Officially, today, I am done with all of that. For so long, new content added to my blog meant me actually thinking about something compelling, writing it, then having the stones to hit publish. I published roughly three articles in 2009 – that’s terrible, my system is broken.

If I am going to keep up a steady stream of content, it has to be more sharing than writing and things have to get easier for me to update. Blogs that rely solely on the written article can dry up in a hurry if the author is more of a sharer. If I was able to share some of the interesting content I took in and make it more presentable, I would be on to something. Then I realized that’s what tumblr trend was all about! Doh! I’m a slow learner.

My system is broken

First step, make the action of sharing flow from my actions of consuming. I consume media in two places – NetNewsWire (NNW) and Safari. I’ve been a big fan of the delicious integration in NNW since day one – I simply use a bookmarklet in Safari for posting to delicious. My usage of delicious sort of dropped off when I realized I never went back and found anything I bookmarked – or at the least, very rarely. This too will change with my new sharing flow.

There are two types of content I will share frequently – links & videos. I will use delicious to bookmark these items and use the taxonomy I created to only pull the content I want to share, not everything I bookmark at delicious.

Links in themselves are kind of boring, I’ve decided to give my two cents (like many others are doing) about the site being linked to. I have a feeling this will finally make me more important than I really am. It’s easy to accomplish link sharing by using a combination of delicious and the feedwordpress plugin. I simply created a tagging schema (link, publish), added a description, and imported the feed into wordpress. Simple.

Upon figuring out how to pull in links with descriptions, I started toying with the idea of having anything I am sharing imported into the blog this way. Using delicious, feedwordpress, and Viper’s Video Quicktags (awesome name), I now have it set that any vimeo or youtube video I bookmark pulls into the blog stream and looks a certain way.

All other content will be posted on the eleven3 site through the traditional means – log into wordpress and post.

I’m excited to start sharing again.

Jeff and I got back to our room and I use the words “passed out” here, although it was somewhere between passing out and going to bed – do you know the difference? Anyhow, the alarm came quickly and we got up, showered, and headed down to the complimentary continental breakfast. We’re staying at the Hampton – shitty wi-fi, fantastic continental, take your pick. One more good thing about the Hampton is it attracts a lot of the industry “rockstars.” Shit, Jeff and I were there, and we’re pretty important. I jest, but the highly talented Shaun Inman was there and I did get to pick up the size medium American Apparel Mint T-shirts he brought. Thank you Shaun – it was an awkward moment, but it was never dull – my name is George.

After all this we made our way to the conference, what follows are my notes from the different panels/presentations, enjoy.

Design is in the Details

Naz Hamid started with many quotes, “Less is more”, and “God is in the details/Design is in the Details” Showed examples of design in details in many fields, cooking, industrial design, etc… Overall I think his presentation was really entry level. I wanted to be blown away and I was just kind of left with a, “well yea…” taste in my mouth. Oh well, not a bad presentation by any means, but definitely light on theory.

The one real world practice I took away was his use of different comps for different components of the site – this is something I will definitely try.

Checklist and Guide

• Experiment – Playing around with things in a few PSD files. Use the source files of the client. Play with color. Logo in one comp, background in another, navigation in another – don’t commit. Then start mashing up.
• Choices – Making choices on client needs, your styles, typefaces, and colors. Pick the things that are simple, most logical choices.
• Stay Consistent – Make sure homepages and subpages reflect eachother. Avoid minutae with clients.
• Completeness – Finish the comp and get it done done.
• Step In, Step Out, Step Back: Balance – Walk away for awhile – take notes when you get back about what is striking you – first impressions.
• Be your own critic – Address the things you may feel the people signing off will have issues with – compromise just a bit, it will go a long way.
• Complexity is Simplicity
• Obsession is Healthy – Dedication to the design, we put in long hours.

Thoughts, Breakthroughs, & Revelations – Let a design sit in your head and think about it. Not Billable Time.

Weird Turn Pro: Crowdsourcing for Creatives

Derek Powazek comes across as very genuine. His presentation was pretty fun and he provided some great examples of the good and bad sides of crowdsourcing. Now following him on twitter – he seems like a seasoned pro of “growing communities.”

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” – Hunter S. Thompsen

Three lies people who don’t get crowdsourcing tell:

• Lie 1: Everyone on the net is an idiot – well they’re are some idiots, but some really smart people doing some really good stuff.
• Lie 2: Good stuff is too hard to find – traditionally has been human editors. It’s gone from traditional, to non-traditional, to moderators. Or it’s computers, text search, and Google. Now the interesting method is the hybrid model, Digg, flickr. Discussing leaderboards and how it encourages users to game the system. Show a random swath of “good results” to avoid the bad results of the game caused by leaderboards.Wisdom of Crowd – Selfish interests that increase the overall good. Says that if we all guessed numbers of beans in a jar, 99% of us would be wrong, but averaged out, we would be 99% right. Simple answers are the correct place for using the wisdom of crowds. Also needs to have diversity of viewpoints. Design for selfishness.Learning from Assignment Zero – Started by Jeff How – “Here everyone, write stories.” Nothing worked because nobody wrote anything. But increase the selfish motivation.

“Using crowdsourcings as a cost-saving measure doesn’t work. Communities must be cultivated, respected, and managed if they are to create economic value.” – Jeff Howe, who coined the term, “Crowdsourcing.”

• Lie 3: You can’t make any money. Threadless example – be the trusted middle man. How do they do it?
  • Contests – Ego, Winning, and Money
  • Fun thing on buyer end – The golden tag on a tshirt, Alumni Club.

Cautionary Tales:

• Yahoo Games Wii Sites: They pulled in flickr feeds tagged, “wii.” Flickr users rebelled and put in tons of “yahoo sucks” type images.
• GM Tahoe Apprentice Campaign: “Hey who wants to help us make a commercial for our SUV.” To make the commercial, all you could do was use their video and pictures and change the text. Chaos insued. “The Earth is now your Bitch”, “MURDER YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY.” They put the participants in a very narrow box. GM was greedy with their content – you couldn’t export it anywhere else, it could only work on the site. But it actually worked – drove more traffic to gm.com than google and yahoo combined.

Community is Grown, Not Built

1. Give people tools they want
2. Trust them to do good
3. Reward Good Contributions
4. Punish bad contributions
5. Expect the unexpected – Flickr Geotagging the word “Fuck” over iceland.

Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts

And this is where the crappy web connection killed my notes. I guess it isn’t so smart to post notes inside of WordPress while having an unstable connection. Either way – this panel was great.

First was Michael Lopp from Apple, he’s a product manager and seems to be a damn good one at that. He started off with some keynote issues, which was ironic, being from Apple. He proceeded to talk about Apple building everything like a present. From OSX being inside of their computers being inside of great packaging being sold at a great store being debuted by a great leader – yea, I could listen to someone from Apple talk about this stuff all day. He had some great anecdotes, which I wrote down – but alas they are deleted.

Are you comfortable being an asshole for the integrity of your design?

Then came John Gruber of the Daring Fireball fame. I read his blog pretty frequently and he’s always on point with thoughts on Apple. He continued to talk about the “blood, sweat, and fear” that goes into great design. In the end he stated that it’s ok to be an asshole as a designer – it means your more dedicated to your vision. Thank you John we all need that.

All in all this was a great presentation and I got to sit on the floor the whole time, which means it was a packed house.

A General Theory of Creative Relativity

You know how when you’re watching Die Hard and you just know that everything is going to be ok because badass John McClaine is on the job? You know, the bad guys are toast, he took a beating but won, and the girl who was in his life but couldn’t handle his badassnes when he wasn’t saving the world, comes back into his life? That’s like Jim Coudal – except he’s saving the world from shitty creative work.

“He’s a man’s designer.”

I would work for Jim Coudal, as Jeff said, “He’s a man’s designer.”

He framed his general theory as a spark between the known and the unknown, the variable or the constant – it was slow to start but then once he got going, he was on fire. I must say that his booking the band exercise was perfect for his concept.

At the end of his talk people had a Q/A round – this is where I decided how much of a badass Jim Coudal was. Again, I lost my notes, so I am going from memory. Small teams are better and meetings are bad news. That’s pretty much all I remember – sad.

Conclusion

First day wrapped up and it was unbelievable, each panel progressively better than the last. I must say with this year’s SXSW and the whole working for myself thing – I definitely feel a lot more happier in where I am at, it’s been a great year. I have also learned I need to take more pics at panels, doh!

Speed is a trait of the entrepreneur, we make things happen quickly, we all think “I can do this or that.” It’s what makes us quit our jobs, it’s what makes us just start things for no reason other than our own thoughts, it’s also, as time goes by, a huge weakness. It’s super tough to rely on anyone else, but it is also absolutely necessary. Often times we think up a strategy and execute without consulting those who have proven valuable. Often times a knee-jerk reaction comes across as a painful execution and an even more painful blunder.

With the WTM website – I could have just designed and built the whole thing. But I know someone who can do it better – and without his help, WTM wouldn’t be where it’s at. It’s been a very slow rewarding process building out wtmworldwide.com piece by piece. We have more that we would like to do – but we are not rushing it. Well, maybe I am pushing it, but have realized a slow marinade is just what the site needs.

Why the entry then? We have carefully launched the We The Blog. WTB, I guess, is an aggregate of all We The Media member blogs. I’m already feeling the pressure because Nick Onken blogs way more than me – I need to keep up! It is just one more channel for us to spread our message of love for the creative souls out there.

Check it out.

The “e” means we are empowered. As consumers, as professionals, as social networkers, as voters, and as evangelists. Believe me, you want us on your side. What we lack in numbers we make up for in determination and knowledge. Leveraging the internet to make real changes is second nature – and it will happen. We can’t be bought or sold by a television network – we really aren’t into TV, it’s too – linear, too “photoshopped,” or too fake. Our real news media has become satirical and our satirical news media has become real, and we recognize that.

We are fearless, bold, and fresh. Yes, we are a top heavy country consisting of many baby boomers who failed to topple the old guard – but that won’t stop us, you see, for we have the internet. Whereas America has been the melting pot for different cultures and race, the internet is the melting pot for ideas – and the best always come bubbling to the top.

I have been fearful of my generation being complacent to all of this – do we really care about our country and the world surrounding us?

Last night I was at a dinner full of the influencers – people who are striving for social change not only with their words, but their actions. They make a strong case that we do care – that we are empowered, and that we do live up to the hype. I think it’s only a matter of time before we wake up and turn the old guard on its head.

Our ideas are strong and our hearts are pure – we get the new world and we have embraced it. We have big corporations lobbying Washington D.C. to get their way – followed by the same corporations limiting which candidates the American public see (and in what light) on their broadcasting networks. This is an example of the competition, deceit, and old guard mentality which is taking our country down a path of destruction. If you’re getting your news from a TV, consider it skewed – not one major news network has a clean reputation. They all do it.

I watched Oprah introduce Barack Obama in Iowa and she said it best:

“I’m not here to tell you what to think, I’m here to tell you to think”

What we need is transparency and open doors. I’m a fan of Barack mainly in part because he is a fan of the transparency ideal. Transparency is something we all need to get behind.

For now, I have placed an Obama ’08 badge on my site for a candidate that stands for so much, but most importantly acts presidential. Grab the code, do the same.
<a href=”http://www.barackobama.com/index.php”><img src=”http://www.eleven3.com/wp-content/themes/eleven3/images/cause_obama.jpg” alt=”Vote Obama ’08″ style=”margin-right: 10px;”></a>

There are many reasons why this is akin to shooting oneself in the foot. First off, if a user has a couple hundred pictures on Photobucket, they’re not going to suddenly upload all of those to MySpace. What they will do is get irritated with MySpace, and remember it.

The second thing this is doing is continuing to build the walls higher, so high not even they can see outside. When MySpace starts asserting that users have to use MySpace’s video, audio, or picture services they’re missing out on the bigger picture. Do they really want to compete with all of the little media startups who do the storing, the sharing, and the community so much better? Has anyone ever uploaded a picture at Photobucket or flickr versus uploading at “Oops we’ve encountered an error” MySpace?

In conclusion, I think the first problem is much scarier. The people I talk to tell of a MySpace that isn’t really fun anymore. It’s ridden with spam, fake friends, and a ton of errors. It’s in making moves like this that MySpace will really begin to sink. Their traffic is already on a downturn. The web2 is built on cooperation first, competition second. Either way, the users are most important, not the product. Social networks are the commodity, not the users.

Get a virb account.

What makes a good user experience good? What makes a bad user experience bad? Why is it that websites seem to go in and out like trends. Will people soon be too cool for a MySpace page? Or is MySpace here to stay? All of these are questions we can ask, however the answers to all of these questions becomes null if a user is not enjoying their time on a site.

If one thinks about the life span of a popular site (or any product for that matter) there is a definite trend starting with the rise and ending with the fall. Narrowing down further, to sites with a spice of social web 2.0 goodness, one can see many sites that have risen lately, many sites striving to rise, and sites that have fallen. And looking even closer at the rise and the fall, one can see a trend going from too few users to too many users. The former leads to a site never getting wings, and the latter leads to a bloated system (in some cases) that is doomed to fail for various reasons.

Too Few Users

I will begin by stating the obvious, if you have the best possible idea/site in the world, and you don’t have any users, it will fail. But why? Part of the glorious benefit of belonging to a site with a hint of social goodness is the benefits one gains from all of the other users.

Digg allows me to see all the other news entries the rest of the community deems important with a fairly democratic voting system. I can participate and digg stories, as well as comments, up or down. Without people, none of this happens. Obvious right? Digg is a no-brainer, it needs people to make it move.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service, a social…bookmarking…service…MmmmMmm. Social, relating to society or its organization, Bookmarking, relating to a record or address of webpage, Service an action of helping or doing work for someone. Uh oh, I am going to state the obvious again, without a good sized user community, del.icio.us wouldn’t be useful. Wrong! Del.icio.us doesn’t suffer from too few users as it does from too many. There are many people using del.icio.us who aren’t using it’s too it’s full potential.

Having too few users in a community is a no-brainer on the path to never getting off the ground, however some sites do offer enough of a lift without the social side of things to function fairly successfully.

Too Many Users

Having too many users can tip the balance of a successful website in a few different ways. Anytime there is a whale, it’s going to attract sharks, or maybe the whale gets hungry and eats all the food in the sea. Metaphors and analogies are NEVER a good way to get to the point, let me elaborate.

Attracting Spammers – AKA the Shark Theory – Wherever there are big crowds, there is money to be made. Beggars aren’t on empty streets asking for change (at least the ambitious ones, ironic). The internet’s beggars are spammers. Hey look at this and click on me. In other words, the spammers are going to work to figure out how to get their message out to the most people in quickest way. The density of a very popular website is a sure fire way to achieve results. I wrote recently of del.icio.us spam I have been receiving through my RSS feed. Somewhere, someboty (gasp!) is populating the sites they are getting paid to promote into my del.icio.us feed. I get myspace messages and friend requests from people who are deleted by the time I get to looking at it. Sharks I tell ya. Not that either one of these services are doomed, but this is the kind of shit that really annoys users.

Trolls – Shark Theory Continued – Are there trolls on unpopular sites? I can’t remember cause I am so trendy. With a popular site full of Apple fanboys (guilty) there are bound to be a good number of Apple hating trolls. Trolls make reading through comments/forums annoying, decreasing user experience.

The Ego – When a site gets so big, a la MySpace, it may forget the users that go them there in the first place. Here’s a scenario: MySpace get so big that they start their own competing services to offer photo slides, skins, and video uploading services to their users, while at the same time shutting out all the services that allowed users to do that in the first place. No problem, they will just have to conform to “our” way. Anyone see the flaw in this logic? Maybe a person has built up their youtube profile equally as big as their myspace profile. Or maybe, social networking site x offers a cleaner interface and encourages you to piggyback on the profiles you have already created, people start moving, MySpace begins it’s fall. People don’t like their walled garden closing in on them, nor do they like unexpected change (look at Netscape and their blunder), be thoughtful with your upgrades.

Coolness – Just like it was once cool to dance like NSYNC (at least to me) it was also once cool to have a MySpace profile. Unfortunately, everyone got that, the service got popular they forgot about the users, and people started migrating. Have we really seen any nice improvements to MySpace since it got popular? Think about how decent hotmail seemed until Gmail came along. I’m getting off topic, but my point ultimately is that once you have a MySpace page and your mother has a page, maybe it’s time to ditch the service.

Conclusion

Ultimately the people pulling strings on these big sites need to achieve a balance. Don’t get too big unless you can be assured your users’ experience on the site isn’t compromised. If you’re small, start hustling (like you need me to tell you that) and get some users. I don’t think we have even come close to the ceiling on this social thing. The other day I sold my Mom on del.icio.us telling her about subscribing to other people’s tags. All we need is someone out there stating the obvious, and that’s what I do!

Cheers.

The worst occurences I have heard are from older folks who write the internet off as a bad place. It’s not! I tell them. There are a lot of good things about it, and with any system, there are the good and the bad. Usually they stay unconvinced, but we’re talking about the same people that believe in the FSM.

So what happened?

Trackback Spam. I’ve never received trackback spam. Ever. Suddenly I’m getting twenty new trackback spams a day. For the first day I had it notifying me via gmail and turned that off pretty quick. I can’t figure out why all the sudden I would go from being an obscure target to being hit pretty hard.

And then like that, it was gone.

I also started looking at my traffic stats and started noticing a lot of domains pointing towards me. I wasn’t getting a ton of traffic, and the domains looked totally legit.

http://www.faxad.co.nz

http://www.euroconf.se

http://www.kitchensunlimited.com

http://www.kassa-shop.nl

http://www.evptour.com

http://www.cyberwald.com

http://www.carnahanpresents.com

http://www.igram.net

http://www.mentavius.com

http://www.tofoc.us

http://www.curer.com

http://www.susanshouseofgifts.com

http://www.kishkinta.in

http://www.innersea.hu

http://www.translink.co.nz

http://www.stromlaw.com

All of those sites could be potential sites linking to eleven3. I checked quite a few of them and couldn’t find any links to my site on any of them. So what’s going on? No clue. Some of those sites fall into the new category, “Splog.” Which basically means, if you’re smart enough you will pick it out pretty quick. But if not, uh oh, you’re reading information generated by a CyBorg.

In the end I had the epiphany that if this type of stuff continues, it would infringe on my internet experience. I cannot imagine this kind of stuff happening to people who aren’t that in touch with the web. Fake websites? Misinformation? Pornography and Pedophilia? Yes, these are dark times. The world was better off when the information was controlled by a few rich ol’ white men. Yes, these are dark times.

Thank god for YouTube.

On my Mac I am using Colloquy (which I have no ideas how to pronounce). As with most Mac apps, it’s a very pretty application and I am very pleased with it. On a PC I am running IRC through Trillian, my IM client.

What is driving me to writing this post is something I have noticed. It seems the strenth of an idea or product or a community is directly related to the activity in the IRC room. Geeks use IRC, geeks fuel successful communities.

Recently I started dabbling in WordPress cause I have begun to feel like Movable Type is a sinking ship. Like another content management system I use, CMS Made Simple, the WordPress community in their IRC channel is huge. There is constant activity and questions get answered relatively quickly. The same can be said for the Rails community.

Now for the contrast. I had some crazy bug in my Movable Type install that wouldn’t allow me to republish my main index file if it had a normal JavaScript file call. At first I panicked and started deleting things only leading to a listing of all the contents of my root directory (ughh…no bueno). Then it popped into my mind how helpful IRC was for these kind of things with the other geekeries I am trying to learn. Upon logging into the Movable Type IRC room I pasted my question and patiently awaited my answer.

That was 30 minutes ago, and still nobody has responded. There are eleven people in the room not participating. This leads me to believe one can successfully gauge a “movement” by the number of people in the IRC room.

In the end I found my own hacky solution, just like I did in my pre-IRC days, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Why did Movable Type break like that?

Upon building my most recent site in WordPress and gaining exposure to that community, it pushes me even further in the direction to ditch Movable Type entirely.

When I finally went looking I saw I had to wait for the next submission round. So like any diligent pot of gold seeker, I subscribed to the 9rules blog to see when submissions would start. In the process of checking I ended up reading their blog…a lot.

So here we are about 8 minutes into Round 5 and I am freshly submitted. Yes I am going into a fairly saturated blogging category, yes I only have a few months blogging experience, and yes I don’t post daily. However, I do post what I think, and I hope that counts for something.

Either love me or leave me alone.

His underlying point was the quality of communication has degraded with the advent of the internet. He’s a brilliant individual and brought up many valid points. But, being a geek, I really couldn’t agree with him. It would unravel my whole world.

This is a bit of a long windy one, read on if you dare.

The whole, “the web 2.0 is about people,” mantra has been drilled several times over and I am not pretending to bring up anything new. My friend was making generalizations based on his own experiences. I don’t think his experiences go past, “web 1.0.” I can’t imagine using hotmail for x many years and giving it up before gmail, only to say “web-based email sucks.”

Anyhow, what initially got me into the internet (aside from being miserable at baseball) was all of the free music and chatrooms (Chathouse baby). Pre-Napster in the Scour Media Agent days, I found out that I loved the internet. People who don’t really know this stuff would say I am a computer geek. I could care less about a computer disconnected from the internet. I am an internet geek! So what’s the point? Why do I love the internet and implicitly state it?

I suppose I never really thought about it much until this conversation, but I love the internet for the communication and the sharing of information (which is essentially communication in its own right). So when my friend began attacking the very foundation of the internet, I became engaged.

As I mentioned earlier, the quality of communication obviously degrades with the internet. Occasionally I videochat with those who have macs and isights, but beyond that it is text-based. And there is not a polished standard for communicating tone through text. Although I do feel like I am being yelled at when I see big red text or all caps. (As a rule of thumb, when I am on the receiving end of this type of email, I usually wait to reply, and then give that person the benefit of the doubt, they really weren’t shouting at me. Usually this works to keep things smooth.)

In the short run, I think the degradation is apparent, as well as the lack of tone. But we fool ourselves thinking we have it all figured out. Body language is the easiest to spread across human nature and say, “oh we’re like this.” Spoken language is slightly different and has not been around as long. Rapid text based communication is twenty years old. Of course there is a lack of understanding.

My friend has given up on it, or perhaps he never really tried. I hope this next boom/bubble gets people as excited as me. Finally things are becoming relavant. Search Engine Algorithms will continue to evolve and so will the those trying to make money off of them. The communities are what get me excited. I subscribe to del.icio.us feeds relative to my field. All of you do my go-getting for me, and it’s completely unbiased and exactly what I want. It’s decentralized with no pie-in-the-sky media type deciding what is relevant and what is not. There is no filtering. I can’t imagine if everyone in the world subscribed to feeds relevant what they did on a daily basis, or even what they were interested in. (Ahhh the utopia.)

This has been longer than my usual posts, and may have digressed from my main point a bit, but I really felt the need to bring some of this stuff up. We are only going to learn more about text-based communication, and those of us who put all of this time into the web, do it, not because we are losers with bad communication skills (for the most part) and “waste” our time looking at porn (for the most part) and playing World of Warcraft (which merits it’s own post about what defines friends and communication), we do it because we love communication, sharing of information, and we are passionate (pats meself on the back) about it.

Last words to my friend: get a flickr account, a last.fm account, a del.icio.us account, subscribe to some rss feeds, and write a couple blog posts relevant to your field, this is all about communication and knowledge.