All Entries Related to "SXSW Interactive Festival"

March 14, 2006

The 2006 Bloggies

No Jack in the front row, no red carpet, no orchestra to cut off the winners. What does a blog award show look like? Check out my summary on Bostonist.

Posted by Michael at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2006

(Fairly) Quick Thoughts About a Couple of Panels

I've been to two really interesting and thought-provoking panels here at SXSWi. The first, How To Make the Most of Maps, was right up my alley. I've fiddled around with a little Google Maps hacking, but I learned about two sites that do all the hard parts for you: CommunityWalk and Wayfaring, which let you plug in photos, reviews, events, anything into a Google Map and make it your own personalized atlas. I plan to crunch the you-know-what out of both of them when I get home.

The theory of the panel is that there's a huge interest in displaying data geographically, and with the foundation of Google Maps, Google Earth, Yahoo Maps, Geotagging, and the ubiquity of GPS information, we'll soon be able to do amazing stuff with maps and the Web. (The best example was Dan Catt's: Imagine at a U2 concert, a disco ball falls on Bono and squishes him. Everyone takes pictures. Somewhere, a database notes a ton of pictures coming in tagged with the same lat/long coordinates. Instantly, everyone knows something's up!)

The second really good panel I saw was Digital Preservation and Blogs. The Web being the fluid thing that it is, there's a coordinated effort starting to save and archive as much of its history as possible. Carrie Bickner of the NY Public Library has started a campaign to archive and preserve as much of the Internet as possible, starting with five(ish) notable blogs, including kottke.org and the Church Music Association of America. The idea is to then branch out, and collect as much of the blog world as we can - in effect, collecting the photos and what passes for the personal papers of our generation.

Josh Greenberg has already led efforts to instantly collect all possible digital memory of the two most significant disasters of the Web era (9/11 and Katrina). It's a little morbid, but also very necessary; imagine if we had countless first-hand accounts of the San Francisco earthquake, or a Pepys-times-1000 history of the Great London Fire.

If I learned anything from the preservation panel, it's to back up everything as often as possible. Flickr and LiveJournal may not last forever, JPGs and HTML might someday be as obsolete as the laser-disc that a British company put together in the early 80's to forever document everyday life in England. 20 years later, there's no technology readily available that can still read it.

Posted by Michael at 04:49 PM | Comments (0)

SXSW Linkorama

Some of the cool people I've met and hung out with (at least the ones whose names I remember):

Hopefully, I'll have more people to add to this list.

*James coined the phrase "lifetime underachievement award" which I plan to steal and use liberally. Consider this the citation.

Posted by Michael at 01:43 AM | Comments (2)

March 12, 2006

Henry Rollins

Henry RollinsHenry Rollins has an amazing resume: punk pioneer, actor, spoken-word poet, author, rabble-rouser. And he spoke at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival, about war and music and politics and education and movies and his new interview show and pretty much everything else.

For more, check out my post on Bostonist.

Posted by Michael at 11:54 PM | Comments (1)

Austin

AUSTIN - I'm here at the Austin Convention Center! Look for updates here and on Bostonist over the next few days. I can already report that it's hot, I've met really interesting people, and the panels and events at the SXSW Interactive Festival look like they're going to be interesting and informative. Keep checking!

I'll keep throwing photos up as often as I can, too - here's the permalink to the collection on flickr.

Posted by Michael at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)