dConstruct 2008: Steven Johnson: The Urban Web

Wants to start with "a rousing speech about intestinal disease".

London, 1854 - mired in its own filth. A Victorian city with an Elizabethan health structure, creating a smelly environment regularly swept by cholera, particularly in the summer. The smell was seen to be the cause: the miasma theory "all smell was the disease".

A public watering hole in Broad St gets contaminated. August 28, 1854 the first victim dies, and following on 10% of the neighbourhood dies in the next 2 weeks.

The story: John Snow works out that cholera is caused by filthy water and creates a map visualising deaths and their relation to contaminated pumps. Snow was a local physician who saw the concentrated outbreak in his community as an opportunity to identify the source of water and thereby prove his theory. He produced a diagram showing location of deaths plotting on a street map - though this itself was nothing new. But he also plotted on the map the area within which local residents would walk to get water - i.e. showing who would be affected by this pump. This disproved the link between miasma (smell) and disease.

Another significant individual: the Reverend Henry Whitehead (local vicar, 25-26yo) was well known in the neighbourhood as a "connector" figure. The pump was well known for its water quality (!) so Whitehead set out to disprove the theory through interviews with local residents, in the process often uncovering data supporting a link back to the infected pump and identifying individuals who had left the area. Whitehead eventually discovered "patient zero".

Snow & Whitehead has access to archives of open data, created in the previous century by William Far (sp?) and in a standardised format allowing consumers to identify deaths from cholera by geography. The idea behind this was that third parties might do interesting things with this data: Snow & Whitehead's first mashup!

Snow's incredible intellectual skill was the ability to move between levels - individuals up to the water system of all London - and draw conclusions. His map was "a social network of dead people" - those united by their disease.

Cholera never returned to London after 1866.

So, to the geographic web. The initial web kicked off in part because of having a standardised means of locating pages: the URI. Stacks can be built of top of this information only because you know where it is. We're now starting to get standardised geographic formats for data online (e.g. Google/Yahoo mapping APIs).

We have local expertise (knowledgeable sources of local information, spread via self-publishing in blogs), open standards for information, and visualisation/mapping tools.

We should be able to filer queries and provide results by "what people near me are saying". Yet in real life things that are said near to us matter more than things said further awau.

Demos "outside.in GeoToolkit" - to help authors Geotag their content properly, then examine it.

Another product: Radar. Takes a location, shows you what's happening in 1000ft from you, your neightbourhood, your city...

Amongst startups doing location products, there's a disproportionate emphasis on finding restaurants, local businesses, etc. Whilst this is valuable, there's a lot more to geography in everyday life.

Outside.in seems to provide a twitter-like feeling of connection to a location.

Geoweb could provide "eyes on the street" (quotes Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of American Cities" - sure I remember Adam Greenfield mentioning this at LIFT or PICNIC last year). These eyes, and the intelligence behind them, are what make cities great.

- snow go ethno

- what geo formats?

dConstruct 2008: Tantek Celik: Social Network Portability

Why does every social site make you

1. re-enter your personal information?
2. re-add all your friends?
3. turn off notifications?
4. re-specify privacy preferences?
5. re-block negative people?

Keeping multiple sources of info (social networks etc.) up-to-date is a maintenance problem.

The goal should be giving users complete control over their data. Portable data + consistent URL = data syndicatability.

Had an interesting chat with Mr Thorpe after this one, who raised the point that in many cases, you don't want to share your identity between sites: you want to maintain many identities and quite specifically compartmentalise them.

Leaving aside whether we can enable people to express very instinctual and deep-seated behaviour explicitly... will they want to? Could we take the N different inconsistent versions of ourselves that we project in the real world (all the time lying to those we project to that yes, they're seeing the genuine article), XML-encode them and set them in concrete online?

dConstruct 2008: Joshua Porter, Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design

Web design is now about psychology; web designers need to learn about it to create decent experiences.

"Bandwagon effect": people often do and believe things because many other people do and believe things.

Heuristics: rules of thumb which prevent us from needing to gather all information required to make a judgement. Sometimes these don't work all that well - this is cognitive bias. e.g. "Not Invented Here", prediction biases which lead to underestimates of time to work.

Seminal paper on this is "Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974)"

Talks about a few biases:

1. Representation Bias.
2. Loss Aversion.
3. Ownership Bias.

These sometimes combine: in the sign-up problem, loss avertsion and ownership bias overvalue what they use by a factor of 3. Because of ownership and prediction biases, software manufacturers overvalue their products by about 3x - so there's a combined 9x dissonance between what they want to charge and what users want to pay.

Demonstrates Freshbooks, which emphasises number of users through a worldwide map showing them (encouraging bandwagon effect).

Q: isn't this evil?
A: It's more about business ethics.

(Sounds like a "guns don't kill people, people do" type argument).

See also Duncan's talk at XPDay last year. Alan Cooper also touched on this at Agile2008.

dConstruct 2008: Aleks Krotowksi: Playing the Web

The web industry and the games industry DO NOT MEET. Strange, given that web people don't talk about games.

Games are sticky. Some people die playing games; many people lose their lives playing them. Stickiness is important because of advertising. (Shows a Wordle of business plans from Seedcamp to demonstrate the important of advertising to business models).

What do game designers do to create this social web and stickiness?

Graphics? Games have great graphics, but some games (e.g. VIb Ribbon) have deliberately poor graphics and are still compelling. So it can't be graphics.

Story? Many games have strong stories. But traditionally the story is the last thing to be stuck onto a game system.

No, it's the stickiness of play. "The experience economy": a very boring term for the word "fun".

Games designers and developers use three systems to bring social elements into games:

1. Controlled systems: what designers explicitly build, deliberately giving reward and encouraging repeat play. The web does this - encouraging an investment of personal data in order to see more value. Also consider openness: creating spaces to play in, or sandboxes. Look at Grand Theft Auto world. Sometimes this backfires, in games which are too open and too large (e.g. Tomb Raider 3). But the web is enormously open, vast space. The challenge is to create a funnel that feels wide enough that you have freedom, whilst directing them towards an "ending goal"

2. Enabling systems: social phenomena emerge based on the design decisions made by developers. On the web we have community; in games there may have been some, but not a great deal until games met the web (with Everquest, WoW, etc.) (Not sure I agree with this: what about LambdaMOO etc?). Look at real-money transfers on ebay arising from virtual goods in online games: a community rallying around a virtual object with real social value. Game walkthroughs or FAQs might fit into this category. There's no need to create an economic model around your site to do this: look at PacManhattan, amillionpenguins.com, PerplexCity, or ludic visualisations.

3. Psychological systems: e.g. the relationship between avatar and reality (shows lovely slide of people photographed next to their avatars). But yet most of the web is personalised: MySpace, Facebook, but even before that pseudonyms/tags/avatar photos. Web developers see points-earning systems as a means of bringing gaming principles to the web. Look at PMOG as a game where you earn points for on-web behaviour (e.g. "don't use google for a week"). Game developers create beautifully efficient feedback systems to encourage repeat play, should they not engage with these types of things? Games developers and designers don't tend to use formal HCI, they tend to be instinctual by nature - and by and large do a good job of it, partially because games developers are making games for people like themselves. In contrast, the web industry tends to be applying their skils to create things for other audiences.
   

Why is there such little games representation at web events?

Ends with a call for a group hug between games and web industry, then questions.

Online games involving community in the form of MUDs/MOOs predated the web by quite a long time. How has the arrival of the web (as opposed to the improvements in graphics and UI) changed the way these communities operate

After last years event, where I did a panel session discussing mobile user experience with Marek Pawlowski, I've been invited back to talk again at the Future of Mobile 2008.

I'll be drawing on the experiences we've had at FP of delivering mobile services across a whole range of technologies, and talking about to decide where to put in effort when building and launching your product.

The quality of other speakers is, I'll confess, a little intimidating: many faces that'll be familiar from the London mobile scene (plus a few folks I've not had the pleasure of meeting yet), ending with what I'm sure will be a heated panel fight^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion chaired by Mike Butcher.

Slightly lower-key, it's Brighton Barcamp 3 next weekend (following closely on the heels of dConstruct 2008, which has been keeping Soph out of mischief for the last few months). Last year I was running on empty after travelling back from Black Rock City. This year I hope to actually stay awake long enough to do a talk... which looks like it'll either involve presenting our experiences adopting Scrum over the last year, or something about software development, martial arts and craftmanship (presuming I can OTA mind-meld with Mr Whiteland between now and then).

If you're coming and have any preference, do comment! From discussions with Ms Cottrell in the office and Mr Silver at the Tuttle club on Saturday, I think there's going to be a range of really interesting stuff going on...