In order to be truly worthwhile, organizers have thoroughly plan out how they want people to experience their trade conferences. The delivery of content must align with agenda and objectives of the conference.
Case in point – the Wall Stree Journal’s D – All Things Digital Conference (aka D7).
Over at PBS, Mark Glaser has an insightful article on the D7 conference, highlighting what they got right, what they got wrong, and what they’re still working to improve.
Glaser explains that in the conference program, there was a section titled “Welcome to Web 3.0.”
First off – the whole Web 2.0/3.0/20.0 shit is tired. Tired.
“Web 3.0” about as relevant to the individual contributors/technologies/companies it claims to encompass as the term “Beat Generation” was it it’s contributors. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and WIlliam S. Burroughs are about as different in literary style and objectives as you can get.
The same can be said for 37Signals, Google and Flickr. Yes, they are all from the same ‘generation’ but that’s where the similarities end.
The other important point Glaser brings up is how D7 used (and didn’t use) technology as a vehicle for increasing and improving overall communication and thus, the overall experience and learning.
Glaser writes:

Another problem at D was the uncertain contract between conference organizers and the press and bloggers covering the event. I was told in advance by Swisher that I would not be allowed to do live-blogging in transcript form. Usually, I attend conferences and try to provide a running commentary on what people on stage are saying, largely paraphrasing what they say. It seemed like the D folks were against that idea, and they also didn’t provide WiFi Internet access in the main hall.

I first started thinking about this point after my colleague Victor wrote a post last September on his experience at The Minitek Music and Innovation Festival. Victor was disappointed that there were tons of great technological mashups and combinations available to enhance the experience of the Festival, but they weren’t exploited to their fullest.
Victor laments:

Finding a beautiful evening space (Penn Plaza) and distributing RFID bracelets wired to the concession booths was a great place to start. There was other RFID technology present in the Innovation exhibits, but sadly they weren’t configured on a unified system. This represents the single biggest missed opportunity, a central theme I’ll return to again and again, which was that there was no unifying system/platform to integrate all of the disparate moving parts. And in the wake of that lack of unification, the crowd was neither engaged nor challenged to become part of a shared experience in any meaningful way.

When we get the impulse to hold recurring industry events and create new ones, we really need to think things through and make sure that we crafting experiences that are communicating the messages in the right mediums.
Yes, many of us need to go back 40 years or so and give McCluhan another read.

Mr. Orange in shades, originally uploaded by combustionchamber.

Every time a go back to the WSJ, they’ve made more incremental changes to their site (mostly for the good).
One particular area they’re putting more effort into is data visualizations:

Since the redesign, articles have been set within a tab structure, with the first tab being the article, then any addition video/visualizations/slideshows within another tab, with the last tab for Comments.
While appreciate that they’re trying to move in a more interactive realm within journalism, visualizations like the one above need some serous help if they want to get up to the level the NYTimes is at.
Here are a few of the talented people who make the NYTimes so engaging (under design director Koi Vin):
http://gabrieldance.com/
http://shancarter.com/

Cameron Moll contemplates, Is it time to move beyond 960?

So what’s the ideal width? I’m not sure yet. Let’s figure it out together. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
• 1020 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15 but not 8 and 16. It’s not much wider than 960.
• 1040 is divisible by 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 16 but not 3, 12, or 15. Yet it has a reasonable width that sits somewhere between the lower end of 960 and higher end of users browsing full screen (many don’t, of course).
• 1080, which is what I’m taking for a spin with a site right now, is divisible 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15 but not 16. It pushes the upper end of the width spectrum, and measure (line length) could become an issue if not dealt with appropriately.

I’ve actually used the 960 CSS framework he speaks of on my last two projects at Roundarch.
I remember the day my friend Jory IM’d me when Apple launched their new 984 pixel-wide website a few years ago. It was a sign, at least for us, that we could officially, safely, move beyond 800×600.
Laugh if you want, but 184 pixels is a big deal when your life revolves around those tiny, square sons-of-bitches.
Now CNN, NYTimes, BBC and Amazon all are optimized for at least 980 (Amazon is an elastic layout, but locks to around 980 on resize).

Looking at photographs and illustrations on the iPhone is a great experience. It helps if the artwork is great, of course. It’s such a rich, bright screen that images almost feel like little flat jewels in your hand as you flick through them.
I’ve banked a considerable collection of images that I’ve dragged and dropped from ffffound and other places to a folder on my desktop. Some of these find there way onto my phone as wallpaper.
This week I struck a little pocket of gold when my friend Promila posted a link to the work of Shinichi Maruyama. I went ahead and screengrabbed all his work, set up a 480 x 360 pixel Photoshop file and proceed to crop the photos to my liking.
Next step was to save out all the images as PNGs and drop them into a new collection in iPhoto.

The final step was changing the Sync settings in iTunes to include this iPhoto collection on my iPhone.

I ran across a post on Engadget this morning, Bumptop gives Windows 7 touchscreen PCs purpose.
I wrote about BumpTop 2 years ago. I wasn’t convinced back then on the utility of it.
I’m still not.
My thoughts remain the same – BumpTop it going too much in the direction of a literal desktop with their interface, and losing any benefits that come with a more abstracted desktop metaphor.
It’s likely that BumpTop will find a niche industry for their product that lends itself to such an interface, such as kiosks & Microsoft Surface apps in museums, science centers and other such public locations.
My problems with BumpTop echo sentiments my friend Bryan has told me when we were discussing the evolution of video games. We were talking about one of my old favorites in particular – Grand Theft Auto. According to Bryan, Grand Theft Auto 4 for the Playstation 3 is amazing. Amazing story, amazing graphics, amazing sounds, amazing effects. The problem is – it’s too much of a simulation and it begins to approach real-time and real-detail. It’s enough that I have a wife and a job and a computer and a dog in my own life, but now my video game is demanding an almost equal level of attention.
Applications don’t have to imitate every aspect of nature to feel natural and enjoyable.
Be selective in the features you choose to crank up the fidelity on when creating engaging products in experiences – that’s where the true art lies.

I enjoy intellectual discussion about philosophy, technology and art, to name a few. I read books, articles and blog posts that stimulate my imagination. I also like to express my views on these subjects on this site.
As much as I like ‘high cuisine’ items such as these, sometimes I’m just in the mood for a Kit Kat.
This made my day today, via ffffound:

Amazon releasing a Kindle application for the iPhone was a very smart move. Like a lot of the news I’m reading today, I’m happy to see Amazon make this move and not try to wall off other devices. While it’s not going to replace the Kindle 1.0 my wife bought me for Christmas, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to read e-books I bought from Amazon on my iPhone.

Now some of you are thinking right now, ‘But Mike – you don’t seem to have any problem with your beloved Apple and their gated community of iPhone applications? Why aren’t you demanding the same openness Amazon is showing with its Kindle app from Apple and its iPhone?”. Ah – but I’m a proponent of the content being open, not the platform. Amazon is selling media files for the Kindle (books, magazines), the same way Apple is selling media files in iTunes (music), and if you remember, Apple didn’t want DRM on their music, the record executives insisted on it because we’re all nasty little thieves. Google made the same move with Google Docs publishing out to standard (albeit Microsoft proprietary) formats like .doc and .ppt instead of inventing its own.

With each succeeding year, it becomes more and more clear why Amazon isn’t just a website that sells stuff, they’re clearly a company focused on innovation.

Fort Totten, originally uploaded by combustionchamber.

What could this post be about? Michael blasting Microsoft again?
Yep.
They make it too damn easy for me. This bit of exhaust has to do with the new ‘vision’ piece for 2019 posted over at istartedsomething.
Microsoft has a vision for things in 2019 and it involves lots of touch screens and e-ink – all networked together. That’s great. And the film short is beautifully produced. It reminds me of of The Island and Minority Report combined with a good helping of Target – all mixed together.
The vision piece is the easy part. A lot of other companies could have produced something similar. The hard part is applying that vision. Maybe if another company were proposing this vision I might have an easier time believing it was possible, but not Microsoft.
This is a company who originally claimed Longhorn (aka Vista …aka Windows 7) would have 3-D rendering within the OS because, you know, 3-D immediately makes thinks better (that pesky 2-D Exposé on OS X sucks!).
Steve Jobs nails it when discussing concept cars in a Time magazine article from 2005:

“Here’s what you find at a lot of companies…You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! …What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

When Jobs took up his present position at Apple in 1997, that’s the situation he found. He and Jonathan Ive, head of design, came up with the original iMac, a candy-colored computer merged with a cathode-ray tube that, at the time, looked like nothing anybody had seen outside of a Jetsons cartoon. “Sure enough,” Jobs recalls, “when we took it to the engineers, they said, ‘Oh.’ And they came up with 38 reasons. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done.’ And so they kind of begrudgingly did it. But then it was a big hit.”

Danka Studio

I’m not quite sure why I’m doing this, but I thought I would open up my stats to everyone, at least for a little while. There’s a little checkbox in Mint letting you do this. Shaun Inman must have put it there for a reason.

They’re not too impressive, but I know there’s stats junkies out there like me who might enjoy them.
Statistics for Daily Exhaust (and The Combustion Chamber)
Update: To clarify, Mint is only tracking pages I have added the mint code to. It works the same as Google Analytics.