Speakers in the News »

3/31/06
MEG HOURIHAN

A belated congratulations to uber-bloggers Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan (pictured above), who were married last weekend in New York. According to Rebecca Mead's story in the November 13, 2000 edition of the New Yorker, the two initially met at the 2000 SXSW Interactive Festival. See various photos of the ceremony, which was attended by a sizable delegation of web luminaries including Matthew Howie, Caterina Fake and Lane Becker. In their first week of marital bliss, the newlyweds have explored new ways to make use of the trunk-space in their compact car . Kottke served as a keynote speaker at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival, while Hourihan was a speaker at the 2002 event.

12:33pm CST | +

3/30/06
MARKOS ZUNIGA

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga

In Wednesday's edition of Salon, Scott Rosenberg writes about two new books written by political bloggers: "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths" and "Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. His review of the second book ultimately re-affirms the importance of personal publishing in shaping our nation's future: "So what should Democrats stand for? What's the banner under which the disparate elements can unite? That's a complicated question, but in addressing it, 'Crashing the Gates' never gets past clearing its throat. There's a lot of repetition of terms like 'people-powered' and 'progressive.' There are love letters to a handful of candidates, like Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer and former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner (whose presidential campaign Armstrong is now advising). There's talk of Democratic reformation, and cleaning house, and generational change . . . The political savvy in 'Crashing the Gate' is considerable. Anyone responsible for building a Web site as popular and loyalty-commanding as Daily Kos is clearly capable of inspiring people -- and organizing them. But for inspiration, I won't reread "Crashing the Gate"; I'll look to what I find on Daily Kos itself -- the continued ferment of ideas and conversation, of quick-hit updates and long-term thinking in post-by-post bursts of anger and triumph and head-scratching. I'm not sure what gate it is that Moulitsas and Armstrong think they need to crash: With their Web sites, they've already got the keys to the future." As noted in Reynolds' essay, the authors of "Crashing the Gate" are Jerome Armstrong of MyDD and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (pictured above) of Daily Kos. Zuniga spoke on the "Revenge of the Blogs: Election 2008" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

10:34am CST | +

3/29/06
MARK WALLACE

"Just like any community newspaper, the Herald has a duty to serve its readers," writes Mark Wallace in a story about the virtual newspaper the Second Life Herald that appears in the April issue of Wired Magazine. "Roaming an unremarkable neighborhood one night, I met a woman who said that she and her online boyfriend were being harassed by their neighbors. When I published my account of the nearby complex of gleaming mech suits, autoturrets, and other war machines trained on whoever happened to cross their sights, an organized vigilante group soon ran the offenders off." Wallace, who is co-author of the new book "Only a Game: Online Worlds and the Virtual Journalist Who Knew Too Much" spoke on the "Secret Sex Lives of Video Games" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival. He also participated in a book-reading at the first-ever ScreenBurn Beta Festival.

11:06am CST | +

3/28/06
CATERINA FAKE

Caterina Fake

"Putting the We in Web " is the headline for the cover story of the April 3 issue of Newsweek. When not hyping the Web 2.0 bubble, co-authors Steven Levy and Brad Stone correctly reveal that the heart of the current Internet re-boom is community and usability, "What makes the Web alive is, quite simply, us. Our presence, most often conducted at the speed of broadband, is constant and mandatory. Thanks to our activity, the Web has replaced phone books, and is in the process of replacing phones. It's the place that answers our questions in four tenths of a second and ships us funny clips that mix the 'Back to the Future' guys with the 'Brokeback Mountain' soundtrack. It's the main news source for the non-arthritic population, and a megaphone for those who make their own media. As we keep offloading our activities to the Web and adding previously unmanageable or unthinkable new pursuits, it's fair to say that our everyday exist-ence is a network effect. That has made some splendid opportunities for smart, nimble new companies, and threatened the existence of old ones now afloat in the mainstream." The Newsweek article features several former SXSW Interactive Festival speakers including Tom Anderson (MySpace), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Caterina Fake (Flickr; pictured above), Mary Hodder (Dabble), Craig Newmark (craigslist), Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us) and James Surowiecki (author).

11:01am CST | +

3/27/06
PHILLIP TORRONE

Phillip Torrone

Who cares is the plastic in your wallet can earn you frequent flyer miles? Writing on the MAKE blog, Phil Torrone says that the credit cards of tomorrow will be geared towards real rewards from virtual worlds. "We're a nation obsessed with credit cards," he writes. "Seriously. Credit card companies and retailers all offer some form of loyalty program to commit to and encourage us to spend more of our hard earned dollars. Airlines pioneered these loyalty programs, convincing us to stick to a single carrier, and then rewarding with upgrades and travel. A company will do whatever it can to keep the churn down and spending high. . . .It's not a matter of if, just when - credit card companies, Pay Pal, Amazon, eBay and the individual 'gaming' companies eventually bridge the real and virtual currencies with loyalty programs and private label credit cards - there's too much money out there to -not- to do this. This 'demographic' is the battleground. The more you spend, the more you earn, sorta. Virtual $ isn't a crappy electronics doo-dad, it's just a number in a computer. Maybe you'll get some discounted airline tickets when you hit level 60 too, you deserve it! Earn your way to a new graphics card, why not." Torrone spoke on the "DIY Media" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival. He also made headlines during his visit in Austin by steering his remote control Roomba robotic device through early morning Sixth Street traffic.

2:24pm CST | +

3/25/06
FRANCIS PREVE

Francis Preve (pictured above) talks about using a laptop computer to remix tunes as well as larger issues about the future of interactive music in an intriguing interview on WebMonkey. Preve tells Byan Zilar,"A fellow remixer and artist in his own right, Josh Gabriel from Gabriel & Dresden, has a very interesting take on this. He feels that the 20th Century was a bubble — it was the first and only time music was able to be captured as a recording. He feels that people really like the live element. As the Napster effect cascades outwards, laying waste to the traditional music industry, the one thing that does remain is live performance. A lot of musicians have turned to making their money through live performance. Interactive music will one day be rather commonplace. We are seeing lots of people doing it already. Look at the number of people already using GarageBand, which comes with the new Macs. The number of people who are using Abelton Live in an interactive fashion to do live performance for people outside their living room or bedroom is on the rise. In the coffeehouse, you'll see the guy in the corner making ambient beats, ambient sounds, and so forth." A frequent speaker at the SXSW Interactive Festival, Preve led a Geek Lunch Session about "Stupid iPod Tricks" at the 2006 event.

08:52am CST | +

3/23/06
TIM ZIEGLER

"There's also a lot of hype flying around the idea, as well as a backlash from internet folks who see Web 2.0 as nothing more than an attempt to cash in now that the big money is back in Internetland," writes Tim Ziegler in an article titled "Web 2.0: A Pattern Library" that is published on webmonkey.com. He continues, I believe that, yes, self-serving hype is being spread around thicker than apple butter, but also that new models of web publishing are emerging that are more powerful than the ones we knew . . . The web is beginning to be used as a "platform" rather than a host of websites. This means that you use hosted websites to get your business done rather than relying on software on your own computer's hard drive. Related to this is the notion that the best web apps are simple and useful and can be combined for extra usefulness, even if they are not run by the same companies.The best Web 2.0 applications get better the more people use them. Since the internet masses are increasingly both the content creators and the content filters (the ones who rate, tag and otherwise filter content to make it easier for others to find good stuff), the more people who weigh in on something the better that becomes." Ziegler spoke on the "Startupland: A How-to Guide to Starting Your Own Company" panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.

10:39am CST | +

3/22/06
ANA MARIE COX

The morphing of new media into old media into new media continues with the announcement this weekend that Ana Marie Cox has joined forces with one of the nation's oldest weekly news magazines. According to an Associated Press report, "Cox, the creator of the popular political blog Wonkette and author of the Washington novel 'Dog Days,' has signed up with the news magazine as a contributor, Time announced Sunday. Cox will write a regular column for the magazine and a weekly column for the magazine's Web site. Her first essay for the magazine is 'Lobbyists in Love.'" Cox served as a keynote speaker at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.

11:15am CST | +

3/21/06
BIJOY GOSWAMI

Bijoy Goswami

As more "energy" returns to the new media space, more and more potential entrepreneurs are considering the option of launching an Internet-related business. But, how is the best way to finance such a new media start-up? As opposed to massive VC dollars, these days the bootstrapping method of small-scale, self-raised funding is growing in popularity. "Bootstrapping Your Way Into Business", a recent story in USnews.com, explains that "it's not necessarily that bootstrappers can't raise big bucks. Rather, these go-getters think financing on the fly is the smarter way to start a company." This article also quotes 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival speaker Bijoy Goswami, who says that having little money to spend forces the bootstrapper to innovate and be flexible, "When you raise [venture capital] money, you are spending all your energy on finding out what your investors want and proving you can return their capital in a certain amount of time." The founder of Bootstrap Austin, Goswami is currently at work on "The Bootstrap Manifesto," a book about the topic of starting a business with little or no external funding. He previously co-authored "The Human Fabric: Unleashing the Power of Core Energy in Everyone".

12:14pm CST | +

3/20/06
RONNI BENNETT

If you had a registration badge to last week's SXSW Interactive Festival, then you were able to attend more than 85 panel sessions and keynotes (non-badgeholders can get a taste of this impressive content by listening to free podcasts of these sessions). If you had a registration badge to last week's SXSW Interactive Festival, then you also got a few additional and somewhat unexpected perks. For instance, Ronni Bennett explains how her badge helped her get on a flight back to the East Coast after she had lost her driver's license. "I had visions of living in Austin, Texas for the rest of my life instead of Maine. The kindly hotel manager tried to help with phone calls of his own to Delta to no avail: 'You must have a photo ID,' they said to him. Assuming it would take hours to talk my way onto an airplane, I arrived at the Austin airport at 5AM on Monday for my 8AM flight home. A Delta booking agent of about age 28 listened to my sad story as he typed into his computer and shuffled through my remaining IDs - electronic boarding pass, a credit card, a voter registration card and an AARP card. I then mentioned that I’d been in town to speak at SXSW, and I handed over my conference badge. The young agent grinned. 'That’ll do it!' he said, and issued me new boarding passes for my return trip. Who knew how powerful that bit of plastic with a really bad picture of me could be." Bennett spoke about elder-blogging at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

1:22pm CST | +

3/17/06
JEFFREY ZELDMAN

Jeffrey Zeldman

SXSW is flattered to have received some very nice accolades about the 2006 event. While it is always nice to be the object of praise, we understand that these compliments are merely a reflection of the incredible creativity of the online community which comes together in Austin every spring. As Jeffrey Zeldman says in his post-event write-up, "The fun at SXSW Interactive is people. Every year there are more of them, from more places around the world. From Sydney and Stockholm and Tokyo they come, as well as from Denver and Dallas. Each year you ask yourself how much bigger SXSW can get before it starts to suck. Yet each year as it gets bigger it gets better. This is, of course, a good time to be of the web, and so a special energy buzzes the halls and spills from the stages. The people provide the kick, the buzz, the juice, but the panels and keynotes aren’t half bad either." Zeldman spoke on two panels at this year's event: "How to Roll Your Own Web Conference" and "Does Your Business Have a Blog." He was also part of the Web Standards Project (WASP) Annual Meeting that occurred during SXSW Interactive.

11:03am CST | +

3/16/06
ROBERT SCOBLE

The recent announcement from Dave Winer that he plans to retire from blogging has inspired similar thoughts amongst other prominent personal publishers. Read the musings of Robert Scoble (pictured above), in a recent entry on Scoblizer: "I totally understand why Dave would want to walk away. I’m staring at hundreds of emails and just don’t want to deal with my inbox right now. I’m gonna take the rest of the day off and hang out at SXSW. My sessions are over and now I just have to catch up with the email. I totally understand why Dave wants to take off from his blog. The pressure is just incredible to do more, more, more. Who made me a gatekeeper? I don’t want that job. Don’t send me more email pitches please. Don’t beg for me to try out your software. Don’t wait for me to blog about your company or your team or your product or you. That’s what comments here are for. You have direct access to anyone who is reading this post. Pitch in the comments! If your stuff is good, someone will try it out and say so. Maybe even me." Scoble participated on the "Remixing Business for a Convergent World" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

10:19am CST | +

3/15/06
DAVE KELLETT

Reading through the coverage of the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival provides some interesting insights, particularly as old media uncovers the possibilities inherent in the new media revolution. Consider, for instance, this post by Houston Chronicle online reporter Eyder Peralta, "I had lunch with Bill Barnes and Dave Kellett. They're both online comic strip artists. Bill's comic centers in a library. He said when he goes to librarian conventions all the ladies go WILD for him. Anyway, both these guys have amazing reach online. Bill alone says he gets about 30,000 people visiting his site every day and while he could have half a million readers at a paper like the Chronicle alone, it's not worth it, he says, because, like the mixtape circuit artists in Houston point out, when you're the producer and distributor of your own content you get to keep a way bigger chunk of the profit. It costs Bill 2 bucks to print his book and he sells it for $14.95. It brought us to a very interesting conclusion: Everyone is saying big corps are killing artistry and that being an artist these days is to be censored by the man. Not true. Right now, if you want to produce go ahead and do it. Granted, many don't have broadband access or a 7200 rpm hard drive, but these things are becoming more and more pervasive..." Barnes and Kellet (pictured above) were both part of the "How to Blog for Money by Learning From Comics" panel at this year's event.

3:23pm CST | +

3/10/06
JEREMY KEITH

Need something more to talk about during the next five days of the SXSW Interactive Festival? Consider the recent post of British web designer Jeremy Keith, who feels that limiting comments on blogs is a good thing -- and doesn't necessarily impair the concept of virtual community: "So why have comments at all? In a nutshell, comments are a great way of fostering a community. But that doesn’t really answer the question; that assumes that a community is necessarily a positive thing. But is it? Clearly, the minds behind Digg, Slashdot and Newsvine feel that the value of the 10% outweighs the ballast of the 90%. They’ve made a conscious decision that having a community built into the site is important, perhaps even the whole point of the site in the first place. Joshua Schacter, on the other hand, made a conscious decision not to have a comment-based community built directly into del.icio.us. A community still exists around the site; it’s still social software — it wouldn’t work unless lots of people were using it — but any benefit gained by adding comments would be accompanied by a corresponding increase in the general level of crapiness . . Comments are a shortcut to a Pyrrhic victory of popularity at the cost of having your pages cluttered with pointless remarks (by pointless, I don’t just mean the negative stuff: me too!' and 'great post!' achieve as little as 'you suck!'). If popularity is your aim, it’s better in the long run to claw your way towards that goal on the strength of your writing or design skills." If you want to comment to Keith about his theories, be sure to catch him at the "How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting" panel on Saturday, March 11. After this session, he will be signing copies of his new book "Dom Scripting".

12:32am CST | +

3/09/06
BRUCE STERLING

Salon's Scott Rosenberg gives a glowing review of Bruce Sterling's recent talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Says Rosenberg, "I haven't heard Sterling in several years, and I'd forgotten his peculiar cadence -- a kind of incantatory precision that you first mistake for superciliousness and then realize, no, wait, those pauses and touches of drawl aren't affectation, he's just savoring those words, he loves them, he doesn't want to say goodbye to them quite yet. Sterling's ostensible subject was 'The Internet of Things,' and he talked a bit about the stuff he's been talking about for some time now: spimes, physical objects trackable in space and time, material things that are -- like items on today's Web -- linkable, rankable, sortable and searchable. It's a fascinating topic, even the second or third time around; but the heart of tonight's talk was a series of observations on language and technology." SXSW Interactive attendees can hear Sterling speak on Tuesday, March 14, when he delivers his annual end-of-the-event rant / evangelical call-to-arms. The focus of this year's talk for the Wired columnist and noted science fiction writer is relatively modest: "The Future of the World."

08:42am CST | +

3/08/06
JIMMY WALES

Earlier this week, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales served as one of the feature speakers at the Financial Times Digital Media and Broadcasting Conference in London. According to an account in journalism.co.uk, Wales "identified three elements critical to the success of Wikipedia which, he said, define what is important about the web itself: its political and religious neutrality, which makes it accessible for a wider audience; its social parameters, because people understand that they are contributing their work to a network that will not be made proprietary; and the openness of the site itself that can be edited and republished instantly." Asked about the role of old media in the new world of new media publishing, Wales told the group that he believes these older forms should "focus on innovating with its social networks rather than it's technology." Wales returns to the US to participate on two panels at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival. In addition to interviewing Craig Newmark for the Monday, March 13 keynote, he will participate on the "Commons-Based Business Models" panel on March 14.

12:20am CST | +

3/07/06
PHILLIP TORRONE

Why just settle for a robotic vacuum cleaner, when you can have a robotic security guard? Such is the logic of Make Associate Editor Phil Torrone, who is featured in a recent Boston Globe story about people who have reprogrammed Roombas in particularly intriguing ways. According to the story, this guru of high-tech tinkering "has turned his Roomba into a roving camera that relays pictures from his house to the Internet site Flickr. Torrone equipped the Roomba with a laptop computer with a built-in digital camera and wireless Internet service. He let it trundle around the house shooting pictures at random and automatically uploading them to Flickr, so Torrone can see them from any Internet-connected computer in the world. The photo-Roomba could be a first step toward replacing human security guards with robots." He also tells the newspaper that his future plans for this machine are even more elaborate, "'I got this robot monkey head at Sharper Image and I wanted to do something real cool with it. [After I attach the head to this automated cleaning device] the Roomba will go around and when it gets to its destination, the monkey head starts to scream." Torrone will talk more about how to re-purpose everyday products when he participates on the "DIY Media: Consumer is the Producer" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

12:19am CST | +

3/06/06
JASON FRIED

Jason Fried

"There’s a new sheriff in town," proclaims the 37signals website in describing the immediate success of their new book Getting Real. As opposed to traditional methods of print distribution, the authors chose to release the book as a downloaded PDF. According to the website, more that 1,700 copies of the book were sold in the first 48 hours of release: "these numbers demolish the sales pace of our first book, Defensive Design for the Web." Hear more insights from this experience from 37signals President Jason Fried (pictured above) at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival. He and Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners will deliver Opening Remarks on Saturday, March 11. Fried is also scheduled to speak on the "How to Roll Your Own Web Conference" session on Sunday, March 12.

12:23am CST | +

3/03/06
HEATHER ARMSTRONG

How passionate is the extensive audience that reads Heather Armstrong's blog dooce.com? On Monday of this week, she celebrated the fifth birthday of her site. To mark this anniversary, Armstrong's February 27 post explored the issue of working out of her home while raising her daughter. She writes, "The real crime here is not that educated women are choosing to stay at home with their children, it’s that many women who want to stay at home aren’t able to because of their circumstances. I know how lucky I am to have options. And it is in those options that I as a woman have power, power to choose the direction of my life, power to wave my middle finger at anyone who thinks it is their right, their moral compulsion, or their obligation to a seemingly fascist ideal to tell me how to live my life. What I want to know in comments is what did your mother do? Did your mother stay at home? Did she work? And how did you feel about what she did? If you could change anything about what she did what would that be? Also, what do you hope your daughters grow up to do?" Armstrong's questions have drawn a tremendous response -- at last count, this post had generated more than 1500 comments. She will talk more about the questions raised in this essay at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival when she participates in a special keynote conversation with Jason Kottke of Kottke.org on Sunday, March 12.

12:11am CST | +

3/02/06
KEITH ROBINSON

This time of the year, our SXSW e-mail inbox grows by leaps and bounds. Therefore, the recent essay in lifehacker.com about e-mail triage seems particularly relevant. Advises Keith Robinson, "The first action you should take is to clean up and clean out your inbox. You might be saying, 'But, Keith, I’ve got, like, 982 e-mails in there!' I know it can be a pain, I’ve been there, but it’s got to happen. Sort, respond to, delete, archive and/or file every single e-mail in your inbox. This’ll give you a clean slate to start with. Next you’ll want to create folders to help you sort and file new and future messages. There are lots of ways this can be done, and sometimes it takes some trial and error to get it right for you. It can also be tricky if you’re like me and have multiple addresses. What I do is have a top level folder for my each of my main alternate addresses. Within these folders I’ve got sub folders broken down various ways, depending on the needs of the address. These folders are for archival purposes only. I use them to store e-mail that doesn’t need action but may need reference. I then have two top level folders for things that may need action. A 'Waiting-Followup' folder for things I’m waiting on someone else for or things that aren’t urgent, and a 'Needs Response or Action' folder for things I need to respond to. I’ve got sub folders in these to split things up by e-mail address. I usually mark messages in my “Needs Response or Action” folder for an added reminder. So, once you’ve got folders set up to organize and archive your messages, and you’ve got a clean inbox, you simply need to establish a process and stick to it." If you think Robinson is organized with regards to his e-mail, just wait until you see how he pulls together a panel. At the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival, Robinson will lead "Design Eye for the List Guy" on Monday, March 14. This session is a followup to last year's "Design Eye for the Idea Guy," which was one of the most highly-rated panels from the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.

12:10am CST | +

3/01/06
ADAM GREENFIELD

Adam Greenfield, author of "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing", explains the basic concept behind his new book in a fascinating interview on Boxes and Arrows: "'Everyware' is computing that is everywhere around us, yet is relatively hard to see, both literally and figuratively. Broadly speaking, it is what you get when you take the information processing we associate with the personal computer and distribute it throughout the environment—embedding it in walls, floors, appliances, lampposts, even clothing. I also use the word to refer to the relatively novel interface conventions everyware requires: gestural, tangible and haptic interfaces, and to some extent, voice recognition. The fact that it is so powerful—so insinuative and at the same time so hard to discern—makes it different in kind from the informatics we’ve grown so used to over the last twenty or twenty-five years of the PC era. 'Everyware' has a lot in common with the contemporary discourses of ubiquitous computing, so why coin an entirely new term? Each of the terms already in use—'ubicomp,' 'pervasive computing,' 'tangible media,' 'physical computing,' and so on—is contentious. They’re associated with one or another viewpoint, institution, funding source, or dominant personality. I wanted people relatively new to these ideas to be able to have a rough container for them, so they could be discussed without anyone getting bogged down in internecine definitional struggles, like 'such-and-such a system has a tangible interface, but isn’t really ubicomp.'" Hear Greenfield talk more about ubiquitous computing when he delivers a solo presentation on this topic at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival. Following this session, he will sign copies of the new book.

12:20am CST | +

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