Despite most of the people I hung out with taking a pass, Matt’s prediction was indeed true. It was even more crowded than the past keynotes. And it really, really sucked. The only good thing is I took a couple winks of naptime, but I probably would have been more comfy in the hallway.
SXSW 2005: The Bloggies
Wow, talk about awards-show on speed. As Nikolai did not sing this year, the highlight was the catty heckling of Ernie on IRC.
SXSW 2005: How to Inform Design: How to Set Your Pants on Fire
This was a pretty good panel, with the most interesting bits being Veen’s visuals, like how they charted success rates through the Blogger registration process. Amazingly simple, but amazingly effective. I like that combination.
SXSW 2005: A Whole New Mind: Daniel H. Pink Presentation
(Note: Suprisingly, I made it to every 10AM session this year. I credit the Hampton’s continental breakfast for serving as the subconscious trigger that was able to push me over the edge. Well, actually this night, it was the Sparks that had me getting up grumpy and wired at 7:30AM, but that’s a whole different story…)
Having read the recent Wired article adapted from his new book, I was initially still undecided whether this panel would be worthwhile. Almost immediately however, I was sure that I had made the right decision (and proceeded to text/rndvz friends), and I was enjoyed probably the most coherent and engaging presentation I attended this conference.
He started on the key to good Monday morning talks: brevity, levity, and repition, and then proceeded in that fashion. When answering questions he was both sharp and thoughtful. The article and the notes online should capture all the important points (which are both well made, and insightful), so instead of rehashing that I wanted to take some time to ruminate on panels and presentations, specifically the different between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ones.
Like many others I’m sure, I’ve sat through hundreds of presentations/panels/discussions over the past few years (besides conferences, being at an University really contributes in that area) including more than a couple about how to make better presentations (Conway’s Aikido and MJD’s Judo, Tufte among others).
A while back I realized that the topic of a discussion actually doesn’t really matter so much, or, perhaps to phrase it as Pink might, it is necessary but not sufficient. Put another way (post-structuralist?) it might be said that the content (at the very least, its use value) is a function of its context, a factor of its form. As McL–ok, I’ll stop now.
Actually, probably the easiest way to talk about it is in terms of story (as most human communication/understanding is wont to be). The discussion is a narrative, and bad panels are almost always so based on structural weaknesses. We’re talking about the basics of pacing, rhythm, arc, setup, etc. Anywho… That’s my hare-brained theory and I’m sticking to it. Moving on.
- Liz’s notes
- Pink gave away free copies of the book at the end of the panel (even being gracious enough to take cards if he ran out) [random aside: who’s read Caldini’s excellent book, Influence?]
SXSW 2005 – Taking Notes
A couple hours ago (about 3), halfway through my sixth SXSW (that means I’ve been coming down to Austin a quarter of my life), I realized that I don’t think I’ve ever published much of my SXSW notes online. I don’t take the detailed notes I used to anymore (Go Go Gadget Notes Exchange), but since I made a commitment this year to hit as many of the panels I could, I’ll be posting summaries and observations.
These entries will be post-dated against conference times. This may make things confusing in the short-term but probably better in the long-term.
Other SXSW resources:
iPod 2.2 Updater Warning
FYI/caveat: the 2.2 firmware update just broke my iPod. The iTunesDB is still there and I was able to copy off a backup, but it no longer recognizes in iTunes, which tells me to reformat (restore to factory settings) my iPod. Suck.
[Note: This post is more fun when you realize that I had't gone to bed yet. ...And it was posted in central time]
SXSW 2005: Afternoon / Evening
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.
SXSW 2005: Keynote Speaker: Malcolm Gladwell
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 2005: How to Leverage Solipsism
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).
SXSW 2005: Emergent Semantics
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.