I skipped the afternoon sessions (maybe I should have hit up Matt’s panel, meh) and sat around and had coffee w/ friends [see priv] before heading out to the Salt Lick (the first time I ever went). And thus began another very long night.

Malcom Gladwell gave a very engaging talk on snap judgements (“rapid cognition”) from his latest book, Blink. Gladwell is incredibly articulate, and could probably talk about his shopping list and still keep the audience’s interest (at this point, I’ll again have to bring up how shitty the room-selections were in general, and for the keynotes in particular — it just wasn’t a physically big enough space to fit people in. You practically needed to get seats 30 minutes early just to get a seat).

Gladwell has a series of great anecdotes which he used to illustrate his points, some of which were quite fascinating (Orchestra selection, emergency room heart-attack diagnoses). If you get a chance to hear him talk, it’s worth while.

That being said, an interesting coffee shop follow-up conversation post-keynote was on the decline of pop science. While I’m not involved enough in the social sciences research to come down on either side, apparently there’s quite a bit of ill-will from that community (or at least, members of) on how Gladwell’s “research” comes off (or is passed off) as research, in the scientific sense of the word.

A (possibly completely inaccurate) observation I made is that in cosmology, biology, etc, “pop” science is frequently written by scientists and grounded by the scientific community (think Sagan, Hawkins, Greene), while in the social sciences, this seems to be less the case. I’m not sure if this is even true though, much less why this might be the case.

Anyway, despite the misgivings people might have, the discussion of our judgement behavior (if only because it flies against convention, and is obviously underestimated) can only be a good thing. Also, I’m flying through the book now. It’s as engaging as his speaking and brings up specific points I definitely want to follow up on.

• SXSW Baby Notes Exchange
• Liz’s very detailed notes

Unfortunately, neither Peterme nor Stewart could make it to this panel (Jeff filled in for Peter as a very chipper moderator, Tantek sat in, in his 50th panel for the week), but despite the lineup mishaps, the (rather obliquely titled) panel delivered.

Both Thomas Vander Wal and Don Turnbull gave well organized and refreshing looks at free tagging. Thomas spoke mostly in terms of personal information management, and Don put it within the larger information sciences context.

My biggest fear about this panel was that the ground would have been so well covered at this point that it would not be worthwhile, but the different perspectives was really engaging and triggered some new lines of thought for me. This was definitely one of the better panels I was at this year.

• Continuing the conversation – Jeff has collected the links to slide decks here
• Liz’s notes – also links to other notes in the comments
• Kevin’s notes

See also: Folksonomy Talks: Information Architects Surpass Techies for ETECH and IA Summit comparisons on similar topic matter (also, Seb’s IA Summit Notes).

After leaving the Blogging Showdown, I swung by Eric Meyer’s Emergent Semantics panel. This was basically Eric going through a bunch of microformats for the audience. (this panel room was also packed/overflowing)

Now I have nothing against microformats (and I rather like finding uses for the rel attribute), and I can see the arguments about lowercase ‘s’ semweb, but it just seems done before (I seem to recall some panels last year or the year before 🙂 especially in light of the new developments of lowercase ‘s’ in free tagging (aka emergent taxonomy aka folksonomies).

Probably the biggest reason I’m not hot over these microformats are that they are largely useless. Currently Google supports nofollow (although I’m sure all other search engines will follow [yeah, that’s a bad pun[one – ooh, I just can’t stop]]), and Technorati seems to be the only ones supporting/pushing most of the rest. Basically, while there’s little barrier to entry, as Alex pointed out in a conversation, there’s even less (none) upside. Also, what I think is even more critical, there are no applications (as in uses) that aren’t dependent on 3rd party tools. (To see what I mean, compare this to RSS — sure it’s great for 3rd party-aggregators [Pubsub, Feedster, et al], but there’s a bajillion user-based aggregators and ingestion libraries that make the RSS useful at the individual level.)

No benefit to user and no user empowerment is a pretty big double whammy and may explain why these microformats (nofollow excepted, which has the former and is automated and zero cost to a user) have yet to pop.

I left before the last questions were asked, when Marc was starting to get belligerent.

• Liz Lawley has some notes – also, mentions the how defining formats is clearly not emergent. This is something I found funny, and while not really relevant to my larger objections, in some fitting way does sum it up.

Here’s the abstract:

Representatives of top personal publishing companies talk about the strengths and weakeness of their applications, as well as discuss where this medium is evolving to in future years.

Sounds interesting, right? From these online notes it looks like it marginally did, but after 20 minutes of introductions and another 10 minutes of nearly content-less product pitchy stuff, I left.

(It looks like there was no chair-bashing, so I guess I didn’t miss anything)

I was really looking forward to Alex’s panel, and I’ll have to admit that I was pretty disappointed by how it turned out. It never seemed to get any momentum, was all over the place, and rarely touched upon any of what was implied by the abstract. Kathryn was rockin the SubEthaEdit on this one and has a comprehensive transcript on the notes exchange so you can judge for yourself. Also Ka-Ping Yee (hey, he’s put up a new Usable Security Blog up after SXSW), who I hadn’t met before came off very well (and IMO had the most interesting things to say).

For what it’s worth, here’s a quickie run-down of some things I might have liked discussed:

• Defining trusts at the node, system, and meta-system level (not covering this first was probably what threw the whole panel off)
• Control of personal data propagation through the network, specifically in addressing issues of social context friction/collisions (and their real world implications!)
• Relationship management, particularly interchange, how they map
• Good and bad ways to represent complex relationships – directionality, transitivity, type, explicit/implicitness
• Actual different approaches for trust, application of the sociological/ontological into real-world systems

I’ve actually done a lot of thinking some of these issues (I’ve posted bits in the past), but it might be worth writing in depth sometime in the near future. In the past I’ve been of the opinion that the last thing the web needs is more punditry, but well, maybe not in this case.

Lastly, one thing I mentioned in the IRC channel at the end (did that get logged anywhere?) was that Danah Boyd gave a very interesting talk at ETECH 2004 on trust from a social theory perspective that I found to be quite interesting and an excellent way to get into the right frame of mind on these things.

The “How to Hot-Wire the Creative Process” panel was supposed to be quite good, but unfortunately completely overflowing, so I spent most of the time hanging in the hallway. I swung through the “Blogs and Blockades” session, but the speaker was talking about which blogs he could access through the Great Firewall on China (didn’t we do this exact thing 3 years ago?) so I tried the “Uses and Abuses of History in the Education of Designers” next. I sat down, but after a minute I realized that words were being spoken, but entirely without content. I didn’t stick around.

External Notes:

• Hot-Wiring presentation slides
• SXSW Notes Exchange: How to Hot-Wire the Creative Process
• terry storch @ fellowship church: SxSW: How to Hot-Wire the Creative Process
• SXSW Notes Exchange: Blogs and Blockades: Forging a True Global Internet
• SXSW Notes Exchange: Uses and Abuses of History in the Education of Designers

To preface, keynotes this year are unfortunately incredibly crowded due to the fact that the keynote room is only a double-room, so you need to get in really early just to get a seat/in the room. Boo-urns.

Zeldman’s remarks were an in-jokey, folksy, rambly thing — not an ‘essential’ talk if you missed it, but perhaps a good instroduction for the lots of new faces this year. I miss Billy and Jess too.

• jz’s deck
• photomatt’s mp3 recording
• Will Pate’s notes
• Clickable Culture’s notes

Earlier, I linked to the SXSW4Pod page, which has a 2.6GB torrent of the entire 2005 Showcase. (There were hundreds of seeders when I got on). It’s been sort of dead around here, so what the heck, lets give mod_musicindex a stretch.

Here’s the entire showcase, 756 songs, available for streaming or individual download.

I’ll be flying out for Austin tomorrow morning. See you guys there.