from chaos

Chris Anderson on freeing technology’s anti-inflationary power.

Anderson brings up important points on balancing environmental protection and global costs of living. Are parts of our environmental protection effort creating unnecessary scarcity? Are countries’ economic protections driving prices up artificially?

I’d add some questions of my own. Are we pushing for or supporting government policies that are holding back the development of technologies that will free us from scarcity of energy or food? Are we selecting technologies without fully viewing their secondary effects (such as ethanol leading to scarcer food corn and driving up global food prices)? Are we allowing our preconceived notions about technologies rob us of their economic (or other) benefits?

I don’t agree with all of Anderson’s suggestions, but I agree with what I believe is the central thesis. We need to consider more carefully the decisions we’re making about what technologies we favor and which we discourage. We have to consider the secondary effects of these decisions if we’re to act wisely and achieve sustainable prosperity.

Early this summer I flew United into Denver to attend a family reunion. Anyone that flies there regularly can tell you that the most consistent difficulty in flying into Denver is the turbulent air.

This last time was no exception, we had persistent rough air all through the flight, which presented a service problem.

Because turbulence is the #2 cause of injuries for flight attendants company policy prohibits flight attendants from providing drink or food service while going through turbulent air, so the flight attendants were unable to serve drinks or even leave their seating areas.

Not knowing why we weren’t getting drink service, folks started to get unhappy and complain.

When they saw people were displeased, the flight attendants moved to explain the situation, why they couldn’t provide service, and an estimate from the captain about how long it would be until we got out of the rough patch and they could start service.

Then the flight crew really impressed me. The captain got on the PA, apologized for the delay in drink service, and gave an estimate as to when we’d be through the rough air based on weather information from air traffic control.

The flight crew provided us information about why we weren’t getting service and estimates from multiple levels of authority as to when the service would begin. It didn’t magically change the circumstances, we still had to be patient, but their being so up front about the situation helped us to refill our reservoirs of goodwill.

A small effort to communicate status helped us feel like we were being properly cared for and curtailed the urge to criticize and complain.

At TED 2006, Hans Rosling presented some cool data visualizations created to shed light on trends in Human Development (specifically health and economic prosperity).

He and his nonprofit Gapminder have done some cool things with visualization to bring out aspects of the data that get ignored, but as he notes, we haven’t got the holy grail yet. Looking through the Gapminder site, it looks like all the visualizations are hardwired to a specific dataset. This pairing of presentation to specific data provides punch to items like their Dollar Street 2003 Shockwave presentation, which includes home walkthrus comparing lifestyle across the world’s economic ranges. (Very cool.) But it leaves me on my own if I want to apply the kind of graphing methods he presents to a dataset that Gapminder isn’t taking on.

It seems to me the next natural step with more general visualization tools like those in Rosling’s TED presentation (even more than searchability) is to develop a visualization system that lets analysts and decision makers apply the same sort of visualizations over their own data, or better, over multiple datasets from multiple sources, providing the same plotting, subset exploding, curve overlays, and multi-axis visualization. Move from delivering the individual visualizations to providing the tools to create the visualizations.

Some very cool stuff they’ve done already though. Shows the power of visuals to convey a message.

Seeking new technologies to leverage a couple months ago, I had an opportunity to review microformats as a way of making content more portable on a site project.

Content + microformats = crazy delicious

It’s easy to find developers and markup standardistas lauding microformats as the next great thing, and as a currently-implementable stepping stone to the semantic web. That being the case, I’ll say that the possibilities microformats provide for easing data export, streamlining content updating, and easing data collection burdens for users are wonderful.

Deferring dreams

I only see one cloud trying to darken microformats’ day… browser support.

Despite how cheaply (in the 37signals sense) developers familiar with hCard can encode contact info, I’ve found it difficult to recommend to many customers that they make significant use microformats on their web sites due to the low payoff compared to the cost.

Microformats are wonderful (remember the crazy delicious comment?), but for a number of customers, this technology shoots wide of their target audiences. Personally, I get stoked when I see Tails’ microformat icon appear in my status bar. But the Tails icon is a great representation of the problem: I’m getting excited over a Firefox extension’s behavior, not a regular browser behavior.

I’m an outlier.

Most of the folks using my recent customers’ sites haven’t heard of microformats, and forget about Tails or any other Firefox extensions. Most of them know Firefox as “that browser that’s trying to take on IE.” The more tech savvy among them will have heard that Bill Gates said something about “we need microformats,” but won’t necessarily know what that means. (To be honest, since that’s all I’ve seen from Microsoft about microformats, I’m not entirely sure what it means myself. Can we look forward to microformat support in future versions if IE, are we doomed to another “embrace and extend,” or is it just talk?)

Despite my love for them, I don’t believe microformats will influence the experiences of “ordinary” users (many of our customers’ customers) until microformat detection and data export are built into IE and cleanly import into Outlook and similar applications. (I want to see the same functions built into Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and all their related browsers and all the various email clients, but until “alternative” browser use ceases to be alternative, it’s all about getting Microsoft to adopt.)

A less oft quoted part of Gates’ proclamation on microformats is that we need “to get people to agree on them.” My read: Until we have agreement on microformats, browser makers won’t be able to read them out of the box, so don’t expect us to deliver this innovation to the masses anytime soon.

hOpe

Fortunately, I think much of the work on standardizing microformats has been done. A number of microformats are established and well documented. Developers are using these documented formats on their sites, and enterprising companies are providing microformat based searching. Google’s Usage Rights feature and Yahoo’s Creative Commons search checks rel-license links for specific flavors of Creative Commons licenses, and Technorati provides a microformat search covering contacts, events, and reviews marked with the relevant (hCard, hCalendar, hReview) microformats.

But even with Google and Technorati showing what cool things are possible with microformats, we will have to drive adoption.

Delivering the dream

If the web’s awash in well formed, standards compliant microformat content, the browser makers won’t be able to ignore it, and they won’t be able to claim that the target’s moving too much to justify the development costs to support microformats.

What about the client problem, you ask?

We have a pretty good sense which clients won’t really gain anything from microformats. We have a similarly solid sense of which clients would benefit and would be interested in what microformats can do for them given the proper introduction.

We also know how to make microformat adoption as cheap as possible on our end. The lower the cost for entry, the easier it will be to sell clients on it or just include it as a value add.

And, just a guess, I’m thinking that most of us have one site or another that’s ours to command, maybe even a few family and friends’ sites that are ripe for a quick implementation.

Old time religionin’

And there’s always spreading the word with those we work and play around. Share the gospel of microformat goodness. As people see how microformats will help them kick ass, ((In wonderful Kathy Sierra “help your users kick ass” ways)) they’ll start looking for microformat support. Just ask Derek and Will, once you’ve got an audience on your side, you’re golden. The more people that see what the web could be, the more there will be pushing for it to happen.

As the excuses fall away and user demand mounts, it will be too expensive for browser makers not to support microformats. And we’ll have successfully taken over the world.

This has been sitting in the drafts folder neglected for a good 7 months, time to let it free…

Though I didn’t make it a priority when it first hit, the new Battlestar Galactica series has had my attention since last spring. Being a latecomer to Firefly, and having decided to try and catch some of the Buffy episodes I’d missed on DVD, I already had plenty of tv to fill any time I felt like devoting.

I enjoy BSG at a general level, but one very specific thing impressed me from the start: the series’ narrative allows the Cylons (the androids that looked like chrome toasters in the original series) their reasons for fighting against the Colonials (the humans looking for earth) and allows them their beliefs about what they’re doing. The structure More and Eick have chosen for conveying the story gives viewers a look at the Cylons’ “side” of things, and their activities when “unobserved” by the Colonials suggests that their belief that they’re doing the work of god is sincere. ((At the time I wrote this, 6 was the primary speaker for the Cylons, Leobon was the only other self-aware (non sleeper) Cylon that had really spoken. Since finishing Season 2, I’d only qualify it with a “some Cylons’ belief is sincere.”))

I find this refreshing in contrast to the treatment of the machines in the earlier parts of the Matrix series. (I’m specifically speaking from having seen The Matrix, The Animatrix, and Matrix Reloaded.) To be fair, it’s a question of where the viewer’s placed as the story’s told. The audience is led to identify with the humans and in the original Matrix film, never leaves the psychological perspective of the human characters, where BSG allows the viewer to experience both subjectivities, if only briefly on the Cylon side. (Since I wrote this we got to stretch around in 6′s head for a bit, so a little less on the “if only briefly.” Excellent television.)

The Animatrix provides further insight into what led to The Matrix continuity’s human-machine war in the history segments (The Second Renaissance). These sections aren’t entirely unsympathetic to the raw deal the machines got from humanity, but even with its sympathies, the story is again told from the human’s side. Matriculation‘s “machine rescue” story provides the best look into machine subjectivity, but again we run into subjectivity problems in the final depiction. We see problems with humanity in the way the “rescuers” are happy to use human friendship, romance, and sexuality to coax the machines into switching sides, but unwilling to extend actual friendship, love, or sexual contact. Problem is, in the end the depiction leads us to sympathize with the rescuing woman’s horror at a machine wanting to be romantically involved with her. The machine is depicted in a form that’s just too alien for viewers to fully empathize.

So I find the BSG approach a refreshing change. The machines may be at least partly right. Right or wrong, it recognizes to some degree that “you can’t play god and then wash your hands of the things you’ve created.” It also doesn’t make the too frequent assumption in sci fi that machines can’t possibly have any claim to spirituality because they’re not biological creatures like us, as if biology were the key to the soul.

Story via American Public Media’s Marketplace.

Last year, TriWest Healthcare Alliance ran into a problem. Someone broke into their offices and ran off with hard drives containing the personal information of 550,000 customers, enough to steal the identities of customers “from privates in the military all the way up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Rather than hoping the story wouldn’t break, then notifying everyone after the press ferreted out the problem, TriWest CEO Dave McIntyre placed his customers’ interest first. He called a press conference to let his customers know their information had been stolen and spent between $1 and 2 million to provide fraud alerts and protection for their customers. Rather than pretending that the $@#% hadn’t hit the fan, he moved quickly to make things right.

What I found especially surprising were McIntyre’s comments about taking this kind of approach.

It’s what’s right for the customer. And I believe that if you keep your customer at the center, that things generally turn out right…

It’s a priviledge to have customers. Ultimately we’re all customers. And so we look at this from the standpoint of how would we want to be treated were we in their situation.

Since that incident, McIntyre has continued advocating for protecting customers’ personal information, testifying before congress and working with lawmakers to draft legislation requiring companies to notify customers of security breaches.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about placing customers first in different places I’ve worked, even more from companies with which I’ve been a customer. (Among them at least one bank who experienced a security breach like TriWest and didn’t notify me until the press and public pressure forced their hand.) I’m glad to see McIntyre step up to acknowledge problems and move quickly to protect customers rather than sit and wait to see if the other shoe drops.

Going through web app bookmarks on ma.gnolia tonight I happened on something curious: a prayer request management and tracking application.

At first I wondered if this was for real or if someone thought they’d channel their web 2.0 energy into a “2.0 for Jesus” satire.

Initial reactions aside, this makes a lot of sense for religious folk… a space where you can develop a community of prayer, sharing things you’re praying for with friends, getting to know friends of friends through praying for them and trading comments. (It wouldn’t hurt the more self serving goal of just keeping your prayer requests straight either.)

What I see as the big unknown quantity is whether people will be shy about sharing the things they’re praying for with the community at large. It provides ways to do so, and ways to limit prayer items to a specific list of friends. My initial guess would be that people will keep their sharing pretty tight, but then, I wouldn’t have guessed that I’d be so free as I am about sharing bookmarks through del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, or photos on flickr, so what do I know?

Jacob Nielsen has released information from their eyetracking study, F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Alertbox).

My initial reaction was a knee-jerk “well, duh.” Part of this is seeing similar results from other eye tracking studies, but it may be me trusting in assumptions about how people scan pages.

Seeing “common sense” assumptions reinforced by research tends to bring the “well duh” reaction, but the results are important. The evidence makes sure we’re not blindly following plausible or pleasing assumptions… the trick is making sure that our studies are designed to challenge our assumptions.Which isn’t a comment on the [Nielsen study,][study] but a general one. I’m assuming they’ve designed objectively.
[study]: http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/eyetracking.html “Nielsen Norman eyetracking course”

Mike Davidson has done the unthinkable: make a MySpace profile that doesn’t make designers’ eyes bleed.

Check out Hacking A More Tasteful MySpace for details, then take a look at the discussion on MySpace the great and powerful in Unstoppable Force or Unnecessary Click Factory?

As Mike notes, the profile page design is a bit of a lark, but it may help those of us that previously turned up our noses to suspend judgment sufficiently to properly analyze the site, look more deeply into community design, revenue, and site design issues, such as those covered in Click Factory.

As part of their Apple Turns 30 coverage, CNET’s showcasing photos of the early Lisa and Mac interfaces, courtesy of Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld.

For a somewhat less garish (though smaller) presentation of those same photos fortified with historical notes goodness, check out Hertzfeld’s “Busy Being Born” article on Folklore.org.

Whichever flavor you choose, it’s a nice look at some of the design decisions as they moved from the Lisa’s early softkey approach to the windowed interface we know and love. And considering the graphics capabilities of most computers at the time, those halftones are quite impressive.