Epistemographer

Spent the past few days mulling over the heady experience of South by Southwest Interactive…I’ve been thinking out loud to a few friends in the time since I got back on Wed. night, and I think I’ve processed enough to put some ideas down on screen. So, without further ado…
*Why was it important for me [...]

Tantek Celik Senior Technologist Technorati
Jonas M Luster
Joyce Park Tech Staff CommerceNet
Ernie Hsiung Web Developer
danah boyd Apopheniac University of California @ Berkeley

- Tantec -
What’s new here?

Is e-mail social software? IM?
Is this just groupware?

Does “why” matter?

People inexplicably putting huge amounts of personal information online
Maybe it doesn’t matter why people are [...]

So, I’m sitting in the 3rd row at the SXSW Wonkette Show, when I glance at the conference Rendezvous List (a post about which is forthcoming) and see that Ben Brown (of Austinist.com fame) has his status listed as “Does anybody have a photo of Wonkette?” I fire him a message, pull out my camera, [...]

Room scheduling has been a problem throughout SXSW, but this takes the cake:

Homestar Runner
Wired at 13
You make the call: given the makeup of the SXSW crowd, which would you have scheduled in a room several times the size of the other?

Presentation available online here…

Panel notes:

- History Unwired -

Neighborhood in Venice
Travel guide, veers into film and multimedia
Organized into “Characters” and “Paths”

Hear character steps
Video of individual characters telling stories
Some interactive elements: interior tour of a building you can’t enter in reality
“The more you explore, the more intimate it gets” – movement into people’s homes, private spaces
Building in a timer (sensitive [...]

Still more panel notes:

Jeffrey Veen (Adaptive Path)
Tantek Celik
Don Turnbull (Asst Prof, UT Austin)
Thomas Vander Wal

- Jeffrey Veen [presentation] -

Solipsism = “There’s nobody but me”

Metaphysical assumption that the self is the only definite thing in the universe
Look at filesystem interface: structured around the self’s computer
del.icio.us: tagging is about replicating filesystem conventions w/r/t online bookmarks
friendster: fundamentally not [...]

SXSW Panel Notes:

Anil Dash, Six Apart

Focus on diversity, different tools for different communities (Typepad/Movable Type/LiveJournal)
On audiences: Movable Type’s oriented towards technology/templates; Typepad is the more “populist” option; LiveJournal much more introspective/introverted, about finding “kindred spirits” and forming small, close networks

Jason Goldman, Blogger

Goal is to make blogging as fast and free as possible (transparency)
“Appeal to millions [...]

(credit to someone on the Rendezvous network for the title)

Another SXSW Panel: How to make big things happen with small teams

Reducing mass
Making things manageable
Lowering cost of change
Staying out of debt

When you write bad code, make bad decisions, you’re building up debt that you’re going to have to pay off later (one way or another)

Advantages of [...]

At a SXSW panel on Uses and Abuses of History in the Education of Designers:

Miodrag Mitrasinovic: the history of “contexts” is crucial to design education – “history is the history of artifacts in context; if you remove the artifact from its context, then you don’t get it.”

Meikle: Design history has traditionally been a sort of [...]