PEOPLE
The psychology, philosophy and sociology behind a rich and meaningful communication experience between people.

USER INTERFACE
The fundamental principles, best practices, explorations and other lessons about designing the user interface to bring communication to life.

TECHNOLOGY
Understanding and leveraging the software, hardware, and services that enable and enhance communication for work and play.

More info on the Seattle World Usability Day 2010 Event at http://www.microsoftwud.com/

Watch the keynote from the Visit Mix site. It is a great show.

Now for my concerns… :-)

While I really appreciate the desire to enhance the designer’s toolkit with controls that can be used as building blocks in the foundations of our applications I am concerned about potential to abuse. I truly believe that Microsoft is doing it’s best to embrace designers but I wonder if developers will inadvertently take this work and corrupt or commoditize the value that good design can bring to a project.

I am a little fearful of carousel controls and Deep Zoom (Sea Dragon) everywhere when the effort to do these types of interfaces becomes effectively none. They say God is in the details so while I applaud the desire to have people do less grunt work and focus on adding value to a project. Do not lose sight of the details . Developers you can’t always do it all, consult a designer, Business Owners your developers can’t always do it all, consult a designer.

Good design is not a feature it is a pillar of the success of your product.

Oh and here is a picture by Betsy of Bryce singing on the RockBand Stage, sober to boot.

HEROES HAPPEN {HERE} was not only about Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 it was about celebrating the people who keep things running.

It is often easy to forget about the people that maintain the systems we expect to be running (except when the sky falls) when we are so focused on new and shiny technologies and systems.

Microsoft acknowledges that making maintenance simpler and more agile so that IT staff can focus on solving problems and add real value is what everyone wants whether you are an IT professional or the business that hires IT professionals. They call this strategy Dynamic IT.

Kevin told us a story of two heroes.

Now, let me tell you a story. I want to tell you about a couple of heroes, just to bring this theme of this launch to life. And I want to start by telling you imagine it’s November 12th, 1999, and you’re in Istanbul, Turkey. And it’s the middle of the night, and an earthquake hits, 7.2 on the Richter scale. So you get in a doorway with all your family, buildings are shaking and collapsing around you, and all of a sudden all the lights go out and it’s completely dark. After several hours, the shaking and the crumbling stops. You somehow find a way to make it outside. When you finally get outside, you look around and it’s total devastation all around you.

Now, most of us can only imagine this, but this was the reality for Omer Celik. Along with everyone else in the region, they had to live and eat in the streets for five days before help arrived.

This challenging time, that five-day period, sparked an idea, an idea that Omer said, you know what, there’s got to be something we can do with technology.

So, he wanted to create something that could help tell rescue crews what was going on in the areas that they couldn’t reach or get to, somehow create a tool that would allow them to see just what they were facing and where help was needed right away.

So, over the next 24 months he and a friend partnered, and it’s his childhood friend, Oguz they’ve been friends since they were 10 years old, they partnered and using Microsoft Robotics Studio, Visual Studio 2008, which we’re going to talk about, Virtual Earth, Windows Server 2008, with IIS 7.0 and Silverlight, they’ve created something called RoboTurk a robotic helicopter used in disaster situations to fly into areas that are so badly damaged so that you can stream video back to the rescue crews, so that rescue crews can get real time feedback on who and where they need to provide help.

Now, Omer and Oguz are two developers, but they’re also two developers who decided to make a difference, and they’re heroes, and we’re celebrating them today, because today the Turkish government and Microsoft are investing with Omer and Oguz to bring this technology mainstream.

That is so cool. I need to get more info on that soon. I have been doing a bit of research lately into how technology can help in catastrophic situations and there is some fascinating work being done. I know it sounds cheesy but if anyone has ever worked with a government agency or body you know that they can be a little slow sometimes. Work like RoboTurk and projects like JEPRS from Infusion are like very exciting because in an emergency time is of the essence.

Here are some photos of some Heroes.

There were many more exciting things announced like: built in virtualization in Windows Server 2008 and where that is going; PHP support for IIS – that will be exciting for enterprise applications and JavaScript Debugging and IntelliSense in Visual Studio 2008.

I think that one of my favourite case studies that day was one from Sorin Manta, Manager of Windows Server Infrastructure Technology and Operations at BMO.

“Just by eliminating the need for infrastructure, we save about $150,000 in capital costs for every office that we open… and we’ve opened four so far. That’s more than half a million dollars already.”

Sorin Manta, Manager, Windows Server Infrastructure, Technology and Operations, BMO Capital Markets

See him tell his story.

Voice is Back!!! I was invited to see the launch of Microsoft Unified Communications. Looks pretty cool, really it does. I think that this is just one of those technologies that will quickly become part of our everyday lives.

I hope we get it at the office soon.

Anatomy of a Facebook Application (JayGoldman, Radiant Core)

Download the Quicktime or Download the MP4

FBML Overview (Sunil Boodram, Trapeze Media)

Download the Quicktime or Download the MP4

FQL Overview (Craig Saila)

Download the Quicktime or Download the MP4

As part of the event Meagan Marks from Facebook.com presented “Best Practices around Product Design and Viral Marketing”. It was an excellent presentation that had a lot of great information. The Facebook people asked however that we do not broadcast the presentation. So I won’t but I’ll SHARE it. (at least for now – MP4 98megs)

The MP4 files are on my server and may be sluggish

There were more presentations including:

• Updating the Facebook Profile (Colin Smillie, Refresh Partners) Presentation
• Demo: .Net Sample Application (Ricardo Covo, Web Nodes)
• Demo: Carpool by Zimride (Rajat Suri)
• Demo: My Aquarium by Greg Thomson

I’ll try to get them up soon.

Our good buddy Sandy Kemsley was recently interviewed by Maggie K. Fox. of the Social Media Group. It is a great listen and I encourage you to check it out.

[audio:http://media-c02.libsyn.com/podcasts/54f394de1913fe5f1c0790e69ae5f698/4694cfec/socialmediagroup/SMT20_SandyKemsley.mp3]

Ever since I started this blog I have always had a love hate relationship with YouTube and other video distribution methods. YouTube video sucks but the exposure is great. I’m not dedecated enough to encode every format under the sun and host them like the fine folks at CommandN. Also I believe that people don’t care if they can download my video, I wouldn’t. I’ve tried Revver because I thought the video quality was better but honestly they take too long to put up a video, their review process is annoying. Revver’s video time limit or lack-there-of is great though. Facebook video is good quality and has an interesting distribution mechanisim. I wish i could see # of views in Facebook but the fact that I can’t post the video outside of FB doesn’t really matter to me. To my detriment I also don’t care about iTunes (yes that is my bias showing, I should be able to hate sucess/monopolies as well).

I will probably still use YouTube, Revver and Facebook in the future but for placing video on this site, I’m going to use Silverlight.

The Silverlight Streaming service allows me to host 4gigs of video for free and I have control of the encoder which is what I have always wanted. They say the video time limit is 10 minutes but it is actually 22megs, so if I have a video that is only 2 minutes long I can offer it up in HD resolution practically. Right now I am using a minimal player skin while I think about my new site design but this player can be customized to whatever I want (when I get around to it).

I hope that the missing plugin experience gets improved that lame little banner is not good enough :-)

Info on the EEE PC

No comments about choking :-)

[tags]Asus, EEE-PC, EEE PC[/tags]

Grab the quicktime version from the Revver page.

[tags]barcampottawa3, olpc, onelaptopperchild, 100dollarlaptop[/tags]

This presentation kicked of the IA Summit this year for me. It is a big topic to get into any real detail in 45 minutes and I’m looking forward to the book.

[audio:http://www.thechickentest.com/vid/IASummit2007/Using_Search_Analytics_to_Diagnose_Whats_Ailing_your_Information_Architecture.mp3]

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 23 megs )

We’re witnessing a rapid recognition of the value of search analytics among people from a variety of backgrounds, and we hope that our presentation helps crystallize the discussion within the IA community.

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt Milan & Gene Smith
• Project Touchstones how to bridge competing viewpoints and build vision consensus and innovation – Jess McMullin
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, SearchAnalytics, SearchOptimization, Search, RichWiggins, LouRosenfeld[/tags]

What is Nakama?

Nakama lets you share pictures and videos from your phone with your friends on the web, and on their phones too, and there’s nothing to download or install.

What can Nakama do?

Want to post your pictures straight to your MySpace, Flickr, Blogger, MSN or other gallery or blog? Send a picture or video from your phone to go@nakama.ca and we’ll post it for you. Ever taken a great picture or funny video? Send it to your friends! Nakama lets you send it to ALL their phones in one step. It’s that easy: no more fighting with your phone or spending a lot to send it to each friend.

I’ll have to get a phone that lets me take pictures and video.

A Nice Saturday in the Dufferin Grove Park, Wireless Toronto launched Toronto’s largest free wirelss hotspot with the help of their sponsors Kijiji.

Then there was a rally at the end of a march from Queens Park for the Second Annual “No One Is Illegal” Community Fair.

I felt like a little Jeru so that is the soundtrack if you want you can get the video in Windows Media or Quicktime7. You can also check out the photos on Flickr.

[tags]NoOneisIllegal, WirelessToronto, DufferinGrovePark[/tags]

Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry¹s APOSTROPHE is, as far as they know,
the first book ever written by a search engine. Each line from the original
poem has become the title of a new poem generated by five robots on a
metonymic romp through the World Wide Web.

APOSTROPHE is an entirely new and very old kind of poetry, epic and lyrical
by turns. Neither stable nor unstable, sections come and go, but the overall
shape of the poem remains vaguely familiar, like a trick of memory.

Check out the Upcoming Listing for more info.

So Microsoft is going to have a busy year with many product releases and betas. The Mix06 conference was cool and I’m looking forward to them continuing. Albert from Bubbleshare got to have lunch with Bill Gates and hopefully he can turn that event into some MSFT love $$$.

Check out the Link below to see pictures from the keynote on Bubbleshare some of them are very funny

[tags]Mix06, Design, Web2.0, Bubbleshare, BillGates[/tags]