21apples

SXSWi: The Rise of the Blogebrity

Posted by arvind s grover Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:15:44 GMT

The Rise of the Blogebrity

Kyle Bunch Co-Founder, Blogebrity
Amanda Congdon Co-Pres, ABC News/Oxmour Entertainment
Henry Copeland Founder, Blogads.com
Karina Longworth Editor, Netscape
Casey McKinnon Exec Producer, Galacticast
Nick Douglas Director, Look! Shiny!


Copeland: (on blog rankings) “Totally screwed popularity metrics”
Going to look at Forbes Web Celeb Top 25 and Technorati Top 100 – how they are screwed up

To be famous on Forbes, you do not need a lot of hits, you just need to know a reporter. Their #3 blogger only has 80,000 page views compared to those with millions surrounding him.

Technorati #60 has 400,000 impressions where one much lower have millions.

Trying to make it into the technorati top 100 is ridiculous – “it is a piece of crap”

Congdon: it is about where I see them about how often I see them – writing books? Quoted in newspapers? On TV? This his how I evaluate blogebrities.

Longworth: People who get a lot of traffic on their blogs because of who they were before they were bloggers – Arianna Huffington. Film blogs are different – the best film blogger is David Hudson

McKinnon: I only pay attention to video. Celeb video people: Ask a Ninja, Ze Frank. We are considering people celebs as soon as they are in the New York times. Sad because we are new media but we are relying on old media.

Douglas: I like bloggers who give me the stuff I am going to blog about. Just the one step cooler than me.

Video Killing the Blogging Star? Post YouTube is it the end of text-based bloggers?

Congdon: there are still books. TV and books live harmoniously. Most on the panel are video bloggers. Visual medium is more visible making us more recognizable.

Douglas: people come across text blogs by searching for words. Video blogs don’t work that way, but they do give you a public face (people stop you on the street).

Quantity vs. Quality:

Douglas: 600 people watch me. Quality is totally important

McKinnon: quality. Sound and picture quality is essential. We are not professional film makers, but trying to make the video bigger and better looking online is key.

Copeland: If we are just replicating TV we are in trouble. Good to subvery the traditional hierarchy and screw the networks, but the star culture may be harmful. Web 2.0 is about communities and making them better is the real importance.

As a blogger who is clearly not a “blogebrity” it is interesting to listen to these people who are literally famous on the Internet. The moderator is asking them if their celebrity status becomes too much to handle. Jeez, bloggers are that famous?!

Forbest Top 25 only had 3 women on their list. Will we see a bigger shift or is this just a flawed report?

Copeland: those methodologies are flawed. 75% of the celebs on this panel are women.

Right now blogebrities are based on flawed metrics, still using old-world celebrity making, word of mouth of powerful people and those connected to traditional media. Shouldn’t the Internet be able to tell us who is popular with simple metrics?

Ok, my liveblogging steam is wearing thing. I stopped liveblogging this session, but let me tell you the listening was somewhat interesting. I realize that I am not obsessed with blogebrities as a lot of the people in the room are. They are trying to figure out how to make money and how to be famous in the blogosphere – I’m glad I’m not in that position. Me and my three readers are good to go!

Time to go check out the evening events. I’m headed to the SXSW Web Awards Preparty after I drop my laptop back at the hotel.

technorati tags:blogebrity, Kyle Bunch, Amanda Congdon, Henry Copeland, Karina Longworth, Casey McKinnon, Nick Douglas, blogads.com, netscape, Galacticast, ” rel=”tag”>Look! Shiny!, ABC News, Oxnour Entertainment, blogging, celebrities, sxsw, sxswi

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SXSW: The Big Bag

Posted by arvind s grover Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:20:45 GMT

Your registration to SXSW comes with a bag full of free stuff. It is mostly paper with magazines, flyers, coupons, etc. Some free stuff like pins, stickers and other little trinkets. With the thousands of registrants, putting these bags together must be a nightmare. When I went to pick mine up I snuck a peek behind the scenes: scary is the only way to describe it.

technorati tags:sxsw, sxswi, schwag, free, bag, big bag, nightmare

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SXSWi: I Can't Believe You Sent That: E-mail Disasters, Large and Small and How to Avoid Them

Posted by arvind s grover Sun, 11 Mar 2007 20:12:48 GMT

If you don’t know me, I both love and hate e-mail. More accurate, I used to love e-mail, now I hate it. I think it is over. It is no longer effective, particularly in business/organizations. I think there are lots of new tools to do what e-mail might have done somewhat well. Too much to write on that now. Here are the notes from a good session.

I Can’t Believe You Sent That: E-mail Disasters, Large and Small and How to Avoid Them

Will Schwalbe Random House
David Shipley Random House/New York Times
Their new book/website, Think Before You Send

It is not a technological issues, but psychological, anthropological, sociolgocial.

We are not talking about stupid people. CEOs who are insider trading on e-mail; space shuttle pilots who carry on romantic conversation on e-mail,

They showed a video interviewing people about why the love and hate e-mail. Pretty well done. All people in the video showed people who valued email and didn’t want to live without it, but no one expressed confidence in how to use it.

Dominant form of electronic business information and major player in social communication.

Last year each of the speaker received about 50,000 emails and sent about 30,000 e-mails. They were having lunch and both had had bad days. Both realized that most of what happened had happened on e-mail.

E-mails are often too vague, too long, unnatural, or unnecessary.

Email can be an enormous time waster as it creates the illusion of forward progress.

Email is dangerous because it gives us a feeling of action even when nothing is happening – Bob Geldolf

Nothing serious happens in the delay, no people dying, etc (usually).

Causes of bad e-mail, the “why’s”:
1) curse of the new – new in human history. Once we get something new, we tend to use it too much. Using it for things that should be done in person – firing, breaking up, scolding
2) If you don’t insert tone specifically, tone gets inserted for you
3) E-mail is fast, often too fast to keep up with. Volume tone, content, spelling dozens of times a day under intense pressure. Speed encourages sloppiness and that causes problems because words have meaning.
4) In face to face (voice to voice) our emotional brains are constantly evaluating the responses of the other party – email does not have that ability, but lulls us into thinking it does.
E-mail puts people into a state of disinhibition (NY Science Times).
5) E-mail actually eggs us on – more duplicitous, less aware, encourages the lesser angels of our nature – combine with an easy-to-hit send key and you have a problem
6) What works in speech and letters comes out very differently in e-mail
example: “please” – common sense says adding please to an e-mail makes it more polite. A spoken please is considerate, an e-mail please conveys a sense of exhasperation.

Video showing worst things that have happened to people using e-mail. Great anecodote about how an e-mail was sent out accidentally to 38,000 e-mail with a joke when woman was testing e-mail blast software.

8 deadly sins of e-mail:
1) unbelievably vague e-mail – “where is Dave” (which Dave? where physically? when you sent this?) – send this to multiple people and many are confused.
2) email that insults you so bad you have to get up from your desk
3) email that is cowardly. (fire people, drop bombs all while safely shielded, and emoticons that don’t soften the blow; Friday afternoon email to avoid discussing it)
4) email that puts you in jail (“Never talk when you can nod, never write when you can talk. My only addendum is never put it in an e-mail” – Elliot Spitzer)
5) the thank you e-mail – then the thank you to the thank you…
6) sarcastic e-mails – people don’t recognize this. Cornell study shows that drippingly sarcastic e-mails only read properly 87% of time. Sarcasm comes for Greek word from ripping flesh with teeth
7) e-mail that is too casual (Billie, Billster, etc)
8) inappropriate e-mail (4% of Enron e-mails were racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive)

Lesser sins:
- subject lines
- personal spam
- wallpaper

What makes good e-mail?
- love exclamation points
- like emoticons
- like furious e-mails when justified
- short paragraphs
- requests clear at the top
- top posting, not bottom posting
- simple fonts
- let people know when no response is needed
- flag-free e-mails, we’ll decide what is important
- condolences or congrats when proper follow up is coming (good for quick delievery)

Whether e-mail sticks around: the less annoying we make e-mails, the more it will continue to stay in use

Cut each other some slack, evolving too rapidly for their to be style police. But let’s not cut ourselves too much slack, let’s be careful and thoughtful

Their final points:
Think before you send
Send e-mails you want to receive

I can’t believe they didn’t list this, but my pet peeve is trying to schedule meetings, pick a dinner location, etc with 10 people over e-mail. Yikes, it never works. My new lifeline for scheduling meetings is Doodle, a website that super-easily lets you schedule meetings. Use it, you’ll thank me.

technorati tags:e-mail, email, culture, kindness, research, book, Will Schwalbe, David Shipley, Random House, New York Times, schools, education, NYCIST, sxsw, sxswi, emoticons, Doodle, SEND

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SXSWi: Serious Games: Can Learning Be Hard Fun?

Posted by arvind s grover Sun, 11 Mar 2007 17:48:55 GMT

Serious Games: Can Learning Be Hard Fun?

March 11, 2007, 11:30 CST

John Purdy, President/CEO, Red Knight Learning Systems
Lauren Davis, Liemandt Foundation, Hidden Agenda Games
Paul Medcalf, Senior Flash Game Developer, Blockdot Games
Melinda Jackson, Director of Instructional Design, Enspire Learning

Resources on serious games: seriousgames.org gamesforchange.org, elearningguild.org, seriousgamesmagazine.com, seriousgamessummit.com, seriousgamessource.com

book resource: Engaging Learning, Designing e-Learning Simulation Games
– Clark N. Quinn

“Can learning be hard fun?” – central question

You are challenged and it is difficult, but the fun is in that grappling to solve the difficult problem. Similar to a tough professor who made class fun and pushed you to learn more

Q: What are serious games?
A: learning games, educational games, games with non-entertainment purposes

If a picture is worth a thousand words, an animations is worth a thousand pictures. And to take that a step further, a game is worth a thousand animations. – Peter Raad, Executive Director, The Guildhall at SMU

Davis: working with Liemandt Foundation in Austin to develop middle school game on $25,000 (about 1/10 of what is needed). Worked with college students to create contest where the objectives are to design a game for middle school students to learn. Run through Hidden Agenda site. The games are free for students, teachers, parents.
Examples:
MeChem – robot battle game for middle school kids to play against each other. Have to build robots to fight against each other – requires physics knowledge and chemistry knowledge
ELEMENTAL – periodic table Tetris-like game. Have to build compounds to make shapes disappear
Waste of Space – Asteroids-like game where you are a space garbage man, but using real physics properties like velocity, thrust, etc
Algebra Arcage – Pacman-like game that teaches FOIL method. Takes a lot of practice to learn FOIL and this game does that.

Metcalf: from Blockdot games. Game programmer and game play designer. Formerly worked with Cisco to create games that teach. Developed game to teach about wireless networking. Objectives: teach components, teach security types, protocols. Want to make it fun, introduce an environment like outer space. They give different objectives like room sizes, layout, etc that require a wireless network be set up. They gradually introduce new concepts so that player doesn’t have to learn everything at once. Had to design all the levels so that they were fun and challenging without being too much in your face about the technical stuff.

Jackson: (enspire learning) Create interactive learning experiences for mostly corporations, but also some K-12 and universities like Harvard Business School. Learning is about “tell me, show me, let me.” School: a lot of telling, a little showing, not much letting. Games: a little telling, more showing but a lot of letting.

Purdy: Remission – a game developed for teenagers who have cancer (by HopeLab). To learn about their treatments, chemo, radiation and the importance of staying with their medications, etc. Also designed to get them to take care of their help. First person tutor type of game. Starts by getting you to learn how to move, then how to use your weapons, then to fight bacteria, etc. The price was fairly high to develop this game. Give the game away free to teens with cancer. They ask for a donation if you are not a teen with cancer. Young people who played the game showed higher adherence to therapy and meds.

Q to panel from Purdy: if the ultimate goal is to provide learning experience, should it be a 50/50 balance of learning and entertainment?

Davis: Hidden Agenda games are judged on 70% entertainment value and 30% educational value. If it is not fun they just won’t play it so you have to skew to entertainment side and then move education in later.

Medcalf: sometimes you have to compromise a little on entertainment to get in the education, but without fun the game isn’t worth building as people wont play.

Jackson: we have to make tradeoffs. Game designed might not think it is fun, but instructional designer has to force certain issues to be covered.

Jackson: Feedback is one of the most important teaching tools we have. Letting students know what they have done right, wrong, etc. Feedback should be more immediate.

Question from audience: how do you balance the pedagogical/content expert who is a teacher with the person making a game?

Medcalf: At Cisco, the holy trinity of educational game designing: subject matter expert, instructional designer, game designer all have to work together. There is an internal conflict, but it requires teamwork to balance their different expertise.

Question from audience: the “trick them into learning”, coercive rhetoric doesn’t come across well. Why is their a distinction between education and entertainment?

Davis: “Hidden Agenda” is tongue and cheek. Rather than hiding, the learning needs to be baked in or intrinsic to the game. We save 70/30 to get designers to think primarily about the game play and bake in the education. Bad games have “shoot the bad guy now do a math problem!” That just doesn’t make sense.

Question from audience: Are these games a one-time thing or an over and over experience for users?

Jackson: YVille is giving a lot of focus on game play and how much kids are using these programs.

Overall an interesting panel. My only problem (and I didn’t get to ask this) is that most games start with very few rules (Steven Johnson’s explanation). You know how to move the character, but you figure out all the rules as you play. How to get into the castle, how to get more gear, etc. But when you are teaching chemistry, so many of the rules need to be laid out. How does this jive?

technorati tags:games, serious games, learning, education, blockdot, John Purdy, Lauren Davis, Paul Medcalf, Melinda Jackson, NYCIST, sxsw, sxswi, Guildhall, Peter Raad, Liemandt Foundation, fun, mechem, elemental, algebra arcade, k-12, university, college, Hidden Agenda Games, Cisco, Remission

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Too Many Electronic Distractions?

Posted by arvind s grover Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:06:30 GMT

I am Twittering, Mozesing, blogging, texting, IM’ing, calendaring, Flickring, talking, meeting, collaborating, watching and more while I am down here in Austin for SXSW. It has gotten to be a little much and I ended up missing a session I really wanted to go to, Parent Bloggers 2.0. I guess I’m going to have to wait for the podcast of that one like everyone else. Oh well, the next session I am headed to is Serious Games: Can Learning Be Hard Fun?

technorati tags:twitter, mozes, blog, IM, Meebo, 30boxes, Flickr, sxsw, sxswi, parents, games, learning, podcast

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SXSW/Barcamp Austin: Enough Liveblogging

Posted by arvind s grover Sat, 10 Mar 2007 23:19:47 GMT

Ok, have been liveblogging all day. If you think any of my posts were worth reading, please do leave a comment so I know whether I should continue or not. I am going to go drop my laptop back at my hotel now so I can attend some of the evening events. Will carry my camera I think, but not the laptop bag and the SXSW schwag bag. I will have to post pics of the schwag bag later, I caught some photos of the storage space where they keep them. You wouldn’t believe how many were there…

technorati tags:sxsw, sxswi, liveblogging, schwag

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