This October I gave a presentation at Mashery's Business of APIs conference, speaking about how our API provides hyperlocal headlines on CNN.com as a case study for how APIs can power business relationships between tiny startups and multinational corporations.
The slides and (ack!)video from the conference are up, so you can check them out. In all honesty, I still haven't worked up the nerve to watch the video myself, so perhaps, my friend, you could watch it and leave me encouraging remarks in the comments? Please???
As a ruthless pragmatist, I'm always frustrated by the lack of practical take-aways from a conference, and the unconference is no exception. The strength of the unconference is that it accepts that you won't decide anything or make anything today and instead forces group contribution and constant socialization. Instead of listening to pre-appointed speakers, some people propose some topics, everyone shows up to the sessions that interest them, and you all have a nice dinner-table conversation about your topic for an hour.
This helps you get the two most important things you came to get: A) connections with industry peers and B) renewed energy about your industry. Note that A would be impossible for someone as pathologically shy as yours truly without the crucial forced socializaiton component. I've been to a regular tech conference before and I could barely bring myself to say hi to the fellow sitting next to me.
Some silliness I could've lived with out: writing "as a result of today…" on a post-it note and sharing it with the group (mine: "…I know how it feels to have a job where you talk to people all day"), a poem/rap/limerick-writing competition about what we got out of the summit, and RWW trying to sell us their $300 (not a typo) report on The Real-Time Web and Its Future for half-price. These felt a little like two sleep-away camp activities and a visit to the Scientology world headquarters, respectively. The bit where we got to give wine to people we thought did something good during the day was a nice touch and not overly sentimental.
Session 1: Truth-Detection on the Real-Time Web
I joined this session a little late. When I got there we were talking about the phenomenon of people thinking articles from The Onion are "real" news—partly because Baratunde Thurston was there. Shava Nerad pointed out that "The Onion and Jon Stewart aren't fake news" so much as a humorous commentary on what's going on in the world that "points to the real news" with the intention of interesting people in getting more information about what's going on in the world. I've been reading The Black Swan, so I'm not really sure what the "real news" is, but I agree that The Onion and The Daily Show are intended to be farcical commentary rather than misinformation. They throw a wrench in our problem because they sometimes unintentionally spread misinformation.
We discussed the problem of identifying bad information and tracking it back to the people who are spreading it. Any method of automating this would face the problem of distinguishing between those who are knowingly propagating the misinformation and those who are ignorantly repeating it.
At some point, we triedtostartrumorthatJustin Bieber got arrested. This was probably not a great topic because apparently this rumor had already been going on. A few people retweeted Baratunde's tweet, but I don't think anyone else in the room had followers who would retweet anything Justin Bieber-related. I know I don't.
We came back a few times to the idea of eBay-esque ratings systems for individuals' and organizations' reliability, but were perplexed by the challenges of people gaming the ratings for personal and political reasons. I asked: "Even if the system was working perfectly and my rating was a legitimate measure of how often I'd shared correct information in the past, how much confidence can that give you that I won't get bad information and innocently share it with you in the future?"
We decided that to get information out fast but maintain your integrity as an information provider, you have to be willing to correct yourself. We talked for awhile about the disproportionate sizing of articles and corrections in mainstream media. As Shava said, "Say you got it wrong louder [than your original bad info] and get appreciated for it."
Writing this up later, I wonder if even large retractions and corrections would be effective, because the original misinformation will probably have been reposted many times before the retraction is online. People who reposted the story may not check back with the original source hours or days or weeks later. Maybe there needs to be some inverse of a pingback system whereby the orignal source of a story can update repostings with breaking info.
At the end we talked about the importance of educating young people to think critically about the information they find and share online.
Session 2: Collaborative Knowledge
My friend and former outside.intern Cody Brown convened this session and kicked it off by mentioning a Wall Street Journal article (perhaps this one?) that described Wikipedia as a "crowdsourced" encyclopedia in such a way that Cody thought the term "crowdsourced" was pejorative. He also mentioned a blog post by Chris Dixon (definitely this one) that had posited that the most important startups in the past decade had been based on collective knowledge, citing the goog, the wikipedia, delicious, Yahoo! answers, and Yelp.
We discussed the advantage that aardvark and quora have over Yahoo! Answers of letting people know where their crowdsourced information is coming from. I somehow hadn't heard of quora but signed up immediately and am loving it. Whereas aardvark feels very invasive coming in through IM (which I hate with the fire of a thousand grandmothers) and never got my interests right enough to ask relevant questions, I have checked quora at least four times since I signed up on Friday and have found some extremely relevant questions that I really want to answer, such as: "How does outside.in get their traffic?" and "Why do some companies still force their employees to use IE6?".
We talked about what motivates people to contribute to collective knowledge and came up with two main buckets of motivation:
the super-user model, exemplified by (ma)gnlolia's "gardener" status, wherein people get privileges, influence, and recognition for contributing
the selfish motivation model, exemplified by bit.ly and delicious, wherein most users shorten links or save links for their own use, while unwittingly adding to a pool of knowledge about what URLs people are sharing and clicking on
Session 3: Semantic Analysis of Activity Stream Data
In this session we talked about the difficulties of doing semantic analysis on short status updates with a modicum of data to analyze and no standard taxonomy for presenting data. The only taxonomy that's been presented so far—hashtags—has been overrun with spam.
We didn't decide much in this session—the topic was a bit too specific and practical, and the number of attendees was a bit too small.
We discussed the tribulations of getting users to proactively add metadata to short status updates and the relatively small adoption rate of twitter location. A representative from TwitJobSearch mentioned that they crawl the links from Twitter profiles to get extra metadata about the tweets they analyze.
This session started out with four people in camera-less Section G (where, coincidentally, every session I participated in took place), but about 15 minutes in some folks from justin.tv came in and asked if we'd mind being moved to Section D, where sessions were being streamed live and, of course, recorded. The group quickly grew to six, then 10, then 15 people, with a few strays rotating in and out to see what all the streaming fuss was about, I suppose.
You can watch the video here if you want to see the whole thing, or check out my summary below the embed. I don't say too much—the other participants were pretty talkative—but if you're inclined to watch, there's a continuous shot of me alternating my best serious gaze between my co-participants and my computer whilst doing the following:
If you skipped out on the video, here are my notes from the session:
We started talking about foursquare and its privacy concern pretty quickly. Someone said that "foursquare is better at showing where you were than where you are," and we wondered if location becomes less important the less real-time it is. I pointed out (uh, rhetorically) that even if I had tweeted the latitude and longitude I had just shared privately with echo echo cofounder Nick Bicanic, I don't personally believe that my precise whereabouts at a single given moment make me particularly vulnerable. I didn't get to my rationale, but it's this: The cost of acting on real-time geographic information is extremely high. I don't think anyone wishes me ill that decisively.
We discussed the possibility of an "eBay for cabs" mobile app would allow you to share your location with cab drivers and find out how far away they are. Apparently such a one exists in San Francsico—it's called cabulous.
Bob Wyman—who had a lot to say on the subject—told us that his daughter carries an Android phone and uses Latitude to share her whereabouts with him so he doesn't necessarily have to call her and yell at her if she's stayed out too late. He also speculated that Abby Sunderland (the 16-year-old girl who went missing whilst sailing around the world alone) would've been a lot happier if she could've shared her precise location with people who were looking for her during her rescue mission. I wondered if she could've known that before her mast broke—making a solo trip around the world in a sailboat being of course one of the most brazenly independence-seeking things a 16-year-old girl might do—and congratulated Bob on having such a great relationship with his daughter that she surrenders her exact location to him at all times. I know my brother would've had part of no such thing as a teenager. Nic Luciano of GetGlue quipped "I'd be more likely to give a cab driver my lng and lat than my father." Ha!
Nick mentioned his feeling that the tendency to document our lives at every step—say, by checking in on foursquare as soon as we sit down at the table and tweeting a picture of our meal before we eat it—is a bit absurd in its interference with actually leading our lives. Bob countered by referencing a 1945 article from The Atlantic called "As We May Think" that suggests such documentation long before the age of "lifecasting" and "oversharing." I haven't read it yet, so don't spoil it for me in the comments, ya hear?
Personally, I found continuously tweeting pictures and observations from my trip to Ireland last year extremely helpful in reviewing and labeling with correct dates and locations the photos from my real camera after I got home. At the very least, we're making it easier to sort our photo albums and write our own histories by tracking our lives in real-time.
In Sum
I hope my notes help some people remember their sessions or participate vicariously. I'm looking forward to reading some other folks' writups. You can also check out the official ReadWriteWeb Photo Roundup from the event if you fancy.
My fave project in the ITPSpring Show last night was definitely AL-gorithm by Alex Kaufmann(seemingly unlinkable).
Wanting to experience language the way a computer does—as meaningless packets of information—Alex printed up 22 copies of his favorite passage of All the King's Men and cut out all but every instance of a single letter on each sheet.
The finished product is 22 sheets of paper with seemingly random placements of a single letter that create the full passage when stacked on top of each other in any order.
The very best thing about this project—aside from the Brian Dettmer-esque OCD required to complete it—is that it's basically the opposite of Raymond Queneau's Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (see this great interactive version). Each unit of Hundred Thousand Billion Poems has its own meaning, but reordering the strips destroys the original meaning of the original poem (and rarely produces new coherent meaning)—and in AL-gorithm each page has no human-decipherable meaning, but reordering them preserves the original text. Cool!
The only thing it needs is a better title. How 'bout a quote from Queneau? "Oh reader thinking thus your heart will lock."
A little mechanical and electrical engineering porn [via Google Blogoscoped] to start the week off right:
Embedded video doesn't usually work in RSS readers or scrapers. Check out the actual post.
My fave part is when the technician goes into a container to swap out some hardware on a scooter, referred to by the narrator as his "Google-provided personal transportation device." Hilari!
I somehow missed the muchdocumented inaugural flight, so I was shocked and psyched to see the BetaBlue pamphlet, but saddened to read that the WiFi provided no actual web surfing, but only email and instant messaging…and only through Yahoo!?!
According to Engadget, "If all goes well in what is admittedly a beta test, more aircraft will receive the WiFi makeover, and more features [...] will be rolled out, along with additional service providers besides Yahoo."
Well that's a relief! JetBlue, if you're listening, keep in mind that we'd rather have the option of paying to get service-agnostic access than be limited to an account with a contacts list that's about three years outdated, eh?
Of course offering WiFi at all — especially free WiFi — puts JetBlue light years beyond any other airline (and just reinforces their status as my all-time favorite airline), but seriously: We get that you don't want to give unlimited internet access, but don't tell us whose servers will be holding our emails and IMs.
Oh, and btw: What on earth does free Yahoo! email and IMing on your planes have to do with an RSS icon? If we can only log into Yahoo! email and Yahoo! messenger, we pretty much by definition cannot access our ballooning number of unread items in Google Reader. Ya know?
