When i was working for Macromedia, we went down to Disneyland to meet with one of Generator’s beta clients – Disney Online. The families of some of my colleagues came along, for the vacation aspect. One of them had this darling little girl who found my tongue bar utterly fascinating and she kept staring at my mouth. I hadn’t been around many children for years so i had forgotten how cool tongue bars look to children and i started horseplaying with her. Unfortunately, she got so excited that she started sticking out her tongue and pointing to it to her mother who was not so amused. Somehow, i got coerced into washing my mouth out with soap (literally) along with her daughter to prove a point that sticking your tongue out in public was bad. ::sigh::

Five years later, i’m hanging out with the creator of Macromind (which became Macromedia) and his little girl who is equally entertained by my tongue bar. Of course, Marc had a lot more fun with this!

Life is odd. I’m going to be a booth babe. Does this mean that my feminism is going down the drain? Of course not. But i know i’m getting old because i don’t care if the feminazis will discontinue my membership because i think that being a smart hott geeky booth babe sounds like an adventurous thrill.

The Go Game is going to JavaOne. Using fun little techy tools, conference attendees will get to run around San Francisco trying to solve problems while getting to engage with plants who are running around trying to make the task easier or more difficult. Of course, i’m voting that they get to enact the Tumbling Duke Applet.

I mentioned the Augmented Social Network white paper before, but after having attended the discussion, i’m in utter awe at the commonalities that emerged with no awareness of one another. Nancy Van House, one of the SIMS professors, attended the talk and poignantly noted that work along these lines is being done in a variety of fields using different languages and not properly connected. (Of course, this reminds me that an ongoing role for a researcher is to bridge all of the research going on in one’s area.)

The ASN folks are completely engaged with the ideas of persistent identity from a conscientious people-centric approach, noting issues of trust, context, brokered relations, reputation, etc. Although i’ve had to defend why context matters over and over again, these guys saw this as obvious. They also *get* the issues of persistent identity and are not just looking at collapsing contexts to fulfill corporate desires. In effect, their philosophies clearly resemble that expressed in my thesis. One of the coolest things in the paper is Cynthia Typaldos’ diagram of “12 principles of civilization” as a structure to analyze systems.

[Of course, while i love what they’re doing, there are folks who think it’s too pie-in-the-sky and not enough implementation. Ah, Marc… Of course, i still believe that theory is necessary before creation.]

Even while my thesis mirrors their work (while grounding it in social science research and providing implementation examples), i have a feeling that i need to get involved with these folks ASAP (and i think they’ll get a kick out of the to-be-finished-soon paper on visualization tools for identity storytelling).

::bounce:: There’s nothing better than getting your work validated in odd ways! Oh, and PlaNetwork has been fabulous.. finally putting actual faces and personalities to digital people (like Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn, who breaks my assumptions of a business person by being exceptionally friendly). The collapse of people here is phenomenal… of course, it’s also exceptionally exhausting to meet so many fun and interesting people who are willing to engage on issues of technology, environmentalism, politics, sociology, etc. I still want a utopian world where all of the interesting people are constantly engaged and physically together. Of course, the New Yorkers and the San Franciscans could never agree on location.

As an undergraduate, one of my primary roles as an A/V person was to create a library of all of the videos that Andy had. Usually, it required watching them to figure out what they were. Most of them were utterly painful, but there was one that always blew my mind. It was on such an old tape (pre-NTSC VHS) format, although i don’t remember which one now. I remember thinking it was so fragile.

Plugged in and out comes this black and white demo of Doug Engelbart demoing the mouse for the first time, an interactive hyperlink, shared-screen collaboration and a variety of other things. 1968. It was a perfect demo – no flaws, not hiccups, clean as day and done on the first take, live. (If you’ve ever done a demo, you know that it’s impossible to live up to that standard.)

Engelbart is a pioneer in computer science, a complete visionary. He invented so much of what we take for granted today. And all of his inventions focused on people’s needs and designing for a civil society. His work is stunning.

And i had the amazing opportunity to hear him speak tonite. I sat there smiling with my eyes closed, listening to his voice which is unchanged in the 45 years since that demo was created. Flashbacks to crazy days in the overly ACed A/V room labeling and wandering through the library with utter awe and fascination.

I just saw Mobile Asses today and i can’t help but be stunned by the mix of shared cultural languages and frightening social implications.

Juxtaposition this site next to the case where abortion clinic patients were photographed and placed on the web. Of course, it’s legal, but is it the society that we want to live in? Second, the site uses a shared web cultural language/norms by mimicing Hot or Not‘s format.

In an interview, Esther Dyson talks about Cataphora, a system that profiles email behaviors:

Then there’s this great company, Cataphora, which works with emails and other documents to do a much better job of searching for and analyzing emails. Their market right now is primarily litigation and [legal] discovery. For example, if you’re looking for emails in a brokerage house, it’s pretty rare that you find something that says “XYZ Company is a piece of shit.’ Instead, there’s something that says “This is an important accommodation for a banking client,’ and you don’t know how to look for that. There is no keyword that would get you to that. So you want to look at patterns of communication, who has talked to whom, and did the chairman of the company talk to the analyst before the analyst raised his ratings? Who talked to whom, before so and so sold their stock? It’s not just the content-you want to look at communication patterns.

Cataphora lets you see how and when people are connected rather than what they said.. but that lets you know where to look for the content you want. It displays the communication patterns in a kind of flowchart that shows the progress of conversations over time, who talks to whom and so forth. So you can you say, “Look at all the emails between this guy and that guy on such and such a date.’ And you see who within the conversation suddenly stopped talking. As Elizabeth Charnock, Cataphora’s founder, says, “One guy who usually talks to everybody is suddenly cut out of the conversation. Maybe they’re planning a surprise birthday party, but usually it’s something else”.’

The question is whether or not the outsider can figure out the something else. For example, in my visualizations, sometimes folks broke up, sometimes people died, sometimes a project ended, etc. But the data owner always knew.

I’m very much looking forward to a conference this weekend in San Francisco, called PlaNetwork: Networking a Sustainable Future. I’m a big fan of any network research that is created to be socially beneficial. And i was even more fascinated when i saw a paper entitled The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust Into the Next-Generation Internet that will be presented there.

This paper argues for many of the thoughts that i have addressed (in my thesis most notably). In particular, they address an intelligent way to do identity management in a socially conscious way; they address the value of social networks when personally managed; and most importantly, they frame all of their arguments in the idea that you don’t change social norms, you build technology to help people be social in the way that they see fit. It’s a fabulous paper and i cannot wait to discuss it further this weekend.