NEW VISIONS + NEW CONNECTIONS

SXSW Interactive · March 10-14, 2006

"The event was extraordinary. I've never hung in a more congenial atmosphere or learned as much at an Internet event." - Henry Copeland, Blogads

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TUESDAY, AUGUST 23

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.

MONDAY, AUGUST 22

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.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 19

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."

THURSDAY, AUGUST 18

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.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 16

"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.

MONDAY, AUGUST 15

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.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 12

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.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 11

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.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10

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."

TUESDAY, AUGUST 9

"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.

MONDAY, AUGUST 8

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.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 5

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.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 4

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.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3

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.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 2

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.

MONDAY, AUGUST 1

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."

FRIDAY, JULY 29

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.

THURSDAY, JULY 28

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".

WEDNESDAY, JULY 27

"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.

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