David Lee King » sxswi

SXSW Interactive is Coming … Please Vote!

David Lee King — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:20:19 +0000

SXSW Interactive is a very cool conference … and I have a couple of chances to speak!

Here’s how it works – everyone with session ideas submits those a couple months in advance. Then the fine SXSW folks put up their SXSW Panel Picker. The Panel Picker is a cool idea – people planning to attend the conference actually get some say into what sessions will be held – how cool is that?

It’s pretty easy to vote on sessions. First, go register … then vote – there’s a thumbs up/thumbs down button! You can also leave a comment on each session (you have to register to do this stuff – but it’s free, so that’s cool).

This year, I’m listed twice:

Designing Your Customer’s Digital Experience
Visitors to an organization’s digital space don’t want to think about interacting with a website. They want to make a purchase, find an answer, or connect with someone – they want to have digital experiences. David introduces digital experience design for websites, and explains how website structure, community, and customers are parts of the total digital experience. This one’s obviously focused on my book. I’m hoping to do either a normal session or an author talk (they separate those from the main sessions). Either one would be cool.

Curating Cultural Content – Libraries Save Your Ass & Etchings
How are libraries responding to the firehose of cultural content when deciding how to curate digital media? What does it mean to be an online archive or library in an age of user-generated content? Librarians, quasi-librarians and techies will share tips ideas and the usual horror stories. Jessamyn West submitted this one – I’m listed as a panelist.

So – go vote (ok – only vote if you really WANT to hear these presentations)! And go to the conference. I guarantee you’ll learn something, and meet some interesting people, too.

SXSWi2009: From Framing Shots to Pushing Pixels – Crossing Between Film and Video Games

David Lee King — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:56:29 +0000

Last session – let’s see if I can make it! And a funny aside – I was talking to two people before this session about sound boards of all things – one attendee and one SXSW volunteer. Turns out the volunteer is a librrarian who took a year off to write a novel (good for her), and the attendee – not sure who she is – actually attended another presentation and asked me what FRBR was, of all things! Wow.

Panelists:

Rich Vogel
Rodney Gibbs
Mark Bristol

Gibbs:

If you flake, you’re out. Don’t leave the project before it’s done. Also share turntables – mix things up that don’t actually go together.

Try awkward things.

Learn how to deal with difficult people. (he worked with Michael Medved)

Henry Winkler says “say thank you” (panelist worked with him).

Ed Spielman says “Start with the poster…” Make believe the movie’s done. He’d get people to give him money … then they’d go write the script.

Megatron says “Geeks have a long, long memory.”

He transitioned into video games in the 90s.

Tim Curry says “say dirty words in funny voices.” Hmm …

What stuck with him in his transition was storytelling. Games are stories. In a gaming pitch he attended … the designers were focusing on the story.

Mark:

To film makers – you should be able to transfer your writing ability to the gaming industry.

With film, you have a budget, can maybe just do 3 takes. With games, you can do whatever you want to do.

Talked about his transfer from film to gaming…

Rich:

Ouch – he always loved film, made a documentary about a teacher affair with a student, got in trouble for that!

Loved PCs in college… After college, realized he didn’t want to program … so went to grad film school (I think).

Landed a game design job – they put in long 60-70 hour work weeks…

Film helped him develop game pacing, how to make them more immersive.

He was a senior producer for Ultima – a virtual world game from the late 1990s.

With “suits” – in presentations, they mainly notice what you’re showing them – not what you’re actually telling them. So his background with storyboarding and quickly getting to the point helped – if you have this skill, you will get the gig.

They went through 1000 writers before they picked the 12-14 they kept. Wow. The writers take a writer’s test.

SXSWi2009: Change your World in 50 Minutes: Making Breakthroughs Happen

David Lee King — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:34:07 +0000

Presenter: Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users

started off by playing a music video … I should probably know these guys … I’m hearing the sound guy say “she just wanted to play this video for walk-in music.” cool.

There’s a huge wall between you and your goal. This is for times when incremental changes don’t work.

Incremental can = an arms race – quality race or features race.

What’s stopping us from kicking ass?
- are your users stuck in P mode (like an SLR camera)?

People don’t want to upgrade …

Anyone can compete.

How to know someone:
- ipod playlist
- flight vs invisibility – which one? We had to choose one and chat about it with the person beside us

Ask: what superpower do we give our users?
- hugely important question
- ie., auto-correct spelling man – not a superpower

Productivity man – it’s a superpower, but looks about as exciting as broccholi “because it’s good for you”

14 more ways to make breakthroughs:

- superset game. ask “what is the bigger thing are these things a part of” when you want to go after something. Can be a lot more interesting and helps you make the bigger jump

- or what cooler thing is my thing a part of. ie – blogging about your company – not cool.

- Outliers thing – 10,000 hours. That’s not acceptable for Kathy, because she’s older. How do you shrink this?

- there are patterns and shortcuts – so learn the patterns. Also shorten the duration.

- Example – how does she get 10,000 hours in with horse riding? She has a work desk with a horse-shaped saddle seat. It’s better for her back, and she’s getting in more hours when she’s not really riding. Nice. (looked sorta funny though)

Kicking ass – 1000 hours of practice.

After 1-2 years, experience is a poor predictor of success – some people do that 1st year for 10 years.

To get better, work on your strengths instead of their weaknesses.

Do deliberate practice of the right things.

5. Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard.

make it easier for users to have a breakthrough than to stay where they are

treadmill gathering cobwebs? It’s not in the corner because you don’t use it … you don’t use it because it’s in the corner. Remove all your chairs in front of the TV, and replace it with that excersize machine.

6. Get better gear (and offer it).

She’s showing a pricey saddle she bought. Her ability made a huge jump – the saddle probably helped.

You sometimes have to convince others of this though… ie., you think you need more monitors and they will make you a better hacker. Your boss thinks – it will make you be a better gamer.

So find, make, and offer higher-end gear that bumps users to a new level.

7. ignore standard limitations

- think clueless. Kathy and her husband were fired from their tech jobs, so they decided to write a book – and make it print-ready. People were saying “you can’t do this” with their headstart books – and they were successful … and stupid. Because they didn’t know what they were doing.

8. total immersion jams.

16 hours over two days vs 16 hours over two months. If you stretch it out, you might not improve.

ABC – Always Be Closing. Gave some examples of groups that get together with a challenge, like writing songs – the main goal? By the end of the time-limit, you HAVE to have a song done, no matter how it is.

(me – this is like the nanowrimo thing or the videoblogger’s weeks and months I’ve participated in – practice makes perfect (or at least improved))

Less Camp, More Jam. Don’t just talk – actually go do stuff.

9. change your perspective.

don’t make a better x, make a better user of x – ie., don’t make a better software developer book. Make a better programmer instead. Nice.

10. ? Missed it …

Who are your users, who’s your tech support (Aragorn or Jabba the Hut)

Your company is to your user as blank is to Frodo

What movie are your users in? (this was an exercise). What movie do they want to be in? … and don’t forget the soundtack.

11. don’t ask your users.

If you want to make breakthroughs, don’t ask your users.

Hugh Macleod’s new book – Ignore Everybody.

Listening to users – what they way vs what they really want

asking users gets you to consensus – you’ll get incremental change – not a breakthrough

Breakthrough – ask other people’s users.

12. Be Brave.

She stopped giving talks at microsoft because there was no bravery there.

13? Death by risk aversion – you got scared, and lost your big idea.

Ease-of-use police stop in, and we end up giving our users less than the big idea.

14. Rethink deadness. Henry Ford said – his users wanted faster horses … so he didn’t ask his users.

Re-examine stuff you sent to the deadpool. ie., $40 billion horse industry (even though the horse is obsolete)

So look at those things and see if they can have a new life.

14. (yes, 14 again). Change the EQ.

Move the slider.

With the headfirst books, they didn’t push around incremental sliders Instead, they added new sliders.

She’s inviting Gary Vaynerchuk on stage again … she did the same thing last year.

She’s asking – what did Gary do?

What did Gary add to the sliders? Gary says he talks about wine from the heart – no other people do that. Gary made wine fun. Gary was confident enough to talk about what HE thought wine tasted like, and shared that.

So – figure out what new labels and sliders you want…

passiveaggressivenotes.com – silly website.

A blog about people who mis-use the word “literally”

The blog of “unessessary” quote marks

16. Be Amazed.

Played a funny clip of a Conan interview of a guy who was giving a different perspective on flying (ie., it’s amazing!). So switch that outlook!

Go to SXSW for Free!

David Lee King — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 04:00:46 +0000

Well, not really. Or sort of, depending on your outlook! Here’s the deal – I am going, in a day and a half, to Austin, TX to South by Southwest Interactive, or SXSWi2009. Or just sxsw (ok, or #sxsw in Twitter).

For those not familiar with SXSW, it’s a cool webish, techie conference. Want to hear Heather Champ talk about flickr? She’ll be there. Charlene Li talk about Groundswell? She’ll be there too. Yes, to say I’m excited is a bit of an understatement

But here’s the deal – wanna come along for the ride?

There are a couple of ways to follow along on the conversations, the conference sessions, and probably even the partying (well, that last one’s a bit of a stretch, but still):

Easiest way = Read my blog!
I will blog most sessions I attend (I say most because there’s always a couple of stinkers at a large conference, or I get conferenced out towards the end). Hate my writing? Do a search for sxsw, sxswi, or sxsw2009 in Technorati or Google blog search to find other bloggers blogging away about all things sxsw. Or go to one of the popular sites like Mashable or Boing Boing – they’ll most likely be covering the conference pretty well.

Photos and Videos
I’ll also probably take some photos and some video, so click those links in the next couple of days, and you just might see and view interesting little tidbits of the conference. Don’t like my photos or videos? Search flickr or YouTube for sxsw and (my guess here) see a TON of videos and photos of sxsw happenings. For even more video, make sure to check out other sites like Vimeo or blip.tv.

Well, how about real time?
I will make sure to Twitter some. Even better – follow along with the twitter hashtag #sxsw, or if you discover some of the hashtags for individual conference sessions, you can follow along (and even participate) using those. For example, Beth Kanter plans to use #roi for one of her sessions.

And don’t forget the streaming video sites! I’ve heard of more than one speaker who plans to live stream their sessions. So check out uStream.tv, justin.tv, and qik.com for those.

So now you know where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing for the next 4-5 days. Feel free to follow along for free!

Vote for my SXSWi2009 Panel Idea!

David Lee King — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:17:55 +0000

I had a great time at last year’s South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference – there were some great presentations focused exclusively on the social web, and I brought some cool ideas back.

The one problem? I also had to do some “translation work,” as most sessions were led by corporate or start-up types, and the conversations usually drifted to monetization, ad networks, and selling products. So, I did what I usually do when I don’t like something but see the value of it – I submitted my own panel ideas!

And this is where YOU can help … because people have to VOTE on these panel ideas (very cool). GO VOTE FOR MY PANEL! Go here – http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ – set up an account, then find my two panel ideas. My two submissions are:

1. Experiencing Digital Community: Conversation Economy and Non-Profits
The conversation economy is all about experiencing real conversations in your organization’s digital space. This panel discusses online conversations in the digital spaces of non-profits. We’ll touch on: * Conversation as experience (conversation economy) * how to start conversations online * examples galore from non-profits, what works and what doesn’t

2. Non-Profit Rockstars: Using Video to Share Your Message
Video is a great way to share your organization’s message, start conversations, and move people to action. How do online videos fit into your non-profit’s digital space? This panel discusses ways to incorporate online, interactive video into your organization’s digital space.

To vote, simply click on the “Your Vote” star rating thing.

So – go vote (voting ends on August 29), and if you can (whether or not I get to speak) go to the conference. It’s a great one for anyone interested in new media and web 2.0.

Update: also check out the list of potential non-profit-related sessions that Beth Kanter (of Beth’s Blog) put together. Lots of good stuff this time around (hopefully!).

Final Thoughts on SXSWi2008

David Lee King — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:07:42 +0000

I had a great time attending my first SXSWi conference! As you can tell from the notes I’ve been posting the past few days, there was a lot to do at this conference. Here are my final thoughts about the conference, the sessions, and why I think everyone reading my blog should attend SXSWi 2009! If you’re interested, here is a video of one day at SXSWi from my videoblog.

First off, for the sessions. The sessions I attended (save two) were really good: on-topic, good speakers, and made me think. Two favorites:

Quit Your Day Job and Vlog – I’m very interested in the topic, so it was cool to see some of the “highly watched” vloggers explain how they started and what they do. And the room was full of “Internet Famous” types, so it was slightly surreal, too. Cool session.
Kathy Sierra’s session – I don’t think Kathy has spoken much this past year (could be wrong about that), so it was great to see and hear one of my personal favorite blog hero types speak – if you’ve ever read her blog posts, that was how she spoke. Very useful stuff, too.

Other sessions I attended covered a wide range of geek-related topics, including blogging, making money on the web, connecting with people, web design, usability and wireframing, community management and gaming.

The keynotes were interesting. Three that stood out for me:

Mark Zuckerberg (the Facebook guy) was just fun to listen to – a 23 year old coder geek with a great idea. Also interesting was watching the audience revolt develop, and then reading about it on twitter the rest of the evening.
Jane McGonigal – evangelist on gaming and how it relates to experience (she called it happiness). Amazing stuff.
Frank Warren, the Post Secret guy – he received a standing ovation. He seemed very into helping people share their stories. He sees his sight as a form of art and as a type of public, yet anonymous, confessional. Amazing session.

Other takeaways before I bug you to attend next year’s conference.

SXSWi attracts a different crowd. Instead of librarians in khakis, SXSWi attracts creatives of all types. Noisy creatives that will let the speaker know if he/she is stinking to high heaven. During the session. Then they’ll already have blogged, twittered, flickr’d, and youtube’d it by the end of the session.

There were at least three major reasons people attended this conference:

To learn stuff in the sessions (that’d be me)
To network – when you met someone, you exchanged cards and told people what you do – in your “real job” and in your “day job.”
To write and video other attendees! http://sxswvideos.com/ The place was literally crawling with video teams, looking for “Internet Famous” people to chat with.

Remember that if you DO attend, you will most likely be flickr’d or video’d somewhere along the way.

The evening parties are fun! It provides a chance to mingle with other attendees in a less hurried, “I have to get to the next session” way. Many of these events have free food (ok, and free booze, too).

Everyone seemed friendly, and everyone I talked to seemed to think it was cool that a library sent people to the conference.

And… pretty much everyone had an iPhone. Seriously.

Now – for us Librarians. You need to attend!

This year, there were somewhere between 10-40 librarians attending (not scientific by any means – just my best guestimate). I think more of you should attend! Why? Let me illustrate what I mean:

you can go to computers in libraries and hear a librarian talk about Facebook
or, you can attend SXSWi and hear the creator of Facebook talk about Facebook

Both are valuable. It’s great to hear what other libraries are doing with these new tools, and obviously we need to network with each other. But sometimes, it’s also good to hear what the non-library organization is doing… and it’s good to meet the people creating the tools we’re using!

Who should attend? You. If you read my blog, you’re a great candidate for going to this conference. I guarantee you’ll learn something new. Other emerging tech librarian speakers – you know who you are. All the “webish types.” All the “digital strategy/2.0″ types. Give it some thought!

Even better – submit a panel idea!

OK – attending is one thing – speaking is another! Why should you submit a panel idea? We already know a lot of the stuff I heard. Here’s just one example: Jane McGonigal gave a great keynote presentation focused on gaming and how it’s changing real life. But I’ve already heard most of what she said… from librarians!

My point? We already have a good grasp on technology, online community, and content from an information professional point of view. I think SXSWi could really benefit from our knowledge of content, search, and knowledge management. The speakers I saw, for the most part, know a lot about web design and online community. They don’t have a clue about metadata, standards, working with non-digital types in a digital world, and in many cases, even using a service for an organization rather than a personal blog

And hey – we’re considered sexy and cool at the moment, so it’s maybe a good time…

SXSWi2008, Day 4: Closing Remarks

David Lee King — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:16:42 +0000

Title: Alternate Realities

Speaker: Jane McGonigal

Showed “The Lost Ring” – video preview of a game – you can find hundreds of screenshots of this video in flickr, looking for hidden clues

She focused on the game designer’s perspective on the future of happiness

Question – are you in the happiness business?

Our primary product soon will be happiness… (think experience)

Happiness is the new capital

four key principles of happiness:
1 satisfying work to do
2. experience of being good at something
3. time spent with people we like
4. chance to be a part of something bigger

Multiplayer games are the ultimate happiness engine

We can be good at something (in games) that we can’t do in real life

Games give you instant feedback (you never get a “great job at speaking – you gained one speaking experience point”)

better feedback all the time in games – we know how we’re doing

better community – we feel part of something

Quality of Life – for many gamers today, their gaming life is better than their real life.

Bad News:
multiplayer games – it’s like we invented the written word, and we decided to only create books – why are we chaining the game to a PC or console? Why not free it into the real world?

Real world game examples:
Chore Wars – you do household chores, you gain points
Zyked – video games are fun, excersising not so fun – they give points for excercise
Serios – give work mates points for doing stuff at work – helps you set priorities. And you can see where the virtual money is being spent… it shows connections

Citizen Logistics – what if life were like a team activity? Treating everyday reality like a game by doing stuff in the real world

all these are in beta/alpha

to imagine the future, always look backwards

Soap analogy:
1931 – soap kills germs… it took many thousands of years to figure this out! Games are kind of like soap – we should be installing them everywhere. Instead of killing germs, we are killing boredom

Games kill alienation – for people who are socially challenged

games can kill depression by giving you community and a sense of purpose

She’s making the point that it’s not alternative reality – it’s alternate reality – still real, just alternate – another way of experiencing existence

World Without Oil as example – live your real life like this statement was true. People actually converted their cars to non-gas power and made videos of it. It sounds like a social activist kind of thing – figure out how this works, and attempt to do it. It lasted for 32 weeks.

It was alternate reality in real life

10 skills/terms in gaming that help amplify happiness…?

1. mobbability – ability to collaborate on large scales. Think crowd conrtol

2. cooperation radar – who would make good collaborators

3. ping quotient – ability to reach out to others in a network, easy to resspond to them

4. influency – adapt your persuasive abilities to different environments

5. multi capitalism – somem people want money, some want social capital, etc – different types of currency and how can you trade amongst the groups

6. protovation – rapid, fearless innovation – not worried about failing because you’re still learning

7. open authorship – think blogging. comfort with giving content away and knowing it will be changed. Also a design skill – knowing it won’t be broken when people change it

8. signal noise management – they hear lots of signals, and can sort it out

9. longbroading – ability to think in much broader systems

10 emergensight – spot patterns as they pop up

[aside - interestingly, these are all business-related skills or team-building skills with a game-based name...]

how do we start?

start with twitter

nike ipod – it gives you feedback, challenges by friends

sniff collars for dogs – the collar measures speed, “dog friends” etc in real life

Prius – “my car is a video game”

trackstick – records your gps locatin every 5 seconds

new brain scanner thing that shows when you’re tired, angry, etc while in a game

the important stuff:
- most of us in this room will be in the happiness business
- game designers have a huge head start (think experience in gaming, in web, in real life)
- important because they signal the desire, need and opportunity for all of us to redesign reality for real quality of life

Q&A:

Q on how much is good. some people are breaking their broken reality with gaming. Also – some have perfectly happy, normal lives. We won’t replace face-to-face

sf0.org – no online story. It’s about real life stuff.

SXSWi 2008, Day 4: Life After the iPhone

David Lee King — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:49:31 +0000

I thought this session was supposed to be about this (from the SXSW summary of the panel):

“The iPhone may be the most disruptive technology of this decade. The countless ubiquitous computing tools available to User Experience professionals mean convenience and usability headaches. With boundaries blurring between web and mobile, how will the UX discipline change? This panel explores challenges for designing Rich Internet Applications for multiple devices.”

That sounded interesting. Unfortunately, the actual panel was nothing like the above description. This presentation had: no info and no real thinking about the future.

More than one panelist said they like other phones better (so what in the world are they doing on this panel – according to the description given, they were supposed to do a bit more thinking about the iPhone, how disruptive it is, and the future).

One panelist said the iPhone was hard to use, another complained about the SMS capabilities and how hard they are to use.

Hmm… I’ve seen like 5000 iPhones this week, all being used successfully.

But enough about that! Fortunately, I’ve only attended two really bad presentations.

SXSWi2008, Day 3: Pimp Your Non-Profit

David Lee King — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:45:31 +0000

Moderator said agencies don’t like to work with non-profits – because we’re passionate about what we do. How funny.

Work with management to make sure the important stuff is written into job descriptions, or it won’t get done – extremely important!

Reproducible – if you create a cool techie thing and then leave – can someone else do it?

Empowerment – make sure the tech empowers your staff – something that will excite them, empower them, so that the enthusiasm can spread

Beth Kanter (one of the panelists):

“getting good poke”

strategy
most important thing – make it personal
Will it scale – will passion scale?
she showed a “ladder of engagement” graphic

[aside - nothing against the other panelists, but I would have liked to hear Beth for the whole hour! She was pretty interesting]

Three Rs of networking… something else? Missed it:
relationship building
rewards – important (even a PBS coffee mug works)
Reciprocity

she used her social networking contacts to raise money for something, and it worked – she ended up winning a “raise money” contest

SXSWi2008, Day 3: Frank Warren’s Keynote

David Lee King — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:44:21 +0000

Frank Warren does the PostSecret blog

Starting off with a video Frank made of some of the secrets from his site – nicely done

He put some postcards in the back of the room – here’s one secret that was filled out: “My large company sent me here to steal ideas from start-ups – I’m pretending to be a freelancer.” [aside - yes, there are some scumbags here]

When we feel like we’re keeping a secret, it can hold us back – he’s enabling a form of confessional

Frank’s a good speaker – he’s doing all the right speaker things

Wow – he started out by physically collecting secrets – he passed out postcards on the street, asking for secrets – then posted the postcards on the wall of an art exhibit

He stopped when the exhibition stopped… but postcards kept coming to him, so he created his blog

The band that cut “Dirty Little Secret” used his postcards in a music video – Frank didn’t take money – instead, he asked the band to donate to a suicide hotline. Nice.

showing some secrets that the lawyer didn’t allow to be in his book for copyright or privacy reasons

interestingly… by sharing these at this particular conference, he IS publishing them – they are being photographed and filmed and blogged… hmm

he used his community built up around the blog to raise $30,000 for another suicide hotline that was having financial troubles – they raised the money in a week, and saved the hotline.

He keeps the barcode stickers on because it shows the journey the card had getting from the person to him, and it provides a sense of authenticity

Picasso said “there’s an artist born in all of us”

Someone shared a “secret” – he proposed on stage… and she said yes! Neat.

David Lee King » sxswi

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