Kathy Sierra writes that, “Ten years ago, if you’d told me I’d one day need a manual to use my car radio, that would have been inconceivable. All I want to do is find a frickin’ radio station! […] What if instead of adding new features, a company concentrated on making the service or product much easier to use? Or making it much easier to access the advanced features it already has, but that few can master?”

She goes on to construct a simple graph, which she calls the “featuritis curve.” John Gruber thinks Apple is on the right part of Sierra’s curve with the iPod, and is trying to stay there: “the major reason behind the iPod’s success [is] not because it has a lot of buttons, but because it only has a few, and they feel good when you press them.”

Digital Web magazine has published an overview of the basic principles of design. Author Joshua David McClurg-Genevese writes that “any good discussion about design begins with the fundamentals. Almost by definition, the primary tenets around which any field is based are universal: they can be applied to a variety of disciplines in a variety of ways. This can cause some confusion as principle is put into practice within the unique constraints of a particular medium”—web design, in this case.

Years ago, Adam Curry was an MTV veejay, who registered the mtv.com domain before the network even understood what was going on with the Web. More recently, he helped co-invent podcasting, and he gave the closing keynote for Gnomedex. Here are the live notes…

• This is a Daily Source Code Episode #200 podcast recording (MP3 file).
• The background music is immensely annoying while he’s talking.
• Still, the Jimmy James mashup of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band-Paradise City was groovy.
• Look at all the technical stuff in here.
• What message should we be sending to the world from Gnomedex?
• We want to take back our media, to put it back into our hearts.
• Our free love is free information.
• Bring in our audience.
• Podcasting came about as a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup event — chocolate + peanut butter.
• The magic came about when Adam became a developer and Dave Winer became a user.
• Wanting to listen to Dave’s recordings, Adam built a piece to get the files automatically on his iPod.
• Look at the RSS feed with an enclosure and put it on my iPod.
• Adam figured out how to writer.
• Users and developers partying together.
• Developers having user experience, and users having developer experiences.
• Developing is hard work.
• It’s an art form.
• The easy stuff comes last.
• Big companies can be very helpful if we can guide them the right way.
• RSS built into Windows? Podcasting built into iTunes? Who would have imagined that a year ago?
• Power of subscription is changing anything.
• This is mainstream media’s dream.
• We need to fix a few things:
  1. One-click subscriptions need to work now! (Applause.)
  2. Metadata — lots of good work going on, new namespaces, attention.xml, but we need more.
  3. Bandwidth issues. BitTorrent is the way to go now. (Applause.) Otherwise experiences will degrade quickly.
  4. Take the music industry back into our hearts.
• If you’re talented, you can produce the same results as Mick Jagger (who uses GarageBand) or whoever.
• Sales and distribution are no problem.
• Radio remains the promotion mechanism for the traditional industry.
• Picking the hits is just repetition.
• Now podcasters are listening to each other.

Derek K. Miller is Navarik’s Communications Manager. He’s covering the Gnomedex conference in Seattle by posting entries to this weblog.

How the law applies to blogs, RSS, websites, and the new digital environment is an ever-changing set of questions and answers. Denise Howell (lawyer), Buzz Bruggeman (lawyer), and Jason Calacanis (lawyer-baiter from Weblogs Inc.) had a big talk about it at Gnomedex. Here are the live notes…

• Buzz spent 30 years studying law.
• Denise is an IP/appelate lawyer.
• Legal briefs are like applications that build the common law.
• Beta testers are appelate courts.
• Supreme Court justices use the Internet to do research.
• Buzz: The law is not static, but dynamic.
• Many lawyers blog.
• Blogs have been cited in Supreme Court opinions.
• If you’re involved in building companies, what do you need to know?
• How has legal information been processed, and how is that changing?
• Westlaw and Lexis cost lots of money.
• What we’re seeing as lawyers now is that people can access the information.
• Jason from Weblogs Inc. — deals with a lot of legal issues.
• You can impact the way the law is executed.
• What’s fair use for bloggers? Trade secrets? Picking your fights?
• When PT is working for you, you get sued every two weeks. Now he’s at Make.
• Blogging contracts.
• PatentMojo.com - monitor patents being applied for.
• Microsofties are not supposed to look at other people’s patents, which seems odd.
• Blogs are starting to take on a serious presence in the legal field.
• Locked-up information is starting to come out from behind the law firms’ firewalls.
• Lawyers are routing around traditional PR and communications.
• http://del.icio.us/tag/lawnow tag.
• If you incorporate as a blogger, that might help you.
• You need to force lawyers to file papers, which is a good way to test that you’re serious.
• Then you can acquiesce, which made them do work for nothing. :P)
• Lawyers hate discussing it — so ask them why.
• Put three or four days (and I’ll talk to my counsel, NYT, and EFF, etc.).
• Materials that were formerly uniquely available to lawyers are now becoming more widely available.
• Jason is a warrior on the front lines of participatory law.
• Disputes are no longer hidden, and people know about them.
• Publish letters from the lawyers.
• Phone numbers and addresses are published.
• Blogs are great at sticking to your guns and having the truth come out, whether you’re wrong or right.
• Unless you absolutely know something, say how you know stuff. Alleged, claims, this looks fake.
• Basically you have to be good, and not be a liar.
• EFF has published a valuable legal guide for bloggers.
• Would you hire a lawyer based on his or her blog?
• Blogging lawyers are serving the community.
• A good way to find a lawyer.
• Try to turn lawyers into human beings again.
• Talk about stuff beyond legal issues, and maybe that will sidestep the whole problem.
• Lawyers for publicly traded companies don’t seem to blog.
• Alex at Google does.
• Jason is really fond of hanging up on lawyers.
• Don’t get scared when you get letters. Talk to them, post the letter on your site and blog.
• If you’re starting something, “let’s talk about what happens if this doesn’t work out.”
• Sort of a pre-nup conversation before legals get in.
• Plain English bullet points one-on-one in email or whatever.
• This is what we’re doing pending legal discussion, we’re not going to debate these things.
• Initial each bullet point, sign, fax it and mail it back and forth.
• Don’t do business deals without all this stuff in writing.
• Do it right in a single, signed document, or don’t do it.
• Let’s make legislators available online for free with an iShight and Skype.
• How do you put music into podcasts legally?
• Is there any sense being made of all this?
• People want to be legal, what can we tell them?
• Jason: What percentage are you using? Are you confusing the public? Are you infringing on their ability to make money?
• Talk to people and communicate, be aware and talk about what’s fair.
• Wikipedia has a great section on fair use.
• Ourmedia has a good guideline too.
• It’s very case-by-case. Keep the percentage down to only what you need.
• Put yourself in their position.
• Thumbnail images are okay, by the way.

Derek K. Miller is Navarik’s Communications Manager. He’s covering the Gnomedex conference in Seattle by posting entries to this weblog.

Bob Wyman from PubSub, Mark Fletcher from Bloglines, and Scott Rafer from Feedster spoke at Gnomedex this morning about “tomorrow’s RSS.” Here are the live notes…

• How will RSS evolve?
• Scott: RSS hasn’t evolved as much as he thought.
• Not as many namespace extensions, etc. as he expected.
• Now that it’s turning into a real business, so only large economics can change it much.
• RSS-only publications might be one of those.
• RSS on mobile phones.
• Mark: Agree with Scott — not as much innovation as expected.
• Not that surprising or worrying, though.
• Enabling “universal inbox” — any type of information.
• Looking forward to it creeping in all sorts of places — flight status notifications, package tracking, jobs, etc.
• Bob: RSS isn’t just for text anymore.
• Airport status, earthquakes, SEC filings, etc.
• Structured data syndication.
• An important change in the environment.
• Publish events that can be easily distributed.
• The future of RSS is Atom via IETF etc.
• All aggregators read all formats, so legacy formats will deprecate.
• Mark: Parsers are remarkably liberal, and there is so much momentum behind RSS that it’s unlikely to get into a single standard.
• Neither does it matter.
• Scott: We’ll go where users ask us to.
• Bob: Why is Atom the future? It’s more flexible and has more variety using the standard rather than using proprietary extensions to RSS.
• Better internationalization, dates, signatures, etc.
• No one will stop supporting all formats.
• There is no need to publish feeds in a whole bunch of different formats — pick one, since otherwise it confuses users and aggregators.
• Whatever format you publish in, people will read it.
• Use whatever format gives you the best ability to publish what you want clearly.
• Good Freudian slip from Bob: “aggravators” instead of “aggregators.”
• Dave Winer: It’s just Postel’s law, but we should be conservative in what we send as a collective too.
• Bob agrees with the Postel’s law approach, but not with the collective approach. Still, the format debate is a techie thing, but there must be more interesting questions.
• Advertising in RSS: it’s like the Internet in ‘96.
• What do we do with a subscriber mindset, rather than a browser or searcher?
• It’s a different approach for advertising, but there are still a lot of similarities.
• It’s not solved yet, and there will be several different models for content producers.
• NYT does excerpts to bring people to the website.
• Others publish full feeds to show their expertise.
• There is no one right answer.
• We need to have advertising in feeds, especially since intermediary services need ways to make money.
• Help figure out how to do advertising so that it doesn’t ruin the user experience.
• Otherwise either users or publishers will have to pay, which is a dreadful solution.
• Would the three reps onstage do things the same way if they were to start only?
• Feedster: yes. But we’d wait to introduce the ads for a bit.
• Mark would change the name. “Proven time and again that I don’t know how to name things.”
• Bob would have done it sooner.
• Consulting on something similar in 1978 for the CIA.
• Did it again in the early ’80s at Digital with a predecessor for Lotus Notes.
• Waiting for the network to be ready for Internet-scale publish and subscribe.
• It is a publish-and-subscribe system, and should have started 6 or 8 months earlier.
• This is the next decade of computing — ’70s and ’80s was messaging, ’80s and ’90s was request-response.
• Now it’s publish and subscribe — one request, multiple responses.
• This will define the next 10 years.
• Argh, the words “monetize” and “sticky” are appearing again.
• We’re not early adopters, we’re the lunatic fringe at Gnomedex.
• Corporations are really nervous about things that are free.
• “It’s nice that it’s free, but please let us pay for quality of service.”
• Mark: Could feed providers charge for subscriptions via PayPal etc.?
• Not really a good business model.
• We need help from the user community, because we haven’t figured it out.
• If we don’t have the advertising, someone else will have to write the cheques.
• Dave Winer: I seek out so much commercial information — new things to buy, restaurant to eat at, etc.
• It should be marketing, rather than advertising.
• Feeds about products and services that I want.
• Newspapers are basically streams of advertising, and putting in more is just a distraction.
• Users don’t want to be experimented with.
• Bob: But that hasn’t translated into reality, which doesn’t work with intermediaries.
• We have a valuable role to pay– I mean play, and we need to find a way to get compensated for it.
• Will anyone opt in to advertising?
• What about those catalogues you order?
• It is happening, but can these intermediaries get anything from it?

Derek K. Miller is Navarik’s Communications Manager. He’s covering the Gnomedex conference in Seattle by posting entries to this weblog.