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This was a great event last night. Howard Rheingold showed real stamina, answering all of our questions and even staying for dinner, even though it was an hour for him to drive home. Thank you.
He came with his trademark self painted shoes: Splattered 2002. He is encouraging everyone to liberate oneself and go and paint your own shoes. He has some examples and a how to guide here.
It was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone who came.
Equally interesting will be our next Futurist Salon on April the 18th: "Genetic and evolutionary computation" will be the theme that Mike Korns is preparing.
His companies Korns Associates/Invest by Agent live and breath these things, see this excerpt from their webpage: "...R&D company that develops and uses sophisticated agent technology to build artificial intelligence applications for securities analysis and stock ranking"
The basis will be the book Emergence from Steven Johnson. If you are really interested in this area Mike also suggested "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World" by Kevin T. Kelly. He will use these books as an intro to what's happening in the world of self-programming software. Can't wait.
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution at our our Futurist Salon on the 21st of March.
In a recent post on his SmartMobs.com weblog he writes: "Don't be afraid to deliberate, to think about what you are doing, to argue about it. Don't let the flush of early victory and the coolness of your technologies blind you to the real work that democracy requires."
That is what we are doing at our Futurist Salon, deliberate arguments/discussions.
As always we will start at 7pm with futurist articles/news-clips that you stumbled over recently. Like this one about InFlow a software that graphically shows the connection of people in an organization. Print them out and bring them with you.
7:30 onwards is then Howard Rheingold and Smart Mobs time with discussion and book signing afterwords. As always you don't have to have read the book to participate.
Come on out this Friday 7-9 pm Barnes and Noble Bookstore at the Hillsdale Shopping Center. (Map although the star is slightly misleading, it is right at the El Camino across from the Caltrain station.)
If you are up for it, we always continue the discussion and extend the evening next door at Romano's Macaroni Grill with some good wine and Italian food.
See you all there.
First of all I had to learn some abbreviations. The event was organized by the BayCHI the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI. Wow, that is a mouth full. ACM I learn from their website is the first society in computing founded in 1947. SIGCHI is the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. In short usability guys, although I don't think they like that term.
I glanced through their CHI2003 conference catalog and to my surprise they are offering child care support throughout that event. How progressive is that? I have been to lots of conferences, but your luggage was the only thing I was ever able to check at the entrance. I guess they take the H in their name serious.
Looking through the room, I realized, that 60% of the audience are women. Wait, isn't this a computer event? Something is wrong here. Truth of the matter is, that human computer interaction is where many woman in the field are attracted to and end up working in. Therefore it is less surprising, that at their conferences child care is offered. (One more reason why usability guys is the wrong term for them)
The speaker was Professor B.J.Fogg the head of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. He has written a book: Persuasive Technology and brought a host of his students to co-present with him the following theme:
Using Computers to Change What People Think and Do: Insights into Captology
Before they started they had a PowerPoint slide show running that listed why Google News is one of the best sites on the internet. There were over 20 points and one of them was, that the news is computer generated and therefore unbiased.
Well, on the same stage at PARC Eric Schmidt the Chairman and CEO of Google just last week admitted that there is a bias in Google News. It's towards international news (applause from me) and towards cricket see this post for details.
B.J. Fogg has presented the same theme a couple of weeks ago at Stanford. Here is his abstract and the video. Kudos to Stanford for making these videos available to the world.
Notes from his talk, which he did with lots of interaction and audience participation:
- Captology happens where computer and persuasion overlap
- In computers we went from technology (making it work) to usability (making it easier) and now the next step is persuasion (influencing the people using them)
Amazon's Gold Box as an example of an apparently very successful persuasion tool. They pretend to have special deals only for you and only if you decide in the next 60 minutes to buy it ... Personally I am not persuaded, it seems silly to me, the false urgency that tries to trick me into buying something now. Seems like a different audience is making this one a success. B.J. Fogg said that people are very divided either like it a lot or hate it. He also pointed out that Amazon and other companies on the net are creating a persuasion profile of you. They will learn how to push my buying buttons, the Gold Box will vanish from my Amazon page and be replaced by something I can't resist. It will be addictive. I see a new section for the Adbuster magazine coming.
Other examples of persuasive sites:
Quitnet.com . Helping you to end smoking. There you really want to have the computer persuade you as much as possible to break the unhealthy habit.
America's Army a first person shooting game created by, surprise, the Army. Over a million people are playing it right now. Huge success for the recruiting effort of the US Military.
B.J. Fogg differentiates between:
Macrosuasion (entire product is about one goal for example getting people to sign up for the army.)
Microsuasion (no overall goal, but little items that persuade you)
Lots of persuasion already happening in print, movie, TV, radio. The advantage of the computer is the interactivity it is offering and that it can track, learn and improve the whole experience.
What are the differences between human and computer persuasion?
- Computer does not get tired
- Computer persuasion scales
He also introduced his method for the first steps in his design process: Influence analysis
- Write down two columns:
1)Attitudes/believes (you want to change or strengthen)
2)Behaviors (that you want to change)
- Take a couple of minutes to fill in these columns regarding your current design problem.
- Once you filled them out, circle the points that are doable current technology.
- After that circle the ones that matter most to you.
- The double circled ones are the ones you focusing on.
From there onwards you use your usual brainstorming techniques and product development techniques.
Big ethical questions are looming regarding persuasion. B.J. Fogg only briefly touched on them. He said that ethics should be a topic of another session. Solution to these questions is education.
He sees that as one of his tasks to spread the word about it. He wants to found a Center for Ethical Use of Persuasive Technology and is looking for people to join him in his effort.
I am a bit behind with my posts, only now find the time to write down my notes from the presentation of Dr. Eric Schmidt Chairman and CEO of Google at the PARC Forum. Interesting little trivia is, that Eric was once a member of the PARC research team.
Unfortunately I was a bit late, this is why I am looking forward to see the beginning once the talk is available on their video archive. Although it looks like it takes them a while to post new entries, the last one is from March of 2002 [Update: I send the PARC Forum organizers an email regarding this and Eric did not give permission to post it. Bummer]
I arrived when he was talking about the next big thing. The usual suspects, always one wireless using 80211 technology, which brings with it a wall of information. He did not say that, but of course Google will be the one to help you find the relevant things in that wall of information.
He compared our current recession with the one of the railroad industry in 1859.
The following quote is from a Business 2.0 article that supports this point:
In the depression of 1859, the economic commentator Henry Carey Baird complained that "our railroad system has cost more than $1,000,000 and has brought ruin upon nearly everyone connected with it, the nation included." But, again, at this time railroads in the United States were just beginning. In 1860 the United States had 30,000 miles of built-out track; by 1914 it had 253,000 miles.
Eris said, that this railroad buildup made possible the cheap distribution of goods which then enabled the success of for example mail order companies like Sears.
Fundamental innovation seams to come and will in the future come from universities. The 23 year olds don't have any baggage, nothing to loose and therefore are able to create freely. He suggested that the core competency for us that we are above that age therefore may be to meet these 22 year olds. (Oh, yeah? Raves have never looked so attractive ;-)
This statement did not sit well with the audience, one of the questions at the end was more or less, how can you say that, here at PARC [You that you have been one of us not too long ago].
Another little factoid that really made me happy: "20% of all searches are misspelled" Nice, I am struggling with orthography all my life and to have proof that lots of others are struggling too is reassuring. It's no wonder that the "Did you mean:" feature in Google is one of my favorites.
From the server IP addresses Google approximately knows where these servers are located. There is this Nasa picture of the earth at night called Earthlights. (It more or less shows where the people left the lights on. There are some better citizens in the middle of Africa ... ;-) The origin of Google searches and the Earthlights are identical, wherever there is electricity, there is the Internet and Google searches.
How to make money with it? Advertisement is a 500 billion industry that will not go away. His suggestion is to know where the change is. Lean back, as in watching TV and lean forward as in sitting in front ot the computer will merge. My immediate question is where? Half way of the LazyBoy? Or when falling off the office chair? They are fundamentally different activities and will stay that way.
Google news. When they first introduced the concept they got lots of push back from the editors of established news organizations. Rightly so, if the program is good it is a big thread to their jobs. Eric said that these news offices are the heaviest users of the service which is still in beta.
He once got asked, what bias Google news has. His first responds was, the page is computer generated it does not have a bias. Of course it has the bias of the coder who developed the tool. So Eric admitted that there is a bias in two areas. First there are more international news stories then at usual your usual US news outlet like CNN.
The second bias is towards cricket, the developer of the tool is originally form India and a real fan of that sport. It's true, there are always lots of cricket stories in the sport section of Google news. One may laugh it off as a funny little tidbit, how important is it that cricket is placed higher then soccer. Still one should analyzed, whether the ranking of the main news stories are according to their importance especially which ones don't make the cut.
Some principles that Google lives by:
- Happy end-user is the key
- Get the user and the technology together
- Don't, scare the end-user
- Every decision is based on what value it has for the end-user
- Co-mingle researchers and non researchers
He said that they were lucky that Google was profitable more or less from the beginning and therefore the principles of the founders were not watered down. Most people in the business did not have that luxury.
Because they are not public yet, they have the freedom to do things differently. Every three month they make a list of projects by importance and tell the people to self assemble around the project that is most interesting for them. They hire new people for the projects that no one tackles. That is the best method to have a super motivated people working on the projects. He qualified, that this works specifically good for a web service company.
Decisions are decentralized. He said that he got hired and gets payed the big bucks for calling meetings. "You think I am joking, but I am not, I just know which meetings to call"
Case in point was the acquisition of Pyra. People came to him and said we are going to buy Pyra. "What do they do? Oh, good."
He said that in the future there will be lots of self publishing. When he was asked why Google bought Pyra he answered: "Oh, we just want to help them being successful." We at the Futurist Salon of course know already the connection: A more successful Blogger has more targeted advertising space which adds up to more revenue for Google.
If they can maintain the balance of great service with non intrusive advertisements all success and money to them.
Yes, I am very much influenced by the information that I find on the internet, but how much are my thoughts influenced by the fact that I am using a computer or other technology to form my opinion.
I know about the difference attitude that we have towards the television compared to the computer: Backward versus forward leaning, passive versus active, but beyond that I haven't thought about it.
Word of the day for me is captology. It is so new, that it does not even have an entry in dictionary.com, but you can study it at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab.
Professor B.J.Fogg the head of the lab has written a book: Persuasive Technology and will speak about: Using Computers to Change What People Think and Do: Insights into Captology this Tuesday the 11th of March at PARC's George E. Pake Auditorium 7:30pm.
Fellow futurist Dr. Bob Glass pointed me to this one. I met him at the last last Pub Talk of the World Internet Center. The funny thing is, that I posted about one of his events in early February: Are we there yet. A Look at Technology and Where We Expected to be by Now. Can't wait to see the film: Starfire that he and his team created 10 years ago to project what will be common place by 2004.
Howard Rheingold is kind enough to post our event on his Smartmobs weblog.
Last time I saw him, he was interviewed at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Their first question was "What does SMS stand for?"
I hope that we come up with some more interesting questions. I would like to start collecting questions, but my fear is, that there will be lots of emails on the board and people that are not interested in the questions will tune out.
My suggestion is to post the questions as comments to this weblog post. (It asks for name and email address, but feel free to put in bogus ones.) Would be great if we can get a good list together.
