So today I found myself at home, sitting on the couch, plugged into my laptop. I was talking to a gentleman in Australia, where it was already the next day, over the internet with Skype. We talked about the web, blogging, and community, while his daughter squealed in the background. He recorded the conversation and has now made it available to his listeners as a Podcast.
Is this what it’s like to live in the future?
Thanks for featuring Fray, my humble site, in the lead of your recent story, You Are What You Post. We always appreciate journalists taking the time to use a 5 year-old personal story contributed to our “obscure” literary site as a to peg to hang a fear-mongering, hysterical story on.
But it would have been nice if you had at least linked to the original stuff to let readers judge the threat for themselves. The original story was called Letterman on Drugs and was written by the talented storyteller Lance Anderson.
Young Josh posted his story to the posting area that follows every Fray story. His contribution appears at the top of the second page. As you can see, he’s in good company. There are 39 pages of stories like Josh’s.
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Another one of my favorite sessions at SXSW Interactive 2006 was Zero-Advertising Brands, where we got to watch Maggie Mason talk to the guys from skinnyCorp, the makers of Threadless among other creative commerce/community hybrids.
One of my favorite things about talking to folks that really get the user-generated web, is that when they tell you their secret recipies, it all sounds so easy. Here’s George from Flickr in the Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps talk: “We listen to what our users say, and then iterate the design.” See? Easy.
So when the guys from skinnyCorp opened their komono in the Zero Advertising panel to share their four steps to success, I took notes and made my own translations. Here goes.
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One of the most interesting panels at SXSW Interactive 2006 was The Future of Darknets, moderated by JD Lasica. And while the concept of Darknets – communities using private subnetworks to communicate and collaborate out of view of the larger internet – is indeed fascinating, the panel was not interesting because of the intended topic. In fact, we never actually got to hear much about DarkNets, much to my disappointment, because the panel was hijacked the moment one panelist said, “Hello, my name is Kori Bernards, and I’m from the Motion Picture Association of America.”
What followed was an hour-long firing squad as one audience member after another directed angry questions her way. The feeling of pent-up frustrations with the movie biz was palpable, especially as her claims of flexibility and excitement within the MPAA to find “creative new solutions” to the problems raised by the audience rang more and more hollow, the more times she repeated them.
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We interrupt this conference-related revelry with an important announcement. It seems that in the haze of my cold medication, I made some adjustments to my email server’s settings which resulted in the last few days of mail getting unceremoniously rejected.
So, if you sent me mail in the last week, please resend. I realize this request subtracts a few points from my geek cred, but I’ll just have to live with that.
I’m firstname at lastname dot com, as always.
You made it to the bottom! You must be very good looking. Wanna go back to the top now?
Hi, I’m Derek. I used to make websites. Now I grow flowers and know things. I’m mostly harmless. More.
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