Michael Tchao is the General Manager of Nike Techlab, a sports technology innovation group within Nike. Today at Picnic he presented Nike+ to show a few examples of how social and commercial networks interact. You may have heard of Nike+ in the past, they began the line in 2006 with the Nike+iPod campaign and now have expanded it to include Nike+Sportsband (”for those who don’t run with music”).

What can you do with Nike+? Basically Nike+ started to help the runner track distance, elapsed time and calories burnt during the run. A fancy pedometer you say? Well, Tchao explains how over the past two years Nike customers have been using this data to create a community of runners online. Nike hopes to use this product to “motivate” a new generation of runners (and of course to sell shoes).

Tchao shows a brief history of Nike’s efforts over the years that combine running with digital technology, admitting that his team really needed to “rethink running”. He has an example of the “classic advertisement” for how we traditionally think of running: one man running on the long open road. But Nike+ (much like everything 2.0) wants to make running more social: “to give runners the feeling that they are part of something bigger, a group”.

Nike+ runners take their running data from the shoe to the web where they can also set goals, track progress and create an online history or runs. I’m not a runner myself, but I have to admit that Tchao’s demonstration of the interactive site - shiny graphs and bubbly displays - does kind of make running look fun (if such a thing is possible). And this is exactly what Tchao is hoping for: people like me who need extra motivation to run.

The social aspect of this comes in through “online challenges”. Tchao gives the example of a group of friends setting up a race: “First to hit 100 miles gets get free lunch”. The biggest “online challenge” was a 26 city race that Nike held this past summer called The Nike+ Human Race 10k. On this one day, Nike+ runners around the world competed in the same 10k race by comparing data from each runner’s Nike+ shoes.

Tchao’s presentation felt like a long Nike advertisement, and he really didn’t give the Picnic audience much more than what is already on the Nike+ site (but, then that is what I’ve come to expect from most speakers here at Picnic). What is interesting about “connecting shoes” is that it brings us one step further into augmented space. Networking is clearly moving beyond our laptops and mobile phones, striking “intellegence” into something as rudemenetry as a running shoe. Rafi Haladijian, who spoke directly after Tchao, has the motto “First connect rabbits, then connect everything else” (refering to his adventure in networking through toy rabbits). Haladijian spoke about how we can look forward to connecting the other 700,000 material objects in our lives - from keys to a loaf of bread. I see Tchao’s Nike+ team as an innovator for 1 of the other 700,000+ products that are yet to be connected. If Nike+ running shoes are a financial success, then it might not be long before Nike Techlabs started “rethinking” other athletic products: digital tennis rackets? or maybe a high-tech swim suit?

The developers at Mozilla Labs believe that the problem of the web in 2008 is that it is “disconnected: information and services are far apart”. Basically: data is restricted by the web pages on which it lives. On the web, we are accustomed to linking from site to site, but what if we could link data to other data on the web?

Web mashups pioneered this concept of combining data from multiple web services into a single, more powerful tool. The most famous example: combining locative data with the Google Maps API. With this combination we can visualize Craigslist apartment listings, crime statistics, or our favorite jogging routes etc… This is all very exciting! But, still doesn’t solve Mozilla’s disjointed web scenario because now the data is caged on someone else’s web site. Mozilla’s Ubiquity attempts to quell this problem by giving the user access to data from a growing number of APIs, right within the firefox browser, but without having to jump to other sites.

With Ubiquity you can create your own user-generated mashups. It’s a bit difficult to describe how Ubiquity works, you really need to watch the video or play around with it. I think Scoble did a fairly good job with his explanation, “It’s a box that lets you ask different questions and get answers. It’s sort of like search. But far more powerful.”

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

This problem of disconnected data has been around for some time. Vannevar Bush in 1945 recognized that the human intellect was not equipped to sort through and grasp the “growing mountain” of data available to us. He also had a problem with how people were accessing data: “When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome.”

Although Bush wasn’t referring to digital information, today we are still looking for new paths and better rules for how to access data. And while mashups were a useful beginning, they nonetheless add to this problem by needlessly “duplicating” that data onto yet another page. Ubiquity is user-centric, rather than site-centric. It opens new paths to information by accessing web data without having to visit the web site, and it creates better rules with it’s natural-language commands (therefore, you don’t need to be a web developer to start creating mashups). For example, to map an address you type, “map”; to twitter it’s “twit”; or to generate a tinyurl it’s “tiny”

I see Ubiquity as a convergence of web services. Convergence is defined as “the tendency for different technological systems to evolve towards performing similar tasks”. Convergence has been happening for years to our technological devices. A standard example being that of the iPhone: we no longer need to carry with separate gizmos (watch, walkman, calculator, camera), the iPhone can provide us with all of these services on one interface. Ubiquity moves the separate services of the web to one interface.

“As technology becomes ubiquitous it also becomes invisible“, states Kevin Kelly. Kelly uses the word “ubiquity” often to refer to the proliferation and success of a technology. The idea is that through technological evolution we no longer notice all the small parts that make up the larger machine. Whereas once Sears Roebuck sold electric motors as a product, now electric motors are so common, so small and so embedded that we are “unconscious of their presence”.

Mozilla’s Ubiquity helps evolve the web by making web pages more invisible, and of using the web as a larger machine. Kelly’s advice for the new economy of the web is “If it’s not connected , connect it. The benefits of communication often don’t kick in until ubiquity is approached; aim for ubiquity.”

My name is Chris Castiglione and I’m a web developer with experience creating usable, accessible websites.

I graduated from James Madison University where I studied Music and Media Arts and Design. Until this year I was at the development firm Omnistudio in Washington, DC where I developed websites for non-profit organizations in the district and around the world.

Currently, I’m a graduate student involved in the New Media M.A. at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. I’m interested in issues surrounding open source and the network culture.

Blogging Heroes is Michael Bank’s compilation of biographies and interviews with 30 of “The World’s Top Bloggers”. Included in the list are bloggers from such well known sites such as BoingBoing, Engadget, Ars Techinca and PostSecret. While not all the bloggers covered are quite as famous as those I’ve just cited, more than half have been ranked in the top 100 blogs (according to technorati.com).
In 2007 Banks conducted these interviews via telephone interviews with the goal of finding out “how they got started, why they are successful, and how other bloggers might emulate them”. The book is broken down into 30 chapters (one blogger per chapter) and the format is consistent: he starts with a brief biography regarding why the blogger is notable, followed by a straight dialogue style Q&A session, and finally a list of bullet points highlighting the blogger’s advice.

A central theme that almost all of these bloggers bring up: have something unique and interesting to say. Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing elaborates, “New bloggers should not concern themselves with trying to be the first to report on something…what’s easier, and better, is to have something interesting to say about news.” In the next chapter influential tech blogger Robert Scoble echos a similar sentiment followed with some helpful tips. He admits that while it is important to stay up to date and follow other blogs (Scoble confesses that he looks at an average of 700 blogs each day), new bloggers need to be “more thorough” and focus closer on one topic. Scoble believes that the best way to distinguish yourself from the crowd is to be an expert in a niche rather than trying to be the authority on everything.

One of the more enlightening chapters includes Bank’s interview with Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Anderson blogs for a different reason than most: “Blogging is a way to make myself smarter.” In the two years leading up to the release of The Long Tail, Anderson used his blog (longtail.com) as an open source research project where he essentially wrote the book in public. Anderson tells his story, “There were some people who thought that I was giving away my ideas”, but “what happened was that the Long Tail blog established quite a large readership, which helped me with the research.” It’s first-hand stories like Anderson’s that make Blogging Heroes an excellent inspiration for all bloggers.

The lack of a common story binding the chapters gives the impression that the interviews in Blogging Heroes would have been more engaging as separate posts on Bank’s blog. If the content had been organized as such, or even as a how-to for bloggers book - with supporting quotes and stories from “The World’s Top Bloggers” - it would have been more helpful and enjoyable to read. Instead, I found myself gravitating to the bloggers whom I myself follow, and felt the pages grow heavier somewhere after interview #16 realizing there weren’t any other bloggers I cared to read about. The most alarming problem is that Bank’s didn’t follow his own book’s advice: have something unique and interesting to say. If that were the case he would have done a better job editing the book which includes countless repetition of the same bits of advice. Adages such as “Use your own voice” and “Don’t worry about SEO” may be beneficial the first time, but start to feel like those pestering testimonials that some companies will use to convince you about how great their product is.

Ultimately, there are some interesting stories and useful advice to be found in Blogging Heroes. I think it is well suited for anyone who is currently blogging or thinking about starting a blog. Since it’s a quick read, and feels more like a long magazine rather than a novel, Blogging Heroes may be better suited for a hour of browsing at the local library.

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