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FOWA 2007, day two
Posted by Cathryn in : Technology , trackback
The day starts inauspiciously with sales pitches thinly disguised as serious talks from Adobe and Microsoft. The wifi still isn’t working and someone postulates the theory that the failure to repeat last year’s booing is down to the lack of a backchannel for coordinating dissent. BT had promised to try and get it running, but that’s BT for you.
Just before morning coffee things get a lot better, with a couple of Swedish masters students showing off their take on mapping the blogosphere, Twingly. A combination of google maps and a roll-their-own technorati, it shows the blogosphere in real time, with bars for posts. The US, UK, Taiwan, Japan are huge, but the whole world is alight.
Khoi Vinh, lead designer at NYTimes.com, talks about how they design the paper. The hidden costs of features are born far more by users in the digital media than they were in traditional papers. Experts aren’t as easily offended as beginners, so make it easy for beginners. Even the New York Times pushes content out with digg, permalinks for bloggers and so on.
Simon Willison was the star of the day for me, with his talk on openID. Now that this is being supported by industry giants such as AOL and Microsoft, perhaps the reality of single signon is at hand. Importantly, it allows a user to be authenticated - I am who I say I am - but authorisation - what am I allowed to do - is left up to the application. That keeps it simple, and is likely to help its acceptance. I own my authentication data, and chose the server which authenticates me (perhaps even my own server). Its early days yet, and may be a while before its acceptable to the corporate world, but its definitely an idea to watch.
A series of short attendee selected presentations went well, and provided a much needed antidote to the earlier corporate slant. Phillip Wilkinson of crowdstorm came up with a nice set of criteria for deciding whether a site would succeed or not, including the idea that a site should appeal to the selfish individual before the social good - it should be useful to one person, then their friends, then others. del.icio.us, flickr, even potentially wordpress.com and linkedin.com (with its online profiles) all fit into this model, so I think he has a point.
As I do a little php (eg. the wordpress hacks on this site) I was looking forward to seeing Rasmus Ledorf, its inventor, but it was a bit dry and I was tired by then. Not that I fell asleep, but I don’t remember much.
Have you seen those tiny wee business cards with lots of different photos on them. One of the designers in our project team has them, and they are very funky indeed. Moo are the people who make them, and they were the only business that produces a physical product to speak at the conference. A beautiful piece of marketing, well executed, and with praise for Royal Mail’s ability to get stuff places cheaply. I wish more web delivery firms would use Royal Mail as its so much easier to pick up parcels from their depot if you’re not home when the postman calls.
So, what did I take away from all this?
Firstly, a strong sense of the energy and creativity being poured into the web, as much from the conversations going on around me as from the presentations. I want to have an idea, and do some coding!
Increasingly, web applications are seen as organisms in an ecosystem, growing, adapting, feeding off each other. Even the New York Times realises that it isn’t a portal for everyone, and many people want to get in through the side doors.
openID, content management and applications which transcend the online / offline divide are areas to watch. I met three people launching, or planning to launch, CMS sites. openID came up again and again, and, if it happens, will not just make it possible to be sure who you’re talking to, but will make it practical to ask.
The importance of kittens. For a gather which was at least 90% blokes, I would never have expected to see so many furballs on slides, even if one was carrying an uzi. You never know, it may just be shoes next.
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Comments»
Hi there - I completely agree about Simon Willison’s talk being the highlight of day 2. It is going to be interesting to see how communities get to grips with identity. Oh, and there were shoes in the crowdstorm presentation!
Yeh - Simon did a very good job of explaining OpenID. I was even tempted to announce support of it myself when I want on stage!
Does anyone actually own Moo cards?