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The “Real” SXSW

The loose notes must make SXSW seem somewhat dry. The real juice happens between the margins:

  • Notice someone on the smoking deck wearing a WordPress t-shirt, ask where she got it.
  • Get invited to a WordPress meetup at a cafe’ six blocks away after the sessions, where I’ll be able to get one.
  • Arrive to find it’s not just a cafe’, but a funky restaurant, and it’s not just a WordPress meetup, but the tail end of this year’s BarCamp session.
  • Discover you’ve arrived just in time to see a 340-lb. robot destroy cardboard boxes in the parking lot with a pair of spinning blades, dangerous enough that everyone is required to stand behind concrete barriers.
  • Find out there’s going to be a pirate-rock band playing later, picking guitars with hooks for hands (missed the band because of prior dinner obligation).
  • Race back to hotel and catch a ride with old friend to the best TexMex restaurant in Austin, and sit under a ceiling plastered with 1970s American car hub caps.
  • At after-awards party the next night, bump into the same core BarCamp group, get into a conversation about the glutinous contents of those now-ubiquitous glow-necklaces, which is now spread in psychedelic swirls across the table. Memoirs of barium enemas. Get a free beer thanks to the fact that one dude wore a kilt and was given a pile of drink tickets at the door.
  • Get into a juicy conversation about problems with tagging and folksonomies.
  • Eric Skiff pulls out an audio recorder and asks if we would mind re-running the conversation for his podcast.
  • Retire to the street for some quiet, dive in to the cast.
  • Halfway through, a couple of passers-by (drunk?) stop to talk, making too much noise. Turn around to see that said drunks(?) are Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress) and Ryan King, and who’s going to tell them to shut up?
  • Skiff’s batteries run out, and kilt dude magically produces his own audio recorder from folds of tartan; recording continues.
  • Turn around to learn that the one guy who wasn’t participating (but who cares an awful lot about the state of journalism) has produced an iSight out of nowhere and is webcasting the whole thing live, reflecting to his personal QuickTime Streaming Server.

When the catalog warned not to miss the after-parties, they weren’t kidding. The podcast should be up on GlitchCast once the pieces are assembled.

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SXSW Notes: How To Bluff Your Way In DOM Scripting

Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session “How To Bluff Your Way In DOM Scripting”

DHTML vs. DOM scripting: DHTML was created by marketing wonks – a bunch of bluffers. The problem with DHHTML was that it had a lot of baggage – browser-specific code, lots of forking (yourself and your application). Lots of people doing stuff for screen only. Lots we can do improve accessibility. DOM scripting is the best approach to adding interactivity with respect for web standards. DHTML was a maintainability nightmare.

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SXSW Notes: Jim Coudal/Jason Fried

Loose notes from SXSW 2006 presentation: Jim Coudal / Jason Fried Opening Remarks (keynote).

37 Signals has rocketed into the spotlight this year both with Ruby on Rails and with the tremendously popular Basecamp, Backpack, and TaDa Lists. But Fried sounds like a heretic, defying common web startup practices. He’s against functional specs, against VC money, against lots of features, for time and money constraints.

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SXSW Notes: Beyond Folksonomies

This is the first of a set of raw notes from sessions I’m attending at SXSW 2006, presented with little editing.

Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting Tag Clouds for Grandma

On bottom-up, user-created taxonomies, both public (shared) and private — social bookmarking sites, dispensing with folder structures in favor of user-created / organic databases. Problems of cross-client integration, maintenance, etc. The wisdom of crowds: How to extract wisdom from a crowd? Is the crowd just the Borg, or is the crowd wiser than the sum of its members?
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Waste of Bandwidth

Over dinner with Andrew Devigal last night (that’s me, knocking back oysters), got talking about the massive amounts of bandwidth it takes to run a successful podcast. This Week in Tech, for example, reportedly chews through a terabyte a week. The only reason they can afford to do it is that AOL donates the bandwidth.

Started thinking about how badly RSS stats skew traffic logs. I’m subscribed to maybe 100 sites, and my aggregator is pulling feeds once/hour. I end up actually viewing those feeds maybe twice a month. The ratio of bandwidth consumed to media digested is just silly. Now map that same problem onto podcasting and you see the problem. I subscribe to around 20 podcasts but only listen to three or four of them regularly. Now multiply me times a few million podcast listeners out there. Massive amounts of bandwidth are being wasted to download serialized media that never actually gets consumed by the consumer.

There’s got to be a fix for this dilemma, or podcasting will be pulled underwater by its own anchor. First of all, RSS aggregators, and podcast aggregators in particular, need to grow some AI, and should politely recommend that untouched feeds be unsubscribed, or at least put into some kind of stasis. But that’s a voluntary solution, which could only mitigate, rather than solve the problem.

Another approach would be to take the load off single connections through seamless integration of BitTorrent (or similar technology) into podcast aggregators. The trick there will be not so much download/format recognition as discovery. Here‘s a tutorial on setting up a .torrent podcast… but until the discovery/consumption side of .torrent podcasting is solved, we’re still where we are right now — if you’re not listed in iTunes or similar, you’re not on the grid.

And ultimately, .torrent casting would only distribute the bandwidth wastage evenly across the network, rather than solve it.

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6th Street

Landed in Austin, TX today for South by Southwest 2006 — a week of seminars and conversations on web tech, emerging trends, “visionaries,” etc. Expect to be bombarded by Web 2.0 stuff. Did not expect to be bombarded by the downtown Austin / 6th St. scene. Walked out the door of the hotel hoping to scrounge up some dinner and the city opened up wide — tattoo parlors and jazz clubs, cajun restaurants (giant crawfish on the side of The Boiling Pot asking “Dya suck the heads off?”) and fajita stands, nudie revues and head shops and hip magic shows and costumed buskers and music pouring out of every doorway and even a bar with a tropical aquarium spanning an entire 50-foot wall. And it’s muggy, right in the middle of winter (should be 91 degrees Sunday). The pigeon has landed.

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Top 10 Copyright Crimes

Dealing with a bit of a dilemma: A 12-year-old niece is becoming interested in music, and turns to me for suggestions. Excellent! Of course the overwhelming temptation is to send her MP3s, much as friends used to exchange mix tapes. But her parents want to take a hard line on MP3 swapping and copyright matters, set fully legal ground rules from the outset. So what can I do? Send her links to iTMS or other services for low-bitrate 30-second previews? All of this digital flexibility has left the legally conscientious parent worse off than we were 25 years ago. We’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water.

Related: Jamie Kellner, the CEO of Turner Broadcasting was recently quoted as saying:

[Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn’t get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you’re actually stealing the programming.

In response, LawMeme has posted Top Ten New Copyright Crimes, speculating on just how draconian things could become:

9. Changing radio stations in the car when a commercial comes on.
Future radios will prevent listeners from changing channels when a commercial comes on. The RIAA has not yet taken a position on whether it is permissible to switch channels when the listener doesn’t like the song.

More at the site, with more bizarre Kellner-isms, such as this one on bathroom breaks:

I guess there’s a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom. But if you formalize it and you create a device that skips certain second increments, you’ve got that only for one reason, unless you go to the bathroom for 30 seconds. They’ve done that just to make it easy for someone to skip a commercial.

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Chickenfat, Reprise

Over dinner last night, Miles started singing — a familiar refrain, but not one I’ve heard from him before:

Push up! / 10 times! / Every morning. / Not just. Now and then… Give that chickenfat back to the chickens, and don’t be chicken again…!

Could not believe my ears. Thought the song was lost to the 70s, but nope — apparently his preschool teachers have the same great memory of it that many of us do, and have decided to use it as an intro-level exercise song (I don’t recall hearing it until 4th grade). The three of us ran into the office, cranked the MP3 version, and did jumping jacks together right in the middle of dinner.

Ironically, we were having chicken that night.

Music: Cat Power :: Living Proof