Anthony Milner

My blog survived its first year – hoorah. It wasn’t easy - late nights, Wife telling me to its either her or the PC, staying motivated, writers block, all these things make it difficult, but there’s also a million reason to continue. Thanks Mark Cohen for sowing the seed and Web Directions 2006 which inspired me to write.

Everyone has a different opinion on blogging ranging from worthy to waste of time, but its not about them. It’s about us tragics who are passionate about something and love to write and be a part of the social fabric of the web. IMO those are the only reasons for blogging, any other benefits (and there are many) are just a nice side effect.

Happy 1st Birthday Blog

The world is experiencing enormous change and we [developers and designer] are making this change happen.

We don’t fully understand it these impacts because we’re in the trees and can’t see the forest.

Sometime in 2007 we will reach 3 Billion mobile subscribers. This is unprecedented and unexpected.

Nokia 1100 sales outstrip sales of ipod because of this 3^rd world take up. The Nokia 1100 is the Model T ford of mobile phones.

The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it – Gilmore’s Law (1993)

The Aussie NetAlert was hacked by a 15 year old in 30 minutes, the rewrite was hacked in 40

The people are the network. We’ve had networks for centuries and are born to share information we just have a really cool medium on which to do it.

Collisions between Gilmore’s law and the way of the world.

This mob “routing around things” can be seen in many examples

Encyclopedia Britanica a walled garden has been made completely obsolete by Wikipedia

Google being forced to expose its Map API. Originally it didn’t want to but the mob routed around it

Mark Pesce has rewritten Gilmore’s law as…

The net interprets hierarchy as damage and routes around it

One hierarchy that hasn’t been broken are the Telco’s

Wireless mesh routing – large scale low cost networks will kill the telco’s – Meraki Device

Advertisement is censorship

Websites are not the future, IP services are

Embrace your obsessions

The future lies in making networks happen

The future – A common base of collective intelligence for medicine will be created i.e wellness as a service

Have courage and keep moving – standing still is not an option.

Blog.futurestreetconsulting.com

Create serendipitous webapps – it increases stickiness and usefulness

Serendipity is providing the ability to drill or browse data e.g. IMDB, Amazon

Search for a movie, click on actors, year etc… Displays the data relating to the facet.

To make this happen we have to be smart about our data.

It all starts with the structure. Getting data structured data is half the battle – the rest is easy

The problem with data blobs – can’t do anything with them. Need clean Key | Value pairs

e.g Flickr lets you browse by subject, who took the photo, location, camera etc…

Give your data “the treatment” i.e take it from the big DB and turn it into efficient and serendipitous Hypertext.

Permalinks are very important. You must be able to create permanent link to concepts or specific information.

Data granularity is great for SEO

More Examples…

Chicagocrime.org
View crimes by date | location | type | hour | precint | crimes on route

Washingtonpost.com – Faces of the fallen
View by age | state or territory | military branch | by year | month | day

Video Game Reviews.com

Mixed Messages.com

THOUGHT: It struck me that our very own Secure Forms is only 1 degree away from allowing our customers to create these structured data browsing pages by themselves on the fly. We need to talk about and promote this more effectively – in fact this is great and could/should be a contender for our next event as it’s a natural extension of the search concepts we promoted at the first event.

www.holovaty.com

George Oates is our very own Flickr co-founder and designer originally from South Australia. I was really interested in going to this talk because Flickr practically created what is now summed up in the overused and misunderstood term – web 2.0. Her talk gave us an awesome insight into how Flickr flourished.

Here is a snapshot of history, ideas and experiences that George shared with us…

What is Flickr…

It’s a great place to be a photo

It used to be a game called gameneverending [MMRPG] objective – pick paper off a tree, find/trade items, chat – funny charming game that pulled people in. Deepy social, conversational, collaborative. The core engine of this game was used for Flickr. Photo sharing in 2003 was being done by huge brands such as Kodak… there was a growing demand to host photos online. Camera phones had just started appearing.

1.5 billion photos – 3000 new photos every minute – 10 million members

Naiveté can be charming and productive. Naiveté applies to usability. Many people that arrive at a site know nothing

Didn’t sweat the technique – just designed stuff – made a ton of mistakes but learnt from this

There was a shared understanding of netiquette amongst the user base of GNEr’s and Bloggers

There was an appreciation of experimentation

A lot of web natives who knew the boundaries of trust, membership began to grow. Comments from users were absorbed and acted upon quickly through Flickr ideas

The Gamma release “a state of continuous improvement” – Improved search, nav and layouts.

Removing rules of engagement around people makes the space more co-operative

Tried to mirror the offline experience of photos

Metadata associated with photos mimics offline i.e writing on the back

Use personas with care – If you don’t know who you’re dealing with it forces you to bring your own creativity to the product

Design for zero data – i.e for people that are new to the site and have not yet uploaded anything e.g groups page on Flickr.

Sensible defaults for software – lots of options does not mean more choice – it makes it harder to use and is lazy design – keep it simple simple simple

Experience “gates” – instead of a lockstep process you could have a branching tree

Show activity – this is important e.g. facebook – The activity/dynamism is what makes it successful

Go UTF-8

Support structures – not everyone is comfortable. Supporting the community need to be addressed.

Organic growth – need to be hands on and have human contact. Welcome people in give them beer ask them if they’re comfy.

Community guidelines – give people boundaries (not rules).

Mantra – “Don’t be creepy” German translation – “You know what you’re doing – don’t do that” [J]

Provide excellent customer care – have humans answer emails and manage forums. Good measurement of this is whether or not you received a reply to your assistance

Maintain a neutral POV – with great power comes great resp. Let users negotiate the space on their own

Remember to keep calm and carry on i.e in the face of negativity

Be open – nobody like surprises – e.g. be open (and creative) about downtime

When the community gives you you’re wealth I have a strong belief that you give it back. Anita Roddick

Recommendations…

Book – Abstracting Craft by Malcolm McCullough
Website – http://Futurefarmers.com
Cool photo – The face of Sydney project

Scott delivered a hugely valuable commentary on innovation. I think his comments about 3M summarises beautifully the main take away for people working in the corporate world who are trying to encourage innovation…

3M stands for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. How then did they end up with such hugely successful products such as the post it note? A persistent inventor at 3M, Richard Drew, came up with an idea [Sandpaper], his manager William McKnight tried to kill the idea/product four times. Drew’s product eventually came to fruition and it outstripped sales of all other product lines. This led McKnight to declare…

As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way. Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs. Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow” – William McKnight, 3M chairman, 1948

And this style of management led to other inventions such as the postie.

So in summary, how to innovate in the workplace…

1. Delegate
2. Take risks / make mistakes
3. Reward initiative

And an interesting final comment…

The more you use the word innovation the less likely you are to actually innovate

In a few minutes Scott Berkun will give talk on The myths of innovation. Mike De Fries and I attended a Project Management Master Class run by Scott Berkun at Step Two last year which gave us The Simple Plan – a great methodology for doing only what’s important and ensuring these things are directly linked to our goals. This was hugely valuable contribution to our project management processes at the time and I’m hoping for some more gold nuggets on innovation today.

I couldn’t help noticing at Web Directions the number of Macbooks in use by attendees and speakers. I usually see designers holding their little white and silver babies but today it was rare to find a anything but a Macbook. How times have changed.

Nigel McFarlane was an open standards advocate long before it was cool. In fact he spoke at the ATP in 2001 to promote CSS and met with John and I at Elcom after the talk. He explained to us the concepts behind CSS and its compatibility across different media devices. At the time our focus was e-tax security and we compartmentalised his comments into a “look at this later space”, hindsite is a wonderful thing, CSS became a major part of accessibility compliance and adaptable UX’s. Sadly Nigel passed. He was clearly ahead of his time and this competition, the McFarlane Prize is run in his honour. It awards sites that display best practice standards compliance.

This year’s finalists…

EQASRM by Angela Bonfato Creative and Spoon Media
Occupational Psychiatry by August
SitePoint Design Contests by SitePoint
Solution Central by Propeller Graphic Design & Marketing
The Wyllie Group Developed by Spoon Media

And the winner……

Andrews Must Resign by Michael Koukoullis

Congratulations.

It’s not every day you get to learn about IE directly from the platform architect of IE so this was definitely a highlight.

MS championed standards in the mid 90’s. Chris Wilson worked on the Windows and Mac versions of Mosaic and has been involved in the development of every version of IE. He provided experimental support for CSS in IE3 which was a critically important step in the evolution of CSS.

Notes from his talk….

Challenges that we collectively face in moving the web forward…

Not here to talk about IE next features, release date or name

Where did we start – the original vision – it should be really simple to create and serve content

Web was driven by the need to interconnect i.e. hyper linking, not folder structure

Another Web 2.0 definition [I like this one]…

caring about the quality of web UI

Social experiences make the web immersive, we’re connecting people to people, not just information

3 types of people – Web developers, browser vendors and users

Wed dev is painful – non standards compliance developing for opera, ie6 hacks, ie7 breaks

The deployed browser base is a problem – Browser share is inconsistent – no consistent target to develop for.

Life as a Browser vendor is pure bliss NOT

Security is hard and will always be the top priority. Exploits target complex interactions

Trustworthy browsing means protecting the user against fraud which is why they built in a phishing filter to IE7

Don’t break the web – you can’t shut off access to legacy content

IE has over half a billion users. If we break the web and it affects 1% of users this equates to 10000 packed auditoriums that we’re sitting in.

Developers got used to the IE6 broken behaviour and baked it into the pages which caused a lot of problems when upgrading. People assumed IE 7 was broken but actually the hacks were breaking it

The big questions is “how to support standards without breaking the web”

Where is our common ground between the competing user base – Leave the web better than we found it.

Define “better”…

1. Secure
2. Stable
3. Interoperable
4. Performant
5. Powerful (features and functionality)

Secure is difficult in a world of complex relationships and trust interactions

Security is everyone’s problem

There are increased attack vectors with AJAX – code sharing, proxying and script inclusions requires trust

Have a security model for your code

Privacy – Aggregation of user information without user consent is a problem (privacy is not just cookies)

Syndications and mashups are catalysts for privacy issues – Apps and services need privacy models

Stability – if web apps don’t work consistently across all browsers people won’t depend on them

Compatability rules – if a page works in 1 version of a browser it must work in the next version.

To hit 90% of the market you need to test on IE6,7 and FF 2.0 and 1.5

MS supports browsers for 7 years after release.

Standards mode is increasingly popular 50% of the top 200 websites in the US run in standards mode

Quirks mode no longer protects compatibility because a lot of the web is in standards mode

Interoperable – the standards need to reflect reality and ambiguities need to be stamped out. We need to work together to define standards.

The goals is not to have a standard, the goal is to have interoperability

MS is working on the next version of IE and MS are committed to standards

A big part of the investment in IE7 (after security) was standards

MS recognise that their underlying assumptions of what the web is being used for needs to change in a web 2.0 world

With IE.Next there is a huge investment in a layout engine using the CSS 2.1 standard

Web 2.0 is evolution not revolution – don’t break the web | we must be backwards and forward compatible

The Goal

leave the web better than we found it

Event blogging is hard yakka. I lost power at lunch and went searching, I ended up at a powerboard table with of handful of hardcore geeks. Anyway I managed to peddle hard enough for a quick post on Brian Flings Mobile 2.0 talk

Quick notes…

1. 1 billion people have mobile devices – this vastly outnumbers the PC
2. The iphone is the first mobile web 2.0 device. It supports CCS 3
3. Mobile widgets are the next big thing
4. AJAX on the mobile is the next frontier
5. Generally speaking mobile UX sucks
6. Mobile web apps are the future

Definition of web 2.0….

Web 2.0 is a way to describe an evolution

How to solve a problem…

Start with a goal and then reverse engineer it

Summation    

We’re at the precipice of the next generation of the web – Mobile 2.0 = The Web