BlogSchmog | We live as if the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be.

One of the goodies in the tote bags for CHI 2007 this year is a series of seven cardboard cut-out personas by Cisco. They include:

• Eagle-Eye Ed, Systems Engineer (Reseller)
• Keep His Cool Kumar, Network Engineer (Reseller)
• Motivated Mitch, Technician (Reseller)
• Supporting Sam, Outsourced TAC (Reseller)
• Multitasking Millie, Office Manager (Customer)
• No Lunch Nancy, Network Technician (Customer)
• Value-Oriented Vince, Director of IT (Customer)

The SV lounge is starting to grow a small army of persona people. Some of us have visions of assembling three hundred of them to stage a reenactment of the Persian battle with the Spartans near the entrance to the San Jose Ballroom. Mostly, though, we are searching for the CHI equivalent of the Wonka Golden Ticket: Value-Oriented Vince. So far, Vince is MIA, leading to speculation that Cisco only made six as a contest for a tour of the big factory.

I signed up yesterday to fulfill my SV duties by sitting near a camera for another 10 hours as part of an experimental effort to archive ACM conferences. Scooter Morris, the head tech honcho for CHI, is on a committee to explore adding archival video to the ACM library. The organization will be trying to capture several sessions and a few courses this week, digitizing both the video of the speaker and the VGA feed for the slides. The idea is that a search of the ACM library online will not only point to a PDF but also to streamed video files showing synchronized presentation and speaker. What makes this particularly cool is that Eli Blevis’ talk on Tuesday and the entire Student Design Competition are scheduled to be captured. Someone just traded time slots with me, so I’ll be at an Intro to CSCW course tonight and free to enjoy the non-Eli part of the day Tuesday.