people could tag information with useful tags in, say, Oracle.

Flicker is the commonest example, biggest competitor is Kodak EasyShare Gallery, but site is typical and comfortable for marketing communities. Compare that to Flickr, which is far more personal, with content and value that’s created not by a marketer but by friends and strangers.

So what does this do to marketing? It’s a form of disintermediation, and it’s not that it’s not commercial, it’s that the foundation …

Interruption from floor: You’re not saying anything controversial, but you are co-opting people to provide content for you so you can make money off. Flickr isn’t different, it’s just repackaging people’s materials as ‘authentic’.

Janice: It’s very different because it’s really authentic. Authentic is a word you don’t like. But marketers like messages, but that doesn’t matter, people develop their impressions based on their experience, not on your message. It’s about shifting the focus from what the ad agents want to present to what the community wants to create.

With Wikipedia, people expect to contribute. The expectations that people are coming to the internet with are different – instead of it being how MS does business, it’s how everyone does it. Instead of it being what developer communities know, it’s transferred to the wider world.

From floor: Having open standards which people can build upon is new.

From floor: Want to know what is new, not look at the differences between existing services.

Janice: I think a lot of what’s new is what existing packages are doing with providing more user-centric stuff.

AJAX. Big projects aren’t as interesting as small subtle ones. Very lightweight, small app, like BackPack or BaseCamp from 37 Signals. Tools that people can pull out on a case by case basis, so not supposed to have a big return, but will be used by lots of people.

Feature stinginess – over-wraught apps that have too many features are short lived and the pendulum is swinging towards lightweight, easy to implement, easy to maintain, single focus apps.

[Hard session to take notes in – lots of questions]

From floor: Flickr is actually feature rich, but easy to use etc.

Janice: A philosophical shift.

Kevin Marks: The release early, release often methodology of web apps is seeping into other areas of development, and APIs is a part of that because it allows incremental development.

[OK, I give up on note taking on this. I just can’t keep up.]

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Thanks to Robert Scoble, Charlene Li and Michael Sippey for making the Business Blogging Session go so smoothly.

For those who are interested, my terribly vanilla slides are available, as is the Dark Blogs Case Study (2.3 MB).

Michael Sippey’s slides are also up, and I believe Charlene Li’s stuff is going to be available on Forrester but the page currently returns a 404.

I’ll update with notes and stuff as and when I find them.

UPDATE: Charlene’s PowerPoint slides and report, Blogging – Bubble or Big Deal.

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Tantek Çelik, Technorati, hCard and hCal

Microformat principles

– solve a specific problem, e.g. XFN, XML solves a wide range of problems simultaneously. Microformats such as tags solves a specific problem

– keep it simple

– evolutionary improvements

– design for humans first, machines second. Semantic web is about making the web more machine-readable

– adapt to current behaviours

– reuse from widely adopted standards

– modularity, embeddability

– decentralised development, content, services; but also includes centralised publishers. not either/or.

vCard and iCal – common, but not XML, so not suitable for the web. Are XML or RDF variants, but no one uses them. Can’t be easily embedded in XHTML, can’t be easily displayed.

hCard and hCal – mapped 1:1 into XHTML, using same terms, same schema.

Date formats are a nightmare, so uses human presentable time and date instead of machine-readable ones.

Tantek uses hCal to put his events on his blog, and there’s a little script that sends his events to anyone’s calendaring events. Which is actually really cool.

Tantek’s slides.

Michael Sippey, Six Apart, hCal

Experiment, using MT to keep a timeline of major events throughout the year. Annotates journals with weather info and major events, but no seasons on the West Coast, so can’t do the ‘snowing then, so must be April’.

MT produced ATOM, RSS1.0, and iCal feeds.

Joined MT because of possibilities for microformats and micropublishing, particularly aggregation and discovery. People can publish different things in different formats but can still aggregate them.

In personal blogs, people like to talk about what they have done, movies, music, books, etc. so put that with microformats and thus you end up with hReview – a format for reviewing things.

Strip down core data elements of a review by looking at existing reviews – Amazon, Yahoo, blogs, etc. What data elements are necessary?

Tools make it very simple. MT supports ability to override the default app template, so can customise the way that it displays, e.g. title becomes item, category becomes rating, body text becomes review text. So simple enhancement of MT and some template tags, one creates a review which is a div class in the template.

Usable for job listing, events, competitive review, and people are customising MT, creating new plug-ins to do this, but applications are going to (are being?) built to aggregate small bits of information.

Real cute little hCal in MT app by Les Orchard that puts the hCal fields in the MT entry body. Nice. Gets integrated into the tool so that it’s really easy to create micro-content for distribution on the web.

Kevin Marks, Technorati, Tags

Tags – different way of organising knowledge. Trad way is hierarchical where each thing has a place. From Aristotle. Like shelving books.

E.g., picking categories for Yahoo Groups can be difficult because it’s got a high cognitive load – have to think about where things belong. Even faced with categorising photos – iPhoto has a keyword feature which no one uses because it’s all hierarchical. Flickr, however, allows you to decide on your categorisation from the bottom up, so it’s a lower cognitive load.

This means that you actually do it.

Dynamic categorisation wins. Apply it to blogs. Blogs have categorisation works in the abstract, and categories are exclusive, if it is in one place it’s not in the other. So people end up either not using categories or using one or two. Most popular category is ‘general’.

So Technorati tags picks up existing categories, but wants an easier way. Easiest way is by links, but must distinguish between linking to something to talk about it, and linking to create a tag. Visible links promote good behaviour, prevents gaming. Decentralised linking.

Use rel='”tag”, so can link to anything. Because it’s simple, people can easily write plug-ins for different tools. Fits in well with other formats like hReview and xFolk.

Kevin’s slides.

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Cydni Tetro and Tom Ngo, NextPage

Missed most of this presentation, although what I did see looked really interesting – it’s a way to version-track MS Office documents from user to user so that you can easily tell who has created the latest version, which edits were made by whom and when. Considering the mess that can be made by several people editing the same document at the same time, and the fact that wikis are not always appropriate for long or complex documents, this software looks like a really good app.

I didn’t see, however, a way to actually amalgamate concurrent edits, and someone has just asked that exact question. You still have to make the edits manually but the system will help you compare documents so that you can incorporate changes.

Greg Lloyd, Traction Software, on Enterprise Weblogs

– Email’s perfect for point-to-point communication, but really bad for collaboration.

– Blogs are good for conversations extended over time.

– Good for situational awareness, and aggregation from many sources.

– Scales like the web to handle the largest enterprises.

– Can cross the firewall: internal blogs; external limited access blogs; external open blogs.

Question: Is it possible to over-codify enterprise blogging with too much in the way of permissions and management. How do you ‘Scobleize’ an intranet?

Answer: Most intranets are open to the majority of people within a company, but where permissions become useful is when one is crossing the firewall and dealing with off-site stakeholders like contractors or clients.

Point: Is there an issue with culture – if everyone doesn’t play then you have a problem. There are plenty of people who aren’t into blogging, so the concept of people commenting and reaching out to others and creating a record of interactions can be greatly reduced if people are too busy.

Question: People look at blogging software in competition with collaboration software. Hard to get senior people to blog [externally], even though they me prolific writers as they see external writing as the job of the marketing department.

Answer: How do you differentiate between collaboration [from blogs]. The most powerful force is people’s expectations of what they could do, and those are set by what they are seeing on the internet. If they see things being done within the public web, then they want to do the same thing on the intranet.

Point: Blog content is richer than simple collaboration – more context.

Point: Easily scaled.

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