After a (very painful) migration from one domain registrar to another, I’m back online!

I’ve now been back from SXSW for one week.  Apparently, I needed that week to get caught up with work and with life in general (I was at Barcamp LA the weekend before SXSW, so that means that combined with work I had basically geeked out for 21 straight days by the time last Friday rolled around).  This post will probably fall under the category of "if a tree falls alone in a forest…does anyone give a sh!t" since I’m now one week behind the times, but the last two sessions that I attended were extremely interesting to me personally as they were about video blogging and I am in the (somewhat slow) process of converting yours truly (kid’s allright) into a video blog so that I can start writing about things more interesting than what conference sessions I attended at SXSW.

How to Add Video to Your Blog — Tuesday, March 14
Great to see video bloggers treated like rock stars.  Panelists included:
Shlomo Rabinowitz — Echoplex Park
Eddie Codel — Geek Entertainment TV
Mike Slone — Daily Experience
Michael Verdi — freevlog.org
Sarah Hepola — sarahhepola.com and writer for The Morning News

Video Highlights:
GeekEntertainmentTV’s clip about What is Adaptive Path had the crowd cracking up at 10am.  For the record, Adaptive Path is a user experience design and consulting firm in San Francisco).
Schlomo Rabinowitz showed a darling clip featuring his mom.  His quote was killer, "Everyone likes moms…Moms are like the new cats of the 21st century internet."

Takeaways:

1. Michael Verdi’s site FreeVlog.org is full of useful tips and tricks to get a video blog up and running.  Michael is about to publish a book on the subject, and as soon as that gets out he’ll have time to add even more info to the website.
2. Attention span –> shorter is better.  Clips should be less than 3 minutes.  Even 30 seconds can be effective.  Clips should be less than 1MB each, should be rendered at 320×240 and compressed at 4-5 MB/minute.  MPEG4 is good, 3ivx and H264 are good codecs.
3. Hosting: There are three viable options including,
   • Host yourself which can now be achieved for less than $10 a month unless you become extremely popular.  Dreamhost is a great option as it provides a ton of bandwidth (I signed up for it this weekend.)
   • Use the Internet Archive, a non-profit that is providing free hosting solutions
   • Use blip.tv.  Blip hosts the files for you similar to YouTube and other popular services, but with Blip you keep all of your rights to the content.  Be very careful using those other services as you are surrendering your ownership rights to the content by uploading there.  Also, I met Mike, co-founder of Blip, at SXSW and he’s a great guy so I certainly advocate supporting his service. 
4. Audio Quality: can be a concern if you are in a noisy venue and using a beginner camera (which they ALL recommended.  Most of them shot on either a <$400 handheld digital video camera or even just a still digital photo camera using video mode).  But you can always compress audio at a higher level.
5. Branding: Put your brand at the front and back of your clip so that your brand (and URL) stay with your work in case people steal your content (which they will).  On that note, the Center For Social Media has a great site that outlines best practices for fair use of content.

 
Video Blog Business Models — Tuesday, March 14
Panelists included:
Andrew Michael Baron — Rocketboom (a top daily video blog)
Casey Carvet — blastro.com (online music videos)
Josh Kinberg — Fire Ant (online video aggregator and desktop client)
Chris Nolan — Spot-On.com (political commentary site)
Chuck Olson — Minnesota Stories (a top daily video blog)
Kevin Sladek — Video Egg (providing video hosting, editing and sharing capabilities)

For the most part, discussion in this panel was pretty similar to the panel I attended the day before about how online comics make money.  Lots of discussion about whether to put ads at the front or the back of the video, whether to do exclusive sponsorships, whether to do product placement, whether to do subscriptions, etc.  For the most part, people were very protective of their content’s integrity and would conceded to an add near the end of the video and ads on their site but that was about it.  Nothing earth shattering here, though I still think that the absolute explosion of Rocketboom (they sold their first ad on eBay a few weeks ago for $40k and you can also get Rocketboom on TiVo now) is astounding.  Both Andrew from Rocketboom and Chuck from Minnesot Stories said that frequency is a big driver of success…people still want serial content.  I had an interesting conversation with Chuck after the show.  He posts content about Minnesota five days a week…but was in Austin…so what did he do?  Well, Minnesota had a blizzard the previous night so Chuck took some free archical footage, a stream of Flickr photos depicting the blizzard, added music, and created an nice slideshow.  Freaking brilliant…and so simple.

After the sessions, I had a great lunch with a number of these guys, and sat next to videoblogger Bre Pettis (I Make Things and Room 132) who showed me a cool site that he put together over the weekend: PhoneTagger.com.  Check it out.

Technorati Tags: SXSW, SXSWi, SXSWi06, SXSW06, videoblogging, vlog, videoblog

After a morning thinking about the Cluetrain Manifesto and microformats, and an afternoon spent having an intense discussion / pseudo-interview over coffee with an industry thought-leader about the future of Yahoo!, I couldn’t have picked a better session to help wind down the day than one on how online comic book cartoonists make money online. For one, comic book writers are funny. That’s why they are called comics, I suppose. And it was a pretty entertaining session full of people who can appreciate the humor in the details and side notes of life. I found that their basic business models were fairly similar to most blogs: try a contextual ad network, sell your own ads, have a subscription for premium services, request tips, sell merchandise, etc. There seemed to be a number of comic artists in the audience who were on the beginner blogging track, so the session appeared to go over very well for them. And, again, the stories were funny. And the best part about it is that I now have a number of great new online comics and services to read, and to share:
- Unshelved, a comic about life in the library by Bill Barnes
- OK/Cancel, a comic about user interface design and useability by Kevin Cheng
- Sheldon, a comic that is currently distributed via United Media / United Features Syndicate by Dave Kellett
- Daring Fireball, not a comic but rather a widely read witty blog on design, Macs and other fun stuff by John Gruber
- Neekole.com, also not a comic but rather a personal blog on pop culture by Nicole Lee

And I didn’t muster up any questions to ask, but I wish I would have as they were giving out nicely bound comic books to the brave souls who did.

Ok, it is nearly 10pm and I am at SXSW…so I’m out. Ciao.

Technorati tags: SXSW, SXSWi, SXSWi06, SXSW06, comics

Led by microformats guru Tantek Celik (CTO of Technorati) and including Chris Messina of Flock, Mark Norman Francis of Yahoo! UK and Jeremy Keith, this panel provided an overview of microformats and gave examples of how they can be applied.  Tantek posted all of his presentation notes online and blogged his own summary of the event, so I will be quite brief in explanation.  But basically, microformats provide a means to standardize data on the web that is not yet standardized.  It is attempting to do for random bits of data (movie reviews, contact information, concert listings, etc) what RSS has done for text articles by standardizing the meta-data that defines the given item and making the data universally accessible.  So, for example, the microformat for contact information, called "hCard", universally standardized the HTML that one uses to denote Name, Address, URL, Email, etc, within the page code.  For a better high-level overview than I can give, I will again point you to the microformats.org site.  But the takeaway is that microformats will help expose data that is currently locked into unstandardized HTML code so that people can use it for mashups, syndication, and other means of simplified data importing/exporting into various programs.  For example, if Yahoo! Address Book, Outlook and MySpace all supported and organized contacts via microformats, you could easily merge all three address lists into one in order to have a master address file.  Another tangible example for microformats use was given by Jeremy Keith, who showed you Yahoo! UK Movies currently supports the hReview microformat such that anyone can access and reuse the movie reviews and access the data in a unified way.  Jeremy Keith showed how he had created a mashup using Google Maps API and the microformats-supported events data in Upcoming.org to map out his SXSW evening activities (link).

You can now download the Tails extension for Firefox, or download the Flock browser, and both support microformats.  That way, if you are on a web page that supports microformats, you can easily access the raw, microformat-supported data from the page.

I welcome any comments below by folks more intimately familiar with the subject than I, as today was very much a learning experience for me.

Technorati tags: SXSW, SXSWi, SXSWi06, SXSW06, microformats

This one happened off the record as part of the ScreenBurn session.  Joi Ito is VP of International and mobility for Technorati and Chairman of Six Apart Japan.  He is also on the board of Creative Commons.  Here is a link to his CV.  But Joi was not at the ScreenBurn track to talk about these experiences.  He was there to talk about World of Warcraft, an interactive networked video game.  Now, I’m not a gamer (if I were one, I would most certainly fail to properly balance life reality with virtual reality) so I can’t pretend to summarize much of what was said about the game or the various cyber groupings
that occur among WoW players.  (Someone PLEASE add some additional info in the comments to fill out this section of the story for me).  But Joi is a SERIOUS gamer.  He is the leader of a guild within World of Warcraft, and as such, he constantly has his guild members (real people who are also gamers and are members of his guild within the game) available via conference call so that he can call in and check up on recent events or order raids on other guilds.  Joi views this cyber-reality as a case study of start-up culture: he is essentially running a small business within the game albeit with alternate laws and societal norms.  But leadership, organizational strategy, motivation and competitive tactics matter just as much when dealing with people in a cyberworld than they do in reality.  And for those who think that this is just strange and weird, look at how corporate marketers are already jumping all over MySpace.com (here’s the myspace page for the Honda Element and an article about the madness), think about the heyday they can eventually have creating virtual marketing campaigns by getting people to user their products virtually.  To me, it seems to be an inevitability that this will happen…but I suppose it might take longer for Honda to come around to want to promote having their cars driven by a bunch of orcs who eat sheep (if orcs don’t eat sheep, again, please correct me below…)

Technorati tags: SXSW, SXSWi, SXSWi06, SXSW06, WoW, gaming, Warcraft

Also standing room only, this session led by Kathy Sierra of Wickedly Smart (check out her wickedly smart blog) was the best of the conference so far.  Sidestepping all of the in depth theoretical discussions about identity or the technical grok about AJAX or Microformats, Kathy taught an hour long session about how to create really good products.  Some of the key takeaways:

- No one is passionate about something they suck at, so make sure you give people the ability to do something cool with what you are offering and enable them to kick ass.

- How do you enable ass kicking?  1) Create examples of what expertise looks like, 2) Create obvious steps/levels for people to achieve to work their way to expertise

- How do you keep people’s interest?  1) Enable ability to kick ass, 2) Create a payoff once you reach each level

Ok, so I guess this seems like a "guess you need to have been there" description, but the presentation was really good.  So, in summary, check out Kathy’s blog on the topic.

Technorati tags: SXSW, SXSWi, SXSWi06, SXSW06, product, , marketing

I saw this panel on Saturday afternoon immediately following Justin Hall’s presentation.  Standing room only.  It featured a panel including Heath Row of Squidoo, Dennis Crowley of dodgeball.com, Scott Heiferman of meetup.com, Michael Sharon of Socialight, and Molly Steenson who is a former web dev but is now studying architecture.  The collective theme was that new social technology can and should enable people to meet up in real world space rather than meet up in a virtual world that exists behind a screen.  All of these services are focused, in some way or another, in enabling people to form off-line connections and groups.  (Great quote from Scott Heiferman: "We started meetup because it was flipping the bird at the statement that space doesn’t matter anymore…and there is a reason that you are all here in a room sitting on the floor."  All of this was very interesting to compare with Justin’s presentation and Joi Ito’s presentation, which advocated using personal information to create your own virtual self as part of a larger virtual game.

Technorati tags: SXSW, SXSWi, SXSWi06, SXSW06, mobile

Heavy hitters in the room for the early morning (ok, 10am…) session at SXSW Interactive attempting to perform an exegesis on the Cluetrain Manifesto in order to see what has and hasn’t happened yet in the prophesied triumph of networked individuals over corporate marketing.
Moderator:
- Henry Copeland, founder of BlogAds
On the panel:
- Doc Searls, one of the original authors
- Brian Clark, head of IndieWire and interactive marketer
- Heather Armstrong, blogger from Dooce.com

The theme of this panel was two-fold: a) how interactivity and community continues to be the strongest force behind promotion and branding (viral marketing), and b) the ability for individuals to participate in this trend by building their own strength of voice is the force behind a society that is able to increasingly become independent (both professionally and as consumers in terms of freedom of informed choice).

Background:
- in 1998, Searls, David Weinberger and Chris Locke were upset about the trends of the dotcom boom in that the boom was taking the great space of the internet and turning it into virtual malls online
- casual conversations led to writing down thoughts which led to the creation of Cluetrain 95 Thesis (hey, if it worked for Martin Luther…)

Theme One: Community as Marketing

Henry asks Brian to comment on his thoughts on Cluetrain: Brian has always been “less entranced by the notion of the web as a human-machine interaction”. He talks about fear that still exists in corporate marketing around interactivity and engagement. He talks about the need to promote brands and products via interactivity such as alternate reality gaming but that it still scares marketers. But he tries to sell them on the notion that “the culture of the web values discovery”. Enabling marketing via interactivity helps users find things themselves, which influences minds more than top-down marketing.

Searls: Microsoft (3000 bloggers) and Sun Microsystems are two
companies that deserve credit because they’ve so embraced corporate bloggers. Notes that Robert Scoble is one of the most powerful people at Microsoft even though he’s not high up the corporate ladder at all. (Funny side note: Searls says he can’t believe that he, as a Linux guy who writes for Linux Journal, is doing PR for Microsoft).

Conversation moves into how to measure market buzz. Doc talks about someone he knew from a bra manufacturer who wanted to do a focus group on a new bra and then realized that all of the info they needed was available in the blogosphere. Brian talks about the buzz tracking services (Umbria, Buzzmetrics, BuzzTracker).

Theme Two: Independence

Searls: The next seven years will bring a huge explosion of indenpendent film and TV in a way that neither Hollywood nor any of us can yet comprehend. States that we are still on an overall trend toward independence that started during the
enlightenment (with a brief blip during the Industrial Revolution).

Heather: Agrees with trend toward independence. States that being a mother can be a lonely endeavor but that the web and the networked society has greatly increased communication and is helping women build incredibly strong community and independence.

Brian states that he recently read that the quickest route to financial success in America is to be a self-employed homeowner. He says that this increasingly shows that people are having success building their own businesses around personal and social networks.

Searls: Digg and other web 2.0 companies are representative of the “demand side supplying itself”, which is the notion of open source at its core. We’re going to continue to see a lot more companies like this.

One of Doc’s last discussion points is to note that the most exciting change happening right now is that people more and more will stop going to a corporate site or even subscribing to individual blogs and instead will more and more begin subscribing to subjects. (Example: If you want to know about recent features from Canon cameras you will learn less from two or three blogs than you would by subscribing to the Technorati
tag for “canon“). He says that there are two sides of monetization: you will make money with something or you will make money because of something. And with blogs, there will be far more money made because of blogs than with blogs.

Brian: Isn’t the internet writing all of the product manuals today
anyway? When I have a problem, I don’t call customer service, I search for my specific issue because someone has already had that issue.

Note: As I finish writing this, Craig Newmark from Craigslist is sitting behind me. Someone asks him what he’s up to and he says “dealing with roommate scams…I’m getting too old for this!”, which I guess is a good reminder that with the liberation of independence comes an even greater need for personal responsibility and focus.

Technorati Tags: SXSW, SXSWi, SXSW06, cluetrain

Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

Sitting at Justin Hall’s presentation at the ScreenBurn sessions at SXSW, which is a track specifically focused on though-provocation from industry insiders.

Justin was one of (if not) the first bloggers online back in the early 1990s.

Highlights from his presentation (note: I arrived late…which seems to be an unfortunate trend):
- keeping up with blogging is a positive social interaction, but many people burn out (and "retire") within 18 months
- NOT keeping up with email is a negative social interaction; Justin showed how he has thousands of unanswered email (note: my current Yahoo! mail inbox shows 654 unread messages; my current Outlook box shows 1108 unread emails!)
- flickr started out as an attempt to create a browser-based video game and has actually succeeded by creating a game out of reality in that people are organizing themselves aroud things that they otherwise would not have even thought about
- "my ware" is the opposite of spy ware: last.fm, del.icio.us, siteshuffle help me show off my profile to everyone (ok, I’ll share.  Here are mine: last.fm, del.icio.us, flickr)
- "what is my location in webland?" he wants to be able to play along on the web with other people.  key actions online: "arrive, share data, find friends"
- key verbs that the web should inspire: "play, share, connect, experiment, understand"
- Games should not be isolated.  All of the interactions that users make online should feed into a meta game online to enable.  Playing in isolation (single player games) is a masturbatory experience but by building interactivity into gaming we enable  people to interrelate online.  But there is a question about how much should be shared.  We are ok sharing flickr, del.icio.us, etc.  But do we want to share the fact that in Warcraft we spent last night going around cutting the heads off of chickens?  How do our actual social interactions in games change the way we view actively sharing data and information publically, even though much of this information is already public, just not aggregated.  What other bits of aggregated data do we want to avoid?  Do we want to share the purchases we made at Safeway that are tracked by our frequent buyer card?
- Justin spent 11 years "overly sharing personal info" online, but is currently experimenting with "secrecy" by developing a personal video game (in opposition to everything he is currently speaking about but in order to allow for escape)
- "I’ve given up on books.  I love books but I can’t sit still long enough to read them."  (I am certainly suffering from this same issue. Confession: I’ve been reading the same book since December…)
- Terranova is a website about multiplayer games that college professors write to in order to help them justify their obsessions with online game.  Example, college professor’s kids ask them what they do when gaming and they must explain why he embodies himself as a three-horned demon who eats goats.
- "Only good girls keep diaries, the bad ones never have time" is a quote from Tallulah Bankhead that Justin references in response to Greg’s question about whether new social media has helped solve the Victorian Writer’s dilemma about whether to eloquently write about the world or whether to go out and experience it

For more about Justin, I highly recommend reading his site links.net.

This was a high-paced session…if anyone has corrections to my notes, please add them below.

Technorati Tags: SXSW, SXSW06, SXSWi06, justinhall, Austin, gaming

After writing my last post, I realized that I had “blogged through” the first morning session, which is unfortunate because I would have enjoyed “Better Blogging Brainstorms“. Jason Toney, who I met on the plane last night, covered it though (link).

But now I’m currently sitting in “AJAX: What Do I Need to Know“. And it is interesting because I know little about developing it. I enjoyed Jason Calacanis “calling bullshit” on it last week at BarCamp Los Angeles (lavoice.org covered Jason’s appearance at Barcamp). Jason’s big point was that there are a host of companies basically creating businesses around cool UI — and that the UI isn’t really that cool anyway because it is basically just bringing web apps to a level where desktop apps were 10 years ago. He’s repeatedly made the claim that a big list of AJAX-based sites will be out of biz within 3 years (insert link).

I also remember a great post from VC Fred Wilson on how Indeed.com’s new tools show how much job demand there is for Ajax right now (link).

So the specific references to various toolkit libraries are currently a bit over my head (note to self: really need to work on API mashups skills soon to get good frontend development experience).

Highlights:

- Dylan Schieman (Dojo Toolkit, Renkoo Inc) primarily
talked about the standardization issues with Ajax (lack of
stardardization about what happens with Back Button, etc). He also
spoke about various toolkit libraries and how most look very similar to scripting languages (Prototype = Ruby, Mochikit = Python, Zimbra = Java, YUI = PHP, but his Dojo toolkit is more of a blend).

- Dori Smith (dori.com) also talked about standardization issue (back button, bookmarking) and harped on most toolkits’ lack of browser, platform, and version support (she plugged the Yahoo! JavaScript developer tools and overall YDN developer kit for being “surprisingly clear and transparent” for a large corporation in terms of what is supported.

- Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path (I love that I’m in Texas listening to a guy names Jesse James talk about web stuff) stated that he coined the term AJAX as a cool name. He asked, “why is this happenning now?”. And he stated it is primarily because we are smarter now and the sophistication of programmers has
evolved significantly over 10 years. (Dori rebutted that broadband ubiquity has also helped since most AJAX apps are broadband dependent). He also mentioned that people are excited about AJAX because it is the obvious next step in web apps, but it isn’t the last step…it is just a step in decoupling user interaction from server-client interaction.

- David Humphreys (dbhumphreys.com) was also on the panel but I missed his intro…!

Now it is on to lunch and the afternoon panels. I’m thinking that “Cyberplace: Online in Offline Spaces — And Vice Versa” looks fascinating. And with a little downtime, maybe I’ll finally get my work documentation done too (though I also would really like to look through the film screening schedule!)

Technorati Tags: SXSW, SXSW06, SXSWi06, AJAX, Austin, design