I’m in Aarhus, Denmark, listening to the only English presentation of the day (besides mine), which is a terrific talk by Mark William Hansen about Lego’s embrace of Web 2.0. E.g., four days after Lego launched MindStorm, the software had been completely redone. “We could have gone after them with a lawyer,” he says, but instead “We embraced the changes.” The adult hobbyists, who had been a “shadow market,” with Web 2.0 have become key because they drive enthusiasm and stretch the product. Lego is working on “Lego Universe”: A social world in which you can build with virtual bricks and play with them online with others; the planes will fly and the boats will sail. [Tags: lego play web2.0 ]

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Martin Weller has an excellent article on the future of content, presenting an economic and a quality argument for why it’s bound to be (in my terms) miscellanized.

This is the first in a “distributed blogging” experiment that will have three other bloggers responding. [Tags: content publishing books clay_shirky martin_weller long_tail chris_anderson everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Julian Dibble has a rich post about the interpenetrating of work and play. There’s so much in it, it’s hard to know where to start. Fortunately, I don’t have to decide because I’m running late for a presentation… [Tags: julian_dibble game play philosophy economics ]

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I’m only a little bit into Bioshock, but so far it’s the most immersive game ever. Its game play may turn out not to hold up as well, but as of now, it’s actually got HalfLife2 beaten. It plops you rather literally into a utopia-gone-sour created by a suave visionary named Andrew Ryan (who, I’ll bet, is as to Ayn Rand as Howard Roark is to hard work). The graphics, the sound, the voice acting, the settings — post-WWII sf — all work to make the city feel like there’s an entire world behind it.

I’m still just warming up. It may get tiresome or disappoint in any of the ways that games, narratives, and computer programs can disappoint. But so far, it’s swell. [Tags: bioshock games halflife]

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Here’s the video of Tuesday’s Berkman lunch featuring four fellows giving five minute talks on the future of the Net, followed by a lively group discussion. It’s all part of the global One Web Day celebrations of the Web and its value and its values. [Tags: one_web_day -berkman]

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Doc posts about Yet Another Scary Lawsuit. From what I can gather (I’m on the road and running to check out of my hotel in time), this one asks that an anonymous blogger be identified so that a defamation suit can go forward.

And, in another case, a judge has ruled that a high school student isn’t free to call her school administrators “douchebags in her blog outside of school.

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David Isenberg has a good post on One Web Day, Yom Kippur, and their coincidence tomorrow.

So, go celebrate the Web while we still have one that’s distinguishable from cable TV.

And if I have hurt you in any way in the past year, I ask your forgiveness. I will try to do better next year, especially if you’ll let me know what I did wrong ([email protected]).

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Donna Maurer, an information architect, writes about how she organizes her wine, thereby answering the question: What is the opposite of miscellaneous? But who cares? She is not aiming at organizational purity, although her scheme has the attention to detail that purists often demand. But those details represent the information that matters to her, and her system lets her find and use that information…exactly as you would expect from a leading information architect. A folksonomic, tag-based wine cellar — while a fun concept — is not exactly called for here. [Tags: tags taxonomy wine donna+maurer information_architecture ia everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I keynoted Shop.org this morning and then walked up the long aisles of their exhibit hall. I was (and am) pooped, so what caught my eye was more random than usual.

I thought PermissionData.com was going to be one of those phony permission marketing companies that are all too happy to spam you. Nope. They show you (at your request) a page of offers. None of the boxes are pre-clicked and none are pre-clicked and below the fold. The idea is that if you trick people into giving you permission to spam them, they are remarkably bad leads. Bad leads cost money. So, good for PermissionData!

3B.net looks like a combination of Second Life, the early Wolfenstein, and LL Bean. They render the entries in your product catalog as posters along the wall in a 3D space. Your avatar and your friends’ avatars can wander together, talk about what you see, and click to be taken to the normal merchandising page. The guy in the booth (lost his name…sorry) and I bonded over our days playing Doom, Duke Nukem, and the under-rated Painkiller.

I met Rousseau Aurelien, CEO of SecondRotation, which aims at being the place you sell your stuff when you’re done with it. If the item is one of the thousands on SR’s list, SR buys it from you and arranges to have it picked up. It then refurbishes it and resells it or donates it. Rousseau says they pay about two thirds of the going rate at eBay. But, boom, you’re done. I asked how many people say their item is in one shape, but when it arrives, it turns out to be broken or damaged. Rousseau replied that 95% of the stuff is in the shape claimed or better. “People are generally good,” he says.

I kept running into people from Bazaarvoice. (Brett Hurt, the CEO, introduced me when I gave my talk; he said some very kind things. Thank you, Brett. It meant a lot to me.) Bazaarvoice creates customer review pages. The booth had one of the more effective marketing gimmicks: a rack of irreverent sayings you could attach to your name badge, like the “speaker” and “media” tags. I saw a whole bunch of people with “More cowbell” tags from Bazaarvoice.

I met with Daniel Wright, CEO of mporia, which does “m-commerce” (= e-commerce for mobile phones). Interesting space. It’s not going to get smaller over time. The actual transactions are handled via PayPal, or by sending the merchant an encrypted message with the credit card info.

I stopped in at Broadvision because they bought Interleaf years ago, a company I worked at for eight years. (I was long gone by the time it got bought.) Interleaf was way ahead of its time, with a structured document editor, electronic publishing system, document management system, and program-enabled documents. I often wonder why there’s no market for high end document systems for managing the creation and management of large, complex document sets. Broadvision is still selling the Interleaf system, and the maintenance stream is strong. Good to see the product is still around.

I also visited briefly in the Endeca booth because Endeca is doing great selling faceted classification (they call it “guided navigation”) systems, and I like what they’re doing. It’s been fun watching the company go from just about nothing to having an amazing client roster.

So, that was a truly random assortment. Now it’s off to the casinos to use my patented and proven Lossless Las Vegas System(tm): I don’t play. Well, I will drop $20 into gambling machines and wonder why people consider this fun. [Tags: shop.org ecommerce marketing ]

[Note: I had a stupidity glitch and ended up deleting and then rewriting from memory what this post said. The original was up for about 15 mins and this one is as close as I could come to the original. If you noticed the change, I didn’t want you to think there’s anything nefarious going on. Just stupidity.]

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Keynote’s ability to animate objects has gotten much better in the new version (Keynote ’08, v 4), but it’s still not up to PowerPoint. The biggest gap at this point is it’s inability to loop actions. This may be because Keynote apparently doesn’t let users interrupt animations, so a loop would loop forever, making for an especially ineffective but oddly hypnotic presentation. Also, and less important, Keynote is surprisingly sparse with the graphic shapes it provides, and those shapes aren’t as manipulable as PowerPoint’s. E.g., PPT gives control points for block arrows so you can adjust the head, provides “smart” workflow connectors, etc.

Way more important to me: Keynote doesn’t always let you say two effects should run at the same time. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I was finding this frustratingly unpredictable until I realized that in some cases it would allow simultaneous actions that were in slide sets I imported from PowerPoint. (Keynote’s import and export facilities are awesome.) As soon as I altered the action in Keynote, the “do action with” option went away, leaving only the “do action after” choice. If I’ve diagnosed this correctly (and, really, what are the chances?), then Keynote can display behaviors it doesn’t allow users to create.

Weird. But it does leave the possibility of exporting the deck to PowerPoint, doing the animation work, and importing back into Keynote…except you’ll lose Keynote’s over-the-top eye candy, especially for slide transitions.

(I’m not a Keyspan expert, although I’m pretty good at PowerPoint. If I’m wrong about any or all of this, please set me straight. Thanks.) [Tags: keynote powerpoint animations ]

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