Jeff Winkworth’s IMM Blog

This took a little longer to post (write) than I originally expected, but nontheless it is here!

Lee Brimelow’s ByteArrays for Beginners began the morning, and was one of the highlights of the day for me. I had been looking forward to this presentation; during some of my classes at Seneca I was exposed to basic bit-shifting concepts but never really understood what the power of them were, beyond advanced manipulations on video cards and such. In addition to walking us through the concepts and techniques, he illustrated many examples of things created in Flash using byte arrays. One such thing was WiiFlash, something I was planning on looking into before I went to FITC. I have since began quickly experimenting with it, and hope to show off some things I come up with.

I then wandered the floor for an hour, stopping in at every panel to see what was going on. I was initially interested in seeing Brian Lesser’s talk on RTMFP, but I got in late and had to sit at the back where I could not see any of the slides very well. I ended up in R. Blank’s AS2-AS3 Migration session, which had a larger audience than I anticipated – I guess I had figured that more people had made the jump to AS3 already. I’m glad I stopped in, as I picked up a few things.

Ryan Wolman gave a great talk on the business of Web 2.0 (probably one of my favourites of the show), and discussed things such as taking a step back when someone says “we should make a widget” or “we should use Twitter” and figure out what they are trying to do and why. In addition, Ryan talked about the concept of “going viral” and how when you plan to do it, it typically doesn’t work- but to be sure you have a plan to follow it up with in case you are successful.

Another aspect was knowing the audience you wish to reach, and knowing that there is a difference between demographics and behaviors. “Plan, then pick the right channels.” Ryan broke it down to 6 groups:
Creators vs Critics
Collectors vs Joiners
Spectators vs Inactives

Finally, he discussed risk assessment – figuring out all the possible things that could go wrong with a social media campaign, such as allowing people to post comments on your website, and taking into account that people may write negative things about your brand or product. This is something I got a lot out of, as it directly ties in to some things that I am currently working on.

Koen De Weggheleire gave a great lesson in Play with Pixels: Bitmap Manipulation in Flash (a pretty self-explanatory title). This is something that I’ve always wanted to spend more time learning, and Koen gave a great talk on the subject, discussing matrix transformations for color, shape, size, etc. It was a great introduction on the subject, and having only briefly touched some of this stuff in school during my game programming classes, it was a nice refresher on the subject.

Cool Japanese Flash Side B was presented by Timohiko Koyama (Saqoosha) and Yoshihiro Shindo (BeInteractive!). I had not attended Side A, but heard good things about it so I thought I would check it out. Saqoosha showed off some sites using FLAR toolkit, which while impressive, was nothing I hadn’t seen on YouTube weeks before. Shindo showed us a lot of different things he had been up to. Most interesting was Frocessing (an advanced Drawing library) and BetweenAS3 (a new Tween library).

At the end of the day, Jared Ficklin presented Seeing Sound, some of his exploits around audio visualization and sound manipulation. One high point was when Jared played a live Neil Diamond song (sounding like it was recorded during a club session with cheering and clapping), only to click a button and reveal that it was actually a studio track! The “crowed” was created dynamically based on the signal strength and sound information.

Another great part of his presentation was when he decided to give a rundown of Sound Wave mathematics in a nutshell. Realizing that not everyone in the crowd may be interested in such a thing, He placed a picture of Sienna Miller on one side of his slides, and Daniel Craig on the other, “so everyone has something to look at.” When he was finished explaining his mathematic concepts, he pointed out that no one had noticed that the pictures had actually swapped position halfway through, because “we’re all nerds!”

This being my first Flash In The Can, I didn’t know to expect. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and can’t wait till next year. I was quite inspired by pretty much everything I encountered at the show. There are many things that I have been exicted to take a look at and explore.

Tuesday’s Multimedia Pioneering class found Wayne MacPhail, a social media consultant, arrive to discuss Social Media and the DIY community. My first impression was “cool laptop case.” I didn’t get a full glimpse of it, so I’m not sure if there was bumper stickers, or just one image, but it looked neat. I also immediately noticed how this was an actual “presentation” and not just someone talking about their profession.

The first thing he did was define “web 2.0″ for he class as nothing more than a marketing term. Its about time an “industry insider” actually admitted this point. I’ve heard countless “professionals” toss this term around and lost of people I know who are less-computer savvy think of it as a new technology. Wayne defined web 2.0 as follows:

• encourage community & collabaration
• shared content creation
• focus on a single task
• clean, clear interface,
• supports tagging / bookmarking
• moves data and apps from desktop to web

The last point is one I found interesting; for years people were using desktop applications, and around 2002-2004 there began a shift to move desktop apps to web interfaces (currently I am writing this blog post in google docs, and once all my thoughts are organized I will paste the contents into wordpress). In the last year or so however there have been numerous attempts to bring web-based applications back to the desktop. In particular, Wayne seems very hyped about Adobe AIR, a technology that I like, but at the same time have noticed one or two pitfalls with (the lack of threading support that a language such as c++ or Java can utilize proved to be a major problem for my client project last semester). When I asked him his thoughts on this trend, he stated that “different tools can get used for different reasons” and that both technologies can co-exist. While I agree with this sentiment (I am currently not using my personal computer, hence the use of google docs and not Microsoft Word), I find this contradictory with Dan the Man’s “Mutlimedia Pioneering is more than just taking something that already exists and modifying it” stance.

Wayne then gave us a quick rundown of web 2.0 technologies such as tagging (he cited an example of how social norms dictate how things are labeled: Photos from the New Orleans Hurricane are easier to find when tagged as “Katrina”), del.icio.us, rss, and “embed code” (which allow less-savvy computer users easily update their websites with muliimedia. He also broke down some “social rules”:

you dont use a social network, you become a part of it

If you are a company trying to “cash in” on a social network, you will fail if you are not actually a part of the community and instead just try to force your product down people’s throats.

contribution is participation

This goes back to the first point; If you don’t contribute to the community, then you really aren’t a part of the community, regardless of you membership.

social media encourages engagement & evangelism

Wayne cited an example of a group of sheep eating grass; if one farmer is a douchebag then he can let his sheep destroy the entire field, whereas if everyone does their part for the “common good” then the community lives on.

social media:

• is local first
• is viral
• is granular
• is a conversation, not a broadcast
• is mobile
• wants to be free

He also discussed many 2.0 technologies. One that Wayne was very passionate about and kept returning to was Twitter, and kept telling us how wonderful and fascinating the twitter experience is for anyone not involved (for those not aware, the idea is that anyone can know what you are thinking at any time). Well, a quick search through Wayne’s archives found some gems from before and after he spoke to us. I would never want to get involved with something that ARCHIVES your thoughts for all to see. I also would think there would be a problem of professionalism when you rant and rave about this that and the other thing on a public forum. Additionally, didn’t we have a speaker last week in Andrew’s Project Management class who spent a good deal of time slamming the maturity level of most Twitter users?

Finaly, Wayne briefly touched upon some of the following technologies:

• iPhone SDK
• Flash on iPhone
• Android
• Sprout – WYSIWYG editor for flash
• ning, toolkit for “creating facebook”
• jaiku – “social life feed”
• Mogulus – a real time web based tv studio for creating live web tv shows.

He also touched upon the current Facebook Beacon controversy, something I have been following since about December. Its good to see that someone other than myself is concerned about Facebook’s pitfalls.

Wayne was a very engaging speaker, but I felt he left me very confused in the end. Wayne does not appear to even have his own website, and instead jumps on every social media bandwagon out there (a quick google only came up with his name attached to social media sites). While his argument is that in this day and age community is everything, personally and professionally I do not seen any forseeable future where an IT professional would not have a web site, if not even to just store links to all of his social media communities. We also mentioned “not becoming a slut to social media” which, to me, he very clearly is.

Additionally, I am curious when and if there will ever be any form of “social network convergence” where you can keep everything together in one place; right now I find alot of these social media places redundant, and full of redundant information. I assumed the world wide web and in particular “web 2.0″ was supposed to be about ease of use. Right now everyone puts all their photos on flickr, bookmarks on del.ico.us, video on youtube, and status on twitter, and then puts all that information AGAIN on their facebook or myspace anyways.

That’s one of the reasons I have never got much into the whole “social community” trend. I post on applicable message boards, I have a facebook account, and I rate films on IMDB. That’s about it. Perhaps its because I have always had a programming background; if I ever required somewhere to store my photos, I could just write a photo album script and place it on my server and tweak it to my own needs. If i needed a blog, I could install wordpress on to my own server, and not have to worry about Facebook or myspace slowing down to a crawl during peak hours.

Finally, here is a video of Wayne’s more or less talking about the same sorts of things to another group of people I am sure he talked about on Twitter afterwards.