random($foo)

I’ve put up a page that I’ve threatened to do years ago that randomly rotates old posts. It’s augmented by other automatically generated feeds (by products of my daily actions). While the latter is a widespread practice, I think as more and more blogs accrue years of backlog posts, that we might be seeing more and more designs/mechanisms to surface them.

In fact, it’s only after implementing my own random post rotator that I’ve realized just how compelling this is on a personal level – it brings back a sense of serendipity and self-discovery, and also gives a new context for accomplishment. (4000+ posts over the past 7 years!)

My in-progress redesign is focusing on ways of highlighting and integrating the various streams and non-blog projects I’ve been working on, but I think the random historical posts will stay, especially as I experiment with adding new ways to interact with them (rating, tagging, favoriting, commenting, addendums, related posts)

It took all day to compile, but I have Filelight running on my Mac thanks to Fink.

This year was my seventh SXSW, and it was good.

If you’ve read much of my blog, you’ll know that I tend to shy away from going overboard on the personal introspection here. At a sub-conscious level, perhaps it’s a carryover of New England sensibilities towards mawkishness, or maybe, my reflexive aversion to the medium’s early tendency towards extreme navel-gazing. My conscious rationale has always been that capturing my behavior and external interests would both be more relevant to others and also in the long term, give me more self-insight than any extemporaneous analysis.

That’s a wordy way of saying that I don’t get too personal in my posts. That isn’t however, to say, that my blog doesn’t serve as a marker for points in my life. Usually, when I look back, the gaps reveal those just fine, but sometimes, I find myself wishing I had been just a bit less economical, and more diaristic.

SXSW was very different for me this year. It wasn’t just the conference itself: the signficantly larger crowd, the new faces, the shifted focus, the tone (if you sat and listened, you could hear the difference in the air), but it was me and my role as well. Beyond the changes in job and the relocation, my experience was reframed by the new responsibilities I had, sitting on a panel, hosting a party and representing a new organization.

I don’t think fully I appreciated the luxury of just being able to sit down with old friends that I’m lucky to see maybe once a year. Maybe I’m just turning into a softie in my old age.

(I started on that recap but couldn’t really be motivated to do a blow-by-blow. I spent the first half of the weekend very stressed out by panel and work stuff, but ended up relaxing Sunday night and having a great time after that. As far as panels, there was no Hamptons Inn continental breakfast to get me up every morning, so I missed a couple of 10AMs, but my in-conference experience was pretty good – I based my panel choices mostly by the panelists I knew, or knew were insightful/entertaining in the past. The best session I was at was Daniel Gilberts. Chatting with Andy afterward, we both agreed it was better than any session at ETech. My biggest disappointment was that I had no idea Why, of Why’s Poignant Guide was speaking. I really hope they put that podcast up. Also, worth listening to is the Bruce Sterling podcast. He takes it in a different direction this year.)

For my last night at SXSW this year, I skipped out early on the closing night parties and caught the Comedians of Comedy show at Emo’s. The line was a bit intimidating, but it turns out that this was definitely the right decision. (standing for so long was leg-numbing, but the Emo’s Sparkleberries helped – yeah, what can I say, I fell off the horse there)

Sure you know Patton Oswalt is gonna rock, but the rest of the lineup was great too. I really dug Flight of the Conchords, but a special googlejuicing shout out goes to Aziz Ansari, fucking badass (see also), who just won Best Standup at the Aspen Comedy Festival, for bringing on the east-coast nerdcore in full effect [mov].

(Some more SXSW recapping should be coming, but definitely not anything as involved as last year)

I’m on a panel on quitting work and getting your own thing going later today (Saturday @ 5PM). Hopefully, I’ll have some insightful contributions to make. We have a site for the panel where we’ve gathered some links and will be putting up info.

Heading into the last day of ETECH06, I’ve been a bit underwhelmed compared to previous years. There seems to be a focus on lots of decidedly not-emerging topics. Product pitches have always been part of ETECH, but rarely have they been so boring and generic (here’s another AJAX widget!). Even dependable sessions like Sifry’s Data Dump has been corrupted (half product pitches, none of the other stats presented actually said anything insightful about the larger net). Whither the deep insights, the new research data, or the plain gee whiz factor?

Maybe not completely fair, since the hallways have still been fun, and there have been some highlights:

• Getting to the airport
• Simon eating live shrimp
• Bruce Sterling on the Internet of Things (spimes and blogjects) – his point on ordinating is well taken, the physical as instantiation and interwoven with data is definitely very etech
• Ray Ozzie presenting Live clipboard – an actual useful feature, given as a “gift to the Internet” – desktop clipboard integration is one of the webapp holy grails – it’s compatible with Firefox and Safari — if this gets built into IE7 and FF2, this will change the face of the web
• Multi-touch display – sure, the video’s been floating around for months, but omg, want. I wish it was set up for people to play with. Physical interfaces like this (or Matt Webb’s awesome accelerometer presentation tool hack) are the future.
• SXIP 2.0 – removing federated trusts between identity providers and requestors, abstracting and allowing pluggable certifying authorities, and moving privacy management, just in time and into the client – SXIP 2.0 looks like an open identity standard I can wholeheartedly get behind. toreview: sxip.org
• IBM reveals worlds ugliest AJAX app (an enterprise mashup RAD tool which actually might have some potential. One of the less embarassing shills actually compared to the race to the bottom this morning)
• Amy Jo Kim’s overview of applying game mechanics to communities had some insights and new examples even for someone who’s a practitioner in the field who keeps up on the area (that’s how you do it, go Amy Jo!)
• playsh is mad science. I loved it, and it really set my mind off into some wild tangents that I’m hoping to follow up on… in my copious spare time
• Clay Shirky reminding us why we got into this in the first place
• George Dyson’s continued-from-last-year presentation on the personal history of computation

Lows so far:

• Standard O’Reilly completely-crap wifi (sure you can’t help the number of retarded Windows laptops with computer-to-computer networks, but just once, I like to get some traffic shaping so I can have a decent SSH connection – I suspect 1 or 2Kbps of low latency bandwidth would be fine)
• Completely uninteresting product pitches. Can one really get nostalgic for the days of swarming autonomous killbots?
• Hyping of 3yo web technology w/ aforementioned crap products. Also, continued discussion of emerged tech w/o further insight
• Not getting to the f’n point. Inverted pyramid, people
• Not having a f’n point.

Links:

• ETECH feed aggregator
• Gabe has a Subetha notes dump online
• Dan Hon has been taking extensive notes
• Oren Sreebny has been posting as well
• Chris Lott has some interesting comments
• Gordon got more out of today than I did

Go Andy! Standing up for your right to Cosby!