*Why was it important for me to go to Austin for 5 days?*

I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly what it is about the SXSWi experience that was so damn valuable – _I_ know it was, but trying to put it into words is more than a bit tricky. Yes, the sessions are great, but as any veteran of the academic conference circuit knows, you don’t ultimately go to a conference for the sessions; they’re there as nucleation sites, a sort of lowest common denominator that gets a lot of smart, interesting people in the same space thinking about particular issues.

The easy answer is that the value of a conference like SXSWi lies in the people you meet, and that gets closer to the meat of it. Put simply, the people I met were amazing. I made a ton of new friends, and even more new contacts – the experience was rewarding on both personal and professional levels. I’m still processing the sheaf of business cards I picked up in Austin, and I’ll likely spend a good chunk of this week writing followup e-mails.

However, there’s something more to it than that. “Much”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/mac-os-x/rendezvous-connection-036624.php “hay”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/03/18/rendezvous.html#004539 has been made about my “little experience”:http://blog.benbrown.com/index.pl/document/44 with “Ben Brown”:http://blog.benbrown.com/ during the “Wonkette keynote”:http://www.sxswbaby.com/archives/2005/01/ana_marie_cox.php; he put out a request for a photo for his “Austinist”:http://www.austinist.com blog, and I responded, took one and sent it to him.

bq. Joshua and I posted a virtual message on a message board that did not exist physically, but was tied to a specific location. He responded, and was able to take advantage of his slightly better vantage point to record a notable experience. He transmitted a digital photo, first over a wire, then over the airwaves to me, where I transferred it over airwaves then wires to a server somewhere in New York. While the notable event was still occuring, two strangers collaborated to share the event with the world, and record it for posterity. It all took about three minutes.

I’ll admit that this was a pretty cool use of the technology, but in the grand scheme of the conference, it was pretty minor. I’m used to being on the bleeding edge of technology adoption, but I’m not used to being surrounded by hundreds of others who are as well…for five days in Austin, I lived, learned, talked, ate and drank in a sort of utopian world where everyone else used digital/online tools as seamlessly and fluently as I do, and I got to see what that could mean:

* It meant that up to several hundred people popped up on my laptop’s Rendezvous screen during every session; what Ben mentions in passing is that most people used their iChat status line to indicate their physical location (which session, where in the room). I wasn’t limited to my preexisting “Buddy List” and could form new contacts based on spatial proximity and shared experience, striking up conversations about the session in which I was sitting or asking about the content of another one. I’d read about this before (see “the”:https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2004-August/msg00098.html “discussion”:http://www.core77.com/news/archive_09.04.asp of “SSID messaging” at DIS 2004), but experiencing it was something altogether different, and oddly comfortable.

* It meant that I never once had to hear someone say the words “Could you e-mail that photo to me?” *Everyone* used “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com, and the process of tagging and sharing individual photos of an event became so common that that by dinner on the last night, our “esteemed host”:http://www.wheretheressmoke.net stood up, cleared his throat and announced the “Flickr tag”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/castlehill05/ for the evening. The experience of _taking for granted_ the frictionless sharing and juxtaposition of tangible traces like photos, notes, etc… was just remarkable.

* It meant that I saw my first tangibly real-time use of a wiki, as my new friend Kevin and his colleagues from AOL posted their remarkably-detailed session notes to a specially-set-up “Wiki”:http://lawver.net/wiki, and I saw for the first time *in practice* exactly how valuable collaborative information technologies can be on a more local (as opposed to the macro-scale wikipedia-esque) level. From here on out, I’m going to do something similar for every academic conference I attend, and I think it’ll change the way I perceive my notes.

It meant, in short, that everything worked the way that I imagine it working, the technological and to social merging seamlessly in the tech-world equivalent of actually living the theory as opposed to the often-frustrating practice. That’s not to say that the technological subsumed the social – in fact, far from it. Rather, it’s that they augmented each other frictionlessly, enabling actions and abilities that would usually be much more difficult (if not well nigh impossible).

To me, *this* was the real value of SXSW; the wicked-cool Molly “writes”:http://www.girlwonder.com/archives/001122.html#001122 that “SXSW coalesces a platform — a human platform,” but I’d argue that it’s simpler than this…at the risk of losing my detached, analytical academic cred, SXSW is a space for people who’re inventing the future to actually live it for a few days. It’s a future where you can make an entirely technologically-mediated connection one moment, and later that night find yourself “swapping Moleskines”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/molly/6630567/ with someone because you’re throwing so many ideas/references/literatures at each other that it’s easier to just write them directly in each others’ notebooks (in a sense, right into each others’ external mental storage).

*So, aside from all that, what’d you learn?*

There were a few big-picture points that I took away from my sessions and conversations, some of which were new, and some of which confirmed things I’d already been thinking. I’ll be mulling these over in this space over the next few weeks (in particular, how they might apply to the kinds of projects on which we’re working at the “Center”:http://chnm.gmu.edu), but for the moment, here are a few things I think are breaking over the horizon:

* *Syndication* – we’re well past the point where RSS is novel, but the core philosophy of sending out raw feeds of information is still very much in its embryonic stages of practical use. In a sense, the idea is a natural consequence of the divorce of “content” and “style” that’s been pushed by CSS proponents, but its real uses are just being explored now; think of what Flickr does with its streamed feeds of photos, or del.icio.us’ feeds of links. This is something about which I’ve been thinking for some time, and have already been building into our “tools”:http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/ (more on that as soon as I write the damn documentation), but I think there’s a lot more thinking to be done about the potential uses of syndication writ large.

* *Tagging* – I’ve seen the future, and it’s piling, not filing. The Flickr thing alone could’ve convinced me, but the work that Technorati’s doing with “aggregating tags from multiple sources”:http://www.technorati.com/tag/ is brilliant, and holds a lot of promise for how one might create resources from disparate collections without requiring some sort of top-down order. (I hear this was also a “prominent theme”:http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/003803.html at O’Reilly’s “Emerging Technologies”:http://conferences.oreillynet.com/etech/ conference, which seems to be a sort of sister – or, given the unfortunate gender balance, perhaps “brother” is a better word – to SXSWi.) Again, something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but there’s now some new fuel for the fire.

* *Aggregation* – Maybe the most valuable session for me was the awesomely-titled “How to Leverage Solipsism”:http://2005.sxsw.com/interactive/conference/panels/?action=show&id=IAP0075 _(notes “here”:http://www.epistemographer.com/archives/000362.html)_. I’m reading Surowiecki’s book, and I’m convinced that there are some very interesting things to be done by aggregating the individual (and self-oriented) actions of the many…I need to look more closely at “Cite-U-Like”:http://http://www.citeulike.org/, though I think that what I’m talking about is bigger than merely a del.icio.us for academic papers. We’ve got a grant application pending to build a Firefox plugin to aid scholarly work, and while there are definite problems raised by conflating so-called “solipsistic” (or self-oriented) actions with public ones, I definitely need to think more about how we might hop on the aggregation wagon.

* *Games vs. narratives* – Maybe the most unexpected insight of the conference came after dragging myself out of bed after only 3 hours of sleep for a 10 am session on “Story Structure and Mobile Media”:http://2005.sxsw.com/interactive/conference/panels/?action=show&id=IAP0042 …I’d never seen the tension between narrative and “game-like” interactivity quite so clearly, not had it occurred to me that insights from the world of game-design might offer explicit directions for some of our projects at the Center; in particular, we’ve been thinking a bit lately about how to embed history in geographic space using mobile devices, and while it was *incredibly* valuable to hear several researchers speak about their own work with mobile media, it was the game designer on the panel who really blew my mind, throwing into sharp relief the assumptions that I’d taken for granted about what it meant to “do history” using mobile tech. Again, much to mull over here.

* *XFN* – The notion of “embedding more nuanced relationships”:http://gmpg.org/xfn/ into the very architecture of hyperlinks is brilliant, and the analogies to scholarly citations and other ways of defining a network beyond the commonplace “friends and family” are spilling out of my head faster than I can capture them on paper.

Those are just a few of the high points off the top of my head; I’ll spend much of tomorrow going over notes and briefing the gang at CHNM, so I’m sure more will follow shortly. For now, I’ll just say hi again to all my new friends and colleagues (new blogroll is forthcoming), and thanks again to “Kevin”:http://www.kevinsmokler.com, who for years has been telling me that I needed to get myself to SXSWi; he was so damn right.

- 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 doing things, as long as we can build for the actual uses

Who owns your data?

Can technology be too simple?

• Engineers tend to overdesign
• Trend towards design of simpler and simpler technologies…
• Have we gone too far, or not yet far enough?

- Jonas Luster -

Not an expert; former academic but “much better now” (Sociologist who’s done social network analysis)

“What’s in my bedroom” or “my favorite books” does not a social network make

Simplified attributes of Social Networks (John Scott)

• Density
• Proximity
• Direction (is the relationship symmetrical? unbalanced in one direction?)
• Source/Origin (rarely covered by “social network” sites)
• Time (actual temporality of individual relationships not represented in SN sites)
• Type (where does the relationship come from?)

There’s more than one variable (language means diff. things in diff. contexts)

Networks are transient from context to context (and application to application)

Well-defined vocabularies (lover/friend/acquaintance) or free declarations

Overlay networks connect trans-communal areas

- Joyce Park -

Built Friendster, got fired by Friendster

Do people understand the consequences of putting information in a purely public realm? (esp. women)

Approaching question from the perspective of a software designer, not as a social scientist

“Women have greater need for security…plausible deniability, compartmentalization…”

• Woman on Dodgeball: “I’d never use that – it’s a stalker’s wet dream! Best use would be for call girls.”
• Man on Social Software: “I’d like Outlook for my social life, so friends could schedule dinners with me.”
• Man’s wife: “Are you crazy? Half the time I’m lying to friends about why we can’t get together…the ‘little white lie’ would go away.”
• Womanwho won’t use SN software: “I won’t until my uncle, friends and boyfriend can see different things that I control.”

Where are the SN apps for women’s practices and needs?

- danah boyd -

ethnographic engineer

• interested in questions of “why” and “who”
• how are people and culture transformed by technology; and vice versa

open is not the answer (problems of access limit actual practice)

“there is freedom in walled gardens”

• personal Ani DiFranco site formed a community nucleation site
• public nature of site took “safety” from young girls who post
• case: Gay men on friendster who treated it as a closed, gay-only community, posting things not for consumption by outsiders

whose values are being served?

• technoSOCIAL problems
• social awkwardness (how do you san “no” to a friend request?)
• articulation problems (does your description of self correspond to mine of you?)
• the problem with public (not everyone wants to speak to a wide public)

We haven’t built anything new in a larger technological sense; what we’ve done us built something new socially

- Ernie Hsiung -

Early adopter of weblogs

Web developer at Yahoo! in communities group

Orientation to users

• Who uses Yahoo! photos? (mothers of two somewhere in the midwest)

XFN: XHTML Friends Network

• Idea to take social linking and embed it in web page
• rel tag in <a href=”"> link in blogroll with strict vocabulary of friend types
• purely a framework; there are a few apps (rubhub)
• data stored on your site; you’ve got control, you own data
• No real applications with functionality beyond basic visualization; right now, it’s essentially a meme, no more

‘Course, it wasn’t until later that I noticed the sign:

Bad Josh. Think the photo police will come get me and the half of the audience with cameraphones waving in the air?

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?

- 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 to location) – you get 30 minutes, but the more you explore the more time you have

Tech Specs:

• Delivered on PocketPC right now, planned to port to mobile phones

User testing

• Interaction b/w virtual and real (people running into locals in person whom they’ve seen virtually)
• “Local explorers” – people who try to race through as fast as possible

- Digital Street Game -

Michele Chang, Intel

Interested in “mobile culture in the space of urban environments”

Use of a game as a way of exploring mobile practices

Location-based game accessible by web

• Goal is to take over as much turf as possible by “tagging” street intersections with “stunts”
• Stunts: “Actions”, “Objects”, “Themes”

Questions:

• Hybrid spaces
• How to design a game in which participants are actually engaged
• How do people in different cities react to same task?

Effortful play: some players used tasks to jump into self-directed play (that might last for hours)

Audiences: lists of registered players, tools for facilitating connections between players

Lessons:

• Create systems that account for user creativity
• Conversational Design
• Physical and Social design constraints

- Harvey Smith -

Comes as games from a more traditional writing/interactive narrative standpoint

Drawn to moral and social creativity enabled by games

“Deus X” (?)

• Emergent gameplay dictates player’s path in a more “analog” way
• First test: player played around on initial dock, chased a rat around, rolled a trash can around, etc. – User: “This is great”, Designer: “Play the game!”

Spaces that were created that were more mundane were more compelling to users

Key difference b/w embedded and emergent narrative: former is more interesting to “audience,” latter much more interesting to “player”

“Gaming platform of future will be handheld” (provided advances in tech)

- Wiley Wiggins -

Comes from film, traditional narrative

Early adopter of Nokia’s “Lifeblog“

Difference that mobile media brings is one of context, rather than content

Standard perspective on mobile media is almost like a “little TV you hang around your neck”

Sees killer app for mobile tech as documentary narrative

Format suffers from small screens, bad sounds – can overcome limitations with more interactivity

- Discussion -

We have to be careful about how much of a “free for all” we’re going to allow; it’s my tour that I’ve built – instinct toward controlling narrative rather than opening it up. [ME]

Wiggins thinks that you can have your cake and eat it too, sees games as an example.

Interesting to think about the use of game design as a lens through which to think of interactive mobile narratives; Epstein seems to be thinking about what he’s doing in a very different way, much more along traditional narrative methods.

Chang raises notion of “problem solving” as a key activity in the social space of a game…

Games shouldn’t just be diversions, they should engage people, connect people [WW]

Real benefit of mobile media is “enhancing where you are” [MC]

“Trying to design an interface you don’t have to look at too much”; use antireflective screen [ME]

Difference between “games” and “toys” is fundamentally that the former are structured around a narrative of some sort [HS]

Question: Who’s out there pushing the boundaries of storytelling and narrative using mobile media?

• Swedish company (It’s alive?) with game targeting teenage girls
• Steve Benford, Nottingham
• Users who use game engines to create new experiences; large component of “The Sims Online” is creation of stories behind game screenshots.

• 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 about socialization, but about amassing a self-oriented list of “People I know” (like a high-school yearbook)

Handful of examples of “leveraged solipsism” (Connection of personal information with other people’s personal information)

• del.icio.us: other people’s tags
• Amazon recommendations
• flickr: open standards, extensible

- Thomas VanderWal [presentation] -

• Personal View: “We each have windows out onto the world, and they shape the way we see it.”
• “We don’t control what happens outside, but we shape the room behind it; we each have our own organizational system.”
• “On the web, we have a great view through the window, but really poor personal organization systems in our rooms.”
• Information shapes us
• One problem with information ecologies: we get lost early (no persistent trails, no convenient trail markers, difficult “refindability”)
• “That syncing feeling” – have to keep various applications/devices/information storage systems synchronized
• The “personal InfoCloud”: “the rough cloud of information that follows us as we go from place to place, this cloud keeps all the information the person wants to be kept nearby.” [cite from his site]
• Building a personal infoCloud:
• Portibility/ubiquity; access; personally organized
• External storage: flickr, del.icio.us, WebDav, Personal Portals, e-mail, attention.xml
• Personal storage: PDA, laptop, iPod, desktop, keydrive
• Standards: open APIs, standard connectivity => interoperability => personal control

- Don Turnbull [presentation] -

Uses of Tagging:

• Collaborative filtering systems
• Recommender systems
• Information Filtering
• Search system augmentation
• Focus on the user’s perspective rather than the system

Folksonomy issues:

• How do you get people to cooperate?
• How good can tags be? (Find things you’d never find, categories you’d never think of)
• Volume of recommendations vs. number of recommendable items
• How accurate can the recommendations be
• What about changing interests?
• Web is a shared information space without much sharing

Tagging issues:

• Tag spamming and gaming
• Tags are explicit
• Tags are text and can be analyzed (feature extraction)

Tag Properties:

• Power Law distribution
• Popular Tag terms
• Prolific taggers (expertise)

Social issues:

• Who controls the sharing?
• Who controls the controls (ontology)?
• “Give to get” systems
• Anonymity vs. community (community of “friends” vs. people as “data points”)
• Free ridership
• Personalization vs. community
• It may be more interesting to find a like mind than a resource recommendation

Use(ful) Metadata

• Implicit tagging vs. explicit tagging (Amazon purchase vs. flickr tag, for example)
• Read wear, clicks, dwell time, chatter (analyze unintentional personal traces)

Don’t fence me in

• Tag mobility
• Common tag API
• Desktop vs. server

- Tantek Çelik [presentation] -

Technorati tags

• rel=”tag”
• ultra-fast development turnaround for plugins/etc.
• step toward interoperable tagging systems

- Q&A -

Here’s the question I asked Veen via Rendezvous:

I’m wondering: it seems like we’re talking about two things – truly solipsistic data (amazon purchase records, traces of web viewing) and data generated with an understanding of the broader social landscape (flickr, del.icio.us tags, etc). In the case of the latter, you’re not so much leveraging solipsism as using people’s ostensibly solipsistic actions which are really intended to create a public identity. For example, a blogroll might look very different from a record of all blogs actually read; I’d love to hear the panel’s thoughts on whether the conflation of these two kinds of data is a problem, and how (if at all) we might solve it…

Seems like a crucial point, which didn’t come through when he raised the subject; a lesson from Goffman is that we’re perpetually constructing our identities through perceptible actions, which raises big flags when you’re talking about a system that might leverage our truly solipsistic actions (i.e. the one we do without thinking of anyone else watching). It’s at core a question of public and private, and one which is totally muddied in the (albeit really rich and valuable) discussion here.

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 of folks in as straightforward a way as possible”
• Though it’s been used for larger projects, their design goal is to let people share with their families and close friends
• One lesson: “People are really good at putting text in a white box…After you fill out a few, you realize that you’re creating a history of yourself.”

Mike Slone, Ink Noise

• Initially grew out of desire to share photos/video with family
• Allows hosting of mpg, flash movies
• Focus on multimedia
• Pitch toward “those of you who aren’t writers”
• Caters to niche audiences (extreme sports community, for example)

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress

• It’s open source
• Surprised by number of “amateur, non-techie” bloggers using WordPress
• New project => Mordpress MU; a reach for a more mass user base

Thought: Several people on the panel have referenced outreach toward the growing number of “amateurs” turning to blogs. It’s not clear what exactly “amateur” is being defined against here (i.e. who are the “experts” against whom these individuals are “amateurs”?)…best guess seems to be that the definition centers on technical (and maybe design) skills, rather than content or professional expertise.

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 small teams:

• Close to customer
• Less distortion when passing information between different organizational layers
• Change is easier

Important thing isn’t having more people, but the right people

Build half a product, not a half-ass product.

• Say “no” by default – whenever someone requests a feature (including yourself), say no. If they (or you) keep asking, then consider it.
• Listen to the product
• Every decision is temporary
• Ignore details early on
• Ignore features

Build less software

• Lower cost of change
• Less room for error
• Less support required
• Encourage human solutions

Give people just enough to solve their own problems their own way. Build general, rather than specific, and get out of their way.

Sunk costs: Just because you spent money on something doesn’t mean that you need to use it. The money/time’s already spent.

Feel the hurt: people who design software should have to do tech support for it. By sharing the annoyance, you’ll fix the most urgent problems first.

• Chefs become waiters

Release:

• “Feature food”: little features that everyone wants to eat, pass on and talk about. (Essentially, appeal to vocal minorities)
• Promote through education
• 30-day major upgrade: hold back a few key upgrades, upgrade in 30 days. Makes you look on the ball and continually upgrading.
• Transparency = Trust
• Bloggle: Google + Blogs = lots of new traffic

“Code Smells”: when you write something and think “I never want to touch that again.” BAD!

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 ‘great man’ discipline where the thing (rather than a given person) is the object of analysis; shift in emphasis toward process and larger context is useful from the perspective of history as a discipline.