Some nice presentations this morning. Here’s some of the stuff I found interesting.

Jon Udell - Attention Focusing Stratagies

To get yourself or your content more attention, there are four strategies

1. heads, decks and leads: make sure that your content is acurately represented by it’s title.
2. active context: provide date, source and subject information in your titles (such as for blog posts) to give the user an idea of what they will find if they click on the link to read the entire article. Clicking is a big investment and they will be more willing to make it if you give them enough information to make a good decision. Some examples he showed as included blog post titles in the format “Post Title | Blog Title | Subject | Date”. Subject is important because it gives the user an idea of relavency and Date gives currency against similar posts.
3. canonical names
4. multimedia story telling

An interesting concept that he proposed is that a URL is a promise to update itself in the future. If it points to a list of items (such as a del.icio.us archive), the list can continue to grow. Sharing your links with people instead of full copy of text or lists is more of a dynamic exchange.

And he demonstrated something I hadn’t seen before: you can bookmark soundbites! Very cool.

Clay Shirky - Patterns for Moderation

Clay’s talk was an analysis of different ways to control how groups participate with authoring and moderating content on collaborative sites.

First was Slashdot. Clay emphasized several times that it is set up to defend readers from the writers. Slashdot doesn’t have “users” in a general sense. They also have a very dedicated small group of moderators who work tirelessly to ensure that the content that appears on the site is worth reading.

There is a problem with group contribution sites, in the “Tragedy of the Commons” where people will try to get attention by being disruptive. Slashdot handles this through design choices and moderation:

1. Move comments to a separate page
2. Treat readers and writers differently
3. Let users rate posts
4. Implement defensive defaults

This can give the moderators a lot of power which could also be abused. They implement another pattern to answer the question “Who will guard the guardians?”:

1. Treat users and members differently
2. Measure good behavior
3. Enlist Commited members
4. judges can’t post

Another example is Bronze Beta, which is a very stripped down and simple group blog. Users are not required to be logged in to post, and the posts are not threaded, but the lack of complexity is intentional and the focus is not on posting articles but on commenting and group participation. The pattern follows:

1. Don’t have complex features (KISS) for posting or reading
2. Make comments central
3. Make Login optional (passwords are only used if you want to protect your “identity”)

Clay’s final example was Writely.com, which takes yet another approach

1. Login is at a group level (so participation is context specific)
2. Participation is by invitation only (gatekeeping)
3. Participation is time limited (project focused)

Clay made a good point: by deciding what moderation patterns to use, we are encoding the ability (or lack thereof) for freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We should be conscious of these decisions and their effects. If these tools do not make it possible for the users to defend themselves from the moderators then something is wrong.

There’s more information about these ideas on Clay’s wiki or you can join a yahoo group to participate in discussing them.

Kevin Lynch - Flash and AJAX

Kevin perfomed some pretty cool demos showing how to use Flash/Flex to augment or supplant the capabilities of AJAX. Flash movies can remove some of the limitations of using pure AJAX such as small storage (cookies), cross domain processing, lack of direct access to web protocols, etc.

He listed several free tools for development:

• Flash Player
• Flex Framework (you may code in your editor of choice)
• Flex/Ajax Bridge

There’s not much else I can really say other than I am definitely curious about it after seeing the demo and will be shortly checking out the development labs that he mentioned.

Brian Dear - Eventful/EVDB

This presentation was a lot more intresting than I thought it would be.
Brian mentioned two services that I didn’t know they had:

• There is a tool that allows you to “import” your iTunes lists into Eventful and it will build a list for you of all the events related to the artists you listen to.
• There is an AIM bot called Eventfulbot you can ask about events
• You can create a prospective search that will notify you as events are listed that meet your criteria (such as, “tell me whenever Beck comes to Phoenix”).

The most interesting part of the presentation was about the new featureset Eventful released today called Eventful Demand. It is a way for you to make a wish for an event, request it, promote it, and hopefully (if you got enough interest and it’s actually possible) have the wish fulfilled. Once you make a demand request, if you get enough people interested, the performer will be contacted. You can promote your demand through email and blog badges. It’s a cool idea, though it may be hard on a general blog to get enough people in your physical area to vote for your demand and have it reach critical mass.

It’s an exciting idea though, to be able to let performers know where they’re really appreciated and it potentially takes away some of the power from the big bad record companies which is always a good thing.

Hans Peter - Plum

Omigosh this software looks cool. It may just be what I’ve been looking for for the last couple of years or so. Basically it is a storage place for everything, links (and looks like potentially copies of the page), photos, email, addresses as well as a way to reorganize and share that information with other people. It has an open API to develop your own types of data to collect and a floating toolbar widget (called a Plummer) that sits on your desktop and lets you collect information from all your PC applications. I was extremely impressed with the demo and found Hans after the break and literally begged him for an invite to the beta. So far this is the most exciting thing I’ve seen here at ETech, mainly because it seems to solve a personal problem I’ve been struggling with for so long. I can’t wait to try it and I will write up my review. I REALLY want to try Plum!!!

Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software) - 2006 Report Card

Joel gave an entertaining review of several popular “Blue Chip” products and websites. He listed some psycological criteria to judge your product as successful.

1. Does it make people happy
2. Is it (positively) involving emotionally
3. Aesthetics are important (you should obsess over them)

Joel had one of the best quotes so far in the conference while talking about why SUVs make you feel safe because they are full of soft rounded curves but where they fall short of the obvious psychological message implied there: “You can’t put breasts on a sports utility vehicle.”