So this is the view from my temporary housing. Today was pretty wild. Veronica and Sadie flew home to Toronto and I had new employee orientation where I received a mountain of materials to read. This is material that doesn’t even have to do with my job. I’m going to have some late nights doing some elearning I think.

It’s very exciting. I’m going to refresh Seattle with Craig on Wednesday and there is some crazy picnic this weekend that people are talking about.

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This is a project that can help bryce justify his playmobil collection which is considerable.

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So today he got some card from his family and they were really nice.

This card is from his wife Veronica

This is from his Daughter Sadie

and this was from his Mom and Dad

Now over the years I have seen Bryce’s parents put some pressure on him. They urged him to buy a house, they wanted him to get married and have kids. When they realized that the married part wasn’t likely going to happen they skipped it and moved on to the “have kids pressure”. But now that he has the house/wife/kid combo I am wondering what they mean by this card. Is it a move to the west coast and have a mid-life crissis cowboy affair?

I’m sure that is not what they meant but everytime I look at this card I just can’t help but think Brokeback Birthday. You know Bryce does like facial hair after all so maybe his parents are on to something. RaRR!

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The coolest startup in Toronto has been recognized by the finacial post. They deserve all the attention and praise that they get because the company, it’s people, the technology, the setup, the scary lathe in the basement are all awesome.

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I would really love to see more of the Tech Rooster so everyone should go support him at 1938media.

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THE TORONTO CATASTROPHE SLAM
"a day of dialogue over Toronto disaster
scenarios".

Be part of this unique day of dialogue and challenge for academics, students, professionals, not-for-profit and the public. The purpose of this event is to exchange knowledge and ideas with others on the topic of catastrophe, disaster and emergency. This is a rare multidisciplinary engagement that will include informative keynotes and participatory challenges that will be designed to examine scenarios including a Natural Disaster scenario, a Health Epidemic and a Security Crisis. For more info on the Catastrophe Slam check out http://digifest2008.wik.is/

WHAT IS A DESIGN SLAM
A Design Slam is where we have a fictitious group of stakeholders present a problem to groups "consultants". We will form these groups randomly at the beginning of the event. These ingenious and innovative people will have a set block of time to design and pitch their idea to the stakeholders.

We have 30 slots that we are opening up for free public registration to the Catastrophe Slam but I encourage you to check out the entire 3 day Digifest event for $25.
You can register for digifest here: http://www.dx.org/digifest/register.html

BUT if you want to sign up for the Catastrophe Slam only head over to
http://digifest2008.wik.is/

1. Create an Account on the Wiki.
2. Sign Up for the event on the signup page. No Charge

It should be a really great day we have some great people coming out to this event and it is a unique space to play in.

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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.

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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.

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This has been banging around in my head for a while. I was thinking about how I could write this up and expand upon the idea but I give up. So lets just throw it up on twitter and see if anything sticks.

If anything interesting comes out of it I’ll post it

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I have been working on a mindMap that illustrates the kinds of activities, research and technologies that me and my co-workers do in our everyday practice. While I realize that this is somewhat specific to our company and the work that we do I thought it would be interesting to get feedback on it. I hope to refine this as we develop the practice.

So if you have anything that you’d like to share, please comment on Flickr.

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When the user is in control
Configurability, personalization and sharing are not considered technologies by most users, they are a base use case for their personal lives. People understand control in a very serious way, and they know when they have it and when they do not.

- - - -

A couple of months ago I was taking to Jon Lax at the Toronto Expression Around the Clock event. I told him that I wanted to focus on enterprise user experience design and he looked at me as if I said I wanted to bring haute couture to prison uniforms. It is not that the idea is preposterous it is just something that has always seemed highly unlikely.

In a post today Robert Scoble asks “Any of you have any ideas on how to make business software sexy?”

Many of the Enterprise Irregulars led by Vinnie Mirchandani have blown up and said that sexiness is in the eye of the beholder. Don’t Weep for Underappreciated Enterprise Software by Dan Farber on ZDnet is a good launching post to see what people are saying.

Michael Krigsman wrote that Robert misses the point:

When I’m at home using Twitter, a great example of cool consumer software, I want to be delighted, thrilled, entertained, and engaged. When I transfer money through my bank, which is certainly a non-sexy enterprise system, I demand the system work every time without fail. There’s a big difference between enterprise and consumer systems, a lesson I suspect Robert Scoble is about to learn.

Nick Carr counters Michael’s argument:

By perpetuating a false dichotomy between the friendliness of consumer apps and the seriousness of business apps, all that Krigsman is doing is giving enterprise vendors cover for continuing to produce software that’s difficult and unpleasant to use. Scoble’s asking the right question.

This is where the whole debate forks from what Scoble was taking about. Michael Krigsman goes on to rip on Nick Carr: Carr talks about applications being friendly and Krigsman thinks that means easy to use. This exposes what I think is a common misconception that a good experience is more than ease of use — people need to be engaged.

There are many examples of applications that are useful, dependable, interesting, very slick, but not many enterprise applications that are engaging. I think that the aspect of sexiness that is missing from enterprise applications is JOY. John Morkes of Expero Inc. at the closing keynote of CanUX 2006 talked about the Joy of Use (PPT). In this presentation there is an example of how Quicken was trying to make their signature application more enjoyable. This was well before the idea of enterprise2.0 and consumer experiences on the enterprise. Companies are aware that their products need to be friendly and that it means more than easy to use.

It reminds me of when I present interface mockups to corporate clients: they often have more than one colour in them. There is always someone who feels that they are too bright or flashy for their organization. The corporate aesthetic that prefers monochrome designs comes out of a time when 4-colour printing was too expensive for internal communications. So decades of blue on white drab has become the norm, making people feel uncomfortable with bright colours that they associate with the marketing of consumer products.

I’m afraid that consumer experiences on the enterprise will not be as revolutionary as we all hope but a slower evolution.

I hope to talk more about this in the future and it reminds me that we have not had an EnterpriseCamp in Toronto for quite some time.

I needed to add this list by Anshu Sharma. It is a pretty amusing idea, like there is a Victoria’s Secret catalogue for CIOs out there where you can ogle some sweet SaaS:

Here are five things that turn CIO’s on:

1. VIRTUALIZATION: A data center that has fewer wires, requires less energy and is easier to manage is nothing short of an IT dream.
2. SaaS: Ability to rapidly deploy new functionality without having to buy new hardware and go through lengthy implementation cycles – its sexy the way a husband cooking dinner is sexy way for a wife. Again, it takes a certain eye and maturity.
3. VISIBILITY: Call it Business Intelligence, Business Activity Monitoring or Complex Event Processing, the ability to have both senior executives and employees performing the actual tasks be able to get actionable intelligence is huge.
4. COLLABORATION: I recently attended a Cisco telepresence session and I don’t care who you are and what you smoke, that stuff is outright sexy. And so is Oracle’s Social CRM.
5. TRANSACTIONS: Yes, age-old transactional applications. When they just work, its sexy. The way a plain perfect old black dress just works.

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If you didn’t see the videos from FacebookCampToronto1 you can get those here.

Top Applications and Why They Work (Jesse Hirsh)

Introduction & Update from the last FacebookCamp (Roy Pereira/Colin Smillie/Andrew Cherwenka)

High level presentation on platform and best-practices (Ami Vora - Facebook Inc.)

How Many ways can you Market your Application Inside Facebook? (Roy Pereira)

Monetizing your Facebook Application (Greg Thomson)

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Everyone should go check out the capabilities section of the idea couture site. I personally find it very inspiring but I know it would not work for us. Mind you we are a stogy software development house not a hip design shop :-)

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Got to hang out at the first Toronto SharePointCamp and have a bunch of developer friends ask me, “What are you doing here, you’re not a developer”

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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.

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This is from Lawrence Liu’s Report from the Inside. It was posted a few months ago but it is one of those things I really like.

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Here is some pictures of the little hatchling.

~

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This is an amazing simple and straightforward presentation on why consumer web2.0 experiences need to infiltrate the enterprise. Without a familiar experience for your employess IT dollars will be wasted.

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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.

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Switching back to YouTube for this one.

Alec Saunders recently highlighted our little blog in a Tagging exercise and I am going to keep it going. Here are some blogs you should check out:

• Startup North
• Between Us - Audrey Carr
• Found in Translation
• Agency Time - Sam Ladner
• nForm

[tags]facebookcamp, BlogDay2007[/tags]

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I have ignored this blog too much lately. I will tend to it soon but for now it is summer and the chick is coming.

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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.

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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 :-)

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Info on the EEE PC

No comments about choking :-)

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

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If you don’t have Silverlight, Get it. If you want to see the Flash Video it is here.

Open Cities was a great event and I hope that we can get alot of material up on the wiki. I’d like to try to put up new topic of conversation that we could continue on the wiki shortly.

So be sure to check out the flickr photos and blog posts.

For now I have 3 recordings from the sessions yesterday that you can download below.

Open Source Chamber of Commerce hosted by Mark Surman

Download the MP3 of Open Source Chamber of Commerce ( 22 megs )

Open and Weak vs Closed and Strong hosted by Luigi Ferrara

Download the MP3 of Open and Weak vs Closed and Strong ( 30 megs )

Collaborative Municipalities hosted by Mike Smith

Download the MP3 of Collaborative Municipalities ( 37 megs )

Video Embed Code
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://agappdom.net/g/silverlight.js"></script><script type="text/javascript">function CreateSilverlight(){Sys.Silverlight.createHostedObjectEx({source: "streaming:/7325/OpenCities2007",parentElement: OpenCities2007Wrapper});}</script><div id="OpenCities2007Wrapper" style="width:480px; height:400px; overflow:hidden;"></div><script type="text/javascript">var OpenCities2007Wrapper = document.getElementById("OpenCities2007Wrapper");CreateSilverlight();</script>

[tags]opencities, opencitiestoronto2007[/tags]

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If you don’t have Silverlight, Get it. If you want to see the Flash Video it is here.

Microsoft put on a great event this weekend. 2007’s EnergizeIT was a good day.

Thanks to everybody who encouraged me to go from Microsoft - Mark, John, David, Jean-Luc, Barnaby, Paul, Daniel, Qixing, Bristowe

If you want to play this on your site try this code
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://agappdom.net/g/silverlight.js"></script><script type="text/javascript">function CreateSilverlight(){Sys.Silverlight.createHostedObjectEx({source: "streaming:/7325/EnergizeIT",parentElement: EnergizeITWrapper});}</script><div id="EnergizeITWrapper" style="width:500px; height:400px; overflow:hidden;"></div><script type="text/javascript">var EnergizeITWrapper = document.getElementById("EnergizeITWrapper");CreateSilverlight();</script>

[tags]EnergizeIT, Microsoft, Democamp[/tags]

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It is a theme that aims to be anything and to be the best at being anything. It degrades beautifully. It embraces the best available practices in blog design.

So actually the Sandbox is a lot of things:

• Very beautiful on the inside
• For WordPress 2.0.x through 2.2.x
• Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• Widgets plugin-friendly
• The basis for innumerable designs, themes

More importantly, the Sandbox can be a lot of things. The real feature of the Sandbox is its markup. The use of class-generating functions in key elements (the body, post div, and comment li elements) creates the most extensible WordPress theme available.

[tags]Sandbox, wordpressthemes, webstandards, microformats[/tags]

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Get the Quicktime version here.

Jeff Parks puts out a great Podcast called the IA podcast and last week he was at Mesh. So he did a session with a bunch of great people on UX & Community and I wasn’t in it. WHATS UP WITH THAT. Bryce is in it but not me. Well you should go check it out anyway.

[tags]userexperience, ux, jeffparks, torcamp, mesh07, barcamptoronto, thechickentest[/tags]

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My co-organizers Audrey, Kaleem and Lindsay worked very hard to put the event together. I hope they got as much out of the event as I did.

Session notes and slides from the event.

• Jon Lax - The Experience Divide
• Sam Ladner - TimeandIxD
• James McNab - Values-based IxD
• Audrey Carr - Designing Sustainable Conversations Through Social Media
• Lee Dale - Brand Communities

I encourage people to keep adding material to the wiki.

Our great sponsors

We had great sponsors for the event and I’d really like to thank them for their support.

• Microsoft
• Critical Mass
• Techsmith
• Usability Matters
• Canux 2007 by nForm

Keep the community going

I urge people to check out more events by Barcamp Toronto (TorCamp) and the UXIrregulars like the upcoming CaseCamp, VisThink , Energize IT and Open Cities events.

Another event people should really check out is this years CanUX. CanUX2007 - The Canadian User Experience Workshop. I have attended these for the past two years and it is the best kept conference secret going.

[tags]InteractionCamp, BarCampToronto, TorCamp, EnergizeIT, OpenCities, Visthink, CaseCamp, Canux, Cannu2007[/tags]

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To get it in Quicktime

There is a silly trend by business people to call web 2.0 web2 and that is wrong and lazy. Keep social media about geeks and community. Semantics are important
Call it Web Two Point Oh.
Web Two has got to go.

I’m going to start using silverlight & silverlight hosting soon but I want to update my whole blog.

[tags]mesh07, barcampttw, enterprisecampttw, torcamp[/tags]

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There are a couple of posts about the event:

• Ben Vinegar
• Colin Henderson
• Deb Hartmann took some great notes on Mark Kuznicki’s discussion on the idea of whether or not Mozilla should invest more in promoting itself as a platform.

The organizers Ryan Coleman, willpate, Dan Kurtz and I would like to thank our sponsors:

• Idée Inc.
• Microsoft
• Faculty of Information Studies - University of Toronto
• Tucows
• Hyndman Law (Rob Hyndman)

EnterpriseCamp was today and it went really well. Sandy has some great posts about it.

So have a good tech week people of hogtown.

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http://barcamp.org/BarCampTorontoTechWeek

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I’m enjoying Mix this year and the keynote was pretty cool. The conversations are there but there are still some good old fashion whiz Bang demos. Silverlight looks amazing. I really hope it takes off.

At lunch today I talked Ian Muir and he felt the same way. All the marketer are like “videos with skateboards, AW YAH” and all the developers in the room are groaning.

[tags]mix07, microsoftmix, silverlight, MixKeynote[/tags]

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Matthew Milan & Sam Ladner

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 28 megs )

A mashup of scenario development and social learning, backcasting is a strategy framework that allows practitioners to successfully conceptualize, scope and structure multiple future states. It also provides a framework for successfully negotiating obstacles and threats to achieving those states. Originally used in the environmental planning field, backcasting has been hacked and refined for use in web strategy discovery activities.

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt MIllan & Gene Smith
• Project Touchstones how to bridge competing viewpoints and build vision consensus and innovation – Jess McMullin
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

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James Robertson

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 25 megs )

Within the enterprise space, it is often the case that even the problem to be solved is not well understood. For example, information architects may be approached with ill-defined ‘problems’ such as to improve the effectiveness of the intranet, to help call center staff to access required information, or to increase the uptake of the document management system

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• 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
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• 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, JamesRobertson, ethnography[/tags]

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