Popular social bookmark site del.icio.us, widely credited with helping to popularize the current tagging craze, has accepted venture capital funding that will enable creator Joshua Schachter to devote his energy to developing the service full-time, as reported by Schachter himself in a post to the [delicious-discuss] mailing list.
Congratulations, Joshua!
Quoting from The LitKicks Board Archive (I interviewed Levi and discussed Literary Kicks in the book):
In January 2001, I was playing around with some Java software at work when I heard the poet Gregory Corso had died. I decided to try this new software out by putting up a Corso tribute board, and this is how the LitKicks boards were born.
The boards grew and evolved into a massive social experiment, often taking on a life of their own. Last July, 684,000 messages later, Caryn and Jamelah and I decided to shut down the boards and redesign the entire site for a more focused, literary experience. We've been getting hate mail ever since. Take, for instance, this charming missive that recently arrived: "You should know that you have singlehandedly destroyed a great community. I could never have guessed that you would commit such a selfish and domineering act to people who were your friends, by which I include myself."
The truth is, we like getting hate mail because it makes us feel like someone cares what we do. But, in fact, it was a very difficult decision for us to change the site, and I guess it was my own techie pride that prevented me from revealing one major reason we had to make this change. By the summer of last year, the board software was falling apart.
Once healthy and fast, the system was choking on its backlog of data, and it could take two or three minutes to pull up a message more than a few months old. In early 2004, many of us tried to read through the old boards to find the best poems and stories to use in the Action Poetry book, and this was when it became clear how bad the situation had become. Any message over a year old had been lost in a cold oblivion, from which it might be coaxed out if the software felt like it. I had always viewed the boards as a literary experiment, but literature is something that endures through time, and the software wasn't letting this happen.
In fact, I work as a web systems architect, and I know how to build scalable community software that can elegantly handle massive amounts of traffic. But LitKicks wasn't built that way. I had never set up the infrastructure required to handle the level of activity we were getting on this site, and by the summer of 2004 LitKicks was a Titanic waiting to sink. If you ever tried to read a LitKicks page and saw a Java error -- well, yeah, that was the iceberg peeking through the hull.
I liked the old boards a lot. There was a creative anarchy there, and a real spirit of fun. But there was also an overriding mood of underachievement, a sort of prevailing "dumb chic" (no doubt inspired by Charles Bukowski, the epitome of dumb chic), that seemed like a creative dead end. Occasional moments of genius cropped up on one board or another, but there were also long stretches of depressing banality. By the spring of 2004 I wasn't sure if I wanted to rebuild the existing site with a different software package or instead come up with an all new format, a new beginning for LitKicks. I asked Jamelah and Caryn if either of them felt remotely satisfied with the boards, and when they both told me they didn't, the decision seemed clear: shake things up, try something new.
The new LitKicks is still "finding itself", I think. The public reaction to the board shutdown was more negative than I'd expected, and I think some people are still warming up to the new format, which is designed to move slower and generate more thoughtful writings and conversations. But LitKicks has been around for more than ten years, and the site is designed to change, to evolve, to do surprising things. The current version is our latest attempt at being what we should be, but we're not going to rest or stop here, just as we've never stopped at any of our previous incarnations.
As for the old boards, I'm happy to tell you that I've moved them all to a brand new archive server, designed to be fast and error-free. Here it is, for all posterity: the permanent LitKicks Board Archive.
Looking back at this vast array of human-generated spontaneous content, I have to wonder, what does it all mean? There are over a hundred thousand poems here, for instance ... but what do they all add up to in the larger scheme of things? How can these poems be read? What significance does yesterday's stream of literary ephemera hold today, if any?
I was very proud when the Library of Congress included posts from various LitKicks boards in September and October 2001 in their web archive of that moment in history. But what about the rest of this huge mass of content? I am really not sure what good this archive is, and for that matter I am still not exactly sure what good LitKicks is. I'd like to hear what you think, and I'd like to know whether or not you think these old boards are worth archiving at all, and why.
I also wanted to explain why I left two of the more popular (but less literary) LitKicks boards out of the permanent archive. It was a hard decision not to migrate Mindless Chatter to the new server. But this board had about three times as many messages as any other LitKicks board, and while most of it certainly was mindless, I really didn't find that much of it was timeless. We had laughs on this board, but you probably had to be there, and you can't be there anymore, so Mindless Chatter didn't make it to the archive.
I felt less ambivalent about my decision not to move the Flames board into the archive. This actually felt good to me. During the 42 months of the LitKicks Boards Experience, I often had to remind writers that the point of LitKicks wasn't to help strangers dislike each other, but to help them like each other. Flames was a fun place (some of my own best posts showed up there, I think) ... but I am not going to pay disk charges to store hatred and misunderstanding. Both these commodities are cheap, and readily available elsewhere.
Anyway, I do have text-file backups of these boards, along with the others, so nothing is lost to posterity. I hope you'll go visit the LitKicks Board Archive in its new home, and I think you'll agree with me that there's a hell of a lot of interesting stuff there. Thanks for being part of it, if you were. And whether you were or not ... hang around, and help us figure out what the current version of LitKicks is supposed to evolve into.
Andy Baio IM'd me this morning to alert me to the new version of Upcoming.org (Upcoming.org: News: Huge Changes!).
Improvements includes the following:
By jove, I think David Weinberger has spun out yet another brilliant idea in P2P backup
I think I'm missing something obvious, but why can't I find a p2p backup system that lets me and a designated buddy swap storage space? I'll give my pal, say, 5GB of storage on my computer if she'll give me 5GB on hers. My computer is pretty much always on, and so is my buddy's. All we need is some basic sw for letting us designate the directories we want kept up to date and for making the p2p connection. Maybe a little encryption and compression. Neither of us guarantees 24/7/365 access, multiply redundant raid arrays, or whatever, but it would help me sleep better knowing that when my house melts, the drafts of that unfinished awful novel will survive.
Does this software — preferably free and open source — exist and I've just missed it? If it doesn't, have I missed why this is a bad idea?
Quoting from Blog and Wiki Best Practices
Infoworld has posted a comprehensive package on the use of blogs/wikis in internal communications as well as for corporate communications/PR. Platforms reviewed include JotSpot, Socialtext and Moveable Type. The package is rich with good information. Here's a summary of the article's best practices. Note how they suggest to plan for leaks. Intel learned this the hard way. Also notice how they encourage companies to support popular bottom-up corporate bloggers. Microsoft clearly is doing this. Cut this out and stick it on your company's break room bulletin board next to your favorite EEOC document.
Quoting from Steve Johnson on books and blogs:
Steve Johnson has a brilliant post on why he doesn't blog his books as he writes them:
The problem for an author is that books are not written the way they are read. They usually take years to write, from original proposal to final proofs; they are rarely composed in sequence; and by the time you submit a final manuscript, you've invariably read every page dozens of times, mostly out context.
So for me at least, the trick of writing a book is somehow shedding all the layered, time-shifted contortions of writing, and somehow recreating what it would feel like to sit down as a newcomer to the book and start reading..
...And private, linear, slow is exactly the opposite of the experience of blogging. .
Read the whole thing if only because it is itself an example of Steve's blend of logic, insight and voice.
I wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joined entirely online, posting updated drafts every day. That was a mistake. What's the point of reading, much less commenting on, drafts the author is going to throw out tomorow? So, next time, I think I'll aggressively blog ideas as they occur and post drafts of chapters as I finish them. I think. [Technorati tags: SteveJohnson blogs]
This blog started off as a private place for my editors and I to gather notes and references, then it became a place for editorial discussion and a way for me to sift through all my references when writing or rewriting a chapter. I never posted my drafts on line but very occasionally a sentence or two from a blog entry ended up more or less verbatim in the book. When the book came out last fall the blog became a site for promoting the book's sales, and a way of continuing to cover the same "beat" even after the printing presses had gone to bed.
Did some yoga this morning for the first time in months. What a relief. I nearly cried in downward-facing dog as I felt my calves stretching out of their tight cramp. And in the warrior pose, my shoulders felt like they might crumble and fall off, but something tells me this is just the countervailing effort I need to stabilize those muscles that are aching from all the guitar and ukudelia.
As I'm not yet an influential enough influencer, I will point you to initial impression of Yahoo 360 (danah boyd).
I was checking in with a Yahoo group set up for alumni of a startup I worked for in the dotcom days and noticed someone pointing to his progile at Txters.com.
Looks like YASN, this one geared around enabling free text messaging.
Haven't had a chance to explore this new Microsoft offering, but Crossfader appears to be a site designed to enable collaboration across the net among musicians and music producers:
Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky - That Subliminal Kid
In his debut Crossfader session, Paul Miller lays down the inside track about his new album "Drums of Death" a collaboration with Dave Lombardo (Drummer from Slayer). Featuring Chuck D of Public Enemy and Vernon Reid (guitarist from Living Color). This album is – as Paul puts it – "Think of this record as a band made of samples". Layering tracks and reworking drum solos he walks us through his production techniques using Sonar by Cakewalk.
Spending time with Spooky is always enlightening. In these five minutes we also journey through Paul’s thoughts on "experimenting", social computing and Dj’ing as a contemporary art form.
I hope neither Caterina nor Stewart punch me in the mouth for reporting this: Yahoo actually does acquire Flickr:
Nicely written FAQ there. Example:
Are you going to become Yahoo Photos?
No. Yahoo Photos will get a lot of Flickr features, and there are alot of other areas around Yahoo that will also be Flickrized where Flickrization would be good. Yahoo Photos and Flickr have different kinds of users with different needs, and will remain separate for the foreseeable future. Flickr would also suffer from a sudden deluge of LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! omg! so we're going to grow it carefully.
Update: Jeremy Zawodny articulates the Yahoo perspective on this acquisition.
Ben Brown, one of the names I finally met at SXSW this year wrote up a good example of spontaneous social networking on his Intarweb Rockstar blog: Virtual Community Boards, Missed Connections Not Missed, and Ambient Noise
Bonus: Jeff Veen blogged his own comment at the "leveraging solipsism" panel about the best way to continue the conversation, which also points to the benefits of ad hoc solutions over yet-another-signup lock-in solutions.
Unrelated: My wiki is down. (Follow the "about me" link in the home page navigation to see the error message.) Are there any phpwiki mavens who want to help me diagnose the problem? I have no idea what caused it or when it started.
Nancy White did a fantastic job taking notes at various panels throughout SXSW interactive this year. In her write up of my second panel, Are Political Parties Obsolete?, she definitely captured the gist of most of what we were saying up on the stage.
I plan to do a few retrospective posts here once I get home and chew over my experiences a bit more, and I'll be posting about the activist-technology track specifically over at PDF.
Because I'm about to check out of my hotel for my return flight from SXSW, I'm just going to swipe Steve Rubel's Book Editing Wiki Style post from his essential, how does he do it, I remember when I had that level of energy and ethusiasm for blogging, Micro Persuasion weblog:
BusinessWeek reports that Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig is opening up the revision of his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, to public editing this week via a JotSpot wiki. The editable Web page will be the vehicle for people to participate in the revision process, the results of which will be published in print this fall.
In related wiki news, Eastwick Communications has launched a new practice in conjunction with Socialtext called eastwikkers that provides services and technology to organizations that are looking to integrate new-media tools into their communication programs. Also, MS&L has launched its BlogWorks practice. They are the agency working with GM on their blogs. See a trend here? I think there's room for all of us.
When explaining social network services to people I often point out that Yahoo, with its profiles, groups, photo banks, and so on, is already the most popular YASN in the world. Obviously Yahoo recognizes this too and by adding a little blogging secret sauce to meld together their existing service offerings, they are making that share-stuff-with-your-friends network explicit.
See also Yahoo 360 will succeed where many others will fail.
Mr. Sun: Humor on the Web - what I've learned and where I've learned it is an online version of Mr. Sun's presentation from this past week's SXSW.
All of the advice is good, but the last point must become your mantra:
There's an official wiki for this panel that Kaliya is technographing on the screen, but I can't read the URL (but will post it when I get it - ah, here it is: Sx Sw Delib - NcddWiki), but there's another one also being built up at the same time: Deliberative Democracy and Interactive Technology - Lawver Wiki
The session also has an irc channel on freenode (#sxsw-democracy).
Quoting from Nancy White's excellent notes SXSW: Blogging While Black Panel below the jump
The day was kind of a blur. I've been taking notes when I've had an adequate power supply for my laptop, and I'll either post them raw or try to clean them up a bit when I get a breather. (There's a few-hour stretch today where I think I can get a little work done.)
My panel with Rob Davis and Jason McCabe Calacanis seemed to go real well. We packed the room, which was good to see. (We were up against Dan Gillmor, so we were worried about that. In the green room, Jason raised his fist at Dan and said "Damn you, Dan Gillmor!" or "Curse you, Dan Gillmor!" I forget which but it was funny.)
Jason is a good provocateur, willing to stake out controversial positions and not worried about turning large parts of the audience (like Mac users) against him. This was cool because it stirred up a lot of shit in the room and left me lots of space to seem moderate and reasonable. I seem to recall a few laugh lines that cracked everyone up, which makes my day, since deep down I think I'm a repressed wannabe stand-up (or sit-down) comedian. We had a lot of great questions from the audience, so there was lively give-and-take instead of dry lecturing from the stage.
I'm haunting the pubsub feed to see if anyone blogs anything about the session because who knows, maybe it was terrible? For instance, I'm not sure we ever defined Open Source Marketing adequately or established that it is anything at all or that if it exists it's really worthwhile, etc. Ping Yee asked a great question, vis a vis the Dean campaign (where we met) about the downside of open marketing. I agreed that there is one and had nothing to offer about how to manage it. I reminded everyone (like we need reminding) that in the election the more traditional command-and-control structures won. Kerry beat Dean and Bush beat Kerry.
If you attended the session and have feedback positive or negative (er, I mean, constructive) please drop by and leave a comment or send me a trackback ping or something. I'd like to learn how to do this kind of thing better, and I'm on another panel on Tuesday, so, as a user interface guy, I'd like to keep evolving the "experience" as we say.
I really enjoyed the session with Craig Newmark and Matt Haughey at the end of the day. They are both low-key modest guys with clean functional websites that kick the ass of most of the flashier more hyped projects out there. They've learned a lot by serving their users, and they both do customer support. Their anecdotes were entertaining and their insights were valuable.
Plus, I finally got a chance to introduce myself to mathowie in person.
For the second night running I opted for music instead of geek-schmoozing. Perhaps not the smartest thing to do career wise - I probably won't be appearing in too many flickr photo streams, but musicwise I was in heaven. Saw the Resentments at the Saxon Pub and they were incredibly good. I'll write more about the music in Austin over in my personal journal.
Tonight I probably should get myself to a good geek party though and press the flesh. When I got back to the hotel last night there was a buzzy little thing going on in the bar, with danah, Steve Champeon, Calacanis, and other familiar faces milling around, but I was just too tired from the two-and-a-half hours of music and the late barbecue dinner at Ruby's, and I was missing my baby, so I spun through the bar once and then hied myself up to my room to call home before hitting the sack.
Quoting from Eyebeam reBlog - SXSW Report: Ben Walker on 'Net Censorship in China
Weblog: Eyebeam reBlog
Source: SXSW Report: Ben Walker on 'Net Censorship in China
Link
Yesterday at SXSW: a presentation on blogging and censorship, with Hossain Derakhshan, prominent Iranian-Canadian blogger, and Benjamin Walker, radio host and Berkman Center for Internet and Society fellow, who just got back from China last week. Hot on the heels of this March 4 New York Times article on censorship of blogs in China, he refuted what he defined as several misconceptions of the western media on how the Internet is being used there.
Misconception 1: We in the west assume that millions of Chinese are searching for information to aid their revolutionary struggles.
Truth: Most Internet users in China are looking for the same thing most Western users are looking for. Porn.Misconception 2: Information from the outside gets blocked at the national level, especially on oppressed movements such as Falun Gong.
Truth: Chinese get flooded with unwanted email about this and a lot of other things, and just like users in the west, they consider it spam.Misconception 3: There are 30,000 to 50,000 "Internet police" who do nothing but monitor people's email, web surfing, etc.
Truth: This is a number invented by officials for official propaganda missives, aimed at the national media, not Western reporters, who nonetheless take up information ministry press releases as legitimate and use them as source material.Misconception 4: Only the most tech-sophisticated kids know how to use proxies to get beyond the firewall and onto "banned sites."
Truth: Lots and lots of users regularly use proxies to not only get to more content, but to avoid extra pay-per-service charges. (Although, apparently even this does not manage to evade the highly effective national censoring of porn content.)Misconception 5: Censorship is all happening at the government level.
Truth: Censorship is more prevalent at the personal level, with bloggers omitting or removing references to certain ideas or issues in order to avoid trouble with the authorities. Service providers in China also must cooperate with the authorities on screening for certain words and phrases and intervening with those who post them, but the active hand of the government with individuals is rare.According to bloggers Walker interviewed, the Chinese blogosphere is evolving, with bloggers carefully testing the openness of the system. There are different levels of censorship--new tools might help users move towards freer use of blogs for more sensitive topics. For example, on Google China, blogs are starting to rank higher than official web sites on searches about "city reconstruction," a phrase that signifies development in the countryside. It's a significant shift in information resources, that points at the potential for bloggers to reveal more of the truth about life in China to each other.
All very interesting to me -- I've been reserved in my trust in the "blogosphere" to foment social revolution in places like China, where it seems like it was too easy to stop up the pipe -- a view definitely influenced by what I've read in papers like the Times. Walker's POV is that we need to look a lot deeper than what mainstream press is reporting about blogs, the Internet and China.
(Posted by Emily Gertz in Global Culture - Art, Music, Fashion, and Travel at 04:11 PM)
Steve Rubel seems to have evoked a response from AOL PR about the draconian new AIM terms of service, in the comments to his AOL's TOS Change Sparks PR Crisis entry at Micro Persuasion / MicroPerfusion:
UPDATE: AOL PR is listening and they chime in via comments to this post.
The blogosphere is buzzing this morning over a major privacy change to AOL Instant Messenger's Terms of Service. The change is sparking outrage because of this quote...
Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.
If I were working with AOL, I would call a huddle this morning to get out there talking about this with a blog and/or other means. The hasn't started covering this yet. They can start to turn the car around if they act now. However, it may soon be too late. Houston Chronicle veteran tech reporter Dwight Silverman already has it up on his weblog.
Quoting from sxsw: leveraging solipsism (Liz Lawley, who once again took much better notes than I did)
Unfortunately, two of the original three speakers for this panel—Stewart Butterfield and Peter Merholz —couldn’t make it today. Jeff Veen is moderating, and Tantek Çelik, Don Turnbull, and Thomas VanDerWal are the participants.
Jeff Veen starts by framing the context, since the title is…well…somewhat oblique. He points out that tools that help us manage information are becoming more socially aware. del.icio.us, for example, which allows you to discover people as well as information, and to discover information based on people rather than simply topics. Last year social networks were all the rage; but he felt that tools like Friendster were like yearbooks—fun and useful for showing off who you know, but that’s a short term activity that doesn’t sustain long term interest. It gains ongoing attraction once you add in the kind of value-added media that tools like Flickr (and, I’d add, last.fm) provide.
He makes an important observation—what’s most interesting here is the blending of public and private. That needs more elaboration, I think it’s a key concept. He also talks about the need for more interoperability between these systems. Can travelocity, for example, know where he is and share that information in useful ways with other systems I’m on (like flickr, for instance).
Thomas VanDerWal is up first, and discusses personal views of information. Too much online information is ephemeral—so we end up emailing things to ourselves, copy and pasting into new documents and losing context. We need a way to get back to information we’ve seen. (Reminds me of Microsoft Research’s “stuff I’ve seen” approach to searching.)
He says that we “get lost early” in the information around us, and ask how we can get to “findability” in our own information spaces? del.icio.us, for example, allows us to name things in ways that make sense to us. But how do you tie different personalities together? How do we jump between disciplinary vocabulary boundaries?
Our current tools don’t support us well. (His slide is titled “that synching feeling”) Synchronization frequently makes mistakes and overwrites inappropriately. We need a “mothership of information” to tie together our various devices and collections of information.
How do we build a “personal infocloud”? Many requirements. It has to be portable (or ubiquitous), the access appropriate to the context, organized in a way that makes sense to the user in the context they’re in.
External storage and management is important. We need smarter aggregation, attention.xml for everything on your own hard drive as well as the online sources we’re following. What’s important? What should I be focused on? Need standard formats for being able to pull information in and organize it. Aggregation only works when information is in a recognizable format.
(“Unbolding” as a constant activity; great term.)
The next speaker is Don Turnbull from UT Austin’s School of Information. He opens with a great line: “I’m from the university, and I’m here to help.” Launches into an interesting discussion of tagging and folksonomy issues.
Turnbull poses some key questions related to folksonomies:
- How do you get people to cooperate?
- How good can the tags be? Can you find things you wouldn’t have found? but more interesting, can you browse through categories you never would have thought of (like the “me” tag, or “whatsinyourbag”)
- Is there a point where we stop tagging? where we feel we don’t need to tell the system anything else about us? (for example, he himself has tagged thousands of movies on netflix “mostly because I go to a lot of faculty meetings and we have wireless access…”; is there any point in tagging more?)
- What about changing interests? You buy a gift for someone on amazon, and your recommendations are skewed towards it for a while. How can you tell recommender systems “I’m not interested in that any more?” [my note: last.fm handles this pretty well]
- There are still lots of people not using these systems; this is a small slice of the information world
He raises some issues related to tagging, as well, such as the potential for spamming and gaming, the inherently explicit nature of tags (not always a good thing), and the value of tags being easy-to-parse and analyze plain text.
Then he moves on to social and community issues related to tagging and sharing of data:
- Who controls the sharing? And who controls those controls??
- anonymity vs community (and privacy issues related to this)
- free riders—people who never tag, just browse
- what constitutes a community? are personal relationships necessary? do they grow out of the information sharing, or define with whom you share information?
(Ack! I want his slides! I’m missing a lot!)
Talks about all the implicit metadata that could be added to explicit tags, such as “i bought this,” “i own this,” dwell time, clicks, chatter, etc.
He ends with the concept of “don’t fence me in” - we need tag mobility across systems, (flickr, email box names, amazon ratings), a common api for tags, and the ability to move between desktop and server-based views of our data.
The last speaker is Tantek Çelik from Technorati. This is a much less theoretical, much more “look at our cool Technorati tags” presentation.
He says “Anybody can be their own delicious.” — But this misses the point, I think. the value of delicious isn’t just your own bookmarks or even your own tags, it’s the collaborative filtering and discovery. He says that technorati’s approach allows you to own your own data—but the user owns his or her own data on server-based sites, too; it’s easy to import/export and backup. The value to me is in cross-user data, and new ways of thinking about things.
A questioner mentions open space technology—how can we do that virtually? How can we extend the conversation in this room beyond the borders. Panel member (can’t see who) says “that’s why I maintain a blog.”
Tantek says that things like using the technorati tag for sxsw2005 in a blog entry provides “unprecedented” aggregation, but this is exactly what trackback provides. O’Reilly did this last year by allowing people to trackback to conference session pages.
A few more questions, and I’m off to eat. I’m starved! More later from the Malcolm Gladwell keynote this afternoon.
(A meta comment about sxsw: it’s hard to get called on to ask a question; that’s where IRC really helps, but it’s surprisingly underutilized here. Too bad.)
Mark Miller is hatin' on SXSW:
SXSW, at least the Interactive part, is not any fun. You have several people here, trying to be a "techie", yet failing miserably, with such panels as, "Bluffing your way through CSS", et cetera. Also attempting to talk about the "blogosphere". And then you have just in general the publications and such of SXSW still trying to be "cool" and "grassroots". It's a big corporate stunt. If they'd admitted they were a big corporate thing, that'd be fine. But they still try to delude themselves. A $275 ticket is not "cool" and "grassroots". And of course they still have volunteers. Saddening.
Quoting from So Many Great Women at SXSW
From left to right: Me (Caterina Fake), Emily Davidow, Emily Gertz, Adina Levin, Mary Hodder.
I'm here in Austin at SXSW Interactive, as is misbehaving.net founder Liz Lawley (who is sitting right in front of me). There are a lot of great women both in attendance and speaking on panels. This is a great thing to see, especially after a talk I did in Munich where the audience and speakers, aside from our very well selected group (thank you Jochen!), consisted almost entirely of men in suits, and was followed by a Playboy party, replete with Playboy bunnies!
Quoting from sxsw: eric meyer on emergent semantics (Liz Lawley), I noticed that her notes on Eric Meyer's session bear directly on the tagging discussion we're having in the solipsism panel now:
He talks about microformats for solving specific problems, generally expressing a human-understandable semantic definition using xhtml markup (e.g. rel=nofollow). Then he uses the example of colleges paving well-worn walkways ("pave the cow paths"). Acknowledges that there’s an opposing view, but dismisses it as wrong. But I'm not sure that "herd mentality" always derives the best possible answer. (It's not hard to find examples to support my concerns in current politics…) I think he should acknowledge that there's a need for deriving patterns from trusted networks, not just global populations.
The specific examples he provides include not only nofollow, but also CC license link annotation, and XHTML Friends Network (XFN) "metrolling," Technorati "VoteLinks," and hCard.
I'm baffled by the lack of discussion of folksonomy in the context of emergent semantics. That’s genuinely emergent, as opposed to the examples being provided here. Most of these strike me not as emergent, but top-down, created and implemented by a relatively small group of people; the fact that they’re not coming from a standards organization doesn’t make them any less deterministic.
Why the emphasis on "met" — this strikes me as a not particularly useful thing. And it prioritizes geographic proximity and, to a large extent, wealth. If you can’t afford to travel to conferences, you become excluded from the "met" network, and marginalized if that becomes a significant factor in trust.
Ah... a brief reference to what he’s calling "free tagging," but goes back to Technorati, saying that rel="tag" provides a necessary definition of tagging. But why should Technorati be defining meaning in this space? Again, that's the antithesis of emergence.
An audience member asks about how to make large collections more accessible (like library books). This is exactly where free tagging makes so much sense, but he goes back to seeing this as a format construction issue.
Went to Stubb's barbecue last night with Syrup and her beau to hear the Gourds and Old 97's. Tried to eat there but there was 45-minute wait so we went to Jaime's across the street and I had - wait for it - tex-mex again! Shrimp enchiladas were excellent, as was the top shelf margarita.
The Gourds were really great. It turns out I'd heard them once before (they do a killer cover of Snoop Dogg's Gin 'n' Juice - but they didn't do it that night). They use at various times a fiddle, a mando (two guys play it), a banjo, acoustic and electric guitars, bass, drums, and accordion and keyboards. This is just five guys. Great sound. Often somewhat down-homey but always rocking and at the end even a bit shreddy. They also covered the Standell's "Dirty Water."
Old 97's were ok alt-country radio friendly rock, but I was getting tired so walked the four or so blocks back to my hotel after about six of their tunes.
Tonight, on the recommendation of Fresh Air's Ed Ward I'll be checking out the Resentments at the Saxon Pub.
Jason is the head of the company and he handles the tech support for their products(Leave it Behind > Brian Bailey)
Hmm, very similar to Craig's commitment to customer support.
Oh, and other ways to follow SXSW on the web include the delicious tag, the Technorati tag, and the flickr tag.
Quoting from terry storch @ fellowship church - SxSW: How to make big things happen with small teams... because he took great notes. By the way, found this post via the PubSub feed for SXSW that Scoble set up.
Weblog: terry storch @ fellowship church
Source: SxSW: How to make big things happen with small teams
Link: http://www.terrystorch.com/2005/03/sxsw_how_to_mak.html
How to make big things happen with small teams
Jason Fried, President @ 37signals
http://www.37signals.com
http://www.basecamphq.com
http://www.tadalist.com
Book: Defensive Design for the WebJason was by far the best speaker that I heard today. Jason is a very charismatic communicator that also knows what he is talking about. Jason is the president of 37 signals, a web design and software development company. 37 signals would best be know for Basecamp, a web-based project management tool.
4 keys to making big things happen with small teams:
1) reducing mass
2) making things manageable
3) lowering cost of change
4) staying out of debt (design, code, and cash)here is Jason’s outline-----------------------
small has big advantages
the customer is closer
less distortion
less middle/muddle
everyone on the front line
change is easierhire the right people!- passionate and happy
well rounded
quick learners
good writers
trustworthyact your size
don’t try and be a big company
less formalities
less mass
less fear
more flexible
more change
more freedomembrace constraints
less people, more power
less money, more value
less resources, better use
less time, better timebuild half a product not a half-a** product
say no by default
listen to the product
ignore details early on
improve what you have
decisions are temporaryless software
lower cost of change
less room for error
less support required
encourage human solutionsget real, start with the UI (user interface)
there is nothing functional about a functional spec.
start designing
start prototyping
start experiencing
start changing
rinse and repeatmake most decision JIT (just in time)
scalability (don’t build for it until you need it)
admin interface (don’t spend time on admin side)work on the next most important thing
is this it?
if not, what is?
are we doing it?
if not, why not?celebrate small victories
iterate
celebrate
etc, etc.feel the hurt
builders support it
chefs become waiters
shared annoyance (developers need to support it!)publicity amplifiers
get your message out!
feature food- people want to talk about it...
promote through education
30 day major upgrade
transparency=trust
bloggletags: sxsw | jason fried
what is a tag?
George is listing his planned schedule - good idea!
Here's mine:
Some tough choices there!
I missed the kickball game this morning (KICK! 2005) ... got to follow George's advice more closely....
A quicky (I'm at SXSW and am scanning my aggregator in the lull before the storm: Quoting from Peopleweb: Mark Pincus has a vision
Peopleweb: Tribester Mark Pincus has a vision. It's kinda open source ad tags, only for people.
Mark writes:
"as more people take on 'open' identities online, that can be crawled, found and linked to with bits of semantically organized data like 'profile', 'about me' or 'my tribes or groups', there will soon be an ability for search engines to organize people into relevant groupings...(snip)
...imagine a future where the network acts as one database. you will tell the web that you are single and what your dating criteria is. your dating profile will only be shown to those people."
Amazing how tagging and search can transform everything so quickly.
A quicky before heading to the airport this a.m. Check out the new version of the CivicSpace site: Free, open source tools for building thriving online communities | CivicSpace
Well, the outgoing mail sending problem seems to be located in my client software, Eudora. By process of elimination, I've ruled out the DSL connection, the various mail servers, and so on.
This seems to be the final push I need to abandon Eudora, since it appears to be a bug in the software or its settings. I've reinstalled the latest version and it's still not working. In fact, now instead of offering one of several different errors every time I try to send, it simply goes through the process and completes it without sending and without reporting any problems.
Unacceptable!
I downloaded Thunderbird and I'm learning it now. It sends my mail just fine. It did crash when I tried to import my Eudora mail store, which might have something to do with it being ginormous. So the transition may be rocky for a while. I've got hundreds if not thousands of email messages over in Eudora that I still plan to reply to eventually, and right now I'm manually copying over the replies from yesterday that got stalled out.
At least I am free to communicate again. For a net.junkie like myself, losing smtp access is like losing a limb.
Note to self: Don't end up in one of David's photos of oblivious digital hipsters.
Quoting from The unofficial geek guide to getting over yourself at SxSW Interactive 2005 | davidnunez.com:
Ditto for parking yourself in the hallway with the laptop. I always found that very sad. I think I may take a picture this year to remind myself how sad it can get: Seeing a row of geeks on the floor, clicking away, lost in the ether, as tons of very interesting and very real and very Right Here and Now people walk by. Potentially fun or even lucrative people connections squandered by the minute.
Be honest with yourself: how critical is it that you are online Right Now? Are you online to show off? To show that you are a hipster digirati? Can't it wait until you get home or at least until you finally crash at your hotel room that night?
(via George)
Quoting from The Internet Gap - by Micah L. Sifry (from Personal Democracy Forum)
Kerry voters were two-and-a-half times as likely to participate in online discussions or chat groups about the election than Bush voters, almost twice as likely to register their opinions in online surveys, and four-and-a-half times as likely to contribute money online to a candidate, according to the just-released Pew Internet study. Remember the "gender gap"? Now it looks like there's an "Internet gap."
Patrick Ruffini, Bush-Cheney '04's webmaster, has helpfully placed the relevant chart on his blog, and he argues that, contrary to appearances, there's mixed news for the left in this finding. Democrats, he suggests, "tend to excel at the web-only kind" of e-activism, "while the Republicans focus on building powerful synergies between the online and the offline." He continues:
And the web-only kind of activism has a mixed track record at best. At first, MoveOn's "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest seemed like a trailblazing concept. Until you saw the God-awful ad that won, and realized that, like most MoveOn initiatives before or since, all that energy was simply being dumped into a rat hole. Just how credible and useful are online polls when your guy wins with 90% of the vote? And using a chat room or posting a comment on a blog is not in itself a productive political act; for one thing, you could be out talking to undecideds instead of preaching to the online choir, and secondly, in the blogosphere, quality matters more than quantity. A thousand blogs echoing the WaPo/NYT line will never be as effective as fifty blogs providing an interesting and original alternative voice, probing for weaknesses in the MSM Death Star.My two cents: Like most debates about the relative merits of different political strategies, this one is colored indelibly by the fact that the Republicans won. GOP e-activists are also doing a good job of presenting themselves as the most net-savvy, most concerned with pushing power to the edges of their network, etc.
Jon Udell's got another wonderful "screencast" up: The on-demand blogosphere.
I've been a fan of Jon's since he was narrating his content-management system learnings for Byte Magazine. These days he's pioneering a bleeding edge that the rest of us will get to only when it doesn't require customizing one's own interface to the degree he's willing (and able) to do so.
So, his reports are like dispatches from the future and when he says we're moving in a direction, I trust him.
Is anyone else using this screencasting medium the way Jon is?
In Define "Journalist", Scot Hacker says:
At the J-School, we've been exploring the question of whether bloggers are journalists for a couple of years, in both classroom experiments and in conferences that have drawn fascinated/scared journalists and the blogging elite from around the world. The question can often be boiled down like this: Journalists may argue that "if it's not edited, it's not journalism" -- a...
Over at Personal Democracy Forum (my other, other home), Chris Nolan takes Tapped to task for privileging "professional" journalists over the online variety: TAPPED Out:
Please God, would someone – anyone – make the people with salaried journalism jobs stop trying to draw a line between what they do for publications that appear on paper and what people like me, working almost entirely on-line do? Will I – will any of us - live long enough to see the silly caterwauling about subsidized punditry, fund-raising and partisan bickering die down to a dull roar? It's nothing more than a convenient disguise for salaried journalists to use to assure themselves that their station in life is secure from the rabble in its pajamas. It's short-sighted and silly. And everybody knows (or ought to know) it.
Chris's perspective is particularly valuable given that she has at different times inhabited both sides of the street.
For some odd reason both of the outgoing mail servers that route mail for me from my various addresses are stalling out repeatedly at the moment. This means I have about seven or eight messages in my queue that aren't being sent out.
This means that I may be trying to reply to email from you but I may be unable. I'm a little distracted today, printing out sample documents for a long meeting/interview, so diagnosing the problem isn't high enough on my priority list at the moment.
Rest assured, I am receiving incoming mail just fine and I'll figure this problem out probably by tomorrow, unless, like so many other Internet issues, it decided to just go away on its own.
I'm headed off to Austin next week to attend South by Southwest Interactive for my first time, something I've been meaning to do now for a number of years.
On Sunday, March 13, from 3:30 to 4:30 pm I'm on a panel called Open Source Marketing: The New Unwieldy / Unlimited Product Publicity.
On Tuesday, March 15, from 11:30 to 12:30, I'm on a panel called Are Political Parties Obsolete?.
I believe I'll be signing copies of my book (you know, The Power of Many?) immediately after the Tuesday panel.
The conference ends Tuesday but I'm sticking around an extra day for an Activist Technology miniconference on Wednesday featuring many of the movers and shakers in the political / activist / technology world.
Of course I'll be blogging the conference both here and at Personal Democracy Forum.
In his Fresh Books Blog (Do you need an agent in the tech book market?), literary agent Matt Wagner points to a discussion about agents, how they earn their 15% and how useful they are in today's business climate, taking place on the weblog of Joe Wikert, an editor at Wiley (Agents: Do You Need One?.
It's a fascinating discussion and well worth having. The living web is clearly disrupting hidebound traditional publishing infrastructure and while there may always be a role for go-betweens, it would seem obvious that literary agents are themselves due for a reassessment of their role and how they can best give value to the publishing process and be compensated for their skills, contacts, and advice.
Disclosure: Matt Wagner is a former agent with Waterside Productions, Inc. and I am currently associated with that agency, both as an agent and as a writer. (My agent at Waterside is Margot Maley.)
Seb Paquet points us to this International Symposium on Wikis, currently in the midst of a call for papers and presentations.
Should be interesting. Perhaps I can come up with something to submit.
Quoting from The great FEC scare.
This interview with FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith, warning that political bloggers may soon be subject to draconian regulation as a consequence of McCain-Feingold, has been linked to from all over the blogosphere.
I'm frankly not sure how seriously to take it, because in all honesty I don't entirely trust any "news" story bylined by the guy who made up the "Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet" story (and, later, boasted about having done so). A basic technique of the modern Right is to enlist the libertarian impulses of decent people in the service of policies that actually serve to consolidate power in fewer and fewer hands, and lots of libertarians have shown themselves to be entirely user-friendly in this regard. Not being an expert on the intricacies of campaign law, I'm not entirely sure all this alarm about Imminent Regulation Of Weblogs (film at 11) isn't just a con designed to undermine support for any limitations on the latitude of the ultra-rich.
Assuming the story is legit, though, Nathan Newman, as he so frequently does, talks sense.
The FEC is making noises to limit the speech of blogs in the name of campaign finance reform. Josh worries that this "would mean the end of what this site and so many others on the right and left do."
Only if we follow the rules. I won't. Free speech is worth fighting for and the best way to do it is to refuse to be silent. There are a lot of bloggers out there and that's a lot of people to throw in jail if they all pledge to defy the rules.
I think most campaign finance rules restricting contributions are worthless and lead to idiotic proposals like this one. This is a good place for the insanity to stop. The more bloggers who pledge to defy the FEC, the less likely they are to move forward.
I'll take that pledge.
Count me in... if it comes to that.
Quoting from FEC May Regulate Blogging - by Michael Bassik at the Personal Democracy Forum blog:
Bloggers and online-only journalists might have to report their hyperlinks, articles, and postings as in-kind political contributions. This according to a CNET interview with Bradley Smith, one of the six FEC commissioners.
Talk of a potential rule change follows a Federal Court decision last year, which was discussed in detail on PDF last month.
Smith states:
The real question is: Would a link to a candidate's page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.
Man, that's crazy talk! How is this going to work? It seems like an insane can of worms. How do you value an in-kind contribution of this type? This could turn the political blogosphere into a litigation-happy zone. Stay tuned.
I'm making my plans for SXSW and getting tips from experienced attendees like George aand Austin residents like Sarah about what to do. Sarah reminded me of the 20x2 event (20 speakers, one question, two minutes each). Looking over the participant list I recognized a few names right off the bat (Dave Shea, David Galbraith, Nick Finck - all people I know only by reputation although I did meet David once in passing at a bloggers' dinner in SF a year or so ago), but I realized that I wasn't familiar with the website listed after David Galbraith's name: wists.com
So, I went to check out wists.com and it's another social networking tool in beta. This one seems to be geared toward creating and acquiring lists, such as wishlists and bookmarked items, and sharing them with other people. If you copy anyone else's items, you are considered their friend. That's as much as I've figured out so far and I'm not sure I even got that part right. I'll keep poking around and see.
I imagine a number of people will be announcing or launching sites at SXSW (or ETech, which is at the same time). I'll be flogging my book of course, but I'll also be pointing people to Mediajunkie, my digital media agency, and to Monkey Vortex Radio Theater, another project I'm into up to my neck.
Quoting from Could Social Networking Save the World?
Rob Paterson has penned a long and extraordinary article suggesting that social networking tools, building on a foundation of finding and connecting and relating tools including weblogs, could be used to cut out the corporate and government middlemen everywhere, usurp the existing economy and power authority, and create peer-to-peer networks that would run everything.
Um, OK. That sounds a bit, well, utopian, but I'll bite. I do agree that peer-to-peer relationship management has the potential to disrupt the pharaonic hierarchical approach to organizing just about everything that our corporations and governments and most other institutions inherited from feudalism and monarchy, but I see these changes happening gradually (despite the oomph of the word "disrupt") and I don't expect top-down organizations to vanish quietly. There will probably always be some role for command and control, but it may have to justify itself on a case-by-case basis if other modes of organization gather steam.
But don't take my word for any of this. Read Rob's article and then read Dave's analysis to get a much more complete overview of the topic.
Nothing much substantial has changed but for some reason I'm the optimism tip this week. I have a feeling something's about to break big and I can't quite put my finger on it. Or maybe I'm just getting hyped for south by southwest.
I'm more productive when I'm in this kind of mood, though. I'm working hard on the new Civicspace site for East Bay for Democracy and I've been keeping up around the house with vacuuming and dinner prep and whatnot, helping B set up my thinkpad as an alternative workstation in her office, and even dealing with bills and related money woes.
I haven't had quite as much time to practice the guitar lately, so I'm kind of chomping at the bit to make time for that, but I'll get to it. Also, I think I finally got the Monkey Vortex Radio Theater podcast working, so that's cool. Now I just have to finish my Understand, Rubberband? script for said radio theater and I'll have my writing chops back too.
I need to work on a few articles for Personal Democracy Forum, and I need to download tax software pronto, because I think I'm getting a refund this year.
What else? No word from the documentary TV people I spoke to in New York, so I dropped them a line to say what's up? Also, another feeler for some information architecture work for a huge global services company working for another huge Fortune 500 company based in Missouri. If that works out I'll be doing the commute-by-plane thing for a while, but it would sure help with cash flow.
One of the two panels I'm speaking on at this year's South by Southwest Interactive conference (in just under two weeks), is on the subject of Open Source Marketing, with Firefox as a case in point.
To prepare for the panel, I've been doing some online research and I'll be posting the links here mainly for my own convenience.
The first such link is for a manifesto at ChangeThis (via MicroPersuasion), called, appropriately enough, What is Open Source Marketing?
I'm continually impressed by the thinking and writing of Stephen Downes, who was also, I believe, the first person to perform Blogistan Pie before a live audience.
In the abovelinked post, Community Blogging, Downes explored some ideas about how a self-organizing community of bloggers might subvert the dominant power-law dynamics.
Highly recommended.
Quoting Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger:
First chapter posted on our corporate blogging book
We've posted our first chapter over on the Red Couch. Steve Lacey already praised it. Thanks! Bob Wyman, founder of my favorite blog search engine, Pubsub.com, wonders if the book will still be useful by the time it's published.
Yes, what is the tradeoff between public open source vetting and timeliness?
Quoting from Introduction to Activism on the Internet:
John of Social Design Notes has built an excellent resource in “An Introduction to Activism on the Internet”, touching on key issues like the role of geography and gender in access, privacy and anonymity, and current topics like advocacy tools, and blogging. Timely, accessible, and attractive.
