Way overdue, but I finally have posted my SXSW photos to flickr.

Amy and I gave our panel on the first day of SXSW interactive and it was a blast. It was nice to have it out of the way so we could chill and enjoy the rest of the week. Despite a one day sickness that I warded off (and developed into South By Scurvy upon my return to DC) I was out and about at the conference center and Sixth Street Environs.

Here’s the breakdown of Photos:

SXSW Interactive

SXSW Music

Hotel Café Tour @ Parish

Sara Bareilles @ Parish

Honor by August (my band) at the 7th & Trinity Guitar Hero Stage (photos by our manager Trish on my camera)

and finally, but not least of all, Paramore at La Zona Rosa

The talk that Amy Hoy and I gave at SXSW this year is now online at behyphenated.com. Check it out!

Our talk pitch: Zen masters taught it. Isaac Newton knew it. Scott Adams writes about it. Now you can know it, too. We’re talking, of course, about the manifold benefits of being a n00b (at something). And, of course, about all the good stuff that happens post-n00bishness: the excellent side effects of being good at multiple things, even if they’re not related – heck, especially if they’re not related. So many of humanity’s important discoveries, innovations and beautiful leaps of logic have been made by people whose brains were leveled up by the cross-fertilization of multiple interests and disciplines. Nano-thin specialization is out, a broad understanding of life, the universe, and everything is in. It’s time to synergize, baby. So, reach outside your comfort zone, be a beginner again, and you’ll be smarter, sexier, better at your job… even more valuable. With the wisdom of the ages (and a little bit from modern pundits), we’ll talk about how, why, when, and where you can go about it. You won’t regret it.

Gary Vaynerchuk is one of our clients and a brilliant promoter and people person. While down here at SXSW this weekend, he got fed up with the crap lines outside the overcrowded official parties and sent out a ping:

"Huge free wine event at mariott lobby …. Sorry 16 bit"

...and the masses showed up mighty quick As the article says, it wasn’t on the event listings, it wasn’t an official party, and it got shut down by the hotel for being too loud. And it was one of the most enjoyable parties of the week.

Now that, my friends, is how rockstars do it.

I recently completed two sleeves for some far flung clients (and friends). The first is for Spectre’s new release:

Ryan Hudson, the band’s singer, sent me a variety of lightwire creation photos he made. Mixing it together with the band’s wings logo and adding that to some distressed type worked out well. They just had their CD release party at the Key Club in Hollywood. Not only do they have great originals, but they completely rock a cover of Sade’s “No Ordinary Love”.

The second disc is for my friend Daniel from Texas. He performs under the name of Johnny Citizen and his new record:

I met Daniel years ago at the Dr. Dremo’s open mic and we kept in touch through a few long years on both accounts. He had these great drawings from a friend of his and we put them together into a digipak sleeve.

Anyway, you can get these records from various locations. They’re both great and you should check them out!

Amy and I have been accepted to a new thing at SXSWi coming up in March in Austin, TX. It’s called a “Core Conversation” and we’ll be holding one on our concept deemed “Career Rev 342: Dabble Dabble, Toil and Kick Ass”. The basic premise revolves around a lot of what Amy and I have been through: broad, multi-faceted learning, generally out of the classroom, and lots of nose to the grindstone. It’s also a discussion about how mutliple facets improve team interactions (as opposed to specialists who don’t understand each other’s specialties).

We don’t have any details yet, but we’ll update you as we move towards March.

My business partner Amy just put up a new article at Vitamin that discusses product pages and how to make them not suck so much. It’s a great and quite in-depth read along with some nifty flow charts and screen capture skadoodle action. It’s a great overview on why user experience can make or break a web site and specifically a product page.

The city of Newport News has released the software that runs their website free of charge to any organization or individual. The series of Plone-based products is not the only thing they are releasing. Andy Stein, the IT director for the city, is also releasing the knowledge base, their best practices, documentation, standards, retrospectives/lessons learned, experiences on converting to a CMS, training materials, hardware and software configurations and setup, and various other things. These are released under the GPL.

“We intend to provide a low barrier to entry,” said Stein. “It should be simple and inexpensive to assess the level of fit with an organization’s needs. The same efficiency should apply through the entire product life-cycle: test period, deployment on intranet and/or Internet, maintenance, support and enhancements. ( from govtech.com )

Newport News isn’t a large city in the sense of Boston or Chicago, but it’s a decent mid-level American city with a diverse voter base and has a lot of the problems facing many post-industrial American cities. Newport News Shipbuilding is one of the main shipyards for the US Navy and has a downtown that’s a bit run down. I see this system as being a boon for many cities that are the size of Newport News or smaller that don’t have the funds to get this level of a site online. This also encourages more interaction in government, something that is sorely lacking in the one-way communication of the television era.

The code is available on the city website.

“Wait,” you say, “there’s only one?” Well, no, but there is the one that irks me the most at this moment

I just watched Leisa Reichelt’s presentation on Ambient Intimacy at FoWA London and it started churning my gears about the things that drive me nuts in social networking apps. We’ll call this the Problem of Interconnectivity (or the lack thereof). I’ll snarkily refer to it as “One App To Rule Them All”.

I am not talking about just one social network app that everyone uses and refusing to publish to the rest of the world. Leisa said “People use different types of applications to facilitate different forms of communication…” and I believe that to be true. But there’s a lot of overlap between different applications, and I want a touch point by which I can manage those various applications with ease.

The Problem

I spend a lot of time contributing to various parts of the social graph: LastFM, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Upcoming, Flickr, Dopplr, TripIt etc. etc. Each site has its own login and password. Each site has it’s ups and downs. Some are great and some aren’t so great. But I use them all, and many of them have overlapping datasets. For example, Myspace, Pownce, Facebook, LastFM and Upcoming all have event objects. Dopplr and TripIt contain ancillary information about those events. Flickr later will have photos associated with those events.

This means that I end up with redundant and split-up data. Not just in the publishing of data from me to the sphere, but also via the manner in which that information is commented upon and how feedback returns to me. I don’t mind that it comes back to me in various ways, but it’s difficult to find that comment that was not in the normal pipeline six months after the fact.

The problem, at the core, is one of time—a lack of time. It takes an excessive amount of time to update all of these sites on a regular basis. And it requires that I visit each and every site in turn in order to enter the aforementioned data. That takes about five to ten minutes per site. Adding one event can take 30 minutes or more. Even if I’m bulk loading, I can easily drop a few hours doing data entry.

There has to be a better way.

The Pieces That Exist

There are a variety of technologies that could facilitate these things to come together.

1. OpenID | A distributed identity system that lets you use one login across many applications.
2. APIs (or Application Programming Interfaces) | These are tools created by the developer of the application that allow for other developers to create interactions with that application. The API is a concept and a series of things that can be done. What one does with them is entirely different.
3. DHTML | Dynamic HTML is basically made up of the DOM (Document Object Model), XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is the base of the building blocks for interacting in new ways with the browser.
4. XMLHttpRequest | Also known as XHR, this is the core of AJAX, this allows for things to happen in the background while one continues to interact with the application.
5. AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) | A new technology from Adobe, this allows for people to build either AJAX, Flash, or Flex applications and deploy them across multiple platforms utilizing the AIR framework.
6. Ruby | The Ruby Language is a very easy to use and very powerful programming language. With ERB and some light Apache hacking, you can use this without having to install a full stack framework (such as Rails)

There are a variety of other protocols and technologies that could also be employed (such as Jabber) but due to my lack of experience with them, I’ll provide them only a cursory mention.

A Potential Solution

It’s easy to consume these streams after the data is input via RSS). A great example of merging multiple streams into one is Jeremy Keith’s creation of a collected stream on his site. So we’ve got the ability to pull multiple RSS feeds into one location and display them in a new manner. I’ll write a post in the future about doing this with some lightweight ERB.

But sending to each of the sites becomes a much larger endeavor. The API is a series of potential calls, not a plug-and-play piece of code. So even with some heavy lifting, you still have to manually identify the data fields in the models you wish to update on the remote server and make the proper calls. This is great and horrible in the same breath. The power of the API means that you can, in fact, push the data into the system (in most cases). It’s just a lot of work for little, if any, reward for the developer of said system.

The most obvious example of something that i have difficulty with in this arena is events. I play a lot of shows in my band. I also do a lot with various travel for work. So, I’d want to add a show and have it add a show at MySpace, an event at Facebook, an event at Upcoming.org, an event on Pownce, and update my Dopplr account that I’m going to be in that location.

Or how about a blast status update to Twitter, Myspace, AIM, Pownce, and Facebook? Information is only as relevant as the last post. And if it’s easy to distribute, a more complete view of communication exhibits itself.

I’m sure there are even more potential uses that I can’t envision myself and that is the beauty of the web in that people will use systems in new and unexpected ways.

Potential Pitfalls

Let’s call it out right now. Public enemy number one in this space? Spam.

Any system that lowers the barriers for the mass push of information very quickly enables the spam attack that everyone dreads. Spam, however, is subjective. I think 99% of us would agree that penis enlargement and “Get your free viagra now!!!” are a complete waste of time, effort, and electrons. But where is the deciding line? If I post a show to my network is that spam? If I post about a web conference is that somehow different? If I’m speaking is it more spam-related than if I’m just attending?

Another potential pitfall is asyncrhonicity. This could be planned for using something like Adobe’s AIR system and intentionally alowing the user to input massive amounts of data into a submission queue. When the user connects to a network, the application begins to sync up with various APIs in succession. So that could be a benefit over a pitfall, but covering user expectations would be very important. Does it sync automatically? Does I have to hit a button? Does it save previous syncs? What happens if there’s an error in the sync? What if I was really looking for a kitchen sink?

Truly. A potentially insurmountable obstacle. Especially the garbage disposal.

So what next?

Well, after writing this I happened to be reading MetaFilter and saw a post to NoseRub, which claims to be a decentralized social network protocol that lets you sync data between places. It appears to be more of an aggregator as opposed to a publisher as far as can see by reading their about section.

I’m going to chew on this and come up with some visual ideas of how this might work. How would you like to see this kind of application work? Is it even possible?

The Future of Web Apps conference in London was a week or so ago, and I’ve finally gotten the photos online in a photoset at Flickr. Enjoy!

Our client, Gary Vaynerchuk will be appearing on Ellen on Thursday, September 20th. That’s the same day Honor By August plays the Viper Room in LA. Anyway, Gary appears with Jessica Alba.

What a lucky, lucky man.

I got a phone call this morning at 7:55am from my Dad. In typical fashion, I immediately think “it’s way too early for him to be calling unless something is wrong.” I was also still sleeping (yes, I know… SLACKER!)

He had actually just heard my Hyphenated Person in crime, Amy Hoy, on NPR’s Morning Edition talking about co-working in New York City.

You can listen on NPR or the mp3 version (courtesy of Amit Gupta )

Sometimes things just happen in a way that is exactly what you asked for, with just really odd timing. You might get a white Christmas on Dec 26th (happened two years ago). You might ask yourself “where is my beautiful house?” You might get… uh… Well, you know what I mean.

So things just started kicking like Bruce Lee. Honor by August’s schedule is taking off, we’re going to be playing the Viper Room in LA in September, and we’re on the road pretty heavy this fall. We’re also doing some showcases for various labels. And I can’t be on the road as much as I am and really run a creative department at a physical location.

So I’m going to be going back to the world of working for the self. I’ve teamed up with Amy Hoy to rock the world of UI and User Experience. And we’re doing it in snarky style as Hyphenated People. You could say we’re dabblers, or ADD or just confused, but really, we just love learning.

Amy rocked out a sexy site complete with Easter Egg heaven:

Oh yeah!

So, we’re doing some really cool stuff for a guy that was just on Conan O’Brien amongst other people. Lots of exciting cool projects and I get to sink my teeth back into Ruby while working from the van and rocking out.

So, last year on my birthday, I joined a band. This year I quit my job and got a food processor. It’s a quarter-life crisis people. Watch out!

The incomparable Amy Hoy and I are pitching a panel for SXSW this year about being a dabbler. We’re both pretty much ADD dabblers, but this is actually a prepared presentation, not a five person Q&A session gone wrong.

We’ll be chatting about things like

• constant learning,
• why it’s good to have a guitar next to your desk,
• pushing your team members into renaissance-man land,
• and some good “Now Everyone Hug” motivation.

Amy will be recording and I will then spend four weeks “EQing and Mastering” it in ProTools, by which time she will have just put it out anyway, forcing me to resort to releasing the Criterion Collection edition. Of course, no one will notice any significant difference. :D

So, yeah, vote early. Vote Often.

Our client, Gary Vaynerchuk is going to be on Late Night with Conan O’Brien tonight. For those of you who haven’t seen Gary’s Wine Library TV webcast, you are missing out. We’ll be launching a new project with him soon and then moving on to more world domination with the man.

For those of you who missed it, Gary was also recently profiled in TIME magazine by Joel Stein.

UPDATE Here’s the full video from Conan (the NBC site cuts the beginning and end) and Gary was recently featured in Slate as well!

Good news today, the NY Times has an article stating that e-Toys, Inc. has dropped their lawsuit against the great art group etoy. This is a major step for artists who feel they got raped when corporate america liked a name they were using and sued them over it. ALSO, Napster has been reverse engineered. Aww yeah. Mac version here I come.