The use of abstract personas that represent users/actors is common in the field of user experience design. (Before the "persona" label was used, we talked about having actors with use cases). Andrea Wiggins at "Boxes and Arrows" suggests explains how to build a data-backed persona. Is this more effective? I really like Andrew Otwell's comment below:
One of the key things about personas, I think, is that personas aren’t primarly a research technique, but a communication tool. So if you’re “only” able to synthesize assumptions, folklore, myths, and a little data about your users into a format that anyone can read and get something out of, you’re still making communication happen better.This might be my year-end summary
I know I should be writing a year-end summary, even though I'm put off by all the top ten lists and summaries of others. It's just what people expect. A good start might be a poem in the New Yorker that came today, Blue Song by Tennessee Williams. I never met Tennessee Williams but I knew his sister in law Joyce, Dakin's Wife, who was born in my hometown and hung out with my parents. She was very pleasant... it was hard to imagine her in a Tennessee Williams play. Here's the poem:
I am tired.
I am tired of speech and of action.
If you should meet me upon the
street do not question me for
I can tell you only my name
and the name of the town I was
born in – but that is enough.
It does not matter whether tomorrow
arrives anymore. If there is
only this night and after it is
morning it will not matter now.
I am tired. I am tired of speech
and of action. In the heart of me
you will find a tiny handful of
dust. Take it and blow it out
upon the wind. Let the wind have
it and it will find its way home.
I suppose by including that poem here, I signal that I'm depressed. I suppose it's normal when you get older to start losing your enthusiasm, to wonder what it's all about, to feel a little tired and a little depressed. That's really okay.
The poem has a literary feel to it and reminds me how I once thought that I would be a successful writer. I never dreamed that I would spend so much time writing and giving it away, as I do here at Weblogsky. Then again, I was pretty innocent about life's financial demands back then. This was before I understood business and thought people could just do things.
That's a long digression – I should get to my summary. I thought at various times that I would be a writer or a film director or an attorney; each phase was driven by high hopes. Ultimately I've become an Internet professional, which means I have a career no one could envision when I was in college. I was an English major and I wanted to write – somehow I think that ideally suited me to become an Internet pro. I was fond of publishing, wanted to learn all about it. I worked for years with typographers learning about their craft, and the process of printing books. That was good preparation for web publishing, though I have to admit the web is a bit of a letdown, design-wise, after you've studied how to make books. The web doesn't let you much control over the appearance of your publication.
My year end summary is about the web. 2006 was a transitional year, it seems to me. The Internet and the web seemed to sink into the fabric of our reality more than once before, but this year it really seemed to become Important. This was the year of convergence. All media is data now, and it can be transported from one device to another with relatively little effort. The web is replacing everything. It replaces television, radio, records, newspapers, magazines, books... all those things are still around, but they've leaked onto the web, and the web is where they really exist, despite the legacy of paper and analog media devices.
Every year I give advice and help to the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference, part of the larger set of conferences that include music and film. Interactive was like the bastard child, small and sort of ignored by the others, until 2006. Last March it was a different conference, larger, more professional, more of a scene. More THE scene, I should say, because music and film are leaking or converging, becoming part of the interactive world. I think that was a key story in 2006, and I'm surprised that others aren't mentioning it, though Time Magazine did try to kill it with an acknowledgement ("label it, and you dispense with it.")
Another big 2006 story: people finally accepted that global warming is a very real phenomenon. Some people didn't, but most people did begin to see the problem and want to do something about it. Green thinking is more common. I think much of this can be traced to the work Bruce Sterling started in 2000 with the Viridian Design Movement. He had the right instinct: at the time environmentalism was not a compelling interest, it was boring, and too much of it was doom and gloom. Realizing that global warming was seriouis enough that it had to get into our heads and stay there, he proposed a design movement, because design movements really can transform consciousness. I helped a little by building and maintaining the Viridian Design web site, so I was in a position to gauge the movement's effect. You could see Viridian thinking grow and spread, so that people who had no idea who Bruce Sterling was and had never heard the word Viridian were influenced by it, if indirectly. We waited too long to do much about it, we're probably really screwed, but at least we're a little more conscious about it.
2006 was, in fact, a year that I tried to be more conscious of a lot of things. It was the year I realized I had grown up – you don't realize it til your life is 2/3 over. It was a year I started reading more and listening to more music, listening closely. It was the year I could finally acknowledge that I'm not a nice person (but no one else is, either, not really). It was the year that Tom Ferguson and Larry Lockard died, and each death in its own way forced me to confront something profoundly wrong in the way I'd been living. Confront and admit it, though I don't know that I changed anything. It's still good to be aware.
It was the year I realized how totally committed to the Internet I've become. I just live and breathe it. I'm not even sure why anymore, it just fits. I get how it works, and I spend my time helping other people leverage its power. I stayed with it even when there was no money in it; that's how I know I love this work. Like a good musician or mechanic, I've got it in my bones now, I have muscle memory about the Internet. I walk around in it and I don't get lost. 2006 is the year I realized I'd made my choice, though it's a choice I made fifteen years ago. I realized that the future is all present now, and this is what I'm doing.
Was Tennessee Williams really depressed when he wrote that poem? Or was he just doing what he did best?
Web 2.0 WatchWeb Design Journal says Google has ended the Web 2.0 era by taking Blogger out of beta. Onward, they say, to Web 3.0! This is just wrong on many levels. First and foremost, Web 2.0 is a convenient label, not a real project with a clearly defined beginning and end. Though Google is a prominent practitioner of Web 2.0 voodoo, no single company can bring an end to the fuzzy conceptualization, and Web 3.0 doesn't necessarily follow (what happened to Web 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 etc.?)
Meanwhile Tim's attempted a new definition of Web 2.0. This light definition, and the paragraph that follows, makes a lot of sense, though it doesn't have to be called "Web 2.0"... I don't know that it's a change so much as a realization (which is pretty much what Tim is saying in the paragraph that follows the definition).
Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I've elsewhere called "harnessing collective intelligence.")
(Eric Schmidt has an even briefer formulation of this rule: "Don't fight the internet." That's actually a wonderful way to think about it. Think deeply about the way the internet works, and build systems and applications that use it more richly, freed from the constraints of PC-era thinking, and you're well on your way. Ironically, Tim Berners-Lee's original Web 1.0 is one of the most "Web 2.0" systems out there -- it completely harnesses the power of user contribution, collective intelligence, and network effects. It was Web 1.5, the dotcom bubble, in which people tried to make the web into something else, that fought the internet, and lost.)
In the nineties, when some of us were ranting about bottom up/community/online social networks/interactive and participatory, most of the business people who were ready to call the Internet an industry and monetize every bit were missing this point, and it worked against them in a big way. Many who got the point failed, too, because there wasn't enough air to breathe; they suffocated. "Web 2.0" is just a label, but it represents new sources of oxygen, room to breathe again, and everybody breathing in the same direction.
Take a look at Go2Web2.0 – "the complete web directory" – if you want to find innovative stuff that's been popping up in the wake of the 2.0 meme. I find myself wondering by what criteria a site is selected for this index. There's a go2web2 blog... recently launched and tech crunchy. (As you probably know, Tech Crunch has its own index – I don't know the criteria for selecting those, either. I suppose the criteria can be pretty loose. If Web 2.0 is an era defined by a way of thinking about the web, and not some specific set of technologies, you could include just about anything developed since the 2.0 meme appeared.
Ars Technica reports that comScore will "take Web 2.0 seriously" and get away from page views as the metric for determining a site's popularity (since many Web 2.0 sites are built with technologies like Ajax that don't generate page views for many uses of the site). Site metrics have always been a bit of a problem; creating a better way to determine popularity could be a very good thing.
... I know of more than one major acquisition deal involving hot Web 2.0 sites that have been stalled on this account. Site owners aren't about to leave money on the table because of what an analytics firm says, but companies in acquisition mode aren't always looking beyond the metrics. What's worse, the inaccurate numbers give a false impression of what's really attracting and retaining users online, and it's particularly unfair to the most cutting edge sites. Consider MySpace: do they really deserve the #1 spot simply because to do anything on MySpace, you have to load many, many pages? MySpace was built to generate page views. Other sites are built to minimize them.
To make matters worse, many of these traffic measurement services use data collection methods which are known to undervalue certain classes of users, including those dedicated to technology. comScore, for instance, tracks users who voluntarily participate in an e-commerce tracking system, and then it uses behavioral data from those opt-in users to extrapolate trends on a massive scale. As you might guess, this means that some sites are under represented. Ars Technica, for instance, attracts highly savvy readers who by and large do not opt in to such systems. The same is true for most technology sites online, and their scores suffer; comScore does not truly know our audience, only a small portion of it. Other metrics might rely on a toolbar or similar opt-in systems, which immediately raises the question of what qualifies as a "standard" Internet user. If that definition remains "guy who buys things online using Internet Explorer with this special toolbar installed," then you can see the problem.
In another world, the Wall Street Journal is questioning whether Web 2.0 is another "bubble." This is a debate about markets between two vcs, Todd Dagres and David Hornik. This is probably a good place to wrap...
Mr. Hornik: I think that you aren't giving Web 2.0 entrepreneurs enough credit. Sure, there are some "me too" sites out there. There always are. But the amount of rapid innovation in online services has been staggering -- from Skype to Digg to Six Apart to YouTube to Flickr to Facebook... The list goes on. They aren't microprocessor companies with years of patent-protected intellectual property. On the other hand, they are innovating around things that matter to consumers today. And I believe they are being appropriately valued, not just by potential acquirers but by the consumers themselves.Time discovers the Internet again
You say that billions are going to be lost. I think that overstates the potential problem. Certainly billions haven't been invested to date. It takes a whole lot of companies to get to billions when investing a few million dollars at a time. On the other hand, if a few billion dollars are lost in the face of exits like Skype and YouTube, and others that I see making hundreds of millions in the future, then the market is doing well and investors and entrepreneurs alike will emerge decidedly net positive. That doesn't sound like a bubble to me. That sounds like a vibrant market for innovation.
Mr. Dagres: Aha! We agree on what may be the most important point -- great entrepreneurs are the key to building valuable companies. If you invest in great people, you have a good chance of making money. In the current market there are gifted entrepreneurs that will benefit and thrive. These people will start disruptive companies that look for what will be hot rather than what is hot. They won't be lumped into the Web 2.0 category; they will define their own categories. This is what will separate the few winners from the many losers. So in closing, I am leery of Web 2.0 but I am always going to invest in great people pursuing big ideas.
Mr. Hornik concludes: I was recently asked by an entrepreneur what I thought would be the next great technology in the coming year. I told him I thought it would be the Internet. We have just started scratching the surface of the enabling power of the Internet. Whether it is called "Web 2.0" or "New Media" or "Enterprise 2.0," Internet services are going to drive the world's economies for the foreseeable future. To me that doesn't spell bubble, that spells opportunity. [Italics mine]
Time Magazine made all of us "Person of the Year," and I've been thinking I should blog some articulate comment or other. Frankly, I'm just relieved. When Time last focused on the 'net, it was all about Cyberporn. At least this latest issue explores worthy and productive aspects of our New Life Online. Ethan Zuckerman writes a longer assessment of the Time piece and its various aftershocks, and he includes a d'oh quote that I kinda like (and missed, because I didn't wade through Time's article): Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. The older I get, the less I see wisdom, especially in crowds, and especially in media, either broadcast or interactive. But that's okay, we can't be smart about everything.
Seriously, so much of this stuff is buzz, and its like meringue - it's evaporating even as it sets. Time Magazine knows something's happening, but it doesn't know what it is. You can't really think it, anymore than you can approach surfing (either kind) as an intellectual exercise.
The Internet is popping up everywhere and more and more people are connecting. I think that's a god thing. I live and breathe Internet and media and live by those connections, even though I don't believe much of anything these days. What I think about these days is how to make those connections work, and how the connections might work to preserve the things connecting, all those eager minds. Perhaps a noösphere is forming.
One of the original aspects of the noosphere concept deals with evolution. Henri Bergson (1907) was one of the first to propose that evolution is 'creative' and cannot necessarily be explained solely by Darwinian natural selection. L'évolution créatrice is upheld, according to Bergson, by a constant vital force that animates life and fundamentally connects mind and body, an idea opposing the dualism of Rene Descartes. Later thinkers such as C. Lloyd Morgan took this work further, elaborating on an 'emergent evolution' that could explain increasing complexity (including the evolution of mind). Morgan found that many of the most interesting changes in living things have been largely discontinuous with past evolution, and therefore did not necessarily take place through a gradual process of natural selection. Rather, evolution experiences jumps in complexity (such as the emergence of a self-reflective universe, or noosphere). Finally, the complexification of human cultures, particularly language, facilitated a quickening of evolution in which cultural evolution occurs more rapidly than biological evolution. Recent understanding of human ecosystems and of human impact on the biosphere have led to a link between the notion of sustainability with the "co-evolution" [Norgaard, 1994] and harmonization of cultural and biological evolution.
Some people don't want schools to teach evolution, but they can't stop us from evolving. We can evolve with and without wisdom, with and without loud flashy and beautiful media. We can evolve with or without Time Magazine.
Search marketingWe had a great discussion about Search Marketing and the world according to Google last night at the Bootstrap Web meeting, led by Bill Leake and Brian Combs from Apogee Search. [Link to 81MB MP3 of the talk]
Enterprise 2.0 failed the neologism testAfter spending some time editing the Enterprise 2.0 article at Wikipedia, Ross Mayfield saw it disappear, a victim of speedy deletion because it failed to meet Wikipedia's neologism criteria. [Link]
At one point every term was a neologism, language evolves, faster for some people, and the new becomes mainstream. What's interesting is that Andy McAfee's initial Enterprise 2.0 definition (freeform social software adapted for business) still stands, but is being extended in consistent ways. Jeff Nolan's insight that enterprise mashups are of processes, while Web 2.0 mashups are more simply data, is significant. Vinnie challenges us further. Dion Hinchcliffe offers up a definition of Enterprise 2.0 (richer than what I quote) as liberation....Gartner's high-impact technologies
Gartner Inc. says some of the technologies that will have the greatest impact on business over the next ten years are in the Web 2.0-social software realm... e.g. social network analysis and collective intelligence (which they define has individuals working together with no central authority to produce intellectual content... which is commons-based peer production, aka open source methodology).
Other high-impact technologies: location-aware applications, event-driven architecture, and semantic web. [Link]
Popup PoliticiansVery cool little Ajax widget: you can add mini-profiles of politicians to your pages. [Link] (Thanks to Greg Elin for the pointer!)
Here's an example, my own rep. This probably won't work if you're reading this in an RSS feed or email. Otherwise, Just mouse over the sunny widget on the right of Smith's surname.
Representative Lamar Seeligson SMITH
Web 2.0 reviewSome Web 2.0 article links, with excerpts and comments...
"Too many CIOs fail to ride Web 2.0 wave" by Shamus McGillicuddy at SearchSMB.com.
"If a vendor is telling them, 'Here is our Web 2.0 solution,' that's an illusion that needs to be dispelled," said Ray Valdes, research director of Internet platforms and Web services at Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc., Valdes said. "Web 2.0 is not something you can buy and implement."and
Some vendors are selling products labeled "Web 2.0" technology. But when it comes to Web 2.0, technology is just a means to an end. The real business value lies in what the technology enables: better collaboration among users. In fact, a growing number of companies are developing new business models to take advantage of the collaboration the technology empowers.
Valdes warns that while the products allows companies to build Web 2.0 applications, a company will also need to know how to use those apps to encourage the social interaction that is integral to the concept. It's "more than just the technology," Valdes said.
Regular readers of my blog know that I'm conflicted about the term Web 2.0 though I'm all about the participative, collaborative approaches that are inherent in Web 2.0 thinking. However there's a lot of confusion about the term, exacerbated by hype; the label could actually be useful if we had more writers lilke McGillicuddy, who get the reality behind the hype.
Consider that I recently saw a web development company's web site leading with the headline "What is Web 2.0?" There was no answer anywhere on the site; it was mostly about the company's adherence to web standards. They totally didn't seem to know what Web 2.0 was about, but they didn't mind using the term to sell services. Every time a company uses "Web 2.0" in a sales pitch, we get more confusion.
But I digress... more articles:
Austin Web Posse party at Futures Lab
Jon L. with pal Derek Woodgate of The Futures Lab
Polycot strategic partner The Futures Lab hosted last night's Austin Web Posse party, a terrific little jam with all the usual suspects. You may wonder why futurists are part of the web posse, but it makes perfect sense in context: The Futures Lab and my for-profit partnership Polycot have been talking quite a bit about the future of the web as part of our research to support strategic web consulting, and we're working on a presentation that explains Web 2.0 in the context of the web's evolution. Last night's party had a diverse crowd including many of the usual suspects from other projects Derek and I have been working on - Austin Future Salon, Culture Forum, etc.