electronic museum on RSS Mixer

Recent entries: 1-17 of 17

1. If you love something, set it free

   Posted 1 day ago
   
   

   Last week, I had the privilege of being asked to be one of the keynote speakers at a conference in Amsterdam called Kom je ook?. This translates as “Heritage Upgrade” and describes itself as “a symposium for cultural heritage institutions, theatres and museums”.

   I was particularly excited about this one: firstly, my partner keynoters were Nina Simon (Museum Two) and Shelley Bernstein (Community Manager at the Brooklyn Museum) - both very well known and very well respected museum and social web people. Second (if I’m allowed to generalise): “I like the Dutch” - I like their attitude to new media, to innovation and to culture in general; and third - it looked like fun.

   Nina talked about “The Participatory Museum” - in particular she focussed on an oft-forgotten point: the web isn’t social technology per se; it is just a particularly good tool for making social technology happen. The fact that the online medium allows you to track, access, publish and distribute are good reasons for using the web BUT the fact that this happens to populate one space shouldn’t limit your thinking to that space, and shouldn’t alter the fact that this is always, always about people and the ways in which they come together. The changing focus of museum moving from being a content provider to being a platform provider also rang true with me in so many ways. Nina rounded off with a “ten tips for social technology” (slide 12 and onwards).

   Shelley gave another excellent talk on the incredible work she is doing at the Brooklyn Museum. She and I shared a session on Web2 at Museums and the Web 2007, and once again it is the genuine enthusiasm and authenticity which permeates everything she does which really comes across. This isn’t “web2 for web2’s sake” - this is genuine, pithy, risky, real content from enthused audiences who really want to take part in the life of the museum. 

   My session was on setting your data and content free:

   Hopefully the slides speak for themselves, but in a nutshell my argument is that although we’ve focussed heavily on the social aspects of Web2.0 from a user perspective, it is the stuff going on under the hood which really pushes the social web into new and exciting territory. It is the data sharing, the mashing, the API’s and the feeds which are at the heart of this new generation of web tools. We can resist the notion of free data by pretending that people use the web (and our sites) in a linear, controlled way, but the reality is we have fickle and intelligent users who will get to our content any which way. Given this, we can either push back against freer content by pretending we can lock it down, or - as I advocate - do what we can to give user access to it.

   Posted in museum   Tagged: api, content, data, feeds, free, rss, sharing   

   
   Mike

2. Limiting addiction

   Posted 28 days ago
   
   

   Before the brave new world of cloud computing, selling and buying software was a pretty straightforward thing. It’d either be shareware, in which case you’d download and walk away, or there would be some kind of time- or function-limited demo which you’d (if you liked it) upgrade at some point in the future.

   Since stuff went cloudy, life has got a little bit more complicated in the world of the software business model. Recently, I’ve happened across a number of services that approach their business models in different ways, and I thought it’d be interesting to compare and contrast.

   

   Pic from http://tinyurl.com/5hwvvp

   One of the models that has now become popular carries the buzzword “Freemium”. It’s essentially not a whole lot different from a downloaded bit of software which is functionally crippled in some way. In the Freemium model, something is provided which allows the end user access to free stuff, but a lack ultimately convinces them to upgrade to some kind of paid - “premium” - service. A classic example is the widely-lauded hosted project management software by 37 Signals, Basecamp. You’re encouraged to sign up for free. Your account then gives you access to a limited version of the software. In this particular instance, you get a single project and no file uploads, but apart from that everything is the same as the paid version. The unpaid version gives you enough of a glimpse into the functionality and usefulness of the tool to realise that the additional functionality provided by the paid version is likely to be useful. 

   Another example is SugarSync, the cloud file-syncing service. Interestingly, while they used to have a “get 2Gb free” freemium model, they have now reverted to “10Gb for 45 days” on their free plan. We’ll examine why in a moment.

   The Freemium model is based around something I’m going to call limiting addiction. The service provider is attempting to find a fine balance between provision and lack of provision of service. In the Basecamp example, 37 Signals are looking for users to find the service useful enough that they see the value, but not so useful that they’ve got enough with the free version. In this particular example, they’ve got things right: a single user without file upload ability gets you far enough to see the value of the service, but it isn’t enough that you can actually run any projects usefully. Net result? You upgrade to premium.

   Let’s examine SugarSync now. When they first launched, they offered a time-unlimited 2Gb of storage space under a free account. I don’t know the inside track, but I’m betting that users found the service too useful - 2Gb is after all a fair amount of synced disk space - and I’ll bet that not enough of them were upgrading to the premium editions. The Freemium model in this case offered too much for nothing.

   In the last couple of days I’ve signed up for a service called Spotify. It’s a downloadable app which lets you stream pretty much any music on demand to your desktop. I love the service, possibly more than anything I’ve come across this year - I’m an avid last.fm and Seeqpod fan, but Spotify goes a step further - it is fast, reliable, content rich. It is pretty much the perfect music application for me. The Spotify business model is interesting: you can get music for free, but it is ad supported: every 3-4 songs there is an audio advert. To remove this you can either pay 99p a day or £9.99 a month. 

   All well and good. But (and I hate to say this in case they’re reading..), Spotify is offering too much for free. The ads just aren’t annoying enough or frequent enough for me to bother paying the premium. The value is - like with the original SugarSync model - too high. I’m addicted, but not limited by the free version of the software. I’m a customer waiting to happen: If those ads were more in my face - if the software was more limiting - I’d almost definitely pay to get rid of them. I’m sure Spotify will get this right in the end: they’re currently still in closed beta and are very early into their market, and I’m delighted that I get so much value for nothing for the time being. If they’re savvy, though, they’ll continuously tweak their business plan as time goes on until they have the perfect freemium balance. And what is that balance? Well, a high addiction -> limitation -> upgrade rate.

   There’s one more example that I’d like to look at, and this one fails for reasons that I’ll highlight in a minute. This example is a web prototyping tool called Protoshare. Rather than opting for a Freemium / functionally limited model, they’ve gone for a 30 day free trial. During that 30 days, you get full access to all the functionality - but after that you have to pay.

   Again, all well and good. However, there’s a subtlety here which I think Protoshare have missed. It’s this: People like me who do IA work for a living tend to do stuff on a client/project basis. This means I have two options when it comes to Protoshare: I either start the 30 day trial at an arbitrary (between projects) time - this is fine, and pressure-free, but like most people if I’m not using a tool for a specific purpose, I don’t fully evaluate it under real-life conditions. The second option is to use Protoshare for a specific project. In this scenario, however, I’m putting myself way out on a limb - I haven’t had a chance to test the software before committing to it, and there’s no way I’m going to do a bit of paid (and timetabled..) work for a client without using a tool that I know and trust. Net result? I walk away from a product which could be exactly what I need - and would pay for. If Protoshare had a limiting addiction model, I’d probably have signed up by now.

   There are infinite ways of cutting the Freemium business model: you can do it around paid support, functionality, disk space, speed, look and feel, etc. The extent to which various facets of the software are measured and valued is key, and - as the Protoshare example shows - really quite subtle as well. It’s not a case of “X has value Y, do Z” - it is more about considering the software against the likely market, users, use scenarios and so on. Ultimately, though, all these approaches are about giving a taste of something which tempts to an extent that you want more, but doesn’t satisfy. If you fail to tempt enough (Protoshare) or satisfy too much (Spotify), it’s very likely that you’ll either miss markets, or revenue, or both.

   Posted in museum   Tagged: business model, cloud computing, freemium, saas, software   

   
   Mike
   addiction

3. “we have a tech generation that thinks that’s all there is”

   Posted 1 month ago
   
   

   How to go about writing up a conference like Future of Web Apps? With, what, a thousand plus people converging on a space as large as London’s Excel centre, it’s not like you can be at every talk, breathe in every vibe, taste all the startups. I was even more crippled by the fact that I couldn’t make the first day. Nonetheless, here are some thoughts…

   

   Mark Zuckerberg. Now with Media Training (TM)

   Conferences - in my experience anyway - aren’t usually about the sessions. They’re about the people, the schmooze, the drinking, the between bits. FOWA does these bits - big time. I had the headache to prove it. From that perspective, FOWA (and I believe I’ve - almost by accident - been to every one) is a winner. Big name (Zuckerberg, Rose, Arrington, Sierra..), big announcements, big…well, everything.

    

   For this, Carsonified (and I’m slowly getting to know ‘em - they’re Bath-based after all..) get massive quantities of respect. Ryan Carson is good at this shit: he knows it, the industry knows it, and it’s obviously a formula that works.

   But..but..but..

   I also think that conferences need a very strong sense of direction. It’s all too easy to revel in the hero-worship that surrounds people like Zuckerberg, and somehow forget that however much we might want to influence 100 million people with our web app, most of us aren’t there yet, and there’s a huge number of boxes to tick - technology, funding, usability, content, luck - before we’re going to even stand a chance of getting there. FOWA should be the place that, even if not actually answering these questions, goes about helping young developers begin to ask them: how can I get funding, what technology should I use, how can I create outstanding content, and so on. I’m not close to being a cutting edge developer, but every session on the developer track was so generic you could probably sum them up like this: “oAuth: it’s quite good”, “cloud computing: it’s quite good”, “work-life balance: it’s quite good”. To me, FOWA doesn’t come across as the future of web apps. It’s the near past of web apps. 

   The challenge that Ryan et al. face is not an easy one: they’ve built a conference of big names, and with that comes a conference with a high level of sexiness and kudos. But what they haven’t done, IMO, is to build a conference with big ideas. This is increasingly going be a problem as - in the words of developers - FOWA attempts to scale into the future. As much as the bits-in-between make you feel warm inside about the whole tech scene, it’s a transient kind of warmth - as Simon Cowell said recently on XFactor (I know, hard to imagine someone as high-brow as me watching..): “it’s like eating water”. Without really challenging sessions, the socialising bit becomes really pretty vacuous. 

   I don’t have the answers to this, but I have some thoughts:

   Firstly, and most importantly - ideas. If we’re not at FOWA to exchange ideas, what exactly are we there for? At events like this - actually, at events like life - I’m looking for disruption, for new stuff, for insight, for difference. I’m not expecting academically rigorous research: I go to museum conferences for that - but newness should surely be a part of a conference all about the future, right? While some of the sessions delivered that (for me: Kathy Sierra on engaging users and Gavin Starks on green computing), for the most part this was very much a safe, formulaic place and not a bleeding-edge, forward-looking one. The business talks were leagues ahead of the developer ones, but even so there wasn’t enough challenging going on. Even Jason Calacanis, who pretty much makes a living from being offensive, didn’t manage to say much about life/work balance apart from “work hard, play hard”, which is hardly disruptive or original. Originality is often brave and sometimes dangerous, but I think this is the space that FOWA should be striving to be in.

   Second: speakers need to be not just mediocre or good, but fucking great. I want entertaining, well-delivered, funny. Simon Wardley (I missed his session, but we shared a stage in Cardiff a couple of weeks ago) - is all of these. He rocks. He could talk shit and it’d still be great - as it happens, he talks with sense and conviction AND makes it funny too. Ditto, Kathy Sierra, who in my opinion did the best thing I’ve seen in some time: a funny, insightful, interactive session which really engaged as well as inspired. Many of the people presenting at FOWA just can’t do it. They might be great developers, but they can’t talk in public, and I’m sorry, but if you can’t do it, don’t do it. Or at least have a mind-blowing idea to cover up the fact you can’t talk about it

   

   wakoopa. software without a reason, and bad spelling too...

   Finally: I think that all events like this can - and should - learn from people outside the specific sector. The tech scene should increasingly be listening to, and encouraging discourse with normal people. Ask yourself - where were the users at FOWA? It’s easy impressing a room full of developers with your new startup. It’s incredibly hard impressing a room full of people who have full, busy lives doing things other than geekery. It’s great having the funders and business guys there, but I also think it’d be really interesting to hear from people who struggle with technology - and endeavour to get some insight into what works for them. I’m personally 100% in support of Tim O’Reilly and his crusade to encourage tech that makes a difference rather than tech that scratches a transient, unimportant itch (and yes, Wakoopa, I’m afraid that’s you..).  I think it’s especially important to focus on this stuff in the current wave of uncertainty about our financial and environmental futures.

   I hope this doesn’t seem an overly negative response to FOWA. It’s not meant to be - after all, I’ll be going again next year. This is a great event, and really the only one of its kind in the UK - but I also hope they learn to grow over time and mature the conference into something with a bit more weight - not serious, or academic, but perhaps finding ways to improve quality, Pirsig style…

   Posted in museum   Tagged: carsonified, conference, fowa, fowa2008, future of web apps, ht, technology, web2   

   
   Mike
   Mark Zuckerberg. Now with media training (TM)
   wakoopa. software without a reason, and bad spelling too...

4. It’s FOWA time again

   Posted 1 month ago
   
   

   I’m off to Future of Web Apps tomorrow. It’s (I think) my fourth year, but I could well have miscounted, what with getting old and all. Unfortunately, I can’t make it up until late on Thursday, but the schedule on Friday looks better anyway, so better that way round I guess.

   FOWA is usually a good one to go to - a kind of chalk to the cheese that are standard museum/HE get-togethers. Wheras the latter tend to be fairly cautious, slightly academic affairs, FOWA is usually stuffed to the hilt with VC-funded 17 year-olds just waiting to be bought by Google or for the next bubble to explode and dash their dreams on the rocks of inevitability.

   Having got the bitterness out of the way (I’m fookin 35 ffs, and STILL don’t have any VC funding ), I usually come away from FOWA with a fair amount of enthusiasm for the world of web apps and what they have to offer. To be honest, right now I could do with some of that enthusiasm - I’m slightly feeling that the stuff we’re seeing right now is all pretty transient, non-game-changing stuff; technology that is funded just because somebody somewhere needs to fund something, and not because useful things are actually being built.

   It’s stuff like sw0p (by my new friend and BathCamp helper extraordinaire, Darren Beale) that is getting me excited right now: web apps that solve real problems like “shit, we throw away a lot of stuff” rather than “hey, another twitter AIR app…”.

   If I’m perfectly honest (and REALLY not wanting to do the media thing and fan the flames of fear..), it all feels a bit pre-burst right now. But I’ll let you all know on Friday once I’ve heard and schmoozed and mingled.

   Posted in museum   Tagged: fowa, fowa2008, web apps, web2.0   

   
   Mike

5. Assumptions, exactitudes, perfection and creativity

   Posted 1 month ago
   
   

   A while back, those wonderful fellas at Box UK asked me to take part in their Cardiff Web Scene Meet-up #4. I pondered for a long while what I was going to do. The obvious one was an overview of BathCamp: how we put it together, what tools we used to collaborate, and so-on. In the end I decided I’d use the slightly different format (an informal gathering in a bar) as an excuse for a slightly different kind of presentation (an informal gathering of thoughts and slides..), and not just do the obvious thing..

   The slides are an expansion on my previous post, Newton vs Einstein, and form an underlying question which continues to be an itch I need to scratch. The question is really summed up in my third slide: When do we need perfection? . 

   The Newton / Einstein metaphor (for those who can’t be arsed to read my original post) stemmed from In Our Time on Radio 4: given that we manage to go about our daily lives (and even carry out a number of fairly stunning technical tasks, such as putting a man on the moon) without worrying about the complex rightness of Einstein, how much can we make do with simple approximations - how much do we actually need to worry about being “right” when we’re in an environment of wanting to get things done, where “rightness” actually hinders rather than helps?

   This question isn’t as simple as it first appears. There is no binary position here, no right or wrong, and yet often in IT scenarios, we are asked to choose EITHER the easy, quick, risky, “lightweight” way OR the long, arduous,  ”enterprise” one (this Dilbert cartoon, posted by @miaridge on Twitter about museum projects, may seem oddly familiar…). And yet this isn’t just about over-speccing or analysis paralysis. This goes deeper, asking questions about creativity and innovation and what these mean.

   Here’s an example. For maybe 5 of my 7 years at the Science Museum, the entire website was published (not served - how stupid do you think I am ) from an Access database using a simple system I built in ASP during my first year at the museum. This system enabled maybe 20 authors to contribute to the site, whilst maintaining a simple templating system and look and feel. During this time, the site was run out of a single (and slightly battered) web server. Just before I left, we went through a long CMS project, and ended up installing the excellent Sitecore content management system across (if my memory serves me correctly) 7 servers, plus having a re-design which culminated in the current Science Museum website: it is beautiful, clean, well coded, and - frankly - the apple of my eye. 

   It would be very, very easy to dismiss the old site and way of doing things in light of the “professional” approach that content management at “enterprise” level brings to the party, but the fact was for five years the old site performed nearly perfectly, both technically and in terms of responding to the content needs of the organisation. It was imperfect, hacked-together, “lightweight” - and did the job. Compare that to now (when I’m betting that 90% of the CMS functionality and 95% of the server capacity isn’t used..) and it’s not immediately obvious to me - and this is a quite open statement, without bias - which is the better solution. I think both bring benefits and disbenefits, and somewhere in the middle is a ground which more of us should be striving to inhabit, rather than hanging on to our notions of “lightweight vs enterprise”.

   These questions begin with a bias even in the naming. “Lightweight” seems fickle, faddish, subject to change and risk. “Enterprise” is laden with visions of dull corporate lunches, sales people and multi-million pound pricetags.

   The question I ask in the slides really outline the entire theme to this blog and the questions I have been asking over the past decade (eek!) working online. Brian Kelly suggests in this post that “it is time to get serious” - that strategic thinking somehow lives in a different place to the lightweight. He’s referencing the presentation we did together a couple of years ago (Web 2.0: Stop thinking, start doing) - but I can’t help thinking that now is the time to bring strategic and lightweight together rather than trying to drive them apart.

   My time as Head of Web at the museum was almost all about strategy, about bringing together digital and real content and about getting things done. Ultimately, I’m way, way more on the strategic side of this stuff than anything else. But…getting creative things done requires making assumptions - inaccuracies and uncertainty are inherent and valuable. 

   Ultimately, most of us work in enviroments that are at complete odds to creativity: we are forced to work to project plans, “plan” our time, “justify” our expense, “do” the actions. Web2.0 and “lightweightness” are never going to be comfortable - these approaches are deliberately disruptive. The question is - and always has been - how do we embrace this uncertainty and creativity and move forward but still maintain a clear view of the horizon..?

   Posted in museum   Tagged: creativity, einstein, innovation, IT, newton, perfection, web, web2   

   
   Mike

6. That was…BathCamp 2008

   Posted 1 month ago
   
   

   Going away to a land without any internet access (rural Devon, in a valley with no mobile coverage..) immediately after organising something like BathCamp feels a bit odd. On the one hand it’s great to run away and escape the stress, build-up and excitement that comes with running an event like that. On the other, it’s often the few days following an event that really help to mark whether something was a success or not, and missing out on the buzz feels a bit like missing out on the good bit of a party

   It’s now more than a week ago, but I still wanted to chuck out a brief blog post with some thanks and thoughts.

   First off, massive thanks to our amazing sponsors - without you, nothing at all would have happened. We ate, venued (?) and drank extremely well, and I think we wanted for nothing. Except maybe space-themed savoury snacks, that is (noted - we’ll sort it out for next time ).

   I’d particularly like to thank.. Darren Beale of Siftware who went waaay beyond the call of duty by not only sponsoring but also helping us shift baths and drapes, not to mention running an excellent quiz; Peter Gradwell, who - again - not only sponsored, but also provided us with technical support (thanks Gavin!) to help bolster the wifi network in the venue; JR from Invention who helped in so many ways - and under really rather…difficult..circumstances - I can’t possibly mention them all here; Matt Jukes for the multi-function bath / duck habitat / beer cooler (not to mention the ducks themselves…); the awesome Lisa P for organisational skills extraordinaire; Tim B for being amazing and knowing - well, everyone; the other co-organisers for all your hard work; Oh, and the sponsors (again!) - particularly for their flexibility and patience dealing with someone like me who knows NOTHING about sponsorship..; my mum…and…look - you know who you are - thanks…!

   Without the people who turned up and did talks, of course, BathCamp would have been a pizza n beer fest without any reason or meaning: fattening, tasty, but ultimately unsatisfying. As it happens, the talks were extraordinary in their range and interestingness, and I’d like to thank everyone who contributed - and everyone who listened and questioned too. One of my core personal aims of BathCamp was to try to create an event where ideas of all kinds - deep tech, light tech, non-tech - were surfaced and shared by people who cared passionately about those ideas. I think it worked.

   I’ll leave commentary on sessions to everyone else. Over the coming week, I’ll find some time to try and link stuff together a bit better from the main BathCamp website. For now, you can get a pretty good idea of what people have been saying about the event by checking out this OneTag view. Once again, thanks everyone. You rocked.

   Posted in museum   Tagged: barcamp, bathcamp, bathcamp08, event, ideas   

   
   Mike
   bathcamp-schedule

7. It’s BathCamp weekend!

   Posted 2 months ago
   
   

   …well, almost.

   A long time ago I posted the first mention of BathCamp. We came up with the idea in Montreal at Museums and the Web in April 2008. Now we’re 5 months down the line and two days (eek!) before the event itself.

   I’m deeply, deeply excited about what we’ve (collectively - thanks guys!) achieved: fantastic sponsors, an amazing venue, a hugely interesting list of people wanting to talk and a quantity of buzz, too. I’ve also been very touched by the number of people who have helped out in many and various ways. Sometime soon I’ll talk about who they (you!) are, but now is not that time - got things to do

   You’ll have noticed that there has been a looong gap since the last post on Electronic Museum. The reason for this is two-fold. First, the obvious one - BathCamp has not only diverted some of my writing attention over to http://blog.bathcamp.org/ but also eaten up many spare evenings and weekend time: the time I usually spend both researching and writing the Electronic Museum blog. Second, I’ve become increasingly aware that the blogs that I really read are not the ones who mercilessly grind out a post or more a day (you know who you are!), but the ones which are beautifully written, opinionated, well crafted and (possibly because of this) most often less frequent. Much as I love TechCrunch, for example, my Google Reader tells me 13.6 posts a day are pumped out from the lips of Arringtons’ team. I also did some asking around about RSS subscriptions, and a number of people said they subscribe to 100 or more feeds. I subscribe to a choice few feeds, and checking today after a 3 day break, I have 650 unread items. This is craziness, and I want to be a part of the signal, not part of the noise.

   I’m on holiday next week following BathCamp (so you’ll get a bit more blessed silence from me..) - following that, things might return to normal round here OR I may bring my latest scheme into action. Watch this space

   See you at BathCamp - if you can’t make it, remember you can keep an eye on anything tagged bathcamp08. ta!

   

   
   Mike
   bath

8. SAFE…or obvious?

   Posted 3 months ago
   
   

   At the Institutional Web Managers Workshop recently, a team from branding agency Precedent talked about a so called “SAFE matrix” that they use for branding work - in this particular context they’d used it for the iSoton portal as a way of evaluating success. Here’s the matrix (click for slideshow):

   Now, I’m new to the world of HE but I think it’s fair to say that brand and design don’t necessarily sit comfortably or naturally with many university web teams. You only have to look at most university websites - particularly those of the “old” universities (sorry, my language in this space is still naïve, but I basically mean “the universities that didn’t used to be polytechnics”…) to see - well, a lack of design. These sites aren’t incompetent, visually: they often look ok, but at the same time there is often a missing coherence to the visual design; a lack of deeper thought about what the site represents and why.

   There are many possible reasons for this - first off, it can be expensive - inevitably it involves agencies and not just “someone in-house who can use Photoshop”; second, it requires a series of skills that are specialist and often not available to these institutions; and thirdly, it just isn’t (or hasn’t been) seen as a priority. And in a world where sites have grown organically, without any strategic overview (much like many large museum sites), it’s hardly a surprise that the end result often looks like an explosion in a paint and typography factory.

   Here’s the thing - personally, I think it was a mistake to have Precedent doing the talk at IWMW. This isn’t - contrary to what would be an easy assumption - because “I hate that London designer type”. Far from it. I’ve worked with agencies like this day in, day out for (scarily) a decade, and see the extraordinary work these approaches can have in supporting and extending “the brand”. I’ve been the budget holder for projects where we absolutely reaped the benefits of getting the brand right. Where I once squirmed at handing over tens of thousands of pounds for “a logo I could have knocked up in Photoshop in an hour”, I now see that the work surrounding brand development can be absolutely fundamental to aligning the various voices held by institutions. I have - I guess - grown up, and now find myself fighting the battle on the side of the design and brand agencies; or, to put it another way, against mediocre or non-existent visual design.

   The fact is, though, you couldn’t have scripted the opposites at IWMW more perfectly if you’d tried. One the one hand, a media type with his SAFE matrix; on the other, a room full of techies with SQL, Java and repositories higher up in their mental wish-lists than all that high-level brand stuff. Which is not as insulting as it sounds: these guys are busy people with the daily requirements of huge, political and sprawling organisations in their in-boxes. Why should they care too much about what the thing looks like?

   The reason I think Precedent were the wrong choice for IWMW is that what they do is so far in one direction - they are at a distance that is worlds apart from where most HEI’s and other institutions are today; it assumes an acceptance of the need for brand; it assumes a considerable budget; it assumes that anyone actually cares about what brand and visual design can do for web users and the coherence of an online offering. Out there in the commercial web world, these things can - sometimes - be taken as read; in here, with museums and HEI’s, many sites haven’t even got coherent colours, style guidelines or a consistent tone of voice sorted yet, let alone a “brand” or online strategy.

   The net result, of course - through no fault of the speakers, but more the context - was that the already-held misconceptions about brand agencies (expensive, marauding, slick) were reinforced rather than broken down. No-one went away thinking “great, a SAFE matrix: I’ll take this back and implement it”. Instead the audience sniggered a bit and then went down the pub to laugh at iSoton for spending money on a text based logo that - yes, you guessed it - “…I could have knocked up in Photoshop in an hour”.

   What would have worked better, I think, is an online marketing agency talking about why visual design and coherence is important; someone with some understanding of the barriers that museums and HEI’s face when trying to get to this coherence; what it means to have to battle with differing internal pressures about what the website is for and how brand work can help win these battles.

   Even amongst web people, there is a huge divide - astonishingly huge, IMO - between those who think visual design is important, and those who don’t. Go to any web conference like FOWA and you’ll see beautifully crafted visual design on everything you come across; go to any repository, VLE or research site and you’ll get Times New Roman-esque nothingness, or worse, a level of extremely nasty amateurism. Just take one look at the Moodle logo on the left, for example. I mean, that hurts, right? That’s a classic “hey, the bevel filter. Cool! Where can I use it…?” moment. That isn’t design…it’s…horrible..

   The question - either to the HEI’s, museums, public bodies or government sites that are lacking in visual appeal is - well, hey, does it actually matter? I mean - Moodle works, right?

   My personal take is - yes - it matters a great, great deal. What Precedent are saying I think is that visual design and brand are absolutely vital in communicating trust, and increasingly this will be the case as time goes by. The trust landscape is the place that we will increasingly be inhabiting as the web evolves. The very fact that the social web is a leveller, a democratiser, makes it even more vital that institutions have coherence in brand, voice and visual appearance.

   Of course, the debate (as was highlighted by a recent twitter moment about the new delicious re-design) is only made more confusing when you bring in non-visual design: how the IA helps or hinders a user; whether (as I strongly believe), “accessibility” is about brand, look and feel, identity and not just about whether the thing “works”. That, as they say, is a whole different story…

   One thing is clear: the bar is continually being raised, and with it the expectation of users. All institutions, whether HEI, museum, public body or otherwise, are continually being compared to commercial websites. We should therefore learn to listen to people like brand and marketing agencies. They have something useful to say - whether you choose to engage with a “SAFE matrix” is up to you…

   

   
   Mike
   safematrix
   moodle

9. OpenID: fail.

   Posted 4 months ago
   
   

   [ Do you know what - I'm a bit nervous about this blog post. The reason I'm nervous is that I'm writing about something I really don't understand too well. I've tried - I really, really have - I've watched videos and slideshows, looked at diagrams, read explanations. But I still don't really understand how OpenID works. And for a long while that put me off writing this. I know that OpenID has a lot of people gunning for it. And I know that support is gaining, at least in numbers of service providers. But in the end, it comes down - as always - to the user - and the experience I have had has been as that user. And I simply can't, won't - and don't use OpenId. Because it's rotten, and broken, and failing. So I went ahead and wrote this anyway..I'm sure you'll let me know what you think ]

   The geek world has been getting excited for a fair while about OpenID. You’re probably all familiar with it and I’ll leave it up to Wikipedia to describe the service in detail, but in short the notion is that managing multiple identities online is increasingly problematic, and that some kind of way of managing these identities in one trusted, decentralised place is what is needed to make life better.

   OpenID is based around the use of a uri as the unique identifier for an individual, not an email address, as is so common today with most sites.

   All well and good, you’d have thought. The only thing is there’s an enormous, hulking great elephant in the room: OpenID doesn’t work.

   I should clarify. In a technical sense, OpenID works. But from a usability perspective, it’s absolutely horrible.

   Let’s examine the user flow for someone signing up to a.n.other site using the “traditional” method: they arrive, they click “register”. They put in their details, including email address. They go to their email account and click on the “validate” link. Done. The purists all shift uncomfortably in their seats - the users’ identity has been propogated to yet another site (eek, duplication) and there is also a reliance on the email provider (eek, single point of failure / “evil” company fear, etc).

   Now let’s have a look with OpenID. And let’s consider it in the best possible case scenario - user has not only already created an OpenID but knows the address AND is signed in (i.e has a currently active session/cookie) to that providers’ service.

   So..user arrives at site and is asked for their OpenID. They put in the address and push go. The site then redirects them to their OpenID provider. User clicks to allow access to data, and selects a persona. Provider site then redirects back to the original site. Original site then (inevitably, in my experience) asks user to fill in additional “persona” data for their service as well as what they already entered. User enters site.

   That’s at least a couple more steps, and remember that’s if they’re signed in or even have an OpenID account. If they’re not signed in (but have an account) then they still have to sign in on the OpenID providers’ site. Using a username and password…If they don’t have an OpenID, just add at least 3 more steps. If they forget their OpenID then the process to get it back has to be done on the provider site and not on the site they’re wanting to access.

   There are several thing that are really badly wrong with the OpenID / user landscape. Here’s how I see them:

   1. Users don’t understand the use of a URI as identifier
   This is about education, but it’s an important point. People see URI’s as “web addresses”, not as personal identifiers. They don’t get it, and aren’t being encouraged to get it, either.

   2. Users don’t like redirects
   Actually, users don’t care about redirects - what they do care about is maintenance of trust and brand. A user mid-basket on Amazon is not going to be happy about a jump away to another site unless they’re very clear that there is brand association between the sites.

   3. Users won’t remember OpenID’s
   Not only are OpenID’s longer and more complex, they’re also a dog to get back once forgotten. With email/pwd, you just click the “forgotten pwd” link. Email, click, done. With OpenID you have to go back to your provider site and do it from there, not on the site you’re trying to access.

   4. There is no paradigm
   Apart from password remembering within the browser, there isn’t a “central persona management” paradigm. This doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be one, but it makes the job of invisibile tech that much harder.

   I’ve left what I see as the single biggest issue until last:

   5. There isn’t a problem that needs solving
   As I’ve indicated before, we (tech savvy geek types) are not the normality. I may have a sign-up obsession and belong to hundreds of sites, but normal people just don’t. By some gentle “finger in the air” reckoning, I’d suggest that most people have - what - ten sites they sign in to? That’s hardly shouting out for a distributed, decentralised, persona-based solution, is it? What’s actually wrong with a “remind me of my password” link, anyway? And using email as identity is secure enough for pretty much any application. We geeks are making assumptions based on our experiences of the web. It’s us, not Joe Normal who has 400 passwords in our heads, surely?

   So on the one hand we’ve got an elegant, beautiful, technically “good” solution that is almost completely unusable. On the other is something ugly and flawed - but something that works well for most people: something that isn’t actually broken, and - frankly - doesn’t need fixing.

   OpenID feels like it could and should be better, but the current scenario whereby hundreds and thousands of sites are becoming providers (AOL, Orange, Yahoo!, etc) and very little effort is being put into fixing the flawed user flow - or user education for that matter - is just a road to nowhere. Some sites (LiquidID, ClickPass, Vidoop as examples) are just starting in the usability direction, but it’s nowhere near enough. And right now, I - like most people I know - are just fine sticking with the original email/pwd alternative.

   

   
   Mike
   

10. Mashed Museum 2008

    Posted 4 months ago
    
    

    On June 18th 2008 (the day before UK Museums on the Web conference) a bunch of us met in a room at Leicester University to do some museum mashing. Our aim was:

    ” …to give ourselves an environment free from political or monetary constraints. The focus of the day is not IPR, copyright, funding or museum politics. Our energies will be channeled into embracing the “new web”: envisaging, demonstrating and (hopefully) building some lightweight distributed applications. “

    I thought I’d borrow Matt’s N95 and do a quick “interview” (loose term) of everyone that wanted to say something about what they’d done. Finally last night I got round to chucking this into Window’s Movie Maker and doing some editing and have uploaded the result to http://blip.tv/file/1029060. It’s around 12 minutes long, so grab a cuppa and a comfy chair…

    Finished?

    The following day I did a presentation at the conference itself. This is now on Slideshare (and embedded below)

    I’d just like to say thanks loads to everyone who attended - I know giving up a day is always problematic (even if it involves beer at the end). I hope you had fun. I know I did. Also enormous thanks to Ross Parry and the MCG for giving us the opportunity to do this.

    Several people who attended have written about / linked to the things we built:

    • Jim O’Donnell did some nice stuff with Yahoo! and RSS - see his demos of a tagged RSS feed, browsing by tag and browsing by object
    • Brian Kelly played about with PicLens - see his coverage on the UK Web Focus site
    • Daniel Pett blogged about what he got up to over here
    • Steve Pope used his OpenCalais helper to mashup some hoard.it data with Flickr and Amazon
    • Frankie Roberto did some very cool stuff with Freebase (my coverage here) and the MIT Simile Timeline
    • Fiona Romeo used the awesome Many Eyes visualisation tool on some data she had…
    • ..and I built an SMS thing in the morning (but gave up as we had no mobile coverage..) and a very simple mystery object game (again based on hoard.it data) in the afternoon. (deliberate error: the right answer is always the first one…damn…)

    (I’ll also be continuing to update www.mashedmuseum.org.uk with future museummashingmoments…)

    The message? Well, Lee Iverson from the Univerity of British Columbia used a phrase during his presentation the following day to beautifully encapsulate what I’ve posted about so, so often - and the one thing that makes any mashups possible:

    “If you expose data, you lose control but give it life“

    And that pretty much sums it up.

    

    
    Mike
    

11. AIR coming of age

    Posted 5 months ago
    
    

    Now is a hugely exciting time to be involved in the web. I believe we’ll look back at the early 2000’s with a sense of awe at the rate and extent of technological change. Personally, I believe it’s faster and more engaging than it ever has been before. The 1990’s were exciting in a different kind of way - in a crazy, rollercoaster, unsustainable, first toe-dipping way. It was good for jobs, too - I remember a period of a few months where I literally - and I exaggerate not - got 2/3 offers a week; and I wasn’t really that much cop, either. That doesn’t happen any more. Or maybe Google lost my number

    The good ‘ole days were fraught with tension and frustration, too. There was so, so much we couldn’t do - so many hacked together approaches, so many nastinesses in browser renderings, so much uncertainty about frames, browser-dependent tags and dialup speeds. Even saying that makes me chuckle now - hey, we used to worry about whether a page was 10Kb or 20Kb - imagine…

    Today, things are markedly different. The challenges are - at least to someone like me - actually much more satisfying. They’re not generally about whether system A can talk to system B, they’re about the more human challenges: will person X understand what I mean when I say Z; will they use what I’m building, and how? How can I hit this niche? What’s the best marketing strategy? Can I ever, ever make money doing X?

    More and more, we’re also asking “where will we use it?”.

    Everyware - the notion that the internet is all around us - is, as you will probably know, a notion that I believe forms an absolutely central part to where this all goes from here. And core to Everyware are real questions about convergence and re-purposing (remember those phrases..?).

    A while back, I took a quick look at the blurring line between desktop and web apps. Back then I commented that two major player were entering the “Rich Internet App” (RIA) space - Microsoft with Silverlight/WPF and Adobe with what had been Adobe Apollo and which became Adobe AIR.

    Microsoft is - obviously - never a player to be underestimated. They’ve got the desktop sown up, an unfathonable quantity of cash, and some serious technologists who know their shit. On the other hand you’ve got Adobe, previously somewhat irritating to “serious” web developers who didn’t want to learn Flex or Flash, and considered them “something for them weird designer types”.

    Microsoft have done some nice stuff with Silverlight and WPF. But…it seems terribly, horribly cumbersome - it’s all a bit .Net, a bit codey, a bit deep and impenetrable. Frankly, a bit ‘fn dull. Over on the other side, Adobe chose a lightweight “if you can do it in xhtml, know a bit of AJAX and can cope with expanding your javascript a smidgin” approach.

    You know what? Adobe are winning, hands-down, with absolutely no doubt whatsoever: AIR is getting huge numbers of column inches from the major blog writers compared to Silverlight. The AIR applications being built are deep, beautiful and useful, even for the Enterprise. They install easily, they’re rich and quick and well designed. They make the transition from desktop to web seamless.

    And as usual, it’s the easy, lightweight, familiar approach which is beating the heavy, technical and possibly “more feature rich” one. Once again, people like me - semi-serious web types - can play with technologies we understand; we can see results almost immediately; we can view source and copy what other people have done. And we are writing desktop apps which you can - pretty much as-is - also deploy to the web. From a reality perspective, this is an exciting way to think of applications: true develop once, deploy to many channels.

    This is holy grail land. If you haven’t played with AIR, go do it now…

    

    
    Mike
    

12. Museum mash

    Posted 5 months ago
    Most of you will probably have seen this already, but I’m running another museum mashup day in Leicester on 18th June 2008, the day before the annual UK Museums on the Web conference. It’ll be a developer/techie focussed day working with various bits of museum data to see what we can mash together in just [...]

13. hoard.it : bootstrapping the NAW

    Posted 6 months ago
    What seems like a looong time ago I came up with an idea for “bootstrapping” the Non API Web (NAW), particularly around extracting un-structured content from (museum) collections pages. The idea of scraping pages when there’s a lack of data access API isn’t new: Dapper launched a couple of years ago with a model for mapping [...]

14. BathCamp update

    Posted 6 months ago
    As I mentioned in an earlier post, because I haven’t got enough on outside of work (OneTag+, various blogs, a novel, music composing, Stufflinker, museum mashup day, 2 kids) - and really need to fill that 25th and 26th hours of the day - I’m working with a bunch of people to put together a [...]

15. Lights, bushels.

    Posted 6 months ago
    Brian has written a short post about universities actively trying to stop promotional material (yes - promotional material) finding freedom on the web. How funny is that? On a related note, Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb did a post a couple of days ago about hidden image resources in the so called “deep web”. The list of [...]

16. Webnoise

    Posted 6 months ago
    A lot of rumbling about the noise created by the (social) web has been reaching our ears recently. I’m not in this instance talking about the management of “outgoing” social media but more about how people deal with the sheer quantity of stuff which is arriving through various channels. The news feeds, tweets, emails, IM [...]

17. Eduserv Foundation Symposium

    Posted 6 months ago
    I’m off to the 2008 Foundation Symposium tomorrow, a day of asking: “what do current Web trends tell us about the future of ICT provision for learners and researchers?…” The programme and speakers look pretty good - Larry Johnson from NMC and Jem Stone from the Beeb to mention but a couple of the better known [...]