Not all of us got to go to Austin and join the SXSW party… but we don’t have to miss out completely. Following up on Steve’s post, here’s a bunch of podcasts at the 2006.SXSW web site.
In particular I found the Bruce Sterling speech to be very inspiring. I listened to it and David Jones’ Seneca event podcast the same day and found many similarities.

David speaks about practical applications of what’s happening now, and he’s got a lot of insight on how organizations can leverage sincere use of social media. Bruce Sterling takes it a decade or more out, and gives us the macro view of it all. He’s a Sci-Fi writer, so he’s really well positioned to give us the vocabulary we need to describe the uber-strange-wonderful next wave. Imagine taking a person from 10 years ago and asking them to describe the web of today. They wouldn’t even have the words…

I’m in SXSW withdrawl these days but I’ve discovered a remedy: podcasts of the panels I couldn’t make it to. Just this morning I found James Surowiecki’s discussion on the “wisdom of crowds” concept. James is a columnist for the New Yorker and has actually written a book entitled (duh) The Wisdom of Crowds. For anybody who isn’t familiar with the idea, the premise is that a group of people have a collective intelligence that is far greater than any of the individuals in that group. Now, obviously the bigger the group the better, but groups as small as 8 have demonstrated this theory with often remarkable results. James used real-world examples ranging from horse track betting odds to jelly bean counting contests to the stock market to the page rank algorithm at the core of Google’s search engine to illustrate how effective this method of decision making can be.

It’s a really fascinating subject and I highly recommend the MP3 link above as a great primer on the topic.

Back in Ottawa in the office today and thought I’d take a few minutes to write a quick recap of the last 5 days in Austin…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, everybody knows the whole Web2.0 craze (for lack of a better descriptor) just seems to be exploding all over the place and SXSWi was no different. I have to say I’ve got a bit of the fever too and a lot of the panels I selected had to do with the whole productizing-your-ideas model. Why? Well, it can be pretty lucrative if your idea takes off (especially if you’re bought out by one of the big players) and obviously it’s incredibly rewarding to have something you built yourself succeed.

Naturally, I couldn’t help but think about our own situation… we’ve been toying with the idea for a few years of productizing one of 76design’s very first projects: agent76. agent76 is an internal tool that we use to track our time, manage projects and complete monthly invoicing. It’s proved invaluable to us and we’ve always thought in the back of our heads that it’d be a great move to bring it to market someday. About a year ago we did a quick study and determined that the time wasn’t quite right, but after this weekend I’m thinking it might be something worth revisiting.

Here are some other nuggets of wisdom I picked up (in no particular order):

• “Functional specs are stupid”
• “Corporate design makes you mediocre”
• “[Excessive] planning is a waste of time”
• “Never make a decision out of fear”
• Listen to the users and let them guide your development process – iterative design is the way to go
• We’re still not sure if this Web2.0 explosion is another bubble or the first whispers of something much bigger
• Oh, and saying “AJAX” or “Web2.0″ is becoming a major faux-pas… thanks to the abundant (and mostly inappropriate) uses of these buzzwords it now just brings on a lot of eyerolls

All in all, it was a great experience and Brett and I hope to be back next year for SXSWi 2007!

Peter Morville gives some good insight in the field of information architecture and findability. Morville wrote Ambient Findability and co-wrote Information Architecture – both great books. Morville spoke on two panels at SXSWi this year: the first, Searching and SEO; and second, Ambient Findability.

A portion that really struck me as valuable was his characteristics of usability – a word that has become synonymous with general quality of a website: Useful, Useable, Desirable, Accessible, Credible, Findable, and Valuable. Each characteristic contributes to the appearant value of website design.

Another topic that came up dealt with the conversation of taxonomy vs folksonomy. While quite popular now, folksonomy may become essentially unuseable due to the impending growth in content under single tags. Tendency back towards taxonomy will keep the content findable and ultimately useable. For example, clustering tags into logical groups is a step towards traditional taxonomy.

While taxonomy and folksonomy help us in finding the content we are looking for, the social aspect of describing the aboutness of content is increasing as a qualificaiton of the content. “What others are doing” with this content ultimately gives further context and credibility.

The intuitiveness of the path to the content we look for is the essence of ambient findability. When designing a website we have to realize there are a variety of methods of navigation that may be equally intuitive. Searching, for example, is more than likely going to be the first step in navigation. User-centric and self-identification based navigation is another method. A subject based hierarchy is yet another. The following steps should provide an effective way to drill down into the content the user is looking for.

Further exploration, reading resources for information architecture

1. Boxes and Arrows
2. Don’t make me think by Steve Krug
3. Information Architecture Summit

Burnie Burns, of Austin’s Rooster Teeth, just delivered the day four keynote presentation. Rooster Teeth is best known for their “machinima” video series like Red vs. Blue. Burns talked briefly about machinima but the bulk of his talk was looking at the changing landscape of the internet – examining the space where content providers, customers and the owners of the networks (you know, those mysterious companies that actually built and maintain that part of the internet that normally occupies the “cloud” part of the diagram) intersect. As telecom giants (and rightful owners of the internet infrastructure) like Verizon and AT&T get increasingly frustrated with content providers like Google and iTunes basically mooching off their system while we, the customers, enjoy the free lunch it seems like things will come to a head sooner rather than later. Burns predicted some pretty drastic changes in the flat-rate monthly payment model for net usage most of us have become accustomed to. Certainly doesn’t bode well for a company like Rooster Teeth that creates and publishes original video content.

The DIY theme seems to have stuck with me today as I’m starting to notice a trend in my panel selections this morning: building buzz for your web project. I seem to be catching a bit of the DIY bug, and it’s hard not to when you’re surrounded by so many smart folks doing such smart things. But what inspires me most (and probably a lot of the attendees here) is that after listening to people like 37signals, Shaun Inman, and SkinnyCorp talk about their humble beginnings and how they struggled for months or years before their idea really took off, it makes the possibility of succeeding seem a little more tangible.

After Craig Newmark’s keynote interview, I attended a session on “Zero Advertising” Brands which was essentially a Q&A with the two founders and creative director of SkinnyCorp – the firm responsible for Threadless, Naked & Angry, 15 Megs of Fame and Extra Tasty. In developing this run of successful online communities it seemed their approach was much the same as Craig Newmark, who maintains that the smartest thing he did was just “get out of the way” and let the community run the site, because that’s who the site exists for.

The last session of the day was “Design Eye for the List Guy”, a panel that took over the controversial task of realigning (not redesigning) the venerable craigslist. It was an impressive exercise in the art of the “realign”. And in the end, Craig (who happened to be in attendance), seemed content with their efforts.

Day three’s keynote featured Craig Newman of Craig’s List being interviewed by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. While it was a little dry at times, Craig and Jimmy did share their shared philosophy on the old “wisdom of crowds” cliché and how that idiom applies to each of their community-managed sites. Craig in particular talked about how he feels that nearly everybody is good and trustworthy and as the tech-phobic late adopters join online communities, the “bad apples” will be (just about) eliminated from the equation.

The following is an introduction to media and technology convergence. This is intended to pique interest, provide a brief overview of where it is coming from, where it is and where it is going.

Multiplicity of data

The information explosion/revolution is generating more and more data and content. We see this in mobile devices capturing our environment and simultaneously tagging with context, position and time; events posted, tagged, attended, and followed-up-upon; websites, books, photos, music – content – tagged and shared; blogging, rss, etc.; and, so on. Steve’s post on Personal Knowledge Management lists various tools that allow us to create, capture and digest the information and data that is available to us now.

Ubiquity

Anywhere, everywhere and anytime – the essence of converging technology. What do I want to know right here and right now. Access your resources, publish your story where you are and when you are. Postion and time context is more relevant than is considered. It all comes down to usage of computing systems becoming behavioural and ingrained in our everyday life – technology becoming utility.

Enabling remixing

For content creators and application developers: integrate and be integrated. Share how to really be productive with your work and make designers and ultimately evangelists out of your audience. Allow your data to be remixed and recombined. Promote recombination. This all ends in the ability to slice the data to match your personality and thus to really specialize and essentially diverge from the convergence.

Wrap-up

Convergence is a movement towards ubiquitous computing. It means transparent and unobtrusive computing and usage of seemingly smart systems. See below for suggested exploration and check back for updates.

Further exploration

1. dodgeball.com :: mobile social software
2. socialight | friends | mobile phones | fun
3. Platial
4. Observations, New York City | Adam Greenfield
5. Digital Convergence Initiative – Central Texas

Started the day with a panel on “What’s Hot in Web Applications”. The name was slightly misleading (and the moderator was quick to point it out) since there was no talk of technologies or techniques used to build web apps. Instead, the panel featured founders of three Silicon Valley startups (YackPack, meebo and Zimbra) sharing their experiences creating and marketing web-based applications. The moderator framed the panel by highlighting the three points that should be considered when creating a startup: feasibility, viability and (consumer) desirability.Some of the key points:

• Not presuming what features the users will want and the importance of letting user feedback guide a product’s development
• Why web-based software is the way to go (vs. installed software)

Following that session I attended a panel on tagging. The speakers were pretty dry, but there was some interesting discussion about the pros of tagging (including how it gets around analysis paralysis) and the cons – a lot of which I hadn’t really considered – such as: tagging is not intuitive to most people, tagging standards vary widely across the web, and subtle differences in how we tag compound inprecision (think of “cat” vs. “cats”)

After lunch we sat in on SXSW film’s interview/Q&A with Henry Rollins. I’m not a particularly big fan of his music, but he’s a smart guy with an engaging personality and a great sense of humour. Being an outspoken Liberal, there was naturally a lot of political rants, but most of it was just picking Henry’s brains on a variety of topics. Definitely an interesting guy to listen to.

Then came the Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong keynote conversation, which I posted on yesterday.

The two afternoon sessions I attended were on DIY web projects and holistic web design. The DIY panel included the founders of Dogster (and Catster), editor-in-chief of LifeHacker and the creator of the WordPress blog authoring software. The discussion centred around how to take that great idea from concept to reality and some of the pitfalls you’re likely to encounter on the way – especially if your idea becomes a success. The holistic panel wasn’t especially educational, but interesting nonetheless. The five panelists took on the job of redesiging an existing site from the ground up. They chose Plazes.com and each panel member brought a different skill to the project (design, information layout, project management, coding and scripting) as they examined how they tackled the redesign – from logo to layout to design to construction. A fascinating look at how this team of experts handled the types of challenges we encounter everyday in our client work.

Attended the awards ceremony in the evening – pretty boring all in all, but seeing some of the faces behind the sites that inspire us was kind of neat.

After that massive long day one brain dump I thought’d I’d break today’s report into smaller pieces today that are a little easier to digest.

Just got out of today’s keynote conversation with Heather Armstrong and Jason Kottke, two bloggers who quit their day jobs to blog full time. Jason’s income comes from a (voluntary) subscription model and Heather’s comes from advertisting, so naturally the chat started out with a quick rundown of the pros and cons of each model. Both seemed to agree that, despite the inevitable reader backlash, advertising is the best way to go. Beyond that, discussions stuck to their own personal philosophies about blogging, which was interesting since Jason with his techie news and Heather with her deeply personal postings do have fairly different opinions on what is and is not “blog worthy”.