Topic: Media
Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Architect of Bing Maps, discusses its structure and "information ecology," of content, users, and apps. By extracting the semantic content of 2D images and mapping them in 3D, Bing Maps continually improves a rich infrastructure of surface data about the world on which apps and services can ride. When it began allowing users to bind sets of images, Bing Maps found myriad partners to infill data, extrapolated to 3D, about tourist sites around the world.
Lili Cheng and her team at Microsoft's Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Lab take the challenge of making social networking more engaging while increasing productivity. Cheng, in this recording from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (May, 2010), demonstrates the various social networking tools developed at the Fuse Lab designed to create a worthwhile social experience.
Journalists tell stories. In this Where 2.0 presentation, Matthew Ericson talks about how the New York Time's team of designers, cartographers, and developers worked as journalists to create interactive maps and charts that told stories about the 2008 presidential election.
Do you set up feeds and alerts, and jigger social sites as headline aggregators? How do you get news on your favorite topics and find out about things you didn't know you wanted to know? And how do you stay informed without showing your hand? Mark Drummond, CEO of Wowd, offers 'a discovery tool for the real-time web.' It dynamically ranks listings. Alert information stays on your machine, while its indexing happens in the cloud, promising the freshest, most relevant results.
How can social tools provide a vibrant and relevant experience to the people who use them? Amy Jo Kim explains how to create a richer experience through open tools for syndication, support of independent software developers, and especially game mechanics, which she categorizes as collecting, points, feedback, exchanges, and customization. Learn how YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and others use these elements of game mechanics to engage people more deeply.
The future is at hand in this lecture by Mark Callaghan, the leader of Facebook's MySQL engineering team. He discusses MySQL, the host company of the conference, and considers future trends, forks, and ideas.
John Podesta and James Fallows discuss Gov 2.0 communication challenges for presidential candidates and administrations, and how messaging strategies and tactics affect international perceptions of America.
According to Tim O'Reilly, of O'Reilly Media, the Internet is full of information and is capable of using that information to make connections and trends. The real question, as Tim points out, is whether this information will be open sourced, or owned by companies such as Google and Microsoft.
Dr. Moira Gunn visits with author, George Prochnik, to talk about his new book, In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, where he examines why we began to be so loud as a society, and what it is that gets lost when we can no longer find quiet.
Listen to enough Baroque harpsichord music, and you'll decide you've heard enough! So says Elaine Wherry, and she applies that lesson to her web designs. Baroque composers used ornament and layering to overcome simple melodies and limited instruments like the harpsichord, but the effect can be grating. As musical technology progressed, composers created more refined works. Elaine draws a parallel with web design and suggests the history of classical music can be our guide toward more subtle designs.
