The summary, again:

Customer Service is the New R&D
With forums, Get Satisfaction, good old email support and more, let your early adopters help build your product and create the solution they’ve been searching for. See how boot strapping start-ups (and some past the start-up days) build an online R&D lab to turn 1000+ voices into real features.

But enough about me. How ’bout some friends?

In addition to our panel, I’m asking you to toss a vote to some incredible nice and smart friends of mine.

They are (notes are mine):

Michelle Riggen Ransom : Social Media for Social Change

Michelle’s blog and writings at PopTech! are jampacked with all sorts of non-traditional applications of social media. You can’t help but walk away with new ideas.

Joshua Porter : Managing Your Online Identity Outside the Walled Garden

Joshua will be presenting with John Eckman. Seems like everybody is trying to get into this space lately, but who’s doing it well? The site that finally nails the UX for this problem wins.

Joshua Porter : Designing for Sign-Up

Really, it doesn’t get much more important than signup. This is the last step before a user commits to your product. Don’t lose them at the last step!

Brian Oberkirch : Try Making Yourself More Interesting

Seriously, you just have to experience the Oberkirch. Vote for it. And then make sure you don’t miss it.

Saul Colt : Personality Marketing Doesn’t Mean You Are Ugly!

Saul Colt : Building Personal and Company Brands with Web 2.0 Tools

I’m becoming quite the Saul Colt fanboy. Saul’s WOM work with FreshBooks has been nothing short of inspiring.

John Eckman : Managing User Generated Content

John Eckman : Open Source and Design: Ideologies Clashing

John (wow, I’ve only ever called him jeckman…) is an open source guru… really looking forward to Open Source and Design. I’ve always been curious why designers don’t get more involved in open source when developers are so into it.

Mario Sundar : The Future of Corporate Communications

Mario handles corporate communications with LinkedIn (who are famously open with their users). His views on the topic carry serious weight.

Aarron Walter : No Web Professional Left Behind: Educating the Next Generation

Aarron is a designer, author, teacher… I’m not sure there’s anything he doesn’t do. He also is spearheading the Web Standards Project’s Education Task Force.

Kit Seeborg : Your Name Sucks!

I first “met” Kit through WebVisions—she’s the organizer of the event. This panel started as a Twitter discussion and ends up in the Panel Picker.

Jim Barcelona : How to Make Your Own Web Scripting Language

Barce apparently is a wizard who can write his own scripting languages. I had no idea!

David Peck : What Does A Community Manager Do?

My friend Connie Bensen is on this panel. Connie has been a community management superstar over the past year, building her profile like nobody I’ve ever seen.

So, did I miss anyone? Anything you’re particularly looking forward to?

I’ve heard a lot of people complain that FriendFeed is an uncontrollable firehose of data. I disagree. If anything, I’ve found that with a few tweaks it can actually help you manage your information better. Here’s a few tips:

You Don’t Have to Follow Everyone

This one sounds obvious. But ever since I started subscribing to feeds or following folks on Twitter, I’ve been very selective about adding A-listers. Why? Those folks tend to produce a hell of a lot of content. Following too many prolific A-listers can really turn your feedreader into a mess.

My theory has always been to follow bloggers with whom you share similar interests. They’ll tend to chime in about the stuff that’s worth talking about. I’m thinking of Brian Oberkirch here. You can’t believe how much time I’ve saved over the last two years by reading Brian and NOT reading other people.

FriendFeed gets this. I don’t need to follow Robert Scoble. I just wait for some of my friends to let me know when they’re interested in something Robert posted. It appears in my feed like so:

Never Miss an Important Tweet Again

I’ve already talked about how I can filter my FriendFeed feed by service, letting me read all tweets on Twitter and not duplicate them on FriendFeed.

But, I’m hitting that “following” threshold that makes it difficult to keep up with EVERY tweet on Twitter. So, if I only have time to skim the last few pages of tweets or I go offline for a few hours (or, more realistically, Twitter does) and can’t catch up on every tweet, FriendFeed will let me know which of my friends’ tweets are being “liked” or commented on.

Follow Stuff that was Previously Clunky to Follow

Does Del.icio.us even have a “friends” feature? I don’t even know. It very well might.

If it does, nobody uses it. And that’s a shame. Think about the mundane things you find yourself reading about folks on Twitter. Then, when you consider that you’re missing an important activity like taking the time to read an article online and save it for later… It’s crazy.

It’s true that everyone with a Del.icio.us account has had an RSS feed, but with FriendFeed it has never been so easy to subscribe to all of someone’s services at once. There’s gold in those Del.icio.us feeds. And the more you rely on your friends’ bookmarks, the less you’ll need to subscribe to a billion blogs.

Saved bookmarks on Del.icio.us appear as individual entries in FriendFeed. This is awesome because now I can see, for example, what Joshua Porter is bookmarking. Chances are, if he’s bookmarking it, I want to read it.

I used to appreciate when people would have a post of “this week’s links on Ma.gnolia” or whatever. I didn’t want to have to hunt for their bookmark feeds. But now, there’s a downside to those blog posts. I’m now subscribed (through FriendFeed) to the blog feed AND the social bookmarking feed. That means I get duplicate content.

But, FriendFeed has all sorts of options for hiding this duplicate content. For example, if you have a FriendFeed friend who has social bookmarking links published in their blog feed, you can just hide all social bookmarking entries from that person. Similarly, you can turn off the other two features I profiled here—you can choose not to see friend of friends’ content or tweets that people “liked”/commented on.

So, FriendFeed can be a firehose, I suppose. But they have put a lot of tools in place to help you turn down the pressure.

SXSW likes to elicit the opinions of attendees when choosing who will speak on the tens of millions of panels that occur that week. They set up the panel picker to allow you to rate panel ideas (723 of them right now) from 0–5 (with “5″ going to a panel that you’d basically attend SXSW just to see).

I haven’t really picked panels before, but I’m doing it this year. I’m going the “honest” route—not just voting for buddies, but actually voting for topics I want to see. I have voted for 43 panels so far and I wanted to share some of those in case you want to support them as well (or in case I forgot some).

I gave four panels a “5″:

1. How to Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Web Site: Kit Seeborg is chairing this. She chaired the Webvisions panel that basically triggered the transformation of my career. Another similarity between the two panels is the presence of Jeremiah Owyang. You know I’m a fan. Add Tara Hunt and Shel Israel and this one has huge name power. But it’s not about name power. I’m actively developing a corporate web site, a corporate blog, a support portal, user forum… I want to make all of this work together.
2. Kick It Like Pele: Beautiful Touches for World Class Apps: Brian Oberkirch (man, yet another from that old Webvisions panel) heads up this one. With him will be Jeff Veen from Google. This panel will focus on the little touches that can make a web application truly unique and successful. Since I’m working on a web app… like, 24 hours a day… this is totally relevant. I need to keep an eye on the little touches that can delight the user.
3. Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing: Yeah, this one is going to be awesome. Oberkirch. Owyang. David Parmet (who was part of one of the highlights of last SXSW) and Deb Schultz. These people are among the top minds in modern marketing… or “un” marketing… or marketing 2.0… or—actually shutting the eff up and working with the gosh darn actual users to make your product better. I want to be a better person, so I’m going to this one.
4. Interface Design & Development Behind the Scenes: Simplicity is beautiful. Garrett Dimon’s blog is proof. Sometimes I feel I’ve strayed a bit from actual design work at some of these conferences. It’ll be great to see someone who really does great work present a couple of case studies.

I have rated ten panels as 4s, including Social Design Strategies (Emily Chang), Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World (Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton), Using Color: From Black to White and Everything in Between (Veerle Pieters)—so I can start to let go of gray, Social Networking and Your Brand (Jina Bolton with Paul Boag & others), Designing Social Media: Interface Tricks and Tips (Christina Wodke), Building Portable Social Networks (Jeremy Keith), and Becoming a Web App Machine (Daniel Schutzsmith).

See any good ones I’m leaving out?

Joshua Porter posted a great article yesterday on Bokardo called “Sermo a sign of a larger trend toward specialized social networks“. In the post, Joshua says:

Sermo is a sign of a larger trend: the move to smaller, more specialized social networks that have custom tools to support a unique activity and may cater to a private or exclusive set of users. In this case it is sharing medical information among verified doctors.

I’ve blogged about Sermo in the past. I love what they are doing—creating an exclusive social network for physicians so that they can discuss medical issues long before they hit the journals (and are likely more candid than journals). Of course, they are raising a little hell as the pharmaceutical companies can no longer control their messages delivered to each physician. They are (gasp) talking to each other.

If it is possible to have a crush on a company, you know I’m in love with PatientsLikeMe. I left a comment about them on Josh’s blog, so I’ll just repeat myself:

On the other side of the medical spectrum, I’ve spoken with a few folks from Boston-based PatientsLikeMe, another example of a specialized social network. They are a network for the patients. I love that instead of Amazon’s “customers who bought this also bought this…” intelligence, they have “patients at the exact same stage of ALS as you who are experiencing these symptoms that you are have taken these medications and felt these side effects.”

Ridiculously amazing.

The market of “just because” social networks is now bloated. In order to take off you’re going to need one of these specialized networks that offers something nobody else can. One key to that can be taking detailed profile data and using it to help foster your users’ social interactions (like PatientsLikeMe, and others such as last.fm).

Damn, reading that back, it sounds good. You can tell I love this idea. I recently joined Facebook. I yawned about it here. All I’ve done with it is insert widgets into my profile of specialized networks I have elsewhere (last.fm, Flickr, Twitter) and add friends that I have elsewhere. I find Facebook doesn’t really do anything more than my personal blog already does—act as an aggregator for all this information.

So, these specialized networks—last.fm (for tracking my music listening habits), del.icio.us (for storing my bookmarks), Flickr (for storing my photos), Twitter (for microblogging, public IM, whatever the hell you wanna call it), etc.—offer a hell of a lot more value than the “aggregator” social networks. You can easily hop to another aggregator (or create your own) and add the specialized content to that new profile. You still need the specialized services, but the Facebooks and MySpaces become expendable.

Then there’s OpenID and portable social networks (via Oberkirch). Once these reach their enormous potential, what really is the purpose of Facebook or MySpace?

Whenever there’s Jeremiah and Brian in one place, you know I’m sure to cover it.

Brian touches on (among other topics):

• Developing web apps outside of The Valley (see my notes on his SXSW panel)
• How companies can use blogs as outreach to become thought leaders, getting their name out there. Then, they can provide services to those interested (37signals model).
• Don’t use social media as spam. Use it as a focus group.
• Marketers are dinner party hosts. Link people and companies that can help each other.
• Marketing is moving towards “small good things” and away from blasting out big ad campaigns.

These are two great guys that were huge in getting me started on my path away from the traditional ignorant design approach. They helped teach me that design is more than just making something functional to fill a need. There are ways you can engage the user base and collaborate with them to make something really special. This approach has been career-changing for me.

Yeah, I had to look it up, too.

Meryl tagged me on a couple levels. First, she presented me with an “Inspirational Blogger Award.” I’m not really sure what to say about that. There are a lot of people out there far more inspirational than myself (I mean, I can’t think of how I am at all). Meryl seemed to like the whole “blog is the new resume” story, so perhaps she was inspired by that.

The meme says that I in turn have to award the blog awards. For “Inspirational Blogger”, it is very hard for me to pick. A ton of bloggers have inspired me. Would it be a cop out to name the crew of Dan, Brian, Jeremiah, and Joshua? For”Courageous Blogger” (the award Meryl was given), I’ll give it to Kathy Sierra. She took a stand after dealing with crap she shouldn’t have had to. She did what was right, though I feel like I’m not as smart a person when she’s not blogging. Kathy could also get “Creative Blogger Award,” but Tara is also quite deserving. I’ll stop there since what I mostly read are tech blogs and those are the ones that fit best.

Not done there, Meryl also tagged me to reply to a meme about revealing tips for dealing with problems (or dealing with adversity, as the original post said). I have five to offer off the top of my head. While most relate to solving technical problems, some can work at a higher level as well.

1. Figure out the high-level problem. This will actually allow you to solve all issues related to the greater problem. This way you can avoid simply endlessly applying band aid after band aid.
2. Get a baseline to work from. This one works best in interface design. A lot of things go into an interface. There are tons of decisions to make. To avoid feeling overwhelmed, you just have to make a first version. You will throw all of it away, but you need to have something to look at to say “I don’t like that.” Otherwise, you’ll never know what you want.
3. Don’t dwell. This one rises above software design. Is this problem really the end of the world? Probably not. I’m totally a “make lemonade” guy. Hell, I love lemonade. Not that crap made from powder, though.
4. Do the other little things first so you can focus. No, it’s not procrastonating. It is eliminating one of the additional stresses you have—the stuff you have to do AFTER you solve this impossible problem. When all that’s left is the impossible problem, you can focus on just that.
5. Get another set of eyes. I’m not ashamed to run something by someone else. I love feedback. It’s why I listen to Mogwai.

So, I hope that fit the bill. I think I survived my first memetag.

I’d have five cents.

So, I trimmed my RSS list not long ago and made a category called “Must Reads”. I’ll share those here:

• Brian Oberkirch: The ultimate aggregator
  
• Joshua Porter: Social web design
• Creating Passionate Users: Empowering user to kick ass
• Jeremiah Owyang: Social media guru, though he digs far deeper than I do
• Dan Cederholm: Because he’s my hero
• Chris Messina: He’s just got his finger on everything
• Tara Hunt: Pinko marketer extraordinaire
• Guy Kawasaki: The legend
• Ryan Carson: Just because I love all of his ventures

I know, for a “designer” it’s a little light on design blogs. But I figure if anything too crazy is talked about in the design world, I can get that from Dan or Chris. I also listen to Paul Boag’s Boagworld podcast, which helps out on that front. But what can I say? I love the strategy side of things.

Brian’s obviously thinking of the same thing, and he writes:

… the best way to get users from beginners to intermediate users is to take away their fear of making mistakes with the app. If they feel like they can’t permanently mess things up, they’ll fiddle with the knobs, try features, pop in text, and so on. Undo is a psychic blankie, always there for us when we go slightly astray.

I think there is a bit of a fear to web apps—a fear of the unknown. You’re entrusting your data to a third party. I’m not talking about privacy concerns, though those are valid. I’m talking about the fact that when you’re working on a Word doc and you save it, you see the file saved to your desktop. On Google Docs, you press save and it’s like… “Your work was saved. Don’t worry. You can totally trust me. You can’t see it, but it’s there.”

There’s also the fear of the unfixable fuckup. Accidental presses of “delete my account” or “delete this contact and all associated information” can happen. You just never know. My cat has selected text passages and replaced them with “dkkfkgadkl;fj” simply by walking across my keyboard. With a desktop app, I can rely on multiple undos. If that’s not there in a web app, I’m not going to trust it with anything worth losing. And if you’re not using it for anything worth losing, what are you using it for?

A key part of the launch early, iterate often approach to product development is being agile and empathetic enough to recognize errors and make the necessary adjustments. Sometimes it’s an interface issue. Sometimes it’s the way we’re telling the story. Sometimes it’s the number of features we offer. The way we structure the product tiers. Sometimes we just get the user behavior wrong, and we have to adjust. No points off for not guessing 100% right the first time, but serious problems happen if you can’t retool in time. How much time you have depends on your users and your competition.

Fantastic photo by LaughingSquid via Flickr.

Do I really need to provide an intro? My two heroes.

• Dan Cederholm (SimpleBits)
• Brian Oberkirch (Small Good Thing)

Location. Does it matter where you are?

“Daddy, where do web apps come from?” – Jackson

• Location doesn’t matter (except when it does)
• There are some amazing virtual companies being created
• What it takes is the right people
• You can build great web apps anywhere in the world
• Silicon Valley happens to be where more people do it
• What makes the valley different?
  • Talent
  • Startup mojo
  • Infrastructure/funding
    • Don’t think about funding. Think about making great stuff.
  • Community
    • What we outside the Valley would like to replicate
    • SuperHappyDevHouse
  • The valley doesn’t understand people
• Knowing your users > Who you know
• Build your tribe
• Come bearing gifts
• Building Blocks: Vitamin, Co-working, A List Apart, Distributed tools (Skype, Basecamp)
• Tundro
  • Cork’d: Dan & Dan hadn’t really met each other when they started
    • Didn’t meet until after it was done
  • IM, phone, Skype, Basecamp
  • Location doesn’t matter
    • You can successfully work with people virtually
  • Dan works by himself, 10×10 office with no windows
  • The benefit of being able to sit next to someone and bounce ideas around is huge
  • How did they hook up?
    • Knew each other through blogs, worked on a couple projects together (freelance)
    • Skills overlap on lots of things, IA, copy writing
    • No easy answer for how to find people (friends, people online)
  • How do you add to the number of people you know to work with?
    • Conferences, Twitter, Flickr (who’s doing what?), Barcamps
    • Hosted Boston-area designers meetups
  • How did Cork’d come about
    • The user was them – they wanted to use it
      • Started off using Flickr to share wines
    • Very “Getting Real” – no mockups
      • One main template outside of Rails
      • Dan B dumped it into Rails
      • Built on top of that
      • SVN made building with the two of them easy to do in real time
    • Downsides to not sitting together?
      • Not able to collaborate on other types of projects
    • Not wine experts, but now talking to wine companies
      • You should really be passionate about the subject
    • What’s the status?
      • Sidetracked by interest in site that stalled development (that sucked)
      • Chugging along
• Does being remote hurt?
  • Hasn’t worked with a company in Boston yet
  • If he had to go to meetings, he couldn’t get any work done
  • Physical meetings take up a lot of time
  • It helps being virtual
• Etsy: In Brooklyn
  • Don’t get distracted by issues that are important to alpha geeks

I expected a lot of this panel, and it did not disappoint. It was great to hear Dan talk about not only the process involved in creating Cork’d, but also how “lonely” it can get, working by himself out in Salem. One of the highlights of this panel was the folks I met afterwards, but I’ll write more on that later.

If you ever get the chance to hear either of these guys talk, go. I love hearing Dan talk about CSS. I love hearing Dan talk about business. I would go to a panel where Dan was discussing Guided By Voices. Or ukulele. Brian, to quote Josh Porter, is the ultimate “aggregator.”

So, as you can see via the proof above, I finally met Brian Oberkirch in person. Amazing how you can meet someone for the first time (really), but you know (just about) everything that has been on their minds lately through their blogs. Quite awesome.

Jeremiah Owyang, who I didn’t even know was attending, took the photo. Was nice to see him again. He said he liked the new blog design.

I also met Tara Hunt, a total starstruck moment. I’m like… “you rule.” She’s just… brilliant. While waiting in line to meet Tara (yep, rock stars have lines), I saw Gillian Carson silenty sitting in the front row. So we talked a bit. I love the Carsons, I’ll tell ya. I also chatted with Ryan a bit later. Talked nothing about tech. That was pretty nice.

After meeting Tara, I also met Chris Messina for the first time in person. At least I think it… yeah, it was. Tough to remember sometimes.

Good times.

So, Brian’s latest interview is with Guy Kawasaki of Garage. I touched on my long fascination with Guy before when Jennifer Jones interviewed him. One thing that I like about Brian’s chats is that he often is doing his interview subjects as much of favor as they are doing him by granting the interview. A lot has to be said for a good brainstorming session with a fresh set of eyes and ears. I’ve taken part in a few of these lately and I love the feeling of being helpful and being helped.

When Brian was talking to Guy about the possibility of blogging his next book chapter by chapter, Guy made an interesting analogy. He compared blogging to working out every day and blogging to going on a binge Jenny Craig diet. Frequently blogging keeps your writing—and your thought process—in shape. I noticed I’ve been slipping a little over the winter (an analogy for my physique as well?), so it’s time to start “working out” more.

Here’s a few things I’ve been doing/have done lately:

• Getting ready for the release of Aptima’s CogBlog. We will be launching February 28. When I say “launch”, I mean changing our URL from https to http. Then, of course, we’ll post our first content again so that our trackbacks and pingbacks can work properly. I recently wrote my first post for the blog. It is called “Distributed Learning for the Army: Cost Effective or Just Plain Effective?” I’m consciously trying to make sure the subject matter between my two blogs don’t overlap too much. I’ll be one of four bloggers when we kick off, along with Daniel Serfaty (our brilliant and engaging founder who I have been working on “alternative” blogging methods with), Jared Freeman (our VP of Research), and Webb Stacy (our VP of Technology). Then there’s me. The web kid.
• Working on TRACE-SE. TRACE-SE is the project that really kicked off this blog. It is a community resource site for cognitive systems engineering, so I started this blog to document what I was learning about community and Web 2.0. Well, we’re back into some serious development on that project after a bit of time off, so I’m quite excited. Late last night I was getting my kicks doing an Andy Budd-esque CSS-based image map. Woo!
• Chatting with some interesting folks. As I mentioned above, I’ve had some good brainstorming sessions. I’ve also “met” a guy named Nick Peters, who has been writing some about Microformats and OpenID. One post of his that particularly smacked me upside the head was one about the iPhone and Microformats. As I wrote in the comments on that post, the iPhone (being a mobile device with a real, usable web browser) has the potential to really make use of microformats. Code marked up as phone numbers can be instantly detected and called. Code marked up as an address can be sent directly to that sweet Google Maps widget. Contact info can be added to your address book and synced back to your Mac or PC. Sweet.
• Playing with the new MacBook Pro. Oh god I love this thing. One other thing I’ve noticed… don’t listen to what they say about Rosetta. Office still opens as soon as I click on it. Going from PBG4 to MacBook Pro is insane, even on non-native apps. And the thing is just so sexy. The key to great computer hardware development is making something people just want to touch. When they’re touching, they’re typing. When they’re typing, they’re getting shit done. When they’re getting shit done but still thinking they’re just touching this extraordinary piece of hardware… well, then they become a fanboy.
• Securing everything for SXSW. Hell yeah, I’ll be there. Also, I saw that Webvisions 2007 is going to be in May. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it this year. But that’s when it was in July. May… that could be a different story. Two days? Cheap price? Gonna do my best to swing it again. It was life-changing last year.

Man, all that typing while getting back into shape? I’m gonna be sore.

I have a “problem” named after me.

When I was chatting with Chris Messina a while back, he was telling me about how OpenID can solve the problems I brought up in my post hCard Overflow: Could We Use rel=hcard?. My homie Brian Oberkirch referenced that post in a recent post of his own titled OpenID, Portable Social Networks, and The Darowski Problem.

Darowski problem? WTF? That’s awesome!

I’m not sure what technically makes someone an “A-list” blogger, but to me, Oberkirch certainly is one. I gotta say, I’m honored to have the contact info overload problem be associated with me (a line I never thought I’d say when I was in design school). Then he emails me with a cryptic message that just says “Check it”, and a URL. He’s We’ve been picked up by ZDNet blogger Eric Norlin on a post called Brian Cracks the Identity and Web 2.0 Problem. After getting over the “Darwoski” spelling in Norlin’s piece, I’m pretty psyched. I literally have a problem.

So, back to OpenID. My god, this is needed. Read Brian’s article for a great summary of what the problem is and how OpenID will address it. Chris had told me to put OpenID on my to-do list for 2007 and Brian just gave me a bit more of a kick in the ass.

I’ve talked quite a bit about Jeremiah Owyang and Brian Oberkirch here. Both have been a huge help to me.

Now hear them talk.

The first result of the 258 Oberkirchs is the Syndicate 2005 speaker list hCarded on Tantek’s site. This hit helps back up my two issues with overhCarding.

1. Incomplete Data

Brian, like all of us, has a lot of bits of contact information. Among them, he has a phone number. He has an email address. Heck, I’m sure he even has a mailing address. But none of them are included in the hCard on the Syndicate list. Should that data be included? Well, there’s really not much of a need for someone to care about the phone numbers and mailing addresses of every single speaker at a conference. But then, what’s the point of setting it in hCard if you aren’t collecting the person’s entire collection of contact information? There are likely some uses that I haven’t thought of, but the extraction example usually given for hCard is to convert to vCard and add the person to your address book. What good are vCards in your address book without proper contact information? But at the same time, what good is being inundated with contact information on a conference speakers list?

2. Data Evolves

The hCard downloaded from the Syndicate speaker list has Brian’s organization as “Weblogs Work” and his title as “host of the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog and CEO”. Well, Brian is no longer with Weblogs Work. He’s gone solo. And while he was the host of the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog, that is still hosted with Weblogs Work, with whom Brian is no longer associated. So, when someone changes jobs, email addresses, or phone numbers, all of this hCarded data on the web is then obsolete.

What to do?

A Solution?

I’m no Microformats expert, but I wanted to brainstorm a potential solution to go with this question I’m raising. The solution I came up with is:

rel-hcard

Rel-hcard would be very similar to rel-tag, rel-nofollow, or rel-license in that it is simply an attribute of a URL. Rel-hcard would allow developers to link an appearance of a person’s name on a web page to his/her own personal hCard on his/her own site. This way, if the person’s contact information changes, the site always links to the most recent information. Also, you don’t have to provide information about that person that really isn’t needed on that page. You can simply list the name and a link to that person’s hCard.

On the Syndicate 2005 speaker page, each speaker is marked up as a row in a three column table. The first column contains the speaker’s name linked to the speaker’s bio on the Syndicate site. The second column contains the speaker’s title and the third contains the speaker’s organization. Like so:

<tr class="vcard"><td><a class="linkType fn url" xhref="http://www.syndicateconference.com/live/38/events/
38SFO05A/conference/bio//CMONYA00BEAU">Brian Oberkirch</a></td><td class="title">host of the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog and CEO</td><td class="org">Weblogs Work</td></tr>

So, one flaw that I see with my approach is that it requires a separate link. So, since Brian’s name is already linked to his bio page on the Syndicate site, we can’t link to his hCard with his name. I can think of a couple of ways around this.

The first involves creating a second link that we then hide with CSS (using {display: none}). Like so:

<tr class="vcard"><td><a class="linkType fn url" xhref="http://www.syndicateconference.com/live/38/events/
38SFO05A/conference/bio//CMONYA00BEAU">Brian Oberkirch</a><a class="contactinfo" rel="hcard">(Contact Info)</a></td><td>host of the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog and CEO</td><td>Weblogs Work</td></tr>

You’ll notice a couple of things. First, I stripped out the class names for the title and organization. That’s because if we’re using a rel-hcard, there would be no need to mark up this information. The HTML would basically be a timestamp of the person’s contact information at the time it was published. The current, up to date hCard would provide the most recent contact information in the correct hCard markup.

You will also notice the second link in the first column (Contact Info). It is given the class “contactinfo”. That class can then be styled to display as none. So, is it bad that it’s still in the markup but not displayed on the page? Personally, I don’t think so. Those viewing unstyled content are probably not going to have Microformat parsers available to them. This way they can see that there is a link to the person’s complete contact information.

Alternately, the speaker table could be modified so that the speaker’s name is linked to contact information (with rel=”hcard”) and another column is added with that speaker’s sessions (and links to them). The title and organization columns could stay, though I wouldn’t mark them with “title” and “org” Microformat classes. I’d leave that to the hCard we’re linking to.

Does this make sense? Has this already been brought up in the Microformats community? Is there already a solution? This is similar to rel=”url” except that this would specifically tell parsers that the link contains an hCard. Perhaps this is encroaching on some of the work underway with OpenID, but this solution is one using pure Microformats.

Update: Brian Oberkirch has dubbed this “The Darowski Problem”.

So, who is Brian Oberkirch?

The About portion of Brian’s website describes him as “Social media consultant. Writer. Marketer. Dreamer & tinkerer.” Basically, to me, he is an idea factory. Forget about just social media and marketing, he has great ideas on tech subjects such as microformats and mashups, too. Brian does a series of interviews under the name “Edgework” and he recently rattled off three good ones in a row.

In the most recent episode, as I mentioned, he interviewed Ted Rheingold of Dogster and Catster. Dogster and Catster allow people to make web pages for their beloved pets. So, quite the community has grown around these pages. They talk about how the sites fill niche, passion-centric markets. General social networking sites don’t tend to do so well. It helps to have a common interest that the users rally around. Flickr revolves around photo sharing, for example.

MySpace started off as a site where users discussed unsigned bands that they were fans of. Now MySpace is far more general, but it is sustaining itself—probably because it is so damn ubiquitous. Facebook is now trying to do the same. They were a community that were bonded together by academia. You needed a .edu email address to be admitted. So, there was a sense of community because everyone had something in common. Now Facebook is letting more users in, and some existing users don’t like it. It will be interesting to see what happens there.

Before Dogster, Brian covered Kiva, a nonprofit founded by Matt Flannery. What is Kiva? Let me just let the site explain it:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

There just aren’t many sites out there like Kiva… it’s a great idea. Not only community marketing, but community financing—for a cause. Kudos to Matt.

Finally, before those two episodes Brian talked to Chad Dickerson of the Yahoo Developer Network. The main topic was Yahoo’s Open Hack Day. Yahoo used to hold internal contests to see what types of cool hacks and mashups their developers could come up with. Recently, they opened it up to the outside world. Check out the winners here.

Brian provides a lot of great ideas about the mashup culture, which is nothing short of fascinating. To see more examples of mashups, check out ProgrammableWeb.

To find out more about Brian, check out an interview by Shel Israel on Naked Conversations. I recommend checking it out. One quote from that interview that stuck out to me was when he was talking about how old school marketers will need to be cognizant of the new school “unmarketing” techniques, though it will be a gradual process:

I know we talk a lot about dinosaurs and how everything is changing, etc., but I think it will be gradual. If you don’t eat well, keep smoking, never exercise, eventually that will catch up to you. Same thing will apply. You’ll be able to get away with it for a while, but there will be a tremendous opportunity cost.

I thought this exact quote could relate very well to what will happen if old school table-based web designers don’t pay attention to web standards.

Not to be bandwagonesque, but Jeremiah Owyang also recently had a post about Brian.

So, lastly… I need to ask a question. Brian… when are you going to write a book on all of this? Personally, I can’t wait.

Yesterday, 37signals posted an article detailing three ways to make money with your software. Their three were:

1. Advertising-supported
2. Subscription-supported (or single price)
3. Support-supported

Now, 37signals makes some great productivity web apps, so they prefer #2. Their business model allows for #2. When designing a site that relies greatly on community interaction, charging your community to help YOU isn’t always going to fly. You need your visitors just as badly (if not much more) than they probably need you.

Brian Oberkirch has published Beyond Adsense: A Business Model Checklist—a post that has become invaluable to me. He also presents three options, but expands on many approaches within each. His three are:

1. Advertising
2. Make Them Pay
3. Because of, Not With

So, the first two are very similar, although Brian expands on more opportunities within each on his blog. But the third, “Because of, Not With”, took me a second to get. But what it boils down to is indirect revenues that occur because of your site.

For example, I’m working on a “community of practice” site. If that community grew to a certain size, perhaps a “meetup” or small conference could happen. That would be in this third category. Say the contributors to the site released a series of books together. That would be one more way.

So, yet again I am helped along my path of becoming a web-developer-marking-guy-and-god-knows-what-else by a couple bright minds sharing thoughts on EXACTLY what I need to research right now.

CSS Bootcamp

Speaker: David MacFarland

This seminar lasted the first half-day of the event. I didn’t know David MacFarland before today, but he was a great presenter. The seminar was a mix of things I’ve recently learned, a refresh of things I’ve known for a while, and some new things I look forward to adding to my arsenal. One thing worth noting is the fact that the last hour of the seminar was devoted to bugs with Internet Explorer. Why this browser has so much of a market share, I’ll never understand.

Some other tidbits I took from this seminar is not to put your site’s title (or company name) within an h1 tag. The reasoning is that search engines LOVE pages developed in standards, because the code is so semantic. Engines pay special attention to what is in that h1 tag, so it makes sense to put the title of that page in there. For example, a blog page would have the post’s title as the h1. A company’s web site would have something like “About Us” in the h1.

I never paid a whole lot of attention to the “active” state of an HTML link… I usually just style it the same as the plain link. The only time I’ve ever seen the active state is that brief split second that I’m clicking on a link. Well, I neglected to remember that some people tab through elements of a page. And when the user tabs through these links, the currently selected (active) link is styled with the a:active selector. So, that’s something I’ll take into consideration in the future.

I also learned a bit more about floats (allows you to use CSS layout instead of table layout), learned that there’s actually an address tag in HTML (who knew?), and that David calls a style that is the product of many different cascaded styles a “Frankenstyle.”

For Aptima: Well, this seminar means a lot for Aptima. I’m currently developing my first true web standards site (not the one I originally though I would be developing… unfortunately—another project jumped in the lead to become the first). HOwever, the original site should be right behind it, making another project I will need this stuff for. Plus, Aptima.com was developed with a good amount of CSS in there, but it’s still table-based and I’d like to fix this at some point.

Let Go, Jump In: Community Marketing Strategies for Empowered Customers

Speakers: Kit Seeborg (moderator), Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Oberkirch, Dan Saffer

The first slide of this combination presentation read “Embrace Intelligent customers.” Each member of the panel then took a turn with some opening remarks:

Brian Oberkirch:

• We (the users) have attention scarcity.
• Marketers are no longer in control (We filter advertising with ad blockers, Tivo, etc.).
• Our best tools are not technological.
  • head (thoughts) and heart (committment)
• Recommended book: Brand Hijacking
• Letting go does not mean laissez-faire.
• Avoid advertising by other means (no trickery).
• Flickr has great brand persona.
  • Downtime message turns into a user activity.

Jeremiah Owyang:

• Got Hitachi’s CTO blogging
  • Toughest part was getting him to open up
  • No problems with him being public face of company
• Started industry wide wiki (for storage community)
  • let go, link to competitors, take control of industry

Dan Saffer:

• Companies want more customer participations.
• Power Law of Participation
• Different types of users will display different participation behaviors
  • You can design for them all
• The simple act of reading a news story can contribute to the community by providing input to a “Most Popular” list

Then, some other topics were discussed by the whole panel:

Trust:

• Who would make the best corporate blogger (for your company)?
• Are you afraid of what your customers might say?
• The future is building products together with customers

Risk:

• Audience communicates with each other (not dialogue, triologue).
• Executives are message holders and message controllers
• Companies feel comment moderation is a giant suck of time
  • Give users moderation tools
  • onus not completely on the company
• There is a mistrust of amateurs among professionals.
• Does citizen journalism dilute the brand?
  • For example, when users upload photos incorrectly to a news site.

I asked a question:

I work for an R&D company that is currently moving towards productizing our offerings. I am interested in getting the bright company executives blogging. How do you deal with the line between trying to spark discussion in the communty vs. looking like you’re just trying to pitch your products. For example, Ryan Carson takes flack every time he mentions DropSend.

The advice:

• Gear your posting towards problem solving and best practices.
• Don’t even mention the product if you don’t have to.
• If you do talk about it, don’t link to it. If they want, they can find it.
• Some of the best blog posts can be:
  • What do we need to improve…
  • We’re not very good at…
• People will tell you if you’re talking about your projects too much.
• Keep it conversational – conversations cannot be one-sided or the other person will just be annoyed.

For Aptima: Obviously, even though I went into this seminar for one project, I came out with more of an attack plan to get Aptima’s brilliant minds blogging and sharing with the community. My current project work doesn’t have as much of a marketing aspect because it isn’t really selling a product, per se. But a lot of this still applies to retaining the user base.

Step Away from the Computer

Speaker: Andy Baio

Andy talked about when online communities meet offline.

• First “meetups” — HAM radio (amateur radio)
  • Geeks with funny handles chatting over long distances without meeting.
  • Referred to people they met as “Eyeball Contacts”
  • 1947 first HAMfest in Atlantic City
• Meeting BBS people in person was defining moment of Andy’s life
• Why go offline? What does meeting face to face fill in?
  • Face to face is high fidelity
  • No subtleties and tones online (emoticons half assed approach)
• Andy’s Half-baked Unified Theory of Meeting Offline
  • Personality
    • need a way to express who you are
    • makes people want to meet in person
    • tons of info asked on MySpace
  • Group Identity
    • Are you emotionally invested in the community
    • If not, won’t be motivated to self-organize
  • The Commons
    • Public space for people to self-organize
    • Digg has no form of commons

I actually had a “meetup” while I was here in Portland. I run a community web site of my own. It’s centered around a baseball simulation league, the Ted Williams Memorial League. We have 24 guys across the U.S. and Canada, and I’ve met about half of them face to face. Wednesday night, Mark (who lives 45 minutes north of Portland) came down and we hung out. It was the first time we had met face to face. While Mark was here, we recorded a podcast, so it was good fun. But I could certainly relate to what Andy was talking about today.

For Aptima: My Aptima tie-in for this one was in the event that we develop a community site that is wildly successful, who’s to say we won’t one day have a small (or large?) conference based on the community? Even before we get to that point, “meetups” among users could certainly be possible.

The New Community: How Decentralized Conversation Empowers Individuals while Creating Community

Speaker: Derek Powazek

I first heard of Derek through an article he did for Vitamin. I also recently heard an interview with his wife, Heather Champ of Flickr, on the Web 2.0 Show. They both just seem like very fun people, and Derek was a great presenter.

• In 2000, wrote the book Design for Community
  • 4 pages devoted to “new thing called blogging
• Communities happen when people have the ability to use their voice in a public and immediate way.
• Web 1.0 – Community sites were company towns.
• Web 2.0 – Increasingly self-powered and independent.
• Connective Tissue – technologies power distributed community: blogs, commenting, tags, APIs, etc.
• Decentralizing: Commenting through your own blog makes for less flaming.
• Memes – proof of life
• Pros & Cons of decentralized community:
  • PROs: Self-ownership, nobody can turn you off
  • CONSs: Nobody is in charge, hard to converge, difficult tools
• Modern Company Towns:
  • Flickr, You Tube, MySpace (Frindster/LiveJournal/VOX), TypePad, Last.FM
• Now, we wear different hats.
  • Current: blog posts, everyone can read.
  • Future: Able to talk to specific groups
• Treat your community well – if you don’t they’ll leave.
• Go to where your community is – you cannot create community
  • Best you can do is create tools that people like to use, then they’ll hang out and end up making a community.
• Decentralized community better mirrors “real” community (for better or worse)
• Blogs have forced Company Towns to interact with the rest of the world.

For Aptima: This relates more to project work than it does to Aptima.com in the respect that I see a particular project as one of these mashup kind of sites that combines all sorts of different content types to educate the user base. They will have tools for collaboration and communication within the site. The other site that I’m working on (that is already in development) is based on a similar framework, but the user base isn’t quite as collaborative. It is more of an instructor/student relationship.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow will be a super cool day for me. WebVisions is touting their speakers as “rock stars” and tomorrow I will meet the supreme rocker of the mall, Dan Cederholm. He’s giving a seminar on his book Bulletproof Web Design and is also taking part in a Design panel. Plus, he’s got a book signing, and I just happen to have a copy of Bulletproof right next to me.

His first book, Web Standards Solutions is absolutely fantastic. I’m so glad I picked that book as my first foray into Web Standards (well, after reading Dan’s blog—and others—for months). Anyway, Dan is one of the many great designers out there that have really influence the way I’m looking at my work—and my career path—lately. He is a pioneer in modern content delivery.

I haven’t decided what I’m seeing during the second slot yet… perhaps About Interface: Designing for Lifestyle (presented by Kelly Goto). Kelly appears to be a rock star herself, but I’m not familiar with her yet. After lunch, I’m wrestling between three good ones, but I’ll have to choose between Tagging in the Real Web World (very relevant to proejct work as more and more content populates the sites) and Beyond Just Content: Websites as Interactive Applications. That’s the next step to a lot of this web standards stuff… throwing a layer of AJAX on top of it to make it behave like a desktop application.

(Note: AJAX comes LAST though… you have to put it as a layer on top of everything else. That way, you have a web app that degrades nicely to standards compliant HTML on whatever device the user is using.)

Social Metadata and the Relevance Revolution (at 2:15) is also very project-relevant, but it competes against Scaling for Your First 100k Users. Okay, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself on getting 100k users.

Finally, we end with a keynote by Jared Spool, anther rock star I need to familiarize myself with. All in all, it looks like it’s going to be an awesome second day. This is looking like the type of conference that was made for me.

More Notes:

• Ryan’s Notes
• Brian’s Notes (on Stepping Away From the Computer)
• Brian’s Notes (on The New Community)
• Jeremiah’s Notes

Also See:

• Day 2, Part 1
• Day 2, Part 2
• Final Notes