just write click

I have been talking to SJ Klein regularly via email and phone for my work on the wiki pages and kid’s user manual for the XO laptop for One Laptop Per Child, so I was excited to hear him speak and meet him in person. Also, directly afterwards I planned to go to lunch with SJ and with Robert Nagle, the technical writer (and self-named idiot programmer) in Houston who originated the idea of XO user groups across the states after the Give 1 Get 1 program completed.

I had tried my best to promote an XO meetup as a lunch after the Textbooks talk, even getting it listed on the entirely awesome sched.org, but when the four of us arrived at Las Manitas at about 10 after 1, we were the only ones with the “little computers,” as my son calls them. So we just waited our turn for seating, and got to know SJ and Melissa Hagemann, a program manager with the Open Society Initiative who was moderator for the panel. As it turned out, she and Robert had been in some of the same cities in south eastern Europe in the 90s. While speaking of books, Robert described hand-carrying two fifty-pound bags of books along dirt roads as a Peace Corp volunteer and for me it really brought home the fact that books - they are heavy. Much heavier than the two 3-pound XO laptops I had been “lugging” around the Austin Convention Center all day. The 3-pound OLPC library on the XO laptop probably contains hundreds of pounds of books, and you could add several hundred more pounds of books by putting in a small USB stick or SD card. Quite a revelation for me.

Here are my rough notes from the Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative talk at SXSW Interactive 2008. I’ll link to the podcast of it when it’s available. (Updated to add the link, since now it is.)

For open source textbooks, take a look at cnx.org.

Yes, wikibooks are now possible. Pedia press had been doing high quality book output for a while, now partnering with Wikimedia Foundation.

OLPC’s interest in open education materials is that it gives students and teachers ability to share and collaborate on materials. They’re in a unique position in some ways, though, because they’d like to target 15 languages for their materials.

Why are open textbooks possible now?

• Convergence of technology and community
• Also XML - lets you build lego blogs of reconfigurable, recombinable objects (sounds like DITA topics, doesn’t it?)
• Online lets you go past books
• Intellectual property now has new licensing - creative commons license
• Development of quality control mechanisms, repository of content
• Lens - gives you a filter, lets you see things through a lens, filtering which items which you think are valuable
• National Instruments, Texas Instruments, checking the books, offering lenses

Print on demand options - if you can’t produce shiny books, you aren’t taken seriously in many parts of the world, and in some age groups, print is important. With just-in-time printing, books are assembled automatically, index generated automatically, print on demand only costs students $20 instead of $120.

The same thing will happen everywhere that knowledge is valuable.

Is there a role for publishers in the new learning environment? There can be conflicts even in branches of publishing. All major publishers he’s talked to know that a change has to happen. They’re investing/investigating.

What strategies are useful? “The Budapest Open Access Initiative: an international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet.” from http://www.soros.org/openaccess/index.shtml

Three dimensions -
people (blurring the lines of roles, in today’s society we have rigid lines of roles of teacher, or author)
networking, transmitters, guides

Q: Robert’s question as a representative from Teleread.org - people searching for tutorials or text books want “the best” - what’s the finished state?
A: People looking for most efficient and effective way to learn things. Those sites will rise to the top.

Q: Can you use a lens that is another company’s lens?
A: Next version, yes you can.

Q: What about “controversial” areas or areas that evolve year over year?
A: For CXN.org, they decided not to develop with a wiki model, allowing for a multiple entry model, such as causes for the civil war has multiple articles with author attribution. Lenses can then point towards most used, or most heavily peer reviewed, your choice.

Q: From instructional designer in corp. environment - she sees missing things such as visual representations or animations, what’s happening or needs to happen to bring in those valuable designers.
A: Inkscape - open source vector drawing application, access to others’ illustrations (svg, vector graphics standards) Also mentioned the payment for illustration contribution based on Phillip Greenspun’s donation to Wikimedia Foundation.

I finally have an exciting handful of stories from South By Southwest based on the really neat people I met. Yesterday I wrote about the awesome attendees. Here’s a story about Twitter used in a way I hadn’t heard of before.

At Tom Parish’s social media metrics panel, I sat next to Summer Huggins, who works in Austin for Hammock, a media company based out of Nashville. We chatted about Austin, how I feel like a tourist in my own town when I come downtown, and laughed about the Compass Bank building when she said it looks like a giant nosehair trimmer. (Yes, it does.)

When she left the talk, she accidentally left her digital camera on her seat. I noticed it and asked both the guys in front of me if they caught her last name so that I could try to find an email address for her in the SXSWi attendee directory. None of us could remember her last name, though.

So, I took the camera in its cute case to the SXSW information desk to be placed in Lost & Found, telling them that someone named Summer from Austin would hopefully pick it up. They said they’d be open until 8:00 and it would be kept in a safe place overnight.

Later that night, I started searching on twitter for someone named Summer from Austin who maybe just maybe had talked about attending the social media metrics panel. Sure enough, SummerH posted a tweet marked with #SXSW saying she had lost her digital camera! I immediately sent her a direct tweet, clicked through to her blog, found her email address, and sent her an email telling her she could pick up her camera at SXSW Lost & Found. Problem solved!

Summer was very excited and also noted the power of the Twitter and SXSW attendees! The power of SXSWi attendees was certainly not lost during the metrics panel, but this story has a feel-good ending to it.

South by Southwest Interactive is a big web design/blogging conference in downtown Austin. There are thousands of people here for it in 2008. It’s crazy busy.

The latest excitement was in a friend’s panel where people tried to stage an uprising on both Twitter and in the meebo room at meebo.com/sxsw, set up specifically for this talk. Tom Parish has a great picture and is quoted in this Wired blog story. The very next day, the Zuckerburg interview had a similar uprising on a much grander scale. Jeff Jarvis has the best analyses I’ve read so far about it, and Scoble’s view from the Twitter gallery is also a good read.

I’m of two minds about the things that have happened here this week - on one hand, I think the conference is only as high quality as its presenters. If all the attendees think they’re smarter than and better than the panelists, then why bother coming at all when you can view the video online or listen to the podcast later? I guess that hypothetical question is answered with - we come because we can interact with the panelists.

I even witnessed a panelist admit that he “wasn’t paying attention” to another panelist’s answer to a question during their panel. It came across as immature, arrogant, and unprofessional to me. Much like the sweater-tossing antics I observed based on the meebo room conversation in the social media metrics talk, I internally rolled my eyes and thought, how many people are just trying to get attention, drawing it away from the panelists disrespectfully? Is this online behavior and real-life behavior only as mature as the junior high lunch room?

On the other hand, if all the panelists preach about user-centered content, then when the choir stages an uprising, the preacher should be able to adjust his message to fit the audience. Right? I really admired Tom’s quick thinking. I was admiring the way that Tom handled the panel, ensuring that the podcast recording turns out well also, by having each speaker introduce themselves so that listeners later can identify voices while listening.

But enough about the conflicts and struggles going on between panelists, interviewers, and SXSWi attendees. This year, my interaction with other attendees has been the most exciting and fun for me.

Before and after the social media metrics talk, I befriended two guys from Washington, DC, and Summer from Austin who were all sitting around me.

I ended up giving a ride up Sixth Street to David, one of the guys from DC, and he and I had the nicest conversation on the way to BarCamp. I had asked about the conversations that occur on wikis and how interesting it was that the WoWiki panelist George Pribel said they never want to answer how to or troubleshooting questions on their wiki, that they only wanted articles and discussion around strategy. I said that as a tech writer, I was looking for the best use of wikis for content, but since we usually live nearest to and offer the most value to the customer support department, our wikis would be shaped more towards howto and troubleshooting information. However, best practices and strategy wikis might be more easily shaped for conversational articles, so, which was the better approach? His answer was spot on and an excellent example that will stick with me. He said, it’s just like the real world conversations you have in a crowd. If you and I are talking about movies, and someone comes up and starts talking about their favorite restaurant, we would politely inform them that we’re talking about movies, and could you take your food conversation elsewhere, maybe to the person sitting next to me? It’s a matter of staying on topic. With wiki design, I would conclude, you might want to prepare for two audiences (and two types of conversations), just like Lisa Dyer has done at Lombardi Software.

After attending David’s talk, WhiteHouse 2.0 at Barcamp, I learned that he’s former White House Internet and Communications Director David Almacy! He started RSS feeds and podcasts on iTunes and Tivo for the president’s white house. He wrote a Barney Cam script that got posted on Youtube and had over 25,000 views that season. As it turns out, he has two daughters nearly exactly the same age as my two sons. Our youngest kids were born within three days of each other. He was so nice and professional, a knowledgeable expert who is also willing to share his experiences. Prior to the social media metrics talk, I babbled about how I was a blogger for Ynema and Tom on talk.bmc. Little did I know of my fellow attendees level of experience with social media, but I was so pleased that David didn’t try to prove just how much more knowledgeable (and famous) he is than I. Instead he just answered my questions and truly listened to me.

I’m still amazed at the serendipitous meetings and conversations. Yes, the attendees make the conference interesting, and the panelists are bravely facing those attendees.

RSS must be hitting the big time since Microsoft will support RSS reading in the new version of Internet Explorer, IE7. Charlie Wood (he’s an enterprise RSS expert here in Austin) has already noticed that IE7 won’t be supporting password-protected feeds, however. I don’t yet have any feeds that I read that require a password, though, but I have been enjoying Charlie’s vision on RSS for a while. Fred already thought about secure RSS notifications for banking and so on, but check out Charlie’s ideas for use cases for enterprise RSS.

• Customer Support Use Case
• Marketing Use Case
• Field Sales Use Case (which he has made come to life with his Spanning Salesforce application)

Charlie’s blog often contains insightful and forward thinking for a technology that is gaining attention and adoption rates are increasing. Heck, Scoble reads him, but I found Charlie through an Austin-based RSS aggregate list that used some sort of geography marker to collect a list of Austin Bloggers.

I’m also planning to read more on the Microsoft Team RSS Blog.

I have some notes from the “RSS: not just for blogs anymore”, SXSWi talk, with Chris Frye of Feedburner, Scott Johnson of Ookles (formerly of Feedster), and Robyn Dupree of Bloglines. Each panelist had interesting ideas for what RSS is being used for besides reading blogs.

They estimate that there are 75 million RSS users in the US and UK, but only about 17-32% of the users know they’re using RSS (source: marketingsherpa.com). Adina Levin, the moderator, noted that some users use RSS notification to avoid the flood of emails as a source of information. What’s interesting about that observation from my personal experience is that I find when I introduce RSS feeds to some folks, they would prefer to get the RSS content in their email client (via Newsgator). Some people just prefer a one-stop-shop for information and that happens to be Outlook for them. They want to “open the fire hose.”

RSS is mostly associated with text content, and as Scott Johnson put it, RSS was originally just headlines and links, but has now become “XML that matters to his Mom.” But Feedburner is starting to see more “big enclosures” on RSS for TiVo-like web content. I have often explained RSS aggregators as “TiVo for web pages” so that analogy makes so much sense. Preach it, Chris.

Robyn Dupree of Bloglines had the most comprehensive list of alternatives to text for RSS. Considering that Bloglines has 1.5 B articles in their index (and they only index ones that people actually subscribe to through Bloglines), they likely see the most creative and varied uses of RSS. Here’s her list (furiously scribbled in my notebook):

• Podcasts, video
• “Buzz” on blogosphere with Most Popular Links feature that you can subscribe to
• Notifications on classified ads (craigslist has this, I believe)
• Group conversations (such as Yahoo Groups, which offers RSS feeds for conversations)
• Package tracking (nifty! especially for ebay resellers she says this is a useful tool)
• Product newsletters (again, email alternative)
• Calendars (notification for birthdays, anniversaries, etc.)
• Higher education (notification for course information)
• Searches for competitive intelligence and other specialized information

After the panelists spoke, they opened up the floor to audience members who had ideas for RSS beyond blogging. Adina tagged all of them using the del.icio.us tag rssbeyondblogs. One of the most interesting ones to me is stuffopolis, helping you keep track of your stuff (and helping small businesses share stuff online, apparently.) Another creative stretch for RSS feeds is actually a couple of WordPress plug-in created by Andy Skelton and showcased on andy.wordpress.com including his 30 boxes calendar and his dodgeball info (although that one is apparently broken and named “Unknown Feed” on the sidebar right now). I sat behind a guy who works at dodgeball (recently acquired by Google) and he was very excited to be mentioned.

Any other ideas for RSS beyond blogging? I think I’ve got to go find some secure feeds to subscribe to just to make sure I’m on the cutting edge of RSS technology.

This year’s Interactive conference was interesting to say the least, because I was too sick to attend two day’s worth of sessions. So, I’ve been listening to the podcasts of the sessions I really wanted to go to but missed. The fine folks at SXSWi have also made videos available online for sessions misssed.

The Dooce/Kottke keynote had me laughing aloud while I listened. From Jason asking Heather if she had seen her Wikipedia entry, noting that it said at the bottom “both Heather and husband remain unemployed” to Heather commenting that a subscription model for blogging for money gives people the sense the they are owed something, and when Jason went on a 2 week vacation during the year, Heather said “Bastard took my money and went to Asia with it” both of them cracked me up constantly. Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry has been changed to say “They currently remain self-employed.” My guess is that someone changed it during the session. At South By SouthWest Interactive most audience members are multitasking with an open laptop and IMing their friends or liveblogging during the sessions.

One of the reasons this was such a great session was the complete opposite nature of the two speakers — female/male, extrovert/introvert, personal blogger/personality purposely removed blogger, Heather’s married with a two-year-old daughter, Jason’s getting married in two weeks, Heather lives in Salt Lake City and is a self-proclaimed “house wife,” Jason’s living in New York City. Their blog styles are completely different and it’s likely their audiences are different but with a lot of overlap (they’re arguably the two most popular bloggers out there today). Certainly the audiences they have in their heads are different, according to the session. Jason says his are the “bored at work network” and Heather thinks hers are mostly women either with kids or trying to have kids.

In my mind, the main reason they were chosen as opposites for this keynote is because both “went pro” in the past year, blogging for a living. Heather chose ads as her method of payment, and Jason chose a subscription model (1500 “micropatrons” paid him an average of $30 each). I’d describe this keynote as a great match up, great format (they asked each other questions while sitting opposite each other in overstuffed armchairs), great questions for each other (the audience questions were pretty dull and uninspired) and a great idea, whoever thought of it. I was more entertained than educated by this session which was fine with me. I have no current intentions of blogging for a living. (Yes, I don’t consider this arrangement of corporate blogging to be blogging for a living, there are definitely other tasks I do for BMC that are my “living”.)

Read this Real SXSW post to get a funny insider look at what goes on at SXSWi, which involves random encounters that lead to many more connections and podcasting in the streets.

I also attended BarCamp Austin at lunchtime on Saturday and met some interesting people, Alex Muse from Dallas was one, and I had a nice short chat with Michael Cote, formerly at BMC but now analyzing and blogging for RedMonk. BarCamp is an informal meetup where you chose sessions to present and then could listen to presentations all day, given by fellow barcampers.

Here is my SXSW Interactive trip report from three years ago. Over the next few days, I’ll post my thoughts on the sessions from this year.

Organizing the World’s Information — Google and Blogger.com

Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful.”

They complete a web crawl of the entire web every 3 to 4 weeks. There are about 2 billion pages covered in their web crawl. If you include graphics and 20 years of Usenet postings, there are 4 billion web documents.

Their ranking system is heavily weighted by how many times other sites link to a particular page. They consider their system to be very similar to a book index. Google looks at over 100 factors including font size, proximity to other words, etc. when looking for keywords within a page. They also display a snippet from most relevant part, based on the factors in their algorithm.

The hardware is cheap, cheap cheap, and they use a distributed search mechanism with 10000-plus machines running Linux. He had a funny graphic of a bunch of bowed motherboards in a rack. Okay, it was funny to us geeks in the room. Basically they have hardware failures all the time since the hardware is so cheap, but they have so much redundancy in the system it’s easily fixed in time to avoid any problems.

They have noticed that their queries in English are declining. A fascinating study is to read the trends on http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html. Google is inventing new areas and researching new features. Examples:

• Google glossary
• Google API, which allowed for map of web
• content target advertising on other sites (speaker’s example was when you’re on edmunds and you do a search for an air filter, Google’s air filter ad hits are displayed on the side)
• news.google.com 4500 news-only sites crawled daily
• froogle.google.com (Love this name!) price, name of product, category, and pic

In ranking pages, Google doesn’t use metatags due to not trusting those tags to tell the real “importance” or “relevance” of a page. (People obviously load up their meta tag data in order to try to get hit by more search engines.) They are working on a natural language query, but people often don’t “talk” their questions. Apparently we’ve become so accustomed to writing in two or three words, we don’t do a good job of writing complete questions. This was particularly interesting to me, looking for search trends in online information. And, without further ado, the (seemingly) surprise presenter at this presentation was Evan Williams from blogger.com.

Blogger.com was acquired by Google this year (2003) in a surprising move that had the blogging community speculating wildly about what this meant for blogging and for Google. While he didn’t have much more information than “there was a Slate article with some good ideas” it gave a better idea of how this came about. (I believe the Slate article to which Evan referred is Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?. ) There are approximately 3000-4000 new blogs created each day on blogger.com, and maybe a half million to 1 million blogs exist in total. A lot of information is being posted on these blogs which google can help organize and lend easier access to. There are approximately 20,000 new posts per day.

Blogger consists of 6 guys in one room — and Google added 1 or 2 more. They basically moved from one San Fran office to another, this one without a window. They are getting more hardware resources and people resources and continuing maintenance and new coding on the blogger product.

Database-driven Websites

The main thing I learned from this presentation was that many times, server-side includes are more efficient than using text that is stored in a database. Server-side includes are basically ways to imbed files within HTML so that they appear seamlessly in the browser-window, but you’re basically writing a shortcut to the other files’ content. This approach makes sense for boilerplate information used over and over again. I guess it’s similar to the “Library” items used in Dreamweaver.

The speakers were from these sites: 13colony.com, brainfood.com, rackspace.com, and sxsw.com. They recommended that you cache query results and create files out of those results for more efficiency. If you want to teach yourself about database-driven web sites, they suggested that you start with php with Postgres or Mysql on Linux, and then pick an open-source application and figure out how it works.

Putting Online Conversation to Work

The only speaker for this panel was one of the WELL’s original directors — Cliff Figallo. The other speaker couldn’t make it, I’m not sure why. He was an interesting person who had lived on The Farm and felt that too many free-riders broke the community financially. He lent this experience to his experience with thewell’s online community — if too many people are “lurkers” instead of actively posting and contributing to the online conversation, then the community doesn’t grow well and has break downs.

He observed that ” attention is energizing.” So, the people who rant and rave got attention but usually that just fed the fire.

He noted that in online conversations, these factors are influencing on the conversation:

• who is talking
• intentions
• commitment
• tolerance
• traction

They didn’t want to become ‘benevolent despots’ at The WELL, although those with time and money took over sometimes. He had us remember that in those days, you paid per minute for your online time. (In 1985, membership on the WELL was $8 per month plus $2 per hour.) So, those with the most time, money, and the best modem could over take conversations, sometimes for the worst.

He thinks that for success online, you need founders, implementers, and sustainers in any online conversation and community.

He mentions the idea of subtext - you had to read between the lines and ask, was there a lack of credibility under the surface? He thinks this happens often on corporate intranets. Often this would be shown by non-participation by specific groups.

He noted that customers are getting more say in online conversations. I.e. Edmunds.com, epinions.com, allow users/customers to give feedback to companies. One thing he suggested during the Q&A session to a question about how to build a new community is to implement a ‘full value contract’ -make participants sign an agreement that they will listen, will contribute, will make the conversation useful.

One of the audience members was a doctor on a web community site like WebMD, and he said that as soon as a doctor joins a conversation they are flooded with questions and that anyone who identifies themselves as a doctor is treated differently than other community members. I was hoping for information and tips for real-time conversations embedded into products but the session was much more geared towards message board-type communities. Still, a thought-provoking session.

Beyond the blog

dollarshort.org is Mena Trott’s weblog.

stupidfool.org is Ben Trott’s weblog (the Trotts are co-founders of Moveable Type.) This session discussed the evolution of features on blog tools like Moveable Type or Blogger.

Ideas from the session’s panelists:

All blogs today are written in reverse chronological order, like a journal. Could there be another order or method of organization?Why can’t you post a book review on amazon and also place it on your weblog? The site a.wholelottanothing.org is Matt Howie’s blog, and he has a ‘posted elsewhere’ section. Audio blogs - the general consensus is that “these suck.” How could they be improved upon?

There’s a relatively new feature called friend of a friend - basically you can use XML to build a map of relationships. One of the enhancements might be an “enemies” or “nemesis” list.You can subscribe to weblogs using a Mac-based tool.

Many of the panelists read weblogs rather than watch tv. Their claim is that it’s better than reality tv, it’s mundane everyday life, usually well-written. This type of feature could evolve into a non-professional personal news feed. The panelist envisioned feeds from 10,000 blogs coming to your desktop, all with info that the filter thinks you’d find interesting. An early example is found at http://topicexchange.com/. I came away from this session with a burning desire to write a blog entry daily or at least weekly and to play with this technology. I don’t yet know how it will be used in tech pubs, but it’s fun to watch the technology grow and evolve.

Keynote speakers

I only got to see two keynote speakers, but both were highly creative, entertaining, energizing speakers. Joshua Davis is an amazing Flash developer/creative genius who paired up with a “mathlete” to do diagrams/drawings of how things grow in nature. I can’t begin to describe what he showed us on screen. Imagine a tree and leaves growing, made out of black sticks on a white background, in an exact pattern that matches what happens in nature. Then, imagine that he has about 10 of those patterns randomized together. Well, you can’t imagine the results, but it was amazing. I was completely blown away. He has done many other things for museums and artistic types as well as for Nike corporation and Pontiac. See his portfolio at http://www.praystation.com.

Richard Florida is a professor at Carnegie Mellon who specializes in regional economics. He had a great talk about the creative class and how they shape local communities and help make them successful. Austin is one of his top ten areas of economic growth and success (ranked 2 among major regions). Read more at http://creativeclass.org/. Highly inspiring and thought-provoking.

Other links for speakers I saw:

http://www.zeldman.com

http://tantek.com/presentations/2003SXSW/stylesheets.html

http://validator.w3.org

http://www.alistapart.com

http://www.stopdesign.com/

I last attended SXSW Interactive in 2003. Just three short years ago I was … enamored with CSS… awed by search engine technology and Google… struck by Flash’s programming capability… I found my old trip report and read through it prior to this year’s conference. Maybe I’ll post it later, but for now I’m excited to head on down to the Convention Center and learn a lot and get some creativity charge.

South By SouthWest (SXSW) Interactive is the web, blog, RSS, and other three letter acronym part of the SXSW conference and festival here in Austin. I finally paid the $250 registration fee (today’s the last day for that, it goes up another $50 to the walk-in registration rate after January 13th.) I’ve been once before, in 2003.

This year Jason Kottke, full-time blogger at kottke.org, and Heather Armstrong, supporting her family by blogging at dooce.com, are keynote speakers. I’ve been reading them for quite some time now and look forward to the keynote especially.

I hope to take away inspirations for structured authoring from a techpubs standpoint as well as online technologies that are at the heart of our user’s needs. I’ll post a full report, I’m sure. Anything in particular you’d like me to keep an eye on?