As always, Jess/Gene and the gang are hosting CanUX, a Canadian User Experience workshop, Nov 25-27 in Banff. The lineup looks terrific:

• Lou Rosenfeld, founding figure in modern information architecture, author of the best selling Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and publisher at Rosenfeld Media.
• Dave Armano, VP, Experience Design for Critical Mass. An active thought leader in the industry, David authors the popular Logic + Emotion blog currently ranked in the top 20 media + marketing blogs according to Advertising Age.
• Derek Featherstone, leading authority on accessibility and its implications for user experience.
• Gene Smith, author of the definitive book on tagging, coming early 2008 from New Riders, and principal at nForm User Experience.
• The Banff Leadership Arts Ensemble, world-renowned facilitators who work to help executives develop leadership capacity through the combination of the arts, creativity, and leadership principles.
• Kes and Sue Sampanthar, founders of Metamemes, producer of generative thinking tools and experts in moving beyond brainstorming for innovation.
• Jess McMullin, business and design evangelist, advocate for increasing practitioners’ influence in the organizations they serve, CanUX program chair and nForm User Experience founder.
• Brad Nemer, Product Portfolio Manager for Motorola’s Asian 3G business, and pioneer in combining business and design thinking.

If you’re want to find a very inclusive, intensive workshop with the beautiful Canadian Rockies as your inspiration, this should definitely be an event you consider.

I stumbled upon this site about apml a few weeks ago from a post on the Sig-IA mailing list.

When i saw this diagram

I immediately began thinking about how a browse could be created through these interest clouds. If we took the interest clouds and mapped the information to a critical mass of users you could get a collaborative filter that would allow users to browse interest based on their own. If we want to add reputation we could remove anonymity as well (of course this would be voluntary). In essence it would be a creation of Interest networks from ambient attention data. Passive behaviour = a very cool user driven browse.

About a year ago I mentioned that Teehan + Lax started a UX Fund where they invested in stocks they deemed to have good user experiences. Well I’m happy to report the fund is up more than 42%! Of course good UX isn’t the only factor in making these stocks appreciate but when your senior management buys into design and crafting good holistic experiences the outcome is proving to be quite positive for everyone.