Live audio of the Freedom to Connect conference (provided by Berkman).

The IRC is open. Try here. (Note: It’s projected behind the speaker.) [Tags: f2c]

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Michael Copp, an FCC commissioner, paints a distressing picture of the FCC’s role in restricting the Internet. Copp pushes for Network neutrality, i.e., preventing those who provide the pipes from controlling what goes over the pipe.

If providers can favor their own content, he says, we’ll end up with a balkanized Internet. “That inverts the entire democratic genius of the Internet. It makes the pipe intelligent and the end user dumb…It artificially constrains the supply of bandwidth.”

Copp thinks broadband access could become a grassroots issue. [Tags: f2c fcc net_neutrality michael_copp]

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While standing around having coffee this morning before David Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect conference, I had the chance to talk serially with Esme Vos and Dewayne Hendricks, both of whom said basically the same thing: The war for the Internet is over and we’ve won; we just don’t know it yet.

Esme says the telcos are inevitably on their way to being profitable commodity businesses with little or no direct contact with end users. Dewayne told me about his project providing 100mb wifi to a county the size of Connecticut. He is disturbed that people don’t know that county-wifi is happening from Washington State to Rhode Island. Both Esme and Dewayne think the debate over Net neutrality hasn’t yet grasped the way in which abundance is outstripping such questions. (Forgive me, Esme and Dewayne, for getting you wrong.)

Because I get my connection through RCN, a cable company, I’m not getting the “real Internet,” says Dewayne, because I’m not getting a fixed IP, ports are being blocked, my access is asymmetric, etc. Dewayne deplores the fact that I think this is an acceptable deal.

[Tags: ftc esme_vos dewayne_hendricks net_neutrality]

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Andrew Hinton asks what we can learn about the future by looking at what the kids are doing. [I came in a few minutes late.]

71% of all teens are playing games online, he says. [I missed the scope — US teens?] . He goes through the impressive financial stats: We’re spending lots of money on these games. Wells Fargo built an island in Second Life.

Designing a game overlaps heavily with designing information spaces, Andrew says, and thus there is much IAs can learn from game design. E.g., game sites assume multitasking and are ok with complex interfaces. Games assume you will learn by doing.

We need to give people not just maps but navigational tools because the environment is constantly changing. He points to Microsoft’s Wallop.

“Kids are going to be kings of all media,” he says. “Broadcasting is dying; it’s not going away but it’ll be a specialized thing…It’s a peer-to-peer world. And, please only give me authentic voices.” And community is important, he says, pointing to Warcraft as an example. Why doesn’t Photoshop’s help system send us to the communities of Photoshop experts, he asks.

MySpace takes all the stuff about high school — how many friends you have, for example — and makes it explicit.

Being able to make multiple selves — e.g., multiple profiles at Yahoo — is relationship diversification.

The virtual environment is spilling out into the real world. He talks about TATUS, a simulated virtual ubiquitous computing environment. “This is freaky. This is Postmodern to the nth degree. we’re studying virtual reality to study reality.” He also refers to the “I love Bees” marketing campaign to launch Halo 2 that engrossed the user community.

Andrew calls “the game layer” the merging of the physical and digital realities. “This is going to make our real lives more like game lives, because we’re going to be immersed in data.”

[Great talk. I haven’t done justice to it or its playfulness.] [Tags: iasummit andrew_hinton games]

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Donna Maurer of Maadmob Interaction Design has a session explaining to IA’s why they ought to take seriously George Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, a book basically about Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory. (I’m about to start writing about this in my book.) It’s a difficult book to read, despite its great title.

Categories, she says, have been taken as being existing/natural divisions that can be expressed in clear definitions. But, Lakoff says (says Donna), categories have prototypical examples. We can organize by similarities to the prototypes without having to define the category.

Donna talks about the concept of basic level categories— you generalize up from them and down to the specifics. BLCs are the level you learn first and usually has a short name, e.g., “dog.” It is the “highest level at which a single mental image can reflect the category.” [In English we can’t form an image of furniture but we can of chair.] BLCs depend on the culture. E.g., city dwellers will say “a tree” while a country dweller might say “a maple tree.”

Donna looked for a web site that organized information by laying out BLCs, but she couldn’t find one. E.g., the eBay site’s category list mixes BLCs with more specific categories.

Prototype theory is important to IAs because the classical theory of categories is built into much software. She says this is her most important point: “Recognize that categories occur and you’ll be less stressed about categorization that is not neat.” Messiness is ok. No scheme is going to include everything and be perfect. (Someone from the audience points out that Sotheby’s “Other” category has an “Other” sub-category.)

Other implications for IAs. Donna suggests using less prototypical items to describe edge cases. And, she says, you can derive BLC names by doing research to see what they are for your users. “Basic level items are easily recognized and likely to have good scent.” Card sort, she suggests, with basic level items rather than more granular content elements. “Get people to the basic level of the hierarchy as soon as possible.”

She wonders whether tags are often BLCs, accounting for their popularity. (Livia from the audience says that they probably are basic level if the taggers are typical of the group.)

Q: Does Lakoff deal with the cultural differences?
A: Definitely. That’s what the title is about.

Q: Folksonomies can help us get away from us imposing a taxonomy on a system.

Q: The same category may be basic level for one group and high level for another…

Q: (Christian Crumlish) When you focus on basic level categories for navigation, where should they be on the site, typically?
A: On the home page, if possible.

Q: (me) How stable are BLCs and what size group do they vary over?
A: They’re pretty stable over time, and the size of the group depens on the domain.

[Excellent talk. Exciting to me to see IA’s taking this stuff up.] [Tags: iasummit donna_urer george_lakoff prototype taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous eleanor_rosch]

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Luke Wroblewski has done an impressive job blogging an outline of my talk at the IA Summit. Thank you, Luke! (Wriggle Room Note: There are a couple of things I’d tweak or quibble with.) [Tags: iasummit everything_is_miscellaneous luke_wroblewski]

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I’m at the Information Architecture Summit, which I’m greatly looking forward to.

At the opening cocktail party, there were three common topics of discussion, at least from my non-statistically-relevant experience: 1. “Did you see how dramatically attendance is up this year?” 2. “I don’t really call myself an information architect.” 3. “How can I arrange to move to Vancouver for the rest of my life?”

I’m giving the opening keynote, a choice that has me bewildered and terrified. I rewrote it last night and I’m about to change the chunks again. (No, “change the chunks” is not an alimentary euphemism.) As it stands, I’m trying out a couple of ideas that have surfaced late in the course of writing the book I’m working on; as my talk progresses, the ideas get flakier, which is not a good thing.

Well, I’ve got to get back to un- and re-writing my presentation. I will feel better — or possibly much worse — after this morning. [Tags: iasummit06 ia user_experience]

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John Van Oudernaren, senior advisor to the World Digital Library, talks about the global library initiative. It grows out of the American Memory project in 1994, an effort to being 5M references on line. The Global Gateway grew out of that, an effort to put selected material from international libraries online, working with Russia, Brazil, Spain. the Netherlands and two other countries [which I couldn’t see on his slide…sorry]. Projects provide thematic coherence, e.g., life in Alaska and in Siberia. The interpretive text is bilingual; not every individual artifact is translated.

The scanning is being done in three spots in Russia, and in Brazil and Egypt. Almost a million images have been scanned. Images include maps, illustrations, and the full text of books.

He says the project is a success, but it’s still too tied to American history and is difficult to scale. Plus, each project is in only two languages, which is a limitation. The next step is to build the World Digital Library. Dr. Billington proposed this about a year ago. It intends to digitize selected materials to enrich particular themes highlighting various cultures. It is not a mass digitizing of libraries. Scholars would advise on which items to scan in. The project is still in the planning stage, supported by a $3M grant from Google. [Tags: libray_or_congress libraries]

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Dan Pelino, General Mgr, IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences, talks about the move towards patient-centric healthcare. He paints this as a requirement as the boomers get older, especially since we spend as much in the last five years of our lives as we do in the rest of our lives.

Lee Strickland spent many years in the intelligence community but is now at the U of Maryland. He says we need to restructure the intelligence community, revitalize the discipline of analysis, and rationalize our policies.

In intelligence today the technology supporting the efforts is neither a backwater nor state of the art. The community is moving from stove-piped, proprietary solutions to one in which info is ubiquitous.

“We tend to ignore the uniquely human aspect of intelligence.” Intelligence is, he says, the human mind converting information into knowledge, in light of the entire context, through a rigid process of hypothesis and testing.

He suggests five points to improve security:

1. Rationalize and restructure. Organize around intelligence priorities and then apply intel sources and methods and technologes required for the task. Don’t let the collection machinery drive the train.

2. Institute performance-based measurement.

3. The Cold War culture of secrecy is no longer appropriate. Secrecy inhibits the efficiency of intel analysis because secrecy inhibits access. But lack of secrecy imperils sources.

4. Revitalize the practice of analysis. “Analysis is nothing more or less than the scientific method in action.”

Agencies are adopting federal IT standards. Digital info enables the creaation of ad hoc communities of practice. The digital tech provides a platform, but it’s a platform for human work.

S. Abraham Ravid, an economist at Yale School of Management and Rutgers talks about the declining cost of transmitting entertainment and the legal battles regarding piracy.

He begins with a quote that seems to excoriate music downloading but that turns out to be a case from 1908 in which the owners of sheet music sued the creators of piano rolls. The Supreme Court went against the composers. He says that this type of suit has continued, but the new technologies have actually increased the market.

Abraham thinks that the current struggles will be resolved with a new business model that works out for both the producers and the audience. The new model will “distribute the cost savings among all participants.”

“Intellectual property” [yech – I hate that phrase] will be available everywhere, any time. “We just have to make the contractual environment amenable to this.” He does not think theaters will go away, even though attendance is declining. (The peak in terms of absolute numbers was in 1929, he says…an amazing fact.) People will go to the theater and buy the DVD later, he says.

Content production is being democratized, he says. “Things are moving very quickly and it will take a while before settle into a new model. I’m very optimistic.” [Tags: libraries entertainment copyright health_care intellligence]

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Joe Jaffe, author of Life after the 30 Second Spot, gives one of the lunchtime talks at the Boston Ad Club. [As always, this is a rough, abbreviated paraphrase.]

Change is the only constant in marketing, he says. Marketers resist it. Technology is the change agent. “I don’t believe customers are empowered at all.” We like to be entertained. Nevertheless, marketers are powerless. “Top of mind” is being replaced by “top of page” (where Google is the page). The “funnel of interest” is being replaced by the “funnel of trust.” Prime time is being replaced with my time.

The Four P’s are becoming commoditized. You can’t own a position for decades any more. Pricing is commoditized. Place is now the world. Promotion can’t make it through the mass clutter.

Chief Marketing Officers have an average tenure of 22.9 nmonths, compared to 53.8 for CEOs.

Marketing is paying more for ads and getting less exposure.

We have to be more “consumer-centric.”

It’s time to kill the 30-second ad. We need a fresh start. We need to reintroduce “consumers” to ads. Budweiser is talking about “Bud TV” that will go straight to consumers. If we don’t do our job, we may be bypassed.

Advertising is not consumer centric. The entire mass marketing model is not consumer centric. We tell consumers what and where to buy.

Markets are outgrowing their agencies. We’ve gone from ad agencies to media companies to interactives to search engine optimization companies to boutiques. So, clients have 15-20 agencies, competing and making noise. Next the PR companies will take over.

We need to save advertisifng from extinction (S.A.F.E.), which we can only do by not being safe. We need to figure out how to make relevant advertising again. Ads need relevant, utility, entertainment [RUE]. Advertising should be out to involve and demonstrate. Embrace the new marketing.

Who’s doing a great job? We are. “If you’re here today it’s because you’re part of the new wave of leadership.” “We” means we have to let consumers have their say. We’ve moved from one-to-many to one-to-one and then one-from-one (= search). Now we have many to many. “The brand is a part of the conversation.” The conversation was around before the brand was and will outlast it. “At best we can hope to enjoy the conversation, to facilitate, to stimulate, to be invited to participate in the conversation.”

Broadband, networks, wireless and search are transforming marketing: Always on, anywhere, on their terms, connected to everyone. “It used to be fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Now it’s fool me once, screw you…and I’ll tell one million of my closest strangers.” The new paradigm is conversation, permission, involvement…[I missed one of the four members of the new paradigm.]

“The digitization of media is the cause, the effect, the symptom, the cure, the problem, the solution, the by-product, the chicken and the egg.”

In the game Triple Play, the ballpark seems artificial and wrong because the ads hung on the walls are phony. “Advertising is quite comforting.”

Do product placements only when they make sense and fit.

“When consumers view advertising as content everyone wins.”

Consumer generated content is important. Don’t forge it.

Stand for something.

In the future, consumers will pay for content with their time or money. Those who elect to watch ads will be able to customise their “quotas.” We need performance-based pricing.

He points to the Loctite stunt of gluing a monitor to the wall.

[Tags: joe+jaffe advertising marketing]

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