“The internet is like this new human experience. At first everybody is going to like it, but there will be a fundamental change in the human condition. One day we’re all going to wake up and realise that we’re all just servants. It’s captured us.”

- Josh Harris, Protagonist of We Live In Public (Ondi Timoner’s Sundance winning doco)

Josh Harris, most remarkable for his online video and streaming businesses / experiments did some ground breaking and odd things in the late nineties, just before the bubble burst.

Here is a list of just a few of them featured in the film:

• Founding Jupiter research (brought by Forrester Research in 2008 well after Josh floated, sold and then moved on to begin his next project)
• Founding Pseudo.com an internet tv station (1993)
• Creating an alter ego called Luvvy, the clown who would happily come out at networking events
• Filming and streaming  footage of 100 ordinary Americans and artists who were living in a wild and sanity challenging bunker in 1999. (totally nothing like Big Brother)
• Filming and streaming his own relationship from home
• Becoming an apple farmer

Josh is extreme, visionary, in many ways successful and decidedly strange. His success came from a ballsy approach so there is no surprise that his high flying take on things meant he would suffer badly in the dot-com crash. Josh always spent his personal profits on the next big idea and he loved to live it up wildly. Audiences will probably think he’s a jerk, but they will certainly find him interesting. I’m glad people like him exist, because extreme thinking and doing is just so damn interesting. For me, this film is a net-nuts must because it explores an era at its most insane and because it is totally wild and annoyingly fun. Thank you Trimoner!

Start with a number followed by a nifty subject area full of tips.

Here are some useful examples:

20 Fantastic Resources For User Experience Know How:
http://www.inspiredm.com/2009/05/15/ux-madness-20-fantastic-resources-for-user-experience-know-how/

50 iPhone Apps for Web Designers and Developers
http://mac.appstorm.net/roundups/iphone-roundups/50-iphone-apps-for-web-designers-developers/

20 Tools to Make the life of a Web Developer Easier
http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/20-tools-to-make-the-life-of-a-web-developer-easier/

25 Most Useful Blogs for web design and development
http://www.webappers.com/2009/04/06/25-most-useful-blogs-for-web-design-development/

50 Great Examples of Data Visualizations
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/

5 impressive Mashups of Twitter and Flickr
http://mashable.com/2009/05/11/twitter-flickr-mashups/

30 days to become a freelancer
http://www.skelliewag.org/30-days-to-become-a-freelancer-961.htm

Trend spotting a fashion that is beginning to get irritating.

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 »

Meg Pickard, Head of Communities & User Experience – The Guardian (London)

There are many ways for users to consume content online, begins Pickard. They consume, react, curate and create. Unfortunately we spend most of our time and efforts engaging them to consume and not enough engaging users to react, curate or create.

UCG or user generated content is considered a pretty dry term by Meg, she’d prefer to think of it as users expressing themselves about stuff they are passionate about.

People also tend to get social media and social networking confused. To often the media tends to provide social media tools in a separate environment to the content, rather than having that engagement interacting with the content.

Read the rest of this entry »

Meg Pickard, Head of Communities & User Experience – The Guardian (London)

…on, developments at the guardian.co.uk, how to receive user feedback and designing for your mum.

Life at the Guardian

Meg jokingly calls her self an ‘insultant’ for the Guardian (internal consultant), but in all seriousness highlights the value of having someone responsible for focusing on the user agenda, constantly asking ‘why are we doing this?’ and ‘why would people want that?’. If you don’t know what your really asking of your users, then they most certainly won’t get it either.

Meg describes her job as understanding cultures and spotting patterns of which her background in anthropology is proving useful.

Innovation

The web has changed and now there is a much greater desire to be “of the web and not just on it.”

Some of the things Meg and the Guardian team have been thinking a lot is new ways for streams of information to talk to one another.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ah.

The media really love to focus on the scare stuff when it comes to social media… but I thought you would be interested in this one as it is quite an extensive article about trolling – hammed to the max in the morbidity of death and anonymous cruelty. Another example of focusing on the negatives to convince us that connectivity is a scary thing? Probably…

“That the Internet is now capacious enough to host an entire subculture of users who enjoy undermining its founding values is yet another symptom of its phenomenal success. It may not be a bad thing that the least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity where the malice is usually intramural.”- http://tinyurl.com/trollNYT

Also – interesting stuff around unenforceable legislation and the ungovernable…

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Pesce is always an interesting listen – he cases topics at hand in real world examples which are really engaging.

All the Friends I’ve Never Met details how a group of bloggers took down the US Attorney General and how Twitter informed him of the recent earthquake in China before it hit the wire. Great inspiring examples of social media as hyper-connected and powerful information sources.

Excellent use of 15 minutes of your day.

“What! What did you say? Anyone can do it too?”

The world is in a frenzy. They’re all discussing UGC or UCC. (yep another acronym to further alienate us – user generated content and user contributed content). More and more we’re hearing people talk about citizen journalism. By definition citizen journalism involves public participation in the generation of news content.

So! The common people are expressing views, creating content and sharing it.

The common people are playing an active role. Hmmmm…. Read the rest of this entry »

It doesn’t surprise me that audience consumption & the direction of / role that media plays in democracy makes a key point in Al Gore’s Assault on Reason. It seems as though Al’s personal accounts of the effect of media on democracy will deliver impact. Interestingly, Al appears to favor interactive media for its ability to provide platforms for participation and makes calls for the www to remain open.

Calling for an open web – I wonder what Al thinks of Google & if he in fact uses it at all.

 http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1622015,00.html

Here it is… you’ve heard me rave and finally they’ve put it online…

Great to listen over.

Mark has also written a post on Hyperpolitics which I’m looking forward to reading.

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