connecting*the*dots

Photo by Colin Gregory Palmer

I usually tend to keep announcements under wraps until I’ve made enough progress to warrent them, but in the spirit of Tantek Çelik’s building blocks presentation, Kent Bye’s Echo Chamber Project and Chris Messina’s barcamp escapades, well, here goes nothing:

thepeopleyes.org

Photo by stickerbandit

Can anyone point me to a few good spots in town to get some run? I only have a few requirements:

• More 35+ year-old players than 18+ year-old pogosticks (I need time to get back to that degree of comp)
• A decently maintained court (nightlights are a bonus)
• Enough people consistently around in the mid/late afternoon to get in a decent run

All suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Fresh on the heels of their first campaign blunder, AT&T dives right back in and makes the exact same mistake:

Unbelievable.

Tompkins and Adamson at the Austin airport

Well, it took me until today to be able to write my goodbye to Austin. Man, that town and conference kicks some serious ass. Some of my favorite moments from this past week:

• Bruce Sterling’s closing remarks on the state of the world. I’ve never been moved to tears by a public speaker before… I’ve a new favorite author.
• Running into Doc Searls after the Sterling presentation, and chatting with him for an hour about everything from our shared past in Jersey and Greensboro (my current residence) to our love of basketball to our vastly different experiences with the KKK (mine is through my brother’s documentary, you gotta ask Doc about his) and then hitting up a BBQ joint with Doc, Marc Canter, Nancy White and Jerry Michalski.
• Experiencing Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated and Alan Berlinger’s Wide Awake at the greatest theatre experience I’ve ever come across, the Alamo Drafthouse.
• Adam Greenfield’s ubiquitous computing presentation. (Adam is so very articulate and cultured, I can only hope that experience design is taken more seriously within the world of ubicomp than it is within the web) and Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability presentation. Two very similar topics, yet two very different presentations.
• Finally meeting Tish Grier, Will Giese, Thomas Vander Wal, Peter Merholtz, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina in person after months of blogging, commenting, plazing and flickring each other (did I say flickring?). And yes, I can confirm without a doubt that missrogue and factoryjoe are the web 2.0 version of Bonnie and Clyde.
• Hitting up the town with Khoi, Chris, Ralph and Jeff. We were robbed of the SXSW Web Award for Best Green / Non-Profit site (mediamatters.org) damnit! So we drank more.
• I only ran into one former collegue/friend at the conference — Dan Saffer — but I think I made a handful of new ones along the way.

I had a blast. And I’m looking forward to next year already.

Artist: Rage Against The Machine
Song: Wake Up

==========

Come on!
Uggh!

Come on, although ya try to discredit
Ya still never edit
The needle, I’ll thread it
Radically poetic
Standin’ with the fury that they had in ‘66
And like E-Double I’m mad
Still knee-deep in the system’s shit
Hoover, he was a body remover
I’ll give ya a dose
But it’ll never come close
To the rage built up inside of me
Fist in the air, in the land of hypocrisy

Movements come and movements go
Leaders speak, movements cease
When their heads are flown
‘Cause all these punks
Got bullets in their heads
Departments of police, the judges, the feds
Networks at work, keepin’ people calm
You know they went after King
When he spoke out on Vietnam
He turned the power to the have-nots
And then came the shot

Yeah!
Yeah, back in this…
Wit’ poetry, my mind I flex
Flip like Wilson, vocals never lackin’ dat finesse
Whadda I got to, whadda I got to do to wake ya up
To shake ya up, to break the structure up
‘Cause blood still flows in the gutter
I’m like takin’ photos
Mad boy kicks open the shutter
Set the groove
Then stick and move like I was Cassius
Rep the stutter step
Then bomb a left upon the fascists
Yea, the several federal men
Who pulled schemes on the dream
And put it to an end
Ya better beware
Of retribution with mind war
20/20 visions and murals with metaphors
Networks at work, keepin’ people calm
Ya know they murdered X
And tried to blame it on Islam
He turned the power to the have-nots
And then came the shot

Uggh!
What was the price on his head?
What was the price on his head!

I think I heard a shot
I think I heard a shot
I think I heard a shot
I think I heard a shot
I think I heard a shot
I think I heard, I think I heard a shot

“He may be a real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed obediance to white liberal doctrine of non-violence… and embrace black nationalism”
“Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers… And neutralize them, neutralize them, neutralize them”

Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!

How long? Not long, cause what you reap is what you sow

Bruce Sterling isn’t throwing a party this year, but he’s loving the bubble echo of this 2.0 SXSW2006 get together. He says “enjoy it while you can.”

He’s loving flickr and Wikipedia; companies that are completely unlike anything else, opening up their API’s to create platforms, not sites. What a contrast to standard, American business. “Only in America… where dying phone companies lobby the government as if they’re Indian casinos.”

“Are people in Washington drinking their own bathwater? The guys in power are so eager to monetize the web, they’re turning America into Banana Republic with rockets.”

Get his book: Visionary In Residence

Serbia is absolutely disfunctional; Sterling has a ringside seat. He’s global, as many more are becoming. His Austin stead collects mail, while he bounces around the world. “National borders are like speed bumps.” America is a state at war. “The dollar is low compared to the Euro, which should be in intensive care.”

“Creationism is an intellectual calamity.”

al Quada bomb mosques. How many are enough? (we Americans don’t give a fuck about the “near enemy” issue). When the culture war is over — we are within a culture war — one doesn’t get to say “I served on this side.” “We’re on a slider bar between the unthinkable and the unimaginable. We’ve got a fire in a theater, but the exit signs are just a bunch of glowing letters in jumble.”

Warren Ellis: “The spread of the possible futures and the people on the ground figuring out how to use them.”

Unimaginable does not mean catastrophic, nor does unthinkable.

The word: Spime - In 2004, Sterling did a speech at SIG-GRAPH and spoke of spime. It’s not a word; it’s a tag. It’s a theory object. William Gibson’s cyberspace is a conceptual realization. We’ll never have that, but the word is now passe.

Spime is a speculative imaginary object:

• An interactive chip, unique identity, It’s got a tag
• Local precise positioning system
• A powerful search engine, auto-Googling object
• Evolved in cradle to cradle recycling
• 3D virtual models of objects; a product of CAD cams
• Rapidly prototyped, it’s a fabject — a laser-centered model

If 21st century objects had these qualities, people would interact in unimaginable ways. Spimes begin and end as data. We want to do it to build an internet of things; engage from the moment of invention to the moment of decay. It’ll feel like auto-magical inventory voo doo. I ask, and I’m told. I Google to find my shoes. This concept needs distributive participation.

“The semantic wit is turning into the wetlands of language.”

A theory object is a platform of development. The 20th century could not write, think in this way. Theory objects can have permalinks, trackbacks, databases, etc. This is why the legacy media is going down, because legacy people don’t get it.

We need to become the change we want to see. Make no decision out of fear. None! (my emphasis).

Globalization needs to be understood culturally. Leaders are culpable, but the people are complicit. A society that lived in a locked closet and fed on their own illusions (Serbia). How different are we? Evil has a face in the world; people who don’t like people who don’t buy into their parochial bullshit.

But time passes with historical perspective.

Sterling closes by quoting Carl Sandburg. Picture 1937, the age of depression, WWII at the door…:

The people, yes

The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold again and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds.
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.
The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
Is a vast huddle with so many units saying:

“I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
And it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself and maybe for others.
I could read and study
And talk things over
And find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time.�

The people
With the tragic and comic two faced hero and hoodlum
Phantom and gorilla
Twisting to moan with the gargoyle mouth
They buy me and sell me
It’s a game
Sometime I’ll break loose
This old anvil, laughs at many broken hammers
There are men that can’t be bought!
Fire borne or at home with fire
The stars make no noise
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing
Time is a great teacher
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:

Where to? What next?

—–

I didn’t finish my live-blog of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant speech; I couldn’t.

In the midst of his swaying through global references of humanity, ubiquitous concepts and reflective precision, Sterling briefly mentioned the humanity of the Serbian people, how they still gather to listen to poets speak and grown men openly weep within their shared language, as if their hearts were still broken.

I felt that.

When Sterling hit the very first line of Carl Sandburg’s poem, he began to weep; I immediately closed my laptop and felt the words of a man in the midst of a depression tumble out of the mouth of a man in the midst of priviledge.

Bruce passionately pressed on, as each word struck a newly discovered nerve, setting off a choked up throat, a twist in his chair and freshly drawn tears. And I wept with him.

My last words at SXSW2006

The rule of the robber baron corporate power structure might be coming to a close, but that is no victory. Not even close. Each of us — the creators and collaborators in this 2.0 revolution, especially the ones fortunate enough to spend this time together — are the new leaders of this world.

Each of us.

The choices we make will shape our world; from the choice to harness our personal voice to the choice of developing real relationships with our fellow human beings to the choice of creating an innovative, enabling world of objects in-between…

There is nothing else but choice. Don’t you fucking think for a moment that there isn’t.

So, the next time you come up with a brilliant service idea, try going that extra step to make it just that much more useful for your neighbor… or for that family living on the other side of the tracks… or for that child who was born into a depressed world where jobs were scarce, children were starving and a world war was on the horizon.

Because, you see, we already live in such a world.

Thank you, Bruce.

UPDATE:

• Video of Bruce reading Carl Sandburg’s poetry.
• A complete audio recording of his presentation.
• A full transcript of his presentation.

(via down the avenue, Jill Brown, and Sean Harton respectively)

Andrew Baron and Amanda Congdon are Rocketboom.

“We are in an interesting time, as production tools for mass communication are dirt cheap and accessible.”

Rocketboom: “An interesting intersection of blogging, TV over IP, radical advertising, etc.”… “The art of the possible.”

• Personal filters (media, people they meet, events, etc.) - always on the lookout for more information.
• Design - “One of the most important aspects of Rocketboom is… interface design; making the interface comfortable and easy to use.” The simplicity of the interface equals the experience for all viewers/users.
• Global - “Audience is scattered all around the world. Correspondants are in Kenya, Prague, all over the States.” Very interested in global stories. Rocketboom.jp just launched to communicate from Japan, presenting video stories which isn’t language-centric.



• Time - “Time is power.” Whoever has information before another will have a huge advantage. Large organizations cannot be agile enough to move fast. Rocketboom is daily, so it becomes habit-forming. “Simple concepts, but so important to us and our success. It’s worth considering them in-depth.”
• Consequence - Unlike other business models built on one, two year business plans, Rocketboom deals with consequences in the moment. They’re able to shift their approaches in the moment to take advantage of emerging opportunities. Being open to change is huge.
• Interactive - 25% of Rocketboom stories are user-generated. Then there are comments, emails with viewers, etc. They feel very strongly about the communities this interaction with viewers build. This medium is interactive, so even though a user is digesting video, it’s not TV.

The show is already available on cell phones (thanks to a fan hack), TiVo viewers, PSP and iTunes.

The Guardian
Internet means end for media barons, says Murdoch
· Magnate hails second great age of discovery
· Power ‘moving from the old elite to bloggers’
Owen Gibson, media correspondent

Rupert Murdoch last night sounded the death knell for the era of the media baron, comparing today’s internet pioneers with explorers such as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot and hailing the arrival of a “second great age of discovery”.

The News Corp media magnate nurtures a long-held distaste for “the establishment” but last night confided to one of the few clubs to which he does belong - The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers - that he may be among the last of a dying breed.

“Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry - the editors, the chief executives and, let’s face it, the proprietors,” said Mr Murdoch, having flown into London from New York after celebrating his 75th birthday on Saturday.

Far from mourning its passing, he evangelised about a digital future that would put that power in the hands of those already launching a blog every second, sharing photos and music online and downloading television programmes on demand. “A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it,” he said. Indicating he had little desire to slow down despite his advancing years, he told the 603-year-old guild that he was looking forward, not back.

“It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy - not just companies but whole countries.”

The owner of Fox News added: “Never has the flow of information and ideas, of hard news and reasoned comment, been more important. The force of our democratic beliefs is a key weapon in the war against religious fanaticism and the terrorism it breeds.”

[…]

Until Murdoch implodes the Fox News Channel and those religous propaganda nutso’s, Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson, I’ll continue to take everything he says with a grain of salt, but this degree of a proclamation — from the master of all mainstream media empires — *must* be a good sign to those of us who are already knee deep in this revolution.

Speaking of mainstream media empire builders, I wonder where Jason Calacanis sits on the future of the web…

Kirby Dick, you motherfucking rule.

Peter Morville, Information Architect.

Morville classic quote: “Information Architecture: A balance of art and science.” Risk taking, creativity, listening, trial and error. Designers, writers, developers, etc. are all practicing information architecture techniques (i.e. Microformats)

Different types of domain and users need different types of information architectures.

Search is a System

• User query ->
• Search Interface (Query language, builders) ->
• Search engine ->
• Content (metadata, CV) ->
• Results (Ranking and Clustering Algorithms, Interface Design

Searching is not only finding, but learning (discovery)

Findability
Can people find your web site, find content in your web site and find content despite your web site.

Shifting Gears: “One foot in the past and one foot in the future” What are the longer term trends?

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” - Herbert Simon

You know what? Peter is too eloquent for this live-blogging crap. Go buy the book; it truly is a great read.

This panel is very conversational (you think?), so bear with me.

Doc Searls

On marketing consulting: “There’s money to be made in prolonging the problem.”

On the title: “The cluetrain stopped there (Silicon Valley) four times a day, but never made a delivery.”

How the book came after the site received a buzz: “The book deal got worked out based on how much consulting money wey’d have to give up.”

Companies that get it:

• Dresdner Kleiner Wasserstein; the CIO completely bought into Cluetrain through Rageboy.
• Microsoft is a huge blogging community.
• Sun microsystems is trying to retain people, so they encourage blogging as well.

On the future of 2.0 and women in the mix: “There’s going to be a huge explosion of indie film and video production… the larger trend is independence… and women are best served to manage these communities”

Heather Armstrong

Heather stumbled into the marketing department of Nikon. She posts images and labels them with, “Shot by a Nikon XXX” and her audience is now buying the camera by the thousands. The problem? She’s having issues with the camera and Nikon isn’t paying her. So there’s guilt and then there’s justifiable bitterness.

When will companies get it?: “Cluetrain will be realized when BestBuy goes out of business.”

Brian Clark

“Less than entranced of the web as human-computer interaction (as oppossed to cd-rom).”

“Cluetrain predicts the idea that we can work smarter than that.”

“Ad agencies are starting to build around groups of freelancers, thereby reducing traditional organization, and increasing collaboration.”

Q&A
Before getting into the question of how do we empower individuals, I told Heather that I’ve been dooced twice; once when blogs were just web sites, and once within the thriving blogosphere. She asked me, “didn’t you listen to me?” and I laughed it off with a no, but the truth is strange. I didn’t get dooced twice for shitting on my boss or coworkers, I got dooced for openly talking about how smart we were being within our company(s) at the time. Yeah, I got dooced for having pride in our work and sharing it. Nothing secretive or clandestine, just for daring to speak to people and not go through “proper” channels. That’s a big difference. But like Heather, I refuse to name the two companies.

As for empowering bloggers to a point of sustainability, I understand Doc’s response. Blogs will provide monetary returns via the relationships and opportunities they create — through the development of respected, personal perspectives and grass roots authenticity (sorry for paraphrasing, but this is a post-lunch wrap-up). That’s all good, but my question (which I didn’t quite get out) was more about how do we empower the voices around the US and the world who might be online, but are scraping to get by in the real and don’t (or can’t) see the benefit of sharing their voice.

I feel reaching a critical mass of participation is important; not because I necessarily want to experience *everyone’s* POV, but because the chance that you or I might discover these voices is an extremely powerful, politically empowering concept, as down the road, a yet to be designed interface will make discovering such varient perpsectives within a huge ecosystem of information rather simple. So to get a critical mass, a potential monetary incentive might become the tipping point for participation.

So my original question remains; how can we develop implicit hooks between bloggers and businesses? Maybe it’s not about that direct hook either; maybe it’s about creating an algorithm service which can sense when a blog reaches:

• a readership tipping point
• a query match tipping point (enough people land on x site because they were looking for y)
• a tagging tipping point (enough posts fill the context of a particular topic that matches a business’s controlled vocabulary of value keywords [matching services, inventory, etc.])
• a local readership tipping point (based on a radius from the “home” of the blogger)

This way, community based small businesses can be alerted to potential local blog advertising possibilities and participate with smaller, more targeted payouts to audiences directly engaged within the context of their business model. Instead of creating hooks directly between domains, instead, we’d be creating hooks between people.

Or something like that…

Moderated and kicked-off by Tantek:

Microformats Process:

• Pick a simple problem and define it. No frameworks.
• Document what existing web pages are doing and find patterns for a specific microformat
• Trying not to create standards or formats.
• Brainstorm a set of fields to define microformats
• Post findings, get feedback and iterate.

A Microformats Exercise

• Create your own hCard
• Publish it to your site
• Add a link to hCard examples

Mark Norman Francis, Yahoo! Sr. Developer London, wants to create semantic meaning without the delay of us building the Semantic Web. hReviews will return 7 figures of results in local European searches (for restaurants, films, etc.), while the current Yahoo! film reviews have 4 or 5 figures of results.

Jeremy Keith, web developer, wanted to get his SXSW plans up on his page and add geo-coordinates, so he created a microformat page and mixed it up with the Google map API. I think I speak for all non-developers when I say “holy fuck.”

I copy and pasted my plans into a blog post and manually linked them up from my iCal feeds. Anything more that that would’ve made me nutso. But the point here is the microformats themselves, not this particularly geeky application (Jeremy, you soo outrank my geek factor).

Chris Messina, flock, sees the web as an event stream, a social space and an actual data-storage space. When you build in microformats to search, flock (and outside developers) can leverage “round-trip attention:”

• Blog posts with links to people
• Lists of people and their blogs
• Your contact info and favorites
• Concerts and movies reviews
• Upcoming events

flock can use these semantic information to create relational experiences in results. The more times a flock user comes across markup information about specific people, places, things, etc., flock can capture and present back to the searcher a filtered picture of that person, place, thing, etc.

Q&A

- claimID is gathering individuals publishing service spots and generating centralized hCards.

- Structured Blogging has a Wordpress plugin that supports a ton of microformats

- “Roach Motels are so 1.0″

title: Dunk
created: fall 1990
media: Rapidograph illustration
dimensions: 18″ x 24″

Jill, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, was abducted more than two months ago in Iraq just after her translator was murdered in cold blood. Please take a moment and post a link to this video in an effort to raise awareness across the blogosphere.

If you’re a blogger in the middle-east, your help is most appreciated.

My heart has been and will continue to be with Jill’s family and friends until this nightmare is over.

(via Mental Mayhem)

PotatoStew of Plead the First has been tracking the political leaning of bloggers from Greensboro for the past month or so. The results are pretty interesting:

I say we rename the town “Amsterdam.”