Bulletproof Boss

Our office hosted a discussion on designing for the body tonight , featuring the founders and presidents of two design companies -- one that makes sex toys, one that makes body armor. It was an interesting discussion; the similarities of the stories of starting the businesses and the design challenges they faced was actually thought-provoking in itself. And the discussion of how the things we carry, or the things we use on our bodies, become extensions of our selves tied into some other things I've been thinking about, and is going to rattle around in my head for a while. There were samples of both firms' work out in the studio for us, and later the event attendees, to see. It made for an interesting late afternoon. Luckily, only the body armor was ever tried on.

Bulletproof Boss Originally uploaded by ianonymous.
(Seriously, I'm told that vest can stop rifle fire.)

Twitter: the present of presence

So the first big news out of SXSW Interactive this year seems to be that Twitter has hit some sort of adoption tipping point: In Ross Mayfield's phrase, it's "tipped the tuna." Twitter is a presence publisher: it asks you "what are you doing now?" and you tell it. It, in turn, tells your friends, or the whole world, if you make your posts public. Your friends can receive your Twitter posts via IM, SMS, web, or my preferred method, the Mac-only Twitterific app. When I've been asked to describe Twitter, I call it "Dodgeball for people who don't go out." (And the fact that I can use that description tells you something about the tech-nerd quotient of the people asking the question.) Dodgeball is all about the ephemeral moment: we're here now, come join us. Twitter is a bit more stateful: it could be Dodgeball-esque, but the people on my friends list use mostly for less pressing things -- for updates on their moods, to describe a sky, and even for advice and a sort of asynchronous group chat. However, Twitter is also apparently very useful as a Dodgeball-type app at a conference like SXSW, even though there is a Dodgeball Austin, and I wonder in fact if the long lagtime as Dodgeball has gotten integrated into Google will end up working against it: I'm not sure why it left the space for Twitter to move into. I tried getting Twitter on my phone, on the Dodgeball model, and had to turn it off: it was making me crazy. I need to know that Clive is at his local New York bar right now: I do not need to be interrupted on the street to know that Emily in LA is packing for a trip. (Sorry, honey.) Having Twitter on my desktop makes a lot more sense -- it provides a light-weight, low-cost way to check in with the world outside my workspace. Liz Lawley, a bigger Twitter fan than I am, says:

What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage--personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages--into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

I'm not sure about either brilliant or fascinating there, myself, but I know this much: despite all the other presence indicators available to me, I haven't turned it off yet. For the rest, I'll have to see. Note: I'm michelet on Twitter if you're interested, or want to add me as a friend. I'm not a hugely active poster, as you might have guessed from the above, but reading my previous "twitters" did remind me I still haven't posted here about The Coast of Utopia. Maybe when I start procrastinating tomorrow, which I've taken off to finish my IA Summit talk...

Gender bias, gender blindness

One advantage of having worked in several different fields is that you know the same old bullshit when you see it. Jason Kottke pointed out that web conferences still aren't getting any more diverse, despite the regular rounds of discussion/debate on the topic, and sure enough, started another round of discussion/debate. It's so striking to see the same rationalizations come up in different forms in different fields: why don't we bring in more women to speak/write? Because there aren't more A-list women speakers/writers in our field. How would women become A-list speakers/writers? Um... by speaking at conferences/publishing with us, of course. But they aren't as interested as guys in those technical topics, and anyway, we just wouldn't feel comfortable going out and finding people who are... different from us. Anil Dash has a smart, smart rundown on why the Old Boy's Club is a mug's game in the end: go read it, and save me the time trying to make the basic case that the blinders of privilege will leave you in the end just as sightless as a sharp stick in the eye. Ironically, I'll end this by noting I've just received my first invitation to speak at a conference - one on industrial design, not web technology. If all goes well, look for me at the IDSA North Eastern District Conference in late April.

Life as a chatbot

So this is me testing out a new service called IMified, which allows you to access a whole bunch of web services (Backpack, Google Calendar) and your blogs from an IM service. It makes a lot of sense -- I spend more and more time in chat windows, with friends, co-workers, even clients, and I'm nowhere near this service's target market -- but let's face it, the text entry box of iChat isn't exactly conducive to long deep thoughts. On the other hand, it gets one off one's ass to post. We'll have to see how this works out. (ETA: No paragraph breaks, it doesn't seem like, and I had to come to the Wordpress interface to add tags. Still, an interesting 1.0. Check it out)

Clive’s Google juice

Clive has posted a link to an interview about the whys and wherefores of his awesome blog Collision Detection, in which he discusses the ways the blog has made him, as a freelance journalist, a lot more findable for potential editors:

Google is the determiner of reality on-line and I know the way Google works. Blogs attract a lot of links; other bloggers link to you. You very quickly build up a huge amount of what's called "Google Juice." And sure enough, three months after I started the blog, with barely a couple dozen links pointing to me, I was already on the first page. Within a year, I was number one. Basically, I'm undislodgeable at this point in time.

Curious, I went and Googled just "Clive." Our boy comes in at number five, just ahead of Clive Owen and well before Clive Cussler. More Clivey than Clive Owen! I'm so proud.