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"Tony gets my vote for the best blogger ever," writes former SXSW Interactive panelist Doc Searls in an entry in today's edition of the Doc Searls Weblog. The Tony in question is the incredibly prolific Tony Pierce (pictured above), the man behind busblog and the author of the book "How to Blog." Pierce participated in the "Blogging While Black" panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival and he has committed to speaking on a similar panel at the 2006 event.
In a recent interview in Business Week, Steve Balmer predicted that Microsoft will soon gain complete dominance of the online world: "?We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web." Not so fast, replies frequent SXSW Interactive speaker Molly Holzschlag in a strongly-worded post on Molly.com: "What I cannot stay silent about when reading these words is how blatantly uncaring a statement this is. How ignorant and arrogant and just plain wrong. The Web is not a prize to be won, and Mr. Ballmer?s attitude is deplorable in the light of what the Web means to the world, to users, to designers and developers and to put it into Microsoft parlance, customers. The Web belongs to everyone. The Web?s core vision and value is to be platform independent. Microsoft has no right to think it can win a tool that is for the people, of the people, and ultimately - by the people. No Mr. Ballmer, you will never win the Web for one very good reason: We the people will make sure you never do." Holzschlag is scheduled to lead a panel titled "WaSP: The State of Web Standards" at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.
John Halcyon Styn needs help. Beyond the obvious, Styn is looking for designers to help come up with a logo for his sex-themed hurricane relief effort. As posted on lifestudent.com: "PinkAid.com is an 'adult' Katrina releif effort tassy and I are organizing. It has some placeholder text and graphics. But 'PINK AID' really needs a CLEAN, SLICK logo that could show up in mainstream press and TV. It should imply that it is adult related, but not be explicit . . . Winner will get $50. All submissions agree that their design could be used for charity intentions even if they don?t win." Hurry, September 16 is the deadline for this design contest. Styn is the former emcee of the SXSW Web Awards. In 2005, he organized the "Turning Pink Into Green: The Online Business of Pleasure."
Yesterday's announcement that Google has developed a search engine specifically related to blogs is big news for the web. This is also big news for Technorati, which currently specializes in this service. But, Technorati founder David Sifry doesn't seem to alarmed by the development. Posting on sifry.com, he notes, "This will mark a major milestone for the World Live Web. At Technorati, we have a tremendous amount of respect for the Google team and for everything they've done in the world of search. I'm sure that they'll continue to improve over the coming months, perhaps including tags, recent images and links, zeitgeists, blogger tools and other types of semistructured data. I'm sure that they'll also start indexing the full-text of blog posts, not just the partial text found in most blog feeds. I welcome the competition. We've got some tricks up our sleeves too - and there's no doubt that in the end, the competition will end up producing more innovation and better services for bloggers and readers. Welcome to the party, Google!" Sifry spoke on the "Wireless Everywhere!" and "Ridiculously Easy Group Forming" panels at the 2004 SXSW Interactive Festival.
John Hargrave has posted an audio transcript of the 10th Anniversary Show for Zug.com, one of the funniest sites on the Internet. Of this anniversary party, he writes, "We had a packed house at the famous Cheers in Boston, and our guests made it an enjoyable evening from start to finish. For those of you who could not make it: you will never again have a chance to take part in an event so amazing and unique." Hargrave spoke on the "Humor on the Web" panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.
"In the aftermath of Katrina, we can no longer scruple self-interest masked as caution, short-sightedness masked as responsibility, and lies masked as patriotism," writes 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival keynote speaker Alex Steffen in a remarkable WorldChanging essay about the short and long-term global implications of the recent Gulf Coast tragedy. "To see the pictures and hear the stories coming out of New Orleans is to know one thing: whatever moral credibility professional environmental 'skeptics' once claimed is as shredded as the Superdome roof. We aren't trying to build a bright green future because we have nothing else to do. We aren't scrambling to reinvent our industrial civilization because we're bored. We aren't working for a more just global economy for kicks. We aren't fighting for democracy and human rights and good global governance in order to have something to talk about at parties. We aren't ringing the alarm sirens over global warming because we like the way they sound. We're doing all these things because the future of our planet is at stake. People's lives are at stake, millions of them. We're doing them because we knew Katrina, or something like it, was coming, just as we know now that more Katrinas are on their way. The world is unsustainable. That which is not sustainable does not continue. Katrina just showed us precisely what that means."
Tech analyst and frequent SXSW Interactive Festival speaker Eric Hellweg contends that Hurricane Katrina establishes another milestone for the legitimatization of blogs as an equally credible source of news as the mainstream media. Writing in Technology Review, he argues: "The Hurricane Katrina disaster is the defining moment for the blogosphere -- the first time it has truly become enmeshed in the media landscape, rather than relegated to curiosity status. . . . One critical factor bringing exposure to blogs, ironically, is the mainstream media's rediscovery of its own teeth. During the presidential election, the media bent over backward to appear unbiased, to the point that it gave unproven allegations such as the Swift Boat Veterans' attacks on Kerry as much air time and print space as factual assertions. With Katrina, however, news crews were on the ground, witnessing and reporting the destruction -- and the undeniable ineptitude of the early rescue and recovery efforts. So when blogs highlighted the fact that FEMA Director Michael Brown had little previous emergency management experience, for example, the MSM pounced on the information that blogs were supplying, calling spin for what it was."
"If you want people to learn and remember what you write, say it conversationally," advises Kathy Sierra in a recent post on her Creating Passionate Users blog. She continues: "This isn't just for short informal blog entries and articles, either. We're talking books. Assuming they're meant for learning, and not reference, books written in a conversational style are more likely to be retained and recalled than a book on the same topics written in a more formal tone." Sierra will lead a "Creating Passionate Users" presentation at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival. Other confirmed 2006 panelists are listed on the Confirmed Speaker page of the SXSW Interactive website.
Jeffrey Kalmikoff, who serves as the Creative Director of skinnyCorp (the parent company of Threadless), is featured in an intriguing interview on Cool Hunting. Asked about his advice to young designers, he responds, "I tell design students, because I do a lot of portfolio reviews, school is only 10 percent of education. Independent study and all those sort of things are super-important. Whatever class plan says, 'Read this book,' you have to read at the end of book and see what reference books it used and read those. There's plenty of time to drink beer when you're 30. For people who are good at design and know how to do it, going to art school can be a waste. Maybe better use of time is to go to business school. You can be the best artist but if you are a nervous wreck in front if a client, you're never going to survive. You can't just put on headphones and rock out in front of illustrator." Kalmikoff is confirmed to lead a panel titled "Designing for Community with 'Zero-Advertising' Brands" at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival. Click here to see a full list of currently confirmed speakers for next spring's event.
While the nation's attention is firmly fixed on the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, there's another crisis that has equally serious long-term implications for America: the lack of a comprehensive health care program. As 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival keynote speaker Malcolm Gladwell writes in an amazing essay in the August 29 issue of the New Yorker, "The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is unpaid medical bills. Half of the uninsured owe money to hospitals, and a third are being pursued by collection agencies. Children without health insurance are less likely to receive medical attention for serious injuries, for recurrent ear infections, or for asthma. Lung-cancer patients without insurance are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment. Heart-attack victims without health insurance are less likely to receive angioplasty. People with pneumonia who don?t have health insurance are less likely to receive X rays or consultations. The death rate in any given year for someone without health insurance is twenty-five per cent higher than for someone with insur-ance. Because the uninsured are sicker than the rest of us, they can?t get better jobs, and because they can?t get better jobs they can?t afford health insurance, and because they can?t afford health insurance they get even sicker."
PeopleFinderVolunteer is designed to serve as a central online clearinghouse for Hurricane Katrina victims to locate and communicate with their families and other loved ones. Word of the new project has spread quickly in the blogosphere -- according to the site "within one week of the storm, more than 15,000 records were entered into the database in less than 24 hours! Almost 50,000 records have been entered into central repository . . . .The 50,000 records were entered manually from forums and other sites by volunteers. Over 2100 people have created accounts in the wiki, one can assume that a vast majority of these accounts correspond with active volunteers." Organizers of this project include SXSW speaker alums Ethan Zuckerman (pictured above) and Jon Lebkowsky. If you want to assist with this very worthy effort, PeopleFinderVolunteer is looking for people to help input names into their database.
Read insights from 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival speaker Heather Armstrong (aka, dooce) via an intriguing interview conducted by former SXSW panelist Rebecca Blood. Commenting on the huge readership of her blog, Armstrong says: "I really do think my site is popular because I say things people are afraid to say, and many people feel a catharsis when they read all the shit that goes down in my life because it has gone down in their own and it's good to know they are not alone. I also think that the way I say things has a bit to do with it, that I try to tell a story that someone's mother as well as someone's drunk uncle might find amusing, even if neither of them have anything in common with a housewife who lives in Utah. Ultimately, though, I think I represent a reality that many women my age can identify with and they read me to feel connected with someone who understands their ups and downs, their joy and their sorrow."
Black Rock City has sprung back to life with the return of Burning Man on August 29. The experimental community is home to over 25,000 active participants for a week of creative extravagance in the Nevada desert. "Trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind." However frequent SXSW speaker Molly Steenson gives an eloquent account of the Burning Man experience on the Burning Man site. "You belong here and you participate. You're not the weirdest kid in the classroom -- there's always somebody there who's thought up something you never even considered," Steenson writes. The Man burns in two days!
Former SXSW speaker Lance Arthur is the voice behind "Battle of the Giants", an essay on The Morning News that compares the relative merits of New York and San Francisco. A Bay Area resident, he is somewhat less than objective in comparing the two: " don?t hate New York. Let me get that out of the way immediately. I don?t hate it, but why anyone would want to live there is beyond me. It?s a place to visit, like Las Vegas or New Orleans, where you entertain yourself for a few days, spend a lot of money, ogle and stare and eat and leave. Living there must be a unending exercise in personal frustration, trying to decide which museum to visit, which taxi to take, and which tourist to berate, assail, abuse, and mug. By contrast, San Francisco, where I live, is a paradise of beauty that provides a quality of life unequaled by any other city, let alone that overwhelming city-state in the East. Where New Yorkers have to deal with daily migraines like that chick from Sex and the City and Paris What?s-her-vagina, San Franciscans bask in the carefree glow of California?s intense interest in protecting us from ourselves and have little more to worry about than the occasional earthquake and Robin Williams." Arthur last spoke at the 2004 SXSW Interactive Festival, participating on the "Getting it On(line)" panel.
WEBZINE is back! After an absence of four years, the "real world, face-to-face celebration of independent publishing" returns to San Francisco on the weekend of September 24 & 25. According to the event's website, WEBZINE offers "two days of panel discussions and presentations from speakers covering a micro gamut of the independent publishing landscape. Hear from people who are turning mainstream media on it's head through self-reporting, culture jamming, citizen journalism, experimenting with new forms of audio and video broadcasting and of course, sticking it to the Man." Former SXSW Interactive speakers involved in organizing this event include Tantek Celik, Jonas Luster and Ted Rheingold (pictured above). Rheingold developed the site Dogster, which won the 2005 People's Choice Award at the 2005 Web Awards. Justin Hall, another SXSW alum, will serve as one of WEBZINE's two emcees.
Ever on the cutting-edge of new technology trends, the New York Times has written a long feature story on MySpace. Notes Fashion & Style correspondent Alex Williams, "Created in the fall of 2003 as a looser, music-driven version of Friendster, MySpace quickly caught on with millions of teenagers and young adults as a place to maintain their home pages, which they often decorate with garish artwork, intimate snapshots and blogs filled with frank and often ribald commentary on their lives, all linked to the home pages of friends. . . Although many people over 30 have never heard of MySpace, it has about 27 million members, a nearly 400 percent growth since the start of the year. It passed Google in April in hits, the number of pages viewed monthly, according to comScore MediaMetrix, a company that tracks Web traffic."MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson spoke on the "Taking Your Act on the Road with Mobile Technology" panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.
Want to help design the new logo for Blogads -- and gain $1000 for your efforts? If you've got the creativity, this company wants your ideas on its new identity. Blogads founder Henry Copeland (who spoke on the "How to Make $$$ With Online Ads" panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival) explains the nature of this contest: "Blogads is a community, a transparent collective that thrives thanks to the support of its members, buyers and sellers alike. So it seems natural that the community should help create a new logo. . .So if you feel so inclined, please help create Blogads' new logo. Beyond a bunch of wires connecting 900 blogs to thousands of advertisers, what is Blogads.com? Please write a post describing what you think Blogads is and should be and how our logo might convey this idea. If you aren't a blogger, offer your suggestions in the comments below. Let your designer friends know about our need. Or have at it with your own markers, peacock feathers, jackhammers, neon tube benders, mouse or legos."
Matthew Haughey has something new to add to his already impressive resume: New York Times writer. Haughey, who founded the community weblog MetaFilter, was recently approached by the NYT to write gadget reviews for the Thursday Tech Section. In his first piece he reviews the StarSeeker Chair, "an admittedly geeky contraption that aims to make stargazing more comfortable." Haughey has also keeps up his personal blog A Whole Lotta Nothing and the photoblog Ten Years of my Life. He is a frequent speaker at SXSW Interactive and spoke on the "How to Grow Your Online Community" and "Semantic Web" panels at the 2005 event.
"Whoever creates the best set of services around podcasting tools is going to make money," says Evan Williams in response to a question from Wired Magazine about new competition from i-Tunes. Williams, who was one of the original founders of pioneer blogging company Pyra Labs, recently started Odeo, a company which makes it easier to listen, sync and create audio content. According to this interview, the i-Tunes amped up focus on podcasting doesn't worry him too much: "We'll also have advertising and premium content. But we're well funded, so it's not a huge concern yet." Williams spoke at the SXSW Interactive Festival in 2001, 2002 and 2004 -- and has also confirmed to speak in 2006.
Adina Levin writes a fascinating essay about the concept of conversation clouds on her site BookBlog: "The cloud would be a picture of a conversation surrounding a person or a topic. The picture would show the relationships between the participants in a conversation. The densest areas would represent people who frequently cross-reference each other over time . . . I think this sort of presentation would get more of what we're looking for -- a picture of the relationships in a community that reveals participants, both loud and quiet. The ability to browse the conversation. The results would be more interesting than a diagram of an email thread -- where participants already know who's talking to whom. It woudn't be particularly rankist, since webwide popularity isn't relevant to the picture. It would let you browse to related people, or related ideas that the same people are talking about." Levin, who was a finalist for the 2005 Dewey Winburne Community Service Award, spoke on the "Weblogs and Emergent Democracy" panel at the 2004 SXSW Interactive Festival.
Read the insights of trendsetting, multi-tattooed Internet designer Joshua Davis in a brief interview printed on Cool Hunting. Advises Davis, "Another thing I always end up telling my students this. It's so simple. The type of work that you present is the type of work you'll get hired to do. I probably get more work from my abstract art site. It's how you get to do crazy things for crazy clients. Use the medium to express yourself." A panelist at the 2002 SXSW Interactive Festival, Davis served as one of the keynote speakers for the 2003 event.
1999 SXSW Interactive Festival keynote speaker Mark Cuban (who also moonlights as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks) has authored an insightful post on the epidemic of so-called sblogs. These fake weblogs are polluting cyberspace with bogus, bot-manufactured information and thereby making it harder to access authentic human-powered blog content. "A splog is any blog whose creator doesnt add any written value," he writes. "What makes the problem particularly frustrating is that it doesnt cost anything to setup a blog on what is probably the most common blog host, blogger.com from Google. Its fast, its easy, its free and it can be automated . . . If you are an individual blogger whose blog is hosted on blogspot.com, every day the chances of you being excluded from icerocket.com?s, and other search engines? indexes increases."
In the forthcoming book entitled "Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers," Robert Scoble and Shel Israel explain how and why businesses of all sizes can embrace blogging to enhance and improve customer relations. Using more than 50 interviews with people at all levels and in all sorts of businesses for case studies, it demystifies blogging, explaining why it is more efficient, credible and effective than traditional business communications tools. Employed by Microsoft, Scoble spoke on the "Building Your Brand With Blogs" panel at SXSW 2005 and has a popular blog of his own, the Scobleizer.
"In every standoff there comes a time when the tide will turn in one direction," writes James Moore about the current stare-down at the Crawford Ranch between George W. Bush and peace activist Cindy Sheehan. "In our culture, these moments are palpable because a complicated question has been rendered into a simple confrontation between the just and the unjust, the big guy and the little guy, the powerful and the weak. And we all know who Americans choose in those kinds of fights. Cindy Sheehan, with her soft voice and steely determination, has given us a simple choice. We can stand with a mother who doesn't want other mothers to suffer the way she is suffering; or we can side with a president who offers us platitudes instead of exit strategies and unfounded optimism instead of honest logic. I'm on Cindy's side." This strongly-worded essay appears on the August 12 edition of the Huffington Post. The author of "Bush's War for Reelection: Iraq, the White House and the People as well as the co-author of "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential", Moore spoke on the "Small Media to the Rescue" panel at the 2004 SXSW Interactive Festival.
Doug Bowman of Stop Design writes about how wi-fi access has made speaking at technology conferences more of a challenge. A panelist on the "More Hi-Fi Design with CSS" session at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival, Bowman writes: "I don?t mind when lots of people in the audience have laptops open ? whether I?m on stage or in the audience. It?s not necessarily a distraction for me either way. I do think the amount of people who have their heads buried into their laptops have an effect on the quality of that talk, presentation, keynote, or lecture though.Pardon the lame wannabe-connection. Being up on stage to speak is kind of like a band being up on stage in a small venue. If the audience is into what?s going on, it fuels the band. And they play/sing with more energy. And that feeds back into the crowd and they get pumped up. And the whole thing is a snowball effect. If a good portion of the crowd ignores the band and takes up interest in conversation, their drinks, waiting for the headline act to come onstage, whatever? Sometimes you can see a noticeable impact on the band?s performance. Even if the audience is talking about the band, if they?re not showing any interest to the band, it comes off as apathy." Bowman's post invokes a similar essay by Jeff Veen: "WiFi and the New ADD". Another frequent participant at the SXSW Interactive Festival, Veen served as a keynote speaker at the 2002 gathering.
Bulletproof Web Design is the new book from frequent SXSW speaker Dan Cederholm. This release "contains several guidelines to help prepare compelling designs for worst-case scenarios, increasing user control and readability for varying text sizes and amounts of content . . . By the end of each chapter, you'll have replaced traditional, bloated, inaccessible page components with lean markup and CSS. The guide culminates with a chapter that pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single page template." Win a copy of Bulletproof Web Design by entering a unique contest via Cederholm's simplebits.com website. Entrants are asked to name the present day version of Huey Lewis. In other words, "Who, in 2005 is a middle-aged, awkwardly goofy, sports-loving rock star who, despite all that, wrote undeniably catchy songs?" At last look, more than 500 readers had weighed in on this quirky question. Hurry, the deadline for entering this free book contest is August 17 at 3:00 pm.
As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the web, the next web revolution is upon us -- thanks in part to the innovative and easy-to-use software applications Basecamp and Backpack, and the framework used to create them called Ruby on Rails. In a recent article on Salon.com Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals, talks about his company's less-is-more philosophy and the breakthroughs that led to the development of these "elegant, easy-to-use programs that will make your life better." Fried is a frequent contributor to SXSW Interactive and spoke in 2003, 2004 and 2005.
Liz Lawley, who spoke on the "Spam, Trolls & Stalkers: The Pandora's Box of Community" panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival, has put together a compelling argument for Microsoft and Yahoo becoming bigger players in the search engine game. Posted on her website mamamusings.net, Lawley writes, "No, it?s not because the evil empire is paying me enough to shift my priorities. It?s the same reason that I agreed to be a part of MSN?s Search Champs program when they invited me last year?having Google as the gatekeeper to all online information is something that scares the crap out of me. I don?t think Google is evil. But I know that they?re capable of making mistakes. And when they?re thought of by much of the world as the authoritative online source, their mistakes take on more magnitude than they might in a more balanced and competitive context."
"The 'next big thing' in media will not happen on TV - or at least not primarily on TV," opines Douglas Rushkoff in an essay that is very critical of the direction of Current TV, the collaborative television project co-founded by former Vice-President Al Gore. Rushkoff continues: "[The next big thing] will happen on or through the Internet. The great possibility here was that Al Gore's vision and the goodwill his presence generated could have been enough to surmount the challenges of making a new kind of media. He had my vote, as well as my promise of support. Yes, there were a great many of us who were willing to work for free to help create a participatory mediaspace. That's how the Internet culture of which we're all a part really developed in the first place." An accomplished novelist, Rushkoff spoke about "How the Free Market Enslaved the Internet" at the 1999 SXSW Interactive Festival.
A story in this weekend's New York Times profiles Michael "Burnie" Burns and the crew at Rooster Teeth Productions who put together the popular "Red vs. Blue" machinima series based on the ubiquitous video game "Halo." According to the article (by SXSW alum Clive Thompson), the online video series created by Burns quickly evolved into " . . some dystopian version of 'Friends.' Nearly a million people were downloading each episode every Friday, writing mash notes to the creators and asking if they could buy a DVD of the collected episodes. Mainstream media picked up on the phenomenon. The Village Voice described it as '' 'Clerks' meets 'Star Wars,' '' and the BBC called it ''riotously funny'' and said it was ''reminiscent of the anarchic energy of 'South Park.' '' Burns realized something strange was going on. He and his crew had created a hit comedy show -- entirely inside a video game." Burns spoke about the "Red vs. Blue" phenomenon at both the 2005 and the 2004 SXSW Interactive Festivals.
Cam Barrett, who pioneered the blog format and has worked on the web since 1994, has recently developed a website to help him and his identical twin brother get cast on CBS's reality television show The Amazing Race. "We've been receiving a lot of email from people who think this is a silly idea and chastise us because they think we want to be famous by being on a reality TV show. Clearly, these people did not watch our video or read much of what we've written," Barrett explained in a recent post on bloggertwins.com. Barrett spoke on the "Spam, Trolls, Stalkers: The Pandora's Box of Community" panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.
Digital artist Danny Franzreb has updated his personal portfolio site with his latest work at taobot.com. In addition to co-authoring "New Masters of Flash Volume 3," he regularly contributes to design publications such as IdN, Faesthetic, and Computer Arts. He recently joined the team at Scholz and Volkmer as art director. Franzreb was a Web Awards Finalist in 2004 and spoke on the "How to Create Interactive Sound" panel at the 2005 event.
Shaun Inman has created a wiki to keep track of feedback on the newly-released Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) beta. This page has attracted a lot of attention, including responses from past SXSW speakers such as Joe Clark, Molly Holschlag, Robert Scoble and Dave Shea. A designer and developer who resides in Baltimore, Inman participated in the 2005 Interactive Festival, lending his expertise to the "Typography for the Screen" panel.
Listen to a compelling interview with Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig on the podcasting site staccato. One of the founders of Creative Commons and the author of several books including "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Lessig served as a feature speaker at the SXSW Interactive Festival in both 2002 and 2003. Staccato is run by Matt May, who was part of the highly-rated "Future of Podcasting" panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.
Nancy White has blogged an interesting re-cap of her experiences at last week's Blogher conference. A speaker at the 2004 and 2005 SXSW Interactive Festivals, she tackles the positive and negative reactions to this first-ever conference about women's role in the world of personal publishing. "Why is it somehow wrong for women to want to meet and talk about things they care about. Since Blogher was announced, many snickered about a "woman's" blogging conference. Why would we even need one, since there are other blogging conferences. Well, beyond the fact that so few of those conferences have many female voices, think about how human beings express affinity. Engineers have conferences for themselves. SciFi fans have them. So when women choose to convene about blogging, why is it that some people question the legitimacy of that gathering? We want something for ourselves and friends, we are going to get it. Well, let me restate that. We created and yesterday we reaped the fruits of our labors."
Dorks are way cool, says an Associated Press story initially printed in USA Today and more recently appearing in the Washington Times: "Whatever the reason, being a nerd, a geek, a dork -- whatever you want to call the tragically unhip -- is becoming a source of pride." Among other so-called experts, the story quotes serial entrepreneur Philip Kaplan of PK Interactive. "In high school, I didn't go to parties, I didn't have a lot of friends," he reminisces. "Now all the people from high school are asking me if I have a job for them. So I guess it wasn't so bad to be a dork." Kaplan, who established a worldwide following via F*ckedCompany and is currently involved with the startup AdBrite, has participated in the 2003, 2004 and 2005 editions of the SXSW Interactive Festival.
Are podcasts the new blogs? Former Howard Dean campaign manager and SXSW speaker Joe Trippi thinks so. "I'm pretty sure whether it's 2006 or 2008, we're going to be hearing as much about podcasting and video blogging as we heard abut blogs helping Dean in 2003," Trippi says in a World Peace Herald article. As the public is growing increasingly weary of scripted rhetoric, podcasts are a way for politicians to "be authentic, not trying to create some artificial setting or space to do it in." More and more politicians are using podcasts, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nancy Pelosi and John Edwards. Trippi was credited with Dean's successful use of the internet to gain momentum for his presidential bid in 2003, writing about the experience in the recent book "The Revolution Will Not be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything".
"Podcasts are so last month," writes Christopher Breen in an article printed in today's edition of Playlist. "If you want to get in on the hip trip, you?ll turn your attention (and camcorder) to vodcasts?Video-On-Demand-casts, that is. No, this isn?t stuff of the future. By following the steps I?m about to outline you can create and distribute a downloadable vodcast today." Titled "How to Create a Vodcast", his essay provides detailed instructions on how to utilize this cutting-edge technology. Breen spoke on the "How to Trick Out Your iPod" panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.
SXSW Interactive alums Christopher Schmitt (pictured at right), Todd Dominey and Dunstan Orchard are three of the co-authors of an essay entitled "Stuff and Nonsense: Strategies for CSS Switching" that appears in the current issue of the online magazine Digital Web. The introduction to this article stresses that CSS-compliant, accessible sites do not have to be dull: "While some designers may tell you that building an accessible site means building a boring site, we?d fling their pooh-pooh right back at them. Accessibility isn?t about larger fonts and creating high-contrast guidelines. Some users of the Web can read only smaller texts, while others can see only yellow text on a black background. Rather, many of the design techniques explored throughout this book?semantic, well-structured markup, a separation between content and presentation?can and will afford us incredible leverage in building professional, inspiring designs and simultaneously improve the accessibility of our sites for all of our users, not just a select few. In short, we can better realize the Web?s potential for universal access, and make some ultra-sexy sites to boot."
Mary Hodder posts an interesting series on Napsterization that addresses the differences between blog search services. This series hopes to provide clarity that various other explorations of this topic have not: "I'm going to do this as a six part series, the first of which is below, on how services track links to blogs. The second will be on key word search, the third will cover subscription search (watchlist) performance, the fourth will look at special services and the fifth will look at spam and controls for it. The sixth will summarize and make recommendations about how to best use the services. I picked the five services I look at every day: Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines, Blogpulse and Pubsub, and so I'm familiar with them over time. I see watchlists or alerts via RSS feeds from all but Bloglines, of both URL and keyword searches, many of which are duplicate searches that allow me to also track how the services do with their searches." Hodder, who will be speaking at this week's Blogher event, spoke on the "No Absolutes: Social Software and Shades of Trust" panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.
Poised to win his seventh consecutive Tour de France title, Lance Armstrong has enjoyed tremendous success as a cyclist -- and this success is matched only by the incredible triumphs of the charitable foundation that bears his name. The Lance Armstrong Foundation has awarded more than $14 million in research and community grants since its inception in 1997. Much of this funding comes from the millions of yellow LIVESTRONG wristbands sold across the world during the last two years. The viral marketing strategy that has helped make this item so popular was explored in the panel titled "LIVESTRONG: The Brand Behind the Band" at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival. The session was moderated by Milkshake Media's Kat Jones (pictured above right), whose creativity was a driving force in coming up with this wristband concept for LAF.
In light of yesterday's decision by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to give "Grand Theft Auto" an adult-only rating, we are reminded of a recent column in Game Girl Advance denouncing the politics of game-bashing. "It always stuns me how much the hatred of video games has drawn together disparate political elements," notes contributing writer Mike Drucker. "Games are such an easy target (what about the children?) that no one worries whether or not their views will step on the toes of political rivals. In the political game, everyone wins when video games are involved. It sometimes makes me wonder if politicians actually feel offended by games, or just see opportunity in a medium that allows them to create an as shocking situation as they might need for a campaign platform. In a time when the war on terror does not seem to be working, the Supreme Court is shifting gears, and White House insiders are revealing CIA secrets to the press, I?m glad that every single politician now has plenty of time to concern themselves with the ol? in-and-out, in-and-out in video games." Game Girl Advance is edited by Jane Pinckard (pictured above left), who spoke on the "Virtually True: Journalism and Blogging About Online Worlds" panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.
In an interesting post on his weblog "collision detection", SXSW Interactive alum Clive Thompson writes about the numbing impact of dumbed-down, informationally-vacant, cliche-ridden corporate jargon. Notes the author (who participated in the 2001 Interactive Festival), "The problem . . with today's jargon, is not its meaninglessness -- it's the manner in which it generates meaning. That's the true malaise of modern jargon: It forces people to treat any subject as if it were always a managerial problem of inputs and outputs. The language of business is neither imprecise nor devoid of content. Sadly, it has a very precise style -- and one that is absolutely wretched for civil discourse."
Extreme Democracy is the new book edited by Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe. This work explores the "political philosophy of the information era that puts people in charge of the entire political process . . a deliberative process that places total confidence in the people, opening the policy-making process to many centers of power through deeply networked coalitions that can be organized around local, national and international issues." Former SXSW speakers who contribute to "Extreme Democracy" include danah boyd, Adam Greenfield, Aldon Hynes, Joi Ito, Steven Johnson, Adina Levin, Clay Shirky, and David Weinberger. A member of the SXSW Interactive Festival Advisory Board, Lebkowsky helped organize the "Emerging Democracy" track of panels at the 2005 event. Ratcliffe participated on the "How to Think About Democracy and Technology" session within this track. Read an interview with the two authors via the Well.
On Friday, July 15, the ACTLab TV released its first public beta of the Alluvium Media Player. This device is based on the open-source Swarmcast platform from Onion Networks, which enables streaming file sharing over a decentralized P2P network. As noted in a story about the endeavor in Tom's Hardware Guide, "ACTLab's technology guide gives preparatory information for how broadcasters prepare their playlists. ACTLab stations will make their 'broadcast schedules' available using RSS 1.0, which can be utilized by almost any desktop aggregator today. The final version of the Alluvium player will also recognize these playlists, and enable viewers to choose programs individually rather than change channels--much like the way audio podcasts are made available today." Based at the University of Texas in Austin, ACTLabTV hopes to to provide independent artists with the tools and knowledge to produce and distribute original, independent,creative works. The project is headed up by frequent SXSW Interactive Festival panelist Brandon Wiley.
Many luminaries from the online world are converging on Portland, Oregon for the fifth annual WebVisions event, which begins today and continues on Friday. "WebVisions explores the future of design, content creation, user experience and business strategy to uncover the trends and agents of change that will shatter your assumptions about the web," says Executive Director Brad Smith. Former SXSW Interactive Festival panelists who will be speaking at this event include Stewart Butterfield, Nick Finck, Molly Holzschlag (pictured at top right), Matt May, Peter Merholz, Cameron Moll, Keith Robinson, Kevin Smokler, and Thomas Vander Wal.
Podcasting is arguably the hottest tech-trend of 2005, as millions of users have adopted this relatively new format for receiving audio content. The trend is growing even popular, thanks to the podcasting functions in the recently released iTunes 4.9. If you want to learn how to make these broadcasts (as opposed to simply listening to them), then read "Beginners Guide to Podcast Creation". This article apppears on Ipodlounge.com, a great site for all things Ipod. The site was founded in 2001 by Dennis Lloyd, who participated in the "How to Trick Out Your Ipod" panel at this year's SXSW Interactive Festival.
Rebecca Blood, danah boyd (pictured at right), Mary Hodder, Rebecca MacKinnon, Halley Suitt and Nancy White are among the former SXSW Interactive Festival speakers involved on the Advisory Board of the first annual Blogher conference. Scheduled July 30 in Santa Clara, Blogher seeks to help women bloggers "identify, reach and grow the audience they seek by raising their visibility and searchability. According to the event's mission statement, "Once women bloggers build relationships with each other -- online and in person ?- it will be easier for Web users to find more quality, relevant bloggers. A broader diversity of top-trafficked bloggers will follow." Other SXSW alums who are speaking at Blogher include Heather Champ and lynne d. johnson.
"It?s time for Google and Yahoo to add Blog Search to their offering," writes Jason Calacanis of weblogsinc. "These two companies represent the bulk of the search activity on the Internet. When they add a dedicated tab to allow?and encourage?users to search blogs they will forever change the media landscape. They will promote individual bloggers to the same level as mainstream media companies which have top-level billing in the news sections of these services." His initial July 8 post on this topic was followed by a Q&A about the subject a few days later. Calacanis, one of the leading entrepreneurs in the blogging industry, spoke at both the 2005 and the 2004 SXSW Interactive Festivals.
Here in Texas, everyone we know is riveted by "The Real World: Austin". No one has a funnier take on this MTV craziness than frequent SXSW panelist Ben Brown. Confesses our man Ben about the difficulties of keeping track of the various characters, "This particular Austinist contributor is a douchebag who does not know the difference between the words 'queue' and 'cue.' We promise to use them properly this time. We are very sorry for these errors, and hope you will forgive us for our terrible trespasses." Having earned his comedy stripes by co-hosting the ill-fated Iron Webmaster Competition at the 2002 SXSW Interactive Festival, Brown helped launch Austinist in late March.
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Cory Doctorow's latest novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town has been made virtual. Second Life recently held a competition to design a virtual copy of the novel with Second Lifer Falk Bergman creating the winning edition. The virtual text is now freely available in-game and in-time for Doctorow's upcoming in-game virtual book signing in Second Life. Doctorow also talks about his new book with internet radio host Dave Slusher on IT Conversations, where you can also hear Malcolm Galdwell's keynote speech and
