Category: SXSW

Kathy Sierra packed the house again with her presentation.

She said people become kick ass at things they do because they have the ability to practice. Skill is directly related to practice. So even aging brains can learn and grow simply by practice.

Here are some of her ways to get your brain to pay attention.

Use telepathy. This creates mirror neurons. Mirror neurons create a simulation in your own brain of what someone else is experiencing. But sim resolution depends on you. The more you’ve experienced something in reality, the more you understand the simulation. The way you visualize yourself doing something matters. You want to “see” what you would actually see.

Serendipity. Brains are pattern matchers. People feel that things are not random because they find patterns. Add randomness to help serendipity.

The dog ears design principle. Feel more alive by using real-life physics in animation and photographs.

Create joy. Make products that produce joy. To the brain joy is the most important part of the product.

Inspire first person language. It isn’t about you. Get users to talk about themselves. Look at your testimonials.

Tee shirt first development. What does the tee shirt say about someone that they are one of your users? What does it say about them?

Easter Eggs. Leave little treats for your users. Good book: Smile in the Mind.

Tools for evangelizing. Help people justify why they are so passionate about something. (Henry Jenkins talked about this too.)

Help your user manage stress. Nobody kicks ass when they are really stressed. Stress dumps out chemicals that are not devoted to thought. Site: Stresseraser. Makes deep breathing a video game. Help them manage the fight/flight response.

Exercise the brain. The best help to improve brain performance is physical exercise. Work out and get better.

Give users superpowers quickly. Get people enabled. Then speed up their knowledge growth. Expert knowledge is about having patterns. Helping people grasp patterns can help them become expert.

Make your product react to users feelings. She covered this last year. People who are experts reinvest mental resources in new problems that will help them learn more. Experts keep adding new interesting things to learn. They never stop.

Allow people the chance to focus. Devote all of your attention to certain things. Create a culture of support. Get people becoming mentors. There are no dumb answers. Encourage answers. Don’t insist on inclusivity. Experts can talk to experts without having to mentor newbies but somewhat advanced newbies can mentor complete newbies.

The online world has raised the value of real things. It’s all about the package. Unboxing your package is the new experience. The physical object matters. Etsy. Make. Chumby.

Her guest which she hyped the whole time up to now. The guy she says it kicking it big time. Gary of a wine tasting show. What Gary does is make his viewers entertaining, which kicks ass.

Reading over this it is pretty choppy. I wanted to get down her main points, but without her visuals and her explanations it doesn’t tell you a lot. It’s worth the price of a conference to hear her speak, if you ever get the chance.

More SXSWi photos on Flickr.

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Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is interviewed by Sarah Lacy from Business Week.

A question was about how Facebook was playing out in a real world scenario. They mentioned using Facebook to organize a revolt in Columbia. Zuckerberg also mentioned how people in other countries use Facebook to keep in touch with people all around the world.

Are there things you do to help people? Not really, except that to help people communicate. Sarah told tales about Mark when she first interviewed him that got a laugh over his inexperience. Back to helping people. He says they are trying to built the infrastructure to help people solve problems.

Facebook has launched in Spain, Germany and France will launch tonight.

He thinks there will be some platform in the future, whether it’s Facebook or something like it, that will connect all the people everywhere. They talked about the type of organic advertising that he wants to see on Facebook. Where the things people naturally want to talk about become a revenue stream for ads. Mark did say they may have gotten started on the way they are doing this a little bit wrong. He said Beacom was intended to be part of the platform, not the part of advertising. Beacon was supposed to let people take action in other parts of the web and share that on Facebook. He views it as an important trend, but he thinks they communicated it incorrectly.

Regarding Newsfeed, Sarah said that both Beacon and Newsfeed brought up issues of privacy. Mark commented that people need to be able to decide who to share things with. So Beacon and Newsfeed are meant to offer granular control over who sees what on the site. He said Facebook needs to give people more control.

He repeated a number of times that the company wasn’t thinking about making money per se. They were focused on building a platform that helps people communicate in a whole new way. He insists that this is what the company is all about.

The audience reacted negatively to a number of things Sarah did and applauded a couple of times when they felt they had put her down. I don’t know if this is some old animosity or they just didn’t like her style of asking questions of their hero Zuckerberg. She finally gave up the mike to questioning by the audience. Wild. Seems there had been a lot a Twittering about how she was doing before the audience revolted aloud.

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This panel features Rich Baraniuk (Rice Univ) Melissa Hagemann (Open Society Institute) SJ Klein (OLPC) and Erik Moller (Wikimedia Foundation). Each panelist introduced him/herself and told how they became interested in free collaborative textbooks. (Hint to Erik, a monotone is a big yawn and irritating, too. I don’t have a clue what he said.)

Klein said he sees computers as communication devices and libraries. In the rural and developing world, people don’t have books. With OLPC, the only barrier to delivering books is a licensing question.

Rich said things are coming together in this area because of 1) technology such as digital downloads, 2) creating in lego blocks of material for recombinable objects, 3) intellectual property licensing, and 4) the development of quality control mechanisms. He showed an example of a “content lens” on a page that helps you evaluate the quality of particular content.

Rich talked about print on demand (POD). He showed a site with a hundred modules for print on demand for a music curriculum. POD can create almost professional quality textbooks. This saves a great deal of money. Erik also talked about print on demand. This time I got about one word out of three: empowering educators was something I heard. I could see the Wikimedia Educator Collection he had on the screen, which looks like a good resource.

SJ mentioned that POD documents can be instantly updated when errors are reported. He thinks publishers should see themselves as the curators of information. Rich mentioned that publishing is becoming unbundled. Specific companies may develop for just copyediting or just shipping. He suggested the way Red Hat adds value to the free Linux OS, so should publishers provide value added to the content they publish.

Rich said there is an Open Access Declaration that is pushing scholarly publications to be open licensed. He thinks there may be a similar declaration around open textbooks. (Cape Town Declaration) One of the Cape Town Declarations is that all publicly funded education materials should be available freely online.

Delivery of knowledge: collaborative transcription of video, collaborative editing, collaborative notetaking. This means no individual authorial rights. Blurring the role of teacher/student/author to allow for mixing roles. Blurring of lines between content containers such as novel/encyclopedia/textbook/etc. Context can be added with open textbooks–now books can be personalized for teaching more effectively. Notes around material are becoming as important as the material itself.

Additional photos from SXSWi at Flickr.

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Jim Benton, Rett Clevenger, Wendy Piersal, Heath Row, Darren Rowse form this panel. Panelists come from DoubleClick, BackCountry, emomsathome.com, AdBright and ProBlogger.

Darren talked about ways to make money on a blog. Direct money using advertising or affiliate blogging is the most common way. (You can also make money selling yourself with a blog.) Google AdSense, affiliate programs like Amazon are entry level ads. You can also sell banner ads, sponsorships, popup ads, RSS advertising, paid reviews (controversial idea), selling merchandise, taking donations, selling membership services or information. He said that every blog is different, so every blog monitizes differently.

Wendy started her blog to document a start up. Then the blog became the start up. She learned from Darren and realized she needed more traffic. She sold herself as a coach to increase her traffic, and therefore revenue. Eventually she realized that she couldn’t write enough herself to do that. She added seven more bloggers and this increased her traffic significantly. Each emomsathome blog is different and brings in different traffic. She uses affiliate ads, some direct selling of ads (lots of work, she discovered), ad networks with Real Girls Media, selling text links in a Google compliant way, and a number of other means.

Jim talked about how his network gets advertisers to represent your site. AdBright serves ads to over 50,000 sites. He says you need to decide if it’s about money or about control. If you want control, use an ad network that lets you choose your ads and that has transparency about how a particular site is doing. AdBright segments ads based on the quality and content of your site. AdBright helps newcomer with online tools, an account manager, placement tips.

Rett talked about affiliate marketing and BackCountry. Affiliate marketing creates a long-term relationship. The blogger knows better than the advertiser where the affiliate ads fit in. The blogger decides what sort of ad to post and where with affiliate marketing. BackCountry looks at affiliates like an external sales program, like Tupperware was in the old days. They look for affiliates that add something to the brand, so they are selective about who they allow to become affiliates. Affiliate programs can be used in the real world, too, in a situation such as handing out post cards at a real event with custom codes and landing pages. Let your affiliate managers know you want that kind of material.

Ad lingo: CPM is cost per thousand people seeing an ad. CPA is cost per action. Tracking involves seeing how many people clicked on an ad and how many people completed the purchase.

Best to work with your affiliate manager to maximize your earnings. It’s a two way street that you must cultivate. Also best to really know your site, what gets seen, clicked, and so on. Wendy gave an example of a spot where she had an AdSense ad that got no clicks. She put an ad for her own product in the same spot and it got lots of clicks. So placement and understanding your blog and your readers makes a big difference. She also said that if you write about a product, disclosure is important so people don’t assume that you are only writing about it to sell it. If you write about products because you really like them, say so. Darren said he chooses not to do paid reviews. Wendy also said her readers don’t like advertorials mixed with content and she no longer does paid reviews.

MyBlogLog provides good info on what people click. Other tools are Google Analytics, Crazy Egg.

More SXSWi photos at Flickr.

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This panel included Jeri Countryman, Dr. J. Strother Moore (UT), Carol Muller, Clare Richardson, Abbie Tittizer (IBM), and one gentleman whose name isn’t in the program. He looked like Quincy Jones and advocated mentoring as a way to get girls into tech, but I didn’t get his name.

There was some talk about the misperception among both males and females that women are less likely to be interested in computer science. Especially among women, this really holds them back. For example, if a woman is asked her gender at the beginning of a test she scores lower than when she is asked her gender at the end of a test. And when a panel is given identical resumes that have the names changed to reflect different genders, a male name is chosen as the best person by both men and women who are doing the judging. So there is a pervasive societal problem to overcome.

The panelists each explained the various programs and approached that their organizations use to reach out to women in CS and IT.

Sorry, no photos of this one. I know you want to see the Quincy Jones look-alike.

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The opening remarks are from Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson. It was run as a sort of Johnson interviewing Jenkins conversation. Johnson began by asking if this was the dumbest generation.

They got right into a discussion of the concept of intelligence and how we deal with this idea in terms of skills, information processing and intelligence in this age of new media. In today’s world, we interact collaboratively and through play, but students are not tested this way.

Johnson asked Jenkins if he ever reacted to new technology with “That’s just stupid.” This is how I first felt about Twitter. But Jenkins said that he didn’t do that. He looked at it to see why people were engaged in it. Why were they doing it.

They talked about The Wire, Lost, and Heroes. The audience favored Lost, but Jenkins pointed out that a lot of Lost happens outside the box, meaning online. There’s a compelling community around Lost and may represent where TV is heading. Jenkins said that he’s amazed by the fan community and the intellectual capability that they show when spending time doing things like discussing TV shows online. He compared it to the lack of creativity and challenge that they face on the job. He sees these new kinds of engagement as a way to express creativity and perform complex tasks that people don’t find in jobs or politics.

Jenkins talked about the social networks that arose around Harry Potter. Bands, social networks, full length novels by pre-teens, political activism and more. These are skills developed around the concept of Harry Potter in a new media world. The impact isn’t the book, it’s what young people did with the book.

The conversation moved to politics and how interactive media has changed politics. Jenkins said Obama’s use of “we” in “yes we can” appeals to young people as something they understand as a part of the way social networks operate. He looks at Obama’s platform like a stub on Wikipedia that we will flesh out together.

Civic engagement came up next. Jenkins described a new kind of civic connection developing through online social games. We now carry our networks with us wherever we go as an online social network. Towns, cities, infrastructures need to figure out how to build social networks for local social goals. Johnson talked about local bloggers who exist in a zone uncovered by traditional media. He worked on a company called Outside In to take advantage of that and provide tools to connect people to other people right around them.

The discussion and the questions after were really interesting. If you aren’t already familiar with these two men, follow the links at the beginning of the post and get to know them. Brilliant and fascinating ideas.

More photos on Flickr.

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