I had the opportunity to go to An Event Apart in NYC this week. In addition to meeting some very cool people and get schooled on some areas I haven't been aware of (e.g. Tantek's microformats pres) I also got to experience Ze Frank's Web 0.2 presentation, which was described as "a personal, down-in-the-trenches view of how the technology revolution impacts the way we communicate with a mass audience."

Take aways:

• Conversations resist top-down control
• Users/Consumers want to have a conversation with designers/developers by conversing with prosumer tools and media that were previously only in the professional's domain
• They will show you what's interesting
• Designers/Developers are facilitators of the the conversation
• Web 0.2 gives designer/developer an amazing amount of data to start using in the conversation

His observations are partly drawn from all the literature about the bottom-up evolution of conversations, viral phenomenon and the web itself. It's not new, but it's a very profound reminder he provides by showing us that the most interesting developments are user/consumer driven, e.g. MySpace and YouTube. This is where the conversation gets interesting because the mass of consumer use drives the medium and affects it in terms of economics and sustainability.

It's the same idea, really, as Nardi and O'Day's in their Information Ecology thesis. I keep returning to this over and over every few months. The idea just seems to keep getting validated. The analogy of sustainable biological ecologies seems to apply to so many different information ecologies, whether it's in describing media consumers and their internet publishing/use ecology or the information ecology of enterprise knowledge workers. Sustainability comes from organic growth and localized need or desire.

In any case, the message from Ze for embracing this is the same message many of us have adopted for evangelizing the use of the new wave of grass-roots-oriented enterprise software. He referred to Tim O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0" article in order to give this advice, which I believe paraphrases O'Reilly.

Create architectures that encourage participation and conversation and build value as a side effect of the ordinary use of an application. From the passive to active to interactive.

Excellent stuff. I'm off to finally read that O'Reilly article. I've put it off because it seemed so long, but I see that I can't ignore it.

Google's new Finance site is really quite elegant. The site offers information on North American stocks, mutual funds and public and private companies along with charts, news and fundamental financial data. Different things to watch for here are interactive charts, and the blog and discussion group retrieval. Most of the other tear sheet type information, e.g. news, company profile (description), and finances you'll find on all of the other finance sites as well.

The line/spark line chart scrolling is cool. it automatically scrolls to the news for the period you are browsing in the chart. You can also change the range of dates in the chart by resizing the year widget -- mouse over the years at the top of the chart and a little resizing widget appears. When you drag and resize the date range, the main line graph shrinks or expands to show better detail on that range and the news box on the right refreshes to show only the items in that date range. Very nice, clean and simple use of AJAX.

Don Norman recently attempted a simplicity backlash after a few articles touted Google's simple UI as one of the reasons for it's success. Most of these simplicity articles talk about the spareness of its search interface as opposed to Yahoo's, for instance. Finance people are also saying that Google is not presenting a clear enough strategy and that their tools are all over the place. I might agree with that. They have a lot of applications that never seem to make it out of Beta.

Norman says that the simplicty factor breaks down when you try to do anything outside of searching web corpus. His argument is valid. If you view Google as a suite of tools for retrieving information, there is often a disconnection between the bodies of indexed data. The problem is rooted partly in poor information architecture problem and partly in poor interaction design. Norman is saying, I think, that the site doesn't yet allow the integration of the pieces into one UI, and rather segments it by application (and dare I say, by working group within Google?).

But when they do rich applications like Google Maps and this new Finance site, they DO do it rather simply and elegantly. (The Google News Reader on the other hand, ugh! That thing needs to take a lesson from these Beta apps.) With Maps and Finance their focus and execution on the functionality of simple little interaction widgets, e.g. moving a Google map around with a cursor, changing a data set range with a scrolling widget, is what sets them apart. In the end, our discerete interaction with specific tools is what is simple, and it's why I continue to use them over other sites. I don't care if their products are siloed and perhaps require poking around in the labs or clicking tabs to find them. When I get there, there is very little menu cruft in the way and it lets me get the job done quickly and efficiently.

Erin just posted about the publishiing of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. They've been collecting design patterns internally since 1994 (using Drupal I might add) and are now releasing the patterns to the public in the Yahoo! Developer Network. They're doing an initial release of 13 patterns, but will be adding more in the coming months. Check it out!

The non profit site I've been working with for the past year has finally soft-launched their site. Spoons Across America is an organization that provides information and programs about food and nutrition for schools, families, and community organizations. Congratulations to the folks at Spoons.

On the web design/development side, the site relies heavily on CSS for layout and design and uses both Movable Type and Drupal on the back end. We'll be looking to develop the Network area further in future releases with the help of the upcoming 4.5 release of Drupal.

So check it out and let me know what you think.