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”.

Touched down in Austin on Friday night, had a couple beers (outside of course, it was 20 degrees after all) and headed over to the conference first thing Saturday morning. Here’s a quick rundown of our experience at SXSWi: Day One…

Registration was a bit of a circus so I arrived a bit late for the first session, entitled “Traditional Design and New Technology”. The panel included Jason Santa Maria and Khoi Vinh (the design director of NYtimes.com) and mostly talked about traditional design principles and how those principles have carried over to the web – examining where they fall short, technology limitations and how design goals are different for each medium.

The second panel was an introduction to AJAX and featured Jesse James Garrett (the man who coined the term “AJAX”) and Dylan Schienmann, who co-created the Dojo Javascript toolkit. Discussions focused on the basics of AJAX, it’s benefits and drawbacks (such as usability, degredation, and SEO).

After the morning sessions, Jim Coudal and Jason Fried delivered the opening remarks. Both speakers really resonated with me as a small business owner. For example, Jim, who runs a small creative shop called Coudal Partners, talked about the three questions his firm asks themselves when presented with an opportunity to do work for a client:

1. Will we be able to do good work (that we’re proud of)?
2. Will we be able to make money?
3. Will we learn something?

If the answer to at least two of those questions is yes, then he’ll do the work. Seems like a good barometer to me.

Jason then talked a bit about 37signal’s approach to developing web applications (like Basecamp, Backpack and most recently Campfire) and how his company made the shift from a service-based to a product-based one. I’m a big fan of Jason and his company’s work (their blog Signals vs. Noise is in our blogroll) so I found his experience taking a product like Basecamp from a side project to their main source of revenue quite fascinating.

Jason’s advice echoed what he talks about in 37signals’ new ebook, which provides an overview of his firm’s philosophy towards design, development and marketing, but I’ll summarize here:

• If you’re starting up a web-based product or idea, do it as a side venture. Just dedicate a few hours a week. This allows you to fail in obscurity and continue to develop your product until it provides you with actual income.
• Do it with less money – more money means you’ll waste more.
• Do it with less time – same principle.
• Do it with less features – again, keep it to a reasonable scope and stick to it. Examine what people will really need and give them that. Don’t add extra features that are “nice to haves”.
• Don’t plan (Jason despises feature spec documents and the like). Decide what the product will do, how much time you’ll need to build it and jump right in. When you’ve hit your own deadline, release version 1. That’s not to say it won’t continue to evolve, but I think he wanted to emphasize that it’s better to get something out there and start getting feedback from users right away than tinkering away internally.
• Charge for it. This is how you’ll make money (obviously). Jason argued that while a lot of the web seems to believe that you have to give something away for free to have people use it, if you charge a fee that is less than the value users derive from it then they’ll be happy to pay.

Another good tidbit of advice they both had was that they don’t reply to to RFPs longer than two pages. Their rationale: if the potential client has put that much time and energy into an RFP then they’ll probably be pretty difficult to work with and they probably gave it to several vendors (to recoup some of the investment they made writing it).

My afternoon consisted of a couple panels, neither which impressed me that much. The first one, Starting Small, was moderated by Nick Finck of Digital Web Magazine and was rather disappointing. With Leonard Lin from upcoming.org on the panel, I had expected that it would pick up where Jason’s opening remarks had left off, examining how web firms can make the shift from a consultancy model to a product-based one. Instead it talked about making the shift from day job at a design firm to freelancing on your own.

My final panel of the day I attended purely out of curiosity, and the fact there wasn’t much else I was intersested in seeing. The “panel” only consisted of one speaker and was targeted at how creatives can use simple yoga and meditation techniques to keep energized at work and enhance their creativity. I learned a couple of yoga “moves” that I’ll be testing out when I get back to the office.

Big ups to Frog Design for putting on a great party last night.

Time to head off for day two.

This afternoon Brett and I will be heading down to Austin, Texas for the SXSW Interactive Festival, five days of panels and keynotes on web design, usability, blogging, technology and business. The speaker list is a real web “who’s who”, offering some of the brightest minds in emerging technologies. Too many to mention here, but Joshua Schachter, Jason Fried, Heather Champ, and Craig Newmark are just a few of the speakers I’m hoping to see.

Keep an eye on this blog over the next few days as we attempt to document our escapades in the Lone Star State with fresh installments of “Brett and Steve’s Excellent Texan Adventure”. Not to be missed.