Tags: sxsw08

All of my Flickr pictures are published under a Creative Commons attribution licence. One of the reasons I switched over to using this licence was so that people didn’t have to write and ask me whenever they want to republish one of my photos. But I still get plenty of emails from people asking me if it would be okay to use one of my pictures. I’m very lax at responding to those requests. If and when I do respond, I point out that they don’t really need to ask; as long as they credit me—as either adactio or Jeremy Keith—then they can use my photos wherever and however they want.

Back in March, right before I was setting out for Mix’08 in Vegas and South By Southwest in Austin, I received a typical request:

Is the photo Andy in the VAB your image on flickr? If so can you please contact me with regard to possibly allowing us to use a part of this image in a feature film.

I didn’t respond. I was too busy packing and gearing myself for a big showdown with Microsoft (this was right before they reversed their decision on IE8’s default rendering). I soon received a second email with more details:

The photograph would be cropped in a way where no people would be shown. We are interested in using this image as a background to insert our main characters which would be included as part of a biography film on our main character which is shown at an award ceremony honoring him in the film.

I thought it was an odd picture to be asking about. Let’s face it; it’s not a very good photo. It’s blurry and washed out. I guess it’s somewhat unusual in that it was shot inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral. Usually members of the public aren’t allowed inside. Myself, Andy and Paul were lucky enough to be part of the first open day since 2001. It was all thanks to an invitation from Benny, a bona fide rocket scientist at NASA—thanks again, Benny!

I never got around to responding to the emails. I figured that, whoever it was, if they really wanted to use the picture, they would notice the licence and realise that they didn’t have to ask permission.

I quickly forgot all about it. Other events were foremost in my mind. I got a call from Pete Le Page and Chris Wilson telling me that Internet Explorer 8 was going to render pages as if it were—get this—Internet Explorer 8. Now I was going to Vegas for a celebration instead of a battle.

After a long trip across the Atlantic, I awoke in my hotel on the first morning of the conference, eager to hear the opening keynote. But before I could head downstairs, my mobile phone rang. I answered it and the woman on the other end said, “Hi. I sent you two emails about using a picture of yours…”

“Ah, right!”, I said. I then launched into my usual spiel about Creative Commons licencing. I explained that she was free to use my picture. All she had to do was include a credit somewhere in her little movie.

“Well”, she said, “the thing is, getting your name in the credits usually costs at least $1,500. That’s why we need you sign the license release form I sent.”

“Wait a minute”, I said. “What is this for?”

“It’s for a movie that’s currently in production called Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jnr.”

Holy crap! One of my photos was going to be in Iron Man? That certainly put a new spin on things.

“So I guess you want to use the picture because it’s inside NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building?” I asked.

“No. We just thought it was a picture of some warehouse or something.”

The woman on the other end of the phone—her name was Ashley—said she could reimburse me for the use of my photo if I signed the form she sent. I thanked her, told her I didn’t need any reimbursement, and said I would print out and sign the form for her. Ashley made it clear that I would need to get the form faxed to her before the end of the day.

There was a printer in my hotel room so I set about getting it connected up to my Macbook. That’s when disaster struck. My Macbook began making the dreaded ticking time bomb noise. Within seconds, my hard drive was dead, broken, kaput. Pining for the fjords, it had shuffled off this mortal coil and was an ex hard drive.

Well aware of the irony of my Apple hardware failing while I was attending a Microsoft conference, I abandoned all hope of printing out the license release form and sat in on the opening keynote. This consisted of a few words from Ray Ozzie, a quick look at IE8 and about a billion hours of Silverlight demos. That’s what it felt like anyway.

The next day, I made my way to Austin for South by Southwest. That turned out to be quite an adventure.

Once I finally made it to Austin, I settled into a comfortable routine of geeking out, having fun and generally over-indulging. As I was making my way to the conference centre one morning, my mobile phone rang. It was Ashley.

“Sorry I didn’t manage to get the form to you”, I said. “My laptop died on me. I know it’s too late now.”

“Actually, there’s still time”, she responded.

“Look”, I said. “Let’s cut out the computers completely. Can you fax the form to my hotel? I can sign it and fax it back to you straight away.”

And that’s exactly what we did.

Iron Man was released a few weeks later. I never got ‘round to seeing it in the cinema; I’m not a big fan of the whole cinema-going experience. But some time later I was travelling across the Atlantic yet again and one of the in-flight movie options was Iron Man. I fired it up, wondering if my picture had made it into the final cut and even if it had, whether I’d be able to spot it.

Three minutes into the movie, there was my photo.

It fills the screen. The camera lingers over it while performing its best Ken Burns effect. Not only was Robert Downey Jnr. photoshopped onto the picture, Jeff Bridges was on there too! The Dude!! …On my picture!!!

My Flickr pictures have been used in some pretty strange places but this must surely be the strangest …and the coolest.

I’ve published a transcript of the panel I moderated at South by Southwest this year. The subject was Building Portable Social Networks and I had a blast moderating, mostly due to my great co-panelists, Chris Messina, Leslie Chicoine, David Recordon and Joseph Smarr.

During the panel, I made reference to an ongoing joke by Brian and myself to do a negative version of XFN — an XHTML Enemies Network. I always thought of it as a frivolous idea but sometimes I wonder if there might be the occasional real-world use case.

Suppose, for instance, that I wanted to link to Mike “The Dick” Arrington’s latest bit of bollocks over on TechC*nt? Well, now I can add some extra semantic richness to that link by throwing in the appropriate rel value.

I give you the XEN 1.0 profile.

Please note the fine print:

XEN is not a microformat. It is a joke.

• Listen to the audio recording of this panel.

Jeremy Keith: Welcome to the Building Portable Social Networks panel. I’ll be your moderator. My name is Jeremy.

A little bit of housekeeping first. Obviously you don’t have to switch your phones off, but if you could switch your phones to silent, please, so we don’t have any interruptions, because—don’t make me come down there. I swear to God, I will shove it up your orifice if I hear one ringtone during this panel.

[laughter]

Jeremy: So, we’re here to talk about portable social networks. I kind of want to know what social networks you guys use so I’m going to ask. I’m going to list some social networking sites, and if you have an account with this site, you should raise your hand. If you have built or are an employee of the builders of the site, then you’ve got to whoop and cheer, because there’s a good chance, at South by Southwest, that that’s entirely possible.

So let’s take a random sampling. Who has an account at Dopplr? Okay. And I don’t hear any cheering, but that’s a good amount.

Joseph: Dopplr’s broken out. That’s pretty clear.

Jeremy: Who’s got a Pownce profile?

[whooping from audience]

Jeremy: A bit of whooping? Great. All right. Cool. Last.fm?

[whooping from audience]

Jeremy: Yeah. And there’s some whooping. There’s some whooping. Excellent. Digg?

[whooping from audience]

Jeremy: Wow. Lot of Digg. All right. Let’s see how many hands we get for this: Twitter.

[loud whooping from audience]

[laughter]

Jeremy: Nice.

Leslie: Nice. [laughs]

Chris: Was that a howl?

[laughter]

Joseph: No werewolves…

Jeremy: Yeah, we’re not playing werewolf here. And finally, let’s see Flickr.

[loud whooping from audience]

[laughter]

Jeremy: All right. Now, on each one of those accounts, you had to enter your details every time. And on each one of those accounts, you had to find your friends, contacts—call them what you want—on those accounts, and you had to say, “Yes, I know this person; yes, I want to share my photos, trips, music, whatever, with those people” every single time. Please raise your hand if that got really annoying after a while.

[whooping from audience]

Jeremy: All right.

[laughter]

Jeremy: [laughs] that’s what we’re here to talk about today. And to talk about this, I have assembled a crack team for my panel. And I’m now going to ask them to introduce themselves…

Chris: Why’s it never a marijuana team?

[laughter]

Jeremy: Okay. We’re going straight to the crack. I’m going to ask them to introduce themselves. They’ve got about 60 seconds to introduce themselves. And points will be awarded for creative and interesting facts. Points will be deducted for blatant pimping of companies. So I’ll start over here. Chris, do you want to go first?

Chris Messina: Sure. So my name is Chris Messina. I won’t do any affiliations, but a couple of interesting facts. One is that I don’t like olives. The second is that I’m from New Hampshire. And third is that my alter ego online, Factory Joe, is actually from a “1984”-esque dystopian comic that I drew in high school.

Leslie Chicoine: Nice. Hello. My name is Leslie Chicoine. And let’s see, interesting facts. I was suspended from high school. I have a game design degree. And—oh, my God, everyone’s looking at me.

Jeremy: You can name your company. It’s Okay.

Joseph: Yeah. You should really say where you work for.

Leslie: Oh. I work for Get Satisfaction.

Jeremy: Minus one point.

[laughter]

Leslie: Oh! That was trickery! Did you see that?

Joseph: This is a tough panel.

David Recordon: I’m David Recordon. I’ll take the one-point hit right now. I work for Six Apart. But I’m repping two other companies right here. I’ve got the Blogger glove on, since the whole idea of portable social networks—like our blogging software, their blogging software—should connect, yeah?

[laughter]

David: But, on the other wrist, I’ve got the Facebook wristband. So, also pimping the Facebook. But it’s locked on; can’t get that off.

[laughter]

[applause]

Leslie: Har har.

David: Yeah. So, two interesting facts. I technically have five names, and I’m the only Fajuen that I know of.

Chris: Fajuen?

Joseph Smarr: Wow. So I’m Joseph Smarr, from Plaxo. And I’ve been working on trying to help open up the social Web, by helping you stitch together all the content you’re sharing on these different sites and helping find your friends. And in my spare time, I like to play electric guitar, as many of you may have found out through Valleywag.

Jeremy: Okay. Good. I think Chris is winning so far. He’s leading with the points.

Chris: Sweet.

Jeremy: All right. Down to brass tacks. We just got a show of hands there that people are a bit annoyed, it seems, with having to re-enter this data and having to reconnect with all these people on all these different services. But, let’s face it: this is a gathering of geeks here at South by Southwest. Is this even an issue for most folks? Are we the canaries in the coal mine? Who wants to take this one?

Leslie: Okay, I’m going to jump on that right away. I feel that this framing is actually taking away from this battle that’s being had. The idea that network fatigue is the reason that we need to connect all these networks? I don’t know. That’s such a small subsection of the people. There are so few people who have that issue; I actually think that you guys can be much more creative about your reasoning about why we need to connect our services.

I kind of see it that it’s not about network fatigue. It’s about this sort of burgeoning coalition of services, and making it easier for people to move between those services and pull what types of information they want, what kind of data from each service that they want, into the next service.

So it’s not necessarily even about friends lists. It’s about documents that I’ve created, photos that I’ve taken. And I just sort of don’t really think the framing is a positive way to get things done.

Joseph: Well, I do think we’re canaries in the coal mine, though, in the sense that I think what we’re seeing is that the whole Web is becoming sort of socially aware and socially enabled, and that we’re finding that it’s amazing the number of services that get better when they know who you know. Right?

So, if you think about the evolution of Web 2.0, you think about the evolution of social networks and Facebook platform and all of that, there’s all these things about: photos work better when they’re social; bookmarks work better when they’re social; travel works better when it’s social. And if you think about it, almost everything could be made better when it’s social.

But the problem is if you think about the explosion of the Web itself, once you sort of had those open protocols, everybody could just sort of build a great Website. But when you want to build a new sort of social experience, you don’t just need the protocols; you also need that data of who am I and who I know. And right now, because that data’s not flowing, people have to start over every time. And that’s where that fatigue is coming on.

And that is a universal problem, right? I mean, if you think about when we all came to this conference, those of us who knew each other beforehand didn’t have to re-meet each other at this conference, right? We already had that past relationship. And that’s why we’re able to build on our experiences over time. And right now, every Website acts like you’ve never used another Website before in your life. And that, to me, is a universal problem, and a universal opportunity to make everybody use all of this stuff a lot more.

David: Yeah. I think, combining what Leslie said and Joseph said, in terms of that idea that it’s not just about the people that you know and wanting to have portability in terms of who you’re interacting with, but that all of the things that you’re doing because of Web 2.0, of creating technologies, of community collaboration, that’s what really requires the social features.

And so far, it’s been really poor user experience and poor starting point of, you sign up for a service, and it starts out with: “Who do you know?” And being able to sort of lower that barrier—which I think is why the Facebook platform’s been so successful—of, all of a sudden, you create a new application, there are many people who can go and use it quickly, is important. But it’s also important to remember that the Web is really successful because it’s not siloed.

Chris: I would also add to that, one of the important ways to think about this—and David’s sort of getting to this point a little bit—is what you can take for granted when you’re building Web applications. And I think, more and more, people are taking the social component for granted.

But the experience is, first of all, not universal, and secondly, it has a lot of friction to it. So, insomuch as there’s a great opportunity to reduce friction in using a new application, that’s extremely important.

And so it’s not just about not finding your friends over and over again and having that process be really crappy, because it isn’t that you want all the same friends on all the different services that you use, but that when you actually want to reach out and touch someone, it should be as easy as that—as opposed to having to go through a whole process in getting them to be invited into the service which, we were sort of saying, if I even have 10 friends that I commonly invite to new services, and let’s say I use 50 services, if I’m berating them with 50 new invites every five days, they’re probably not going to be my friend for that much longer. So it’s also about the imposition that you’re putting on other people, the more services you’re using.

For example, I probably have 364 application invites on Facebook. I mean, it’s kind of stupid. So figuring out a way of improving that process, for me, so that I can play Scrabulous without having to worry about going through this arduous process, I think, is also important.

Leslie: Yeah. I think you actually kind of hit on it right there. It’s about being able to move between the services in sort of a free-flowing manner, because right now, everything is siloed around—every service has its own gateway. And so, if we can knock down those gateways, then that means that all these services can actually start working together, and we can have that kind of puzzle-piece, snap-together Web that we keep talking about.

Chris: Or even better, it’s sort of more about competition and choice, being able to, let’s say, have most of my friends really like Facebook, but then I have a number of friends who are on MySpace. Being able to message them between networks is sort of something that’s really important. I mean, email accomplished this a long time ago; you can go from server to server. Well, why can’t you do the same thing with social networks? It’s stupid. But that’s the way it is.

Joseph: And I think what you’re all hearing here is this is not about my ability to abandon one social network entirely and go somewhere else. It’s much more about me being able to have these different tools work together so that I can use them more so that the friction comes down so that more users can take advantage of them. Right? It’s about making each of these apps part of a rich social ecosystem, where hopefully the pie should get a lot bigger and everyone should be able to win. And I think that’s something everybody can get behind.

David: And from a future perspective, I think Facebook NewsFeed was probably one of the really successful other ways to frame this question of, you’re really interested in seeing what are your friends doing online. And this has shown to be really true by the number of startups right now who are going and trying to compete in this space. You had Socialthing launch yesterday, I think, and it dominated Twitter this morning.

And so I think that feature, even though it’s not necessarily the problem of “My data is all in one place,” or “My friends are in one place,” or “It’s hard to get started,” but allowing that feature of just the philosophy that people exist in multiple places around the Web, and are sharing things and creating things all around the Web, is really important.

Jeremy: So, what I’m hearing here is it’s all about reducing friction. So, social network portability is essentially the Vaseline of the World Wide Web.

[laughter]

Jeremy: Which is good.

Chris: You said it first.

Jeremy: But we are still the uber-geeks. And even Mark Zuckerberg, just today, in an interview at ReadWriteWeb, was talking about throwing open his API, and nobody’s particularly interested in using this feature. As he said, “We threw an API and nobody came.” So maybe we are still a bit niche.

Should the reasons for doing this be more business-related, rather than it’s good for the future, it’s going to build the next stage of the Web? Are there business benefits to opening up? Or is it the opposite, that, from a business perspective, you actually want to keep people locked and you want to keep people closed in?

Joseph: We’ve certainly seen a lot of positive business benefits from it because, like I said, as much excitement as there’s been with any of these services, you just think about it: we are just at the very beginning. I mean, most people out there are not sharing rich content with each other.

Think about how many people you know who have a digital camera but you’re not seeing their photos. Think about how many people are doing interesting things that you’re not hearing about, right? Think about how many of your parents are communicating with you in that kind of way, or your extended family.

And so, when you unlock barriers and you make things interoperate, everybody starts using everything a lot more. And we’ve certainly seen that in Plaxo and Pulse; everybody’s creating stuff and sharing it, from their blogs and their photos and everything else, right? And just by being able to go in and sync your address book and find all the people who are sharing this information and connect you to me, even though ultimately you’re going out to the other sites, just that ability to sort of reduce friction has been incredibly good for our business.

And I think for all the other businesses, too, we’re driving them traffic, we’re getting more users. So I certainly don’t think we’re at the stage yet where there’s a zero-sum game, where people have to fight over a piece of the pie, because the pie’s just going to get a lot bigger.

Jeremy: Now, you’re talking specifically about address books. You’re talking about getting people’s information out of their address books so they can move it around from service to service. Is that not kind of a special case? Because when we talk about data wanting to be free, we’re usually talking about “my photographs.” I want my photographs to be mine, even if I’m storing them on Flickr, “my music”, whatever my content is.

But the contact details of my friends, do I own that? I own the fact that I am friends with a person, but do I own their email address now? Does that give me the right to put email addresses around? So address book portability is—I don’t know.

David: And that was something that I think was really the crux of the issue with the Facebook-Scoble-Plaxo…

Jeremy: Debacle.

David: …debacle—thank you—earlier this year, where it was sort of like, what was that fine line there between the information that Plaxo and Scoble were taking out of Facebook, of “Did that belong to Scoble?” Was going and taking that step of having OCR images to get email addresses actually beyond what was socially acceptable or not?

Chris: That’s not even the point. I mean, I think the point there should really be about whether or not you have the ability to contact someone when you want to contact them. And I think that the whole matter was confused by data geeks who care about data and not so much about people who care about people who care about solving real problems or problems in the while.

So, if I’m out and about, and I have this person in my phone, and I want to contact them, I should have some mechanism to do so, whether it’s by their phone number or their email or whatever—it shouldn’t really matter so much as if they’ve given me permission to contact them.

And I think that we’ve been architecting our thinking about this from a very sort of protocol and data perspective, as opposed to thinking about, “Well, what are we actually doing for people?” Why do people want to get this data out of the networks, when the reality is they want to contact someone, they want to talk to someone, they want to share something with them?

Leslie: I think that’s a great framing of it, actually, because the point isn’t really how; it’s what they want to do. So, in this case, there’s got to be a way. For example, if you don’t have the right to have someone’s email address, but these sites are linked, why can’t you, from the technical side, link up the sites so that I never actually see the email address that I’m using but I know that my message gets through? Now, I don’t have ownership of that email address, but I still get what I want.

David: Focusing on the feature, like Chris said, I think is really important. We put sort of a life-streaming concept, called ActionStreams, into Movable Type. And instead of going and focusing on the “Oh, by the way, bloggers, you’re also now adding XFN to all of your blogs and supporting Atom and things like that,” what we did was “Oh, you want to go and share with people that read your blog what you’re doing around the Web?” and focused on that, really, as the feature, building that feature. And now, as a side effect, all these people have XFN links to their accounts around the Web.

Joseph: Yeah, I totally agree with that. That was the thing to start with. It’s like how do you find what your friends are doing, and how do you start getting connected to that, and then how do you start wanting to share yourself?

And when these technologies work well, you don’t even realize that you’re using them, right? You see Yahoo deploying OpenID for all their users, where, when you come to Plaxo, there’s a button that says, “Sign in with my Yahoo ID.” You don’t even know that you’re using OpenID; you just know, “Hey, I already have a Yahoo account. I shouldn’t have to create a new account from scratch.” Those are those signs of progress that real users can get.

Jeremy: Yes. So this is an interesting point. And we’re talking about framing the discussion. If we get bogged down in techy terms, we’re going to put people off. It’s not so much fun. And when we talk about portable social networks, it’s kind of already a kind of techy term. And there’s another term out there that sounds even more off-putting, which is “the social graph.”

David: I’m sorry.

[laughter]

Jeremy: Does somebody want to defend that position? I don’t like that term. Anybody here want to say that they do?

Joseph: I just think we needed something that wasn’t “social network,” because we already think of those as like MySpace and Facebook.

Jeremy: What about “super-best-friends club”?

[laughter]

Joseph: I mean, ultimately, it just becomes a sign.

Leslie: I feel like the whole thing is, again, kind of strange, because the focus then is on…

Chris: Terminology.

Leslie: Well, terminology. And also, it’s really about people’s relationships. But the Web is way more than that. I mean, of course, when things are social, it makes it more fun, it makes it more interesting, there’s a lot more information that you can share and find. But there’s also just being able to move between services freely, whether or not that’s with your friends.

Jeremy: Okay. You keep saying “friends.” Now, this brings up an interesting point as well. Are they friends? Are they contacts? On Dopplr, they very specifically say, “You share trips with these people.” It says “your fellow travelers.” That’s an interesting term. Do we want to be using terms like “friends”? Are we really diluting the English language at that stage? The MySpace definition of friend is pretty broad. [laughs]

Joseph: Including Captain Morgan and what have you, right?

[laughter]

David: A few years ago, I worked on LiveJournal, and this was a huge problem we had, where users were friending each other. And it first started out in terms of how the site evolved, of just a small group of people using it, and they were their friends. But it was also, at the same time, pulling together, reading people’s content, trusting other people with your content. It was very hard, and the LiveJournal still hasn’t gotten away from the concept of friends.

Leslie: It’s hard once you’ve installed your system that way. Once you’ve trained people to think of it that way, it’s really hard to back out. So anyone that works with me knows that I’m incredibly adamant against using the word “friend.” And I think it’s really important to frame things up front in all sorts of interesting ways. So I really respect the way that Dopplr has done their work because they’re very careful about making sure that it’s around an action—so it’s a person that you do an action with, a person that you share a trip with, a person that you want to share photos with.

Joseph: And I think that speaks to another important point, which I think one of you alluded to earlier, which is, just because you want to be able to go to a new site and find who you know there, of course, it doesn’t mean you necessarily want to be friends with everybody on every site or share things with everybody on every site, right?

So, just like we don’t want people to think that to make your data portable, it has to be public, we also want people to able to think that just because you can go find people somewhere doesn’t mean you’re still not going to choose the type of relationship that’s appropriate…

Jeremy: That’s very true. I mean, I have friends on Flickr because I like their photography. But then they might want to friend me on Last.fm. But if they’ve got lousy taste in music, there’s no way I’m making them my friends.

Joseph: [laughs]

Jeremy: Now, we’re going to get on to the technologies required, because the building blocks are there today. But first of all, it seems like, is this not all a solved problem? Because, Joseph, you talking about moving your data from one address book to another service, and it seems like we can actually do that, because I sign up to new services and it says, “Hey, do you use Gmail? Do you use Yahoo Mail? Do you use Hotmail? Great. Well, just give me your user name and your password for that third-party service, and away we go.”

Chris: Well, they are trustworthy…

Joseph: That seems like a loaded question.

Jeremy: Yeah.

[laughter]

Jeremy: Okay. To give some background, I did bring this issue up at the Social Graph Foo Camp, and named and shamed a lot of services in this regard, because I think it’s pretty bad personally because it’s teaching users how to be phished, and that is wrong.

Joseph: And just beyond that, because that sort of issue, I think, we’ll hear about with OpenID and OAuth and things like that addressing it. But I think the other thing that’s really important for people to realize is that that kind of one-time import is really not capturing the sort of dynamic nature of people’s relationships.

I mean, just in South by Southwest, I have met a whole bunch of new great people, right? And I think any site that you slurp down your Gmail address book and try to find people: A. it’s only finding people by email address, whereas increasingly we know people, not be email address but through other social network. So, maybe I know your Twitter name maybe I know your Facebook ID or whatev

Vitamin Features » The thrill of launch

A great narrative by Peter Nixey detailing the ups and downs of launching a web app (Clickpass in this case).

As well as enjoying the panel offerings of my peers at South by Southwest, I had the pleasure of hosting a session too.

There are two ways to approach speaking gigs. You can do a proper presentation with plenty of preparation. That’s what I’ve always done in previous years and that’s what Richard and James opted for with their talk, Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World. The presentation was excellent although much of the humour derived from putting this picture on screen for all to see. And what were the chances that Derek’s presentation immediately afterward would feature a further two Star Wars related pictures of me?

The other approach is to do a panel. This is quite a different beast to doing a presentation. In this case, too much preparation can actually be harmful. If you ever find yourself in the position of having to moderate a panel, I suggest you read the wise words of Derek Powazek:

Do not get everyone together beforehand. Do not have breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Do not start an email thread and make everyone participate. All this does is rob the panel of any spontaneity. Your panelists learn very quickly where the hot buttons are, and will avoid them later, which makes for a boring panel. And when the audience hears a panelist say, Well, as we were discussing earlier … it just makes them feel like they missed the good part.

The secret to having a good panel is actually pretty simple: get together a bunch of passionate, smart, sassy experts and let ‘em rip. I was lucky enough to have a dream line-up for Building Portable Social Networks:

• Chris Messina,
• Leslie Chicoine,
• David Recordon and
• Joseph Smarr.

They were all wonderful and the time up there on the stage just flew by. I had a lot of compliments on the panel afterwards. The kind words of Jeff Veen in particular meant a lot to me—he’s my public speaking role model.

I’m coming to realise how much I love moderating panels. It started with the Hot Topics panels at @media and now I’m hooked. I probably enjoy moderating panels for much the same reason that I enjoy moderating Werewolf: a feeling of power and the chance to get some cheap laughs at the expense of other people’s public humiliation …all without the hard work and preparation that goes into a proper presentation.

So if you’re putting together a conference and you’re looking for a dictactorial sarcastic bastard to moderate a panel, come see about me.

Meanwhile I’ll be eagerly refreshing the podcast coverage from this year’s SXSW until the audio from my panel is made available, at which point I’ll get it transcribed and published. C’mon Hugh, don’t make me break out my bitchin’n’moanin’ mojo.

Extenuating Circumstances – SXSW: The Web That Wasn’t

Dan Hon's very extensive notes from Alex Wright's great talk at South by Southwest, The Web That Wasn't.

Twitter / SouthByScurvy

Quite a few people got sick after South by Southwest. There seems to be some kind of virus going around. Inevitably, the virus now has a Twitter account.

On the Sunday afternoon in the middle of South by Southwest Interactive, Andy, Jessica and I took some time out for a very pleasant Mexican lunch at Las Manitas with Sean Bonner, Tantek, Ariel and our anglo-Canadian musical masters, Matt and Hannah.

As lunch neared its end, every single mobile device at the table began to vibrate with ever greater frequency. We were missing the now-infamous interview by Sarah Lacey of Mark Zuckerburg but Twitter was giving us a blow-by-blow account of the debacle. The most astute observation was delivered from afar by Tom Morris:

What’s the difference between Facebook and the FB session at SXSW? You can leave the session…

On balance, we were all pretty glad that we were missing the train wreck.

We got the bill and started paying up. Tantek began going through each of his dollar bills with a felt-tipped pen, crossing out the word “God” from the phrase In God We Trust. I asked the obvious question. Tantek, what are you doing? His answer:

Separating church and state.

South by Southwest is over for another year and once again, I had a great time. Yes, it was overwhelming. Yes, it was even bigger than before. But I went in with expectations of an overwhelmingly big conference so I wasn’t constantly comparing it to previous years and muttering It’s not like the old days.

As always, the most valuable and rewarding aspect to SXSW is the people. Sure, I didn’t get to see everybody I wanted to but rather than running around frantically trying to connect with everyone, I decided to savour the time I had with people in the moment. It was wonderful to spend some time with old friends and it was equally wonderful to meet new people, all of them smart, passionate and just plain nice.

In between the geek breakfasts, the hallway conversations, the BBQ lunches, the geek bowling—superbly overseen by Cindy—and such great parties as The Great British Booze-up, there was even time for an occasional panel or presentation. These can be fairly hit or miss (remember, no-one gets paid to speak and with 10 simultaneous tracks, the quality is bound to be inconsistent) but I got pretty lucky with the panels I attended.

I did some panel-hopping, invoking the law of two feet and remembering that if you’re not really enjoying a talk, it’s more insulting to stay than to leave. I also made a point of trying to get outside my comfort zone so for the most part, I steered clear of CSS and JavaScript discussions in favour of topics like High Tech Craft.

I really enjoyed the What Teens Want panel. If this had been a bunch of adults talking about what they think teens want, it would have been excruciating. But because this was coming straight from the young horse’s mouth, it was absorbing.

Jim Coudal’s presentation on Creative Relativity was engrossing but I must admit that I ducked out half-way through: just about everyone I follow on Twitter was raving about the Worst Website Ever comedy revue managed by Andy Baio that was on at the same time. I ducked into the back of the already-packed room and sure enough, it was absolutely hilarious—possibly the highlight of this and every other SXSW.

There was one presentation I really didn’t want to miss. Even before the final schedule was announced, the talk at the top of my list was called The Web That Wasn’t based on the new book Glut by Alex Wright. It was a fascinating look at the alternative histories of hypertext from Paul Otlet to Doug Engelbart. It made me kick myself even more that I had to pass up David’s invitation to meet Ted Nelson in the flesh at Saint Paul’s a couple of weeks back.

All in all, I had a great time filling up my brain whether it was at a panel, in a hallway or at a dinner table. I’m sure the conference will be even bigger next year but that’s not going to stop me from coming back. South by Southwest is the one event in the geek calendar that is truly unmissable.

But I hope that next year the organisers will heed Jeffrey’s remarks and provide some kind of daycare facility for the children of geek parents. Not only would it earn good Whuffie, it strikes me that there’s a great sponsorship opportunity there too.

Viddler.com - Merlin Mann - Worst Website Ever - SXSW 2008 - Uploaded by rooreynolds

This was the best part of the best presentation at South by Southwest this year: Merlin Mann gives his spiel during Andy Baio's "Worst website ever."

Getting from MIX08 in Vegas to South by Southwest in Austin should have been fairly straightforward. All I had to do was change planes in Dallas. But the best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft a-gley.

Moments after my flight from Vegas landed, Dallas was hit with an unseasonable snowstorm. My flight to Austin was cancelled. One phone call to American Airlines later, I was booked onto a (much) later flight. Jessica was flying in from London and I managed to get her booked on to the same later flight to Austin. Now we just had to kill some time in an airport. We met up with Natalie who was also trying to either get on a later flight.

Inevitably all the flights were cancelled. At this stage, there were no more hotel rooms to be had in Dallas. The airport infrastructure was beginning to collapse under the weight of a thousand irate passengers.

In the end, Twitter came to the rescue (I know that surfacing serendipity is meant to be Dopplr’s bag but I’m accumulating quite a store of serendipitous Twitter stories). Erin was also in the airport. She read of my predicament and sent a direct message to tell me that she, Peter and Josh had managed to rent a vehicle with space for a few more people. All we had to was get to the rental space. That turned out to be quite a challenging level of the game. It was like Trains, Planes and Automobiles crossed with War Of The Worlds.

Eventually we made it out of the airport and begin a classic American road trip through the Texas night in a gold-coloured rental van, stopping at the occasional gas station to buy toothbrushes and souvenir t-shirts because American Airlines still had our luggage. Meanwhile, other stranded geeks were making their way to Austin by any means necessary. An octet of Britpackers rented a taxi all the way from Dallas (one fine geek didn’t even make it that far).

My simple shot from Vegas to Austin turned out to be quite an adventure. I feel like quite a few us really paid our dues getting to SXSW this year. It was certainly worth it.

4 Technologies for Portability in Social Networks: A Primer - ReadWriteWeb

A nice summary of the technologies presented at my SXSW panel.

One trip ends, another begins. In a few hours I’ll be back in Gatwick. This time I’m embarking on a journey to Las Vegas where I’ll be attending a little bit of MIX08.

I’m going specifically to meet the IE team. I was all set to head out there in a fighting stance, ready to fight my corner in the battle against the default behaviour for version targeting. Well, it turns out that I needn’t be so adversarial. I’ve just heard that Microsoft are reversing their position on the default behaviour. So now instead of going to Vegas for a title fight, I’m going to celebrate.

I can’t express how happy this makes me. I’m also extremely impressed that Microsoft listened to—and acted upon—the feedback from the developer community. They can now count on me as a staunch ally in educating site owners about how to implement version targeting when necessary.

Once I’m thanking the IE team from the bottom of my heart, I’ll hop on a flight from Vegas to Austin for the annual geek Summer camp that is South by Southwest. I’ll be in transit on Thursday, spending most of the day hanging around the airport in Dallas. If you’ve also got some time to kill there, send me a direct Twitter message and we can meet up in some corner of the airport.

As is now traditional, I’ve drawn up Adactio Austin: a mashup of microformats and maps that lists all the best parties so you can see how far apart they are. If our paths should cross at any of those geek gatherings, be sure to say Hi and drink a Shiner Bock with me.

It won’t be all beer and BBQ in Austin; I’m also going to be moderating a panel. This is the first time that I’m doing a panel rather than a presentation and I’m quite looking forward to it. After getting together with my fellow panelists at the Social Graph Foo Camp, I’m certain we’re going to have an exciting and fun discussion.

If you’re going to Southby, be sure to make it along to The Great British Booze-up on Monday evening. It was one of the highlights last year and we aim to repeat the success (we being Clearleft, Boagworld and Carsonified).

See you in Vegas and/or Austin.

SXSW 2008 Interactive Schedule

An iPhone-optimised schedule for South by Southwest.

SCHED: SXSW 2008 Schedule for Friday March 7 in Austin, TX

Look what Taylor made: a handy schedule of everything going on at South By Southwest. Smart kid.

SXSW Videos

The guys from Viddler have put together a little site dedicated to video coverage from South by Southwest.

It’s never too early to start thinking about South By Southwest. The Clearleft posse booked some rooms at The Hampton Inn in downtown Austin months ago. Now it’s time to think about what you might like to see on stage in Texas. The panel picker is live and hungry for your clicks.

There’s a bunch of design and development panels on offer from my friends and colleagues. I’m not voting for most of those though because:

1. they don’t need my votes and
2. I want my friends to spend their time partying with me instead of preparing presentations.

Speaking of which, there’s a panel with my name on it. That’s mostly because Brian had already reached his limit of three panel ideas and asked me to take over. Please don’t vote for it—I don’t want to spend the whole time worrying about keeping my voice. Besides, there are many more panels worthy of your attention.

There are almost 700 presentations to choose from. To make your choice a little easier, these are the panels I think I voted for—the Ajax powered panel picker is built with dynamic disappearing stars—ordered more or less in order of interest:

1. The Web That Wasn’t

   What if the Web had turned out differently? Before Tim Berners-Lee came along, a number of now-mostly-forgotten information scientists were pursuing competing visions that in many ways surpassed today’s Web. By exploring the Web that wasn’t, we can find tantalizing clues to a Web that may yet be.

2. Go For IT! Attracting Girls to Technology

   As the technology workforce changes and outsourcing becomes more feared, it is difficult to attract smart, qualified youth to technical careers (especially girls). This session will survey current programs encouraging computing education, discuss what these programs are missing, and suggest what the techie community can do to help.

3. Totally Wired Teens: How Teens are Using Your Applications

   Listen to real teens talk about the role technology plays in their lives from the time they wake up to their cell phones to sending that last text message at 2 a.m. Anastasia Goodstein will moderate a panel composed of Austin area teenagers to find out where they go online, what types of web design and features they love — and more importantly, which ones they don’t.

4. ‘Redrum in the Rue Morgue’: Collaboration in International Communities

   Do Italian citizens of Second Life stand physically closer than Canadians? Are Portuguese more prone to blog than French? Is collaboration in international communities being driven more by the platform selected than by the culture(s)? The panelists will discuss how people interact and collaborate in international online communities.

5. Meet The Architects

   Meet the Architects: the people who design and think about buildings and those who do the same for websites. The panel also introduces everyone to some of the most active and provocative design-based online communities out there.

6. Adult Conversations: Sex, Intimacy & Online Relationships

   ‘Sex’ is one of the most commonly searched terms online. From MySpace to online personals, the Internet allows a growing number of consenting adults to keystroke their way to new relationships. Join sociologists, bloggers and sex researchers to discuss how the Internet is changing interpersonal relationships and human sexuality now.

7. Designing Social Media: Interface Tricks and Tips

   We all know the core concepts — Identity, Presence, Relationships, etc — but how do these manifest themselves in our design choices? From avatars or log-in pages, a million tiny choices make the difference between lively community and crickets chirping. We’ll teach you how to make social software social!

8. Lost in Translation? Top Website Internationalization Lessons

   How do you publish software or content for a global audience? Our expert panel discusses lessons learned translating and localizing. Leaders from Flickr, Google, iStockphoto and the Worldwide Lexicon will tackle various marketing issues; how to translate the ‘feel’ of a Web site, and; best practices for software and content translation.

9. Designing for Freedom

   In a world where an increasingly diverse set of people are stumbling around the internet, the role of design becomes even more important. This panel will focus on a discussion on how to to design products considering user freedom and user empowerment at every step of the development process.

10. What Women Need to Succeed

    Some feel that women have a tougher time succeeding in a man’s tech world. This panel will examine the facts, ideas and theories surrounding what it takes for women to be empowered and successful as business owners and contractors.

11. Stop With the Web 2.0 Already

    We must put an end to Web 2.0. The buzzwords have affected Web design clients to the point where they just want the latest without having any clue about the implications of what they are asking for. A site for an electrical company really does not need social networking.

12. DataPlay: Living Games

    Our movements in real space and virtual space are tracked by pedometers, GPS units, keystroke loggers, spyware and myware. How can we have fun with all our data trails? I will discuss examples of surveillance data-driven entertainment including our “Passively Multiplayer Online Game”: PMOG transforms the existing topography of the Internet into a game world for players to vandalize, annotate, and curate.

13. All About Storytelling

    Whether you blog, write for a website, or have a need to present important technical information in a way that is meaningful, you are a storyteller. Humans have used the art of storytelling over thousands of years as a means of sharing socially relevant, inspiring, and dangerous information. Learn how to convey your concept, philosophy, or technology in ways that your clients, readers, and customers will understand and appreciate.

14. The Great Debate: Is Web 2.0 Bulls#!t?

    Six people. Two teams. Six minutes each. The Great Debate will use a formal debate structure to allow some of the Web’s best thinkers and communicators to convince you that Web 2.0 is/isn’t a load of tripe. Sincere argument, fiery rhetoric, or insulting ridicule: any approach accepted.

15. Social Design Strategies

    Now that social networking is quickly becoming a regular feature set, designers need to understand the dynamics of designing experiences that encourage social behavior, while giving individuals a sense of privacy, personal gain, and ownership. How do you create a symbiotic relationship that maximizes discovery, game-play, connections, and communication? We’ll examine a breadth of examples and explore their pros and cons.