Meaningful Data » conference

Announcing: Nimble!

Rachel — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:18:51 +0000

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been researching, writing, and editing a report called Nimble: A Razorfish report on publishing in the digital age. It launched this week, and so far the response has been really great. I’ve written about it over on Scatter/Gather and you can view or download the report itself at http://nimble.razorfish.com. There’s even a Twitter account for it (@NimbleRF).

In June I’ll be doing a presentation about report at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. And there will be other presentations and developments in the coming months.

What else? I wrote a couple other pieces for Scatter/Gather:

Content Strategy Stories from the Frontline (SXSW wrapup)
Busy Times for Content Strategy (CS Forum 2010 wrapup)

And I’m helping to organize two interesting events for Internet Week next week:

Razorfish Screening: We Live in Public (by invitation only)
Razorfish: Living in Public (open event, RSVP on Facebook)

Hope to see you there!

Conference Enthusiast 2010, pt. 1

Rachel — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:06:16 +0000

Last April I listed out a bunch of conferences and film festivals that I had attended or hoped to attend, and in some cases I was also a speaker. With the end of 2009 in sight my calendar for next year is already starting to get filled in, so it seemed like a good time for an update on some of the events that have caught my eye for the first half 2010.

Intelligent Content 2010 (Feb) – I wish I had submitted a proposal, but I didn’t. Hopefully I can go as an attendee.
SXSW (March) – Nothing concrete yet, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’ll be involved with aspects of both the Interactive and Film portions of the festival.
PAX East (March) – I plan to attend this Boston-based version of the popular West Coast gaming convention.
Content Strategy Forum (April) – I’ll be co-leading a workshop and giving a talk at this 2-day conference in Paris, organized by STC France.
Tribeca Film Festival (April) – Once the schedule is posted (sometime in the Spring), let me know if you need movie recommendations!
ROFLcon II (April) – I’ll be attending this epic internet culture conference as it returns to its city of origin (Cambridge, MA).
Semantic Technology Conference (June) – In its 6th year, the conference moves to San Francisco, and I hope to once again be a speaker.

Oh yeah, and I’m in discussions with some people to organize an exciting event of our own. More updates to come as plans get firmed up!

2009 MIMA Summit

Rachel — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:20:03 +0000

On October 5th I’ll be speaking at a one-day conference in Minneapolis, held by the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association. Attendees will include marketers, but also designers, content developers, publishers, user experience professionals, usability experts, and product developers. The Keynote speakers are Seth Godin and Jackie Huba, which promises to be pretty interesting. Plus, they’ve crammed a ton of interesting-looking sessions into the schedule.

If you’re going to be there, come see my talk, Content Gone Wild! at 9:45 in Salon A. It’s part of the Strategy Track and I’ll be talking about the embarrassing kinds of things that can happen when you don’t have a good content strategy!

SXSW Panel Picker: Please Vote!

Rachel — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:27:10 +0000

This year I’m determined to present at SXSW. To that end, I’m involved in five (5!) proposals. Two of them are talks, and the rest are panels submitted by other people that, SXSW-gods willing, I will be participating in.

SXSW likes to have the community get involved in deciding what panels will be chosen for the conference, so they use this Panel Picker to let people indicate which ones are of greatest interest. It’s free and easy to register to vote, so please consider voting for these proposals:

Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For – my solo presentation
Content & Semantics: The Wild, Wild Web of Data – a dual presentation I’ll give with Rahel Anne Bailie of Intentional Design Inc.
Why Your Content Sucks and How to Fix It – a panel I’ll be on, moderated by Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic
Let’s Talk About CS: Understanding Content Strategy – a panel I’ll be on, organized by Elena Melendy, an Independent Content Strategy Consultant
Tales from the Basement: Makers of Geek Documentaries – a panel in the SXSW Film conference which I hope to moderate, organized by Jason Scott of Bovine Ignition Systems

While you’re in there, here are some other really interesting panels by some of my friends and colleagues. Please consider voting for these as well!

Adventures in Text and Filmmaking: Making GET LAMP, Jason Scott, Bovine Ignition Systems
Web Re-Design Cage Match: Refreshing the Online Experience, Anh Dang, New York Times
Conserving The Web’s Social Ecology: Theory and Practice, Tim Hwang, The Web Ecology Project (plus a few other cool presentations by Tim)
Your Cell Phone is Your Sugar Daddy (Controlling Diabetes), John Pettengill, Razorfish
The UX of Mobile, Kyle Outlaw, Razorfish
Social Networking for Dealers: Cultivate Relationships First, Mary Butler, Razorfish
Context Strategy: Wrangling Content Gone Wild, Patrick Nichols, Razorfish
Greening Your Content: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rahel Anne Bailie,Intentional Design Inc.
Content Strategy FTW, Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic
Oh, Go Service Yourself! Interactive Content for Humans, Colleen Jones,threebrick
Keep ‘Em Coming: Courting Customers with Content, Colleen Jones,threebrick

There are many others that will probably be amazing, and I haven’t even touched on all the ones about the Semantic Web (will have to write a separate post for that), so get started voting now – you only have until September 4th!

Semantic Web for Publishers

Rachel — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:27:16 +0000

When I got back from the Semantic Technology Conference last month, I helped my colleague, Domenic Venuto, write a piece for MinOnline about the things magazine publishers should know about the Semantic Web. I summed up some of the most relevant presentations at SemTech this year, and why I think these things should be important to publishers. Domenic put it all into the context of the work we do with our Media and Entertainment clients, and we worked together to try to express why they should really get moving on this stuff now!

After the article came out, Semantic Universe posted video from a lot of the talks that I mentioned. Very interesting, if you want more detail:

Tom Tague’s Keynote about OpenCalias’ first year
An executive round table on Semantic Search
The Publishers Panel
Closing Keynote with The New York Times announcement

SXSW proposal deadline

Rachel — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:12:30 +0000

Here’s how I know that SXSW really wants me to propose another talk this year: The email they sent out reminding everyone to submit proposals by Friday, July 10th contains a screenshot of the Panel Picker which includes my name. Twice. So, maybe this year is my year and one of my proposals will get selected. I’ll post details and links when it’s time to vote!

My Paraflows Talk

Rachel — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:16:42 +0000

Last fall I went to a digital arts conference in Vienna called Paraflows. I gave a talk about my personal history, and how it led to me getting into the kind of work that I do (Content Strategy, metadata, semantic web). It’s part personal history, but also touches on the cultural experience of my generation, and how I think it contributed to a lot of what we’re doing and seeing on the web today.

I was quite proud of this talk – it was visual, funny, personal and conversational. It was a different kind of presenation than I usually give, and it provided me an opportunity to evolve my speaking style. It wasn’t perfect, but I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. People had repeatedly suggested that I post the slides on Slideshare, but at the time I could not get speaker notes to disaply, and I didn’t think the talk would make much sense without them.

Well, Slideshare has been working to resolve the mirad issues they were having with that bit of functionality, and yesterday I got notice that it now works for PowerPoint 2007 presentations. So you can now view my talk, A Personal Journey Towards Datameaningfulness, with speaker notes. Don’t be intimidated by the fact that it’s 97 slides. It’s very visual (and you don’t have to read the speaker notes if you don’t want to. You can just flip through and look at the amusing pictures).

NOTE: I just realized that, although the speaker notes are showing up, after the first slides they’re all misaligned (the notes from slide 2 onward are from slides about 8 pages down the line). I have no idea how to fix this. In the meantime, people seem to be enjoying the slideshow anyway.

Conference Enthusiast

Rachel — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:39:14 +0000

I’ve been accused, by a couple people, of becoming a “professaional conference-goer.” I should point out that the people who say this are people that I met at conferences, and I generally only see them when I’m at a conference, to perhaps they have a slightly skewed view of how I spend my time.

But the fact remains that I do go to a lot of conferences. I prefer to think of myself as a conference enthusiast, though, not an aspiring professional. Most of the conferences I go to are in the realm of tech, internet, digital culture, digital arts, or popular arts. I include film festivals too, because, well, I love them. Some are more professionally oriented, and some are more social. In both cases, though, my goal is the same: to meet interesting people and to be inspired.

Here are some the conferences and film festivals that I’ve been to so far in 2009:

Sundance (January)
ROFLthing-NYC (January)
IA Summit & Content Strategy Consortium (March)
Enterprise Data World (April)
Notacon (April)
Tribeca Film Festival (April/May)

And here are several that I’m planning to go to, or thinking about going to later this year:

Web 3.0 (May)
Semantic Technology Conference (June)
Open Video Conference (June)
Toorcamp (July)
Defcon (July/August)
MIMA Summit (October)
Web 2.0 Expo (November)

I know, you’re probably thinking, “There are whole months in there with no conference plans at all.” But it’s early, yet, and there are a lot of interesting things going on out there.

NYC IA Summit Redux

Rachel — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:41:41 +0000

An even next week that should be interesting. From Karen McGrane:

This year marked the 10th anniversary of the IA Summit. If you didn’t make it to Memphis (or even if you did) come see New York locals give abbreviated versions of their talks. This event is free!

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS

Cindy Chastain: Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design

Anders Ramsay: Agile For The Rest of Us

Christine Boese: Are Human Beings Becoming Dumb Terminals?

Karen McGrane: Designing For, With, and Around Advertising

Elena Melendy + Rachel Lovinger: Content Strategy Consortium Highlights

Nasir Barday: Professional IA/UX Organizations – How to start and run a successful local group or chapter

Chris Fahey + Whitney Hess: The Courage to Quit: Starting, Growing and Maintaining Your Own UX Business

Whitney Hess: Evangelizing Yourself: You can’t change the world if no one knows your name

WHEN

Tuesday, April 28

6:30 PM Doors Open

7:00 PM Presentations Start

9:30 PM Discussion + Networking

WHERE

White Rabbit, 145 E Houston Street btw 1st and 2nd Avenues

Semantic Web takes root at the IA Summit

Rachel — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:22:16 +0000

At the recent IA Summit, I was surprised and delighted to see how many talks there were about the Semantic Web. Before this emerging technology can really catch on, we will need more Information Architects and Interaction Designers who understand the potential and can design elegant solutions to real problems (both user problems and business problems). In some ways, I wish the conversation were further along, but I realize that it has to start somewhere. The fact that the subject exploded onto the scene in such a big way is a good indication that Web 3.0 is on a lot of people’s minds.

These are the talks I saw:

In A Fundamental Disruption, Peter Sweeney and Robert Barlow-Busch posed the question “How do IAs design for information that’s self-organizing?” They showed several current products designed for use by consumers (as opposed to “information professionals”), including Freebase, Calais, Zepheira’s Remix, and their own product Primal Fusion. I was a little disappointed that, when it came to addressing the question “What does this mean for IA?” they raised the question, pointed to Kevin Kelly’s TED Talk, and didn’t have much more to say about it.

Chiara Fox took a different approach. In her talk, The Semantic Web: What IAs Need to Know About Web 3.0, she outlined the basics, starting with a hand-drawn visual depiction of the historic scenario described in that foundational Scientific American article from 2001. An evocative portrayal, but perhaps she spent too much time on that, since the Semantic Web community has moved beyond that particular vision, and even Fox herself admitted, “This hasn’t come true, eitght years later. And some parts of it make me a little queasy.” (She was referring, primarily, to concerns about trust and privacy).

But next she pulled out the bits of that vision that are still of interest: sharing data, smart agents, and using a wide variety of platforms to interact with the “web”. She went on to explain the underlying concepts that would be important to understand in order to design for this vision. I know from experience that this requires walking a very fine line between being too technical and being too abstract. She seemed, to me, to strike a good balance, but I’m not sure how it came across to people who were hearing about this stuff for the first time.

In Discovering & Mining the Everyday, Richard Ziade and Tim Meaney (from arc90, makers of Readibility) focused more on Tim Berners-Lee’s current stance on the Semantic Web, with particular attention to the data-sharing aspect. The principal is that data will fuel the Semantic Web – massive amounts of data, generated by everyone’s online activities. What would make people want to share that data, or generate new data that might be useful to others? Meaney and Ziade propose (as I’ve also suggested) that in order for the Semantic Web to take off, it will need to provide compelling consumer tools that exploit our self interest. Tools along the lines of flickr, delicious, and last.fm, where users provide useful shared data primarily as a byproduct of activities that serve their own personal needs. The speakers also touched on the privacy issue, but mostly to point out that we’ve started to become accustomed to giving up privacy in exchange for the value that services provide us.

Chris Thorne gave a talk called Ubiquitous Information Architecture: Building for change and web 3.0 in which he spoke about the BBC’s work with Semantic Web principals, focusing on the architecture of a very specific type of information: URIs. Uniform Resource Identifiers are key to the success of the Semantic Web, because being able to assign each concept a unique and persistant ID makes sharing data a lot more accurate. Still, I’m not sure this was quite the right audience for this talk.

I’m hoping that this is just the beginning of these types of presentations and discussions, and I can’t wait to see what kind of work this inspires.