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we started out the morning by playing “reverse scavenger hunt” (we are soooo playing this at GLLS2008!)

Amy Jo Kim - Putting the Fun in Functional
http://shufflebrain.com/

game design principles have been finding their way onto websites more and more
“social media” for her
1. player-created content (she likes to talk about the people who use your software as “players,” not customers) +
2. social features (profiles, reputation, groups, etc.) +
3. tools for sharing

“game” = a structured experience with rules and goals that’s fun (which includes things like “The Sims”)
stretches what can be considered a “game”
games tap into our primal response patterns
game payoffs are like slot machines - random, unpredictable, not always controlled by your behavior
games engage us in “flow” (that space between apathy and boredom, anxiety and boredom)
the tricky part is that the game has to adjust as you play it

game mechanics for social media
1. collecting - you’re going to show off your stuff (stuff in WoW, friends in Facebook, etc.); so when you’re designing, look at what can be collected to drive player behavior; downside is who has the most friends
2. points - point systems give you leaderboards, give you something sticky over time; great way to introduce new features, new areas to explore; social points are given by other points (different from system points); eg, flickr interestingness, ebay reputation, etc.
3. feedback - accelerates mastery; eg, Guitar Hero; this is probably the lowest hanging fruit of all these; it’s one of the easiest ways to make something compelling and fun and to help people master the curve
4. exchanges - back and forth interactions between two people; implicit (not built into the system, but comes out in other ways, eg The Wall in Facebook or the social pressure to provide feedback on exchanges in ebay) vs. explicit exchanges (codified in the system, eg adding a friend in Facebook); so leave room for implicit exchanges
5. customization - of the interface, your character, your identity, your experience; makes the person more invested and just makes it more fun; Gaia Online lets you customize your avatar before you even start playing

power to the players (trends)
1. the rise of content sharing networks - Flickr, YouTube, etc. that create the network but the players exchange the content
2. accessible tech - much simpler UIs, open APIs, cross-platform services; seeing these things in games, too
3. syndication - not just having your content-sharing network, but also to be able to take bits of it and place it on other sites (feeds, widgets, embed code); integrating with the rest of the web and accessible there

some of this change is because of the change in the audience (new demographics for gaming, both up and down); broadening of the audience has transformed game design into something that reaches beyond the hardcore
happening on the web, too

game mechanics + social media = the future of networked entertainment?

gave some tips that can be found on her website

points don’t have to be explicit - views on a picture, how many times it was emailed, etc.
points are not always the right thing to use

Merci Hammon - PMOG
launched in March before having to take the game down for improvements due to new funding
Firefox extension
game environments, the environment levels you up
in passively multiplayer, you don’t get to choose your class; you get assigned a role
in PMOG, two of them represent order and two represent chaos
you can purchase things that are bizarre
lightposts are used to create “quests” (they “illuminate” your context or something about the site)
“portals” transported you from one site to another seamlessly, but became a problem because of where you might end up
Merci’s favorite object was a mine - could leave one on a site and then the next PMOG player hitting a site would encounter it; an anonymous weapon that spreads havoc for the other players
had to develop “armor” at the end because popular sites would obviously get mined quickly

they were shut out by del.icio.us, open directory didn’t work, so they created their own tags
you get points for erasing other peoples’ tags and for adding your own
so users are determining the scope of the universe

hoping to test the new version in early 2008
http://www.pmog.com/

they don’t monitor gameplay to see if players are gaming the system
passive because of class characterizations and point collection

Playful Programming, Competitive Code - Ned Gully (The MathWorks, Inc.)
“the big brain has many legs”
“competitive wikipedia” - imagine if the system could award points if your edit was an improvement and your picture then appeared on the page?
would wikipedia be better for having a system like this?
his contests run like this:
- entries are automatically scored, ranked, and displayed immediately
- code, author, and score are visible at all times
- anyone can modify anyone else’s code and resubmit it as their own

means you have to put your code into the public domain to get rewarded
are they encouraging collaboration or theft?
will this make you so angry that you won’t play anymore?
having been tweaked, some people delight in tweaking right back
“tweaking is the nickel slots of their contest” - teaches people to open up (their wallets, in the case of the slots)

participation
showed a graph of improving game play scores which resulted in a final entry that was code no one could have written on their own

phase transitions (Jenny: can actually illustrate reflection?)
lots of interesting graphs and an animation of the tweaks
innovation uptake - can see it happen in convultion-based algorithm
social signaling - it’s just code, but thousands of entires have to be named; became fun exchange of communication
code genomics
personal glory or collaboration? the code is the one interested in collaboration
the coder wants to block code propagation while the code wants to propagate - use this to shape the contest design
for the coder, make participation easy, reward vanity, many cheap prizes, and darkness period
for the code, encourage copying, highlight changes, punish complexity, anti-obfuscation tools

think of the code as genomic in a biological sense
liberating to think of the code as an entity with its own agenda
well-written code is manipulating you to make more code like it
“a chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg” –> “a hacker is only a code’s way of making more code”

fitness function is how fast did it run, but performance, too; blending them at a cost function
how would you evaluate future recyclability

A Creative Community for Young Programmers and Game Designers: Boku - Matt Maclaurin
he tried to figure out what computers are for
- creating new worlds
- inventing new languages
- udnerstanding cognition
- evoking wonder
more

software as an expressive medium
code as a medium
- the only truly modern medium

simulation is the fundamental basis of cognition
it’s a good description of how we think; we don’t think like a text engine
playing magical stuff makes you want to make magical stuff
then they get exposed to code - ugh

some history about programming environments (logo, etc.)

Boku’s approach
- start with a working simulation
- real-world objects and verbs
- throw out everything (loops, variables, most control structures)
- no typing (uses an XBox controller instead)
- make the exerpience fluid and immediate

could debate whether or not this is really programming

start off in a blank world where nothing is going on until you participate

demoed Boku - very cool, don’t ever see the code

adding actions adds the narrative; just having one bot eat an apple while the other one tries to kick made it into a contest without even adding any contest code
lets you easily create barriers and boundaries (like mountains)

early testing:
- 11 is a great age for this
- some as young as 7 can program
- community is critical (inspiration, learning)
- kids really dig shooting
- world editing

questions?
- is programming a core literacy?
- is computation a core literacy, and is programming the only manifestation of it?
- do we need conflict?
- is it okay for kids to act out violent fantasies?
- what “verbs” should boku have?
- what is the intersection between storytelling and game design?
- how to define authorship?

Alternate Realities - Susan Bonds
“42 Entertainment creates trans-media narratives for highly participatory experiences through a variety of both online and offline mechanisms”

distributed narrative
i love bees
one of the biggest rewards for this type of entertainment is just playing it
world as platform
- everything can be used to tell a piece of the story, which takes the pressure off any one piece to carry the whole tale

levels of audience (inverse triangle)
- casual, level 1 (more and more people entering here); modest level of interaction, mostly online participation, broadest audience reach
- active, level 2 (significant level of interaction, online and some offline)
- enthusiast, level 3 (very high level of interaction, participation across media into the real world, “tip of the wedge” super-engaged audience that can create entertainment for the other two levels)

has found that the community will form on its own
- the power of one can fuel the power of the many
- “hive mind” - people will collaborate based on shared goals and interests

can take traditional marketing materials and doing something different with it
“hide in plain sight”

used “Year Zero” example from Nine Inch Nails (http://iamtryingtobelieve.com/)
even giving out buttons at listening parties became clues

how can you make people think? how can it used for social experience?
an important part of the ARG was mpowering players to make the themes of themusic their own. this was facilitated through two sites - Art is Resistance and Open Source Resistance, the latter of which accepts user generated art and has even published in magazines and online.

www.ninwiki.com
opensourceresistance.com
www.artisresistance.com

when a story starts coming at you through the channels of your “real” life you start to see your life through the lens of that story
at the end, you saw a file of the players with “case numbers” as accomplices

all of their communities are organic and set up by the communities themselves

audience question: can you use these systems to engender positive/normative behavior?
“it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you speak up”
people are looking for a roadmap to activism

Life: If you’re bored, you’re doing it wrong - Elan Lee
we should all be carrying buckets with us everywhere we go
they are the key to entertainment because you can just walk in anywhere with one (even doors with “unauthorized persons” signs on them)
described the games “toast” and “sandbags” (floodboarding)
can find fun all around us if you can extract entertainment from the world around you
clothing with hidden messages in the stitching, invisible inks, etc.; tell stories through clothing
everyone should answer payphones all the time - it’s an invitation into a whole new world
- it could be an invitation to become a superhero
“i love bees”
think up a question and call a customer service line (call Butterball’s line and ask them if god exists)
there’s always something to do out there
(pecha kucha” format with progress bar)

Supporting Social Deviance - Cliff Lempe
anytime you violate norms of a community
crime, sex, obscentiy, violence, etc.
most of the interesting online communities are privately owned (by Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.)
open questions:
- why do we have to all get along?
- does misbehavior have its place in online communities?
- how can users voice their dissent with owners of online communities?
- why types of deviance shouldn’t we support?

what role does social deviance play in bringing down a community?
need to allow a certain amount of deviance to test boundaries

Beth Kolko - adapting to cell phones
internet in many places of the world takes happens in public places
“being online” = chatting
“being on the internet” = downloading data
communication versus information
“collective technologies”
cell phones are not collective throughout the entire world
mobile usage outnumbers computer usage 2:1
people don’t trust local entities for access
social networking via SMS is the way elsewhere in the world
SMS makes more sense than the internet

Online Video Gets Social - Mary Madden
57% of online adults watch or download online video
of those who have broadband at home, 66% watch or download online video
only 8% of adults have uploaded a video
multi-channel, annotated communication with web 2.0
at what point do we disconnect and not interact because of information overload?

SearchParty: A Design Concept for Social Search - Thomas Erickson
aim is to design visualizations that show the presence and activities of people in online systems
imagine if you could conduct a search in public

(Jenny: this would be an interesting way to visualize virtual reference transactions)

progressive engagement:
- glimpses of activity (entice)
- watching (imitate)
- kibitzing (share)
- acting (commit)

making people and their activities visible to one another is a powerful way of supporting coordination and collaboration in online contexts

Jerry Michalski - presence
a lazyweb set of ideas
why is it so hard for me to share my screen?
why does it still take me 20 minutes of setup for an enhanced conference call?
why isn’t there a simple comparison tool widget?
why can’t I highlight, annotate, comment on email in my email program?
why are the tools so awful when you try to bring people together into a group?
the tools are still in the “Model T” phase

Clay Shirky
diffusion changes the technology, not just adoption
flash mobs as a form of political protest, announced in public, that can’t be traced to specific people
let’s all walk around “october square” smiling - the secret police have to then decide if this is a political act
showed Twitter feed of someone arrested in Egypt
you don’t just drop this stuff in and get revolution, but something is going on here
makes him hopeful, moreso than the lolcats
anything that lowers transactions costs can be valuable, whether or not the older generation understands it
“the more people use it for their cats, the easier it is to use politically” - Clay quoting someone else
if you really want something to be adopted, especially in repressive regimes with some internet access, make sure it has utility to the entire population
showed Tunisian prison map as an underappreciated tool
the change in common knowlege to public knowledge

(shouldn’t this be *wireless* teens??)

Linda Stone:

youth patterns show us where things are going
anil dash said email isn’t used by the 20-year olds at Six Apart (they use Basecamp)

right now we’re doing what the computer does well and we haven’t figured out what to make the computer do to enhance our lives, which we will crave the more noise we have in our lives

“continuous partial attention for continuous partial friendship” (which Liz and Lili took issue with - it’s not partial friendship to them!)

an interest in presence says I want grounding on where I am

Anastasia Goodstein - http://ypulse.com/

wrote a book for parents about what teens are doing
new generation gap
some of the questions she gets asked by parents
- “will they lose their social skills?”
- “will they take this stuff down, can it go away?”
- “how can recruiters and others see my kid’s profile if it’s private?”

when is it okay to take someone’s picture and put it online?
the other big challenge is setting limits when kids have

powerful tendencies to stay connected 24/7
teens will migrate (they left Xanga when adults found it)
growth in virtual worlds
blurring of wall between marketing and advertising
need for marketing literacy

widget explosion - teens have always decorated their rooms, lockers, shoes, etc.; now having a virtual space means tricking it out

glittertext

social media @ school
mtv did a study where they took away the internet for a week and then asked them what they missed most about it; answer was they couldn’t do their homework
most schools are very reactive right now

generational differences at work
more structured growing up, so need structure in work
need more feedback and input
not doing summer jobs but doing service that will help them get into college
how can we help young people manage their online reputations and learn appropriate technology use?
how can we teach information literacy, credible sources, and marketing literacy?
how can we get parents and teachers caught up?
how can we deliver contextual resources to teens “in trouble” online

Stefana Broadbent

looking for opportunities for convergence
visited 250 households each year in Switzerland
75% of Swiss teens are apprentices; at the age of 16, there is a strong selection process that decides which kids go on to finish higher education; the rest go into apprenticeships 4 days a week and school 1 day a week

stefana’s group collects timelines of days; showed an example of kids with the same timelines (schedules) as their father
these kids are using all of the “youth” channels
the group also collects the kids communication diaries (on paper) where they jot down every interaction for professional activities

adults have found special uses for each channel
- fix phone: the Collective Channel
- Mobile voice: the Micro Coordination Channel
- SMS: the Intimate Channel
- Email: the Administrative Channel
- IM: the Continuous Channel
- Social Networking Sites: the Channel for Weak Ties

teenagers have the same pattern with the exception of SMS and IM, which are flipped: SMS is the Micro Coordination Channel and IM is the Intimate Channel
- some shift between written channels - from SMS and email to

IM
- slightly less usage of mobile phone channels teens like to use
- IM is their main communication channel, including on mobile

devices
- mobile phone is preferred for last minute coordination and

longer conversations

channels teens use but don’t like
- email is practically nonexistent (used for contacts with school administration and older people), is perceived as asynchronous and therefore not interesting for maintaining daily contacts
compared to other countries, Swiss teenagers are more multimodal; they are just as multimodal as 25-35 year olds

use of social networking sites is limited to supporting “usgang” (means “going out”)
- heavily connected to partying and going out - as a souvenir, as a way of finding people or mild flirting
- a space where you can share pictures
- not a space where you communicate with friends

communication with friends is still on IM and the mobile phone
their real buddy list is their IM buddy list

is teens’ social online behavior affected bybeing in an adult work environment?
do you need to share a lot of daily activities such as going to school together to really hang out with them online in the “third space?”
are online spaces a continuation of school environments?
how much daily contact do you need to feed your online presence?
associations, clubs, etc. are the environments where teenagers that work, share common activities
importance of shared context
“The Way We Really Are” book by a sociologist
teens in Switzerland are getting an adult, professional role

long before teens in the U.S.

Sean Kelly - Zoodaloo

small company with staff spread out
using Basecamp’s chat channel every day, all day
no corporate storage - it’s all on basecamp

most folks who have a webkinz got it from a female and they use it to stay in touch with kids
casual gaming and storytelling
animal avatars are the most popular right now
secret codes and the ability to find out information you can

use socially (like how to skip when walking)
kids created a code of numbers in club penguin that only they

knew, so cp turned off the ability to type in numbers
sites popped up with Club Penguin Cheat Codes
kids want to believe that everything in the world is interactive

Mike D’Abramo - youthography (marketing company)

did 200 focus groups, 120 studies, on 120,000 youth

youth is a different attitude than it used to be - it’s a way to experience your life, not a number
the 4 x 5 factor = the 10-29 group divides into four equal five-year cohorts (10-14, 15-19, 20-24, 25-29)

self-reliance
21% of youth live in a household with no borthers or sister (so online with friends)
families aren’t traditional anymore, over 11% of Americans were born elsewhere
if you don’t understand immigrants, you’re missing out on 1 in 10 people (1 in 5 in Canada)
my downtime at home
even when kids go to college, they may not be leaving home
at a younger age, you’re taking a certain number of adult responsibilities, but at an older age you’re staying home longer, postponing marriage, etc.
“rolelessness” - if you can stay at home until you’re 29, you do because it’s cheaper, etc.
- “prolonged pre-adulthood”
you start becoming an adult very young, but you don’t really do

it until a much later age
there are many things young people do, but they do them differently at different ages
younger people wanted to be like older people - now it’s going both ways

fewer siblings at home = greater reliance on friends
single parent households = greater self-reliance
balanced demogrpahics = lifestyle sharing
immigration = clour blindness and diversity
six-pocket syndrome = more as-needed cash
==> it’s not only the culture changing, it’s the people

trends:
- integration culture: used to be in tribes, a way of creating identity at school; now, though, young people aren’t being categorized so easily now; no longer so easy to define
kids grew up in a world where this wasn’t normal
- hedonormalization: things that are self-indulgent and make us feel good are part of our experience
now have pharmaculture, talk about sex frankly, exploding influences, information, standards have created a larger

culture of general permissivness, gambling on TV
- rehumanization: not a backlash against technology, but idea that we want to get back to something more authentic
the ipod is very isolating, but we make it social (playlist playoffs); taking an intimate item and turning it into a social experience
the return and rise of rock n’roll over the last few years, comfort food, natural food

on the horizon:
- greater concern for public health (especially kids’ health)
- organizations with multigenerational workplaces need to have all staff get along
- privacy issues grow, especially with regards to data mining

social networks and loyalty cards
- business models: distributed models for mass ownership of businesses at a low cost threshold

we need to think about the people and the culture as much as you think about the product or service
- how do we reach new immigrant populations with technology?
- how do the negative effects of these trends get blamed on the technology itself and what can we do to mitigate this?

Foe Romeo - Children’s Digital Lives: Risk Scenarios 2014

social play creating codes that would be adapted when banned
“dictionary dancing” (Club Penguin)

“Watching You, Watching Me” scenario from the BBC
low fear, centralised, digital assistance with life
“Paying to Play on the Multinet” - high fear, decentralised

digital life, free market delivers branded entertainment
“Left to Their Own Devices” - high fear, decentralised digital

assistance with life, gadget-enabled sociability and play

reduced scope for play (which means exploration)
increasingly institutionalized time
people overestimate risks in situations they can’t control and they underestimate them in situations where they do have control
overestimate on issues discussed in the news, too
there aren’t many designated play places in the world
fewer children cycle to school anymore - they get driven to school
nowhere to let mind roam freely
kids don’t feel welcome in places like shops

showed latter two scenarios
advertising may be the greatest risk to kids in the “paying to play” scenario; specter of an ad-based youth mobile network in the UK; Disney tracking phones; banning of free ads there

children’s mobility and monitoring
mobile phones are the new bicycles, as they are giving children more freedom and range, personal and portable, increasing in interactivity
let parents monitor from a distance

kids expect things like fingerprinting in school and believe they have nothing to hide but go “nuclear” when you talk about parents monitoring their phones
ongoing dialogue between parents and kids
no need for constant updates anymore; parents and kids negotiate the number of updates

most parents aren’t aware of internet-capabilities on the phone

discussion from questions

in Switzerland, finding that 80% of the calls are to 4 people

most people hold their breath when they download email
continuous partial attention and not breathing as a phenomenon means your personal CO2 level goes up
people over-breathe when on the cell phone
food and sleep issues, too (some don’t eat until they get home at 3:30; staying up late and not sleeping

http://www.whateverlifemagazine.com/

Liz Lawley:
saw Twitter becoming a conversation like IM away messages that didn’t require a response, could

happen over a period of time
students building a typology of Twitter users
these kinds of communicating presence
Linda Stone sees these tools de-emphasizing your relationships
Liz sees them as strengthening ties
communicating day-to-day lif - the patterns, the nuances of it – is difficult to do across

distances

Panel on “interesting implementations of presence

Matt Biddulph - Dopplr (http://dopplr.com/)

Much more about potential presence than something like Twitter
“absence of notification” – you’re going where she lives but she won’t be there
all they do is take where you tell them you will be
the important thing about travel is memory – the side artifacts of your presence in a place
the idea of URLs as important resources
if you put a trip on Dopplr, there is no URL you can use outside of Dopplr for it, but that is

going to change
heuristics for who travels a lot to a certain place
exploring expertise through the social graph; helping people help each other
showing you someone who knows about where you’re going instead of saying “we’ve started a forum

about your trip and invited this person to join it”
looking at the fuzzy edges
Jyfi Engestrom - http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2007/08/what-makes-a-go.html
what would happen if you fuzzed up the edges of your trip
can optimize travel and figure out which is the best day to go if you know who will be there when

(earlier than you, later than you, during your trip – if you go a few days early, you’ll see these

people)
geographical fuzziness (how far you can travel from where you will be) = “coincidences”
how do we create natural-feeling interfaces to make these things fuzzy?
The documentation and real artifacts that you put out there from your trip
can easily hit the Flickr photos or Twits for a trip
can you take this data set and compare it against another one without having to do the geotagging

(which most people don’t get around to)
working on a Facebook app that puts your Dopplr updates into your minified
What has changed in the world of the people who matter to you? – not just their status
how can social software avoid lying to your friends about your presence?

Tom Coates – Yahoo
“Geopresence & Fire Eagle” – It’s where you’re at
Communicating your state to other people
90% of Twitter’s traffic comes from APIs
connected data sources – “an aggregated web of connected data sources and services”
data that actively looks for opportunities to recombine itself
letting these data sources “see” you and potentially hook into you
not so much as me making myself visible, but also making myself comprehensible to software as well
becomes a foundation to build on, rather than a goal between two people
Fire eagle tries to express this - http://fireeagle.research.yahoo.com/
what if the web just updated your location ambiently in the background?
how you could use fire eagle to manifest your presence:
1 – twitter maps
2 – phone app that would communicate ambient location of friends so you could look for a group
Geotragging all user content
app on mobile phone would SMS your location to tell you useful things around you
“proximizer” – boss status/presence (how far away she is)
desktop widgets showing pictures of people and their status/location
ambient sense of where your family is
Unexpected uses of this information and what could go wrong
1 – revealing too much information and not knowing you’re doing it
2 –how to trust whom
3 - specific circumstances when you may want to hide
Slide of how you could authorize Flickr to use your fire eagle data and how much they could have

access to
App would check in periodically to make sure you still want to share information at the level

you’re at
Could specify a neighborhood instead of a specific location (like your home)

Gilad Lotan – Presence: intimacy and immediacy in mediated spaces (http://giladlotan.com/)
Love, power, tribute, culture, architecture, religion
Connection and how it informs in mediated spaces:
- tangible: importance of the tangible online and how we can enhance it
- intimacy: the ability and choice to be close, loving, and vulnerable (eg, imPulse – heartbeat

sharing devices, something you don’t share with anyone other than your loved ones or doctor)
- immediacy: having a meaningful conversation, the more synchronous it is, the more attention it

requires; asynchronous lets you connect with many friends at once but is superficial; wanted

deeper meaning in deeper relationships, less on the screen, more complete experience so went to

Jerusalem; intimate connection to the Wall in Jerusalem at Kotel (webcams) but people rarely do

that
- culture & context: we’re all used to cultural norms all around us; when you take a certain norm

or an object and place it outside of its cultural context, you get a much stronger sense of it;

took real missiles that fell in the Gaza Strip and re-enacted scenes on open streets (art exhibit)
Ubi.ach – takes email away from the screen; a ubiquitous doll (pronounced u-beeyatch, heh) that

uses email filters
Tibetan prayer wheels – took the concept and let them react to world news – as you turned these

“news wheels,” images from current news would randomly appear

danah boyd
publics not just as civic spaces but where collections of people come together, often with people

you don’t normally interact with
we validate who we are and make sense of the world around us, differentiate ourselves, in the

presence of others
“always on intimate communities” – spaces created via mobile phones
(davidtr on irc: “attention cannot be forced, but surely distractions can be minimized”
You have a way to express yourself through what your friends say about you, meant to be witnessed

by others (eg, you know others will look at the wall on facebook- showcases your relationships)
Public displays of teenage dating – you talk about having sex long before having it; progressions
who is the intended audience of these performances? Peer group
teens create these images to create presence online and be together when they can’t be
constant construction of profiles as presence
animated visual cues, two pictures merged together, written for the display to people around them
when a breakup occurs, you delete somebody (the only time you do this)
presence and investment disappears when you delete them – comments disappear (except on Facebook)
When we conceptualize presence, it’s people sharing place and time
uncoupling location but keeping time together; can be doing the same thing in different places at

the same time
asynchronously being together
how do we think about technologies that inspire these things
Presence as etching into artifacts
actually see time as part of it
Why does presence matter to people? What is necessary for presence? Shared space, shared time?
What role does persistence or ephemerality play in the construction of presence? Synchronicity,

asynchronicity, semi-synchronicity?
Is time bending synchronicity?
How are people creating presence out of tools that aren’t made for that?

Social Genius game to introduce people – http://txtst.com/sg/ (note to self: must try this in the context of ALA!)
for MSR interns originally
works better for small groups who come together for a short time

“social network fatigue” and moving to meaningful and protected networks
“connections for a purpose”
conveying “emotional fidelity” and “trust”
bridging together populations that never had reason to bridge before
students designing their own curriculum and learning environments
embedding technology in physical objects
designing systems that allow strangers to interact
intentionally finding people to do what you need to do – problem of culture and science and sharing that also includes the scientists and the farm in the field
strange behavior seen on ManyEyes
public and private spaces
differences between how people share information and how genomes share information
collaborative social visualization of data
trouble explaining to the people back home what we’re talking about here and at my job
social deviation – how bring out the social freaks online
how we could make astronomical observations social objects that can be more easily shared on the web
writing a book about ethnography of Linden Labs – how organizations are generating legitimate decision-making when they are denying traditional hierarchy
building horizontally and more shallowly to stay connected with friends
our own lack of ambition constrains what we can be – Anil Dash
how to get your parents and friends to join in these networks easily and understand them
how much you can take algorithms and figure out what’s going on in an explicit way but also through implicit behaviors – video search is very different, can inject human-powered into the automatic
user gaming as a social form of media – how kids are adopting gaming practices into their online world in general
status in social media
do things in real life and tell stories about them – game became a storytelling engine
embedding games and stories in clothing we wear; alternative reality games – stageless entertainment
shufflebrain game design studio – intersection of game and social design; next generation brain games that are much more engaging
human viruses aren’t so different from bacterial viruses
computer-mediated collective action
gps games – invisible creatures on the street; DS games that change based on where you are when playing it
people who share space should share experiences – crappy trivia game on the seatback on a plane that becomes compelling when you’re trapped on a plane – instant neighbors, how you consider the people around you and have a conversation with them without transgressing certain boundaries
one of the places a lot of people share is TV; where do we get people to play these games – it turns out 10 million people are still watching TV
wants to know why the tools still suck – the gyrations I have to go through to be a Gladwellian connector are ridiculous (typing in contact information, using these networks for anything useful, etc.)
should be able to just hit a button “share this screen” with this specific person
human adaptability and our penchant to put up with stuff
imaginary worlds, taking your imagination and putting it somewhere else for someone to play with
how we learn from one another – Dewey and Plato  J
“our books rely heavily on games and stories” – O’Reilly (?)
geoweb – there was no data to share except third-party data; now, though, there is an ecosystem to publish your own data via maps, google earth, etc.
I want to work on software I want to actually use
online profiles and how customization fits into that