Women Speaking at the Information Architecture Summit

Over the past two years I’ve been involved in the Information Architecture Summit programming.

This is an event sponsored by the American Society for the Information Age (ASISI&T). The event occurs April 7-11th in Phoenix, AZ.

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day I wanted to thank the women that will be speaking at the event. The willingness of each of them to share knowledge at this event is a generous and valuable act. We grow in our profession by showing up at events like this conference, sharing and taking that knowledge back to our work.

Thanks to all the people willing to do this. They are my heroes this Ada Lovelace Day.

• Erin Malone
• Cindy Chastain
• Donna Spencer
• 
• Erin Liman
• Samantha Starmer
• Christina Wodtke
• Dana Chisnell
• 
• Tanya Raybourn
• 
• Cindy Blue
• Colleen Jones
• 
• Kejun Xu
• Kate Rutter
• Candy Bernhardt
• Debra Levin Gelman
• Laura McFadden
• Kyle Soucy
• Johanna Kollmann
• Gabrielle Hon
• Jill Christ
• Manya Kapikian
• Vera Rhoads
• Amy Cueva
• Megan Grocki
• 
• Whitney Hess
• 

In addition to the speakers, I want to send out a special thank you to the following women who volunteered their time to make the conference program and web site a reality:

• Abby Covert
• Livia Labate
• Larisa Brandt
• Mollie Clancy
• Mags Hanley
• Lori Baker
• Sue Fensore
• Dimple Mohan

Comedians for our time

Rhett and Link are back at it with the Economic Meltdown song. They just keep putting things out there and making me laugh. It’s better to laugh instead of cry, I guess.

Succumbing to Social Media Peer Pressure

A few months ago I posted about signing off Facebook. Alas, being in the social media and User Experience space, I have been forced back on to participate in a few things I will miss out on otherwise.

1) Some members of a professional organization I belong started a conversation about making the organization more open and transparent to the membership. Ironically, this conversation is happening in the Facebook walled garden.

2) Clients are referencing interface elements that I can’t look at without being on Facebook because specific examples are being cited.

3) My friends have all abandoned MySpace for Facebook. I’m missing out on information about them that they assume I’m getting – I guess I’ll be catching up now.

Begrudgingly, I have signed back on to Facebook.  Since I signed back on, over a dozen people have found me. It was an interesting experiement to try to stay away but sometimes you have to go with the flow because taking a stance can have unintended consequences.

Another Example of No Free Lunch

I just got an email to join OpenSalon. It’s a social networking and blogging site. The idea is that you can blog there and get people to pay you for your work.

From the site:
“Open Salon is a publishing platform with a built-in audience. It was developed for writers, photographers and artists of any stripe in need of a smart home for their work (and not one of those giant, anonymous blog networks), and who are hoping to be rewarded for it. After a quick, free registration, you can immediately begin posting your words, images or videos to your blog, start building an audience and even earning money.”

This sounds like a great idea, right? I always question things that sound too good to be true. So I started a sign up process and decided it was probably important to check out the Terms and Conditions of the site before posting any content.

There was something I found in the Terms that reminded me of the following,

In life, there is no FREE LUNCH.

“By submitting or posting User Content using the Service or the Site, you grant to Salon an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to: (1) use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute the User Content in or through any medium now known or hereafter invented, for any purpose; (2) to prepare derivative works using the User Content, or to incorporate it into other works, for any purpose; and (3) to grant and authorize sublicenses of any or all of the foregoing rights.”

It goes on to say that if I remove my user content, Salon still retains the above rights. They don’t own it, but they can do whatever they like with it. This sounds like a situation rife with unintended consequences.

Gotta be careful out there, I’m telling you, read your TOUs! (Terms of Use agreements)

Social Media is a useful term

“Language is a virus from outer space.”

-William S. Burroughs

We evolve our language to allow us to communicate with each other. As there has been a great deal of change brought on because of the Internet, we have needed many new terms to describe this change. These terms have helped us to frame larger concepts. Our technology has given us abilities that alter our reality. I can communicate instantly with anyone in the world. This changes the game.

We’ve come up with all kinds of ways to describe what is happening. We might well have just gone back to McLuhan to find that this has all been predicted. But we must, because we are human, redefine it for ourselves.

I’d like to share some examples regarding what I mean when I say, we need this language.

Jesse James Garrett coined the term, AJAX. As I understand the story, he was trying to think of a way to communicate to a client some complex concepts. The technology for what he was describing had been around for awhile, but nobody had framed it as Jesse did. This framing made it a much more accessible concept and desirable as a tool for business and design.

Tim O’Reilly came along with his Web 2.0 conference. I don’t think I’ve met a marketing professional that doesn’t use the term, ‘web 2.0′ multiple times a day to attach the concept to the work they do.  We need to understand the significant shifts that are occurring right now. Language helps us grok the bigger concept and discuss that concept and its details.

These words and phrases help us ‘contain’ something. They help us to understand it and communicate about it. Even though it’s not specific, it is useful.

Signed Off Facebook

About a week ago, I disabled my Facebook account. A movie I saw on a reputable blog freaked me out. I don’t want to get into the details here, others explain it much better than me. I had known some of the facts before but for some reason last week, it just got to me and I shut it down.

Just so we are clear, I’m not afraid of the Internets or any of this ‘social media’ stuff. I love it. I relish it. I seek out new services just for fun. But, I decided, since I wasn’t getting any value from it, (my professional network is on LinkedIn and my friends do like to hang out at mySpace so) Facebook felt like it was extra for me anyway.

I think it’s probably time for all of us to start reading those user agreements. DANG.

MySpace – Not a Fan of the Other Internet

I was reading a myspace blog post today. I only read myspace blog post because my friends insist on blogging there from time to time. In this case it was the Skullcranes and they need to do it, so I don’t blame them. Anyway……

I went to the blog post:

They appropriately linked to their own web page and pointed their myspace fans to the site so they could download some free music from the Skullcranes.

I clicked the link and myspace tried to WARN me, that might be bad.

Thankfully, myspace is trying to protect me from the free music. UGH. I really hate it when a web site decides that it IS the Internet. It’s not the Internet and the more they try to keep people from leaving the more interested people will become in finding a way out.

This Is Only A Toy, I Repeat…..

The Netdisaster is only a TOY.

Not Private

I recently discovered that many people are not as savvy about the Internet as you would think. When you post something in your blog. The whole world can see it. You have entered into a public space and everything you post is ‘out there’. Not only is it ‘out there’, it is searchable. So, it’s not like it’s just a big pile of your old papers sitting in your house, it’s a billboard that is not fixed in time or space so it can show up anywhere.

This should be of particular concern for parents today. I remember some of the things I wrote in my journals growing up and I feel very lucky that those things were not typed up and published to the Internet.  It’s a new world and we all have to wake up to the reality of how things have changed and be aware of how all of these new technologies work so we don’t harm ourselves.

Facebook Changes Based on ‘User’ Feedback

Facebook did apologize for the new Beacon feature. This is the feature that shared info from partner sites with Facebook and made it available for public viewing.

“We’re sorry if we spoiled some of your holiday gift-giving plans,” read the letter. “We are really trying to provide you with new meaningful ways, like Beacon, to help you connect and share information with your friends.”

I sent them an email in conjunction with the petition I signed and they did respond.

My email:
Thank you for listening to customers and treading a bit more lightly
and forthright in the privacy/personalization realm.

regards,
Jennifer Bohmbach

and the response:
Hi Jennifer,

We’re glad we were able to improve Beacon so that our users have more control over the information they want to share. We appreciate your feedback.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

(Customer Service Rep Name Here)
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

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So, for now, the site users have been heard. Thank you to Facebook for an appropriate and timely response. This is a great example of the shift in the power to the people.If you’d like to learn more, read this BBC article about the updates to the feature.