Toluu

Radio Free Blogistan

It's an attention economy and we're all wearing eyeblink underwear -George Kelly

Pushing social patterns

One of my top priorities in my job as curator of Yahoo’s Design Pattern Library is to help polish up and publish to the wider web community a series of social-media oriented design patterns that our community platform team has been working on.

The first of this, Vote to Promote (a sort of generic “Digg This!” pattern) went live last week. There are more to come. The author of the pattern, Bryce Glass, has more to say about it in his blog, Soldier Ant, and I blogged about the pattern (and a new organizational scheme I’m trying out for the library, both the internal and open versions) at the Yahoo! User Interface Blog.

As always, we welcome feedback.

[by Christian Crumlish]

Reputation and Patterns at SXSW

Here’s my obligatory plug for my South by Southwest proposals. I’ve got two panels in contention at the cool-but-unwieldy Panel Picker, so I thought I’d provide some shortcuts here. A lot of folks feel that there are too many panels at SXSW and not enough solo presenters. I tend to agree, but I think the problem is really panels that are underprepared or have too many participants. After moderating a panel with five participants last year I’ve decided that that’s too many for a 45 or 50 minute slot. I think four (including moderator) is the max, and three or even two is probably ideal.

The first panel I’m proposing pertains to my ongoing book project (working title: Presence of Mind), on the subject of online/digital identity, reputation, attention, privacy, trust, and presence. Last year, my panel, Every Breath You Take (podcast, my slides) seemed to go over fairly well, despite the gawdawful 10 am but really 9 am because of daylight savings Sunday morning slot (you must recall that Saturday night - and, really, every other night - at SXSW involves a lot of drinking for most attendees.

I took to heart the positive and negative feedback and so the sequel this year will fea

links for 2007-09-12

• Demand Satisfaction! :: You decide who speaks at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival
  plug for one of my panels and a good model for recommending others
  (tags: innovation sxsw sxsw2007)
• Protoscript
  Bill Scott’s amazing Protoscript is a simplified scripting language for creating Ajax style prototypes for the Web. With Protoscript it’s easy to bring interface elements to life. Simply connect them to behaviors and events to create complex interactions.
  (tags: protoscript javascript ajax prototype ria richinteraction)

[by Christian Crumlish]

Build your own search robot at Searchbots

Back in February, Mark Zeman, Lecturer and Subject Director in Digital Media, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand, tipped me off to a search agent research project called Searchbots. I tagged it as something to blog about in my email and then, well, I got busy with my new job.

I’ve finally checked it out. Mark was clever enough to give me short precis of the project:

• Experimental social search engine created as a Masters in Design project.
• Build your own search robot and send it out to search on your behalf.
• Search using tags, location, color and mood, or ask a question.
• Get ongoing personalized reports and feeds.
• Talk to it and feed your Searchbot metadata to keep it alive.
• The more you interact with your Searchbot the better everyone’s results.
• Runs on top of API’s from Google, Yahoo, Digg & del.icio.us and more.
• Cross references popular Digg items with del.icio.us tags.
• Building an artificial intelligence using people’s common sense and clicks.
• 34,000+ Searchbots built.
• I

35 ways to draw more readers to your blog (a series)

23. Write lots of numbered lists.

[by Christian Crumlish]