I'm helping Sir Christopher Wren build this here cathedral

Or should I perhaps have found an anecdote with a bazaar in it for my title? I’ve been enjoying watching a lot of my fellow Y!OS cow-orkers “decloak” if you will and proudly announce to family and friends that yes, this Yahoo! Open strategy is what we’ve all been working on:

Ignite was fun

My Ignite talk, Grasping Social Patterns

Originally uploaded by duncandavidson.

Here are my slides.

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Audio when it’s available (video too).
UPDATE: and here’s some YouTube video shot from the audience (the very beginning of my talk is cut off):

Three talks for the price of, well, none

At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)

I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.

In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.

For now, here are my summit talks:

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and

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Social design patterns slides from BayCHI last week

Here are my slides from my talk at Xerox Parc (the BayCHI monthly program meeting) on April 8th:

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When I get the audio, I plan to put together a slidecast to synch the slides to the talk, which should be more valuable.
Oh, and consider viewing the slides in full-screen mode. They should be a lot more legible that way. I did my best to optimize the source files.

Talk back to presenters with Ted Nadeau's patented* Reaction Deck 1.0

At South by Southwest, Ted Nadeau and I led a “core conversation” on the topic of reputation, identity, and presence. Ted is great at questioning basic assumptions and had this idea of handing out placards an audience of participants could use to signal their reactions to what was being said to them.
We imagine double-sided signs on sticks to hold up, sort of like the Roadrunner does, but we settled for handing out cut paper. We’re still working on the mechanics of this, *and the whole thing is Creative Commons licensed, derivs-allowed, attrib-required, I think (it’s in the fine print), but even now at version 1.0 of this Reaction Deck, I think Ted’s really onto something:

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These are your most powerful and trusted friends

These are your most powerful and trusted friends

Originally uploaded by xian.

A leaderboard, viral, breaks email (one-way only), reputation game pattern from the Circle of Trust app on Facebook.

Great, now I have to keep up with Bucky

This made my day

Originally uploaded by xian.

When I saw someone was using twitter to send out quotations from Buckminister Fuller I was all over that. Getting this email message was just kind of an unexpected side treat.

Now, if Bucky Fuller really was following me on twitter I might feel a little more pressure to be brilliant and cosmic. Like a dweeby Merlin Mann.

Social design patterns talk at BayCHI next week

Next Tuesday (April 8, 2008) I’ll be speaking at BayCHI on the topic of social patterns in a talk called Social Design and the Yahoo! Pattern Library:

Social networking sites are proliferating. New social media aggregrators appear every day. Venerable old sites are adding social features or trying to activate the social profiles of their users and members. A number of the interaction patterns that drive social relationships online are becoming clear (as well as a number of nasty “antipatterns”). Christian will talk about social patterns, previewing some that are in the works for the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library as well as others that he has noted “in the wild.” The newly redesigned Yahoo! Developer Network site is the host of Yahoo’s open design pattern library. Over the next few months, Yahoo! will be rolling out a series of open and social APIs and the pattern library will be gathering and sharing best practices for social web design.

I’m still trying to figure out what I can share and what I can’t, so I may focus on social design patterns observed “in the wild,” as well as my current favorite topics of presence, identity, and attention.
BayCHI talks typically have two speakers back to back, and I’m really looking forward to hearing Amy Jo Kim from Shufflebrain, who is speaking before me on the topic “Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software”:

Over the past few years, we’ve seen an explosion of interactive services that harness the collective efforts of users. On the web, services like MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr, and Digg are providing hours of entertainment to millions of people. These game-like services are changing the face of networked entertainment, and rapidly displacing television as a leisure-time activity. They share three key elements: user-generated content, community infrastructure, and game mechanics. In this talk, I’ll review the psychology and system thinking behind game design, and explore how to use game mechanics to create interactive experiences that are fun, compelling and addictive.

I don’t want this blog to turn into just a litany of upcoming speaking appearances, but then again it would be foolish not to post these announcements, right?