SXSWi 2010: Day 3

Sunday promised to be the day that taught me the most business lessons. Unfortunately that promise wasn’t kept. It was one of those days that makes you think that SXSW is an overhyped waste of time. Well, until it was redeemed by Peter Molyneux.

First up, Social Gaming: Lessons from the Pioneers. A fascinating area but some of the panelists’ seemed blinded by their own genius. That irked me and made it tricky to take in what they were saying. I remember someone making the point that story-driven games aren’t easy to monetise as they don’t tend to scale very well as the story has to end. They speculated that it might be possible to find a way around this to keep the story running ahead.

Merch: The Other White Meat of Monetisation – an odd title and a couple of the panelists seemed surprised to be sat up there. The others knew their stuff well but are operating at a scale far beyond my own. There were some useful lessons though:

• Think through the various stages of the sale – invoice, email and shipping included – and customise messages where possible
• Consider outsourcing printing and packaging
• Give everyone who wants to support your thing as many different avenues to do so as possible
• Don’t ask people what they want – they’re unreliable
• Pre-orders are good. Announce a product a couple of weeks in advance and take sales before shipping a new thing.

I’d wanted to go to the Persuasive Design session next but it was packed (I gather there were rumours of freebies) so I went next door to Writing Web Content for a Living which was fine, but a subject I already knew too much about for it to be useful, so I didn’t stay there long.

My SXSW reached a low point in the Interactive Agency Workflow: Design and Development Process session that, judging by the comments in the backchannel and the number of people who left the room, disappointed many who attended. I’d include myself in that – the talk didn’t deliver what I was after but was hardly mis-sold.

A talk titled The Emotion Engine: Can a Video Game Speak to the Heart? may not have seemed very relevant to me but it turned out to be just what I needed. As mentioned previously, the best rule for picking SXSW panels is to choose by speaker, not by panel title. Spotting that the speaker for this was Peter Molyneux, I made a bee-line for it and was pretty well rewarded.

At SXSW there are a lot of people caught up in the early stages of creating something. Their perspective on things makes seeing the bigger picture harder, so it’s good to go and listen to the pontifications of those who’ve been around a little while. Not only that, but Molyneux’s experiments with introducing ethical decisions into his games are very interesting – to the extent of making some of the actions that are possible in Fable 3 seem difficult by playing up their moral abhorrence.

SXSWi 2010: Day 2

I was up bright and early on the Saturday but none of the earliest sessions really took my fancy so I went exploring, wandering towards the upper floors of the Convention Centre and happening upon the Day Stage, which turned out to be a good move. 37signals’ Jason Fried came out came out and held forth on the subject of running a business.

He was reading chapters from REWORK, their latest book and one that I’ve since bought and (more surprisingly) read. It’s full of short, opinionated chapters, most containing some good common sense. The general aim of the book seems to be to try and dispel the myth that to be a successful business person you need to take on as much work as possible, please as many people as possible, work 23 hour days and grow as much as possible. Simple stuff and, as I said, pretty much common sense, but a useful counterpoint to much of the perceived wisdom out there.

It was a good morning actually, because next I went along to Design for Awareness: Mobile Technologies and Health which I went along to because I thought it would be interesting and a sidestep from my usual areas of interest. As it turned out it couldn’t have been more relevant to my current interests. I don’t think my notes quite reflect what was going through my head while I was sat there but I’ll try and get them written up separately later. In the meantime, here are Jason Hall’s notes.

Next up was Designing The First Fifteen Minutes. Another good session and another one I’ll write up notes for separately. My go-to person on this kind of stuff is Joshua Porter who was name-checked right at the end. It was good to get some different examples of effective sign-ups.

At this point I had a bit of a break before catching the second half of Ze Frank Conversation: The Creative Lifestyle. The main topic of conversation seemed to concern Ze’s attempts at cracking the traditional entertainment industry. I’m not entirely sure what the main story was there but he had the air of a man whose time had been wasted on an endeavour he was never utterly sold on. Actually, his story reminded me a bit of Stringer Bell’s (without the drugs, guns and so on)

The last session of the day was Gaming the System with 4chan. A generally amiable meander with Christopher Poole and a pretty decent end to the day. I didn’t take any notes because I wasn’t really there to learn anything, although a theory that Wikipedia is a game for fans of bureaucracy has stuck with me.

SXSWi 2010: Day 1

I’ve been back from SXSW for a little while now and, as I write this, my notes are still stuck in a small green notepad.

Last year I typed them all up as quickly as possible and put them on this blog. This year I’ve decided to let things seep in a little more. There’s really no rush and last year I tended to find that the best snippets from SXSW became apparent after a bit of a break.

I’m going to round things up a day at a time. If any sessions merit a longer treatment then I’ll see what I can do.

Btw, here’s a full list of the sessions I went to.

Friday

History of the Button was quite diverting. More of a warm-up to the rest of the conference than anything else. The podcast is available here if you’re interested.

Long Distance UX didn’t really deliver what I was after, being the exception to the rule that says ‘pick the speakers, not the topics’. It was all far too basic for me and not applicable to my work.

It says here that I attended Time + Social + Location but if I did I can’t remember it. Ah yes, I can – they pointed out that it was the first of a fair number of location-related panels. Location was big at SXSW with Foursquare and Gowalla competing for users. I don’t have any particularly insightful notes from this session though.

Back from SXSW

I got back from SXSWi yesterday. I’ve got notes to write up about the various sessions I went to (the good ones at least) but for now:

• It was good. Not revelatory, but definitely worthwhile
• Sitby.us was a great iPhone friendly tool, much better than the official app. Here’s my schedule for the week
• I lost my voice for the first few days. Socialising when you can’t talk can be a depressing experience
• Again, meeting folks from the UK was the best and most useful part of the trip
• We stayed in a great house (above) but next year I’d rather be closer to the centre of town
• If you think there’s a limit to the number of foods that can be served with cheese, you’ve not been to Texas
• Texan cab drivers are great ambassadors for their city, although the one that kept going on about the Cherokee nation did scare me a little

(Pic by Toby Barnes)

SXSWi bits n bobs

It was a while ago now, but I’ve got a few notes left over from a couple of panels I went to and I may as well dump them here in a single post – you never know what someone else will find useful, so here they are:

Regional Whuffie – Attracting Innovation

Or ‘the co-working panel’. Truth be told, ‘awesome fatigue’ had taken hold around this point and so, although the panelists were all interesting people doing interesting things, the excessive chuminess and back-slapping was a little hard to stomach.

It’s a problem that marred many of the panels – a lack of incisive questioning which glossed over the troubles, mistakes and difficulties to allow much less useful evangelism/self-promotion.

To spin the self-promotion more positively, this panel saw some interesting case-studies including The Runway Project and ArtCamp.

On the question of how to fund a coworking space, the advice was to not think of it as a business but to do the minimum necessary at any time. Focus on improving community and the city as a whole. The space will follow.

The other piece of advice was to adopt successful international projects such as Pecha Kucha nights, Ignite or 20×2.

How LA Built a Successful Tech Community

The worst panel I attended but the fascinating awfulness of it all left me rooted to my chair. Apparently LA’s scene is a humble one, living in the shadow of LA’s entertainment industry and the San Francisco scene. I didn’t see a lot of humility though.

Half the room were LA residents and things never really lifted above being an insular love-in/bitching session.

The lessons, such as there were any, were to self-promote and to promote others around you. Actually, this is probably worth bearing in mind – there’s been plenty of good stuff happening in Birmingham but information about this rarely gets outside the bubble. The social media surgeries, for example, tend to generate a few blog posts where people say what a good thing they are and those posts are read by others who attended. What about writing a press release and sending it to a newspaper/some council officers/charity workers instead?

A post about posters

As a little light relief from the semi-coherent notes from SXSW that I’ve been posting, here’s something a little different.

On the last night in Austin we were at the Brit Bash, having a merry old time and looking forward to seeing the headliners when a wall of posters caught my eye. This one, in fact:

All the posters were advertising the efforts of various UK regions to promote their musical talent – in this pic you can see the North West, Belfast, Yorkshire and Scotland (twice) all represented.

Alice Russell played on the night and was ace. I saw her at Glastonbury a couple of years back when she sang with the Quantic Soul Orchestra – their take on Sunshine Anderson’s ‘Heard it All Before’ was superb.

SXSWi Notes: Remixing the Museum Exhibition

Remixing the Museum Exhibition

Speakers:

• Jim Forrest – Peabody Essex Museum
• Ben Tucker -  GreenRiver.org
• Ellis Neder – Creative Dir, Sway Design
• Steven Alvarez – Dir of Programs & Media, Alaska Native Heritage Center

Museums can be conversational – you can go with friends and chat about the exhibits. Museums have not generally translated this online. The idea is to get visitors to help museums to collect and share.

The object on display is the point of conversation.

Echospace

Each item in the museum’s collection will be on there eventually.

The site has a digital uploading tool similar to Flickr or YouTube. The site also plugs in to Flickr and YouTube’s APIs.

It also has a touch of wikipedia about it. Users can grab museum resources, add their own and tell a story.

Why did they do this?
Not bandwagon jumping.
It’s a very diverse organisation with locations all over. They are used to using tech just to operate.
They take a lot of viewpoints – academic, tribal, and cultural values and mash them together. Media has been very useful to find commonalities.

New Trade Winds (2002) – project was to use web 2.0 tools to bring together stories.

Artscape – personal collaborative bookmarking tool

Hawaii Alive – traditional navigation/database model did not suit the best way to represent Hawaiian culture and values. Divided by realms of gods, man and ocean.

Teachers Domain – a crucial step on the way to Echospace. Filtering the best from worst practices but tricky to do so – delicate matters not wanting to insult a tribe

Realise that they’re being very open and that won’t go down well with some. Also accept that they don’t know everything and others can be brought in to give their view. Dark side of that conversation might come out but that’s needed.

Steven Alvarez

They’re not stuck in a pre-contact ‘leathers and feathers’ state. They use tech.
However, there’s a tension when doing traditional stuff with new methods. for example, new media allows shift from telling a story to a few people in a room to being able to amplify that voice immediately and, potentially, globally.

They’re targetting a narrower audience with Echospace – that’s a good thing.

All user uploads via the site go to a single YouTube account. A video that breaches YouTube’s T&Cs could be enough to have the account closed – a problem they’re still working on (although they keep back-ups of all videos).

Fears

Joy of oral history is that it changes with the telling – recording in this way captures and freezes those stories.

Also, the tribes have been burned before – people have taken stories, got rich off them and not paid promised royalties.

What happens if no-one uses this resource?

That’s fine. It’s a modular site so if some areas are not used they can dump it.

Is there moderation?

Yes, there is a moderator – a non-native anthropologist who will have her set of biases. Already found snags.

SXSWi Notes: Building Strong Online Communities

Building Strong Online Communities

• Ken Fisher -  Editor-in-Chief, Ars Technica
• Alexis Ohanian – Prod Mgr of Awesome, reddit.com
• Drew Curtis -  The Member, Fark.com
• Erin Kotecki Vest – BlogHer Inc

BlogHer started from a flame war about where all the female bloggers are.

(Liked the line “We decided to do something instead of blogging about it”)

How do you talk to your community?
F – have to take stuff with a grain of salt. Decide if their views are representative of all users.
R – give users the tools and let them do their thing. There are areas they have little/no knowledge of. Found a use for Twitter – can do a search so if someone’s ranting about Reddit he can see and get a conversation going.
A – Twitter useful for engaging people who are on the fringes of participation. Created a forum for complaining about Ars Technica. They don’t have to answer everything as other users may not agree. Doing this publicly can be tricky – give people a chance to slate you in public but transparency is appreciated and if there’s a problem that many complain about you should probably fix it.

How is the community policed?
B – strict community guidelines. Provide safety from trolling/hate speech. Set that standard very early and now the site polices itself quite well.
F – Their rule is don’t be too much of an asshole. They have ‘Nark’ button for reporting users but sometimes see people using this to report comments just to get people in trouble.
R – they set up a wiki for guidelines. Became a list of dos and don’ts. Now they let people set up their own Reddits and let them moderate them themselves.

What do you do with problem bits of content?
B – pulled immediately and email sent to originator to explain why. Anything borderline gets you yanked.
F – similar but philosophy is it’s not capital punishment, it’s just deleting comments on a web page. Can always revisit/reconsider.
R – ditto
A – they leave stuff up unless it’s spam. Worry about silencing people as it’s seen as censorship in the AT culture.

DON’T:

• Tell rather than ask
• Change things without telling community in advance
• Not involve the community
• Troll your own readers
• Listen to readers too much (tyranny of the minority)

Also need to pay attention to the silent majority who don’t login, contribute, etc but make up most of traffic. Stats will tell you what they’re looking at, what they like and don’t like.

Common problem – forums with loads of topics. Starts off emptier and makes it hard for people to get to content.

Expectations online are very low. Engaging people in real life (or just via email) can be very powerful. Do this with the most engaged participants.

Is it worth educating users about being good net citizens?
B – yes. New people are always coming in so it’s good to restate things occasionally.

Other notes about this panel:

• Sexy Widget
• Fast Wonder
• DIIA Blog
• Team Rubber

SXSWi Notes: HOWTO: 149 Ways…

HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!

Speakers:

• John Gruber – Raconteur, Daring Fireball
• Merlin Mann – You Look Nice Today

Talk about everything and you talk to no-one.

Who is your ideal reader?

If you’re going to copy something successful make sure you’re copying the right parts of it. Not just the outside bits but the attitude, etc. May have been the unique circumstances surrounding something that made it a success.

Lawyer – a person who knows which forms to fill out to ruin you.

Getting paid – you get paid in attention. You can’t buy stuff with that but it’s amazing what you can do with that when it builds up.

When there’s news you want to know what happened, what it means and what that person thinks of it. Not many people will do that. Loads of people will just tell you that something happened.

Top tips:

• Give away stuff. Make it easy to get and give away more than you think you should.
• Have diverse revenue streams and keep looking for others
• Don’t do stuff that seems profitable but interferes with why people liked you in the first place

Photo by Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com.

SXSWi Notes: Curating the Crowd-Sourced World

Curating the Crowd-Sourced World

Speakers:

• Jen Bekman – CEO, Jen Bekman Projects and 20×200
• Paddy Johnson – Editor, Art Fag City
• Nion McEvoy – CEO, Chronicle Books
• Dustin Hostetler – Special Projects Curator, skinnyCorp
• Gina Trapani – Founding Editor, Lifehacker.com

This talk is available as a podcast.

Notes

Curation – taking suggestions from your audience. In the echo-chamber though. Making the popular even more popular. Doesn’t help with reaching beyond that audience.

There is value in changing perceptions.

Is presence of a curator a recognition of failure of the crowd?
No. Useful to inspire the crowd (cf V&A’s approach re setting a standard for other users to follow)

On too high a level (ie with a very large crowd) there’s a signal:noise problem.

Other notes about this panel:

• Adam Schwabe (liveblog)
• Aaron Sumner

Fwiw, my notes on this panel are sparse because (without wanting to sound big-headed) I found it was pitched a bit too far below my level. The panelists are all engaged in interesting projects but some of them seemed unable to step back from their practice and articulate what it is they do and how.