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Evidently, my proposal to this year’s IA Summit has been accepted. Now comes the tough part of actually having a presentation.

I have plenty of stuff to present on … that’s just the problem. The challenge is getting it all winnowed down into something coherent and useful.

The conference organizers say I need to have my presentation materials to them by 2/1 so they can go onto the CD-ROM. But my PP decks usually have a lot of filler that only makes sense with the verbal narrative — so it may make more sense to provide an abstract, an outline, bibliography/links to research, and a link to a page here where people can download the latest-greatest if they so please.

Here’s the final version of the proposal/description (which I’m not sure if I got in on time, so this may not be identical to the actual conference info):

Clues to the Future: What the users of tomorrow are teaching us today.

What might Wikipedia have in common with World of Warcraft? And how might that affect design and business strategy today?

According recent academic and business research, there is an enormous wave of people on its way to adulthood that may very well take us by surprise. And while many designers may be aware of this, we still face the challenge of making it clear to our clients and stake-holders.

Beyond the hype and more obvious implications of the “net generation” are key questions that affect how business and design plan for the future. For example: the shift from hierarchical to nodal paradigms; the rise of new kinds of literacy (and authority); the blurring boundaries between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ economies; the splintering of identity; and users who, frankly, expect your web environment to be as well designed as the best games on their X-Boxes.

It’s important not to focus on the surface gadgetry, but to understand what is different about how these users think, how they solve problems and manage resources, how they socialize and organize, and how vastly different it may be from the assumed conventions of most business and design decision-makers (i.e. people born before 1985).

This presentation will:

1. Survey some of the current research and insights on the issue;
2. Explore some of the more challenging theoretical questions raised;
3. Discuss the practical business and design implications of those questions; and
4. Suggest how those implications might help make stronger cases for innovative design.

Hopefully this won’t just be a retread of stuff people already know. The basic theme is that by studying how the net generation uses things like social networks and multiplayer game environments, we can see what their mental models are going to be like when they’re full-fledged adult users.

This theme may sound obvious to many… but I haven’t heard much of a call for looking to these sources for planning business and design strategy for the near term.

If it takes most coporations about five years to get any truly ambitious technology shift into a mature state (and that’s if they’re in the quick crowd), why not go ahead and think about what that mature state should be once seventeen-year-olds are starting their careers? There’s amazing research and theory-making going on about online games, especially. They seem to me to be perfect laboratories, e-petri dishes, for seeing how an electronically mediated community (and that specialized community — the market economy) functions.

Here’s a separate page where I’ll be keeping info about it, links to related articles and research, and the final version of the presentation (eventually).

Oldest .com’s

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing shares a link to the 100 oldest .COM names in the registry, and wonders about the “visionaries” who might’ve realized they needed a “.com” domain in 1985.

But many of those companies likely weren’t thinking about commercial Internet possibilities. They just happened to be involved in the academic, scientific and defense contracting fields, either directly or tangentially, and according to the rules in the registry, they had to be “.com” to show they were commercial enterprises, unlike the majority of the Internet nodes at the time, which were .edu or .gov (and a few .orgs I guess, might’ve been the minority? Hm. )

Anyway, I mention this not just to be persnickety, but because I think it’s interesting how easy it is to forget what the context was 20 or hell even 12 years ago. I’m fascinated at how quickly the ‘net became a “land of opportunity” as opposed to an under-the-radar propeller-head network, and how to some degree we’re all coming back to the ‘net’s DNA of community (which has always been prevalant, it’s just not gotten the press because the ‘real’ community happening online isn’t necessarily connected to any IPO’s).

The market isn’t using the net for its own ends. People are using the market to utilize the net for their own ends… and as always, people are mainly interested in connecting with, sharing with, creating with other people.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger

I just thought this was a fascinating post. Here’s a chunk:

Coase also pointed out that, for a variety of reasons, there is a natural limit to what can be produced efficiently within the firm, which is why all businesses also have a more or less extensive supply chain, and strive for an optimal balance between what work gets done inside and outside the firm.
This balance is now in flux. Since we can now use technology, the Internet and open standards to begin to automate, standardize and integrate business processes, those transaction costs described by Roland Coase are dropping precipitously. Consequently, the whole nature of the firm, and what it means to run an efficient business, is going through very extensive changes. These are not easy changes. Not only is there a great deal of innovation required to automate and integrate business processes, but perhaps more important, there are even greater changes in culture required to transform Industrial Age business models to something more appropriate to our Internet era.

Google Talk

For once, I’m not the last person to hear about something months later.

Google Talk sounds exciting. No voice-capable Mac client for it, but Adium and iChat both work. If nothing else, it’ll educate the masses about the “Jabber” protocol.

Google does have gobs of cash, and it’s lots of fun seeing what they can do with it. What I wish they’d really do is start a mobile phone company, because I would imagine it wouldn’t suck nearly as much as Verizon and others. But that’s merely a pipe dream.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how this affects IM users, if it’ll catch on or not. I still don’t understand why AIM and MSN and others don’t open up their protocols. Maybe Google is what it takes to get people to realize if they use an open protocol (Jabber) they can talk to *anybody.*

However, I wonder if Google plans on using its ads technology for scanning IM’s and displaying ads while chatting or the like? That would kill it for me. I can put up with it in emails, somehow. It’s unobtrusive, and they’re giving me a couple of gigs of space. But for IM’s … for some reason that would cross a line for me. Not sure why.

It will be fun, though, to see if they can do a lot of cool integration like they’ve been doing with their other services. Phone messaging, search, blogging, etc.

Wake-Up Call

Companies of the world, pay attention. These are your future customers.

Pay attention not just to the fact that they’re online, but what they’re doing and how. Pay attention to how integrated their physical space is with their infospace, and how relational their infospace has become. They bounce between applications, they earn and spend “virtual” money in massive multiplayer environments. They live in this place.
And your cute little web-widgets that *might* be finished at the end of their 3-5 year development programs are going to feel to them about as sophisticated and useful as a tire swing feels to a circus acrobat.

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Pew Internet: Teens and Technology

Today’s American teens live in a world enveloped by communications technologies; the internet and cell phones have become a central force that fuels the rhythm of daily life.

The number of teenagers using the internet has grown 24% in the past four years and 87% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 are online. Compared to four years ago, teens’ use of the internet has intensified and broadened as they log on more often and do more things when they are online.

via JOHO/Blog

Wachovia Completes Research

Under this otherwise unassuming title is a press release stating that Wachovia did research into its history to find which of its ancestor institutions might have owned slaves.

Earlier this year, Wachovia contracted with The History Factory, a leading historical research firm, to conduct research on the predecessor institutions that, over many years, formed our company.

The resulting research revealed that two of our predecessor institutions, the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company and the Bank of Charleston, owned slaves.

Due to incomplete records, we cannot determine precisely how many slaves either the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company or the Bank of Charleston owned. Through specific transactional records, researchers determined that the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company owned at least 162 slaves, and the Bank of Charleston accepted at least 529 slaves as collateral on mortgaged properties or loans, and acquired an undetermined number of these individuals when customers defaulted on their loans.

We are deeply saddened by these findings. We apologize to all Americans, and especially to African-Americans and people of African descent.

This is kind of amazing, really. I’m not sure if I can articulate how… I mean, it never would’ve occurred to me (even as a relatively liberal and thoughful and historically-conscious person) to look into the history of a company this way. To some degree you wonder if it’s relevant, but then again the success of this bank is dependent in part upon the success of its ancestry.

When you really think about it, we’re not talking about *that* long ago. I live in a building from the 1850’s. The floors were walked by people who lived through the Civil War. It only takes three grandparents back for me to be connected to somebody who was alive at that time.

It makes me wonder what sorts of conversations went on at Wachovia, how it came about, etc. I’m fascinated with how corporations as a sort of aggregate personality take such nuanced and vulnerable actions.

Anyway, it was just sort of a surprising thing to run into as I went to check my balance today.

“You are being forwarded to an automatic voice mailbox system. ….. The mailbox for ‘Customer Inquiries’ is full….”

That’s what I got when I finally managed to find a phone number on Verizon’s website, and was transferred to a different number (because I found the wrong number after all).

I was calling because I wanted to try the new fiberoptic service. Supposedly my building is hooked up to it, according to my landlord. And Verizon is sending a big cardboard flyer to my mailbox weekly extolling its virtues.

Because it might actually be cheaper for me to use that rather than pay for both a phone line I don’t use and the DSL service, I was wanting to see if I could go that way.

I checked the website, but *it* tells me that, according to my address and phone number, it’s not available at my building. (So why are you sending me the &*$^@* FLYERS??!?)

So I go looking for a customer support number. There’s not one on the fiberoptic (FiOS) area of the site, that I can see (stupid, if they really want people to buy it). What I do manage to find, though, is Verizon – Contact Telephone Numbers – Pennsylvania, which gives me phone numbers based on which company *used to* run my phone utility in my area. Since I only moved to my area 6 months ago, I am not privy to this bit of neighborhood lore. I have NO IDEA if it used to be Bell Atlantic or GTE.

Anyway, I try both… the first option gets nothing. Not even a ring. Just silence.

The second option got me to the situation above… and then to a “full mailbox” ….. ARGH!!!

I will not even get started as to how horribly broken their website is.

Evidently MP3.com’s “rock star parties” weren’t all that and a bag of gourmet chips.

Wired News: MP3.com Loot Hits Auction Block
But those working for MP3.com didn’t just live like rock stars. They partied with them. HR booked Billy Idol for the Christmas party, and The Fixx jammed in the office late one Friday afternoon.

They’re proud of this?!?!?

Lean years.

I want to say more about Stewart Brand’s keynote at the IA Summit in Portland, but for now here’s a bit of his wisdom, a 2-minute talk he gave on the Lean Years, at the 2002 Webby Awards. For those of you who don’t have 2 minutes, here’s the last bit: “Lean years are not just punctuation between periods of fat years. They are the discipline years when civilization consolidates its gains and invents its way out of trouble. In the long now, THESE are the good years. Don’t waste them.”

In their recent story–Wired News: Why Did Google Want Blogger?–the folks at Wired hit the nail right on the head… As I am so fond of saying, blogs are the organic meta-datafarms of the future. And Google’s relevance (hence their accuracy and their market value) is derived from links created by people within some context…and weblogs are an especially rich source of this nutrient.
This article explains some of the rationale, especially the significance of RSS feeds and the ‘semantic web’ :-)
So, anyway, this is yet another move that shows how brilliantly self-organizing the Internet really is. It’s almost like these companies didn’t even have a choice…this was their destiny!

I’ve been thinking a lot about a recent article in Wired magazine (Wired 10.08: The Bandwidth Capital of the World) about Korea. It brings to light some really important stuff about the Internet that we, in the anal, individualistic, capitalized West tend to ignore. Perhaps to our detriment.
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