Cory has altered the Creative Commons license on Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom so that almost any non-commercial adaptation of it does not require his permission. If you want to turn it into a movie or republish it via skywriting, please go ahead.

BTW, you can read the text of Cory’s talk at Emerging Tech here.

Speaking of Cory, I ran into him in the speakers room at Emerging Tech where he was throwing out a print-out of his speech. I randomly snagged a piece that turned out to be peculiarly relevant, so I had him sign it:

Click for full-size image

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It’s one of those little mysteries of the Web, but a one-line blog entry of mine that does nothing but point to John Perry Barlow’s moving memory of Spalding Gray has accreted a set of stories and tributes on my comment board that is quite remarkable.

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In response to my post about a Microsoft presentation at Emerging Tech, Bob “Professor” Morris points us to a Microsoft page that explains something important about its XML schema for Word, Excel, etc.:

Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas.

So, Microsoft’s patents prevent me from writing a program that reads a Word XML file? Wow, that’s harsh.

And besides, isn’t “schema” already a plural?

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Don Box of Microsoft, responsible for Longhorn Indigo (communications tech for building Web services, or “the SOAP messaging stack” that Don works on), is talking about how Microsoft is going to support standards, really this time. He says the following:

WordML, the current Word format, is optimal if you’re a Word author, but is unusable if you are trying to do interesting XML-y things with it, like write an app to process it. It’s designed to work well for Word. When Microsoft shipped it, people had a normal, human, emotional reaction: They hated it. Microsoft said that it didn’t expect you to author it, only to process it.

[A whole bunch of stuff I don’t understand it, and then:] We will be able to extend the Microsoft file system by providing our own schema. (Marc Cantor calls out that this is “really coolio, dude.”) “This isn’t just about the API. This is about data extensibility,” says Don.

Indigo is about “service-orientation” rather than object orientation. “We don’t want you to run .Net on your Linux box.”

[More stuff I didn’t understand. I’m not complaining, mind you.]

[Since I am obviously in over my head – feel free to explain it to me – I should perhaps report that both Bob Frankston and Marc Canter, off line, were favorably impressed with the direction Don sketched.]

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I have an idea! Let’s all get together and not care!

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Don‘s new book is Emotional Design.

He uses lots of photos, so the following minimalist representation will not have the, um, emotional impact of his talk.

People have emotional reactions to, and relationships with, products. Positive examples: A tiny Sony camera and Mini Cooper.

We have two information processes: Cognition (understanding the world) and emotion (judges the world). There are three levels: Visceral (biological and pre-wired), behavioral, and reflective.

Bottled water is their bottles. A Perrier bottle is emotional. A cheap plastic one is behavioral. Those fancy blue bottles appeal to us viscerally.

The 1961 Jaguar E-type (the one in the MOMA) is designed viscerally.

Remote controls (channel clickers) are behavioral remote controls. He recommends the Harmony controller that doesn’t tell you “control your DVD” but “watch a movie.”

The car seat controllers that look like seats are behavioral design.

Hummers are reflective design, although their ads are visceral.

How dress is usually reflective design.

We often neglect sound in design.

People either hate or love the Apple iMac. “That’s a sign of great design.”

He tells us about the last two chapters of his book because people don’t like them.

The Honda robot looks like a person and there’s no reason for it. Robots ought to look like what they’re designed to do.

The Roomba is visceral in that it doesn’t fall off cliffs. But it’s called a robot primarily for marketing reasons. Don’s coffee maker is more of a robot – cost $1,000, has more motors in it than Roomba. and is smarter. It just doesn’t move. Robots will evolve by being connected to others, e.g., coffee maker connected to pantry and to dishwasher. There will have to be a mobile robot to connect them. That robot needs boredom and frustrated, a “weak method” for getting out of problems we wouldn’t have anticipated: “I’m stuck in a corner” so I’m frustrated, or “I’m sitting in front of the coffee machine for 20 minutes,” so I’m bored and will go find something else to do.

Q: What about Amori’s “uncanny valley”

A: The question is what your robot ought to look like. Coffee makers ought to look like coffee makers. Amori says that the more it looks like a person, the more unnerving it is. When it looks like a person but doesn’t act like one, there’s a valley and we hate it.

When I say “put emotions in machines,” I’m not saying we should put real human emotions. We should put in emotional systems appropriate to the machine. [He’s not thinking about machines feeling things, but rather having control systems that function the way emotional systems do.]

Q: [Mark Canter] Pure text or drop shadows and bevels?

A: It depends on the function. BTW: “Jakob Nielsen in his private life likes beautiful things.”

[Great talk. Provided a vocabulary for talking about an area of life, presented via great visual examples and a humble manner.]

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Lily Cheng from Microsoft Research is talking about how people represent themselves on line.

The closer the friends, the fuzzier they want the representations.

We need to make social tools fluid enough to account for the way people’s lives change.

We need easy access to friends and people important to us. We want sponatenous interactions.

Lily’s group went to a mall and asked people to draw their social interactions, and gots lots of circles and lines. Microsoft studied this and built a “personal map” that clusters people based on who they send email to (TO and CC) and how frequently. The system knows who is related to whom based on their interactions. Then Lily’s group mapped all the distribution lists at Microsoft, clustered around the inquiring individual; the app lets you see how to get to person C through person B.

Another presenter (missed his name) shows an app (Koala?) that shows me details about the people in my social network.

Will people use this, Lily asks. What effect would it have? Would it make people feel more connected? They’re going to do some research…

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The rumor going around etech is that Clay and his wife are the parents of a girl! Woohoo! Mazel tov to the entire family. A world with more Shirkies is a better world for all of us.

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Dan Brickley is explaining Friend of a Friend. (I had a chance to talk with him about this yesterday in a hallway.) It’s an XML standard that allows people to express information about themselves…the sorts of things you might say on your homepage. There are currently 2M FOAF descriptions in the world.

There are different styles of FOAF files. You can be very explicit about relationships: “Jane is my arch nemesis.” But there’s also a more implicit, evidence-based approach: Libby and I went to the same school and work for the same organization. (“I lean toward this one,” says Dan.)

Here’s a paragraph from the official FOAF FAQ:

FOAF provides conventions for saying the sorts of things that you might say in your homepage (‘My name is…’, ‘I work for …’, ‘I’m interested in …’, ‘I live near …’, ‘I’m pictured in these photos…’, ‘I write in this weblog…’), but in a way that is easy for computers to process. Since computers are pretty dumb, and can’t read human languages, we provide simplistic FOAF descriptions, to help them answer questions such as ‘Show me pictures of Weblog authors interested in … who live near here’, ‘Show me recent articles written by people at this meeting’, ‘Is this person vegetarian?’. FOAF is a ‘Semantic Web’ project, which is an effort to make the Web easier for machines to help us navigate.

As Dan said recently on his blog: “A purpose of FOAF is to engineer more coincidences in the world.”

“We’re on the border of going mainstream.” The social, legal and pricacy issues need serious attention, says Dan.

Now Edd Dumbill is talking about FoafBot. I had trouble hearing him because I’m in the back, but apparently it provides IRC channels with information gained by spidering FOAF files. Cool.

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Pertti Korhonen from Nokia is talking about the effect of mobile computing.

What do we need to unleash the potential? We need to simplify the user experience of rich environments, for example by bringing touch into the picture: Point and touch your mobile device. He touches his mobile device to a book. It makes a connection to an RFID tag. Now it can open a web site, push an app to his device, or it can push info to his peers.

Two ways of getting to super mobile devices: Try to shrink a PC or try to grow the simple mobile device to enable the new apps. Nokia likes the second approach.

We want personalization: Playing with ringing tones, new covers, etc. “We need to extend and encourage this type of human creativity.” [Could have used some exciting examples. ]

We are looking at how people want to share information. P2P is in the mainstream.

He shows Modish: Mobile distribution and sharing. It works with GPS radio and BlueTooth. Create groups. Capture. Publish.

His most important message today: Openness. Open interfaces and open standards to insure that the maximum amount of innovation can take place. Globally agreed Internet standards making their way to cellphones. Nokia builds on top of Symbian. They have a platform on top of Symbian designed for designing apps and UIs.

This year they will ship 100M devices with Java . “That’s a lot of sockets.” Java is “the prime end-to-end platform we want to support.” They also support Python.

Example of an innovative app: Photoblogging. 400,000 tools and docs are downloaded every month — quite an active developer community.

He demos a simple program that navigates weather info.

We need to start a lively conversation with Internet experts about what to do to enable groups.

Q: It’s great that Nokia isn’t openness and innovation, but the carriers aren’t. Can use your influence to explain to them the importance of open standards? [applause]

Q: Your developer tools are generally Microsoft only. How about Linux and the Mac? [applause]

A: We’ll be releasing new tools. We think it’s important not to be single-platform.

Internet technology will enable integration across domains. IPv6 is important, too, because it will enable device-to-device addressing will be possible, making P2P possible.

Q: How about DRM?

A: It’s important that we put DRM in. The field has been fragmented, but we think it’ll come together.

(Overall, he’s made an impressive case for Nokia’s commitment to openness.)

[The incredibly helpful Greg Elin (“He gives and gives and gives…”), sitting next to me, is more impressed with this talk than I am. He’s hearing that the rest of the world forms the same personal relationship with their phones that we in this room (and in this country to some extent) form with our PCs.]

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