The Breakdown: This week we spoke to Ted Rheingold (@tedr), Founding CEO Dogster, Inc. and GM at Say Media. He talked to us about his upcoming SXSW panel (“On the Internet, Everyone Knows You’re a Dog”), online identity, and what dogs like to do online.

S/G: Having a persistent identity online has shifted the way we interact with each other and with content. What do you think are the most significant changes, and where do  you think this is headed?

Ted: The first  shift I’ve seen is that most people now post real (if not idealized) public  versions of themselves on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+,  etc. Since all these platforms offer OAuth functionality that make it easy to log in to a multitude of other services, people now often default to using their actual public identity on those other new services because it saves clicks. People are becoming more comfortable with not hiding their identity online.

The second major shift I’ve seen is that it is now much harder to be truly anonymous online. In the past, persistent pseudonyms, multiple personas, private Twitter accounts and the like all allowed for a good bit of personally-unidentifiable posting. But today, if the Internet wants to find out the person behind an online identify it usually does.

Where we are heading will only be a temporary transition – as they all are with identity on the Internet – and will be a combination of the following:

• Well-manicured  public personas. Subconsciously or not people are marketing themselves online via their Facebook, LinkedIn, public Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Formspring profiles etc. It’s important to recognize that people are smart enough to refrain from posting things that would embarrass them. People’s online profiles will increasingly become strategically incomplete public personas that represent parts of the person, but definitely not their entire self.
• Persistent pseudonymous  profiles. Many people are also developing alternate profiles not tied to their public personas, allowing them to speak more freely in certain arenas. This won’t be so they can talk about illegal things (which will undoubtedly still continue) – it’s simply so they don’t have to worry that someone doing a Google search will come across information they may not want shared with the masses. It can be as harmless as not wanting an employer to know you’re interviewing or the world to know your new puppy is having housetraining issues.
• An increase in truly obfuscated profiles. In this case, the average web user will never be able to figure out the true identity of the poster. (Though caveat emptor, if the Internet wants to find out who it is, it will). These profiles can be created through services like 4chan, Honestly, Quora, Formspring, Tumblr, and Twitter. Like pseudonymity, this trend won’t be a result of people trying to hide dubious acts, it’s simply because people are getting much more adept at having the ability to share what they want with who they want in the voice they want.
• Trusting of anonymity. Finally, with the rise of pseudonymity and anonymity people will begin to trust the other people using these services almost as much as they trust their family on Facebook. These services will optimize experiences for the most valuable return to each participant and many will find in some cases anonymous is something they can trust more than real names and faces.

S/G: Anonymity has its advantages. What are we at risk of losing with ubiquitous online identities? How can we preserve those benefits while also enabling a more socially connected web?

Ted: I foresee two types of Anonymity rising, each with its own benefits.

There will be the pure anonymity, as experienced today on sites like YouBeMom.com and 4chan, where zero information is requested to post, or demonstrated by the hacktivist communities that allow for anonymous group activities without central authority. This form of anonymity is the same as it’s ever been – it’s easier to facilitate via the web, but doesn’t offer new benefits aside from mass adoption. It’s important to remember that while these groups will never allow for 100% untraceable actions, many will never be exposed. But like I’ve said before, I believe that if people really want to find out who is behind something posted online, they usually do.

I also anticipate a ‘new’ form of anonymity will continue to gain popularity online. I term this “functional anonymity.” Functional anonymity in the real world is nothing new – it’s how most voting systems work. You can only vote if you’re registered with a name and address, but your vote cannot be traced back to you. Online services such as Quora, Honestly, and several blog comment systems are already showing the value of letting people post anonymously if they have already proven their identity. Functional anonymity will create a whole new communication ecosystem allowing for incredible frankness and openness. I anticipate this new form of anonymous expression will be very interesting and contentious as people come to experience it’s benefits and shortcomings.

S/G: What kind of things do dogs tend to do on the Internet?

Ted: The most popular sites for dogs on the Internet are:

• failhumans.com (it’s a knock off of http://faildogs.tumblr.com/ that they
  haven’t been able to code yet because they don’t know how to code.)
• American Association of Meat Producers
• Slutty Puppy
• DogBlogSF (this guy just gets us canines.)
• And of course sniffing virtual butts at Dogster.com

S/G: Who are your other panelists and what do each of them bring to the conversation?

Ted: The goal of our panel is to facilitate a wide-ranging, boundary-pushing, open-ended (hyphen-rich ;) discussion led by the panelists but driven by the audience. All the panelists (Chris Poole, Heather Champ, Rick Webb, Michael Sippey and myself) bring years of first-hand experience in running identity-oriented social software. Flickr, 4Chan, Six Apart, Dogster/Catster, and Barbarian Group have all created community and participatory experiences based upon their own intuition and vision. My goal as moderator is to spring some of the most awkward identity issues from the biggest and small Internet destinations and communication services and see how far back we can unpeel the onion. If the attendees are really engaged and leading a good bit of the conversation I will have done my job properly.

S/G: What are you looking forward to at SXSW?

Ted: It’s become almost trite to say at this point, but SXSW is where the most passionate minds of our generation gather to talk, share, learn and scheme with each other. We all take 3-5 days off of working independently to rub minds for as many hours a day as we can stay awake. I love how at this point you can’t even try and catch every panel you want to see – there are just too many good ones. All you can do is spend as much time as possible in the slipstream of activity around the conference center, party venues and ever obliging bars and cafes, talking about as much as you can with everyone there. Also, SAY’s going to be throwing a really great party. [Editor's note: Check out the line-up from SAY Media's SXSW 2011 party and keep an eye out for announcements on their blog.]

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2012 Q&A Series.

The Breakdown: To kick off our third year of the SXSW Q&A series, we caught up with Peter Meyers (@petermeyers) about his talk, “Making eBooks Smarter: Responsive Page Design” and the future of eBooks.

S/G: Interest in eBooks has been growing like crazy since the eReader/tablet explosion, and a lot of people are talking about what to do and what not to do. What can people expect to hear at your talk that they won’t hear anywhere else?

Peter: “Making eBooks Smarter” is the session’s title, but what it’s really about is making ebooks that make people smarter. I’ll look at the two big tasks everyone engages in when they read—memory and interpretation—and ask: how can digital publications improve reading comprehension? I think of it as customer service meets instructional design meets publishing.

S/G: We love books, and we love digital, but for very different reasons. What makes you feel that ‘the book’ is still a useful metaphor for digital?

Peter: The question makes me think about the music industry and how terms like “album” and “record”, while still common, seem antiquated in a digital world where singles dominate. But the book, whether delivered digitally or in print, feels to me like a much more durable format. Namely, as a vehicle for the extended, considered thinking of an author.

That said, I do tend to think of the “app” as the book’s successor. In the same way that TV didn’t replace radio, I think apps, for certain kinds of content and certain kinds of subject matter, will prove to be a better form for an author to entertain and inform her audience. (Heck, I could probably write a whole ’nother answer on why we should probably start thinking about authors as collectives, rather than working-in-a-garret solo operators.)

S/G: Who’s doing eBooks right? What are some great examples you’ve seen?

Peter: My list of current faves goes like this:

• Wreck This App. A creative sketchbook app loaded up with prompts to get your creative juices flowing (“Pretend you’re doodling on the back of an envelope while on the phone”) and a built-in palette of painting tools. The author’s spirit is encouraging and the digital canvas accommodates the kind of mistake-friendly experimentation that I don’t think you get with print.
• Welcome to Pine Point. A web-based scrapbook which tells the history of a Canadian mining town that thrived for a few years and then was shut down and abandoned. Wonderful example of how to integrate, and not just add, lotsa media elements (audio, slideshows, animations, video). Immersive and linear too, even as all the various multimedia doodads play out onscreen.
• The Magic of Reality. Lovely, innovative design ideas in this iPad app, including figures that remain on the canvas as readers scroll multiple panes of text past horizontally (enabling them to appreciate a visual that’s relevant to more than just one page of text). The book also has a very useful, three-tier bookwide-navigation system. Page layout and typography are efficient and unobtrusive. Interactive graphics like Newton’s Canon simulator are powerful examples of how onscreen teaching can be both illuminating and fun to play with.
• Amazon. I have to include these guys on any “best of” list. They’re a bugaboo to many in the publishing world, but for my money their Kindle apps demonstrate an attention to the reading experience that many others neglect. Administrative chrome is hidden and little details like doing without the faux-book edges that until recently gunked up the iBooks app are signs that someone over there gets the importance of immersiveness.

S/G: We noticed that Modernist Cuisine (@ModernCuisine) is following you on Twitter. That’s a stunning set of 5 huge books with mind-blowing photography. How do you take a unique experience like flipping through those gorgeous pages and transform it into a digital experience?

Peter: I cashed in all of my last year’s gift-getting chits (birthday, Hanukah, anniversary) and corralled a consortium of gift-givers to band together and get me this thing. Stunning, indeed! I’ve erected a shrine for (to?) it in our dining room. At BookExpo America 2011 I spent some time talking to the MC folks about their thoughts on a digital edition. They were pretty adamantly against it. And while I don’t think anyone can argue with the breathtaking results of their print production, I do think they’re missing an opportunity by sticking with pulp only. The short version of my advice to them would be: don’t publish a digital edition of the whole multi-volume set. Instead, distill out an app that’s highly focused on handling some of the in-the-kitchen reference chores and computational wonkery that any modernist chef has to perform.

S/G: You’ve got a book on this topic coming out later this year – Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience. Who’s the target audience for this book and what do you hope they’ll get out of it?

Peter: Early on–2012, say–I think writers, editors, book designers, and publishers will be its core audience. Everyone, in other words, trying to grapple with books in a touchscreen era.  But beyond that timeframe I think the touchscreen publishing revolution is going mainstream. So, in addition to professional publishing types, anyone who needs to create documents bound for a tablet or smartphone is going to be interested in thinking about how to do things like integrate video alongside text or incorporate gestures like the pinch and tap as part of the reading experience. That includes a pretty long list of folks who currently still compose for print: students, teachers, financial analysts, menu designers, newsletter publishers….the list is endless. Breaking the Page is my attempt to catalog all the various content designs that are available and help people new to this stuff decide what to use and, just as important, what to avoid.

S/G: What are you looking forward to seeing at SXSW?

Peter: So many good sessions, it’s hard to pick! Here are four that are on my must-get-to list:

• Creating The Code: A BBC Transmedia Documentary – A behind-the-scenes look at building a transmedia production, centered on the story of a professor’s search for a “mysterious code that governs our world through numbers, shapes and patterns.” How can that not be a fun session? BBC teamed up with “next generation” storytelling firm Six to Start on this project. I just know this one’s gonna be entertaining and informative.
• The Present of Print: Paper’s Persistence – An ode to what oftentimes is still my favorite medium: print. This panel “celebrates the present of print, and focuses on emerging print-digital hybrids”. Reminds me of a neat-o example I saw the other day, GameChanger, an iPad app where the user situates the device on top of a cardboard game (think: Monopoly) and then bops back and forth between the app and the board game. Here’s a video demo.
• Rise of Analytics: Impacting the Editorial Process? – A look at how to use behavioral analytics to “guide the editor on how to deliver digital and mobile content but also offer new insights on how to deliver traditional, offline content to improve the readers’ overall experience with the brand.” Sounds geeky, which sounds great to me.
• Storytelling Beyond Words: New Forms of Journalism – This panel is about using digital tools like interactive graphics to help journalists tell better stories. The teaser that really caught my eye: “Instead of sending users to a separate link for a video, why not embed video into the story at strategic points?” Yes!

Coming soon: More from the SXSW 2012 Q&A Series.

Your trompe l’oeil is ringing (image via A Look Askance)

The Breakdown: As digital becomes a more constant part of our everyday lives, Elizabeth Bennett observes that sometimes our brains get confused about what mode we’re operating in.

Last week, I was awakened by a sound I thought was a forcefully vibrating cell phone. It was in fact a fog horn in New York Harbor. I frequently find myself trying to swipe the pages of a physical book if I have recently been reading on my tablet and, as hard as I try, the ATM screen still won’t respond to my unconscious finger swipes.

Most of us have experienced some version of this kind of disjointedness which has emerged from the liminal space we’re living in.  We hop back and forth between machines and the physical world, constantly dividing our attentions between three dimensional and digital interfaces. Computers and TVs have converged. Phones and computers have converged. The avenues for information and content consumption seem to multiply 10-fold on a monthly basis. (See my colleague Jake Keyes’s post on how businesses are trying to bridge the gap between the physical and digital world.)

We are also deeply influenced by all the new tools and tech that we encounter, to the point where we experience the world in ways we wouldn’t have imagined just a few years ago.

I polled some colleagues and friends to find out about the quirks that they’ve observed as their brains and bodies can’t always catch up to the demands and realities of the moment.  These anecdotes don’t all fall into the same category but they represent a nice sampling of the goofy ways we respond and react to our technology, even when it’s not in the room.

Any of these sound familiar?

“I feel my phone vibrating in my pocket – even when it isn’t even in my pocket.”

“I often get frustrated with my in-car navigation. I am so used to the pinch to zoom interaction on my phone and iPad, I often grab the screen getting frustrated that it doesn’t zoom.”

“My daughters think that everything digital is touch interactive. TV’s, Screens in cars, anything. They are shocked when nothing happens when they touch “non-touch” devices.”

“When I’m on a computer keyboard, I tap the spacebar twice to make a period because that’s how I do it on my phone.”

“After listening to a lengthy voice mail from a friend, I momentarily forgot it was a recording and responded out loud.”

“It’s so annoying when I’m about to take a great photo and somebody calls my camera.” – @JordanRubin

We’d love to hear about your liminal behavioral blips. Please add them to this post so we have a record of this zany modern moment.

Did someone say “party”? (image via Lulu Witch)

The Breakdown: As we wind down 2011, before we head off on vacation, we asked our Content Strategists to tell us their resolutions for 2012.

Michael Barnwell, New York

In a world where content is becoming more and more untethered, I vow to remain open to situations where limiting access to content might be the better experience.

 Liz Bennett, New York

I promise to coordinate more closely with developers when they’re building out functionality in the CMS.  Due to lack of time and not always having a full grasp of how the developers would implement the specs, there were a few occasions this year when we ended up with new functionality that was much more complicated than expected. Better coordination will require establishing some criteria for IT to use when making CMS updates. One criterion might be, if it looks like it will take 29 steps to upload a file or create a content promotion, please let us know and we’ll revisit the design.

 Tosca Fasso, San Francisco

To learn InDesign, so I can make sexier deliverables.

 Rachel Lovinger, New York

To think about content strategy more globally. In my project work and speaking opportunities this is coming up more and more frequently. I want to take a closer look at what a truly global content strategy looks like, and at what’s happening in the CS practice in the world beyond the U.S.

 Erin Abler, Philadelphia

To advocate for a cross-disciplinary understanding of content strategy here in the Philly office.  I think that opening up the floor to talk about CS capabilities – especially with those who aren’t designers or developers – can help us pitch, plan, and build more integrated projects as an agency.

 Jake Keyes, New York

My resolution is never again to do large-scale content production without a CMS!

 Robert Stribley, New York

I pledge not only to continue preaching the virtues of quality content, but to shamelessly create more quality content of my own. I may also exorcise a content demon or two along the way.

Matt Geraghty, New York

I strive to find new ways that Scatter/Gather can be the best platform for the most important conversations happening in Content Strategy today.

What are your Content Strategy Resolutions for the upcoming year?

Follow my lead. (image via mikemol)

Content Strategists have a lot of different backgrounds and skillsets, but many of us share an interest in word choice. We like to explore definitions, nuance, and etymology to make sure that we’ve chosen the best word to communicate precisely what we want to say. We have a thesaurus on speed-dial. We look to different industries and disciplines to see if we can steal words and repurpose them in a new context. We mine history and literature for words that may have fallen out of favor, but are primed to be brought back into the sun. Some of us will even make up a word if the situation calls for it.

Yesterday Kristina Halvorson posted this request on Twitter:

@halvorson NEED YOUR HELP. What’s a word that could mean “informational elements that exist to help people find, use, *and understand* the content”?

There was a flurry of suggestions as people jumped to respond to the challenge to find the perfect word to encompass this concept. At some point she clarified that she was trying to find a single term that encompassed both the copy you might see on a page, and information that was helping behind the scenes. Here are some of the suggestions (some more serious than others):

• Heteroglossia (@jodify)
• “Contextual elements in the content environment.” (@LauraCreekmore)
• Signage? Guideposts? (@eaton)
• Wayfinding (@mbloomstein, @rbcinnyc, and @mfraase)
• Interface (@kissane)
• Subterface (@scarequotes)
• bizgloss & partygloss (@inkblurt)
• Affordances (@mbloomstein)
• Helper, guide, pointer, clue, hint, accessory, or support content? (@ticjones)
• “Framing” material? Breadcrumbs? µContent? (@doriantaylor)

The inadequacies of these words led us to explore the meaning of the concept more deeply. Eventually the distributed discussion led several people (including Halvorson) to conclude that trying to find one word to describe both of these types of information was probably not the best approach. In the course of the discussion people called upon experiences from the realms of physical anthropology, industrial design, textbook organization, and directional guides. And, as with any good linguistic discussion, a healthy dose of ancient Greek.

Which left me thinking about the word “clue.” Or more accurately, its antecedent “clew.” It’s a word that means “a ball of yarn or thread” but in particular it tends to refer to the ball of thread that Theseus used to find his way out of the labyrinth and escape the Minotaur. It struck me as a term that was both the embodiment of the concepts that Halvorson was trying to describe AND an apt metaphor for the process we had used to communally navigate our way through the topic.

Unfortunately, the word “clue” is saddled with way too many other meanings, making it difficult to bring this archaic usage back into the common domain. You’d have to redefine the word every time you used it in this new context. If we’re going to successfully co-opt an older word or a word from another industry (see “curate”), either the meaning has to be immediately clear from the new context, or the word has to be curious enough that it makes people stop and ask what you mean.

What are some of your favorite repurposed words?

Navigating the landscape of infographics. (image via Supersteil)

In my September write-up on “Infographics: The Good, the Bad, and the Fluffy,” I went over the 5 things I look for to weed out a good infographic from the bad and the fluffy when running a content audit. They include:

1. Compelling data that tell a story.
2. An infographic that’s relevant to the brand.
3. Simple, clean design.
4. Rich graphics.
5. Succinct and engaging copy.

After developing this list, I was naturally interested in finding out what the folks I rub elbows with on a daily basis think about these visual displays of information. Following is a roundup of infographics chosen and critiqued by a few of my SF colleagues along with my comments based on the criteria above.

Rebecca Hill, Associate Director, Social Media

Infographic: This is not my beautiful house

I like that:

• it takes a lot of potentially complex data and creates a simple, understandable visual.
• it’s provocative; I like that the side-by-side juxtaposition creates conversation.
• the information itself is compelling and a reflection of our own culture.
• it somehow creates something personal (e.g. like Tufte’s anecdote about the people and maps—you seek out the information most relevant to you).

LP: Though this infographic is mostly made of (ho hum) pie charts, I’d say they were the right choice in getting this meaningful story across in a clean and simple design that’s spot-on with Good’s mission. The headline and supporting copy are engaging and vital ingredients in this infographic. Thumbs up.

Gretchen Atwood, Senior UX Designer, @gretchenatwood

Infographic: The buzz vs the bulge

What I like:

• It smartly expresses a trade-off I imagine many people think about: How many calories are my fancy coffee drinks? How can I maximize buzz while minimizing calories?
• While being a clean design it includes rich comparisons to popular food items and what kind of activity would I have to do for 30 minutes to burn off that beverage.
• The range of coffee drinks represented and the clever way of creating a different shape for each one. Since a big value of the chart is comparing one drink option to others, and finding lower-calorie options, having many drinks represented is important for the chart to have more meaning.

What I don’t like:

• He uses an X and Y axis structure, but the Y axis is not set to zero but a midpoint along the X axis. I understand graphically why he did this, but he could have had the Y axis left justified and still put the calorie “pole” down the middle.

LP: I agree with Gretchen that the designer could have laid this infographic out more simply. Bonus points for the visually appealing graphics he’s employed, but one or two lines of copy to lay the framework for what’s going on—as Gretchen does so well above—would have also helped enormously.

Tosca Fasso, Content Strategy Lead, @toscafasso

Infographic: Approaches to web content strategy

I like this infographic. Here’s why:

• Easy to grasp the large categories (technical, editorial, web strategy and planning) at a glance so that even if you spend no further time, you can take away that there are three primary areas of expertise.
• Offers more specifics with a closer look.
• Areas of overlap are easy to discern.

LP: I’ll admit that I’m biased about this infographic, but heck, what’s not to love about Richard Ingram’s simple and effective visual data buffet, with succinct supporting copy, chronicling all of what content strategists can do in the digital space.

Christine Bauer, UX Lead

Infographic: Inception, the architecture

My favorite infographics are those that:

• summarize
• provide perspective and comprehension
• reveal a pattern or trend that wouldn’t have otherwise been noticeable

Most have seen the movie Inception. I’ll freely admit that after first watching it, I grabbed a pen and paper and tried to sketch out my own interpretation of the nested story. This infographic tackles the more complex summary. It plots the characters’ journeys across the nested dreams while keeping track of both the owner of the dream and the differences in time perception. Learn more about designer Rick Slusher’s thought process for this infographic.

LP: This infographic’s eye-catching iconography and imagery tell a very cool story. My only beef with it is that its minimalist design left me with a few questions—yes, I saw the movie—until I read Christine’s summary above. Embedding a brief explanation directly within this infographic would have made the story infinitely more accessible, and the infographic that much better.

I think we’re all in agreement that when an infographic tells a story simply and succinctly with imagery and copy that engage its target audience, it will succeed. Curious to know what you’ve seen lately that fits the bill—or doesn’t. Feel free to share here.

Siri may be the first voice interface to get it right. (image via Marc Wathieu)

Will Siri, the new voice-recognition interface of the iPhone 4S, live up to Apple’s promises? It’s probably too soon to tell. The digital assistant demos well on stage, but the idea of talking aloud to your phone may prove too weird for most people to do in public. Regardless, Siri is evidence that Apple has realized something fundamental about voice interaction: the way we talk is essentially different from the way we read. And the same interface can’t work for both.

We’re all accustomed to visual and written interfaces, in which a user is asked to choose from a collection of words or symbols. Given lots of items, interface designers and content strategists tend to arrange those items in a hierarchy. Which makes sense: we can only focus on a few things at once, and without a hierarchy we’d have to deal with thousands of options laid out with equal weight in a flat and endless grid. To solve the problem of navigating this complexity, visual interfaces start at a high, general level, and work down to the specific. This holds true in print as well, in dictionaries, restaurant menus, and so on.

Many audio interfaces adopt this structure, too. Take automated phone support, and the typical menu system: “Welcome. Please choose from the following options…” On the surface, an audio hierarchy is appealing, for the same reasons as a visual one. How are you supposed to know what options are available without being prompted, or without having your choices constrained? Using a hierarchy should feel streamlined, necessary, and clean. But it doesn’t. People hate it. They hit 0 without listening, trying to break out of the command tree. Look no further than GetHuman.com for evidence of how passionately people resist hierarchical voice command systems.

The fact is, audio interaction is essentially different from visual interaction. In day-to-day speech, no hierarchy is necessary. We can pluck any sentence from the bottomless pool of possible sentences. There’s no need for people to tell their roommates “Hey, New Reminder. Payments > House and Home > Utilities > Electricity > Pay Bill.”  This certainly isn’t the most natural way to speak and it likely requires some user training to navigate the hierarchy successfully. We want our computers to understand commands without context. In other words, we want audio interfaces to be flat.

For years we’ve struggled. Technology seems to be the bottleneck — computers are bad at interpreting the human voice, so we’ve had to constrain significantly the number of things a person can say. Search engines approximate something like an audio interface, in that they take a single input and provide possible solutions, but there’s a key difference: search engines don’t take our input and execute an action, or bring us directly to a single URL. Some refinement and judgement is always required on the part of the user. (If all we had was “I’m Feeling Lucky,” Google would be a strange and frustrating service). We’ve never really achieved true flatness in any interface.

This is why the concept of Siri is so important. The virtual assistant is a promising step toward a true natural language interface. There are still constraints; for instance, Siri’s capabilities are limited, and she gets confused from time to time. But the concept is there, the idea of a perfectly efficient system for achieving an action: one command, one response.

—

This morning I asked Siri for directions home. She understood, and spent a moment thinking about my question. And then, something eerie happened. She pulled up my empty contact information from my address book. “I don’t know what your home address is, Jake.” Immediately, without thinking, I tapped in my information and saved it. I did exactly as I was told.

Lost in translation. (image via benjamin.krause)

The Breakdown: Apple just released the iPhone 4S, which incorporates voice recognition to intelligently interpret your voice commands. Robert Stribley explains how one of the iPhone’s existing features, however, ain’t so genius.

This week, Apple released the iPhone 4S, which promises, via the wonder of Siri technology, to respond intelligently to voice commands. The innovation may turn out to be ground-breaking, but it was greeted with somewhat muted applause, as Apple’s well-trained audience had been expecting the advent of the iPhone 5. Probably unfairly, the 4S ended up sounding like a way station on the road to the big event. Still, it’ll be interesting to see whether the adoption of Siri’s intelligent assistant feature can mitigate one of the iPhone’s most intermittently annoying features: Autocorrect. Probably not.

I’m hardly the first to notice that Apple’s Autocorrect feature often fails to live up to its name. Many have noted that the program actually proves pretty poor at correcting your spelling, sometimes even inserting an embarrassing substitute for what you intended. There’s a popular blog, which capitalizes on the more amusing instances of this behavior. What I haven’t seen is anyone articulate all the different ways Autocorrect actually performs abysmally. It’s not just that it corrects poorly: In fact, it fails in three key areas. And it fails in ways that arguably teach its users bad English. As a public service then, allow me to codify the ways in which Autocorrect fails.

Autocorrect Substitutes Misspelled Words with Words Which Makes No Sense

The best-known issue with Autocorrect is its sometimes comical tendency to replace misspelled words with something that makes little or no sense or to create a new meaning the writer didn’t intend. The reason this frustrates people so much is that the misspelling is often not too far from the correct spelling. Yet, Autocorrect often manages to suggest something completely different.

Therefore, “making brownies” becomes “making babies,” “Disney” becomes “divorce,” “sinus infection” becomes “dinosaur infection,” and much hilarity and/or awkwardness ensures. And these are some of the tamer examples, you understand.

Autocorrect supposedly works by analyzing the keys near the ones you actually selected to estimate which ones you intended to select. Then it replaces your word with its best guess based on those letters nearby. In order to be improved, Autocorrect would have to incorporate some higher order artificial intelligence, some fuzzy logic, so it would recognize when a word it wants to substitute seems absurd or inappropriate in a particular context. It would need to base its intelligence upon a nuanced, contextual understanding of language, instead of the much more limited contextual understanding of the layout of a Qwerty keyboard. If Apple is able to apply Siri’s semantic capabilities to texting, they could make some great strides in this area.

Autocorrect Teaches Bad Spelling & Punctuation

Yes, perhaps most infuriating of all, Autocorrect sometimes corrects words which are spelled correctly, actually rendering them incorrectly. For instance, if you type “Being simplistic is its problem,” autocorrect will change “its” to “it’s,” which means your sentence now technically reads “Being simplistic is it is problem.” Many college graduates have difficulty distinguishing between these two spellings (one a possessive pronoun, one a contraction) as it is. Now Autocorrect is drumming the exact wrong spelling further into their craniums.

Another example, and this issue is probably often overlooked, but when you use an ellipsis in any sentence Autocorrect automatically capitalizes the first letter of the next word, apparently assuming the last of the three marks to be a period. However, a capital letter does not necessarily have to follow an ellipsis. Ellipses are employed to show that words have been omitted – words, not necessarily sentences – and also, perhaps informally, to show the passage of time. Since Autocorrect cannot know if a capital letter needs to follow an ellipsis, it shouldn’t automatically create one. Otherwise, it may be teaching bad punctuation and capitalization.

Autocorrect Bowlderizes Your Writing

Perhaps it’s inadvertent, but Autocorrect also appears to censor or Bowlderize your writing on occasion. If I write that “Autocorrect doesn’t do a hell of a good job,” the program renders “hell” as “he’ll.”  Oddly enough, however, it doesn’t correct “helluva” as in “helluva good job.” That indicates that if you type in “hell,” Autocorrect assumes you probably meant “he’ll.” That correction, however, takes about six keystrokes to undo. Of course, it’s only one extra touch to dismiss the little bubble that comes up suggesting “he’ll” if you happen to see it, which I seldom do. But the point is, “hell” ain’t a misspelling, so Autocorrect shouldn’t correct it. Think I’m being picky? That, chances are, Autocorrect is generally correct on that one? Well, Autocorrect doesn’t change “shell” to “she’ll,” so it’s not even consistent. And I’m far more likely to say “hell” on any given day than “shell.” But that’s just me.

Additionally, there’s at least two other words Autocorrect doesn’t recognize as spelled correctly despite their being canonical English curse words. I mean, it’s hard to misspell a four letter word. Yet Autocorrect fails to even recognize these words and primly places a neat red line beneath them. Since this is a family publication, I’ll not post the words here. I’ll let you discover them on your own. Of course, I only discovered them myself while thoroughly researching this article.

Let’s also note that Autocorrect highlighted the word “Bowlderizes” above as a misspelling. Leave my writing the he’ll alone, Autocorrect!

Postscript 10/07/11: With the utmost sincerity: Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs, Visionary

Brooklyn rush hour in an instant. (image via Natalie Rodic)

The Breakdown: Natalie Rodic Marsan tells us why Instagram has been embraced so broadly since its launch less than a year ago. Read on to see why it’s not just about taking compelling photos. >>

Have you tried Instagram yet? I installed the App the first week it launched, and it’s been a gradual progression from dabbling to completely hooked.

At least I know I’m not alone. The sheer numbers of Instagram users and the volume of their posts are phenomenal.  The mobile photo sharing App boasted 100,000 “Mobile Photo Addicts” in less than one week after its public launch in November 2010.  The most recent count is that 1.3 million photos are uploaded every day. Users have shared a whopping total of 150 million photos on the platform in only 9 months.  The top users are garnering enough attention to threaten the world of professional photography. And early adopter businesses, some big names even, are utilizing the App for community building around their own brand. Best practices for business engagement are even emerging. All this for an App that only runs on one operating system: iOS.

For all its success, Instagram is not an isolated case. It belongs to a new, exploding category of Applications focused on mobile photography and mobile photo sharing, which are collectively changing the way we think about photography. With the device we have with us constantly, we can capture quality shots of practically any subject, then choose from a plethora of free or cheap Apps to edit or filter these shots to enhance the feeling of the moment.  These photos can then be shared instantly in any of our social networking sites (and syndicated across platforms if so desired).

It is the next step in the democratization of content. Instagram (also referred to as IG by members) enables anyone to be a content creator, and a narrator of his or her world via images. As we begin to understand and relate to our world increasingly on a visual level, soaking up information by way of data visualization, infographics, and digital images, anyone who chooses to engage can be empowered by this technology.

A Wired article in September 2010 “The Web is Dead” outlined that content distribution and engagement is going, “to simpler, sleeker services that just work”. Why didn’t Flickr, or even Facebook, currently the largest repository of social photos, foster the same kind of rich interaction around images that Instagram has in such a short time? Most likely because of the lack of attention on the mobile user experience, their mobile apps aren’t laser-focused on sharing photos socially, nor do the Apps make it easy to do so. Conversely, Instagram is a singularly-focused service on your iPhone that works well, without endless options to pull you in a million directions and lose focus of what you’re there for — to share images, the context of those images, and to connect with others around the subject  (or even simply the beauty of that content). It is what an IG member and community manager, Rachael King @rachaelgk, called “so peaceful, like the ‘going fishing’ place in Social Media Land”.

There is something unique in this design and intent. Other widely adopted social networks have brought us closer to those we already know (Facebook), or have enabled us to build our professional networks (LinkedIn). Others (like Twitter) have enabled us to find new people who share information we find interesting or helpful. But Instagram is bringing us closer to people all over the world whom we’ve never met, but whose take on the world and aesthetic choices resonates with us. Just as the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch followed bohemian intellectual Hans Jaegger’s advice of discovering and telling the story of his life with his paintings in the mid 19^th century, so is each Instagram user in the 21^st century.

Being the narrator of one’s world through imagery is an intimate experience. Because of this, real life Instagram communities are forming all over the globe. To understand this next step of interaction, the in real life aspect, I attended a NYC Instawalk hosted by Postagram one recent Sunday morning. The group was roughly 20 people of all backgrounds and persuasions, iPhones in hand, and eyes wide open.

Walking from Union Square to the Highline Park, we shot pictures that encapsulated the moment: an elderly lady in a walker skillfully navigating her way through our swarm, reflections in windows, other Instagrammers taking photos. We shared knowledge on photo editing Apps, and got to know one another. The saying that you belong to New York in five minutes as much as you do in five years could also be true about Instagram. To have an active account on Instagram, and to be at this event is immediate inclusiveness.

Seeing this thriving community in real life hit home the raison d’etre of Instagram. The proliferation of this mobile photo App and the focused slick mobile interface has created grounds for creating great content and human interaction. The unprecedented rate of adoption, the popularity factor, is impressive – it proves something is working. But ultimately all this exists for an unquantifiable next step:  the fostering of community and relationships. The IG community is one any community builder emulates. And it is only getting started.

Natalie is Founder of Broken Open Media, where she consults on building communities and creating social media strategies. She is currently managing the Razorfish Idea Tank community amongst others. She can be found on Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr as @rodicka.

Keeping an eye on content across the pond.  (image via Maurice)

Content Strategy has gone global. Forget what you’ve heard about CS being an insular, monkish profession. In this second-annual forum, content strategy moved from Paris to London, and, as we found out at the conference, will be landing in Cape Town, South Africa for its next stop. Three cheers to the three organizers of the conference for advancing the practice and maintaining the momentum.

CS forums tend to be states of the state, a reflective look at the condition of the discipline and, as is customary, a reading of the entrails for an incarnation of the future. This forum was no different. There were attendees and speakers from 20 countries and 5 continents (although most of the speakers came from the USA and the UK), addressing a range of topics (although not as wide as could have been hoped for). Rather than give an encapsulation of the talks here, I will direct people to Martin Belam’s nice summary of the conference.

Recurrent and familiar themes about the nature, problems, and purpose of content strategy surfaced at the conference, which prompts me to do some list-making. But not to making a list of the themes. I think these themes are increasingly becoming well worn, and maybe it’s time to instead set them aside and agree that there are a set of commonly accepted mandates for content strategy. We don’t need more convincing about them, we need more beautiful examples of them in practice.

So here’s what I might call a social contract of sorts for content strategists, a set of things we can all pretty much agree on. I don’t imagine there will be much controversy. These are some of the principles that I heard underpinning many if not all of the talks.

Let’s agree that

• Content should be flexible, nimble, portable, reusable, untethered (choose your version of “free”).
• Content should be separated from presentation
• Content should be created once and published everywhere (“COPE”)
• Metadata is sublime, hot, necessary
• CMS are our friends
• Content Strategists are, in fact, respected and appreciated
• Labels matter—we get around and by with words, especially nice sounding, intuitive and informative words
• Content Strategy is interdisciplinary with porous boundaries
• Content Strategy is not emerging; it has emerged

With 39 speakers there were bound to be some memorable quotes. These should keep the CS fires burning for some time:

• The web is built around people. (Is it any wonder that social media arose?)
• Never ignore the CMS.
• The web is becoming apps.
• Metadata is the new art direction.
• Mobile enforces an austerity of purpose.

For all the worldly camaraderie that the gathering conferred upon us all, there was also a noticeable world-weariness. Why all the heavy hearts and anguish? At times, I felt as if I were in an episode of the TV series “Game of Thrones,” a sage of warring Middle Earth tribes.  Sure, some friction exists among disciplines and clients can be wary and retrograde, but it’s a rhetorical extravagance to say that the disciplines are at cross-purposes, or even hostile toward each other, or that clients are still, in 2011, utterly clueless. I’ve seen little evidence in recent memory in interdisciplinary working conditions and client relations to warrant a posture of irritation and deflation about being underdogs and about others not understanding or appreciating us.  Let’s declare the war significantly subsided (or even over) and forge ahead.

Speaking about what lies ahead, I also registered at the forum a heaviness about what we will be asked to face in the years to come. More than a few times, I heard sentiments to the effect that …  “We’re in a stage, a transition. The future is messy, weird. Who knows what devices will exist. It’s hard to predict. It’s getting even harder to predict.” My thinking is, “Isn’t it always hard to predict?” If it were easy to predict, it would be an inevitability that would require no prediction. I say we just move forward and trust our instincts to respond insightfully. Leave some room for invention on our side of the technological divide.

Finally, here’s my hope for the next forum.

We need more inspiration, fewer tactics. We learn tactics on the job in unique contexts. Tactics aren’t readily reusable and aren’t necessarily advisable for application from one project to the next. Let’s include tactics—they have their place at a conference—but spend more time on getting worked up about where content can go. (Who isn’t inspired by thinking of metadata as the new art direction?) Isn’t it time to throw off the heavy lading of both the underappreciated magi and content savior and get inspired? In a casual conversation with a small group of fellow attendees on the streets of London following the second day of the conference, one conference-goer made a brilliant proposal for the next forum’s keynote speaker in Cape Town. “Hey, let’s get Keith Richards.”