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.

I sent Jim Bacon an email last night asking about why the Virginia Railway Express had not utilized the westbound rail corridor heading out towards Charlottesville (and through a lot of the boom area in Fairfax and Loudoun counties) as a new line. For those of you who follow the Virginia transportation mess, and care about sustainable development, you really should check out Jim’s blog Bacon’s Rebellion Blog and his bi-weekly e-zine of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Jim saying that he had checked out Rotoscope (myspace) (via the link in my email signature) and liked it enough to put up a post on the Bacon’s Rebellion Blog. Looking at the comments, Waldo might have felt that he had stepped into the twilight zone when he opened up his RSS feed this morning.

I think I might need to gather my thoughts and write an article about the VRE…

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.

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.

When Honor by August goes out on the road, it’s generally on the Eastern Seaboard between Boston and Atlanta along the various stretches of I-85, I-95, I-40, I-64 and so on that exist east of the Appalachian Mountains. We, like most bands, have a conversion van. We don’t even have a trailer. All the gear [fig. 1], clothes, and four guys pile into “Murdoch”, our lovable Ford E-150 Conversion Van, and head out on the road.

In the last 16 months of being on the road with the band, one thing has become abundantly clear: we are internet addicts.

It’s not just surfing DListed or Perez Hilton or checking on the Weather. We like being connected. I will put in four plus billable hours from the van per day I’m out on the road. Sometimes, on the long hauls, I can get a full day of work done just from the van. One of the best features of the MacBook Pro plus Verizon EV-DO card setup that we utilize is a nifty feature called “Internet Sharing”. This allows us to take the connection on one laptop from the EV-DO card and create a closed wi-fi network using one of the laptops as a base station.

It’s quite simple to setup. Plug the card in, open the system preferences and go to “Sharing” and set it up like this:

And with that simple setup, three of four band members are online. If it were four out of four band members, there would be serious concern about the proper operation of a moving vehicle, so we shall stay firmly fixed at the 75% mark. This connectivity allows not only the guys to stay in touch with friends, but to also work last minute show promotion, route around traffic accidents (yay Google Maps drag-to-alter-this-route feature), and get some work done as well. I’ve many a time made a poster and emailed it off to our booking agent, or updated tour dates on the website, etc.

Now, this isn’t perfect, as there are some drop out areas. All the major cities are usually Broadband speeds. I-26 in South Carolina is a wireless deadzone. West Virginia into Ohio drops down to dial-up speeds for most of the trip. However, most of I-76 through Pennsylvania is actually quite speedy on the download rate.

At the end of the day, it’s about maximizing the effectiveness of everyone in the band. If you can get three people to put in a few hours of promotion a day, that equates to a lot of exposure for the band, and hopefully a better show draw because of it.

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!

DHH posted about the new version of Ruby on Rails that is currently a preview release. The exciting things are just the simplification of a lot of things, especially Migrations. Also, a lot of the acts_as functionality is being extracted to plugins. Lighter, faster, and more streamlined.

Also, one of the elements of RESTful that was implemented with the semicolon functions has been changed back to slashes, which seems much more logical and proper anyway.

Looking forward to the final release.

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!