Christine

Facing Challenges of Multiple Identity

The concept of identity has been increasingly topical in the technology space. But as individuals, do we have the self-awareness and maturity of behavioral psychology necessary to take advantage of this smarter infrastructure? Maria Niles of fizz moderated an extremely dynamic discussion of race, gender, sexuality, and identity at BlogHer 2006:

Making Room for Men at BlogHer

Environment: Blogging extravaganza BlogHer 2006.

Political Blogging for Fun, Change, and Disreputability

As Lisa Williams said today at BlogHer 2006, "bloggers are all self-publishers, and are disreputable for that very reason." Williams herded a gaggle of those disreputable political bloggers today, and revealed the very individual face that bloggers have brought to both global and local politics:

Top 5 Best Practices for Disaster Relief

Hurricane Katrina relief veterans Grace Davis and Sara Ford were joined by tsunami aid activist Dina Mehta in discussing best practices for bloggers delivering tangible aid to communities in need. each of these speakers brought a different perspective:

BlogHer Ad Network Launches

The BlogHer ad network launched this month, with the release of BlogHerAds. (Keep an eye on Lisa Stone's blog for the launch of the full site next week.) Here's a closer look at this effort towards an economically viable market model for blogging:

Elise Bauer's Top Five Tips for Building Blog Traffic

Simply Recipes gets over 20,000 visitors per day, and over 1,000,000 page views per month. Author Elise Bauer shared some of her learnings and opinions on best practices for building blog traffic with the women at BlogHer 2006:

Charlene Li and Marnie Webb on Tagging and Tracking

Marnie Webb and Charlene Li exposed the seamy underbelly of tagging at BlogHer 2006. Tags both increase discoverability and enable readers to find others with shared interests. When you tag your own blog posts, you add yourself to an existing community or to an ongoing dialogue.

Blog Communities: Evolved, or Intelligently Designed?

At today's BlogHer in San Jose, we discussed how to establish intelligent boundaries and scope to a community. The basic takeaway? Let your users guide you. You must understand not only the purpose of the community, but also the purpose of the individual.

Three Common Architectures for Blog Community

Today's BlogHer workshop on blog community architectures, led by Nancy White of Full Circle Associates, elicited a set of common community templates:

The Nostalgia of Pins in a Map (or, More Google Effluent)

While trolling through Derek Scruggs' blog today, I found a link to one of the most common counting habits for obsessives: where have you been? Douwe Osinga, one of Google's European engineers, has this hack posted on his web site. Have some fun and map where you've been:

World War 2.0: the Webtop vs. the Desktop Redux

This recent Supernova discussion on the future of the desktop highlights the challenges that the desktop faces as web services continue to leech users from traditional productivity suites. Though technologists can natter endlessly about infrastructure, very few are thinking about the concepts of behavioral architecture.

Flaming Art at the Crucible

The Crucible exploded this weekend with the annual Fire Arts Festival - twisting, 200' tall tornados of flame; booming fire cannons; sinuous fire dancers; and fiery metal sculpture. One of my favorites was the giant metal t-rex with flaming fangs.

Tools and Tech for Interactive Video Blogging

The broadcast-only aspect of video blogging has been a hurdle to virality and scale. Some smart folks at Vloggercon took note, and worked up both test hacks and structural concepts that enable interactive videoblogging.

Do Microformats Make Web APIs Obsolete?

Mashup Camp 2 included a session on microformats and APIs. While the overall conversation rambled a bit, there were a couple of very intriguing threads. Kevin Lawver of AOL, for example, has spent a long time being frustrated by working with the Google search API. Lawver sees the power of microformats concentrated within the concept of grabbing a chunk of an HTML page and using it as raw data in a mashup. Why create an RSS feed or XSL transport, if microformats can be part of the original HTML markup? Why create new schemas again and again?

Cross-System Access Control is Still Unresolved

Identity, security, access control, mashups, and social networking: a perfect storm of chaos that is only growing in complexity. Johannes Ernst from NetMesh led a discussion at Mashup Camp 2 in which a number of identity-related problems were explored:

Cool Mashup Hacks from SpeedGeeking

It's all about the hacks. There were roughly 25 mashups shared at Mashup Camp 2, all at varying levels of consumer-readiness.

Sustainable Supply Chain Ecosystems for Mashups

Much talk at Mashup Camp 2 has centered on mashup monetization. What was most interesting about this talk was that it focused on ecosystem sustainability. This dialogue attracted many people who were leery of the "build it and Yahoo! will buy it" approach that is being proffered as a substitute for building a sustainable business.

Driving Users to Your Mashup

Nasser Manesh from Frucall herded cats for this session on user acquisition and retention at Mashup Camp 2. After a while, it became evident that there are very few success models so far in this nascent space. These few made the cut in the conversation:

Day One Takeaways from Mashup Camp

An interim post on Mashup Camp 2: The end-of-day reconvening on Day One bubbled up these participant takeaways:

Monetizing Mashups - Still a Black Art

Dave Nielsen of StrikeIron led a conversation on mashup monetization at today’s Mashup Camp. Equal numbers of API providers/enablers and API consumers participated in the session, and almost everyone had something to sell. Only three people in the room were looking to create mashups for internal use.

Men Like Mashups

Environment: Mashup Camp 2, hosted by the ever-fabulous David Berlind and Doug Gold at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

Typepad Timeouts are Ugly

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Today’s Typepad service outage showed some clumsy handling. From Mashup Camp this morning, I retired the content on my home page, wrote a post, and then clicked Save. Of course, this was right when Typepad went offline, so Typepad sent me to a "system down" page without saving the post I had just written.

How Game Mechanics Influence Human Behavior

Most folks intuit that games and applications are designed to complement existing interests, needs, and work patterns. What is less commonly understood is how the converse occurs - how do games and the like shape human behavior?

USC Gamepipe Lab and Second Life Users Apply Game Technology to Learning Environments

As Dr. Phil would tell you, one of the most meaningful parts of interaction is what you don't say. At last week's Supernova 2006, Michael Zyda from USC Gamepipe Lab shared some exciting technology around game interfaces . USC has created a pair of glasses that contain very small biosensors that reveal your mental state. More specifically, these glasses can tell whether or not you are engaged in the game.