Fan films: creating, not just consuming, popular culture

I finally read an essay that Daniel e-mailed me over a year ago. Professor Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, has written about fan fiction as a medium through which ordinary people change their relationship to popular culture from being passive consumers to active participants in its creation. He uses fan films of Star Wars as the primary case study. The essay is long (it’s literally a book chapter) but a good read.

Ajax libraries galore

Lately there's been a bumper crop of JavaScript libraries for creating Ajax applications. At first, it was largely a grassroots effort, and to this day some of the most popular libraries like Prototype, script.aculo.us, Behaviour, Dojo, and MochiKit are maintained mostly by one person.

But now the big boys are joining the party. Yahoo has a modular user interface library that assumes you're doing most of your client-side development in HTML and JavaScript and just need help smoothing out the warts in those languages. Adobe has an HTML-centric framework called Spry. Taking a vastly different approach, the Google Web Toolkit lets you write Ajax applications in Java, and then compile them into HTML and JavaScript. And Microsoft has a library code-named Atlas, which includes both a server-side ASP.NET library that doesn't require JavaScript and a client-side JavaScript library.

The best part: all are available for free, and all but Atlas is open source. (Atlas will have a "reusable modification license," whatever that means, when the final version is released.)

Montreal

Last month I was in Montreal for the CHI conference. I came away impressed by the city; it really is a wonderful blend of Europe and North America. (The signs are all in French, but everyone speaks English!) The original city center still has blocks and blocks of historic buildings intact, while downtown and surrounding neighborhoods have an urban energy to them. There’s also an extensive “Underground City,” which came in handy during the first few rainy days.

I visited a few great museums and historic buildings, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Montreal Botanical Garden, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Mary Queen of the World Cathedral, which is a ¼-scale model of the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica.

(I’ll put up photos once I figure out how to export my metadata from Adobe Photoshop Elements to Flickr.)

(I never did figure out how to export metadata from Photoshop Elements to Flickr… Updated June 27, 2006)

The Homebrew Mobile Phone Club

There would be more innovation in mobile phones and services if they were as open as personal computers and the Internet are today. A grassroots movement of Silicon Valley tinkerers are pushing such an agenda, the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club, whose name pays homage to the famous Homebrew Computer Club (where the Apple I was first introduced). I'm sure the wireless carriers will fight this tooth and nail to protect their "walled gardens," just like AOL and Prodigy did back in the day, and I hope the results will be similar.

PhD Comics creator at Stanford

Jorge Cham did speak at Stanford after all, which was good for me since it made my drive a lot shorter (although I was prepared to drive up to Berkeley…). And his talk was one of the funniest I’ve ever been to. It was also packed; the Clark Center Auditorium was filled with guffawing grad students (along with a couple of brave professors and undergrads). Whenever he does his next speaking tour, I highly recommend it, especially for all you grad students and ex-grad students (however you became “ex”). [photos]

HCI blogs

I read a lot of news online, geek and otherwise, but lately I've been trying to read more about human-computer interaction online. There are certainly a lot of blogs and web sites on society and technology in general, but I'm thinking more about resources that focus on HCI and usability. Here's what I've found so far, in no particular order. I welcome more suggestions:

By the way, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to mix HCI entries with everything else, like entries about food, in one blog, but it seems like having two blogs wouldn't really solve the problem.

User interface design patterns by SAP

Also last month, I went to a San Francisco Bay Area ACM meeting on component-based user interface design, which turned out to be a talk on UI design patterns. Aha! It turns out that SAP has developed an extensive collection of design patterns for their domain of business applications, and they have an extensive web site for designers. The main points I got from the talk:

  • SAP has 3 types of patterns
    • patterns for frequently discovered user requirements
    • patterns for composing UIs from components
    • patterns for executable UI components
  • The only way to drive adoption of patterns is to build them into the tools that designers and developers use
  • SAP validates their patterns through user testing
  • Patterns do "freeze" UI innovation overall, but the patterns themselves will evolve over time
  • There is always a tension between those who use the patterns and those who deviate from the patterns to innovate on the UI

BayCHI April meeting on search

Time to plow through my backlog of stuff to post. Last month I went to the BayCHI meeting on Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information, which was about social search and recommender systems. I got a few things out of that meeting.

How do you recommend to someone that they'll like obscure song B if they like popular song A? How does the connection between those two songs get made in the first place? The speakers from Netflix, Live365, and Pandora agreed that you need experts to make that connection, since the public at large doesn't know enough to make that connection on its own.

Also, if a person likes a popular song, you can't recommend a completely obscure song that appears unrelated even if it is. The user must be gently led down the long tail.

Finally, I started using Pandora for listening to music. I gave it one song, "Venus de Milo" by Miles Davis, and it set up a station that played that song and about 100 other songs that are similar. An instant instrumental jazz station, perfect for listening to at work.

PhD Comics creator speaking at Berkeley

I'll take a day off if I have to: Jorge Cham, the creator of the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper, is speaking at UC Berkeley on May 4. (For a while, he was also tentatively scheduled to speak at Stanford the next day, but that just disappeared from his web site.) It's the Dilbert of graduate school. If you've never been a grad student, it may not be that funny. But if you have, it is absolutely hilarious. Go on, procrastinate! You can't resist…