If We Ran The World

In the spirit of screaming-as-loud-as-you-can-to-get-the-word-out, I figured that it was about time to announce that I will be working in some as-yet-to-be-determined capacity on what I consider to be a project of extreme importance - IfWeRanTheWorld.com. After reading the article in Wired and discovering that I had a friend in common with project co-founder Wendell Davis, I found myself drawn into this incredible web of ideas; ideas which surprisingly continue to touch upon almost all of the many frustrations I have had for the last few years while trying to discover how, as Tim O’Reilly puts it, “to work on things that matter’ in my chosen industry. These frustrations are many, but in simplified (and relevant) terms:

1) How do you turn intention into action - connection into collaboration - group dynamics/network effects into real social power?

2) How do you eliminate not merely the barriers to access but the barriers to usefulness?

3) How do you make something work just as well for the small community group as it does for the large non-profit/corporation?

4) How do you make social action fun - no - more importantly - how do you make it integrate so far into our daily lives that it fades away?

What I respect the most about this project is that it aims to change behavior (an extremely tall order) rather then simply create another place for people or companies to talk about how wonderful they are (think google instead of social network). And yes, I did say companies.

More on this to come in the near future….

Flickr Clock

I admit, I was certainly skeptical of Flickr entering the realm of video. But Flickr Clock, created for the site by Stamen Design, shows how video can be presented in a different, yet seamless, way that is both representative of the innovation of the Flickr community and an indication of the amazing projects that the site inspires.

You can find Flickr Clock (somewhat hidden) in the ‘Explore’ Tab. It is a great idea, with an awesome (and content appropriate) interface, that allows you to explore video uploaded to the Flickr Clock Group. The navigation, a scrubber at the bottom, allows you to move backward in time and buttons to the right and left of each video allow you to easily advance to new content. Nice work.

Reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

I am not one who usually discusses the reasons behind my somewhat abnormal eating habits, which include not eating red meat and pork since age 10, giving up chicken and most dairy products when I was 18 and eating VERY small amounts of sugar and processed foods. In fact, this is probably one of the few subjects in which I choose not to express my opinions in public (those who know me well will know that I frequently find it - how should I say - ‘difficult’ to keep my opinions to myself in lots of situations). However, you will rarely hear me comment about the health or social benefits of vegetarianism or the dangers of eating too much meat. In thinking about it over the last few weeks, which I admit I haven’t in a long time, there are probably many reasons why this has been the case for the last almost 20 years. But, in addition to having something to do with how personal a choice what to put in your body actually is and how difficult I find it is to have opinions about other people’s bodies, the reasons that are still relevant have a lot to do with my own ignorance about industrial agriculture and my inability to articulate what abstaining from eating certain things actually means either personally or collectively.

Over the last 10 or 15 years, my initial desire to eat better due to certain health issues has certainly given way to some general beliefs about what being a vegetarian might mean. Its not as though I never thought about it from a social perspective. I have also had to discuss it a lot more as I got older. One cannot, it seems, obstain from anything, especially something as inconvenient to others as food consumption, for too long without eventually having to explain the reasons to a certain extent. ‘Health issues’ never seemed to cut it, mostly because it eventually became not entirely true.

I have never, even during my very strict vegetarian stages, subscribed completely to the idea that humans were not meant to eat meat. In particular, my studies during college in Anthropology convinced me that this way of thinking is mostly silly and without historical context. But I also could not quite accept that an industrial nation simply had no choice but to treat the animals that were to become it’s food with such disregard and cruelty. Nor did I ever accept that eating food drenched in pesticides and fed with antibiotics was not dangerous to my health. Still, I admit I never fully thought about it or had the necessary information to make a real argument for my strange eating behavior. If there is one thing I can’t stand, its those who make arguments with no real facts or a legitimate grasp of what they are saying. So, I mostly never said anything too specific.

Perhaps this makes me an ideal reader of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, because ultimately my entire relationship with food has been somewhat of a dilemma:

Do I buy organic vegetables even though they cost more? Can I really justify eating fish and if not, can I actually deal with finding protein alternatives that are not fattening (peanut butter/nuts/etc.) ?  Are carbs really bad for you and how could I possibly cut down on my favorite foods in the world; potatoes, bagels and pasta? Could I be allergic to gluten? Could I ever eat a chicken again if I knew it came from a local sustainable farm?

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Green Business Competition Launch Party

Originally posted on greensear.ch:

Last night I attended the Green Business Competition Launch Party with fellow Greensear.ch bloggers Megan MacMurray and Angela Pablo as well as Core Industries founder Corey Szopinski. The Green Business Competition is presented by Green Spaces, which provides green entrepreneurs with work space, business services, workshops, and a networking outreach of over 4,300 environmentally and socially conscious people. Core Industries is actually a silver sponsor of the competition alongside prize sponsor ConEdison, non-profit sponsor The Nature Conservancy and other companies like Squarespace, Design and Source, eco-fusion, Grist and others. The Green Business platform was created to help promote emerging green businesses in New York. The competition, which will run from January 15th, 2009 to March 22nd, 2009, will reward investment funds to companies that have the ability to revolutionize their industry by working with ecological resources while creating economic opportunities.

The Launch Party, apart from providing the traditional (and important!) favorites of free booze, free food and networking opportunities, also allowed potential participants to find out more information about the purpose of the competition and what the creators and sponsors were hoping would come from the contest submissions. After attendees had ample time to sip their eco-friendly cocktails and organic beer, we were presented with a film and presentation from The Nature Conservancy, a speech from ConEdison and a very entertaining and inspirational talk from Tom Szaky, Co-Founder & CEO of TerraCycle. TerraCycle describes themselves as “arguably the first-ever Eco-Capitalism corporation”, in that they not only limit their consumption of natural capital and minimize waste, but actually reverse the entire process by consuming waste as a raw material in creating a finished product that renews natural capital. As an example, the company’s flagship product, TerraCycle Plant Food™, is an all-natural, all-organic, liquid plant food made from waste and packaged in waste (reused soda bottles). In his brief talk, as he explained his early experiences with re-using worm poop as plant fertilizer, he stressed how his original business ideas went from very localized thinking to a concept that caught on with giant corporations and ended up with the potential for global impact.

After hearing his talk, I was certainly inspired to think of interesting business ideas to submit. I most probably won’t come up with anything revolutionary before the submission date, but you should! The prizes for the winner of the competition are quite diverse and include a cash prize of $8000, office space, legal support, accounting services, public relations services, banner advertising, networking and business mentoring and web development and support. A complete list of details is available here.

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‘Useful’ Examples of Facebook Connect?

Facebook Connect, the social network’s data sharing project that enables a third party website’s users to seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account information and thus their friends with that website’s products and services, seems to actually be approaching usefullness. The recent example of CNN’s smart use of the service during President Obama’s inauguration speech may be a fluke as far as online applications go, but apparently it is not the only cool example around. In fact, one of the more exciting applications of the service may be its ability to connect with desktop software. As announced on CNET, Facebook Connect will be hooked up to the Apple photo-management software iPhoto with its new ‘09 release. Basically, users will be able to use iPhoto ‘09 to upload photos directly to Facebook along with photo tags from the software, which can generate Facebook notifications. Additionally, Mac users can update their Facebook News Feed and alert friends anytime they update their websites using Apple’s iWeb ‘09 application. I have to say that, even though I am not ‘yet’ a full-time MAC user and have not actually used the service, this is pretty cool and has wide sweeping implications as more web based systems move away from utilizing their own desktop applications (i.e. the Flickr Uploader - which honestly is still the coolest uploader EVER) to integrating with desktop apps we already use.

However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t much exploration to be done in the online world itself. Out of curiosity, I went searching around for other examples of Facebook Connect being used anywhere - let alone usefully - and found few. Of all places, I found “The Insider” using it to allow readers to sign up for the site using their Facebook login, invite their friends to join “The Insider” and chat with their friends about articles. It also shows which friends have signed on to “The Insider” recently and provides them all with a little profile, complete with photo taken straight from Facebook. Certainly not a revolutionary use of the service, but still somewhat interesting given the genre of the source.

I also found Facebook Connect being used on MyWorkster.com, a sort of Linkedin/Job Posting Board hybrid. I signed up just to see what the service would provide me, but found no advantage to linking my Facebook account beyond the fact that I could publish a story in my news feed (which I of course decided not to do). Perhaps usefulness is only gleaned by having Facebook friends on the site already - and therein lies the problem. This is a reason why the CNN example was so successful. There was no barrier for use, no significant collection of friends needed and no reason to explain the need to connect. You could could chat will all Facebook users or just your friends if they were on, and the fact that your status message was the mode of communicating (while annoying at the end of the day) meant that you were not only continuously alerting friends throughout your entire experience of exactly what you were doing and enticing them to join the conversation, but also communicating with friends NOT using the service. True, the inauguration was a very specific circumstance that caused a predictable critical mass. But I still think that it was a perfect example of the pieces that have to come together for applications of Facebook Connect to be truly useful beyond a universal login system. I am keeping my eye out for other examples. Send me some if you know of any…..

CNN live and Facebook

Upon going to CNN live’s coverage of the Inauguration of Barack Obama, I was pleasantly surprised to see their video stream coupled with Facebook, allowing viewers to update their status message from the live stream window and see what everyone or just their friends were saying.

I have seen quite a bit of criticism suggesting that Twitter would have been a better choice for CNN given the fact that many people are more likely to use it for the kind of updates and conversation that watching the Inauguration is likely to produce. For several reasons, however, I can see why CNN may have thought the Facebook route was a better decision. For one thing, despite the fact that Twitter has certainly become more mainstream recently, many more people are on Facebook making it more likely to achieve a high level of participation by a wide variety of viewers. Also, Twitter does not have a particularly good reputation for reliability during high profile events. Although, I must say that during both election night and today’s speech, I personally did not notice any problems.

One thing to note - while Facebook may have a greater appeal for the masses, I now have 5 status updates on my profile page that are completely out of context and I’m sure others have many more. Changing one’s status message does imply an update on one’s activities, but is not necessarily the right medium to convey the back and forth conversation that was going on between some people and their friends during the speech. It might be that while the status message update was important feature, an integrated Facebook chat application in addition would have made more sense. But I suppose that is also relevant to the group of friends one is looking at. Maybe most people preferred to be silent.

On a separate note, whitehouse.gov was officially changed over as soon as Obama was sworn in as President, a quick, but not surprising, move for the first administration to truly understand the power of the internet.

DIY NYC - First Meeting

Last night, I attended the first meeting of the New York branch of DIY city. DIYcity was created in October 2008 by John Geraci who also co-founded Outside.in and is an alumni of ITP. As it states on their site, DIYcity’s goal is to think about and discuss how ‘we’ want to reinvent our city:

Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps - we use these things more and more in our daily routines to make our lives better. But can we also use them to remake our cities altogether? How can these technologies be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today into finely-tuned, fluid, user-operated systems that are efficient, sustainable and fit for life in the 21st century?

DIYcity is a place where people figure these things out by actually building and launching applications that address the problems around them.

The first meeting was one part introduction and one part rapid prototyping/discussion. It was great to see people from many different backgrounds attending with a range of skills from interaction design to programming to public policy, including people from The Open Planning Project (TOPP), Socialight, the MTA, Yahoo and various other organizations.

The first order of business was to identify problems within the city that we would like to fix, write them on sticky paper and post them up for discussion. The problems ranged from informational concerns like needing to know more about one’s neighborhood school district to the city streets needing more bike lanes to people being afraid of walking home alone late at night. We were then asked to come up with possible tools that could be used to assist in alleviating these issues. The suggestions were typical from Twitter to RSS feeds to Facebook. We then split into groups with each group dealing with a specific kind of issue like data availability, transportation, crime, etc.

I will leave the specific ideas that were generated from the group’s discussion to the DIY wiki, but lets just say that it certainly wouldn’t be too much to expect a new MTA google calender, Facebook zipcode app or text message based ‘get home safe’ application to appear in the near future. It definitely was a productive two hours with some real world solutions completely possible.

What I really appreciate about this particular idea, apart from the obvious pleasure in being in a fully collaborative environment once again, is it’s focus on actually finding ways to solve real problems and doing so in a way that is simple, easily accessible and relevant to an actual city. Ever since taking Kevin Slavin and Adam Greenfield’s Urban Computing class at ITP, I really came to appreciate the idea of the city as a building ground for technological innovation. (Unfortunately, I had to miss Adam’s SVA talk last night to attend this meeting). There are so many things that are possible in the evolution of our cities that could make urban life better, safer and fundamentally more interesting. I think ideas like that of DIYcity are the necessary catalysts for these possibilities to reach fruition.

10 Most Common Misconceptions about User Experience Design

A couple of days ago, Mashable ran a very interesting article called “10 Most Common Misconceptions about User Experience Design”. As someone very interested in the field, I found the article quite eye opening and would suggest all companies with questions about the importance of User Experience Design read it immediately. The highlights:

1. User experience design is NOT user interface design

2. User experience is NOT about technology “User experience designers use technology to help people accomplish their goals. But the primary objective is to help people, not to make great technology.”

3. In addition to usable; desirable, accessible, credible, findable, and ultimately valuable are the essential facets of user experience.

3. “The biggest misconception is that [companies] have a choice to invest in their user’s experience. To survive, they don’t.”

Online vs. Offline Shopping

If there is one thing that working for a branding agency has taught me over the last year, it is the importance of maintaining the integrity of one’s brand and one’s brand identity across different platforms, communication systems and business units. As a consumer, I have certainly noticed, as I am sure we all have, a considerable disconnect between what retail or service oriented companies want us to believe about their brand and what their customer service personnel actually make us believe with their attitude. The problem most often occurs when we are forced do deal with these reps because something is broken, needs to be returned or is otherwise not working in the way we expected it to. While it is understandable, although maybe not forgivable, that some people responsible for such jobs might not uphold the same work ethic or standards as the company as a whole, what I find much more troubling is a certain trend involving the online marketplace that seems to fundamentally necessitate the breakdown of consumer-brand relationships by placing customers at the mercy of these under-trained and under-paid people.

I am speaking specifically of the way that retail companies define a difference between their ‘physical’ store and their ‘online’ store. Perhaps in cases of smaller merchants, this is the only way to do business. For instance, I am not going to be able to return a fuzzy teddy bear to Vermont easily if I live in Florida. But for large, national retailers I think the practice NEEDS TO STOP. It is frustrating, irritating and completely unnecessary. In addition, while the consumer may bear most of the aggravation at the onset of a problem, it is ultimately the company’s image and brand that suffer.

For me personally, the problem with this absurd distinction just recently became even more evident and relevant when I tried to return a broken item purchased at BestBuy.com.

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Best Careers of 2009

Today, U.S. News and World Report published their annual article ranking the best, ahead-of-the-curve and most overrated careers for 2009. I was directed to the article by a friend Lori Perucci, whose current career choice of Occupational Therapist was among one of the 30 ‘best’ careers selected. The list is generated by ranking each career’s:

1. Job outlook - taking into consideration a long-term downturn in the economy and an accelerated worldwide focus on the green economy
2. Average job satisfaction
3. Difficulty of the required training
4. Prestige
5. Pay

What really caught my interest, though, was the inclusion of Usability Experience Specialist, which apparently encompasses the entire range of possible job titles I have really been striving for: interface designer, information architect, user-centered design specialist, etc. Although, the category doesn’t seem to refer specifically to web and technology related position, it was still nice to see it up there. Although apparently, while we have great job satisfaction, we only scored a B for training difficulty, prestige and job market outlook.

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