One of the names generating a lot of excitement for Webstock is that of Bruce Sterling. It’s his first trip to New Zealand and there’s already lots of interest in his presentation. We interviewed Bruce recently, with a little help from Nat Torkington in putting the questions together.
Webstock: Did you always want to be a writer?
Bruce: No. Now that I think about it, my supposed urges to “be something” were always based in everybody around me assuring me that I had to “be” in some profession. I’m sure glad I didn’t go into any of the lines of work that were recommended when I was a teenager.
Webstock: Have you been writing as long as you can remember?
Bruce: Not really, no. I don’t do a lot of writing for writing’s sake — I’ve never been much good as a diarist. I tend to write about specific topics I find of compelling interest.
Webstock: What were the first books you fell in love with, and why?
Bruce: I don’t want to sound contrarian here, but I don’t think that my deep long-term, abiding interest in encyclopedias and reference texts qualifies as “love.”
Webstock: Any advice for those of us raising kids in 2009? What should we be fostering in them, letting them do, exposing them to?
Bruce: Well, it’s certainly important to have children. And, no matter how anxious you feel about them, it’s also important to understand that they are human beings like you, and therefore more rugged than they look.
I think you should try to set your children a good example by involving them in your daily life. They always remember that much better than they remember any “lessons” or “exposures” or “quality time.”
Webstock: What cities most embody the future, and why?
Bruce: Well, no city ever embodies an absolute future, but there are cities in certain periods that clearly embody the trends driving that period.
It’s not a surprise to tell people that London, Paris, and New York are important now, and that things
are happening there now that will spread widely.
But I would also recommend a close look at Berlin, Baghdad, Mumbai, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco,
and Mexico City. Also Dubai and Shanghai. Dubai and Shanghai are kind of the comedy tag-team of futuristic cities.
Mind you, I don’t choose to live in any of those places. Basically, I live in Belgrade, Austin and Torino. These towns don’t seem to have much in common, but they’re all the same size and rather similar geographically. I wouldn’t call them great metropolises destined to dominate futurity, but they are three places that each somehow feel like a home to me.
Webstock: We’re losing the boundary between the online and the offline worlds as more devices are networked and become sensors or displays for the Internet. If you were product development king at Microgooglehoo or one of the three-inital Chinese hardware manufacturers, what would you be creating with this technology?
Bruce: Well, you’d have to be king, because if you build anything that out-thinks the demands of the next quarter, the shareholders will kill you.
Of course, now that the shareholders are jumping out of windows themselves, maybe you have a chance to innovate.
If I really had to choose here, I think I’d go for the Google philosophy: hire many smart people, give them some free time to build anything they want, and try to ramp up the successes. Throw a bowl of cheap spaghetti at the wall, and see whatever sticks.
Of course, business-school graduates will punish you for this sensible approach, because it shows a lack of serious devotion to core competencies, and lacks a unique value proposition. That’s why those poseurs should never run tech companies. In fact at this point I’m unsure what they SHOULD run; if they all retired to monasteries, our quality of life would likely boom.
If I have to focus on one line of tech development, I’d say green energy apps. That’s very hard work, but if we don’t get there, nothing else is going to matter much.
If you give me a second choice, cellphone banking for the Third World. In fact, any kind of democratized banking that isn’t like modern banking. Probably the best place to build such a thing is in an area that has never had any banks. Someplace poor, peaceful and honest. Okay, those three social qualities never go together; you can have two of ’em, but never all three in the same place. But there’s gotta be some good locale for a useful start-up like that… use Google Maps!
Webstock: Thanks Bruce! It’s going to be a pleasure to have you here in February.
We talked with Emily Loughnan, Managing Director of Wellington based interactive media company, Clicksuite.
Webstock: Click Suite is one of the older web, or “new media”, companies around. Tell us about how Click Suite started and some of its history?
Emily: We started when Rex and I went to a television industry conference and heard about how TV would be interactive in the future. We were both blown away by what interactivity would do for audiences (removing the old passive couch-potato viewing experience and really involving the
audience).
We were so excited by this (and boring to be around because it’s all we talked about!) that just two weeks later we sent in the registration to form a company.
That was late 1993.
Since then we have lead (and followed) with a wide variety of technologies that deliver interactivity. These days the web is commonly featured in our portfolio, but we’re also doing work in digital sculptures, interactive displays, and in new user interfaces etc. It’s a VERY exciting industry to be in – it’s always challenging and changing.
Webstock: AS someone who could genuinely be called a veteran (and we mean that in the best possible sense!), what’s the current state of the NZ web scene?
Emily: I think we’re doing some great great stuff in NZ. We’ve (kiwis in general) made websites that really are innovative, there’s a lot for NZ to be proud of. I know from our own experience that we showed someone in the BBC a site we made here, and he was blown away at how much more efficiently we did it compared to one they made with similar functionality – and how much better it was in terms of quality.
That said, we need to keep innovating. To do that you need great people, but you also need brave clients, or backers. (They’re on my Santa list)
Webstock: What are some of the changes you see happening to the industry in the next 5 years? What are the sort of things we’ll be working on?
Emily: The really exciting developments in touchscreen and even gestural, or natural, interfaces means how we interact with the web is going to change. That means we are all going to have to think about a new paradigm in user experience because as the interface evolves, so too does the audience.
Webstock: Click Suite is associated with Jane McGonigal at Webstock. Tell us why you made that choice.
Emily: Well sometimes games are a great way to connect with certain audiences. We have quite a bit of experience in that space, and we are interested in Jane’s knowledge and experience. Besides, I fancy coffee with a futurist.
Webstock: This is Click Suite’s first time as a Webstock sponsor. What made you decide to become involved?
Emily: we have some serious webstock fans here. You could call it peer-to-peer pressure 😉
We talked with Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google.
Webstock: Chris, you manage the Open Source program at Google. Tell us a little about the aim of this program and your role in it.
Chris: We have two major foci in the group: First, understand that Google uses a fair amount of open source licensed software, and we ensure that Google is compliant with open source licenses. Second, we are tasked with broadly supporting the open source developer community. We do this by creating hundreds of new developers each year through the Summer of Code, releasing over a million lines of Google code into the wild each year and providing infrastructure to over 160k open source projects on code.google.com.
Webstock: Can open source save the world? And is it just about software – are there lessons that can be applied in other fields?
Chris: No. Only people can save the world. But using open source software, they can do so while still maintaining control of their computers. Preserving their software destiny, if you will.
Webstock: Most people have some vision of what working at Google must be like – the free food, the smart people, the free food. What’s an aspect of working at Google that people wouldn’t expect?
Chris: Actually, I prefer people look at the computer science we do, but that’s hard to do from outside the company. I’m personally very excited about our work on renewable energy through our Google.org subsidiary. In particular, Geothermal gets me pretty excited. The food is pretty tasty, though…
Webstock: You’ve been to New Zealand a few times now. What’s your impression of the NZ web and software scene?
Chris: I think that New Zealand is doing something very right. For a country the size New Zealand is to have such a presence in web development, and in technology in general, is remarkable.
Webstock: Finally, Google is the premier sponsor for Webstock (which we’re extremely pleased about!). But why? What does Google get from sponsoring an event such as Webstock?
Chris: We feel that webstock is the premier event in the southern hemisphere for reaching out to our friends in web development. We look forward to meeting people there each year.
We talked recently with Annalee Newitz, geek, writer and all-round sci-fi fan-girl.
Webstock: You get to blog about things like, “Ten of the Kinkiest Science Fiction Books You’ll Ever Read”. You must, surely, have the best job in the world. Can you tell us a little about what you do?
Annalee: My primary focus these days is running io9.com, a blog about science fiction and science that’s part of the Gawker Media network. I work with a team of writers, and every day we deliver a mix of entertainment news in the scifi world, as well as details on the coolest new scientific discoveries. We post about 25-30 times per day, with a little less on weekends, so we tend to spend workdays on tight deadlines, exchanging a million little messages on IM or in our Campfire online meeting room. My job as editor-in-chief is to keep the whole ship running: I write, I edit, I balance the budget, and I try to stay in touch with editors at related blogs to let them know when we’ve posted something interesting.
Oh and then in the times when I’m not doing that, I freelance for Popular Science and New Scientist, and I’m writing a book. Just call me a graphomaniac.
Webstock: What’s coming in the next 10 years that really really scares you?
Annalee: I think the scenario that scares me most is one of runaway poverty, combined with climate change that wrecks traditional food sources like farms and oceans. Octavia Butler wrote a very believable set of books called Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents which describe a near-future United States whose government has collapsed. Gangs are competing with evangelical terrorists for control of local areas, and poverty has exacerbated political differences to the point where violence is part of everyday life. Some might say these novels are about the conditions of the developing world coming to the developed world. I think Butler’s scenario illustrates my biggest fear. Which is that we’ll make choices over the next decade that permanently destroy our ability to develop the planet so we can provide education, health care, renewable energy, and decent livelihoods for everyone.
Webstock: Is the election of Barack Obama the beacon of hope that so many outside of America look to?
Annalee: Well, he’s better than the other guy! But he’s a politician, and has made some poor choices when it comes to tech and science policy, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up too much.
Webstock: Who are the four people, living or dead, you’d invite to your ideal dinner party, and why?
Annalee: Tonight’s ideal dinner party will include early feminist and scifi author Alice B. Sheldon (AKA James Tiptree, Jr.), whose life I’ve been eagerly reading about in Julie Phillips’ fantastic biography. She’d probably have a lot to talk about with second dinner guest, the software compiler geek Grace Hopper. They were both in the military at a time when few women were – and they were both pretty geeky science types at a time when women were pushed out of labs and into the home. Along with the two of them, it would be fun to have deposed Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who has argued repeatedly that women don’t possess a natural aptitude for science. I’d love to see them slap him around. Finally, I’d invite my partner in crime Charlie Jane Anders, since she makes delightful conversation and would love to see Larry get slapped around by Alice and Grace too.
Webstock: On the apocryphal desert island, you’re allowed one book, one CD and one movie. What would they be?
Annalee: Several terabyte drives containing every book ever written, plus my entire music and video collections? Can I say that?
Webstock: Hardly in the spirit of the question! But a suitably geeky and appropriate answer. We’re looking forward to seeing you here in February!
For the fourth of our speaker interviews, we managed to catch up with Derek Featherstone in the midst of his quest to see how many frequent flyer miles it’s possible to accumulate in a single year.
Webstock: In hearing you talk recently at Web Directions 09 and Edge of the Web, it seems you want to move beyond delivering “mere accessibility” and actively work to create more fulfilling experiences for those who access the web in different ways. What are some examples of this? And why it is important?
Derek: Here’s an example – lets say we need to have a user click on something in the interface. We need to ensure that this is keyboard accessible — we can use a link, some type of button, or even a span with an onclick attached to it, and appropriate tabindex values so that it exists within the natural tab order of the page. All of these can provide a technical level of compliance and be keyboard accessible. However, moving beyond this technical compliance and into the realm of user experience, only one of those options might provide the most intuitive control that matches its purpose and expectation of the user. Which one really depends on the scenario, of course, but making that decision is something that we must do. Just because we can create a technically compliant solution doesn’t mean that we’ve created an interface that is efficient and useful for people with a variety of needs.
Webstock: For developers and designers thinking about accessibility, what’s more important – empathy or technical understanding?
Derek: 42.
They are both critically important to two aspects of accessibility. The first is truly understanding what problems we’re faced with, what opportunities there are for creatively providing solutions that meet
everyone’s needs regardless of ability. The second is being able to implement something that solves those problems. Empathy helps us realize what the problems are, and technical understanding helps us
with the implementation. I believe we need both to make sure that we’re solving the right problems, effectively.
Webstock: What can participants look forward to in your workshop at Webstock?
Derek: My goal is to make even the seasoned developer or designer look at accessibility issues with a new twist and consider things that they hadn’t before. They will also walk away with new techniques and strategies that will help them when striving to build accessible and usable web apps.
Webstock: February will be your first time in New Zealand. Anything in particular you’d like to do while you’re here?
Derek: I’ve got a long list of things to see and do while there, but I think tops on my list is to go to a Super 14 match. I played rugby union at home in Canada for close to 20 years, and I’d love to see a match while I’m there.
Webstock: Which speaker are you most excited about seeing at Webstock 09?
Derek: It is a toss up between Annalee Newitz and Toby Segaran. And Derek Powazek. I haven’t heard any of them speak before, and they specialize in areas in which I’m not embedded. As much as possible, I hope to broaden my own horizons when I’m speaking at a conference by getting to sessions that discuss areas I wouldn’t normally investigate on my own.
Webstock: Thanks Derek! The rugby scheduling gods are smiling as the Hurricanes are playing in Wellington around Webstock time. You too can experience the unique blend of excitement, disappointment and heatbreak that comes with supporting the Hurricanes!
