Speakers in the News »

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.