"yahoo" in Weblog

Etech is over and a great time was had by all. Our presentation was dogged by technical difficulties that meant I ended up using old slides but everyone seemed to enjoy it regardless. With hindsight I think Charles and I should have been more clear with our objectives: the talk wasn’t about collective intelligence per se but rather complexity and how that effects interface decisions… Still, I really enjoyed speaking and we had loads of interesting conversations off the back of it.

And that brings me on to the most important aspect of eTech - the conversations. I’ve never found that many sharp people gathered together in one place before. Every person I met seemed to have some combination of skills outside of the norm and brought unique perspectives to bear on every topic. Here are some examples:

I chatted with Timo from Nature about getting academia more involved in sharing knowledge and community building, something he’s been doing for a while and I’ve been talking about with my friend Chris at the EES.

Charles and I talked to a chap called Karl from the Rockefeller Institute about socio-political development, the evolution of civilisations, the long tail of micro-cultures and weak signal detection.

We spent an afternoon with Peter Biddle of Microsoft discussing how the internet is effecting our culture, about what it’s like to work for Bill Gates and where his genius is as a businessman, and how Peter’s managed to carve out a semi-autonomous organisation within Microsoft. That was followed swiftly by a chat about his ideas for reverse market applications and massive medieval battles.

Over another lunch we talked to a bunch of guys about fostering types of community through design, game- and party- dynamics, and how online behaviour is bleeding into the real world.

It was an inspiring and humbling few days. I’m not used to having people not just know what I’m talking about but have had similar conversations before and already have an opinion worked out. It’s not just eTech either. I went out for Matt Buddulph’s leaving San Francisco dinner and drinks with Paul Yahoo, Richard Moo, Blaine Twitter, Tom OpenStreetMap and various Flickr and Yahoo folk. Yet again I was amazed by the level of conversation and the passion for the field we’re in. The meandering conversation ended up on whether our online personas that post twitters for acquaintances to see and comment on strangers’ MySpace pages are bleeding into the real world and changing our personalities. Don’t get me wrong - there was plenty of non-geek chat but the fact that a conversation can take such a techno-philosophical turn says something about the culture out here.

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing that London has a vibrant scene for emerging ideas but after this week I’m starting to think that I was wrong. I’ve been quite involved in bits of the London scene for a couple of years and it’s got a very different character to SF. Technology is to San Francisco what celebrity is to Los Angeles or finance is to New York and the result is a culture whose aspirations and ambitions are in sync. In London we’ve got some of the best executors in the world but do we have the innovators too?

From a user experience point of view this is a magical development… The good folk at Yahoo have identified that people search with different tasks in mind and come up with Yahoo Mindset. It’s only a small tweak on the surface, and not something that had ever occurred to me to want, but after battling with search results noise while trying to buy something online recently, I think this is a very exciting addition. And it’s incredibly simple: a slider to describe the kind of search you are performing. Are you researching or shopping? Two distinct mindsets. I will be playing with this in the coming weeks.

This reminds me of something I’ve been battling with recently - gleaning user requirements from user feedback. Identifying what’s not said as well as what is; tracing a series of requests for interface tweaks to their source in a deeper-rooted problem. I’ve still not got this nailed down though. I can sit here and stare at feedback notes for hours and not come up with anything until my walk home when it suddenly occurs to me what’s been staring me in the face all day. Interface design is a fine art but interface redesign is a black art…

I’ve not really been following this, to be honest but this story just doesn’t feel right to me: Yahoo helped jail China writer. The ‘China writer’ has been sentenced to 10 years because ‘he was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message’. Christ almighty! That must sit very uneasily with the conciences of those in the Yahoo boardroom.

And they’re not alone. If I remember correctly, Google allows the Chinese government to limit their search results and Microsoft also censor their MSN Spaces blogging service.

I suppose everyone has to decide where to draw the line and for Yahoo it was at the $1 billion mark. I don’t know how much the others cost.

Now, there are a couple of things that spring to mind, beyond the moral issue.

Firstly, I don’t understand how the Chinese government can do all this, technically. The resources they’re pouring in must be enormous.

Secondly, censorship destroys the single greatest (and worst) thing about the internet - there is information for everyone out there, no matter what they’re into. Working at Wordtracker has given me an insight into what people are looking for on the internet, and while most of it is legit, some of it really, deeply disturbing… And I’m quite laissez faire. Still, the internet, at its heart, is about putting folk in touch with other like-minded people. Without that, how much benefit do the Chinese people really get from the digital revolution that has changed the lives of so many?

Anyway, over at Wordtracker we call it ‘online behaviour’ and it’s a facinating step into cyber-sociology. The internet takes up so much of so many peoples’ lives but we know so little about what’s actually going on. I guess the Chinese have realised that and have developed the world’s first cyber-dictatorship.

With everything that’s going on with Google at the moment it’s worth revisiting EPIC: “It’s the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?” Now read The Google File System and Welcome to the Google Twilight Zone…

Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, who put together the EPIC movie, appear to have been pretty much bang on with their predictions. The idea of the Google Grid is facinating and entirely plausible… Could Google be the new Microsoft? Is Bill Gates worried?