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Sunday, March 14, 2010
Gowalla CEO Williams overall winner in Statesman Texas Social Media Awards
A-List photos: Texas Social Media Awards
Statesman Story: Social Media Awards winner Williams hopes Gowalla gets people exploring
Against the backdrop of an expanding South by Southwest Interactive festival, the Austin American-Statesman Sunday night awards its Texas Social Media Awards presented by Clear.
Williams’ company has been much buzzed-about at the festival, along with other companies like Foursquare that offers ways for people to network based on their location. So-called location-based social networks are a hot topic at SXSW Interactive this year.
The American-Statesman’s Social Media Editor Robert Quigley said Williams was part of a varied group of winners that also included Mobile Loaves & Fishes founder Alan Graham and travel writer Sheila Scarborough.
“More industries are embracing social media and they’re doing a better job of it,” Quigley said.
More than 160 people were nominated by the public. Judges Quigley, Greer and food writer Addie Broyles judged the awards. About 500 people attended the awards ceremony.
Tim Lott, vice president for audience strategy at the American-Statesman said the social media efforts of the newspaper and the people celebrating the awards at the Cedar Door have “allowed our audience to be the largest it’s been — ever.”
Williams, whose company has been aggressively attracting users at the fest, thanked his wife and the City of Austin. “Austin is bar-none the densest quality of really great places to go out and check in. We’re thrilled to be here and honored,” Williams said.
— Omar L. Gallaga
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Statesman Texas Social Media Awards online guest book
This is the online guest book for the Statesman’s Texas Social Media Awards. Guests of the party and awards show can sign in here and give their thoughts about the party and SXSW.
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SXSW Panel: The Emotion Engine: Can a Video Game Speak to the Heart?
Panel: The Emotion Engine: Can a Video Game Speak to the Heart? (Twitter hashtag: #emotionengine
Date/time: 5 p.m. Sunday
Panelists: Peter Molyneux (Lionhead Studios), Frank Rose (Wired.com).
The gist: Peter Molyneux (“Fable,” “Black & White,” “Populous”) is “Pioneer of the God Games” (said Rose) and he has a reputation for trying to break down the barriers between good and bad and creating moral consequences in games, but leaving it up to players to decide which way to go. Though his games have not always been commercial successes, he has always pushed the envelope of what games can do and be. He’s found success with his Xbox/Xbox 360-based “Fable” games and in his next game, he wants to make characters and situations that involve the player, create empathy and engage emotions in new ways. In a demo Molyneux showed of “Fable 3,” he showed the main character you play holding your daughter’s hand and walking though the streets of a Dickensian London-like location. It was very charming and emotionally compelling. The game’s “Touch” interface will allow players to interact with anything around them in contextual ways — use the same hand that walked your daughter to reach for a beggar’s hand and you can take him to a factory and sell him (if you want). Molyneux believes many game designers have become complacent and that new technologies like Microsoft’s motion-sensing camera, code-named Natal, will open new ways of interacting with games and making them more compelling.
Quotes: “The staffing problems must have been a nightmare!” — Molyneux on the plight of the bad guy in movies. “It’s so emotionally more powerful than hitting A… you physically have to drag him and force him to do these things. A simple game mechanic changes your emotional involvement with the world.” — Molyneux. “Natal is a fantastic amazing device because it is so different… it makes designers like me sweat like we never have before.” — Molyneux on Microsoft’s motion-sensing Xbox 360 camera, due out later this year. “It is all about the skill of what we create.” — Molyneux
Takeaways: While movies make us sit passively, video games have the opportunity to engage us in ways that other forms of entertainment can’t. Games like “Heavy Rain” (which Molyneux believes is brilliant, but which he couldn’t finish because he was too emotionally disturbed), are pointing the way to where interactive entertainment is going. Molyneux believes we need more amazingly talented game designers to make interactive art that matters.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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SXSW panel: Inside the Workings of Funnyordie.com
Time/Date: 3:30 p.m. Sunday
Panelists: Richard Glover and Andrew Steele
The gist: Glover, CEO, and Steele, creative director, discussed techniques that have made the sketch comedy site successful. A lot of it has to do with the fact that the site was founded by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay (Upright Citizens Brigade) and that they have access to their celebrity friends. Opening the floor to questions after showing popular clips, they also spoke about their HBO show and their upcoming foray into film production with comedic duo Tim and Eric.
Quotes: “The secret of the Internet is to swear; swearing kids are even better, and so are naked women.” “The minor-league aspect of Funny or Die is very much a part of why it exists.”
Takeaways: While Funny or Die has resources that no Web start-up is going to be equipped with, Steele and Glover emphasized the fact that the celebrity element of the site was less important than well-done comedy, and that effective use of social media sites is essential to maintaining an audience.
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Panel review: From Trolls to Stars (the Commenter Ecosystem)
Panelists: Dashiell Bennett, Anthony De Rosa, Kate Milner, Jaime Morelli, Kelly Reeves
The gist: Bloggers have a love/hate relationship with commenters. A strong commenter community reflects a strong site, but commenters can begin to drive the tone of a site. Moderated commenter communities tend to be more successful. Lack of moderation degenerates into noise as does anonymity in comments.
Blog posts no longer exist only on the originating site. Through social media content spreads all over the internet. Social media arenas Facebook/Twitter, etc. are becoming big forums for commenters. Some sites with quiet comment sections have very active Facebook communities.
Quotes: “You have to be careful about what you put out there. You’re not as anonymous as you think you are.” Anthony De Rosa
“Don’t feed the trolls” Anthony De Rosa
Takeaways: There’s a fine line editors have to walk between giving people the freedom to express themselves and managing the tone of the site. Letting people know what’s expected of them, and empowering productive commenters to help police the site can be effective. Even sites with well-established, self-policing communities sometimes have problems as “star” commenters start to lord over conversations and alienate new users. Forcing commenters to use their real life identities, through Facebook Connect for example, tends to lead to more civilized conversations.
—Deborah Sengupta Stith
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SXSW Keynote: Valerie Casey
Date/Time: 2 p.m. Sunday
Speaker: Valerie Casey, founder and executive director of The Designers Accord, which works with non-profits to develop innovative technology.
The gist: Casey’s area of focus is systems design, and during her speech offered an explanation of what that means and what that has to do with the idea of sustainability. She began by referencing Kurt Vonnegut’s narrative chart, which visualizes the dominant type of narrative arc, and contrasts that arc with the narrative of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” which is flatly negative. The narrative of sustainability, as told through popular stories and images such as an albatross that died from eating trash, is Kafka-esque, Casey said.
Her program, the Designers Accord, works to combat this negativity. She went on to outline how the group was reworking systems, providing a series of examples of ways in which different people or organization have been able to solve problems to affect change. She talked about how a water transportation project in South Africa was derailed when the people involved refused to use raw plastic rather than recycled materials, which weren’t feasible. In a similar example, she talked about a “pizza lab,” NakedPizza in New Orleans that was developing healthy, affordable pizza, but couldn’t use recycled boxes because it drove the price point to high.
She concluded by pointing out that the interactive community was conspicuously absent from these types of efforts. Rather than start another group such as Designers Accord of LEED, though, they should work to help existing groups communicate and work more efficiently.
Quotes: “When will we stop thinking that less bad is good?” “The focus on just the technical aspects of sustainability…completely misses the point.”
Takeaways: A big player in the push for sustainability thinks that the interactive community isn’t doing enough. It will be interesting to see if next year’s conference includes more on this issue.
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SXSW Panel: CrowdControl: Changing The Face Of Media Or Hype?
Panel: CrowdControl: Changing The Face Of Media Or Hype? (Twitter hashtag: #crowdcontrol)
Date/time: 12:30 p.m., Sunday
Panelists: Jason Rzepka (MTV), Joseph Kingsbury (Text 100), Lila King (CNN), Randi Zuckerberg (Facebook), Pete Cashmore (Mashable.com).
The gist: Big media brands (CNN, MTV) and new-media ones (Facebook, Mashable) are both utilizing the crowd for news coverage and to help shape the content it provides. In the case of Facebook, which has about 400 million users, the company used crowdsourcing to help translate its site into 70 languages. In the case of CNN’s iReport, the network is getting many new and different points of view from its iReporters than it traditionally offered. Less certain is how crowdsourcing can benefit labor-intensive efforts like long-term investigative journalism. In this over-packed panel, questions that have echoed through other panels at the fest (how will mainstream media survive? What will take its place if it goes away?) were brought up, but the answers were no clearer here than in other sessions.
Quotes:“You don’t need a printing press to be the press and create media anymore. If you’re on the scene, you’re a journalist, basically.” — Cashmore. “There’s always going to be a need for the person in the field… I can’t see that going away.” — King. “Everyone has an original experience to share with the world.” — King. “What a incredible world we live in!” — Zuckerberg on how open people are on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Takeaways: Trusted brands are still important to get reliable information, but crowdsourcing can still play a role in the way news and entertainment organizations provide content. The mainstream media has failed to adopt practices that have become common in the blogging world (like linking back to sources), to their detriment. Sites like CNN are experimenting, but they don’t yet have all the answers; they do feel they’re going in the right direction. Sometimes the best solution is crowdsourcing for specific goals (like Facebook’s translations), or to supplement existing products or coverage (like iReports bundled with CNN’s staff news reports).
- Omar L. Gallaga
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Panel review: Story.next
Panelists: Sanjay Gupta, Sunil Gupta
The gist: The Kahani Project is the “passion project” of brothers Sunil and Sanjay Gupta. The objective of the project is to create an online community chronicling the stories of the South Asian community that emmigrated to the United States in the 60s and 70s. The inspiration for the project is based around the work of documentarian Studs Terkel, the idea that everyone has a story to tell. The Gupta brothers have chosen a specific focus for the project that reflects their own family history. The goal of the project is to create a mass archive of stories with deep engagement among community members. All material in the Kahani Project is licensed under creative commons and community members are encouraged to collaborate with each other and create remixes and collages using each other’s work.
Quotes: “Ordinary people have extraordinary stories to share.”
“Every community has stories that are worth preserving”
Takeaways: There are beautiful powerful stories hidden in the living rooms of every family. Technology is catalytic and creates new opportunties for people to explore their collective histories.
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Panel review: Story.Next: Narrating the Crowd
Story.next: Narrating the Crowd
9:30am Sunday
Panelists: Sanjay Gupta, Sunil Gupta
The gist: The Kahani Project is the “passion project” of brothers Sunil and Sanjay Gupta. The objective of the project is to create an online community chronicling the stories of the South Asian community that emmigrated to the United States in the 60s and 70s. The inspiration for the project is based around the work of documentarian Studs Terkel, the idea that everyone has a story to tell. The Gupta brothers have chosen a specific focus for the project that reflects their own family history. The goal of the project is to create a mass archive of stories with deep engagement among community members. All material in the Kahani Project is licensed under creative commons and community members are encouraged to collaborate with each other and create remixes and collages using each other’s work.
Quotes: “Ordinary people have extraordinary stories to share.”
“Every community has stories that are worth preserving”
Takeaways: There are beautiful powerful stories hidden in the living rooms of every family. Technology is catalytic and creates new opportunties for people to explore their collective histories.
—Deborah Sengupta Stith
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SXSW Panel: 2009 Iran Election: Women’s Revolution? Twitter Revolution?
Panel: 2009 Iran Election: Women’s Revolution? Twitter Revolution? (Twitter hashtag: #sxswiran)
Date/time: 11 a.m., Sunday
Panelists: Roja Bandari (UCLA), Mona Kasra (University of Texas - Dallas), Shireen Mitchell (Digital Sisters/Women Wired In), David Parry (UT - Dallas).
The gist: Though Twitter brought Iran election protests and how the government deals with technology to the world’s attention, women in Iran have been fighting for rights for 100 and there’s been a blogging/social networking protest movement since at least 2001 with the introduction of Blogsphere. And the women’s rights movement is very intertwined with the Iranian green movement. The government has clamped down on speech and protest by throttling Internet speeds to slightly-better-than-dial-up and even filtered the search term “Women” at one point. One panelist contented that Twitter did not change Iran or create a revolution there, but it did make the rest of the world more aware of Iran’s political crisis and in that way did benefit the pro-democracy movement there. It also benefitted Twitter, which received attention when the U.S. State Department the site not shut down for maintenance during the height of the Iran protest Twitter activity.
Quotes:“I think it was this instance that catapults Twitter into… ‘oh it’s a serious medium and journalists can use it.’ ” — Parry on 2009 Iran election Tweets. “Iranian women been fighting for rights for 100 years. Tech made decentralised organization possible.” - Bandari. “These are just tools. The same way pro-democracy can use it, the government can use them, too.” — Kasra. “”We’re not used to companies being major players in the geopolitical landscape.” — Parry on Twitter. “Suggesting it’s a Twitter revolution removes human agency from the equation.” — Parry.
Takeaways: Technology tools like Twitter have certainly created more tools for election protesters and proponents of the women’s rights movement in Iran, but it has also created new ways for the Iranian government to stifle speech. Iranians were very happy to see Western media get the word out about what was going on. Making connections with real people in Iran, say artists or journalists connecting with artists or journalists from Iran, is one way to support change in Iran.
- Omar L. Gallaga
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SXSW panel: ‘Monkeys With Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature and Digital Data
Time: 11 a.m.
Panelist: Clay Shirky
The gist: Sharing can be a powerful force for social change.
Quotes: “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Abundance is a bigger challenge to society than scarcity.”
Takeaway: The tech tools we have increase our ability to share, and increase our motivation to share. Using the impact of Napster as an example, Shirky illustrated how technology can change something we had thought of us sharing goods to sharing information. Humans are wired to have good feelings about sharing information.
Sharing within a community (like an online medical support group) is valuable, but what Shirky called “civic sharing” or “jackhammer sharing” (because of its power to dismantle old institutions) can change the whole culture. He used the site Patients Like Me, where patients share information on their symptoms with a goal of transforming the medical system.
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Augmenting Maps with Reality
Date/Time: 9:30 a.m. Sunday
Panelists: Chris Pendleton (Microsoft), Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), Ryan Sarver (Twitter), Laura Diaz (Navteq), Kellen Elliott-McCrea (Flickr/Yahoo!)
The gist: In the first location-based discussion of the day, the focus was on the evolution of the map. The high-profile panel discussed challenges to mapping indoor spaces, how cloud computing and user data might inform maps and the value in documenting user location history.
Quotes: “Indoor mapping is the next big challenge.” -Pendleton “Users create really good data, but they also create really bad data.” -Diaz “We have nailed accuracy; what are the other things we can nail?” -Elliot-McCrea
Takeaways: Another location-based panel, but there’s enough to talk about that it is still not redundant. One interesting aspect of the discussion was all the talk of history—not just user history, but the idea of adding history to maps by geotagging historic photos, or adding information about architecture, etc. Also interesting was the mention of z-axis data such as floors in a building and time. The field of mapping is moving forward with an amazing amount of detail and speed.
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SXSW panel: Merch - The Other White Meat of Monetization
Time: 11 a.m. Sunday
Speakers: Mikhail Ledvich (BustedTees.com), Burnie Burns (Rooster Teeth Productions), Jennifer Shiman (angry alien productions), Joel Bush (Amplifier), Justin Sewell (Despair Inc.)
The gist: A mediation on the benefits and challenges of content-driven Web siotes moving into the world of merchandising as a way to derive income from an audience. In a talk that covered every related topic and question possible, the panelists kept their points concise and helpful, making it useful to would-be Web entrepreneurs of just about every stripe.\
Bush started off by framing the move into merchandising as a way for readers and users to become more active patrones for arts on the Web but warned of risks; that unsold shirts and coffee mugs become wasted money on a shelf and time spent running the merchandise operation can - and often does - take dramatic amounts of time from the creative end of the Web site. Ledvich offered that merchandise offers a monetary safety net because products stay at the same price point while Web advertising rates can vary greatly.
Quotes: From Sewell: “Advertising is like rain water because it comes when it wants to without you doing much, but merchandising is like irrigation. It’s the hard work you do tha gives you more control over how successful you’ll be.”
Sewell again: “It’s great because fans are paying you so they can advertise you to future customers.”
From Shiman: “Merchandise kind of becomes the end connection of your work, because people are making the choice to wear your work, or drink their coffee every morning out of something using your work.”
Takeaways: Merchandising represents a boon to Web creators that far outperforms advertisements and subscription revenue, but it has to be properly and efficiently managed without overwhelming the site’s creative purposes.
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SXSW panel: Exploiting Chaos - How to Spark Innovation During Times of Change
Time: 9:30 a.m. Sunday
Speaker: Jeremy Gutsche (TrendHunter.com)
The gist: Standing out during tumultuos economic times when “the deck gets reshuffled” takes fearless innovation by observing customers’ behaviors in their own environment, having a firm grasp of the company’s central mission and utilizing as many new channels as possible to expose products and ideas to the public.
Quotes: Gutsche’s talk, which doubled as a soft sell session for his book “Exploiting Chaos” was long on anecdotes and slogans instead of spontaneous give and take. Among the better talking points: “Culture eats strategy, so at the end of the day it’s about how the culture inside your company can embrace and adapt to change,” “Win like you’re used to it. Lose like you enjoy it,” “Innovation starts with observing customers in their zone and learning to use the words they use.”
Takeaways: Killer ideas matter all the time, but especially in times when a bad economy causes consumers to lok in new directions and seek changes that increase value. To lead that edge, companies need to take chances based on unbiased research and an understanding of what they want to accomplish in the marketplace.
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SXSW Interactive Sunday picks: plethora of panels
Today is one of the busiest panel days at South by Southwest Interactive with tech celebrities, online comedy stars and even CNN’s Sanjay Gupta on the festival schedule. Follow our fest updates on Twitter at @360sxswi and right here on Digital Savant.
Some of today’s highlights, at the Austin Convention Center unless otherwise noted, include:
- A keynote presentation from Valerie Casey of the Designers Accord, 2 p.m. in Exhibit Hall 1.
- “Story.Next — Narrating the Crowd,” a 9:30 a.m. panel featuring Gupta in room 10AB.
- Experts from Twitter, Foursquare, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo! and Navteq discuss “Augmenting Maps with Reality” 9:30 a.m. in Room G at the Hilton Austin.
- Always insightful technology expert Clay Shirky gives a talk, “Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data” at 11 a.m. in Ballroom D.
- Is there a monkey theme today? “Perfectly Irrational: Who Put the Monkey in the Driver’s Seat” is at 12:30 p.m. in Ballroom D See our story on the front page of this section about author and researcher Dan Ariely.
- “Crowd Control: Changing the Face of Media or Hype?” features Randi Zuckerberg (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister), Pete Cashmore of Mashable and representatives from MTV and CNN, 12:30 p.m. in 12AB.
- “From Trolls to Stars: The Commenter Ecosystem” is 3:30 p.m. in 12AB. We’re especially eager to hear commenter tales from Meg Frost, founder of cuteoverload.com (aka that site where you waste time looking at kitten pictures instead of working).
- “The Inside Workings of FunnyOrDie.com” goes behind the scenes at the Web site co-founded by Will Ferrell, 3:30 p.m. at the Radisson Austin.
- Comedian Doug Benson hosts the 13th-Annual Interactive Web Awards, 6 p.m. on the sixth floor of the Hilton Austin.
- The American-Statesman Texas Social Media Awards, presented by Clear, start at 6 p.m. at Cedar Door (sold out).
- Mashable’s MashBash party hits Buffalo Billiards starting at 10 p.m. (RSVP required).
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