Microsoft’s PDC developer megaconference, certainly the largest developer conference for software engineers and architects I’ve ever seen, is being held this October in LA. This year will feature a conference within in a conference, an informal unsession.

An unsession, like an unconference, is planned by participants rather than an organizer and they’re popular with tech crowd. Having been involved in our local BarCamp, I can say that there are many benefits them– real thoughts/ideas/demos from genuine evangelists instead of thinly veiled infomercials, the opportunity to learn about something outside of your primary interests (you might be a java gal presented with your first opportunity to see ruby), and so on– and a group of people from Microsoft get this and are trying in earnest to bring this energy to the show.

Unfortunately they tried something similar at MIX08 that I completely missed (missed meaning overlooked– didn’t see it, didn’t notice it). Hopefully this unsession wont get lost in the sea of over 160 sponsored sessions scheduled.

Congrats to the Chitika peeps for being selected as one of the most innovative technology companies based in North America by Red Herring. Past winners of the award have include Google, Yahoo!, and YouTube. I’ve had the great fortune of witnessing Alden and Venkat work their mojo first hand since its inception. Nice job guys.

I know a few people that would do this if they could get away with it (*cough* Ted):

Paper from University of Chicago discusses why emails are often misunderstood:

“People tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one’s own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else.”

University of Chicago [PDF]

Thank you Ian for the kind words. I will say again, as I said already, that I was really impressed with the job you did organizing OpenFormat at SXSW. Rock on, Ian.

Ian Muir » Good People Day

An interesting look at life in the year 2008 circa 1968. My favorite part:

The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn’t totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder’s spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments—on the average, about two hours of home study a day

What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?

Thanks to Digg the most popular article on Newsweek.com is currently an opinion piece circa 1995 on this thing called “the internet.” See Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway:

“We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

Here are the slides from my sxsw presentation (slides: social networking: the intranet’s killer app). They’re pretty terse by design mostly consisting of an image or a sentence or two per slide. So why is social networking the killer app for an intranet? Nutshell in one sentence, it provides a way for individuals to discover information leveraging their social connections in a way that is natural, scalable, and integrated into their day-to-day, giving people tools they can’t work without.

I spent 20 minutes on the slides, 20 minutes in a demo showing how we use this technology on our intranet at work, and the remainder of time having an open q&a primarily on our real-world usage. The questions were great, when i get a second i’ll update this post with them. Thanks to everyone who made it.

First up, MIX08 (March 05 – 07 in Las Vegas NV). I was excited to see a three-day user experience track added to the schedule. Most likely where I’ll spend my time:

Through unique content delivered by user experience thought-leaders, MIX UX broadens the content choices for designers and creative professionals to include broad and relevant UX topics that are not specifically related to Microsoft @ visitmix

Then off to speak at SXSW08 Interactive (March 07 – 11 in Austin TX) on social networking on an intranet and its usefulness within a business community, March 9, 2008 in Austin TX. No slides yet, I’ll post them when they’re available. Session starts Sunday @ 5:00 PM.

If you’ve been reading feeds for a while, chances are you’ve experienced feed overload. It happens to the best of us. Perhaps we take a break for a day or two, and when we come back to our aggregator we find hundreds of unread items waiting for us. @ Nick Bradbury: Feed Overload? Hit the Panic Button!

I love the concept behind FeedDemon’s panic button feature. It sweeps through old posts marking them read, leaving in its wake a more manageable pile to read through. The concept here being that in general, with feeds, you don’t have to read everything. But a feature request for Nick and Greg: I wish there were an option to configure how it behaves– I want to be able to define which folders are included / excluded from the sweep. True, in most cases you don’t have to read everything, but in certain important circumstances, we really do care to read absolutely every blog post / news item on a specific topic. Update: someone else matking this feature request. Curious if there are any plans to add this in a point release?