Atomiq

My first screencast

A couple of weeks ago I recorded my first real screencast. It's a demo of Kiiro, our project management and collaboration application for SharePoint.

I thought it turned out reasonably well--I'd watched a lot of screencasts before recording this and knew that about 90% of them were half-assed. I wrote a quick script, did a few takes and kept this one because it felt somewhat smooth but not so polished as to be inauthentic.

However, when I showed this to some co-workers and advisors they immediately commented on my vocal pauses and occasional screw-ups. They were saying I sound like an amateur--which is exactly what I am.

I think I've realized (over the past few years of watching YouTube) that production values and quality aren't so tightly coupled anymore. For example, Matt NL shared this hilarious-but-crappy video at the office this afternoon:

I'd say this is funnier than three quarters of the sketches on Saturday Night Live. But the production values are dismal. And for me this isn't a problem.

But there are people--and more important than mere people, customers who might buy our product--whose mental model of video is still largely shaped by television instead of YouTube. For me, these professional production values are often an impediment to just getting something out there [*]. But if they help turn prospective customers into purchasers, I'm there (though a bit reluctantly).

So I'll probably re-record this in a couple of weeks with fewer mistakes and a better intro. One person even suggested I use a woman's voice instead of my own--might do that too.

[*] Analogy: Did Guided by Voices make better music when they were produced by Ric Ocasek? No, but they certainly made less music.

Toddler air guitar

Just about every day Evan and I head down to our basement to play guitar. I play the guitar and he dances (sometimes he strums along on his ukelele). He'll usually request his two favourite songs--Wanted Man and Ring of Fire.

Today Jen made a video of us, which I thought I'd share despite the fact that it includes my terrible singing and some sketchy guitar. Ev's dancing makes up for it though.

(The only thing that's better than this is when Avery joins us on Ring of Fire.)

The Day After

I just ordered The Day After, the 1983 TV movie about a nuclear war and its effects on a small U.S. city.

I've been reading a lot about the Cold War lately and The Day After is remarkable in many ways:

It ran just a week or two after Able Archer 83, a souped-up NATO exercise that the Soviets suspected was cover for a nuclear first strike. Able Archer 83 was arguably the closest the world has come to nuclear war. In Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes makes the point that Able Archer was in some ways more serious than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy's crisis was a game of brinksmanship; Able Archer was more like two belligerent giants stumbling blindly toward each other.

The Day After made a serious impression on Ronald Reagan and helped change his attitudes toward nuclear war. Reagan apparently responded best to video briefings, so it's probably no surprise that it took a movie to convince him that a nuclear war couldn't be won. According to the Wikipedia, someone in the Reagan administration sent a note to director Nick Meyer saying the The Day After played a role in the '87 INF arms reduction treaty.

Personally, I missed both The Day After and Threads (the BBC's nuclear holocaust movie) when they originally ran. But I remember nuclear war being a frequent topic of conversation--how much time would we have once the missiles flew? what would we do?--at that time. It's a strange thing, when you're 14, to think seriously about what you'd do if you were suddenly counting down the last 10 minutes of your life.

The Day After isn't available on iTunes, but you can watch the whole thing on YouTube in installments. Here's the money shot, if you will, the nuclear attack scene:

Boom.

(With comments by Steve Portigal, ...)

Web Strategy Summit, May 4 & 5, 2009

To say that things are hectic at work--and at home--would be a major understatement. (In fact, I'm planning out Christmas day so I can get in a couple of hours of wireframing.) But we've also pulled together some major plans for 2009 at nForm--which makes all the busy-ness more fun that frantic.

One really exciting thing we're organizing in May 2009 is the Web Strategy Summit (or WSS09). This event will bring together two subjects we're passionate about: interactive technologies (like the web, mobile and social media) and creating real value for organizations. I've posted a longer introduction on the nForm blog that explains our plan for WSS09:

We thought there was a niche for a new event that

puts strategy first and focuses on how people are using interactive technologies to transform their organizations and markets (stuff we think is really cool).

is relevant to decision makers as well as designers, developers, marketers and other hands-on roles.

makes sense in today's economy (talking about how you create value with your online investments has probably never been more urgent than it is today).

The Web Strategy Summit brings together those ideas into an afforable package.

Right now we have five speakers lined up: Avinash Kaushik (Google), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester), Christina Wodtke (LinkedIn), Jay Goldman (author of The Facebook Cookbook) and Henning Fischer (Adaptive Path).

If you read this blog you'll have at least a passing interest in web strategy and related topics--think about saving May 4 & 5, 2009 to attend this event. We'll have more details on the sessions and workshops in mid-January. In the meantime, feel free to send me an email if you have questions.

(And happy holidays, too!)

Drum circle

This weekend at CanUX we had a drum circle with one of the artist/facilitators at the Banff Centre. These creativity workshops are a big part of the CanUX experience, and the facilitators are amazing.

My man Bryce J took a video (Malcolm Lim, a percussionist from Calgary, is in the middle):

Great fun!

Squeaky roar

Evan at Halloween:

He makes a good lion (and he's a Leo, too).

(With comments by Austin Govella, ...)

Ramping up for CanUX 2008

In two months we'll be hosting the fourth annual Canadian User Experience Workshop--CanUX--at the lovely Banff Centre. The event runs from November 16 to 18, with an optional pre-conference UX Bootcamp.

We've got an excellent line-up of speakers--Dave Gray (XPLANE), Brandon Schauer (Adaptive Path) and Luke Wroblewski (Yahoo!)--with a couple of slots yet to be filled.

The great thing about CanUX is that it's more like a retreat than a conference. The people who come to participate in all the activities (like the artist-led workshops, the design slam, the show-and-tell reception and, of course, the drinking) have a great time.

As always, we've worked to keep the price low and all-inclusive. A mere $899 gets you into the event, plus two nights accommodation and meals. The price goes up next week, but it's still cheaper than a lot of other events.

The full program, speaker bios and other details are available on the CanUX website.

Melbourne Aquarium

I'm so far behind on my things-to-blog list. Anyway, until I find time to catch up, I thought I'd throw up (ha!) this short video I made at the Melbourne Aquarium, home of the world's largest oceanarium:

Evan at 1

I took this a couple of weeks before Ev's first birthday, but I like the look on his face here--eyebrow raised and cagey.

(With comments by Austin Govella, ...)

Holidays

gsmith http://atomiq.org genesmith@atomiq.org Miscellanea

Best button ever: "Create an imaginary friend"

I like FriendFeed. It's simple and useful, and it brings the utilitarian-but-well-engineered feel of Gmail to social media (several prominent Google/Gmail alums developed FriendFeed).

FriendFeed has one great and, I think, unique feature called "Create an imaginary friend." It lets you track people from other social media sites who haven't yet signed up for FriendFeed.

This is a smart and useful way of dealing with problems like cold-start and social network migration. Your friends don't need to move to FriendFeed for you to get value from it (and them).

But--honestly--the real reason I'm writing this post is because this button just makes he happy. It's an unexpected reminder of a time when I didn't need to keep track of the people I knew, when my relationships weren't a measure of my value, and when I used to hang out with Evel Knievel all day long, jumping Snake Canyon.

But I know all of this will be spoiled once I click the button. So I don't.

Australia bound

Next week I'm headed to Australia to do some speaking, have lunch with some dignitaries and take a short holiday.

I start off in the south and head north where it's warm:

July 18 - 23 - Melbourne for KM Australia
July 24 - 25 - Sydney for lunch at the Canadian Consulate and a couple of meetings
July 25 - 30 - Cairns for sightseeing

I'd love to meet up with any Australian IA/UX/IxD/web design folks while I'm there. Please drop me a line if you want to get together.

Mostly unrelated but possibly interesting to long-time readers: this trip involves about 60 hours of travel both ways, so I'm going to try finish Infinite Jest while in transit. Based on my average reading speed I should be able to read two Infinite Jests in 60 hours. But I think sleep, eating, in-flight movies and other distractions will make this a challenging goal. I will report back.

Book Excerpt: Seven Business Benefits of Tagging

I posted a link to this on our company blog a few days ago but thought I should share it here as well: Peachpit.com has a short excerpt from my book called Return on Investment: Seven Business Benefits of Tagging Systems.

The excerpt is taken from Chapter 2, which was the hardest chapter to write and, if I remember things correctly, the very last thing I submitted. I used Jess's value-centered design model to frame this chapter, so the excerpt is part of larger discussion on balancing users' needs and motivations with business benefits (a core concept of our consulting practice at nForm). Still, I think the article is a good roll-up of the concrete benefits tagging can bring to an organization.

(If you want to read more, you can buy the book on Amazon or read some of the supplementary on the book site.)

I'm shuttering Tweeterboard

Last fall I built a site called Tweeterboard. Tweeterboard was an experiment in using conversation (specifically @username messages) to measure influence within Twitter.

But this week I realized that I no longer have the time, energy, interest or technical abilities to maintain it. So I'm shutting it down.

Tweeterboard started as a fun diversion. At the time a lot of people were using follower counts as a way of finding influential people on Twitter. I thought I could do better by tracking conversation between twitterers. I started scanning people's twitter streams, and adapted Google's PageRank algorithm to produce a influence score. (If you think of @ replies as one-way links between people, you'll understand why PageRank works as way to analyze Twitter conversations.)

There were lots of good things about Tweeterboard. I learned a great deal about PHP and MySQL, and it exercised the little bits of my brain that weren't fried from dealing with a book and a baby. It had a few thousand followers on Twitter, and was a decent success by the standards of Twitter aggregators. A few people even wrote some nice things about it.

Most importantly, Tweeterboard occasionally confirmed my intuitions about who *should* be popular--like Susan Reynolds on Frozen Pea Friday and Barack Obama after he secured the democratic nomination. While Scoble and Jason Calacanis and others who make a point of collecting followers occasionally made it to the top, they weren't there consistently. So I take some satisfaction in creating something that rewarded people for conversation rather than just promiscuous friending.

Tweeterboard also had its downsides, the big one being that running an aggregator is no fun. It's difficult technically and it only makes sense at scale--it has to be big before it's really useful. I'm a decent amateur programmer, but I have to admit that I find this scaling stuff a bit dull and, actually, hard. It's the kind of thing best left to professionals. (I think the folks at Summize could do a much better job with conversation analytics.)

On top of that, there aren't all that many rewards for building things on top of Twitter. Sure, there are tons of active Twitter users. But with all the outages and the arbitrary changes in the API limits, I just haven't been feeling the love. Tweeterboard's gone from a fun diversion to a distraction.

So as of tonight, it's done.

I'll continue to use Twitter (you'll find me there as gsmith). I really hope the Twitter team is able to get that application back on track.

(With comments by drcrazy4, Susan Reynolds, ...)

Nashville!

Last week I was in Nashville, Tennessee speaking at Voices That Matter, a fine web design conference hosted by the folks at Peachpit.

The conference was great, of course. Some amazing people worked on (and around) my book and I was happy to have a chance to meet and thank them in person. That's you, Michael Nolan, Wendy Sharp, Nancy Ruenzel and Glenn Bisignani.

I was also really excited about digging into some of the culture of Nashville, paying a visit to the Hatch Show Print shop, looking at guitars and eating barbecue. So what follows is a short photo tour of my 2.5 days in Nashville.

Visting Hatch was the highlight of the trip for me. My first stop there, with Dan Brown and Jeremy Keith, was a disappointment. Here we are loitering outside the shop:

Turns out that everything cool in Nashville closes at five.

I took a cab down the next day to make sure I'd have time to look around and soak up Hatch's inky greatness. It's not a huge place, but its long history is all over the walls:

I bought two prints, Rodeo and Exclamation (pictures coming sometime... no promises), and a coffee mug.

A couple of blocks away, just across from the Country Music Hall of Fame, there's a Johnny Cash mural on a long, low purple building. It was torn up and distressed, and a lot more interesting because of it:

Here's a picture of the whole mural:

And then back on Broadway, there's the Ernest Tubb Record Shop. It looks authentic in every way except for the domain name on the marquee.

And inside the ETRS was this vaguely creepy display of fancy suits worn by yesterday's country music stars. (Not that I wouldn't love to have that Marty Stuart embroidered horseshoe number on the far right.)

Finally, not far from my hotel was a full-scale replica of the Parthenon:

I wish I'd gone inside; it looks impressive.

Overall, I really enjoyed Nashville. I hope to get back there sometime to visit the Gibson outlet store and, of course, make another stop at Hatch.