Speakers in the News »

11/04/05
LARRY HARVEY

According to Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man and a speaker at the 2001 SXSW Interactive Festival: "Sometimes all you do, as a leader, is pay a great deal of attention to the nature of what the experience evokes, and then you try to articulate it at that moment when they feel it. It's just like a good music track in a movie. A really good music track doesn't tell you what to feel. It expresses what you feel half-a-beat after you felt it.'' Harvey's comments are part of a recent interview posted on the RU Sirius Show. The man behind this site (RU Sirius) spoke at the 1999 SXSW Interactive Festival.

10:16am CST | +

11/03/05
JAMES SUROWIECKI

James Surowiecki writes about the high cost of college textbooks in a short essay in the current issue of the New Yorker: "The average price of a book is around fifty dollars, and many, particularly in the sciences, will run you well over a hundred. A General Accounting Office report released this summer found that, since 1986, prices have risen at a pace of six per cent a year—double the rate of inflation. For critics, such numbers are proof that the publishers are manipulating the market. The dearth of competition in the business is an issue, but the fundamental cause of the price spiral is what economists call an agency problem: professors pick the textbooks, but students have to pay for them. . . When price is no object, professors might as well choose the fanciest textbook around." Author of the book "The Wisdom of Crowds", Surowiecki has confirmed to appear at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

10:18am CST | +

11/02/05
HEATHER ARMSTRONG

Redesigning a popular site is never easy. Just ask 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival Feature Speaker Heather Armstrong, who introduced a new look on her popular blog dooce.com earlier this week. Armstrong explains the rationale behind the changes -- as well as the introduction of advertisements -- in a recent post: "First, I want to say that no one should apologize for their gut reaction to the redesign. All of this feedback is valid. You, my readers, have seen me and supported me through some of the roughest times in my life and the last thing I want to do is alienate you. I understand why some of you are upset about the ads. That being said, I cannot possibly make everyone happy. Some of you want less ads, some of you want a bigger header, some of you want bigger fonts, some of you want smaller fonts. I’ve made a few tweaks to the design according to some of your feedback, and Jon is working on a few more changes as I type this. This design may change over the next few months, but right now we want to see how this works out. We’re working hard to make this the cleanest design possible, a design that will have ads. They aren’t going away. Right now my website is supporting my family. It is feeding us, paying our mortgage and our insurance premiums. I happen to think that this is pretty cool, and I can’t help but believe that this is a good thing for personal websites in general, for people who want to make a living by publishing themselves."

09:55am CST | +

11/01/05
STEVEN JOHNSON

The November issue of Discover Magazine contains an interesting story by Steven Johnson titled "Emerging Technology: E-mail Making You Crazy". One of the keynote speakers at the 1998 SXSW Interactive Festival, Johnson analyzes a study that found that the impact of online activity such as e-mail is far more distracting to one's overall productivity than marijuana usage. He writes, "Researchers drew attention to their study by noting that multitasking is worse for your ability to concentrate than getting stoned. The IQ loss also turns out to be temporary. Remove the multitasking requirement, and test scores jump back to normal. Nonetheless, because the study generated such a buzz, it does tell us something useful—many of us suspect we’re not doing our best thinking in front of a computer screen. We’re worried about what cultural critic David Shenk calls 'data smog' as we wade through e-mail, voice mail, and instant messages, as well as the near-infinite distraction of surfing the World Wide Web. This is the dark side of the connected age: We have vastly more information at our fingertips than ever before but less time to make sense of it."

09:58am CST | +

10/31/05
JONATHAN ABRAMS

Jonathan Abrams

On Friday, Friendster announced plans to add more multimedia functionality to its social software service. According to a report on C/Net, "Friendster's new capabilities, available now, come through a distribution partnership with Grouper Networks, a start-up that specializes in technology for sharing photos and home videos over the Web. After downloading Grouper's free file-sharing software, Friendster members can invite people to view an unlimited number of photos and videos as well as stream music." The C/Net article also notes that this new feature may make this company more relevant to its users: " The multimedia features may also help this Friendster keep members coming back. Out of more than 20 million Friendster members, only about 8 million visit the site at least once a month." Friendster Founder and Chairman Jonathan Abrams (pictured above) served as a keynote speaker at the 2004 SXSW Interactive Festival.