Innovators in information services are creating fun and useful products, but in doing so, they often employ data for new and unforeseen uses, sometimes with dramatic effects for personal privacy. Increased access to information combined with aggregation and analytics tools may out individuals who thought they were anonymous, making an ill-considered comment on a blog or a photo from a party part of one's permanent record. Some commentators have argued that increased access and aggregation will create more transparency, and perhaps tolerance for mistakes; others warn of a scarlet-letter society where individuals are less free to express themselves for fear of future consequences, or for fear of stalking or unwanted attention. Federal, state, and private-sector approaches are underway to address unwanted consequences of access and aggregation, but technology seems to always outpace their efforts. Can information services be designed to avoid the creation of a permanent record, or will law intervene to protect individuals from their own digital droppings?

Guest Lecturer: Chris Jay Hoofnagle of Senior Staff Attorney, Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic

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Three major industry trends lead to a significant shift in how people connect with each other: Online social communities like MySpace and Facebook witness a huge rise, the volume of user generated content continues to expand at a rapid pace and powerful new mobile services are allowing people to leave the confines of their personal computers. Daniel will talk about the challenges, ideas and solutions to integrate these movements into one application.

Guest Lecturer: Daniel Graf of kyte.tv

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This talk discusses how traditional approaches to run an information service company need to be enhanced. Running an information service requires new skills and definitions when looking at the traditional four components: financial, customers, products/services, innovation and talents management. This talk also touches on the need for new knowledge and training for the workforce from all disciplines such as PR/marketing, engineering, sales, service delivery, etc. to support an information service company.

Guest Lecturer: Ly H. T. Pham of CEO, Mobiscale

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In this age where QWERTY communication and point-and-click are implied when I say social networking, face to face can sometimes seem like an inappropriate intrusion and unnecessary add-on — certainly something that we don't need to design for when we outline our services. I will describe a series of studies we did where we blurred boundaries between online and physical space social networking using desktop, personal device and public screen displays, and recent work on the move from online socializing to offline meeting among internet daters. I will use these studies to highlight the omissions in our design reasoning and concomitant surprises. I will more generally speculate on some issues that arise when we extrapolate tacit or explicit metaphors of online sociality to the offline world, and vice versa.

Guest Lecturer: Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo! Research

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Lab-based user testing for Web site usability is one of most useful tools in the User Experience (UX) methodological toolbox. But is it always the best choice for researching Web sites? I will discuss how user research tools have changed over the last few years in response to the maturation of new facilitation technologies like browser-based screensharing and large sample remote methods. Then we will look at some comparisons between lab studies and remote studies we have conducted. The spoiler is that remote testing has developed into a strong alternative to traditional lab research for virtually all research questions about Web, software, and vide game experiences: it is all about accuracy, cost, speed, and logistics, and the mighty native environment factor. I will be detailing our methodology at a successful (and lab-less) UX research firm, along with a breakdown of the new internet-savvy tools that make remote research such a joy.

Guest Lecturer: Nate Bolt of Bolt | Peters

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Like so many other parts of the Web, online educational systems are rapidly evolving from relatively static repositories towards a dynamic systems that encourages sharing, innovation, and highly customized learning experiences. This new digital space is facilitating a paradigm shift in educational practice, towards a global open education commons. The fundamental premise for this open-education movement is that access to educational opportunities is a human right, not a privilege. This movement is evolving in parallel with the internet generally, as seen in the recent explosion of social networking sites. However, this transition is just beginning, and is not at all assured. Different definitions of open abound, and different legal and technical platforms threaten to undermine the capacity of users to achieve the promised goals. In this presentation, I will describe these threats in greater detail, focusing primarily on the current lack of interoperability among supposedly synergistic efforts, and the resulting burden on service designs. I will also discuss some possible resolutions to these issues, highlighting the work of ccLearn in this area.

Guest Lecturer: Ahrash Bissell of Executive Director, ccLearn (Creative Commons)

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Wikipedia has led the way with a collectively edited repository of human-readable information. Freebase seeks to do the same for machine-readable data, as a massive knowledge database compiled from many sources that is built by a user community and made freely available to the world via an open API. Freebase is based on a graph data store that contains several million entities spanning such diverse domains as people, places, business, entertainment, consumer products and science. The biggest challenge of such an audacious goal is achieving a critical mass of data through automated data extraction and by building a large community of contributors.

Guest Lecturer: Robert Cook of Metaweb

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Guest Lecturer: Virgil Griffith of Santa Fe Institute

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MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. MyLifeBits is both an experiment in lifetime storage and a software research effort. As an experiment, Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio. In this talk, we will demonstrate the software we have developed for MyLifeBits, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and Web browser integration. It includes tools to record Web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam output. www.mylifebits.com has more information.

Guest Lecturer: Jim Gemmell of Microsoft Research Next Media

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Guest Lecturer: Jay Trimble of NASA Ames Research Center

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