I’m not really sure what I’ve got myself into. Feeling a little pressured by the fact tickets were being reserved for both girl geeks and those who hadn’t attended a BarCamp before, I haphazardly signed up to attend BarCamp Brighton 3, which is being held at Sussex University on the 6th–7th September. (It is just after dConstruct, which I’m also attending – I’m hoping to glean some presentation skills from the excellent speakers.) Tickets for BarCamp Brighton 3 sold out within 10 minutes, which, of course, made me feel lucky and compelled to actually go.

I know it’s “just” a BarCamp, but I can’t help wondering what the hell I’m doing. Public speaking was something I despised at school and university, and generally I tried my utmost to avoid it. In fact, public speaking and exercise were my two least favourite things. In some grand twist of irony, I now visit a gym three times a week (paying an obscene fee to do so), and I’m attending a BarCamp – voluntarily!

So, I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to talk about. Typography was my specialism at university, and I know a fair amount about how typography works (mainly in print), and, of course, the history of typography. What interests me most about typography is printing. There are obvious parallels with printing and with the web: both deal with the dissemination of information, with literacy, and the flow and sharing of ideas. I wrote my dissertation on the history of the broadside ballad, which was the first low-level way of communicating thought through cheap print. I can’t imagine having written about anything that is more meaningful to me.

I’m going to use a blog post I wrote a few months ago on ‘Twitter and the Crystal Goblet’ as a starting point, and come up with a twenty-minute presentation on transparency in mobile experience design. That way, I’ll usefully combine my three loves: typography, experience design, and mobile. Oh: and Twitter. (I’m also contemplating calling the presentation what dead typographers can teach us about designing for delightful mobile experiences.)

Thoughts welcome. Presentation tips very welcome.

I just discovered Adaptive Path’s blog, which has some really good stuff. Chiara Fox wrote a post on The 5 Senses on Twitter, and discovered (through Twist) that it’s sight that is reported more often than the other human senses on Twitter.

That’s so strange to me. It’s understandable not everyone wants to report the texture of their sandwich, or the smell in their office. Hearing and seeing, if not smelling and touching, are quite central to interesting human experiences that other people can relate to, so I would’ve expected they’d be closely correlated on a graph.

Perhaps it’s a translation problem: Twitter slang includes “OH” which stands for “overheard”. So the word “OH” would be more common than “hear”.

So here’s the original graph showing a comparison of “smell, taste, see, hear, touch”, and here’s a graph showing “hear” replaced with “OH”. Considerably closer. I wonder if there’s slang for the other senses reported on Twitter? Here’s taste replaced with lunch.

Can you see what it is?

The hanging comma, like an unfinished sentence, interrupted by the tiny portrait picture. It annoys me every time I see it.

Hi,

Effective in poetry, but bad in graphic design.

Twitter is the closest thing I’ve seen to the “crystal goblet” idea applied to social networking. ‘The Crystal Goblet’ was an essay on printing by Beatrice Warde which discusses the idea that printing should be invisible; that printed words should do their best to communicate the information instead of standing in the way of it, so that the “vintage of the human mind” isn’t spoiled by swirling ampersands and looping descenders.

Ideas printed in a book and means of networking with people online are entirely different things, but I really like the idea that some of the principles in Warde’s essay could be applied to social networking. Most basically, online services should be as transparent and camouflaged to human need as much as possible. Search is a good example: Google has become like the Helvetica of the internet.

Twitter’s character limitation has endowed each character you type into the box with extra value, as there are only 140 you could use. Twitter is naturally integrated into life, being very location-centric. In the past week I could have joined a friend in a cafe, an impromptu picnic, or a party, based on information shared on Twitter. Twitter is basically transparent to conversation, limited to 140 characters. 140 characters is the perfect length: long enough for a sentence or a question, and anything longer belongs somewhere else (which is why Twitter hasn’t completely replaced my need to blog).

The social dynamics are different from instant message, if you bring followers into consideration. It’s a hybrid forum-im-social network, which gives it a lot of power, and a lot of potential. The main problem for Twitter is that at the moment it seems to appeal mainly to geeks, while Facebook has wide appeal for everyone. Maybe it’ll take longer for its appeal to spread, and it’s still in an early adoption period…