Published on Friday, March 23 2007
Readers with an eye for detail will have noticed the “del.icio.us links” widget in the right column of this blog, just below the “reading list.” (I should say, of course, readers who’ve actually been to the blog, rather than just consuming this in RSS!)
That’s generated by a WordPress Widget, which consumes an RSS feed from del.icio.us.
Whenever I add post a link to del.icio.us, it shows up in that list.
Well, according to the del.icio.us blog:
Well over half of the requests seen by del.icio.us are for RSS feeds[.] That means that people cruising around our site in browsers are actually in the minority, when it comes down to raw traffic. Instead, our heaviest hitters include personalized home pages, desktop news aggregators, and even stranger things.
One of the key joys of RSS is that it can be a wonderful cheap API into any site: server-to-human or server-to-server.
Published on Friday, March 23 2007
Should you build your RIA application in Flash or Ajax? On an open source technology or with a proprietary vendor?
At AjaxWorld this week, I was amazed at the number of solutions for creating Rich Internet Applications. On the Open Source front, the usual suspects (libraries, frameworks, languages and tools) were mentioned:
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Published on Thursday, March 22 2007
Last panel of Monday was “Open Content, Remix Culture and the Sharing Economy: Rights, Ownership and Getting Paid” – moderated by Eric Steuer of Creative Commons. (He’s also one half of the duo Meanest Man Contest).
Panelists included:
As is typically of the last panel of the day, I didn’t really get good substantial notes. But there were a few highlights:
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Published on Thursday, March 22 2007
They keynote for day three was Dan Rather, interviewed by Jane Hamsher from Fire Dog Lake (also the producer of Natural Born Killers and Permanent Midnight).
The mp3 of the interview is available from the SXSW podcast page: Dan Rather Keynote Interview.
Apparently the acoustics of the room were quite bad – Rather asked several times for Hamsher to repeat herself or couldn’t understand the question being asked, and also (the lights?) couldn’t see the folks in the audience with questions.
Nonetheless, it was interesting to hear his take on investigative journalism and why there is so little real investigative journalism in the US today.
He was always careful not to exempt himself from his criticisms of “journalism today” – not claiming to be above or beside it but addressing them as problems within the industry he is still part of.
Unfortunately there wasn’t really much time for discussion of his new show on HDNet, or how new media might be able to change the equation of access journalism – I wish there had been more time for good questions from the audience and for Rather to talk about whatever he wanted to discuss- the interview seemed very focused on what’s wrong with journalism today, as compared to some glory days when Rather was challenging Nixon – and perhaps how bloggers could change that.
(Update: There’s a great summary here – really looks more like a transcript! – Dan Rather at SXSW (Dogged) and another here – Dan Rather Keynote Liveblog from SXSW 2007 (Conversion Rater) )
My raw notes:
Q: What was it like to challenge Richard Nixon, when you refused to be dismissed?
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Published on Thursday, March 22 2007
So if my blog posts from Beyond Broadcast didn’t make it clear, I’m a huge fan of Henry Jenkins’ work.
Monday’s panel “Convergence Culture: A Conversation with Henry Jenkins” was simply further evidence that I’m right to be Jenkins Fanboy.
(I ran into Erik after the session for lunch and told him “Henry Jenkins is what I want to be when I grow up.” Iwas only partially kidding.)
Jenkins was interviewed by Danah Boyd, who was smart enough to generally allow Jenkins to talk with minimal interruption (except at one point to chime in – “do you see why I think he’s god!?”).
Here’s a photo from the pre-session setup – really a crappy photo on my part, so I had to mess with the brightness/contrast to make it clearer:
(I was kind of far back in the room, too – but the audio was great).
My notes from the session are below – covered a lot of the same ground as the Beyond Broadcast keynote, but certainly threw in some additional insights.
My favorite: “What everyone’s now calling Web 2.0 is really just fandom minus the stigma”
Lots of links to issues discussed during the session can be found at Jenkins’ blog: “If you attended our session at south by southwest . . . ”
Notes:
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