Ignite Show: Kathy Sierra on Feeling Better is Better

If you want to be successful with your customers, you need to make them feel succesful. It's all about them achieving awesome. This week, Kathy Sierra explains some of the secrets for creating passionate customers. This is an area that Kathy knows well. She has classes on the topic around the world and her writings have been read by many.

Kathy is the co-creator O'Reilly's Head First series and, as you'll learn in her talk, she loves horses.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. It was filmed at Google I/O 2009 at the Moscone Center.

Subscribe to this podcast series via iTunes. Or, visit the O'Reilly Media area at iTunes to find other podcasts from O'Reilly.

Ignite Show: Jeff Veen on Great Designers

Good designers copy. Great designers steal.

In this week's Ignite Show Jeff Veen, well-known for his design work on Google Analytics, Wikirank and Typekit, lays out a strong argument for why iPhone imitators are the cargo cults of the digital era. The people building touchscreen knock-offs don't understand what makes the iPhone great. So instead of creating an end-to-end service they attempt to imitate it's flashiest features - kind of like Pacific Islanders who built "planes" out of bamboo.

Wikipedia provides further context for the use of the term cargo cults in this way.

From time to time, the term "cargo cult" is invoked as an English language idiom to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance. The error of logic made by the islanders consisted of mistaking a necessary condition (i.e., building airstrips, control towers, etc.) for cargo to come flying in, for a sufficient condition for cargo to come flying in, thereby reversing the causation. On a lower level, they repeated the same error by e.g. mistaking the necessary condition (i.e. build something that looks like a control tower) for building a control tower, for a sufficient condition for building a control tower.

The inception of cargo cults often is defined as being based on a flawed model of causation, being the confusion between the logical concepts of necessary condition and sufficient condition when aiming to obtain a certain result. Based on this definition, the term "cargo cult" also is used in business and science to refer to a particular type of fallacy whereby ill-considered effort and ceremony take place but go unrewarded due to flawed models of causation as described above. For example, Maoism has been referred to as "cargo cult Marxism"[citation needed], and New Zealand's optimistic adoption of liberal economic policies in the 1980s as "cargo cult capitalism".[citation needed]

This episode of the Ignite Show was filmed at Ignite SF. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

You can see more episodes of the Ignite Show on our site or subscribe in iTunes.

Ignite Show: Anthony Citrano on Money Remixed

Ignite Show Episode 26

This week's Ignite Show veers into the current financial situation of the US. The economy is going off a cliff and financial practices are being, ahem, re-evaluated. Anthony Citrano takes this thinking a step further and ponders what would happen if the US dollar disappeared. He suggests that corporations will end up issuing money (like Kong Bucks in Snow Crash).

Anthony Citrano co-founded Pop!Tech and worked on the Obama campaign. He has written for Consumerist, The Huffington Post, Money, the New York Times, Investor's Business Daily, the Wall Street Journal, WIRED, and his blog, The Cosmic Tap. This talk was filmed by Social Animal and was given at the first ignite LA.

Ignite Show: Restoring the Archimedes Palimpsest by Will Noel

In 1906 a researcher realized that in the 13th century a book of Archimedes' treatises had been over-written with prayers. Almost a century later the original manuscript was recovered through the high-tech efforts of Dr. Will Noel. In this Ignite talk he shares the secrets of the Palimpsest and the technology used to uncover them.

As described on the Archimedes Palimpsest on Wikipedia:

Archimedes lived in the third century BC, but the copy of his work was made in the tenth century AD by an anonymous scribe. In the twelfth century the codex was unbound and washed, in order that the parchment leaves could be folded in half and reused for a Christian liturgical text. It was a book of nearly 90 pages before being made a palimpsest of 177 pages; the older leaves folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book. The erasure was incomplete, and Archimedes' work is now readable after scientific and scholarly work from 1998 to 2008 using digital processing of images produced by ultraviolet, infrared, visible and raking light, and X-ray.

In 1906 it was briefly inspected in Constantinople (now Istanbul) by the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg. With the aid of black-and-white photographs he arranged to have taken, he published a transcription of the Archimedes' text. Shortly thereafter Archimedes' Greek text was translated into English by Thomas Heath. Before that it was not widely known among mathematicians, physicists, or historians. It contains:

• "Equilibrium of Planes"
• "Spiral Lines"
• "Measurement of a Circle"
• "On the Sphere and Cylinder"
• "On Floating Bodies" (only known copy in Greek)
• "The Method of Mechanical Theorems" (only known copy)
• "Stomachion" (only known copy)

The palimpsest also contains speeches by the fourth century BC politician Hypereides, a commentary on Aristotle's Categories by Alexander of Aphrodisias, and other works.

The Palimpsest has been made available online at http://archimedespalimpsest.net/. There is more information on the project at http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/.

This talk was filmed at Ignite Baltimore 3. It is available on iTunes.

Ignite Show: Monica Guzman on Being an Awesome News Commenter

This week's Ignite Show features Seattle PI reporter Monica Guzman. She's spent most of her career writing for online properties and she's been able to watch learn what makes for a good conversation around a news item. As someone who also spends a lot of time publishing content online I can appreciate Monica's thoughts on good commenters and hearing some of what she deals with makes me very appreciative of our readers and how you add to the conversations on our site.

The Ignite Show is also available on iTunes.

It's Really Just a Series of Tubes

Molly Wright Steenson hit the Ignite jackpot at Etech this year with her explanation of the steam powered network of pneumatic tubes of the 1800s. If you're someone that, like me, has a somewhat obsessive relationship with Internet Infrastructure, you must watch this talk.

Ignite Show: Dr. Jayson Falkner on DNA Science, It Works!

At Ignite Portland #5, Dr. Jayson Falkner explained the latest in DNA Science, how its effected human evolution and what it's doing to our society. We've cleaned it up and put it into Episode 6 of the Ignite Show. The title is a tribute to the classic XKCD cartoon "Science! It Works....".

The Ignite Show will feature a different speaker every Tuesday for free. It's available on YouTube (user: Ignite), on our Ignite site and via iTunes. It is being released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Ignite Show: Andrew Schneider, Experimental Performance Devices

This week's Ignite Show features Andrew Schneider, a performance artist, and his DIY experimental performance devices, but first a cupcake decorating contest. If you're at ETech this is a preview for his performance tonight with Zoë Keating before the ETech Fest. The cupcake decorating contest and Andrew's talk were filmed at Ignite NYC II.

The Ignite Show will feature a different speaker every Tuesday for free. It's available on YouTube (user: Ignite), on our Ignite site and via iTunes. It is being released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.