earthx.org blog

Thinking about making my posts leaner, making this blog more micro.

Just read a good Jason Fried interest piece.

43folders

including IMA Panel: Social Media, Revenue, and Brand

SXSWi has been percolating in my head for a few days now.  I find myself asking myself these questions in its wake:

• How is social software really of utility to me?  As a larger question, how are my other tools, diversions and practices really of utility to me?
• Given that I don’t get to code as my day job any more, how do I keep fresh?  How do I get back the sense of joy that I got from coding, joy I saw in a lot of folks at the conference?

I started looking at GitHub as a response to both these questions, and I’ve started my first app in Python as a debut project for GitHub.  I’m also thinking about the little ways I focus.  I’m wondering if I can make my diversions — my idle reading, my Web surfing — work for me in an attempt to do better work in everyday life, to learn more, and to enjoy that learning.

To that end, here’s some idle reading I’ve done today — I’d like to share it, to focus on it.

• How to build a “lean startup.”
• The death of quality and what to do about it.
• Five dollar programming words.
• John Resig’s problem statement for TestSwarm, which we saw live at SXSW as part of More Secrets of JavaScript Libraries.

Michael Penn

• there’s no common vernacular between composer and director for producing a score
• Michael Penn used a hurdy-gurdy
• It’s hard to get a good hurdy-gurdy

Observe and Report Panel

• Elvis Mitchell, Seth Rogen, Anna Farris, and the mullet dude
• They wanted to make a more messed-up movie than they expected to be able to make — and they managed to make the messed-up vision real

I’m in the latter portion of SXSWi with a feeling toward social media that I usually reserve towards chips and queso in a restaurant.  I’ve had too much.

I feel this urge to dismantle the “self” that I represent through social technologies.  Does anyone else ever get that feeling?  What is lost by pursuing that option?  What is gained?

Yesterday, Bruce Sterling talked about the “crueler connectivities” of data mining and surveillance that can walk hand in hand with the connectivities of social networking and participatory culture.  I’m suspicious of approaching those phenomena with too much fear and paranoia.  But, at the same time, I’m feeling more mindful of my connectivity this morning, and less indulgent of my impulse to understand online social participation as an unqualified good.

(while, of course, realizing this very blog post is a representation of self through social technologies)

what we can learn from games

• gee: games use learning as a gateway drug
• henry jenkins: moving to usc
• lure of the labyrinth: thinkport
• new media literacies
• spector: steve jackson to tsr to origin to looking glass to ion storm to junction point to disney
• spector: game design as a steady progression of involving players in a dialogue
• the sims, budgeting and life management
• jenkins: the successful balance of the sims taught life lessons
• gee: in sims, people give each other challenges. can you model “nickel and dimed” in the sims
• soft-modding, cases where you are doing metacognition about the simulation rule set
• spector: most games train you to just move forward like a shark
• jenkins: dirt daubers running their head into the wall, 1 in 1000 tries.  the dirt daubing mechanic
• jenkins: leveraging collective intelligence to solve problems.  schools only valorize autonomous problem solvers
• game designers designing communities
• spector: stronger interest in traditional narrative and its intersection with gameplay
• spore and games that encourage player co-design
• the stories that sims players create.  user-created content
• television as scrupulously linear media that encourage user-based design
• gee: deus ex and games where the player can narrate, tell the story of their game experience
• the narrative has to fit the game play
• braid – a crazy game with a weird story
• players debate: how does the game and story fit together in braid?
• spector starts with mechanics and then brings in narrative
• jenkins: we grab “postmodern” to talk about games that have a second-order awareness of games theory.  like the first generation out of film school generated postmodern film
• work as play as work
• schools have anxieties about incorporating play
• jenkins: how can we have play in schools when we are trying to prepare them for lives of boredom and alienation?
• discussion of flow states
• players should be encouraged to reflect and theorize on what they are doing
• robert putnam and the civic spirit of the bowling alley
• game guilds are places where people are making civic connections
• a new civic culture through WoW?

Bruce Sterling

• what happens to paper
• kindle is like an atari 2600 cassette
• release everything to the commons on your death bed
• bruce spends a lot of time in italy
• wired italia
• rita levy montalcini
• the collapse of news
• there is a big aching vacuum of journalism
• global microbrand
• there’s something medieval about being a global microbrand/pundit
• the death of the audience
• why does bruce have a relationship to us?
• what relationship have we to each other?
• the people formerly known as the audience
• it was better when he had parties
• bruce sterling house parties as social media hack.  bring what you can carry and bring anyone you can trust
• the real audience was replaced by social media influencers
• planned parties after a technological threshold
• dense connections
• phones are getting cataclysmically cheap and intensely multifunctional
• connectivity as a signifier as poverty
• there will be crueler connectivities

accessible flash and flex

• in the wake of wcag 2.0

edupunk

• do we need an institution to educate? whether academic or private/technological?
• should people be inclined to hack independently rather than leverage mass tools?
• in defense of “school” – what existing institution is better served to meet the human needs that “school” meets at this time?
• a concept of intimate alienation

ditch the valley, run for the hills

• tolerance for failure is key
• a lack of serial entrepreneurs in places outside the valley
• different communities have different expertise bases.  Austin is not a real QA community, though it’s a better RoR community

social patterns and antipatterns FTW

• crumlish – yahoo. manages yahoo design pattern lib
• malone – tangible user experience
• http://www.designingsocialinterfaces.com/
• pattern language for social interfaces themselves
• giant taxonomy of these patterns
• christina has a list apart article on social engineering
• identity, presence, reputation
• the goal is that this pattern library becomes comprehensive
• handout will be online later

EA Dead Space: Deep Media Case Study

• thinking of your asset library as a cross-media asset library
• this conversation is not deeply theoretical
• consumers now perceive content brands as extending beyond the primary channel of content
• “the content is the marketing”
• say it again’ “the content is the marketing”
• transportable, modular pieces of narrative
• creating transportable, modular pieces of narrative that can be deployed to contexts that are not predetermined.
• game makers are not comic book makers.  surprisingly tough. new genres
• “telling not selling” and the credibility of a good story
• when a team skilled in one genre has to produce content for several… how can that team do so successfully?
• do you need a lot of budget and go full hog crossmedia? or is there a leaner approach
• the advantage of the web site part of the effort is data collection
• fighting with pr and marketing about showing the final boss in the pr campaign.  how does transmedia affect the traditional reveal?
• the risk of original IP vs licensed IP
• ben templesmith is on panel – ease of creating comics ip relative to game ip. but comics have restricted, licensed ip as well, and original game ip can be more freeing
• consumers are savvy and can detect marketing-driven content
• every media channel is going to inform every other media channel
• fear that transmedia becomes a business process rather than a creative process

Nate Silver

• wondering if he should keep bootstrapping as a company
• data is the roots of your plant, it’s not the plant itself
• oscar predictions
• used a database of oscar history and tried to look at what variables were most relevant
• golden globes, SAG as polling history
• got sean penn wrong
• the difference between a zero and a missing result is important
• never go forward with a forecast you know to be wrong.  if it’s wrong, change your model
• upcoming book : nate silver predicts everything
• what kind of airline does nate like?

We have been objectified

• parallels between the film production process and the process of creating designed objects
• oxo good grips
• iterations
• the importance of response and pleasure
• sustainability and the waste stream
• more on twitter

new think for old publishing

• the importance of “slow writing” – long form writing
• the importance of curation – filtering, selecting, sharing good writing
• the importance of paranormal romance
• the importance of michael pollan!
• blood oath is about a vampire secret agent for the president who lives in a basement under the smithsonian.  WORD