I did actually talk at SXSW. I’m so bad about posting recaps of what i talk about. But here’s a short overview.

Panel 1: Blogging Next: Where Personal Publishing Goes From Here [w/ Justin Hall and Anil Dash]

The only thing i remember talking about was the importance of storytelling in blogs. People want a way to share their stories with their friends and their future. They want to do so in a way where they can control the vulnerabilities that they’re faced with. We can tell people to get over the public/private concern until we’re blue in the face and it’s never going to work. People don’t get that public means persistent/searchable and they don’t get how they’re going to feel about this data in the future. It’s like asking Derrida to imagine IM when he talks about the differences between writing and speaking in the 70s. Never gonna happen. People don’t conceptualize this future, especially not when they’re 15 and trying to figure out their identity by screaming to the world “look at me!!” We all regret that. Luckily most of us don’t have it on record.

Jason Calcanis: Entry 1 — Entry 2

Fast Company (transcript)

Panel 2: The Aesthetics of Social Networks (with Jon Lebkowsky, Molly Steenson, Honoria Starbuck)

I brought up the Kant/Nietzsche approach that the only aesthetically pleasing thing is that which represents ourselves. I showed pretty pictures of Visual Who, Social Network Fragments and BuddyZoo. I talked about how people wanted to see themselves represented in relation to those that they knew. Articulated vs. behavior driven networks. Social networks stemming from anthropology and kinship networks. YASNS and the tendency to represent ourselves in context of friends… our representation being affected by our friends (including Clay turning me into a porn queen).

Fast Company (transcript)

I’m sure i babbled more; send me links if you blogged it.

OK. It’s a lost cause. I’m thousands of email behind, without cell phone or the Sidekick that keeps me sorta on top of email sometimes (or at least lets people bug me on AIM). Plus, my server crashed so i lost a bunch of email. Furthermore, i lost everyone’s phone numbers (again….). I don’t know how to be gracious about this so please accept my ungracious apologies for truly turning into a California flake about communication.

I used to send out emails to my friends in bulk telling them that i suck for being a bad communicator and promising to be better about it. At one point, i wrote out to everyone and said that there’s a low likelihood of me ever catching up or getting better abou communication and groveling. A friend immediately wrote me to congratulate me on learning to be honest with myself. Hrmfpt. He knew me all too well.

Alas…

Oh, and riddle me this. You are a robber. You have two phones in your hand. One is a Sidekick with a pretty little image that says “Web.” The other is a Sanyo operating Sprint with its slow backasswards Vision interface. Which one do you use to make web purchases? The Sprint of course! [In fact, as far as i can tell, you never figured out how to use the toy.] But don’t worry. You’re an equal opportunity credit card abuser even if you refuse the cool toy for the broken one. Of course, maybe this says something about interfaces for the masses that i just don’t get…

This incident once again affirmed my feelings on the “man” is basically good/evil discussion that got me into bigtime trouble in the 9th grade. We were stuck reading Lord of the Flies and apparently supposed to argue that it could never happen because “man” is basically good. I disagreed. I fundamentally believe that “man” is basically greedy (which converts to evil in a binary world). Those in power do whatever it takes to maintain power; those without it do whatever it takes to live the lifestyle they want to live. We live in a society that doesn’t see most forms of greed (a.k.a. capitalist success) as bad and we encourage everyone to strive for it. Ah, Protestant ethic. But lots of people never get out of the gates and thus are never going to win the race so they might as well cheat. I remember talking to a friend who worked in a retail store. 25% of the merchandise went out the door unaccounted for. Most theft was employees. Everyone paid for it.

So, here i am sitting in my overly privileged life griping about someone stealing shit from me that will probably cost me about 80 hours of hassle and a little over 1 month’s rent. I can cope. I can get a job. I have opportunities. I have job interviews.

I try really hard to think that maybe they stole that shit from me and helped out their kids or paid their rent. But the little doubter in me can’t help but wonder if my Sidekick and wallet went up their nose/arms. And the cultural pessimist in me wonders how much everyone’s experience with this little incident (since so many people apologied for letting them in) increased homophily in some way… increased intolerance and lack of openness for people different than us. ::sigh::

But i do indeed understand why people get more intolerant as they get older… the burns start to hurt more and more. This is my fourth time dealing with pain-in-the-ass theft in 2 years. It was always due to my naive trust. Let go of my purse at a friend’s loft (2 years ago). Let a AAA guy into my car. Left my car in mid-town NY. Let go of my purse at a friend’s loft (this week).

I hate not being able to resolve the “why” question… why do people do this? If you read this blog and you’ve ever stolen someone’s wallet, can you explain why (anonymously)? I really want to know…

I’m in Austin with no IDs, no cash, no credit cards, no phone, no Sidekick and missing a variety of other purse items. Why? Cause some fucking bastards (6 of em) decided to steal all of my stuff FROM MY PARTY. To torment me even more, they did shots with me before they left. ::grumble::grumble::grumble::

I have a love/hate relationship with conferences. On one hand, i’m stoked to see everyone. On the other, everyone wants to organize and plan. This makes me recoil into a small ball and hide in my hotel room. I’m learning that i’m definitely an adhoc social person. If it can’t happen on the fly, it’s not going to happen. Blame cell phones and AIM if you want, but it’s really causing me grief and anxiety to think about planning. This time, i’m trying to pretend like there are no plans and just head to SXSW for some joy amongst my colleagues and friends (and family) and see what happens.

I’m also talking at SXSW. Two talks in a row:
– Monday, 11:30-12:30 – Blogging Next: Where Personal Publishing Goes From Here
– Monday, 3:30-4:30 – The Aesthetics of Social Networks

Monday will be a killer! Hopefully this time, i’ll keep my voice in tact.

On top of that, i’ll be looking for bloggers and journalers to interview. That should be fun!

Can’t wait to see folks in Austin!

Fellow researchers of mine are doing a blog survey. Help them out and share your opinions. Get good karma in return.

OK… Japan continues to astound me. Thanks to Joi, check out Come for the Seamen, Stay for the Ship (a very gay Flash animation).

I really like this little infographic on “How News Travels on the Internet” (even if infographics make me think USA Today which is *not* a good connection). This is definitely one sphere of blogs. Of course, i immediately thought about creating my own infographic (except that i despise infographics) on “How Gossip Travels on the Internet.”

The thing is, things twist all around when you do that. The “Dark Matter” becomes the SOURCE, personality tests become the “Dark Matter” and “Offline Media” become the “Traditional Big Media.” Plus, instead of having greater/lesser blogosphere based on visits/day, you have hipsters/dorks based on internal perceived fashion (note: everyone thinks that *they* are the hipsters and that everyone else are the dorks so these graphs are inevitably individual-centric). What’s important though is not getting to some “MetaNews” but affecting Friendster Profiles and getting loads and loads of support in the comments. That way, everyone knows that you’re gossip is way more valuable than anyone else’s. And then, of course, there’s Gawker.

Also, Chandrasutra pointed me to this fun Village Voice piece called Blogging Off. It’s all about the social disasters due to blogs. (For example, how much have you given up daily chatter with people cause you know what their doing cause of their blog?)

My favorite line: “There were four or five of the blog-free in attendance (all of whom admitted to being on Friendster, however, which is basically just a gateway drug [to blogging]).” Hmmm…..

I had a analogy moment today. I’ve been talking to more people who don’t identify as bloggers but who self-proclaimed bloggers label as bloggers because the activities are seen as the same. I’ve heard this rhetoric before. From dykes and lesbians.

A lot of dykes engage in activities that lesbians would recognize. Lesbians call dykes lesbians and dykes rebel against that label. Lesbians roll their eyes at the dykes, failing to understand what difference the dykes feel.

The difference is that identity labels are not simply based on activity. Identity labels are a way of self-identifying with a culture, a set of practices, and a set of values. Even when dykes and lesbians engage in the same practices, the dykes don’t see themselves as part of lesbian culture or embodying lesbian values. Part of this has to do with gender identity; part of this has to do with politics. And of course, the boundaries are not so cleanly rigid. Some people identify as both dykes and lesbians, depending on what fits at that moment for them. But there are also quite a few on extreme ends (see Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival).

One assumption about dykes and lesbians is that they just sleep with women. What about tranny boys/bois? Or what about the various self-identified dykes who have sex with bio boys… but whose only sex practice is anal sex where the girl penetrates the boy with a strap-on? It’s not exactly “straight” as most people would recognize…

So, how does this translate to blogging/journaling?

We have a tendency to label people based on their activities. Yet, identity is self-prescribed. Outsiders can certainly label people based on behavior, but to engulf them into their identity simply because of shared practice is dangerous for all. It means that the two groups who might otherwise share a commonality have a repulsion because one feels oppressed or devalued because the other has tried to enforce a foreign label onto them.

What are the implications for bloggers/blog tool creators to see people who identify as journalers and try to enforce that label on them? How does this affect tool design, community understanding and cultural development? Although i’m only just beginning my interviews, i’m already fascinated by the subtle differences in what people identify as valuable. Both groups talk about community, but the kinds of support and the relationship between the community and the text seems to be different. More motivation for interesting work.

PS: If you’re going to be at SXSW and would love to do an interview and you identify in this spectrum, let me know!

Ben Chun asked me an interesting question about graphical smilies last night and i thought that someone out there might know.

IM clients, freemail clients and BB software very commonly uses smilies. They turn textual smilies into absurd graphical ones, sometimes even animated ones. Yet, each client renders its own version of the smiley. Thus, even if you are using AIM, the type of smiley you will get will depend if you’re using the AIM client, iChat, Fire, etc. and whether or not you turned on conversion in the first place. How much do the differing renders affect how people read what is being said?

Of course, all i could do was ask more questions. He’s asking how the technical artifact affects the impression given. I’m curious how the way smilies are read differently because of cultural and individual context. For example, i was suprised to get an email from a woman i met in Mexico *filled* with smilies. They were jumping off the page. What communities use smilies regularly and why?

How much of the smiley representations are functionally textual and how much are they adornments, kinda like the tchotchkes that people add to their phones? Are they used to express emotion, to reframe the actual text?

We’re curious if there is any research on this (or if anyone has any insight).

A while back, i blogged part of a story sent from my friend Devon who is working in the Congo. She sent me another bloggable post today so i thought i would share. If you have the means, it would be great to help her program out. $50 pays for 2 students in the school there. They are applying for grants, but those take a long time and thus any support that you can offer would be fantastic!

—

working with these women continues to be an entire life of itself: births and deaths, sickness and true healing, new arrivals and going home, and being together at every different hour of the day: all those early morning chores, heat-of-the-day lessons, rainy afternoons stuck in the church singing songs, social hour evenings, and worship at sunset. I’ve started a new project to take down the each of their stories: just interviews and photos. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with them yet, but, for so many reasons, it just seems important that they be recorded. Maybe that will finally be a use for my blog.

But just one now the girl I interviewed today is seventeen, quiet now, but with teh most beautiful voice. When her village was attacked, she was abducted by the Mai Mai, raped and beaten. Apparently angry at her for crying, they tore out her eyes and left her on the road. People from her village found her and tried to bring her with them as they fled into the forest but she was unable to keep up, so they abandoned her again. Eventually she was found and taken to one of the docs counselors out at a rural clinic. From there, she was brought into the hospital but there is nothing that can be done for her eyesight and she is also almost deaf, from injuries to the head that got infected. She has no idea whether any of her family survived and has been terrified to leave docs, not knowing where she can go. but lyn, through the network of services and people she works with here, has found a hotel owner who will pay her to do basic kitchen chores and a room in a widows cooperative where she can live; there are kids there that can bring her too and from work. Its so much more than any other hospital would do for a patient and yet I still dread the day when she’ll leave this community of women who are all healing each other to live on her own. I’m selfish, but i hate to have them leave; though the actual goodbyes are always uplifting, with the whole tribe out singing and celebrating, a mix of being happy for the woman who is leaving and, i think, the hope that it brings them for themselves.

the gsf project is coming along beautifully. my connections with people and places from my last visit haave helped me immeasurably and every step just seems to be falling into place. feels charmed, or meant to be. more on that soon.

politically, we had a little scare when the RCD (rwandan party that used to occupy this area) pulled out of the transitional government. almost comical to have jo aka. my dad, head of docs, senator, just a general congolese “big vegetable,” called away from dinner because one of the two govenors of a town was using his personal army to defend an arms cash from the other govenor. everyone is in duplicate here, as the organizing theme of this transitional period is to let the past lie, invited everyone to take part in writing the constitiution, and not oust anyone, even as a new system is set up in its place. a UN presence combined with a figurehead leader so far are managing to keep everyone in line, with the hopes of having the second congolese democratic election (the first being in 1960, with independence.) a new friend here is looking for the funds to start a civil education program to prepare the community for elections but where do you start when so many people can’t read, most of the country is inaccessible by road (there are fewer roads now than there were in 1960), and there are over 200 political parties, all oriented locally or tribally. but this guy is amazing and if he does manage to put together a project, i’ve offered him the gsf school in the evenings to hold his classes. its amazing the gravity of an open physical space for events, trainings, programs, possibilities.