Eric Steuer, Creative Commons
Glenn Otis Brown, YouTube
John Buckman, Magnatune
Laurie Racine, Eyespot and DotSub
Max Schorr, GOOD Magazine

What is the business model of the Creative Commons? How is the rise of open content and alternative licensing models playing out in terms of authors getting paid?

Technorati Tags: sxsw2007

All music on Magnatune’s site is CC licensed as share-alike. If the music you’re putting on the site is free, you don’t owe us anything. If you want to license the music through the site, you can grab free music for the film through the site and then license the music later if it turns out you’re getting the film picked up. lonelygirl15 uses their music, for example.

Star Wreck: 3,000 people contributed to this over years. Kind of a mix between Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica. With a CC license. Over 5,000 downloads. Recently got a deal with Paramount, who gave them special funding to change some of the special effects to it wouldn’t look so much like Trek.

Two distinct/parallel paradigms emerging from media companies. Some looking to extract UGC from users, others trying to extract/create mashups. Huge change in thinking required of media companies. They can now play in so many new playgrounds.

Letting people who have no money use your product anyway. e.g. offering a lower-fidelity version for free. The most interesting models are the ones that straddle the worlds of free and pay. People really like ethical capitalism. They want their money to go into things they believe in. e.g. Labels that pay musicians and don’t cause them to commit suicide. Every page at Magnatune has a close-up of the musician looking you in the eyes. “I am the filmmaker. Support me and I’ll do more of this.”

People ask the wrong question: “How can I ‘break’ into the big industry?” If you want to help yourself, you need to find people who need you too. If you need a distributor, find the small art-house theaters who might be interested. If you try for the big industry off the bat, you won’t succeed.

The most powerful thing is something small that’s done just right. Everyone in this room can make a masterpiece. If you do your cool thing in a small and beautiful way, put it up so people can see it, you’ve got a foot-hold.

YouTube is an example of a great idea gone horribly wrong. “Screw copyright.” Sell to Google. Oh wait, now we’ve got to remove a third of our content (that’s a rumor – the percentage is nowhere near that level).

We can no longer refer to “big media” as one big thing with one big attitude. Some are trying to change their models, others are not. Some are being creative, or more lenient, etc. No longer a single-minded industry.

An evolutionary process is taking place, and the direction is toward openness.

Not everyone on the panel is ready to go so far as to say that there should be a legal requirement for content to be open. You can’t (nor should you) mandate openness.

The amount of legalese that goes into agreements is totally off-putting. Show of hands: How many of you have ever uploaded content/media to a site without reading the whole EULA – most hands go up. That’s a very bad scene. We need simple and plain EULAs, outside of lawyer language. Google sometimes summarizes the user licenses in big bullet points, with a link to the more detailed view.

For many, understanding what a “non-commercial license” really means is difficult to grasp. The EULAs are so complicated because they try to cover every situation known to man. People vary a lot on what they think “non-commercial use” really means.

Do you want open content to be a hard-line party, or a big-tent party? Trying to get photographers to agree with bloggers to agree with DJs is nearly impossible. So big-tent approach is more effective. Give people choices and then collect the data. CC is good at offering enough range to give all content creators the tools they need.

There’s incredible opportunity in education for open content – especially in the territory of remix, etc. But how do you tell a college to release open content? Answer partly depends on whether it’s a state-sponsored or a private college. But even public universities are skittish about this. Non-tenured prof is afraid s/he won’t be invited back next year once their whole curriculum is on the internet.

The year after MIT went open content, survey of students: 30% of students said that open content was the biggest reason why they applied to MIT – it meant that much to the students.

Q: How many people who use a CC license actually register with the US Copyright office? A: No idea. But not many. Remember that when you create something, you don’t need to register it – you own the copyright automatically. Magnatune tells people not to bother. Not much protection is offered. But you’re better off putting your CD in an envelope and mailing it to yourself so you have back-dated proof.

Side note: Statutory damages are totally out of proportion to any real damages that are caused.

The music biz is $18 billion/year. $6 billion of that is sales to consumers, $12 billion is licensing. e.g. When Britanny does a song for Coke. Licensing is a huge component of industry profits. In every market you have consumer-consumer and consumer-business. The latter is always the largest slice of the pie, but the consumer side gets all the press.

Debate: Is the DMCA evil, or really really evil? (audience laughs)

In Europe, less-popular musicians are much more able to make a living, in part because of levies and taxes that affect consumers, with strict laws about how that money should trickle down to creatives. Doesn’t happen here, in part just because our system didn’t evolve that way.

Tony Conrad, Sphere
John Battelle, Federated Media Publishing
Toni Schneider Automattic Inc

Discussion of new ways to monetize the blogosphere, to measure attention streams rather than just page impressions (especially as things like Ajax are making CPM metrics less reliable). Relationship between marketers and the blogosphere.

Technorati Tags: sxsw2007

Missed first half of this session…

FM (Federated Media) is great, but they have, like 120 bloggers. What about the other 20 million? Show of hands: About half of bloggers would like to make money off their blogs.

There’s a vacuum out there that people are starting to fill with solutions other than AdSense. If there was a network to serve them, they’d jump on it. People are going into with the right intentions, but without a solution to serve them. FM and others are serving only the high end, leaving the rest of us to swim in the AdSense soup.

The habit of advertisers is that they only want to deal with a handful of A-list sites. FM’s goal is to get Intel, MS, Hp to agree that FM can move in and sell ads on all those B-list blogs. But it’s hard to get them to change their thinking.

Plane crash mode: CNN is about to cover a plane crash, and there’s a United ad. No time to call the agencies etc., they just pull it. This is what John did when he posted an MS-critical post while MS was his only advertiser. They went into plane crash mode and pulled those ads – just ran house ads for a while. In the end MS wasn’t mad, but all agreed it made sense for them to have pulled the ads.

You must have honest/transparent conversations about this stuff. Don’t leave it all up to the agency. YOU need to dig into your community and figure out what they feel.

Marketers are terrified of criticism, even though it’s the best medicine for them. When a hotel screws you over, but then totally compensates and upgrades you or something, then suddenly they’re your favorite hotel. Marketers have this opportunity every day. But they don’t take advantage of it.

Brilliant Dice.com ad: 7’41″ of average interaction time. “Does your tech job suck?” And the ad itself is a live IM window – anyone can type into it and have a global conversation about how they hate their jobs.

There are cases where advertisers buy space on a particular blog just to get the attention of the blogger.

What Boing-Boing likes ad-wise is stuff that’s “additive” to the content/style of BB.

Some people are deeply good at getting attention.

Rufus Griscom CEO, Nerve Media
Sean Mills The Onion
Ricky Van Veen Editor, CollegeHumor.com
Laurel Touby CEO & Founder, mediabistro.com
Joan Walsh Editor in Chief, Salon.com

This is the kind of panel we host at the J-School often; was surprised to see it so widely attended at this geek conf. The focus ended up being not so much on the future as on the present, but still interesting.

Technorati Tags: sxsw2007

Online mags are a “web 1.0″ phenom, but much has changed in past 5 years.

Is edited content obsolete? Joan: Of course not. The energy of blogs, web 2.0 stuff has been energizing for Salon. Their integration of live, lightly moderated letters from readers has been wildly successful. But people come to Salon to get content they can’t get elsewhere.

It’s easy to get caught up in sexy tech, but the fact is that the average American still doesn’t know what RSS is. Daily email newsletters are still roughly 100x more effective than RSS (wow!)

Editing: There’s no alternative for quality/thoughtful/non-spontaneous writing. The blogosphere is not going to replace a collective editorial process. Salon has 28 people in editorial, 60 people total.

Is premium/paid content on the way out? Ad revenue is way up – maybe it’s not needed anymore. You open up more content to more people with ads than with subscriptions – it’s got more legs. Touby: What’s wrong with a hybrid model? Then you hedge your bets for when the ad market dips again. Salon still offers premium membership, but they’ve broken down the barriers to free access. So membership gets you things like DVDs, mag subscriptions etc., but not required for basic access.

nerve.com has launched sister publication – babble.com (check this)

collegehumor.com has done great with “busted T” t-shirts – accounts for 50% of revenues relative to advertising.

salon reserves right to take UGC down at any time without warning. Adding user moderation soon, as well as authenticated email address to post. But: “Consistently impressed with how good the comments are.”

It’s hard to maintain a consistent editorial tone if editorial responsibilities are scattered amongst freelancers – this role needs to be centralized.

All of the sites are using more and more UGC, starting to surface it more. Not using fully automated (ranking/rating) systems, but combining automated tools with editorial involvement.

Check out smithmag.net

Salon: If we put Darfur on the front page, we know we’re going to have a traffic dip for that day. So it’s a decision our editors make in full knowledge.

Familiar problem: If your pub runs author blogs, what do you when the authors also have their own blogs, and they want to continue writing there, or want to double post content on both? You want to keep them under the same roof, want to motivate them to blog on your site rather than on theirs, but it’s a “herding cats” problem. Salon: If you give them enough money, you can pull it off, but we don’t pay our bloggers and so don’t have incentive to offer. Alternative: Keep them too busy to blog on their own (joke).

Q: There’s a diff b/w a web site and a magazine. What are those diffs? (I think it’s too blurry to make this demarcation now). Advertisers want something physical to hold (this is decreasingly true). Salon actually does not consider themselves a magazine. “We’re a web site” or “We’re a community.”

If you’re trying to re-create the magazine experience on the web, you’re not taking advantage. And it’s crazy. It’s not print – trying to think of it this way is stuffing a round peg in square hole.

But some people have a positive association with print magazines. There’s a coherent branding experience that goes along with mags (I don’t think this is more true for print than online).

Cameron Adams Web Technologist, The Man in Blue
Sally Carson Interaction Designer, Yahoo!
Dustin Diaz User Interface Engineer, IMVU
Jonathan Snook

Why does a site fail? Because one of the three components is not balanced correctly. If any one of those is too large, then one of the other three is failing. Do your uses really need tagging? They may not even know what it is you’re trying to convey. Or you may have a whole lot of users, but if you’re not making any money, you’re failing. At Yahoo! there are over 1,000 developers. An agency may have 10. If you’re a freelancer you may have only yourself. If you don’t know the objectives, you’re set up to fail from the beginning. Also some good conversation on extreme programming / agile web development.

Technorati Tags: sxsw2007

Business people who don’t understand the technology often over-promise, and don’t have a handle on what’s easy and what’s hard. They can set the org up for failure as well.

Politics: Between business and development there’s always politics. When you don’t have buy-in from everyone involved, you’re set up for failure.

What can you do to mediate teams? Don’t play the game [not sure I agree with this].

Research can be a good way to mitigate conflict: Ethnographic research, business research, tech research.

New blood can be really useful – they can uncover inefficiencies that no one else sees. Through their naivete’ they can have great insights on better ways to do things.

One guy advises: Rock the boat. Even if you’re new. Challenge their assumptions. If they don’t want to hear it from you, you may not want to work there.

Generalists are out of fashion. It’s becoming more common to have highly specialized people who don’t/can’t see across the three streams. Generalists were once the norm. This is more common in consultancies/agencies, since every client has different needs. Now it’s possible/likely for peopel to go into an org and just do JavaScript, or just do PHP. If you want to call yourself a specialist, call yourself a “web specialist” which encompasses so many things.

“T-Shaped” people – a lot of breadth for starters, but then gaining depth in key areas. But the danger here is in specializing in the wrong thing.

Small teams are good teams. Even at a big company, small groups of 4-5 people tend to be optimal, where possible.

A challenge of a big org is reducing redundancy, communicating with other departments, getting everyone to jump into the same bed. Spending F2F time with real people makes all the difference. Meals work wonders. Having teams in other buildings is really detrimental.

Loosen up the serious guy. Either that or make him squirm. Either way it’s really funny.

Agile teams: Business, Design, Developers all in the same room. “There’s nothing like breathing someone else’s sweat as the best way to understand them.”

Take every opportunity to talk to users – sounds obvious, but this is critical, and people often forget.

Agile development & extreme programming sound like buzzwords, but they really do work – people really do get excited and involved and it greases the wheels. Gotta go whole hog on the process though. Swap workstations around – one day you’re doing ASP, the next CSS.

15-minute standup meeting every day. Talk about roadblocks, give everyone a quick update on where you’re at. All three parts of the trinity need to be involved in the stand-ups. It builds empathy to hear what other people are encountering. If this meeting goes longer than 15 minutes, you’re doing it wrong. Even if you’re a team of two people, do this Agile Stand-Up every day.

Putting together a great team: Don’t hire people that suck. Everyone needs an innate respect for everyone else’s skillset. Ask interview questions like “What kind of beer do you drink?” and “What do you do outside of web work?” etc. – you need to get as much of a sense for their vibe as possible (before it’s too late!)

If person mentions a lot of drama in their previous workplace, it could mean that they’re responsible for the drama. Could be a red flag (but not necessarily).

[ Running out of laptop juice ... ]

Jonathan Boutelle, SlideShare

New round of religious wars brewing, whether Ajax or Flash is the better choice for interactive web apps, but it’s a false dichotomy. Conversation with someone who’s been in the trenches with both and has built a site that makes use of both technologies in parallel, using the right hammers for the right jobs.

Technorati Tags: sxsw2007

Not either/or, but both/and. All in context of an application Boutelle built called slideshow.net (wanting to become the YouTube of slideshows).

They rewrote big chunks in Flash that had to be re-written in Ajax, and vice versa.

“Good” is a factor of two thing: Good engineering and good user experience. Users: Helping users use as effectively and enjoyably as possible. Speed matters.

Carpenters don’t argue about whether saws or hammers are better. But not simple with decisions like this – not always as obvious which is the right tool. It doesn’t hurt to have both Flash and Ajax running in the same app – in fact it can help.

Final word: Keep Flash on a leash. The web is made of text (gee, I’ve been telling my students this for years – nice to hear this from someone who’s been on the battle lines with both). People can tell when something is running in Flash. Text can’t be copy/pasted. Widgets are non-standard. The user experience is awkward, even with the best designed Flash apps. The SEO story is really bad (since Google can’t see inside Flash). Full screen is a no no. Flash nuggets as best practice. Load time – things don’t tend to load as quickly, and it doesn’t do a good job of chunk-ifying. HTML almost always lighter/faster.

Cheap tricks: In-place editing, attention control, in-page messaging to user, tabs. These things can all be done with DHTML magic (slideshare.net uses both Prototype and Scriptaculous).

From an engineering perspective, you never want to go back to the server when you don’t have to. Keep this in mind up-front – it’s easy to bake this error into your app and it’s tough to get it out.

Flash graphic goodies: Fonts, vector graphics, animation – all things that Flash does much better than Ajax.

Flash multimedia: Way beyond what you can do with Ajax. Output of media, input of media, editing of media. Letting user record audio or video directly into the web page – not possible with Ajax. jumpcut.com – online video editing – amazing use of Flash.

Cool things in Flash – intriguing from an engineering perspective, but hard to find a use for, e.g. Flash sockets – clients can talk to servers, but not vice versa. But who’s using Flash sockets? meebo doesn’t, no one seems to. All are using Comet instead. Local data objects – you can save 100k without asking any permission at all (20x bigger than a cookie). And if you ask the user, you can store as much as you want, which would make your application scream. People tend to delete their cookies, but no one deletes their local data objects – maybe safer (from the web dev’s perspective). Finally, FLEX – very powerful XML declarative language for creating Flash programs. Outputs full-screen applications that look like Win32 apps – but we don’t want that, right? (I’m not sure – see my post on Apollo).

Hiring developers: Tough to find Ajax/Flash crossover artists. Need people who can work comfortably in both technologies without any of the political baggage. It’s hard to find these people – Bouttelle teaches employees both. Get ‘em while they’re young, before they’ve been corrupted by the industry to think Flash is evil.

Jakon Nielson: “Flash is 99% bad.” Boutelle thinks Nielson is 99% wrong.

This is one of those sessions I attended to “open up a circuit” – exposing myself to something I’d never otherwise discover. lonelygirl15 is a narrative story told in brief video segments that has a huge (as in, huge) following. For the first several months of its existence, the story was told as if by a 15-year-old girl video blogging her life, with a story centered around her parents involved in a religious organization called The Order, with sundry spin-off threads involving their attempt to get her to take part in an initiation ceremony.

Technorati Tags: sxsw2007

Fans pushed and pressed and squeezed out clues, and ultimately figured out that the story was in fact scripted – written by a team of three guys and acted by an amateur actress. A small amount of betrayal expressed from a few fans, but almost all of the original viewers kept on viewing even after the truth had been revealed.

Today, the series involves a huge amount of viewer involvement – user-generated videos and ARGs (alternate reality games) tied into the plot, pulling it out in different directions, creating new puzzles for the fan-base. The show has become a phenomenon of TV/internet hybrid possibilities, has pushed UGC in new directions.

The fans are insane. Trying to get behind the truth of the series, a fan once inspected items from the protagonist’s bedroom one by one, looking up item SKUs at Target, WalMart, etc., and determined that the actor must live within 100 miles of all of these stores. By triangulation and using maps on those store’s web sites, the fan determined that the show must be shot in Tempe, AZ. They were wrong, but still…

The whole thing strikes me as “some people have way too much time on their hands,” but I hate that expression, since it’s been used against me and probably sounds judgemental. Maybe I’m just too old / out of it, but it’s hard to imagine following this thing. Still, fascinating that so many people do, and interesting to see new ways in which reality / documentary / life-blogging are being blurred.

Taking one for the team here. Didn’t expect to learn anything new at this one, and didn’t, but since I’m teaching HTML to journalism students, thought I should be at this one. Mostly reiterating the struggle: We all know what we should be teaching, but practical constraints and .edu politics make it tough to get enough leeway to teach things the right way. Also a huge entrenched problem of HTML teachers not feeling the need to teach standards, or to even help students appreciate the subtle glory of semantic, well-structured documents. Schools want to go straight for the design and wizzy jugular before the basics are in place (felt like they were describing my life here).

Technorati Tags: sxsw2007

Teachers tend not to keep up with web technology – way too many teachers still teaching HTML rather than XHTML, or just going straight to teaching multimedia rather than at least starting with standards.

70% of jobs asking for XHTML and CSS skills (This is a subjective estimate by one of the panelists, not a hard stat). Not HTML 4.1. Responsibility to prep students for the real job market.

Think function, think message. Start with content/information structure. For some educators, thinking about semantics before starting on design is a huge paradigm shift. Essential to think about structured content first. Design/artistic direction comes later. This is how you get control of your code.

What makes a good web site? Because it makes money? Or because it has influence? Or because it looks cool? Our criteria:

- Understandable to all
- Workable in all devices
- Easy to use
- Appealing to look at
- Good content

You can no longer think in terms of your web site being consumed only by web browsers. And yet we still teach it this way. Need to prepare students to go into industry and create content that will be consumable on any client.

The usual buzzwords:

Separation of markup from presentaiton
Usability & information architecture
Aesthetic appeal
Accessibility
Interoperability
Internationalization

Students must be exposed to all of these concepts – spend time on each. We forget to teach students what a page of good, clean, semantic markup looks like. This stuff is holding up the rest of the universe.

Teaching it right begins with knowing it right:

- Keep up to date. Insist on adequate training.
- Exchange tips with your peers and coleagues
- Encourage reluctant colleagues to accept change.
- Choose textbooks that thelp you teach standards-based thinking
- Recommended books
- Your students may be skilled users of the Web and might know more than you do about certain things. Learn from them.

Understanding the Impact:

- Industry demands Web standards knowledge
- Are your students going to be employable?
- Students who want to learn standards may go elsewhere if your program isn’t meeting their needs.
- A reputation for turning out industry-ready students may have positive impact on your faculty/department budget.

Resources:

• Time lapse design process
• W3Schools
• CSS Discss Wiki
• Real-world CSS Zen for your site

Christopher Fahey, Behavior
Liz Danzico, Daylife
Khoi Vinh, The New York Times
Brant Louck, World Wrestling Entertainment

Fairly fascinating panel discussion re: Class-ism in design. Not particularly practical except for full-time designers working for clients from all over the socioeconomic map. What is the mystique of elegance and quality conveyed by good design? Why are so many hugely successful sites (craigslist, ebay) so badly designed, or barely designed? Do highly designed sites convey elitism to the masses?

Technorati Tags: sxsw2007

How many got here by airplane? How many flew first class? Airplane is one of the few places where class is made explicit in our culture. Sometimes we’re all equal – like when it’s time to get frisked/degraded.

craigslist, ebay – people look at sites like this and think “It’s not designed” or “It’s designed badly.” Well, maybe there’s a class system here – maybe the sites are designed for another class of people, not for the “elite designers” in this room. Last year at SXSW designers developed a free redesign for Craigslist, but it has not been adopted [I've personally talked to Craig about this - he said there's no interest, either from his staff or from craigslist users - while we all thought the redesign was a huge improvement, the staff thought the redesign was "amusing."]

Why talk about class? Because it lets us talk about education, economic power, cultural literacy.

When we think about class we think of a wealthy aristocracy, vs. the working stiffs – the class warfare structure. But the American mythology is that we had a revolution to escape from the aristocracy of Great Britain, but this is b.s. We don’t talk about it because it’s a dirty word. We use euphemisms. Instead of talking about good/bad design, we talk about blue collar / white collar; popular / underprivileged; Joe Six Pack vs. Latte-Drinking, Volvo-Driving, Sushi-Eating, NY Times-Reading …

Marketers talk about SES (socio-economic status) – which TV shows appeal to whom?

Many people think they’ve transcended class – they’re in Class X. “Oh, I can drink Pabst Blue Ribbon ironically. I can wear shorts to work…”

Aspirational design: Lending the mystique of a higher class to a lower class. Walmart may market a Tiffany look.

When designing, do you design for yourself, or for your audience? How can you get into the shoes of someone whose class experience is different from your own? Do you respect your audience? Are they your equals?

NY Times designer says they never talk about class: They talk about effective storytelling, talk about how to make a button findable. But World Wrestling Fed. designer (formerly designer for Spin Magazine) says they talk about “our guy” – the archetypal WWF viewer. “Will this picture of a dude with toothpaste on his chest make ‘our guy’ uncomfortable?”

Within the wrestling industry they call their consumers “marks” – they’re designing to their marks. Smarter fans are aware that they’re called marks and they’re fine with it. In cities where the smarter “marks” live you can do more stuff that pulls back the curtain on wrestling.

NY Times designer: If you become too conscious of class, disrespect your customer, distance yourself from customer, you’ll do damage to your business.

Sites that market to the lower end tend to rely more on statistical methods – which version of the mag cover sold more copies? It’s out of the designer’s hands. At the higher end it’s the opposite – less democratic – designers have the final word. Steve Jobs is not polling users to see how they react to new web designs – he just hires the best designers. But not exclusively true – some high class designs take analytics very seriously.

Do you move towards your audience, or draw your audience closer to you?

It’s moving like the evolution of TV – we’ve gone from Starsky & Hutch to Lost and Six Feet Under. Because designers stopped looking down on their audience. TV’s gotten a lot better…. web moving that way too.

The language of design: “The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.” -Paul Rand

Class X is an emerging class, and it’s based on design culture. Business Week and business schools are focusing on design. “Interior decorators” are becoming “interior designers.”

Web 2.0 and user-generated-content: The cathedral vs. the bazarre. People making more and more themselves, not relying as much on design from on-high.

Adaptive Path questioner: Vernacular design (myspace is considered low class but is an expresssion of what the people are doing when given design tools). Are people who execute upper class design excluding the lower class?

Question: More fun to design for Spin or for WWF? A: More fun selling to wrestlers, because you can give them big meaty fonts, since they’re dudes.

Designing for another audience: How do you stop outside of yourself – must respect that other audience. You want to reach the fans, and you have to find a way to do that.

Kent Brewster Technology Evangelist, Yahoo!
Sergio Villarreal Pixel Pusher, Slide Inc

This one took an unexpected turn. Thought it would be about all of the funky work-arounds we take to accomplish this and that – and whether we should feel guilty about them – but discussion about screen scraping and Yahoo! Pipes segued naturally into discussion about implications for copyright and whether it’s enforceable. Session ended on ye olde “Copyright is dead” note, compelling arguments made. No one felt cheated; good conversation.

Technorati Tags: sxsw2007

Screen scraping for Peace (or at least understanding)

Mashing up the war | spiffysearch: Sucking the juice out of Yahoo! Search.

Look for JSON returns from Yahoo!, Flickr…

How to enforce copyright? All this mashing up, RSS feeds not returning headers relative to source, nothing forcing anyone to give credit… there’s going to be a blow-out when some big company gets freaked about how their content is being re-used.

Predictions:

JSON everywhere as a visible/viable competitor to RSS.

Intellectual property is a cquestionable concept. A fuzzy thing getting fuzzier. The only commodity left is human attention, and IP doesn’t work with the attention economy.

Suddenly, everything is hackable. Many resources out there to do your screen scraping, run it all through Yahoo! Pipes, everything is mashable, credits fall apart.

Recommendations:

Bloggers: publish that JSON feed now. Developers: build that JSON aggregator and become the next Feedburner.

Content producers: Don’t stop writing. Difference between a writer and an author: A writer is someone who writes. An author is someone who at some point has written something. The web likes writers, not authors. It likes fresh new information. If you try to restrict the way your content is consumed, you become The Enemy. Look sharp, or the eweb will cannibalize you for spare parts.

Within Yahoo! there’s a “porn palace” – a group of people in 6’8″ cubicles, constantly reviewing and pulling content, banning accounts, just keeping kiddy porn out of Yahoo! Groups. YouTube has a similar group keeping horse fisting videos off the site. This requires an army of humans – imagine what it would take to monitor copyright.

Up to now, the skills required to do mash-ups was restricted to a technical few. But now tools like Pipes make it so easy, so available to anyone, that copyright is dead. Or at least impossible to monitor/enforce.

What happens to people trying to make money off content? They’ve been fighting that struggle for years and it’s getting worse. The people who are going to make money are the people in this room – the hackers/aggregators.

There are copyright laws to protect us, sure, but they’re being totally ignored, and there are no means to enforce them.

Cory Doctorow started giving away his content and wow – still ends up making money. It’s very tough for an artist to be paid even through the traditional channels. Chances of ever earning out your advance or making money from music is infinitesimally small already – what will really change?

Technorati Tags: sxsw2007

Rules for developers:

#1) Ignore the betas (of all browser releases) – the first versions tell you nothing and you tie yourself up in knots wondering why feature X isn’t there.

#2) Know your adoption rate – how much should you care? At under 10% marketshare, “It would be nice.” At over 10%, “You have to deal with it.” IE7 adoption has gone from 0% – 30% between Oct. 06 and March ’07. Which is really nice for developers. Part of this is due to forced upgrades via Windows Update. IE6 took a year to lead. IE7 will take about 6 months to lead.

#3) Take inventory. Look at the “back of the milk carton” to see what’s missing. CSS3 still in draft (though Safari and Firefox already implement partially). Text shadow, multiple mbackgrounds on one element, auto-generated content (not sure what this means). Shows looonnng list of squished IE6 bugs – life is better. 41 big IE7 bugs outstanding.

#4) Keep ‘em separated (referring to IE6-specific CSS hacks). Old IE6 hacks are now ignored (underscore hack, star hack, child selector hack, all ignored by IE7. Use conditional comments.

#5) Kick Ass.

New Features:

In IE7: :hover on block level elements, alpha transparency via PNGs, attribute selectors, fixed background postiioning, more up -t-date CSS2 support (IE7 is the browser MS should have had five years ago).

Alpha PNG support: Simple method for IE6 compatibility.

O’Reilly’s CSS Cookbook site – example of alpha PNGs in menu gradients (see how gradient covers the whole button set as a group). Create color shade with opacity to ~10% and save as PNG. So there’s just one alpha png, applied for each button with a different level of opacity. You can use this same technique to handle the rollover colors.

Dave Shea’s Site: – Uses alpha transparency to have site logo change color various pages of the site – pick up a color from feature image and drop its value into the CSS for the alpha PNG, so the background color shows through.

Styling forms: New ways to style forms (via attribute selectors), e.g.:


input[type=submit] {

foo

}

input[name=q]{

bar


}

Fixed Backgrounds – Use for navigation headers.

Andy Budd Creative Dir, Clearleft Ltd
Jeremy Keith Web Developer, Clearleft Ltd

Technorati Tags: sxsw2007

What is Web 2.0? “A startup that generates more RSS than revenue.” -Engadget

Web 2.0 is a state of mind. It’s a zen thing. The sound of one hand clapping. -Andy Budd

Conversation Starters:

What do you think of XYZ framework?

Didn’t I meet you at the techcrunch party?

I’m beta testing this great new app that will blow basecamp out of the water.

Web. 20 is so last year. I’m all about web 3.0

Design Aesthetic:

Rounded corners, childish/garish colors, really big type, lots of reflections (everything is “wet”). Lots of gradients and pastel colors.

Logos no longer look like logos – they just need to look 3D – big bold and chunky.

Fonts: Vag, Myriad Pro, Clarendon, Arial Rounded (Clarendon for landwater), Helvetica, FF Meta, DIN, Interstate

Use the Web2.0 validator (this is real!)

Use lots of those little badges that tell the world that you’re XHTML compliant, RSS friendly, etc.

Under the Hood:

Web 1.0 was all about finding what your customers wanted. Web 2.0 is all about giving A-List geeks points. You should give your developers toys: You need:

- Microformats. One or two other people with an obscure extension for Firefox can actually extract and use that data!

- Lots of RSS. If you have an unordered list, be sure to offer an RSS alternative!

- Offer lots of APIs. REST or SOAP required. If you offer one API and another site offers another, someone can do a Mashup!

Hookr.net followed on the heels of chicagocrime.org – uses h-card – super standards compliant!

Use the Google API to determine how manny megatons of nuclear bomb would be needed to decimate a town.

Microformats give you extra geeky goodness.

Really important to put Ajax in there. NOT DHTML! It’s not about that. It’s about sliding, moving, and fading. Oh, wait…

moo.fx and Scriptaculous – nothing like DHTML in the 90s!

Don’t ever learn any code if you can help it – don’t learn Javascript. Just throw in Ajax whenever you can.

Ajax stands for “Accessibility Just Ain’t Exciting.” Blind people and their screen readers are totally Web. 1.0

You NEED Snap Previews – how could you have ever lived without windows popping up over the text you’re trying to read?

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

How to Build Your Own Web 2.0 App:

#1) Come up with a cool name. Drop the “e” – Flickr, Wankr, Twittr, Tumblr

#2) Use .us or .tv. Or break it up: del.icio.us. Or add “get” to the frong like get.vanilla or get.mint

#3) Jaxpad, Muzu, Trimba, Zabooo, rid.iculo.us, Devtube, Yakiddo, Getwatted, Nmix, Tagvine

#4) Get a cool logo: 3D, looks like candy.

#5) Set up a mysterious homepage. Just a signup form, with no explanation.

#6) Set up a blog. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing, just talk about how hard it is to work with service providers. Tumblr.com, edgeio.com – no idea what it is – just a signup form.

#7) NOW you can think of a concept for the site. Take an old idea, add a name and logo, add tagging and a social network, and bam, you’re done. You could just take an existing site and re-build it. We all need another Flickr and another YouTube, right? Just do what they’re doing. Or take two apps and put them together. Put digg and flickr together and you get dickr! Take a popular desktop add like Word or Excel and put it online, so that no one can use it when they’re not connected.

#8) Build it on the cheap. Pay a young Ruby developer in pizza and beer and stock options. Spend all the money on design. If the back-end doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. If you get the A-List designer, people will blog all about it. Besides, you’ll sell the site before you launch, so it doesn’t matter.

#9) Big launch. Throw a party at SXSW, make postcards and t-shirts, then sit back and wait for Yahoo! or Google to call. Just go to their parties and talk in a loud voice. They’ll walk over and give you a check for $10 million.

Social Stuff:

Wisdom of Crowds. Web 2.0 throws away the underlying science of crowd wisdom and just uses the buzzword.

The greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: Take a normal person, add anonnymity, plus audience = Total Fuckwad. That’s community (i.e. a lunatic asylum).

Milk & Two: Brilliant Web 2.0 app. Sign up and tell it what you want to drink. Then when you’re ready to drink, ping the service and it will determine who’s turn it is to make the tea.

Useless Account: Fantastic(ally useless) Web 2.0 service.

Ratings: You need for your users to rate absolutely everything. Have them rate books, rate Firefox. If you have comments on your site, and you should, have users rate the comments as well!

Tagging: You need to rate and weigh everything. Amazon uses this: Trying looking for “Products tagged crap” on Amazon. On cork’d you can tag your wine. On Blinksale you can tag your invoices. How badly did you need that? Flickr solved tag overload by introducing clusters, so you can find tag combos, e.g. “evil cats.” See, absolutely essential.

Comments: “A blog without comments isn’t a blog” / “A blog without absolutist opinions isn’t a a blog. ” / “A blog without tagging, RSS, Digg this links , and add to deliciou.us links, add to Newsvine links… isn’t a blog.”

Wisdom of crowds: “None of us are as dumb as all of us. ”

Should we make a mashup of mashups? Absolutely. That’s why there are APIs of APIs. You can also make new buzzwords by mashing up other buzzwords. e.g. “scrumjax.” You can even farm out the job of creating buzzwords to an ad agency. Use these and we can all disappear into a singularity.

The problem with Flash is that a lot of people can use it. It gets minus points because it’s getting more accessible. But Flash is too mainstream to be Web 2.0. Not obscure or as hard to use as it needs to be.

If one or two of your visitors get it, it doesn’t matter what your boss thinks. Just get that RSS in there. You’re not making sites for real people, you’re making a site for people like us.

Question: With global warming, do you see reflections drying up? No, it’s not a fad. They’re here for good.

Serious point: The term needs to die. Now. It meant something for a while, it had a real purpose when Tim O’Reilly coined it, but … we’re going to throw the baby out with the bathwater as people tire of it. The point is to judge all techs on their own merit. If you need Ajax, you need it. If you need an API, you need it. If you need social interaction, then build it in. But drop the toxic umbrella term. It’s antagonistic to developers because it gives people the impression that it’s actually a new version of the web.