OZIA has come and gone for another year. It’s a great conference, not only for excellent selection of interesting speakers, but it was so damn comfortable and friendly. I love love love the round table set up. I know you can’t fit as many people into the room, but I just find that you get so damn tired after two days bundled up into rows balancing a note pad on your knee.

About my presentation
Huge Data, Little Screen is about mobile search. More specifically, assisting users to find content on your site through the browser, using what ever hand set you may have. It doesn’t talk about SEO or much on the more broad challenges of mobile phone development – there is plenty of that information out there. Instead this presentation focuses on the interaction models for search on mobile.

About OZIA

• OZIA09 Program
• Ruth Ellison did a great write up of all the speakers on her blog.
• See photos: Flickr OZIA09.
• What people said about it: #OZIA09 on twitter

Ok, so I’m going to speak at Oz-IA in October… and I’m definitely one of those slightly nervous types. The conference is being held at Star City Casino.

Lunch date advice:
“Oh well if you screw it up you can always drink and gamble afterwards… just don’t drink and gamble before”..

Although, maybe just one shot of tequila?

More advice:
Many have said that it is all in the preparation, just knowing your stuff really well and rehearsing.

Me: “I guess the problem for me is that I really don’t like repetition and revision. It’s a bit boring.”

@tinyavatar : “Well… what don’t you like more – repetition, or…”

Me: “looking like an idiot?”

Refreshing.

UX Australia’s Keynote – Alex Wright, Information Architect nytimes.com

A fly by history of information management. Beginning with how tribal cultures created categorical systems for understanding the world around them, through to the use of symbols, the first written word and the evolution of hypertext, a connected web and just who inspired Google’s pagerank.

“Tim would have launched the web in 1984, if he didn’t crash his hard drive… just goes to show you should back up your work. It took him 5 years to re-write it.”

Interesting tid-bits:

• Folk Taxonomy is not the same as a folksonomy.
  The former is the anthropological study of the classification / naming conventions by cultures for understanding the relationships between things such as animals and plants.  The latter is when people collaboratively tag stuff on computers.
• Jewelery was used as an information system by using symbols to indicate social standing and the wearers relationship to others in the community. The use of this system came about when people began living in larger groups than 5 – 15 or so. This occurred during the time Alex describes as the Ice Age Information Explosion, around 30-40,000 years ago.
• The first forms of handwriting we know of emerged around 5000 BC on Bullae, by the Sumerians. (Now the south of Iraq)
• Charles Cutter wrote an essay in 1883 imagining the library of 1983 called “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983” in which he predicted the library would have desks equiped with keyboards and little bits of wire connecting them to a catalog that would call up and display books for the user to read.
• Paul Otlet was the creator of the universal decimal system. He had imagined a sort of paper internet, where not only would a catalog asist people to find a book, but it revealed the content of the book and its relationship to other books as well as the history of the document’s use, who has read, refereneced etc. His work took place in 1934, much of it was lost to to World War 2. A video on his 1934 vision of an internet is below… truely amazing.

• Check out the memex, a large microfilm desk which is considered one of the conceptual precursors to the web from Vannevar Bush’s essay As We May Think (1945)

Vannevar Bush's Memex

• Eugene Garfield inventor of the Science Citation Index, which is a system for acknowledging the weight of links between various documents in the footnotes. It is considered that his work heavily influenced the founders of google and their page rank system.
• Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse also author of an eassy called Augmenting Human Intelect. In 1968 he delivered a presentation often refered to as “The Mother of All Demos.” This demo was the first to demonstrate the mouse, copy and paste, creation of files, folders, links, video conferencing and email etc.

Some of Alex’s references:

Glut, Alex Wright
- Mastering Information Throughout the Ages
- http://www.alexwright.org/glut/

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff
- What categories reveal about the mind.

Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger
- The Power of the New Digital Disorder
- http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/

Facetag
- Working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool
- http://www.facetag.org/

Some references I found:
Alex speaking at Google Masterclass
- The Web That Wasn’t: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8&NR=1

Wikipedia’s Timeline of Hypertext Technology
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_hypertext_technology

Oh my goodness… I won tickets to webDU. There was a twitter competition promote the event. All I had to do was tweet why I wanted free tickets and shazzam!

Ben Self is the founder of Blue State Digital which was responsible for the online social media activities that helped fundraise millions of dollars for the Obama campaign to presidency. As he is introduced at Fairfax Digital’s Media09, Ben Self is credited with engaging the largest civic involvement in US politics in history. The Obama campaign  is the most successful start up in internet history to date.

Self explains that Obama knew he was never going to raise money for his campaign in the traditional way.

“What Obama did,” Self says “was to gather 10,000 people together at a rally and ask each and every one of them to use their mobile phones to sms a number and pledge five bucks”. Certainly not a big ask but there you have it – $50,000 in 50 seconds.

This sort of activity is a great example of how Obama focused on a grass roots campaign rather than doing the traditional fancy dinner party for maximum donations of $2300. Read the rest of this entry »

Carolyn Little, Guardian News and Media North America at Media O9

Now is the age of free. People expect not to pay.

Newspapers need to do more than repackage their content for online purposes. Read the rest of this entry »

With Liz Jackson (Four Corners), Peter McEvoy, Catharine Lumby (University of NSW), Dylan Welch (Sydney Morning Herald Online) and Jacqueline Breen (ElectionTracker.net)

Notes…. on what they had to say Read the rest of this entry »