Jure Cuhalev » ideas

Rebooting the community

Jure Cuhalev — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:50:58 +0000

This year Kiberpipa will be 10+ years old and its’ event lineup is incredible. Over 350 events a year involving various talks, meetups, screening and everything. During this time a bunch of new technologies showed and demand for jobs as well as our interest shifted and I/we stared creating bigger and more exclusive events (as in: you can only attend if you speak).

It mostly worked, with limited success. What happens is that while the core members Kiberpipa and related communities are used to speaking and working out in the open, not everyone is. And we didn’t give new members of community a chance to slowly build up their involvement.

With this in mind, I’m hoping that we can get a few more meetups and events going where minimum level of involvement is a 15-min talk instead of a full 45-min lecture with all eyes on you.

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How to be a community witch

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 12:34:27 +0000

Reading Pratchett’s latest novel – I Shall Wear Midnight (a Tiffany Aching story), I was reminded that witching is mostly a matter of stopping to think and look around and observe what people are actually doing. Witches in his stories call this headology – headology, a sort of folk-psychology which can be summed up as “if people think you’re a witch, you might as well be one”.

Which brings us to modern day with all the experts in soft fields like community management or social media marketing. They’re both fields where two things happen:

You have to know how to stop and observe what all the people around you are doing and understand their reasons for doing these things.
Since you’re mostly not producing things, the only way for others to accept you as a witch of this field is by you acting like one in the first place.

After you understand this, everything else is easy. Oh, and you’ll have to figure out what your pointy hat is.

Why my community is nothing like your community

Mood tags of your app

Jure Cuhalev — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:26:06 +0000

While submitting our carpooling app into Nokia OVI store, they asked something interesting: what is the mood of your app?

The question seems promising, but they make it hard to respond with so many choices. Take a look at the list and consider the mood of the page you’re building:

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On spreading knowledge

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 22 May 2010 22:55:13 +0000

How far are you willing to go to spread your knowledge and make world easier for people to use?

Seen on a wall in Berlin.

Posted URL – http://addresstrick.tk/ is actually a really useful one if you’re a Windows user.

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Self organizing travel information in the wake of volcanic ash cloud

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 17:49:30 +0000

I’m at Campus Party EU in Madrid this week and while it was a decent event, the part that it’s interesting is to see how community of over 200 international participants organize themselves as most of the flights back are canceled. As almost here is versed in IT technologies it is safe to say that we’re seeing the future of citizen self-organizing using modern collaboration technologies.

1. Projecting Twitter stream to the stages. This was more of a gimmick and nice to have back channel before, but during the time of the crisis provides an excellent overview of the chatter and what people are saying or trying to organize.

2. Travel Wiki, where people started writing down which cities or towns they need to get and what are different options of travel and prices.

3. Official blog that keeps everyone updated with the latest information. This if of course transmitted to the wiki and twitter stream.

All the solutions, except for the official blog, relay on the crowd to filter the information and self organize while everyone thinks of the solution. It ensures people don’t panic and there are centralized and maintained places to find the latest information, reducing the level of misinformation and things lost in translation.

Usability reflections: information overflow (vcrd.net)

Positioning of radio buttons

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 09:31:30 +0000

Usability of 3rd party modules is often interesting and you can see evolution of the product through the interface. Breezing Forms is not exception to this, as it uses interesting formation of radio buttons to indicate validation options.

Trick question: what is current setting?

Yep, it’s None. Not Library that it seems from the first glance. Readability of this form can be greatly improved by moving radio button field to the left of text:

The lesson here is that if you’re forms are making you hesitate before clicking, you probably have to rethink them.

Update: D. submitted further improvement in the comments (thanks!):

Startup idea: connecting people via buttons/badges

Visualizing budget of Slovenia for 2010

Jure Cuhalev — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:03:05 +0000

Slovenian budget is a 12 billion euro monster that most citizens don’t understand or even have remote idea how it’s structured and where does their money go. As it turns out, people are just not good at taking abstract numbers to go into billions and understanding proportions and what it means to spend 50 million on one thing and 1 billion on something else.

That is what I’m trying to solve with this Visualization of budget of Slovenia for 2010. Show where the money is going as well as tell a story of a country that’s so much in debt that it would be a reason for panic if it happened to a person or a company. Yet we don’t seem to talk or address the issue that we’re 3.6 billion EUR short of making budget and that we have to borrow more money to pay our old debts.

(click on image for interactive version)

Income

Spending

(red is debt)

Lesson

Having access to experts or your own understanding of the data you’re trying to visualize is essential. In this case we had to reassemble budget since they form listing in a way that presents debt separately from the rest of the budget.

Visualizing Koornk chatter

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass – How to Create A Viral YouTube Video

Jure Cuhalev — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:45:47 +0000

OK Go recently released video for their song This Too Shall Pass, of their new album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, and it shows that they really understand viral web video and that their target demographic consumes their content on YouTube and Facebook.

First, check out their video, if you haven’t yet. It’s really worth watching, even if you don’t like their music. Analysis after the jump:

As you’ve seen it’s a Rube Goldberg inspired music video that is doing everything it can to keep your attention. It starts with a shock view of singer that looks like he just slaughtered a cow and as that grabs your attentions it gives you an interesting machine to observe as you watch the video. If they kept your attention for 30s you’ve probably managed to be enthusiastic enough about it to instant message it to your friends as well shared it on Facebook etc.

Based on their recent open letter, this is exactly what brings money today to a band – YouTube advertisements and the only way to actually make serious money on YouTube, besides having 500 videos that you released over last 2 years is to go viral with a well thought our video.

This brings to a completely new problem: what sells of the internet is porn, but if you can’t show that, kittens and lolcats will do. So the best tactic for an indie band that would like to get a lot of views would be to get some cute girls and somehow embed fuzzy kittens and puppies into their video. This way you’ll have a few bonus points in terms of views and maybe you’ll be able to achieve tipping point that will allow you to skyrocket the number of your views.

Did you spot any other details in the video that would contribute towards virality and sharing?

Announcing RealTime WebCampLjubljana

Jure Cuhalev — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:01:50 +0000

It’s been two months after last WebCamp and it’s time for another party. Following the idea of BarCamps with story line, we’ve decided to organize RealTime Social WebCamp Ljubljana.

This time we’ve decided to focus on a single emerging technology space: Real-Time Social Web. If you’re not up-to date with the latest buzzwords, it’s about next generation RSS protocols like HubSubPubBub, RSSCloud, XMPP (that powers GTalk), Synaptic Web, Twitter API and a bunch of other technologies and ways of thinking about the Web and Mobile space.

Intended audience are developers and people who are close to them (e.g. interface designers, product managers, etc.) and will need to innovate in this space in the next 6 months.

We’re doing it a bit more limited this time, just 50 spaces. I’m interested in seeing how a smaller and more focused group changes the dynamics of such gathering.

The rules for the tickets are the same as the last time. Send description of your talk early and you get a ticket, or hope that you can click fast enough for the left-over tickets later. I believe that extra effort should be awarded.

The official language this time is Slovenian since we’ve figured out that locals that are not native speakers understand our geek talk enough that it shouldn’t be a problem and we can understand them as they lecture in their own language.

As always: all the details are at http://www.webcamp.si

Do internet memes ever die?

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:17:15 +0000

While observing 4chan’s attack on Spar’s “create your shopping bag” online tool, I started to wonder if Internet meme’s ever die or they’ll continue to haunt us well into the future. I’m sure that on the trivial level, we’ll soon see in Jeopardy question type: “popular internet meme’s of 90′s”, but there is a different component. Given that a large amount of our current society and youth is influenced by short and not-so-short lived meme’s – what are today’s anthropologists doing to document and conserve this information? Will we need to resurrect it from old Wikipedia dumps, before they get removed for not being notable enough?

One of the notable things happening in this area is that Jason Scott has an archive of 10 million 4chan threads and while he isn’t releasing it to the public just yet, I’m confident that this will happen in a few years time.

I do hope that there is a whole generation of graduate’s in anthropology that are wondering how to capture all the memes so they can build their careers on top of it.

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