earthx.org blog

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

how not to fail at web services

• the basics of rest are
• common resources (nouns)
• all resources are addressable
• standard methods of interaction (verbs)
• stateless, client/server, cacheable, layered protocol

• sql: select create update delete
• rest: get post put delete
• browsers don’t support put delete.  but everything else does

• don’t put verbs in your nouns (resources). use your http methods for your verbs

• play global thermonuclear war would be “post gnw” in this approach

• who gets it and doesn’t?
• youtube gets it
• flickr doesn’t
• myspace does
• amazon does not
• POST isn’t just long GET. its a distinct verb for a reason
• Rails gets it and enforces it
• ebay fail

• opensocial
• js and server to server
• opensocial gets it
• use your verbs
• specify return formats
• activity, person, group, and appdata resources
• xrds-simple - xmldoc that specifies your api. a discovery document
• opensocial also declares a vocabulary for resource properties
• it provides a schema for your rest apis
• google has shared opensocial client libs
• thinking about extensions to REST.  what if we think of opensocial as an extension protocol to REST

• IE6 browser — Rails can send a method parameter even in browsers that can’t support PUT
• RESTful web services book
• try to let rest conventions dictate your vocabulary… don’t let your function names creep into your vocabulary if they dont gel
• what about restrictions to the restful vocabulary?  is it right to reduce “play” to “POST”? is the vocabulary expressive enough?
• i think that’s the difference between stateful and stateless systems… stateful is where your vocabulary gets more expressive

ARIA

• flash flex and aria.  will flash support aria?  ask them
• aria allows granular management on information
• one of the myths of accessibility is that you have to dumb everything down.  rather, in aria you are generally just adding semantic information
• dojo and jquery, google and yui all working to implement aria
• if the library implements aria, then you are generally getting the benefit by default
• the aria effort has always seemed very well coordinated across w3c and vendors

more secrets of javascript libs

• koechley: getting loaded. get and loader utilities that are part of yui
• since js loading blocks page rendering…
• firebug graph of sxsw homepage
• non-concurrent execution and loading
• single-file concatenation
• most files are order dependent
• also, it’s nice to toggle between file versions: debug and prod
• nice to continue fetching onDemand
• loader, get, and combo handler utilities in yui
• loader, get, and combo work for any library
• works for css as well as js and json
• allows you to define both the modules and their relationships
• allows you to purge after reading
• nice support for lazy loading
• github.com/yui

• dupont: prototype
• the emergence of meta-language frameworks
• code that is transformed into js before a browser consumes it
• google web toolkit
• pyjamas turns python into javascript
• cappuccino turns objective-c into js: objective-j
• narrative js adds “sleep” like functionality to js
• allows synchronous operations to look like asynchronous ops
• google caja turns js into safer js
• human-readable code turned into better machine-readable code
• caja-compatible prototype in the works
• why do this?
• gwt gets to use the java toolset
• cappuccino gets to introduce new syntax and features
• let’s say you want ruby style catch all methods.
• say you want to translate object.callMethod(”eggs”) from object.eggs in order to check method existence in advance.  meta can allow you to do that.  but maybe we just need better features?
• john resig asks whether js language abstractions are a good thing.  what happens when the metalanguage inevitably leaks?
• http://is.gd/aJ36 francisco’s blog
• yeah, abstractions leak, but we all use them anyway
• all abstractions are tradeoffs
• thicker abstractions have thicker tradeoffs
• think about up front cost and ongoing cost
• choose what makes sense in your head.  if it feels simple and elegant with you, godspeed.
• we are stuck with javascript.
• gibson and accessibility.  dojo, yui, jquery are all on the aria train
• becky’s from dojo
• keyboard access to tree controls
• regular notifications to user agents from live regions
• live indicates region is updated with values of off, polite, assertive, rude. values dictate when region update is read in screen reader output sequence
• performance and testing jquery
• using js to measure performance of js
• jquery stack profiler
• however, what about accuracy here? measuring time within js itself affects performance itself.  this introduces platform dependencies on your measurements
• how can we get good numbers? browser tools - firebug profiler, safari profiler, ie8 profiler
• http://fireunit.org
• fireunit profile data - gives you a json object dump
• complexity analysis - analyze complexity rather than raw time
• last jquery release tested against 11 browsers.
• 6 test suites per browsers — 66 test executions.  not possible to do on every commit
• testswarm distributed testing from hub server. distributed.  users provide the browser resources, saving dev need to set up complex testing environments
• http://www.testswarm.com
• selenium rc

ruby on rails in the cloud

• loose coupling patterns
• what’s not so great about the cloud?  the database is a SPF
• amazon gives you permanent disks
• they snapshot that every hour
• every week, full dump
• this is a mail processing app, they store all raw mail
• failtruck
• provisioning new database in 15 minutes
• leverage splunk
• monitoring, logging
• presentation has little to do w rails

We also went to Lessig/Obama girl panel and I twittered that.

I’m at sxsw.  Mike and I are doing both interactive and film this year.

As a personal project, I’m trying more rapid methods of information capture and sharing.  Which is to say that my sxsw notes are messy and incomplete, but I’m publishing them anyway.

Selling social media to the man

• how do you get a trial going?
• What are the initial roi metrics you set up?
• How do you work with an internal champion?
• What if the man has to sell it to a board?
• AHA christian caldwell ROI argument allowed him to get his initiative off the ground
• show examples, paint scenarios and sell a plan
• the metric of reach… communicating ROI metrics that are not necessarily direct profit
• your roi metrics depend on your operations framework
• legal and control concerns…
• executive buy-in will help with legal. Engage legal early. Involve your adversary
• there are a wide set of misconception… this isn’t just letting the inmates running the asylum
• how do you handle social change around sm adoption

steven johnson and the ecosystem of news

• the phenomena of reception
• a reaction to an information imbalance
• what life was like before the web
• paucity of news
• the lag to a keynote is seconds
• the metaphors we use to talk about media are indicative of the moment we are in
• what happens to reportage in the new ecosystem?
• Technology reporting is the old growth forest of web journalism

try making yourself more interesting

• do epic shit
• randy redding
• i like your face
• do things that matter
• lift your game
• twitter hashtag #roux
• lane becker, getsatisfaction and adaptive path
• christina halvorson, braintraffic and content strategy
• byron, bikehugger
• amit gupta, photojojo and jelly
• threadless
• skinnycorp.com
• apprentice yourself to great work
• identify the work you like
• give side projects some front and center time
• focus on delicious details
• go long. make long term provisions for data
• what is the next thing?
• share stuff.
• plan. create. publish. govern.
• have the goods. set new goals. establish self-knowledge.