Blocking it at the Firewall?

While thinking about Dconstruct type things I may as well throw the odd thought that comes along especially if related to a thought that originated at the conference.

I sent a message to two co-workers today, a valid work message. Someone else was using Facebook at lunchtime (more people seem to every day). A comment was made, at some point they will block this at the Firewall. Where I work things get blocked at the Firewall.

Thinking back to Tom Coates and his web of data, then soon (perhaps now) blocking at the Firewall will be pointless, the web of data remember.

Block Facebook, I can still read my Facebook notes via RSS in Google Reader, can still get a summary via the widget in Netvibes. I have only just started using it there must be many more ways.

How would you go about blocking Twitter?

Block everything and block communication fullstop?

Edit: Somebody at work (thanks :)) kindly pointed out this Guardian article.

Summaries (why re-invent the wheel?)

This is still somewhat of an experiment for me, trying to review what I gained from a conference and yet being exposed to the reviews and comments of others etc. People commenting on comments and observations, it goes around and around like a wheel but surely fades overtime. Perhaps some pieces will be more sticky than others?

As many people can write better than me it seems sensible to just co-opt what they have written and finally when I think I have digested enough spit out a summary of my impressions and suggestions for how this may/should impact on my own work environment.

In that spirit my favorite swirly opaque summary of the whole dconstruct07 experience (check out the comment by Tom Coates. Also a slightly more fact based if sparse summary.

I will also dig up summaries of talks that may be worth reading where applicable. For example a short summary of the presentation given by Tom Coates.

I guess I should soon (about a week) be in a position to write up a summary and identify relevance and advantage to what I do day to day at work. If not was there any point in attending?

A Web of Data

Returning to the presentation made by Tom Coates, in my last post I extracted the "Your website is not your product" idea as that struck a particularly resonant chord. But there were plenty more ideas.

On the subject of meta data, Tom seemed to be in favor of retaining as much as possible (particularly if available for free as part of an automated process). You cannot easily second guess how your users will search and sift through your data, using Flickr as an example it was demonstrated just how many different ways that the photos can be sorted, obvious ones by user or tag and less obvious by Camera make/type and various camera settings when the photo was taken.

Tom also highlighted the idiocy of the taxonomy vs folksonomy arguments. Both have advantages so why not provide both, why not throw in parametric searching and anything else as well? This kind of reminds me of the way that small children absorb certain concepts. Ask them do you want X or icecream and they will see this as a choice that has to made. Once a certain age is reached and their mental processing of concepts they are familiar with improves they will think for a second and ask "errr can I have X and icecream please?".

This boagworld.com podcast talks briefly about Dconstruct07 in the news section towards the beginning (also has good things to say about Tom's presentation. Listening to this reminded me of a couple of things that I had forgotten or not noted, I think when they appear the podcasts of the Dconstruct07 will prove very useful for review. For now I have put the feed for the Dconstruct07 podcasts in the left column of this blog, but so far it only contains three pre-conference podcasts. Incidentally as a developer who is also interested in the front-end and user experiance I find the boagworld podcasts very helpful.

Your website is not your product

One the most interesting presentations at Dconstruct07 for someone from my background was ironically at the end. Tom Coates talked about Designing for a Web of Data. It doesn't seem that the podcasts of the presentations are up yet, and I am sure I will get much more when I listen to them. However apart from his obvious enthusiasm and taking us through a world where the absolute location of everyone is potentially available online, the biggest message I came away with is that your website is not your product.

Firstly that fact that the audience general expectations and experiences allowed Tom to present this as possibly surprising, tells us a little. A maker of fine cheese, no matter how good his website and how it enables his worldwide market is never likely to consider that his product is anything but cheese for example. It is though easy to see why many people would naturally consider otherwise, and when I presented this casually as a thought from the conference to a few at work today there were a variety of responses.

Take Twitter, a prime example, the service this website offers is enabled via the network but most of the data people generate is viewed by others on other sites, on other devices (mobile phones for example), presumably via the magic of RSS and API. The data is the product not the web pages at http://twitter.com/.

Increasingly I view the things I am interested in other places than the website they may located on. With RSS feeds I can read blog posts and comments and forum posts etc. on Netvibes or Google Reader. A Chinese learning site I use has written a Facebook application so I can listen to and monitor the lessons in my own personal list of interests without leaving Facebook.

The place where I work is in academic publishing. Once our products were physical journals and magazines and books. What are they now, hmmmm they are not cheese that is for sure, it will require a great leap of technology before I can get my cheese directly via broadband, but in the end our products are words, and pictures and they like individual twits (the output of twitter? I find it hard to keep up) will go down the wires just fine. Already it starts, xml gateways enabling federated search etc. etc.