NowPublic@SXSW2008: LiveBlogging Saturday

Austin, Texas -- NowPublic is on the ground here in sunny Austin, Texas for the annual digerati, film, and music festival blowout that is SXSW.

We'll be posting stories, photos, and video of all the Interactive action as it zooms by from March 7-11.

If you're in town for the fest, or feel like weighing in on the latest SXSW goings on, please add your own posts, comments, and pics to this page.

LIVEBLOG

4:30pm - And that's a wrap. Off to find my next interactive hit. 

4:37pm - WRAP-UP: Learn to manage 'the art of letting bad things happen', in order to determine what's really important to you and your business.

4:35pm - Q: How to get your product to a receptive audience?

A:  Choose your channel and dominate it. Focus and be specific on your market and location. Stay with it.  

4:30pm - Q: What patterns do you find yourself falling back into, when you're trying to step away from the 18 hr tech work day? And how do you cope?

Ferriss: Create a not to do list. Review it regularly. Why check email when you don't have to? Have the freedom to focus on what's important -- don't overbook your calendar. Schedule compelling, non-work related time. Design a lifestyle by scheduling 'bracketing' activities.

4:22pm - Q: How do you find good mentors? 

A:  Ferriss: Knew nothing about the world of social media before starting his book but had to learn about it. Advises people to humble themselves and ask a lot of questions. Don't pretend you know everything. Make it easy for mentors to help you.

Lewis: Don't be afraid to set your goals high. Go for it!  

4:16pm -  Q: How to reconcile getting the best talent possible, when you don't have the budget to meet those demands?

A:  Create huge networks of contacts, build your contacts before you need them -- those people could then be available down the line.

4:15pm - Ferriss: Ways toward improvement of your product? It's not always about adding to what you have, sometimes it's good to take things way. Don't analyze what's measurable, analyze what's meaningful.

4:08pm -  Advice from the panel to startups and newbies: Rush but don't hurry. Keep morale high. Take time to keep the team strong.

Ferriss: in terms of reaching influencers, through social media, don't skimp on the time you spend with someone just to collect more business cards. Meet people in person. Follow up with those you've contacted. Take the time to write something specific to the person you're trying to contact. Don't actively ask anyone to review your product. Offer yourself up to discussing your ideas in whatever format they would like because people need to believe in your concept first, before they'll get behind it and promote it.

4:00pm - The Art of Speed: Conversations with Monster Makers

The panels are getting packed. I've already been turned away from two...and have stumbled my way up to a huge room filled with attentive eyes and ears listening in to success stories and advice from great folks behind wildly popular apps and sites like Twitter, GeekBrief.tv, fourhourworkweek, and Benchmark Capital.

Cali Lewis, host and producer of GeekBrief, offers good advice to aspiring video podcast producers: dive right in! Tim Ferriss chimed in by agreeing that his process has been "Ready, Fire, Aim" -- get hands-on, just start what you want to do, and then learn what you're doing as you go.    

3:15pm - Opening Remarks: Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson

Three main ballrooms in the convention center were filled to capacity and then some, with people overflowing into the hallways hoping to catch sight (or at least the sound of) the Interactive festival's opening remarks which featured acclaimed author and "critical utopian" Henry Jenkins -- director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program -- in conversation with the equally well-respected author Steven Johnson -- CEO of hyperlocal city-based network site, Outside.in.

Their conversation was eloquent, broad and wide-ranging, and emphasized a decidedly optimistic attitude toward technology and society. Both authors share a vision for, and interest in, creating a truly democratic, participatory culture -- both online and offline -- that builds collective wisdom, enables mechanisms that encourage diversity, and promotes a balanced ratio of creative production vs. information consumption. 

Jenkins criticized YouTube for being a technology that, although he believe is full of democratic potential, fails to promote diverse content and does not have means of allowing diversity to be represented. He argued that because YouTube's model is to promote what is most popular, it inherently promotes a dominant culture, such that it limits the ability for diverse voices to be heard. He suggested that if you look at the top hundred videos on the site at any given time, they appear to be exclusively from a dominantly, middle-class white perspective. 

In his view, this is unacceptable. Jenkins believes in the possibility for collective wisdom to be actively constructed. In examining the 'wisdom of crowds', a concept introduced and popularized by James Surowiecki in his 2004 book of the same name, Jenkins suggested that it conforms to YouTube's model of building an "averaged out" perspective of what is valuable knowledge.

By contrast, Wikipedia, he suggested, allows for a plurality of view points to be shared and promotes its very neutrality and openness as its means of build collective wisdom. In this case, what is popular does not define or constrain the way information is shared -- Wikipedia proposes a "deliberative model" that allows knowledge and different points of view to be shared, with the goal of reaching consensus, rather than popularity.

Jenkins argued that this is a much more powerful model to build upon, in that it does not take knowledge production and consensus-building as a pre-determined outcome but, instead, offers the possibility of democracy as a common goal to be engaged with and enacted by everyone.

What a positive and encouraging note to lead off the festival. To the 'critical utopian' it seems, as both Jenkins and Johnson agreed, that even a quarter-filled glass appears full. 

The hallways are clearing out -- and I'm off to the next panel...       

12:32 - Festival Lunch Break -- NP will be back online at 2:00pm for the next panel sessions. 

12:30 - WRAP UP: For the "geo-curious" here are some applications and reference sites if you're interested in geocaching and location-based services:

- WhereIGo.com 

- Loki.com/developers

- area/code 

- Where Camp // May 2008 @ Googleplex 

12:25 - Answer: Introduction of GEO RSS, geo-related content that can be located by latitude/longitude. Outside.in as another example of using mapped content, as is EveryBlock.com. Move in the news business to get journalists to adopt standards of using geo-located data and to add this information as another 'metalayer' of news content.  

12:22 - Question: Ideas on ways that journalists in the field can gather geodata and use it for news stories?

12:20 - Replies: Developers are interested in getting people out into the real world and not only using online data and forms of interaction. Real-world games need to find an actual niche, a defined space for gameplay.   

12:19 - Question: have the panelists explored non-urban centres, more global locations, for gameplay? Tracking weather, tracking animal migrations, using GPS data for other purposes? How to apply location-based content to new apps and games?  

12:18 - Difference between adults and kids in absorption in the game: kids much more easily absorbed in the game than adults. Lessons learned? Make it easy. Event-based games vs. 'pervasive' games. Organize the devices, locations, and set-up. If games require specific technology, be able to provide the devices to the players to facilitate easier interaction and gameplay.    

12:16 - Problem with using these games: you're looking down at your mobile or screen instead of paying attention to the traffic around you!

12:11 - Example of success: Plundr -- a location-based based game of 'piracy' where users navigate the real world as a virtual space in which they move between 'islands' and can 'buy and sell goods'.

12:07pm - Difficulty of developing on these platforms. Have to find ways to make these games work as easily as regular, real world games like Monopoly. Geocaching is more of a platform for developers to build upon -- by marking points in the real world, allows games and apps to be built around these points on the map.  

11:59am -  What does geolocation mean to the availability of products and services: devices and applications? Wi-fi access spots, GPS, G3, iPhone, etc.

11:58am - Recent devices are being developed that incorporate location-based technology and allow cross-over between application and game environments, and interaction with the real world.

11:45am - Panelists are introducing themselves, giving a background on geocaching
and games, and web applications that by "pinpointing a user's
location...can deliver a compelling, contextually relevant experience."

11:30am | March 8  - Fully registered, complete with a bag full of 'Interactive' swag...and off to the first panel of the day: You Are Here: Gaming and User's Geolocation in Web 2.0 

09:15am | March 8 - Crashed
out for a few hours, charged up the N80, and woke early to a chilly,
but bright and sunny Austin morning. I'm off to a Canadian Pancake
Breakfast with fellow folk from the homeland, then will be heading down
to the Convention Centre to get registered and listen in on some panel
discussions. More soon!

12:15pm | March 7 -- I arrived late last night on a
long haul flight from Vancouver through Phoenix and, of course, saw
some familiar Vancouver faces along the way: Kris Krug and Dave O from the Raincity/Bryght crew and Ms. Rochelle Grayson were also en route to Austin. Everyone was eager to get there and feeling good about the days ahead.