Bloggercon so far: lunch, users in charge

visible bandaid
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

I'm at the users in charge discussion sitting against the back wall on the floor, my favorite place to be in discussions. I can fidget, lie down, lean on the wall, whatever, while being relatively non-visible. I'm listening with one ear... the conversation was just brought back to "let's hear from users not developers". "let developers do support for their own product. " (for a while?) fitting data types to people's needs - not trying to put people into your preconcieved data types.

Mostly, I'm digesting my lunch. Mary Tsao and I walked off and at random had lunch with Kelsey and Matthew, from Seattle & Vancouver. Kelsey owns a manufacturing plant and Matthew develops blog-like tools for the plant's employees to keep in touch & work collaboratively. Chris Heuer joined us... we were trying to find Kristi at osha, but it was too crowded. so, off to Thirsty Bear. I recommend the pine nut-micro arugula- goat cheese empanadas with red pepper sauce. DAMN that was good.

Back to this session. It's really nice to have the transcript going up on the projection screens overhead.

Jory has a user bitch, it's like the Ikea problem, you have to go all the way through that frickin store, for a SPOON? It took me an hour to change the number of posts that appear on Typepad... to flip a switch. I don't want to have to memorize everything on that site to find what i'm looking for. q: is there a product that jumps out in your mind that avoids that? jory: ... hmmmm.

I'd say Flickr is quite beautifully intuitive... I'm using it right now. There has to be *something*, a layer of common use, that is amazingly low-entry-cost and intuitive. then, depth you might have to work for.

a bitch about browsers for mac, crashing with more than 10 tabs open. Users care a lot... we arent' going to join a group though... it sounds like a lot of work.

a guy bitches about irc client... ircle. Oh you've got to be kidding... colloquy was good.. it took me one minute to set it up. "most popular" different than "good to use" ircle is a piece of crap and colloquy is great. who has two hours to waste trying to figure out how to set up a damn piece of software?

dude talking about how he and some friends put together suggestions for flickr. and they haven't answered him yet...

product teams want to know, should we be listening to bloggers? teams, prod dev, iterative process, are bloggers the real voice of the average customer?

someone cracks a joke about the search dog in windows xp... hahahaha

ANYWAY I like the projection of the transcript in realtime! Wow! So much more useful than looking at panelists' powerpoint slides!!! To know who is saying what in the audience. it's nice to have their names. The monitors with microphones are amazingly useful. so often in a panel or discussion i can't hear the questions from audience. here, a committment to infrastructure, i.e. providing working wireless microphones, makes a huge difference to egalitarian ideals for discussion.

Back to our lunch discussion : i talked aobut socialtext to Kelsey and Matthew. They talked about t heir product/supplier workflow, about various studies of Bethlehem Steel (the Hawthorne study), another study that said that low light was NOT the factor in productivity but merely indication fo management interest, being observed, etc.

note: email coworking wiki info to Mary.

Chris H: we talked briefly about being dilettantes and sluts. "slutty nodes".

When I got here I was going to the citizen journalism discussion but was waylaid by Kristin from wired news... she wanted some quotes about blogher stuff and was like "waaah i have a deadline like 1 hour from now please give me some quotes" and I figured I'm an awesome media whore, so why not. I can read the transcripts later of citizen journalism and it'll likely be a bunch of weenie wars anyway. (as indeed it sounded like from the reports at lunch... and for a good citizen journalism project, international, I would humbly suggest that I don't give a rat's ass about the price of prozac, but how about the price of childcare? now that would be popular... and interesting... and perhaps influential... WORLDWIDE.) Or something to do with healthcare, like vaccinations or a service that a huge # of people need.



Oh - about the photo. I was blathering to K. from Wired about transparency of life, the personal is political, etc. etc. So, I thought I'd take this appalling photo of my belly hanging out, old school riot grrl style, and the batman bandaid over my tubal ligation laparoscopy scar from just a couple of days ago. Yow, how's that for inappropriate! Squicked much? Want to see my cool incisions? Just be glad there's a bandaid.

More in a bit. I'm going to quit talking about lunch now.