infocloud

okay, so losing all my notes was teh sux0r, but lunch made up for it. Susan & Brian from Evergreen, Kathy from UW, Denise who used to be at SCCC, and Jay from Dartmouth (!!!). headache is a little better, but I think I went over the top on the caffeine. (go Mtn. Dew.)

personal infocloud, model of attraction. focus of web has changed with the turn of century, from going out, finding content provided by someone else. (ew, ppt with bullet points.)

now I am the center of the universe. 😉 usability, user-centered design. going from navigation to other modes of understanding infospace, which isn’t real space, because you aren’t going anywhere, everything comes to us. but how do you rediscover your personal infospace? or share across uses, devices, etc. scraping info possible because of web standards.

refindability. if you are the center of your information universe, how do you get through it?

sweet drawing of overlapping clouds representing sources of information. personal, global (the whole web), local (intranets, mailing lists, etc.), external (stuff you can’t get. frigging electronic journals).

what a weird chart. I almost don’t understand it. something about repurposing carharts by german skateboarders. (C has been wearing their stuff for years and years. it’s not farmer’s clothing, it’s construction worker’s clothing!)

okay, now it makes sense in comparison with this other chart: our view as designers is that the center is the local/global cloud, and for users the center is the personal cloud. we should be focusing on that center. (how?!?!?!)

properties: person-centered, continuous access (which is why wifi is so important!), organized for self, context-aware.

another presentation talking about reuse & creativity, then. all in the interest of commercial, “make it easier for them to consume” —

okay, I’m going to rant for a sec. is all this reuse stuff just another way of coopting human creativity to fuel the capitalist machine?! are the open-soure web hackery tricks just exploitation? — of the hackers themselves, I mean. it’s the converse of the warm happy feeling I had in the last session, that feeling of connection with other people, and instead the sense of being sucked into the machine. you and your online friends are friends because you both are interested in the same movie trailer. feh.

the utopia and the dystopia of the web are only a hair’s breadth apart.

how do I use this in my context?

model of attraction to replace the metaphor of navigation. receptors: intellectual, perceptual, physical, mechanical.

(I think I’m going to step out and get a drink of water, see if any of Molly’s books are left. short answer: no.)

assessing content. hmmm, maybe there should be a way to subscribe to the bulletin? learn what people do with your content — and what they want to do, or could do.

what triggers people to do something with your content or even get to it?

subscribe to a page?

gaps are an opportunity to improve.

what environments do people need your information in?

structure information for access from the middle, not necessarily the home page. making it easier for people to add your pages to their structure.

I really wish I were learning something about ways to *construct* a personal infocloud for non-webnerds. because this all very esoteric. maybe I should’ve gone to the design session, or even the blogging one.

oh, hey…I just realized: this stuff may make *way* more sense for the intranet than for the public site. after all, most of our students are a short-term audience, but employees stick around for a while, and then we can build bonds internally. ad-hoc portaling? (of course, it doesn’t seem to matter what ideas I have, because the IT people will just decide to buy something, or the CIS people will just decide to do something, and i won’t know about it until it’s all over but the shouting. but you didn’t hear me say that.)

“friendly and easy” — yes! doing something that’s working that used to be broken and horrible.

whew. unfortunately no time for questions.