Radiant Core: web2.0 tag

Going Supernova

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 23:14:00 GMT

Back in February, I bravely (and foolishly!) posted on this very blog that we had been fortunate to avoid heavy travel in the growth of Radiant Core. Wiser heads might have realized that posting such a statement could only possibly lead to a massive influx of travel, and since then I've been to Redmond to visit Microsoft in February, San Diego for ETech in March, and San Francisco for Web2.0Expo in April. I thought May might spare me a visit to our friendly neighbours to the south, but the classically Canadian May 2-4 weekend saw me in NYC with some friends on a road trip. Thankfully, that was the end of my scheduled travel and I was looking forward to a restful June in our beloved (and sweltering) Toronto.

But that was not to be! Thanks to the incredible generosity of the conference organizers, I've been invited to attend the upcoming Supernova next week in San Francisco. I'm particularly excited about this one because it combines two of my passions - technology and business - in a forum packed with industry leaders and mover/shakers (similar to cocktail shakers in that their presence at these events is often combined with a fair amount of alcohol and that merely standing near them can sometimes make you tipsy with excitement). A particular thanks to Deb Schultz for the gracious invitation, and for some advice on an upcoming Radiant Core project which I can't talk about just yet.

The schedule looks particularly tasty: they're running an OpenSpaces event on Tuesday at Wharton West, and those who know me know that I'm drawn to those events like a moth to a self-organized, community-driven, meritocracy-based flame. Be still my beating heart and pray that AA gets me to SF in time to catch part of it!

Wednesday is Challenge Day, a series of workshop like events "designed to provoke opinions from leading technology and business thought-leaders on key Supernova topics". I'm particularly looking forward to Making Computers Smart: A Dumb Idea? (Moderator: John Markoff, Barney Pell, Elizabeth Charnock, Nova Spivack), Introducing the Relationship Economy (Jerry Michalski, David Weinberger, Doc Searls), Research and Relationships (Discussion Lead Max Kalehoff, Aaron Coldiron, Steven Haskel, Jonathan Carson), and Where's the Innovation? (Lightning Talks).

Thursday and Friday move into more traditional session days, with everybody moving through a series of talks and presentations together. Topics range from Dark Matter: Are We Missing the Real Internet Economy? to The Social Web: Choices and Voices to Disorder: Feature or Bug?. It all looks pretty interesting, and I plan to blog as much of it as I can, bandwidth allowing (in both the time and network senses).

Registration is still open and I highly recommend it if you're involved in the web. It's not a particularly cheap conference (the Challenge Day is a great deal at $695, the full three days will run you $2,595), but the caliber of the participants is high and the sessions are quite small so you're virtually guaranteed to make some good contacts. If you're going and want to meet, drop a comment on this post or find me on Twitter.

The Machine Is Us

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 12:05:00 GMT

Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University provides us with an excellent video to explain Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 Success: A Defence of Tag Clouds

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 09:22:00 GMT

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the term "Web 2.0" - about what it means, why people use it, why O'Reilly owns it, why you don't, why people defend trademarks, and, of course why we should all care.

Well - you can all relax now. The folks from Underscore_ Consulting have answered your questions in a great little movie from Barcamp Boston (hat tip to Rob Hyndman for the link).

The video's really funny (particularly if you're a fan of the Colbert Report's News Reporter Visuals with Attitude) and it hits on a lot of truths about this current "bubble", some subtle and some more obvious. I agree with a lot of what's said (see any rounded corners on our site?) but I have to take umbrage with one of their points: tag clouds. I know they're all over this wild new web and, yeah, some people put them in for the sake of having them, but unlike some of the stranger "usability" enhancements we've been seeing lately, I actually do find value in them - enough so that we added our own version in this blog's tag soup. It's a really quick and very visual way to get a feeling for what we're posting about and how often we're doing it which is difficult to do with other UI widgets. There's one other axis of information I'd like to work in there somehow - the recency of the use of the term - and I've been thinking about different ways to handle it. Some thoughts:

We could go with a heat map a la Ben Hammersley and I really like what he's done there, though I would maybe keep the font sizing effect for post frequency and use the position and colouring in the grid to indicate post recency.
We could do a separate tag soup, labelled differently, where sizing indicates most frequently discussed topics from the last week. I'm less a fan of this approach because it requires a second widget with the same appearance but different meaning (up with consistency!).
We could leave our existing tag soup the way it is but use a second dimension of colour to indicate when posts happened. Using a cool to warm gradient of colours, we could show how "hot" tags are in terms of when they were last posted, with a legend below showing the colours on a timeline. I'm leaning towards this idea most strongly, though I'm not a fan of using colour by itself to indicate something in a UI given the prevelance of colour blindness. We're okay here because it's not essential information and the visitors with colour blindness conditions will see the key incorrectly as well so they might still be able to understand the data.

Thoughts? Opinions? Tag cloud smackdowns? Post 'em in the comments.