March 11 2006 / (2)

Semi-liveblogging SXSW Interactive.

Cinnamon and I are down in Austin, Texas, for SXSW Interactive. I'll be posting a running commentary and litany of experiences here on me3dia. You can also check out copious photos in this set on Flickr. Elipses (...) indicate more to come.

This is my third "South By," and the second for Cinnamon. The first year, I wrote up a very detailed timeline; last year I posted a pretty fractured thing that was more of a collection of random quotes and links. Expect this one to be somewhere in-between.

Day -1 (Thursday, March 9)
The first half-hour of our flight was extremely turbulent, thanks to a big storm system moving across Southern Illinois and Missouri. Alison was nice enough to pick us up from the airport -- with Maude! -- and put us up in her and Ryan's place for the night. We got burgers and caught up, then headed back to her place and played Scrabble.

Day 0 (Friday, March 10)
Very nice to have a hotel right next to the convention center. We checked in, dropped off our stuff and ran across the street so I could post to mmmChicago on deadline. Found Michael, then met Alison, Ryan, Jenny and Jared at Toy Joy (which is not an adult toy store) to pick up toys for the Interactive Playpen. It's amazing how quickly you can spend $300 on toys.

Michael, Cin and I took the 'Dillo (bus) back to the hotel, stomachs growling, and waited for the others to check into their hotel and reconnect for lunch. Found Leonard and Gordon, who joined us for BBQ at Iron Works. Got the first barbecue brisket of the trip.

Later, Break Bread with Brad at Ginger Man. Lots more people this year -- apparently it was listed on Upcoming and more than 300 people said they were coming. There was a 25-minute wait to get in at one point; thankfully we got there early. I met Lane Becker (he says hi, Jenni & Steve) and inadvertantly blinded Jesse James Garrett with an LED light I bought at the toy store -- he was sitting in the line of blaring light.

We eventually headed to the Paradise, our historic home base bar. Apparently, the kids on Real World Austin went there a lot, so now it's popular with a bunch of folks who weren't there in previous years. Fortunately, UT's spring break started today, so a lot of the students should disappear soon, leaving Paradise for us (more or less).

Day 1 (Saturday, March 11)
"Better Blogging Brainstorms" -- Very casual panel. MJ has a cowbell and is hitting it anytime something inappropriate/innuendo-ish is said. Awesome.

Met: Khoi, Virginia, Matt...

"Web Design Superheroes" -- Andy Clarke and Andy Budd are pretty funny. And it's fun to make analogies between web designers and superheroes. Logos are apparently important.

Andy Clarke, responding to the question of whether web designers have vulnerabilities: "Ooh, that's a good question. Do you want a serious answer or a sensible answer?" (His "serious" answer, keeping track of things and keeping clients informed. Budd's answer was, since he's not a trained designer, the lack of education and lack of knowledge of the language of design.)

Keynote: Jason Fried & Jim Coudal -- Who will inherit the earth? Jim thinks it'll be the curious, not the meek. Jason recommends starting small and obscure. Don't get the startup capital and an office and an "aluminum sign with some nice neon backlighting." Instead, get a side job. Don't outdo the competition, underdo them -- start simple. Having little time means you won't waste a lot of time doing stuff you don't actually need to do (at least right away).

"How to Make $$ with Your Blog Design Skills" -- The actual moderated panel veered way off topic, talking way too much about blogging software, not enough on actual design, and almost nothing practical about making money on blog design beyond "use CSS" and "use Quicken." One good tip: on estimates, include your hourly rate plus a "PIA" (pain in the ass) Factor that varies by client.

"Starting Small: Web Business for the Rest of Us" -- Michael and Leonard on the panel.
• Don't forget your exit strategy (from the start-up phase -- not necessarily from the business).
• Failure isn't always a bad thing; use it for the experience.
• Creative self-financing...
• You'll never get to a 100% billable rate; there's always unbillable time. Get an accountant and bookkeeper in as soon as possible.
• Have discipline when it comes to management tasks -- don't neglect it, but also don't get bogged down in it. Spend the majority of time on billable work.
• Keep money flowing -- don't sit on invoices.
• Plan ahead for potential problems (eg, late payment, deadbeat clients) and get it into the contract.
• Make it clear what you do -- be explicit, so that potential clients know what to turn to you for.
• Work/Life balance: know when to start, know when to stop, and be consistent.
• Biggest challenges: stay on task, be ready for growth.

After Hours -- We headed, late, over to the Ruby on Rails party at Buffalo Billiards, but the place was packed and noisy, and we missed the free beer (100 drink tickets for party at a 1,000+ person conference!?) and we were getting hungry, so a group of us headed off to dinner at [TBD]. Wanting a change of pace from the Paradise (where we ended up briefly anyway later) and some outdoor seating, we checked out the Jackalope, which turned out to be sort of a punk rock type of place with a killer jukebox. We sat out on the patio and played Apples to Apples for a couple hours, which was tons of fun.

...

Day 2 (Saturday, March 11)

"Respect Your Elder Bloggers" -- Between 2000 and 2040, the age of the population will increase 74%; by 2040, 20% of the population will be elderly.
Once the baby boom moves into mature age, there aren't enough informal caregivers to take care of them.

Ronni Bennett, Time Goes By:
• Blogging can be beneficial to the elderly because it opens up the world to people who may not be very mobile. Friendships online can be very fulfilling.
• Many products for the disabled are useful to the elderly: foot-mice, head-mice, big key keyboards, etc. -- but they're prohibitively expensive.


"Tagging 2.0" --
tag tags tagging folksonomy re-finding information personal metadata "tags as verbs" people-centric data interests sophisticated vocabulary tagspam tagfraud taggable implicit interests interface systems management aggregation del.icio.us flickr socialnetworking bookmarks metadata

folksonomy triad:

object <--> identity <--> metadata
(interest <--> vocabulary <--> definition)

Dual folksonomy triad: (see diagram)

Prentiss Riddle: six dirty secrets about tagging:
1. It's the infomation, stupid
2. ordinary people don't get tags
3. It's the User Experience, stupid (when tagging systems work, it's because attention was paid to the whole experience)
4. Tags don't play well with others (character set problems, delimiter issues)(interoperation amplifies imprecision)
5. Rich functionality requires rich metadata
6. Nobody wants real tags -- simplre keyword metadata, no control, no hierarchy, no syntax or smantics, minimal cognitive effort for user. What they really want is tagginess
("official" tags for sxsw2006 on shadows.com: music, interactive, film)

social uses of tagging:
flickr tag games: "japanese maple," "aircraft spotting"

Important: tag refactoring. consolidate synonyms, fix and standardize spelling, add hierarchy. (Drawbacks and risks: "don't make me think," tag snark, loses bottom-up purity)

Social formations supported by tags: Ad-hoc groups, lots of weak social ties, conceptually mediated ties

...

Day 3 (Monday, March 13)

"Digital Preservation and Blogs" -- Alison and Josh on the panel.
Five-and-a-half blogs being preserved by the Locks project: bluishorange, Textism, kottke.org, the Church Music Blog, the Huffington Post, and Al Franken's blog (the half).
What should be saved? From a historian's perspective, ads, design, images, all sorts of things should be saved, because they're part of the context and experience of the document (blogs, in this case).

• D-Lib: digital library publication
• SaveMyBlog.com
• more links at Rogue Librarian

How do you preserve your own digital legacy? Make back-ups! Consider adding metadata.

I was reminded that the first few months of me3dia.com are still sitting in an ASCII delimited file on my computer, waiting to be reformatted from Blogger code to MT (the fields on the export don't quite line up). I need to work on that.

"Does Your Blog have a Business?" -- Not necessarily an informative discussion, but interesting nonetheless. (To be fair, it probably would have been informative if we hadn't already done a lot of it with Gapers Block.)

Lunch at Kyoto sushi took. for. ever. At least it was pretty good.

"Building Community with "No Advertising" Brands" -- Essentially, the SkinnyCorp panel.

SkinnyCorp is about to move again: they've grown 4x every year. They receive 20,000 design submissions to Threadless each year, and pay out about $30,000 in prizes. The 10,000-square-foot space they're in now is too small, so they're moving into a 25,000-square-foot facility. Wow. And next month, they're selling wallpaper through Naked & Angry.

...

Day 4 (Tuesday, March 14)

After several days of late night work and play, I was in no mood to get up and head to the convention center at 9:30am, but I did it anyway. I wasn't interested in any of the first two sets of panels, so I sat in the hall with various folks and chatted while checking email and posting to the blogs till it was time to go pack and check out. Did that, and Cinnamon, Alison and I dropped our bags off at the bellhop desk and headed next door, bent on lunch at the Boiling Pot.

Unfortunately, BP didn't open till 4, so we decided to go there for dinner before the closing party etc. that night. A group of about nine headed toward Las Manitas, including Halcyon whom we picked up outside the hotel, but a splinter group headed elsewhere so it ended up being Hal, Jared, Ryan, Alison, Cin and me for lunch. We wandered back to the convention in time to catch the second half of Burnie Burns' keynote, then I popped into...

"DIY Media: Consumer is the Producer" -- which started off rather gimmicky (there was a Roomba wandering the aisle and spontaneous computer music playing) before I was wooed away by Michael and Cinnamon, who were in...

"The Orthley Children and Their Computer" -- all the way over in Ballroom E. "The band's warming up and there's a projector," was approximately what Michael said over IM. I arrived just in time to see programmer "Why the lucky stiff" and a band called the Thirsty Cups desperately try to fill time after Why's online demos failed to work. Annoying Flash animation and video, rambling stories, twee indie rock... at least the story of the 18 trained orangutans who formed the shape of a whale was interesting.

"Bruce Sterling Presentation: The State of the World" -- Sterling's thing was packed, as usual -- they eventually moved a wall so that more people can come into the room (why they didn't set up an overflow room for this one, like they did the keynotes, who knows). He's living in Belgrade right now while writing a book, and said upfront that he's in a dark, authorly place right now. He monologued for a while, much of which was preaching to the crowd -- although rattled off plenty of great lines -- and ended by reading this exerpt from Carl Sandburg's poem, The People Yes, choking back tears. (Here's an mp3 of the whole talk.)

After much deliberation -- Star didn't want to go and tried to persuade the crowd -- we headed to the Boiling Pot. Lots of crawfish and crab and shrimp were eaten, and Leonard made a crawfish finger puppet wearing shrimp-head puppets on its claws (photos).

Bags transferred to Alison's car, then off to the Media Temple closing party. The party was nice -- the bar was wide open, from well to top shelf, and the room was packed. We talked to a few folks, and Alison brought Maude in for awhile to meet Derek and Heather. Unfortunately, the DJ was convinved the party was about him, and kept turning up the volume until dozens were fleeing to the smoking area outside just to talk to each other. We finally ditched it and headed back to the Paradise, where we found a whole crowd. And despite having eaten just a couple hours earlier, I was hungry again, so I ate while I edited a column for GB, then returned to the party.

The night had a definite last night of summer camp feel to it. We closed the Paradise, and there was half an hour of drunken, heartfelt goodbyes before we wandered off for home. Cin, Alison and I finally headed to bed at her place at around 3:30am.

Day 5 (Wednesday, March 14)

We struggled out of bed at 10:somethingorother.
...

2 Comments / Leave a comment

March 11 2006, 04:43 PM / Jenni

yay! you went to an awesome toy store (toy joy) and met my pal Lane and ate BBQ - sounds like all the right ingredients so far. hope you kids are having a blast... :) jenni

March 19 2006, 11:52 PM / star

In my (unneeded defense) I didn't try to convince the crowd not to go to the Boiling Pot, so much, as say my peace once and then try to figure out a way to get a tasty sandwich instead. My complete duck-out from the prior unsuccessful lunch trip made my sentiments known well in advance.

It was good to see you again!





    

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