Already intense SXSW Interactive prep is gathering more steam as we hit the last week before a four day explosion of activity that culminates in a couple of parties we've been working on, the EFF + Creative Commons Party on March 13 and the DCI C3 Party on March 14. Both great parties, and the DCI party will be a little more, an event that actually demonstrates convergent technologies - it's actually two parties in Austin and San Antonio with a high definition link so they can share content. That party also has a digital triptych, the world-famous Flogiston chair, and live music by Aaron Hamre and Darin Murphy. A bit of an AV challenge.

I've been so focused on party prep and coordination of a convergence track that I hadn't paid attention to the rest of the Interactive program, but the Austin Chronicle has several backgrounders in this week's issue.

Hope to make time to track non-DCI panels and presentations that relate to my more usual areas of focus - online community and social networking, strategic web, emerging technologies, etc. Suggestions welcome!

Adam Greenfield's new book Everyware is nearing release, and he'll be talking about it as part of the Digital Convergence track at SXSW Interactive. The book is Adam's take on ubiquitous computing, which he discusses in an interview at Boxes and Arrows.

“Everyware” is computing that is everywhere around us, yet is relatively hard to see, both literally and figuratively. Broadly speaking, it is what you get when you take the information processing we associate with the personal computer and distribute it throughout the environment — embedding it in walls, floors, appliances, lampposts, even clothing. I also use the word to refer to the relatively novel interface conventions everyware requires: gestural, tangible and haptic interfaces, and to some extent, voice recognition.

... that lucky old sun got nothin' to do / But roll around heaven all day. [Link]

"This prediction of an active solar cycle suggests we're potentially looking at more communications disruptions, more satellite failures, possible disruptions of electrical grids and blackouts, more dangerous conditions for astronauts," said Richard Behnke of the Upper Atmosphere Research Section at the National Science Foundation.

Neil Clark, curator of palaeontology at Glasgow University's Hunterian Museum, might be called a "decryptozoologist" if he's right about the real origin of Loch Ness Monster sightings. Clark learned that circuses used to frequent the Loch Ness area, and they let their elephants swim in the Loch as a bit of R&R. Elephant's hump + trunk = Nessie. [Link]

Years ago, before every scene in Austin was a crowd, we went to a park - I'm pretty sure it was Deep Eddy - to see the Butch Hancock Band, and Jesse Taylor was there shredding the air with his guitar riffs. I'd seen him before, but this was the night I realized how great and unique he was. I think it was his playing on "Fools Fall in Love" that put me over, and the fact that I can still remember that night after 25-30 years says something. Back then we spent a lot of time around live music, and most of it is a blur to me now. And I wasn't responsive to the country/folk/songwriter strain of Austin music, but I looked for opportunities to hear Jesse play again. Sometimes those opportunities found me by accident. One year during SXSW, as I was walking from the convention center to find my parked car, I heard an amazing acoustic blues coming from a building across the street, and when I rounded the corner, I saw that it was Jesse, just playing for the hell of it.

Jesse Taylor died March 7. [Link to memorial page .]

"51 Birch Street" is a powerful documentary about a post-WWII American family that, on the surface, appears much like any other. Dad has a corporate job, Mom stays at home with the kids, and the kids grow up seeing only the surfaces of their parents' lives. Many families leave it there, but in the case of Doug Block's family, his mother's sudden death led to a process of discovery revealing a surprising emotional complexity behind the American middle class facade.

It happens that Doug Block is a documentary filmmaker whose last film, "Home Page", explored online journals and relationships before anybody had ever heard the word "blog." He also shoots weddings, where he catches the first moments and mysteries of nuclear family relationships, experience that he leverages for this latest film.

Doug and I met when he was screening "Home Page" in San Francisco, at a Web '98 screening, and later in Austin at SXSW Interactive '99. He's a bright, curious, garrulous guy, a devoted husband and father, the kind of guy who comes from a solid loving home. After watching "51 Birch Street", I can see that he came from a loving home, but a home that appeared more solid than was the case. Doug approaches his parents' story as the mystery it was, for him. The question was, after his mother died, why his father rather quickly announced his intention to marry his secretary of 35 years past and move to Florida. This leads to other questions, and Doug skillfully documents the pursuit of the answers so that the revelation opens doors for all of us. (In fact, I was tearful at the end, and that never happens.)

Doug is screening "51 Birch Street" at SXSW Interactive. I strongly recommend the film, especially for boomers, since I think it's most relevant to those of us whose parents lived through the depression and WWII and raised their kids - my generation - through the 50s and 60s. I think many or most of them concealed their inner lives, sometimes even from themselves, while the kids (that would be us) made assumptions about reality that owed more to our safe consumption of media, especially television, than to our perception of the less palatable real world.

This film's power owes much to the fact that Doug had been filming his family for years, and partly to his mother's extensive documentation of her thoughts in a huge pile of notebooks (there are scenes where Doug and his siblings wonder whether, by reading her private notebooks, they're somehow intruding.)

There will be three screenings of "51 Birch Street" during SXSW Interactive:

• Sunday, March 12 at Alamo South - 5:30 pm


• Tuesday, March 14 at Alamo South - 2:45 pm


• Friday, March 17 at Alamo Downtown - 11:00 am

Doug's father and his wife Kitty will be in Austin for Q&A's after the first two screenings. Says Doug, "People were floored when they spoke after our showings in Toronto and Amsterdam. Especially me!"

Doug will also be on the "Blogging About Film" panel on Monday the 13th at 3pm.

Next Tuesday, March 14, the Digital Convergence Initiative of the Texas Technology Corridor (DCI) will host an event that's been in development now for almost six months. Originally the plan was to create a Digital Convergence track of programming for the SXSW Interactive Festival as well as a convergence showcase on the floor of the trade show, but we had ambitions for the showcase that would have been hard to realize without more time and funds, so we decided instead to hold a terrific party instead.

As we talked about it, the party turned out to be almost as ambitious as the showcase. We hired an events coordinator (the great Red Velvet Events) and pulled together a group of motivated, excited, and very creative volunteers. We also realized that we could leverage the first DCI workshop and testbed, on Adaptive Web Services, to create a prototype high definition feed between Austin and San Antonio. A terrific idea, but this also meant that we would have to host not one, but two parties, one in each city.

The great thing about the DCI crew, mostly volunteers, is that they didn't flinch when we suggested two parties and a network link of the highest quality (which is definitely a convergence item, and something that hasn't been done quite this way before). The project was conceived by Andrew Donoho of IBM, and we're getting help from AVW Telav, among others. We'll have performers in Austin and San Antonio, and they'll all be performing for both cities. We'll also have other multimedia jazz, the results of the Mobile Content Festival, and Brian Park's Flogiston chair experience.

If you want to join us and you won't have a SXSW Interactive badge, go to http://dcitexas.org/rsvp to sign up. You can also note your intention to attend at upcoming.org.

Brian Oberkirch, Evelyn Rodriguez and I were all involved in online responses to disasters (Southeast Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina). Evelyn was vacationing in Chi Chi, Thailand when the tsunami struck; Brian was living in Slidell, Louisiana when Katrina struck; and I worked with online initiatives that followed both disasters (blogging at Worldchanging and helping coordinate the Katrina PeopleFinder Project). We're going to talk about "Blogging v Disaster" at one of SXSW's "geek lunches" on Tuesday at Manuel's in downtown Austin. Specifics are posted at Upcoming.org, where you can rsvp.

Jon Lebkowsky, Jon Barlow, and Richard MacKinnon at EFF/Creative Commons party during SXSW 2006

I took time yesterday to put up SXSW Interactive 2006 photos. Interactive was big this year – I'd estimate twice the number of registrants as last year, far more diverse than the "usual suspects" we see every year. When we set up some business sessions for the Digital Convergence Initiative's track, we weren't sure there'd be interest given the blogging/design focus of SXSW Interactive's usual crowds, however those sessions – in fact all of the DCI's sessions – were packed. (I'm pleased to say they were all very good, too - and that's not just my assessment. People were stopping Alex Cavalli and I in the halls to tell us how much they were digging the track!)

I think many attendees were in business, and of those, many were entrepreneurs or operators of small to medium enterprises with an interest in convergence and/or "Web 2.0." My general sense of the crowd was that they were smart, creative early adopters, and that their sense of something happening was not about exploiting trends to build individual wealth. Even those who were interested in making money were thinking about more sustainable practices than the usual MBA-driven build-and-sell approach.

That might be a reflection, in the biz realm, of Bruce Sterling's vision in his closing comments, summarized by Alex at Worldchanging.com:

The challenge, Bruce says, is that the worst people in the world -- genocidal ethnic mafiosos, fundamentalist fanatics, Washington lobbyists -- are running the show, American government has become the new Soviet Union (ossified, corrupt and widely perceived as illigitimate by the rest of the planet) and things are not good in much of the world. That said, if you look honestly at the world, you see a new story emerging, with millions of smart, dedicated people locked in a struggle to steer us towards a better future using every tool in their power, and that "that's a big story!"

Joi Ito and Justin Hall were shooting video at SXSW Interactive. Here's a sample. After leaving the Mark Warner party, they wandered over to Koriente and shot video of Silona and I (which should appear sometime somewhere).

J. G. Ballard's streamed a few paragraphs of consciousness about modernism. Makes me want to go out and watch the buildings for a while. [Link]

I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser's brilliant Heathrow Hilton. But I know that most people, myself included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry. Architecture supplies us with camouflage, and I regret that no one could fall in love inside the Heathrow Hilton. By contrast, people are forever falling in love inside the Louvre and the National Gallery.

All of us have our dreams to reassure us. Architecture is a stage set where we need to be at ease in order to perform. Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us, even if the protection takes the form of finials and cartouches, corinthian columns and acanthus leaves. Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature and never prepared us for our eventual end.

Derek Powazek and Cory Doctorow post about the Darknet panel I asked J.D. Lasica to put together for the Digital Convergence Initiative's track at SXSW Interactive this year, and they seem to imply that the session was an angry shouting match between audience members and the MPAA's PR person Kori Bernards, who gamely fielded questions and complaints about the MPAA's technology-breaking restrictions. In fact everyone was civil. It's worthwhile to listen to the mp3 that SXSW posted – the session went very well though it was more about piracy, copyright and new technologies than about darknets per se. Kori said that the MPAA's antipiracy work is threefold... 1) working with law enforcement and governments around the world to stop Internet piracy, 2) attempting to educate consumers about copyright, and what you can and can't do, and 3) working to harness new technologies in ways that consumers will dig. She says they're trying to protect artists and prevent the abuse of new technology to steal copyright material. I.e. she said what you would expect, the MPAA party line, without reference to constraints that break technology and prevent fair use.

Kevin Smokler mentioned Paco Underhill's theory that, if retail spaces are used in unintended ways by consumers, it could be there's a problem in the way the public space is presented. He extends that to say that, if large numbers of people are downloading movies and infringing copyrights, that may not suggest that the public is looking to stick it to the man and break the law. Rather, the way we currently distribute content is not working. If the MPAA and its members can't do it fast enough, that's not necessarily the moviegoers' problem. Instead of saying those who download movies are criminals who want to violate copyright, perhaps the MPAA should provide a way to download movies and do so quickly, and legally. Kori: "I think that Hollywood hears your point. I think it's clear that you're the consumer of the future... everybody gets that people want what they want when they want. We also have to protect copyrights..." then she goes on to note that it's an exciting time in Hollywood ("may you live in exciting times"), that Hollywood wants to be accommodating. Hmmm.

Then David Thomas brought up mashups ("an entire industry to be made from people who want to do mashups"). People will pay for the right to create new works from samples. Ian Clarke: how do you determine who gets what revenue from a mashup?

Polycot's Maida Barbour noted that the MPAA (and RIAA) are not necessarily protecting artists. The very basis of representation has to change. Artists have to understand that their rights are not necessarily being protected in the way the machine is working right now. They have to understand what the ramifications are when they sell their works to the status quo vs having control over where their rights and permissions go. How can we better present the reality to artists, disseminate that information so that they will understand just what their rights are...

Oh, hey, I didn't mean to write a whole transcription... my point was that this was a civil exchange, rumors of flame and dangnation are hype-o-fied.

"Beijing or Bust" director and Global Voices editor Hao Wu was detained by the Beijing division of China’s State Security Bureau on the afternoon of Wednesday, Febuary 22, 2006. It's not completely clear why he was detained; one theory involves potential prosecution of members of China's underground churches. Join the campaign to Free Hao Wu. Hao Wu's blog, Beijing or Bust.

Google's launched "Google Finance," a financial information portal thaqt doesn't have much more than news links at the moment. There's a cool set of market summary charts for Nasdaq, Dow, S&P, and NYSE - see what happens if you pass your cursor over each market link without clicking...

"Hyperthymestic syndrome," based on the Greek word thymesis for "remembering" and hyper, meaning "more than normal," is the name coined for the condition of a woman referred to only as "AJ." She has a perfect memory. Absent-minded Jon L. is green with envy... [Link]

Everything you wanted to know about Bill O'Reilly, but were afraid to ask - via Nicholas Lemann at The New Yorker. Actually an appreciation – who knew that Lemann was an O'Reilly fan, despite their obvious ideological differences? [Link]

The connection between the scourge of child sex abuse and liberals whom O'Reilly doesn't like – a long list that includes George Clooney, Hillary Clinton, Paul Krugman, and Alec Baldwin – may not be obvious, but, to O'Reilly's way of thinking, both are part of a national climate of permissiveness and relativism. This is manifested in the unprovable, but no doubt painful, loss of the norms that O'Reilly and his audience remember growing up with. The implied connection, anyway, gives O'Reilly a good pretext for the odd but compelling mixture of subjects on "The O'Reilly Factor," with foreign policy one minute, a lurid (one might even say titillating) sex crime the next, and the Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof's latest unfair attack on O'Reilly the next. (O'Reilly is feuding with Kristof, who has assembled from readers' pledges a notional fund to send O'Reilly on a reporting trip to Darfur. O'Reilly recently parried by saying that the Times "continues to ignore the child predator situation here in the U.S.A.") It would be useless to accuse O'Reilly of trafficking in cultural symbols and not substance, because to him cultural symbols are substance. Like every artist, he has created a territory that is distinctively his, and under anyone else's supervision would not cohere.

A notice of Dave Clark's post in a Yuri's Night '06 blog reminded me that the it's almost time for this year's World Space Party (April 12). The blog post says Dave's joined Virgin Galactic:

...I’d like to say how ridiculous it is to sit in an office where the girl to my left is designing space suits that will actually be used in space and the guy to my right talks about re-entering our atmosphere with the type of hackneyed commonality that most people would discuss financial reports.

Polycot pal Seven makes things, so it make sense for O'Reilly's Make Blog to feature video of Seven doing his thing – in this case, showing his latest warezL a musical instrument hybrid and a Jacob's Ladder. The latter's pretty shocking...!

I suppose I should attend this one... Lebowski Fest, a tribute to the film The Great Lebowski, a film that's added a whole new dimension to my life!

As Congress considers new telecom policy, Internet companies are pushing for regulation of broadband operators to enforce network neutrality, described by Declan McCullagh at News.com as "he idea that the companies that own the broadband pipes may not be able to configure their networks in a way that plays favorites--allowing them, for example, to transmit their own services at faster speeds, or to charge Net content and application companies a fee for similar fast delivery." The bill's author, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, is taking direction from the network operators (AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon Communications), who've been more effective in buying lobbying politicians, outspending Internet companies 3-1. [Link] [Link to more background from Declan's Politech email list.]

David Isenberg has managed to schedule his second annual "Freedom to Connect" conference at a crucial time. I'll be there; you should be there, too.

The future of telecommunications starts now; there's a new U.S. Telecom Bill
in the works, there's new networks in Europe, fast fiber in Asia, wireless across Africa and networks a-building in cities and villages around the world. Join the discussion. Shape the debate. Assert your F2C:Freedom to Connect.

The need to communicate is primary, like the need to breathe, eat, sleep, reproduce, socialize and learn. Better connections make for better communication. Better connections drive economic growth through better access to suppliers, customers and ideas. Better connections provide for development and testing of ideas in science and the arts. Better connections improve the quality of everyday life. Better connections build stronger democracies. Strong democracies build strong networks.

Rebecca MacKinnon explains why she no longer trusts Yahoo:

Yahoo! executives keep framing this issue as black and white: Either you're in there and do everything the Chinese authorities tell you without question, or you can't do business in China at all. That is false. Companies can and do make choices. You can engage in China and choose not to do certain kinds of business. Yahoo! has placed user e-mail data within legal jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China. Google and Microsoft have both chosen not to do so. Why did Yahoo! chose to do this? Either they weren't thinking through the consequences or they don't care.

Amnesty International has a "Take Action" page to facilitate a letter writing campaign.

Filmmaker Hao Wu, still detained in China, has evidently been accused of committing a crime, but police won't say what the crime was, or allow him to speak with his lawyer. This updated information is based on a blog post by Hao Wu's sister. [Link]

My pal David Pescovitz blogged a great list from 2spare.com of bad predictions about the future. You can't predict the future, I figure – so you have to settle for creating the future. Some favorites:

• It will be gone by June. Variety, passing judgement on rock 'n roll in 1955.
  
• Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation. Karl Marx.
• It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere. Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1895.
• I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year. The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.
• While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming. Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926.
  
• The phonograph has no commercial value at all. Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1880s.
• Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever. Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1889 (Edison often ridiculed the arguments of competitor George Westinghouse for AC power).