Welcome to an Art Break

We’re on holiday until 7 January 2008. To celebrate together, here is a wonderous artwork that takes us through the windows of the feminine soul - through art, through time, through space.

Enjoy!

Many thanks to the artiste Marye “Titch” Wade for sharing this via Facebook. Just as beautiful, just as talented. Congratulations to Philip Scott Johnson for creating it, and Johann Sebastian Bach for the Cello Suites that accompany the piece. What immortal sounds.

Love

Libby

Widgety Goodness Highlights

What a great conference Widgety Goodness was. Congrats to Ivan for pulling it off, from idea to hundreds of people showing up in six weeks or something.

It was good, really good. I got to spend a day with the concepts and details of widgets. I had the sortof skeleton of an idea of what the whole widget thing was about, and then spent the day really adding flesh and ideas to that ever so slippery widget concept.

And some neat and interesting ideas have come out of it all too. Here’s a few of my highlights and thoughts:

Physical Widgets

Russell Davies helped fill in my Amazon wish list with a couple of real-world widgets. Real physical things that talk to the internet and physically exist in the real world.

Firstly, the Wattson which is a sexy-looking real-world implementation of the Viridian Energy Meter proposed by Bruce Sterling in a design competition in, gee, about 2000. This idea here is that if you can see your energy consumption via something sitting on the kitchen table, you might just go and turn off some more lights and appliances on standby. I want one of these.

And I’m still deeply intrigued by the Nabaztag WiFi bunny.

Platforms

There was a lot of talk about widget building, distribution and management platforms. All good stuff. I think some of the vendors did a bit much spruiking their own stuff rather than addressing the big questions, but you get that. It was good the the full lifecycle was represented, and I was delighted to see a lot of talk about metrics around widget usage rather than simply downloads, placements and impressions. This is getting towards the behaviour-based or participation-based metrics we are starting to get out of our scouta media recommendation platform.

Distributed Rights

Great to get into a discussion about content ownership among microsites and widgets. Who owns the data you put in a comment field? I hope we can get something together to come up with a simple way to represent terms and rights next to every input box. A litle rainbow of colours or something. Thanks to Kris from js-kit for originating that discussion.

Freshness and humility

These days, I value more and more the people that are brave and real enough to accept and talk about their mistakes and what they don’t know:

• Google can’t be as cool as their speakers always say they are. Sorry, but I just don’t buy the perfection. It just seems arrogant and unreal.
• If you are a widget platform vendor, I’m happy enough for you to tell me once that you have the best platform. But please don’t do that for half an hour. Move on. Tell me what you are worried about, or confused about. I want to find the human becoming in what you are doing.
• Will McInnes filled the room with fresh Oxygen with his presentation about Nixon-McInnes evolution into a social media agency. I like the humility, I like the experiment. And thanks for the name-check Will!

Just being there

Gee conferences are marvelous things (though the afterparty++ hangover wasn’t). Just getting out there and sharing. Wow. In the day I threw a couple of new ideas out there, worked a couple more through with people during drinks, and chatted probably complete nonsense well into Friday morning.

The value and power of getting together face to face to share and work on stuff is remarkable. Nice one, Ivan.

A bit of help goes a long way - “new technology”

This lovely, funny clip from Norway tells the story of “helpdesk support back in the day of the middle age with English subtitles. Original taken from the show “Øystein og jeg” on Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK)in 2001.”

Reminds me of the journalist who told me she hates blogs. I suggested she may as well hate paper.

It kind of depends on what you do with them doesn’t it?

(Thanks to Lucy West for this one)

User Generated Content needs terms framework and rights icons

Khris Loux did a brilliant, interactive, presentation at Widgety Goodness today based on this js-kit mini-site. js-kit provide widget-like tools for adding features to existing websites.

We debated a number of topics, including Content Ownership. The issue is something like this: you embed a js-kit comment widget on your existing website, and users leave comments there. The question of who owns the content is a real interesting one.

Is it owned by js-kit, who own the widget and persist the comment, or is it owned by the embedding publisher, or the user, or some weird combination of all of the above?

Here’s my answer: It is pretty much all of the above. What we need is something like what creative commons did for adding clarity and simplicity into copyright by developing a set of generic licenses. What I’m talking about is a terms framework that is made clear and simple (via several options). It has to be clear and simple enough to allow the terms, conditions and ownership to be expressed next to a comment box so that it is clear who has which rights, and clear to the content creator just what is going on. Seriously, these rights icons could go all over the place. Every blog comment post. Every forum post. Every review field. Anywhere user-contributed content is being created.

And apart from the icons, this ought to be ripe for some microformat development too, to perhaps allow browsers to help with presenting the terms information.

A nice big non-trivial project. Who wants to take this one on.

Also, if we simplify this down, it ought to be a lot easier to mashup the rights of a widget provider and a publishing/embedding website and end up with rights that actually work and can be explained in a few icons.

Authentic Blogging to sponsor Widgety Goodness prize

We have been involved recently with helping create Widgety Goodness UK 07, Europe’s first Widget conference, in Brighton at the Corn Exchange tomorrow.

Anyone participating in the WGUK07 Social Network will now have a chance to give their blog a boost.

Authentic Blogging has sponsored the event with a coaching session for two bloggers captured in the feed into the network on the day.

For those that aren’t up with this stuff yet, it’s really quite neat. Backnetwork provides a platform for social networks to build in the lead up to a conference or event, on the day and for some months afterwards. Delegates join with speakers, sponsors, media and organisers to answer each other’s questions and help set the focus for the event. During and after, they chat, think and debrief to make even more sense of what’s going on and move things forward in their worlds.

We’ve been facilitating this space since its inception.

So Graeme and I thought it would be nice to give something to the community of Widgety folk by sponsoring the prize for “Most Indepth Blog Post on the Day”.

Delegates will have their laptops there and, believe it or not, be tapping away to share what’s happening for them. To document and reflect. To download, store and retain it all in their “external memory drives” ie. their blogs.

…and propping up the bar at the After Party later on.. and chewing each other’s ear’s off no doubt.

It’s going to be a great day.

Good on you Ivan, Emm, Zoe, Kris, all the sponsors and speakers and punters for bringing it together. Can’t wait to share more about the wonders of widgets.

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