At IDEA2009, Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone, authors of the forthcoming book “Designing Social Interfaces”, gave an overview of some key steps and design patterns that can be used when creating social software or sites.

Christian started by reiterating that social experience design is about the interaction between people rather than the interface between the human and the computer – and that while you can fairly well control one person’s experience with a system, you cannot predict or control how people will choose to interact with each other.

As such, when you design a social experience, all you can really do is provide a framework. You can set the basic rules and capabilities, but the participants will finish the design for you.

Five steps of social experience design

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Today Leisa Reichelt gave a presentation to IDEA2009 on her experiences running the Drupal 7 user experience project. She shared insights she had learned about how to design in an open way with a highly distributed team, such as using video missives such as the “We Need You” video to communicate with developers.

One of the biggest challenges she said she faced was that the project was designed by developers with other developers in mind, even though there were two key groups of users that were alienated by the product. They could not engage with strategy statements or goal descriptions.
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Today saw the IDEA2009 Social Experience Design Conference kick off in Toronto. Luke Wroblewski, Director of “Product Ideation & Design” at Yahoo, gave the first session, where he presented the results of a number of different pieces of research which showed that the way social interactions and relationships are modeled can have a large effect on the way that people behave online. He also uncovered some interesting facts along the way about which types of social model generate the most active users, and what factors influence user behaviour.

He divided social sites into five types of social model:
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Clouds are transforming IT; that’s not news. But regardless of your cloud computing agenda, clouds are already affecting your IT plans, because they give you a cudgel with which to bludgeon traditional software and infrastructure providers.

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Techweb — the folks behind Interop — are launching what promises to be the definitive cloud computing conference. It’s called Cloud Connect, and while it’s still half a year away, we’re hard at work on content and scheduling.

There have been lots of cloud-specific events. But as clouds become an IT reality, the industry needs to focus on specific aspects of utility computing: performance, availability, scalability, and security, for example.

Cloud Connect will have tracks for cloud providers, CIOs and architects, developers, and operators. We’ve assembled around 40 experts to help guide the content (affectionately dubbed the Cloud Crowd) and we’ll be announcing more details soon.

The Israeli Association of Grid Technologies (IGT) puts on a conference in Israel focused on grids, virtualization, and cloud computing. It’s a vendor-neutral organization supported by the Magnet program of the Israeli Chief Scientist.

We’re headed to IGT2009, and will be putting on content with the other organizers and participants. 2008’s conference had all the big names in cloud computing, and IGT09 is expecting over 600 attendees this year.

O’Reilly is the go-to reference for technology (we’re a bit biased, of course) and the Web2 conferences are no exception. Web2Summit is the blue-sky event that talks about what’s possible on the Internet, leaving the attendees and sessions of Web2Expo to figure out how.
We’ll be running a day-long session on web monitoring, with a particular focus on how to tie social media tracking systems back to outcomes in analytics.

We did an overview of Complete Web Monitoring at the spring Web2Expo, and this one will borrow from that, but also add a lot from the discussions we’ve had with various startups and vendors since that time.

This five-day conference bills itself as the IT industry’s largest event, and that’s no exaggeration — it brings together networking, computer, storage, security, and a variety of other disciplines under one roof. We’ve worked with Interop over the years on a wide range of topics, from performance to data centers to clouds. This time, Bitcurrent is coordinating the cloud content, including a one-day reprise of May’s Enterprise Cloud Summit and two days of cloud computing content in the general conference track.

One of the changes we’ll be seeing is a shift from the theoretical to the practical. Last year, clouds were still largely a “what if?” discussion; now, they’re real. There are lots of case studies and lessons learned — both real and painful.

Interesting fact: Interop’s the only event with its own Class A netblock (45.0.0.0 – 45.255.255.255). Hard to argue with that.

We’re going overseas! As part of a seminar with Dutch web optimization outfit Measureworks, we’ll be visiting some startups and enterprises in Holland. We’ll be presenting our findings on performance, analytics, and online effectiveness gained with Strangeloop, and we’ll be joined by folks from Oracle, ING, and other web experts in the Netherlands.

The session runs on November 12 from 8AM to 1PM.

Bitcurrent’s annual conference on Interesting happens on Hallowe’en this year, at a shuttered lakeside summer camp with no phones or Internet. Sound terrifying? Only if eclectic presenters and the rapid-fire exchange of ideas — mixed with not a little beer — scares you.

Bitnorth is TED-meets-Barcamp, with uncomfy beds and cafeteria food. It’s also a lot of fun. For more details, check out the Bitnorth website.