Despite a restraining order and a team of professional bounty-hunters tracking his trail, intrepid Social Studies blogger Gonzo was able to infiltrate SXSWi on Day Two in order to smuggle back the following illicit information:
A few of the panels I attended were the same as StingRay’s. Find his impressions here. I will add a few thoughts to his musings below.
ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy in Here? with Chris Messina
Chris works at Google and has a passion for generative structures like DNA that can grow and rapidly adapt on their own. He reasons that the best platforms/standards are those that are actually really simple so they can be used in many different ways — ways that their creators didn’t plan for. Twitter is the obvious parallel here, and ActivityStrea.ms aims to give us more than even Messina has bargained for.
There are activity streams all around us, but we don’t always have access to them, and if we do, it’s not in a standard format. Banks keep your transactional activity stream and use it for their own purposes and don’t share much of it with you. And certainly not in an extensible XML form.
RSS powered the content web back in 1999. In 2005 Atom was created to replace it and just added a few key pieces of functionality like author and date published (RSS caught up in subsequent versions). The Newsfeed in Facebook is basically the same old thing. We’re stuck in 1999, using outdated models like a paper receipt. ActivityStrea.ms simply adds a few more descriptors, like locations and verbs, so you can tell your phone through FourSquare that you’re “surfing” in “Hawaii” and it will be able to ascertain what you mean and organize the data accordingly. Not only could it match you up with other people in Hawaii, but also other people surfing in Hawaii. Right now the “surfing” verb is mostly unsupported by social networks.
The solution is a universal format so that the FriendFeeds of the world don’t have to manually support each new service (and so we are not dependent on FriendFeed). Activity Streams concept is based on old Soviet ideas about managing activity called Activity Theory.
Social Objects: We need more than friending ability in a social network. We need shared objects to derive meaning. In YouTube the social object is the video but they go futher and allow people to alter them through comments and ratings and even annotations. This shared object is what binds the community together and gives it a shared purpose — watching videos and talking about them.
Flickr has cool interaction model because there are different roles – not everybody has to be taking a ton of pics. You can be a curator of images to make the group you administer stand out from the rest. You can also tune the rules for your own photostream. Rules are set at system level or personal level. This plays into the keynote on privacy, covered later in this post.
The activity streams concept is like semantic web but less ambitious. RDF is considered hard to use. The ActivityStrea.ms approach is to keep it simple and assume nobody wants to use it. But they will eventually find a need.
danah boyd’s Keynote on Privacy and Publicity
Privacy is not dead; people do stupid things online, but that’s how all of us learn. Privacy is fundamentally about control of the flow of information. Set and setting are critical to this equation because they help tell us how to behave in a given situation. What you say in one setting may be totally appropriate, but if you say the same thing in another setting it may draw gasps and shocked disapproval.
Companies can be just as privacy-clueless as people. Take Google Buzz, for example. They did nothing technologically wrong. It was a social mistake; juxtaposing private email with a public lifestream. People wanted to explore Buzz to see if it was cool but when they wanted to leave they thought they had to cancel their Gmail account to do so. Google’s mistake was thinking they could mix the private (email) with the public (Buzz’s stream) seamlessly without alerting the user to the nuances of the distinction. Techies figured it out pretty quickly, but regular users were confused and alarmed. Google found the social version of the uncanny valley.
Social rituals have value. They might not be efficient but they are essential. “A/S/L” was a chatroom conversation starter that was made redundant by dating profiles. Your age/sex/location (and many other attributes) are now listed so what do you have to talk about? The technologists thought they were solving a problem and making things easier when in fact they were demolishing a social ritual that people had gotten used to and had found valuable.
Public vs. private are not binaries. It’s a continuum. People need behavioral context to know which sets of norms to use. Assessments are important but tough to do, especially in the sometimes-isolating technology space. Tech is not the great equalizer. Are teachers allowed to cut loose after class and post pictures of themselves getting drunk on Facebook? Many parents would be upset, but is being a teacher really a 24/7 commitment? Are we becoming less free because of technology?
Just because something is public (online or offline) doesn’t mean people want it spotlighted. How public is “public”? And what if the platform changes? These are questions both regular users and technology companies need to keep in mind as we move forward. Privacy is a minefield of differing expectations, but let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that everyone is an exhibitionist or everyone is a recluse. 99% of us fall somewhere in the middle.
Here’s the first 8 minutes of danah’s keynote speech:
Next up, I snuck into a panel on bloggers vs. Mainstream Media (there’s a topic that’s never been covered before!).
Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies?
Featuring Greg Beato, Henry Copeland, David Carr (from the New York Times), Markos Moulitsas (founder of DailyKos) and Amy Langfield, the panel quickly devolved into a debate between Carr and Kos on the merits of citizen journalism versus establishment journalism. Here’s the play-by-play:
Carr says there’s not as much accountability in a world without the NYT. However, local journalism wont go away. The hole will be filled by someone because there’s a demand. But what about the news we don’t know we want?
There’s more of every kind of news except investigative journalism. Investigative reporting is expensive so it’s been the target of cutbacks in recent years. But if that’s been cut back to the bone why do we need the mainstream media (MSM)? What is their differentiator?
Sourcing standards under attack: Markos attacks unnamed sources and decries the institutional cover that the NYT has due to its age and reputation. Carr defends their sourcing and says Twitter can lead to misinformation and makes rumors get out of control quicker. That sort of rumor mongering is going to exist with or without the NYT. An audience member points out that Twitter is not being billed as a replacement for the New York Times, so it’s a false dichotomy.
The New York Times was a content aggregator long before Google News or Reddit. The difference is that now we don’t need the NYT to curate news stories for us. We can go to the above sites and even create our own custom rules. The audience is willing and able to do more fact checking than before. We live in a decentralized news economy and all sources should be suspect. Are people becoming less gullible? The myth of an objective news source is rapidly dying; everybody has an agenda.
Carr said there might be a large gap in solid reporting if the NYT went away, but insists that the NYT is innovating; they aren’t sitting still. We shall see.