I’ve now uploaded the slides for the recent masterclass that I gave to Slideshare. It took several uploads because in order to re-present these slides on their site Slideshare does a bit of manipulating that changes some of the features I had used in PowerPoint. So, I needed to take two presentations down, rework them and upload them again.
Keep in mind that there are 38 slides, but they were used over an entire day, so there is a lot of discussion you are missing. The slides are best read in concert with the Slideshow Transcript that appears at the bottom of the Slideshare screen – a feature often missed by new users. Also, Slideshare appears not to have been able to pick up all of the embedded hyperlinks used in some slides. Again, they are included in the Slideshow Transcript at the bottom of the screen.
Happy viewing!

Hmmm, no posts here recently, but it is because I’ve been pretty busy preparing a “masterclass” on digitisation for the ARK Group as half of a two day workshop earlier this week called “Revolutionising Library Management”. My half was all about digitisation from a library manager’s perspective – not so much the technical side and stuff like colour management, the explanation of vector images and the mechanics of various metadata schemas.

• DYNAMISM: digitisation is a dynamic field and there are no set or concrete answers. While I was researching new research papers emerged on the use of JPEG 2000 and the digital curation cycle and I had to touch on both of those.
• PRESERVATION: There are some who don’t believe or understand the essential link between any digitisation program and preservation. But it is there and it is there in two forms. Firstly because we do digitise as a preservation strategy. In our institution we have preserved documents and images that could only have been saved using digital techniques. Thermal papers meant historic documents were disappearing before our eyes and acetate syndrome was destroying rare photos. There is also an often disregarded preservation benefit in giving access to digital surrogates which prevents or minimises the risk involved in allowing physical access to rare, fragile or unique collection items. Secondly, whatever you create through digitisation programs or projects needs to be preserved: through a curatorial life cycle, just like other collections do, but with different requirements as applicable to digital objects and collections.
• Learning by PLAYING: Adults learn best by doing (at least in my experience) – sorry, but I think it is true and this is my blog. I’ve also been involved in digitising archival and museum materials for a long time now and I reckon we’ve learned more through our projects than any courses any of us have ever undertaken. So my motto would be “start now and learn by doing”. The chances are the authorities will probably go for hardened criminals like mass murderers before they come after you, so you’ve got a bit of time up your sleeve.
• MANAGEMENT & PLANNING: A lot of useful material of late about digitisation has been indicating the importance of abiding by sound project management principles and using appropriate planning methodologies in your initiatives. This greatly assists us when the authorities (decision makers and purse holders) come after us or don’t understand what it is we are doing and why we are doing it.
• COMPROMISE: This comes up continually in our projects and you won’t see it in any of the theories emanating from academia and various standards organisations. The fact is that hardly anyone I know in this field meets all the criteria and principles that are mapped out for them or even mapped out by them. All the practitioners have made compromises somewhere, whether it be in metadata, file formats, digital preservation, QA, storage, evaluation, reports or many other critical elements of digitisation.

That’s all for now, but you can check out my del.icio.us bookmarks (see the tags on the right of this post) for some new an other really useful sites on the same subject.

I subscribe to the concert series the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) gives in Canberra (& many other cities) each year. I have done so for many years and each year one or two concerts inspire the most amazing creative thoughts in my tiny brain while I am sitting listening and watching them perform. Some of the concepts and design features that I used in our current Lawrence of Arabia & the Light Horse exhibition came to me at their concerts.
Last Friday I saw and heard “Sublime“, a concert that featured music that was written very recently and that which was written as much as 500 years ago. Some of the vocal pieces by Holst, Nick Drake, Sting, Radiohead and Britten were performed and interpreted anew by Katie Noonan. Unlike the online review, I don’t think the combination of music was at all awkward, but that is another issue.
So how is all this relevant? Well, currently a lot of IT-based and web-based museum staff are talking about Web 2.0 and museums. Some curators are also talking about it, but mostly the debate is led by the more geekish and web-aware people who are not that attached to or involved in more traditional museum or gallery practices, like curating exhibitions or developing collections. Perhaps I’m generalising unfairly, but in my experience, that is mostly the case. With regard to the digitisation of museum or library or archival collections, those endeavours are also being led by either technologists or imaging experts or others from conservation or preservation backgrounds. Again, the interpretation of such efforts seems removed from the more traditional curatorial processes. So that is where the musical performance comes in. Sorry for the long and uncertain root to this point.
What dawned on me is that for those of us in museums who are responsible (like I am) for large digitisation programs, just scanning the material and then shovelling huge amounts of it up on the web one way or another is a bit like writing music and leaving it somewhere without performing it. Last Friday, the ACO brought a lot of music to life giving it fantastic new interpretations, like that of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah which Katie sang beautifully and completely unlike other recent interpretations by K.D. Lang or Jeff Buckley. So, what I think this means for us is that all of our efforts on the web re “Web 2.0” and digitisation need to be accompanied by some appropriate curatorial interpretation. It may not need to be that extensive as that certainly wouldn’t be possible with mass programs, but we can’t simply rely on links to hard-to-find catalogue entries, exposure Google search or public tagging.
As I said above, I have an exhibition running here at our museum for a few more months and we know that visitors don’t read much of the carefully written wall text (or storyline) and object or image captions. They will, however, happily come along and listen to me drone on and on about both Lawrence and the Light Horse, perhaps in much the same way that I go along to live music performances in preference to or perhaps in advance of buying a CD or downloading some music from iTunes. (I’m sure some of my “performances” are better than others.)
Museum curators need to be out there interpreting our online content by playing “our own instruments”. And that interpretation needs to be delivered in many different ways. Online means such as blogs, You Tube videos, podcasts or downloadable audio guides are just a few examples. Maybe there are more parallels between our institutions and orchestras and it might be instructive for some senior curators, for instance, to look at the role of orchestra principals and leaders?
More to follow as I think this through completely, but to me the way museums use Web 2.0, social networking applications and services and the provision of online access digitised collections goes well beyond the intersection of web strategy, IT strategy, marketing and a social media strategy. That only tells a very shallow layer of the story or the game, there is more to it than that: the museum or institution itself and its collection.
(A recent relevant newspaper article from the NYT touches on some of the points above. You can read it here.)

A while back at work I suggested we look at moving our entire Encyclopedia to Wikipedia.org. My position has not changed. I still think we should do just that.

Putting the content up on Wikipedia.org gives it MUCH wider exposure than our website ever can and it therefore has the potential to bring new users to our website that may not even know we exist (via links in to our own web content). With a wikipedia.org user account, we can maintain an appropriate amount of control over the content (more than we have at present over wikipedia content that started as ours, already put up there by others).

Another point is that putting it up on Wikipedia allows us to engage the assistance of various volunteers who’d like to help us, but don’t live locally. I’ve been approached by a few keen volunteers who don’t live locally only recently and I think they’d do a good job for us in both maintaining content and generating new content (which we could edit when needed).

It isn’t urgent, but I think we could make some progress on at least a trial.

Adam our web developer has suggested a few things that we need to do before we start using wikipedia.org:

• learn the wiki markup (common sense guide here; markup guide here)
• understand the wikipedia templates (style guide here)
• understand the community structures and the relevant wiki-projects (general wikipedia projects, military history projects, etc)
• individual staff create user profiles and identify themselves as AWM professionals (some may eventually become coordinators)
• participate in the community, firstly by proposing to the community what AWM intends, and participate in existing relevant discussion within the projects
• THEN start importing articles from our Encyclopedia

Some colleagues here said they liked the idea of hosting our own wiki like The (UK) National Archives Your Archives wiki, but they are also supportive of moving our encyclopedia to Wikipedia. One person has started working through existing entries and tidying them up to make sure links are up to date and the sources and references are included for the entries. The motivation to do was that Wikipedians can challenge and/or remove unsourced material.
In a lot of cases we don’t currently list the sources for entries so we are going back to the background material we have for the entry and if that doesn’t exist we may recreate the research. This has made the process slower than we had expected.

As we look further into this and begin to examine some of the issues of “ownership”, reliability and “endorsed” wikipedia entries, a read of a very recent post about such matters via the ABC Digital Futures blog would seem advisable. At first glance one might think that this is a bit of a long bow to draw, because it is focused on the digital future of the national broadcaster and it discusses a model of participation regarding travel advisory websites, but when you think about it, many of the principles apply in a much broader sense and to us us as we look at moving our encyclopedia to a more open and participatory environment.

The whole Lonely Planet model is very similar to our situation. Indeed, our existing top-down model of the publication (in various forms) of Australian military history guides, magazines and books could well be undermined in much the same way as the environment in our own small world shifts from military history for the people to one of military history by the people.
The author/presenter is Alex Bruns and you can read his full text online here.

1. In recognising that everybody has a valuable contribution to make, and as he encourages us not to be afraid of it, Alex says there are four preconditions that are needed:
   the replacement of a hierarchy with a more open participatory structure;
2. recognising the power of the COMMUNITY to distinguish between constructive and destructive contributions;
3. allowing for random (granular, simple) acts of participation (like ratings); and
4. the development of shared rather than owned content that is able to be re-used, re-mixed or mashed up.

So, throughout his article he uses the term “produser” to describe the participants in such a community. It is all about true collaboration, engagement, and the shared development of content.

Finally, he suggests these four principles for anyone seeking to successful and sustainable participatory environments (mind the big words):

1. Open Participation, Communal Evaluation – inclusive, not exclusive
2. Fluid Heterarchy, Ad Hoc Meritocracy – from a hierarchy to leadership based on accumulated merit that is recognised by the whole community
3. Unfinished Artefacts, Continuing Process – evolutionary development of articles; nothing is ever truly “finished”
4. Common Property, Individual Rewards – tangible outcomes for individual contributors.

The reasons we need to get involved in the broader wikipedia community are basically two: firstly it is inevitable that it will grow as a community and if we are to have any influence at all we need to be involved; and secondly, we do not have the resources to be involved in two communities by managing one on our own site as well. Wikipedia is the pick (at least in my mind) because it has much more potential reach and exposure than we ever will. I think it is overly pessimistic to look at the worst possible case scenario (of extensive and malicious damage to entries) in this instance. Moving our encyclopedia to wikipedia should not be looked at as a surrender.

Recently in D-Lib there was a good example of an institution (University of Washington Libraries) using wikipedia to promote digital collections by using deep links back into their site. See Using Wikipedia to Extend Digital Collections.

And IMHO, this initiative from ICOM is a truly awful idea. Here is an excerpt from an email that I saw this morning. It starts like this:
ICOM cordially invites all members of the global museum community to participate in IMD on 18 May 2008 with activities in their museums based on our theme “Museums as agents of social change and development”.
Sounds good so far. IMD is International Museum Day. They invite us all to participate in both the real and virtual worlds with activities consistent with their theme. And here is where they lose the plot completely:
The highlight of the suggested online activities on http://icom.museum is hosted by The Tech Museum of Innovation on 18 May in the replica of its Silicon Valley museum of technology on SECOND LIFE, the virtual 3-D platform created by Linden Lab. From real-world museums, museum professionals and the public will be able to communicate with colleagues, artists and “residents” in the virtual world. They will therefore be able to participate in the collective development of exhibits in The Tech in SECOND LIFE.
I am not at all sorry to say that this is simply one of the worst ideas I’ve heard of recently.

As a former economist, I have long been interested in the new economic or commercial models that are emerging on the web. Many of us will be familiar with Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” description of the niche marketing of online stores like Amazon. Well, here is another theory. It comes from another respected web pioneer: Kevin Kelly (who helped launch Wired Magazine and is still a board member of the Long Now Foundation).

Kelly has recently written up a post called Better Than Free and in it he offers us “eight generatives” that people will still be willing to pay for in the new web environment (”a copy machine”) where so many copies of everything are now available somewhere for free (eg. peer-to-peer networks, not that I’d have any idea what they are for!).

What he says is that even when some product or service is available for free, we are probably still willing to pay for it elsewhere when it is surrounded by or within an environment characterised by these qualities (which can’t be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced). Here is a quick and dirty summary of Kelly’s article with my comments about how each one might apply in the museum world, in italics:

• Immediacy – Eventually you will be able to find a free version of just about everything somewhere, but it could take sometime. People still pay a premium for special air delivery import magazines, so in much the same way we value getting a copy immediately delivered to our inbox as soon as it is released, requested or created. Digital downloads by subscription where applicable and possible.
• Personalization — Generic versions may well be free, but getting something bespoke will always be something that some people want. Offering products like hand-crafted digital prints, very high resolution objects, or rare special copies/facsimile editions may be well received.
• Interpretation — “As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000. But it’s no joke.” I’m not sure how this applies to us because for many museums, particularly in Australia, although we have bucket loads of interpretation, the general expectation is that we provide it, as well as most quick reference services, for free online. Perhaps we need to look at paid subscriptions for well-written online publications?
• Authenticity — “You’ll pay for authenticity.” Again, we can offer very authentic material and already have this advantage. More, better branding?
• Accessibility – “Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them.” I’m still not so sure about this generative: in some ways, we can get web services like del.icio.us and Google Reader to do such things for us, like looking after our bookmarks/favourites and blogs (respectively) for free. It also doesn’t seem to be named that well.
• Embodiment — “At its core the digital copy is without a body. . . . The music is free; the bodily performance expensive.” For museums I think this is about what else we can offer in terms of paid programs or experiences. Generally, major museums and galleries in Oz, charge only for special/imported exhibitions or “blockbusters” (except us). Perhaps it means selling or charging curatorial talks on the talks circuit. I do a few of those in relation to our Lawrence exhibition and a few other things, and so far they are all free!
• Patronage — Audiences probably want or at least don’t mind paying creators. “But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators.” This applies universally for creators, including us, but we probably need to pay more attention to making payment easier and reasonable.
• Findability — “No matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless.” I like this one a lot and it is probably one of the most relevant to our cultural world where such a large percentage of our collections is not on permanent display. It should not be too hard to highlight, find and get our products and services – not too many gates or complicated registration.

Some of these eight qualities apply to us more than others and a few could be better described or have a different descriptor applied to them (like accessibility?). To the list I’d probably add trust and, like one of his comments says, usability. Most cultural institutions are trusted and we can take advantage of that, but usability isn’t really a major focus – think of most of our unfriendly catalogues and systems.

OK, so I might occasionally use a peer-to-peer network for some music and films that are either impossible hard to get or far too expensive in Oz, but I also download a lot of material for a fee from iTunes and I’d agree that the reasons I do this are pretty well mapped out above. If we are to come up with a decent model to make money or even recover costs for certain products and services on our museum websites, we need to very carefully look at this article.

Bruce Heterick, JSTOR, New York, USA

Abstract: This session will discuss the changing nature of library services and scholarly research in the networked world. Our affiliated group of not-for-profit digital initiatives – JSTOR, ARTstor, Portico, and Aluka – has a unique perspective on this shifting environment. There is ongoing discussion about the evolving Web (or Web 2.0): the migration of the Internet from a platform to a service; the network effect that encourages (and values) contributions and collaborations; and a shift in software and services to a participatory model. This evolution is changing libraries, publishing, and scholarship. In particular, it is fundamentally changing the paradigm of scholarly communication, and this presentation will examine this change.

I thought this was yet another good paper from the final day. Bruce knew his stuff and was an engaging and stimulating speaker. Fabulously, you can download the slides he used from this link: http://www.jstor.org/about/forum/ShiftHappens.pdf (1.1. Mb pdf file)

Bruce opened up by quoting Neil Postman “Technology doesn’t add or subtract something. It changes everything.” It does, however have a short half life. He then argued that Apples introduction of the iPod (bringing us portable media) in 2001 was as important an advance as Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web in 1989.

Next he told us of John Seely Brown’s “Four exponentials” (regarding the pace of change as it applies to working together):

• Moore’s Law: the power of computing doubles every 18 months.
• The Law of Fibre: the capacity of the bandwidth of fibre doubles every 9 months.
• The Law of Storage: digital storage doubles for the same cost every 12 months.
• The Law of Community (Metcalf’s Law): the power of the network increases with the square of the networked people interacting with it (more people = more power).

This increasing pace of change becomes unsettling for some, but he said that when things are in control, you are probably moving too slowly.

The Transition from the Information Age to the Age of Participation

• Active, not passive
• Multilateral, not unilateral (If your federated search has a problem, who do you call? It could be with any one of 12 repositories.)
• Communities, not silos
• Contribution as well as consumption.

An Environment with New Dynamics

• The network effect. It increases in value the more people use it, eg. Open Source software (Linux, Open Office), Communication (email, SMS), Social Networking software (MySpace, Facebook), Scholarly Resources (arXiv.org, JSTOR). Its growth can be extraordinarily fast (“viral”) and without control. Eventually the power of the network moves down.
• Two-sided markets. In Web 2.0 people can contribute as easily as they consume. These new networks have two groups that provide benefits to each other and enjoy intermediary platforms that balance their interests, eg. Flickr, eBay and OCLC’s WorldCat.
• The “Wisdom of Crowds”. In the right circumstances groups are often smarter than the best people in them. Their decisions work best when the crowd is: diverse, decentralized, has a mechanism for summarising the answer and acts independently, eg. Wikipedia (this applies particularly to our situation and our Encyclopedia!), Google’s page ranking algorithm.

So, what does this mean for us?

• Libraries (and we may read here “museums” or “cultural institutions” I think) have to manage access and preservation for system wide and local resources (wikis, blogs, repositories).
• We need to take advantage of economies of scale (OMG, I think I’ve said this meself before and nobody believed me!) so that we can reduce costs by sharing core services.
• We must reconfigure our services for the networked environment (which means they aren’t actually configured that way now).
• We need to learn how to engage proactively with our constituents – see the OCLC report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World.
• Free-standing publishers will need to share the commodity layers of their activities, eg. HighWire Press. There is tremendous pressure to move from print to electronic publishing.
• Publishers that harness the network effects and which are able to build self-sustaining communities will grow faster than others, eg. arXiv.org
• (There are also implications for the academic world, but I’m not going into those here. Sorry, call me selfish and self-centred.)

Conclusion
Libraries (and other cultural institutions) are small systems in a much larger one and we must learn to move with it! Bruce then briefly touched on the “Gorbachev Syndrome” in which change agents are swept aside by the tide of change they initiated because of their continued commitment to legacy systems/products/services. And I’m afraid that in my view, most libraries and archives that I know about are still well anchored in their old ways and processes. The world has changed around us and we need to move on. Some of our much loved standards and ways need to be left behind, not continually patched up and brought with us.

Some people don’t have the time to plough through all this text, so I’ve been asked to put together some of the main messages that I picked up at VALA. I reserve the right to adjust these as I complete posting all of my notes. So, to date, I think the key messages that come to mind are as follows:

• The importance of pro-active engagement and interaction with the relatively new social networks that have emerged on Web 2.0. That is where the future will evolve from (very rapidly) and we need to be aware and involved to stay up. It is relatively risk and cost free. We should start making more use of engagement/interactive tools like wikis to develop and grow our own community (utilising the wisdom of crowds).
• Systems (on the web) need to be engaging and intuitive (not “must do”) or they’ll be avoided by users.
• We need to look at the ways we catalogue and who we are cataloguing for (ourselves). If you think of the Collection-Cataloguing continua it is something like Acquisition>Arrangement>Store>Keep – we are good at all of that, but we are not so good when it comes to the “providing public access via the web” (assisting our users to find and get) part. Our catalogues need to be fully optimised for search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. If we are maintaining systems that do not get the data out to the web because of some facility or capability that only we need, we should consider using a mash-up to account for those needs and simpler more open web standards for the essential needs of the public users. The use of persistent identifiers (particularly “canonical” URLs that in many ways are brief catalogue entries themselves) was a plenary topic that attracted much interest.
• Web services are increasingly being used and can provide almost anything. Slideshare is a good online example of an online repository in the Web 2.0 world. Much of the useful cataloguing (or tagging) is done by the extended community or network. Library Thing for Libraries was also mentioned quite a bit as being used by many libraries around our size (mainly to augment their conventional cataloguing systems).
• We must stay in touch with developments in Copyright and we should consider making use of the Exceptions in the Act to ensure they stay with us (this will be relevant to the WW1 non-OR digitisation project that we are just beginning – many orphaned and unpublished works).
• Regarding digital repositories – much of the experience so far has been in the universities storing research material. From them we learn that a one-size-fits-all approach (from the outset) should not be applied too rigorously. Needs and different requirements will evolve as the repositories are used and certain assets may have vastly different needs to others (eg. storage, metadata, etc.) Otherwise, the ECM itself may become a victim of “Gorbachev Syndrome” – swept away by a tide of change that it started and could not keep up with through its own inflexibility and resistence to changing with the times and new technological trends.

Here is a link to LukeW’s good summary of Stuart Weibel’s plenary that closed VALA 2008. I liked what Stuart had to say and my notes probably differ a tad from Luke’s notes, but maybe I just misunderstood what Stuart had to say?

Stuart comes from OCLC and presented really well, leaving most of us with a new perspective on what could have been a dull a dry topic. I found his message easy to follow and quite inspiring.

Branding & Web 2.0
OCLC have released a report on the perceptions of libraries and information resources.
Libraries and search engines are trusted about the same.
People care about the quantity and quality of information.
They do not view paid information or free information differently.
Branding can be achieved by building on trust by making things look free. Scale is represented by libraries and their presence everywhere. They have global scope and reach (via networks?). BUT people need more awareness. We must be part of the new online environments that dominate our lives.
Social networking software. Only technical manifestation is new (we’ve always networked). Motivate people to tag, participate. Wired said 40% of those they interviewed contributed in one way or another. (Higher than Yahoo’s figures.)
Re social consumer environments. Facebook, etc. are not just for games. But they are probably not the right models. There are lessons to learn though (OCLC has just put an application into Facebook). They are flawed – closed gardens, rudimentary features, but offer an experience as well as a service.
Libraries must compete and compare favourably with popular models (in Seattle books with coffee is the law!). But can we compete and should we? What can we do to fit in and how to distinguish between the trends and the trendy?
Catalogues – how can they change morph/grow? Networking. Collections linked to people, organisations, concepts, context, metadata, etc. (So I’ve just started an account on Library Thing to learn how this works.)
Do we need a web or scaffolding – do we want more – coherence, durability, etc.
Mentioned FRBR – works, expression, manifestation and item. But with other dimensions.
He said that for discovery on the web, a book review is more useful than a MARC record (I agree – how many people truly understand MARC records?). They are a social bibliography. He also cited: lists, services, commentary, etc.

Infusing bibliographic ideas into the web & vice versa?
First class objects need: persistent identifiers; access to all; stand alone status (identification & clear IP); and they are curated (not left lying around unintended – bit-rot!). Allow users to enter and traverse the catalog from any point!
Establishing a canonical identity on the web is very important.
See WorldCat identities. This should have been done ages ago. Tag cloud into popular Ids. Has stuff by/on author, works, links, encourages serendipitous discovery, associated subjects. All from bibliographic data.

Identities on the web
What characteristics are best in identifiers? There are no hard/fast rules – just suggestions. He thinks URLs need to reflect something about what they are. Make them meaningful.

Design criteria for identifiers
Characteristics:

• persistence (function of organisational commitment);
• universal accessibility & global scoping (work everywhere, open to all, WorldCat provides architecture for library assets mapping global surrogate to the local);
• optimised for search engines and canonical (raises search engine ranking);
• branding via URIs (mini-billboards);
• usability by people and machines – speakable, short, predictable (hackable).

This amounts to gluing the pieces together with identifiers.

WorldCat identifiers – are they good enough?
Unique, free, citable, resolvable, linked, canonical (no, not really). Some functional duplicates (more records pointing to same thing).

A glimir of the future?
A global manifestation identifier. Global, business neutral, canonical, provides URL equity, fits with FRBR model.
There are other identifier schemes. So, OCLC is cautiously exploring this territory.

Summary:
IDs are the key; they are needed for mission, to compete, brand, to bring bibliographic values to web, to provide services and access to digital tribe. Books not done yet.

See particularly his blog posts on related subjects (persistent identifiers).

Andy Powell asked whether he was talking about the semantic web. Stu supports it, but is skeptical about the technologies involved. He spoke of middleware as the plywood of the internet. It needs to become the plywood of our arena. He said the abstract model has fundamental importance on the web.

Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design, Yahoo! Inc. and Principal of LukeW Interface Designs, USA
I really enjoyed this plenary and got a lot out of it. He may have initially been a bit biased towards Yahoo and anti-Google, but eventually he got over that and had excellent points to make. Again these notes are pretty rough. It was a great start to the final day and really got us in the mood and opened our minds.

It isn’t that people don’t read – they’ll read when they find something they want to read. So, there are three key considerations in designing websites: Presentation – voice, where interaction happens; Interaction – responding to users; & Organisation – structure.
Luke strives for usefulness, usability and desirability (why do I care, why should I use it?)
He referred to videoegg – as a good example.

What is different about today’s web? What are the recent shifts?

A. From locomotion to services
We interact through locomotion, conversation and manipulation. It is all now much easier and more widely evident on the web. He showed us the huge use of yahoo answers (5 mins to an answer in US; 0 to 90 mill. users in 1.5 years); the spread and use of word processors online. It is all part of the web transition – the locomotion to digital representations of physical entities, then digital manipulation of physical good (e-commerce), and now purely digital services (no physical presence, just display services: aggregation, flickr, MySpace, blogging tools, video editing online, entertainment sites). Many of these services have popped up in last few years with hosting for around US$6 per month. Instantly you can reach a huge audience; there are few barriers to enter; and you can use free open source platforms. BUT, you have about 1.6 secs per month per person to convince them your site is interesting, unique, worthwhile. Therefore you need to know your core – define, focus & build outwards. Some examples of those who do:

• Eg. eBay – global economic democracy. 30th largest economy in world. US$1,800 sold per seconds. 520,000 stores hosted worldwide. (Sorry, no link to eBay, I was the one who shouted out “greed” when Luke asked what makes it work so well.) Luke said it was held together by democratic feedback. Any search or browse defined by democratic comments & feedback; they are not sorted. Interaction on a level playing field is core underpinning element that makes it tick.
• Also digg with 3 million people online filtering the news. Interaction on all news items. All can express opinions. One click interaction made the site go – the core element.
• flickr – builds outwards, can be shared, embedded, favourited, etc., but core is a picture of a subject.

In packaging design for the web, Luke saw three key tools:

1. “Meaningful shouting” through: differentiation (distinct and appropriate), attraction, and embodying the brand. He looked at three well known wiki tools – how are they distinguished meaningfully? Is it coherent story-wise?
2. “Back of pack” – supporting the story & outlining benefits/features. The new Yahoo home page calls up elements and gives you benefits in three bullets on a pop-up window. It helps people use the product. Yahoo also provided a 2 min video on how to use Yahoo Bookmarks.
3. The unpacking experience – eg. the Apple experience. Culminates with the personal photo taken from your new laptop. Google video just gives you a form. It is an interrogation room. That happens with 90% web services. Jumpcut first asks you to make a movie, so the first things seen is the movie and online editor. After that, you are asked for an email address. Also showed pbwiki – it does the email messaging thing and then three more steps, re passwords, access terms of service, more services, etc., and then you need to get through a barrage of marketing material, all before you can even start! But he compared that to geni (creates a family tree) – it starts with a name to make a tree. You jump straight in right out of the gate. It is what people want to do! They got 5 million profiles in 5 months.

B. From pages to rich interactions
It is all about design considerations. Ajax interface design. Pages become more dynamic, updated and rich (although these same pages become more difficult for those who are print handicapped). Examples of inline micro-actions (within previously flat web pages): ratings, online indication, fade, transition, status, transition, etc. You manage three spaces by design: the invitation (to vote/drag); transition (when voting/dragging); and feedback (when the vote/drag is done). All are then encapsulated in design patterns – repeatable design patterns (they catalogue different states and interfaces – eg. Yahoo’s pattern library) – the use of search assistance layers after some user hesitation and these deliver more meaningful results, and more conversational information retrieval.

C. From sites to content experiences
Sites used to be structured in hierarchies – closed and rather negative. The emerging networks, like clouds, etc. are not as accurate, but maybe they are accurate enough? Content is not treated as part of a structure, it is treated as part of an experience. See his article on primary and secondary action in web form. The new experiences are delivered in the form of: content creation tools (eg. search, blogs, like ajaxian, wikis), aggregators (like digg, del.icio.us), display surfaces (eg. Facebook, MySpace), and entertainment services (eg. You Tube).
Design considerations again. When readers come to his page it delivers primary content, related content and a bit of context. How much of site dedicated to overhead? People really just want what they came to find and maybe a bit of related stuff and context. Why hamper the user experience with what they don’t want. Do you need to get everything into the whole page? (The long tail phenomena again – for most web sites, only a few pages get most of the attention/use.)
Eg. personalised search like ROLLYO and a party planner/arranger like RENKOO
If expectations are met . . . people will look around and may take up relevant invitations.
Distributed or re-mixed content. These experiences are not just about distribution, but bringing content in context (and core design still matters!). Eg. blog posts with rich metadata in it, say from Yahoo Shortcuts (interestingly, I found it easier to find this page online via a Google search than a Yahoo search). Things can be added in with a single click on your blog. Context can be king.

D. From webmaster creation to everyone creates
Community on the web comes from features like tags, ratings reviews, trackbacks, blogs, wikis, subscribe RSS, etc. Unity through shared interests and goals. Something gets them all there around something. Social behaviours – reputation & identity; communications; sequences, etc. Implications: GOOD – Filter, content creation, increased engagement (Yahoo answers), invested consumers and collaborative innovation. BAD – blurred focus, spam and poor quality, power laws (abuse), factions and tribes, privacy and exposure issues.

• Enable identity for communities: welcome, anonymity can be a death sentence, profiles.
• Provide for creators synthesizers, comsumers, not just one or two. Who creates – only 1% create, 10% are synthesizers and 100% are consumers – they read, engage, benefit from content. Value from reaction of people with each other.
• It all depends on the tools. How to get people to contribute and how to encourage quality? MySpace kinda ugly? But is is possible to create good stuff. It is hard to create good profiles on MySpace and easy to create ugly stuff.
• Quality content is based off the level of effort needed to put something in. Burying the submit button encourages fewer but better posts! So some barriers to entry can help QA. The best check on bad behaviour is identity. Has implications for comments on our blogs (Facebook founder, Mark Z.)

See his blog – Functioning Form

Luke’s responses to questions:
Re government websites – any trends? Enormous opportunity for us to build on these principles. Many different ways to engage. Eg. initial (adverse) reactions from digital media, film and music and their attitude now.
Getting around crappy content – don’t just go for the quick fix, quick dollar, think about the long term (what Liz usually urges us to do!). There are ways to make it good.
Redeveloping sites from scratch – all about knowing your core. Start at that. Not with the amalgam that you have that hides the great original idea. What is really working and what is the core essence?