I’m now in an SXSW “salon”, their formal term for an informal, more interactive conversation about a topic. This one is titled “Friendship is Dead”, and here’s what’s so cool about SXSW: there are 200 people sitting in a circle discussing whether social networks and the internet have changed the way we define our friends and relationships.
The obvious answer is “of course”: people have hundreds of friends on Facebook, hundreds of followers on Twitter, and therefore share information with a much larger pool of people.
But it’s more complicated than that. We think about Facebook “friends” differently than, say, our “best friends”. Or do we?
My DE colleagues and clients alike know that I love the New York Times website. It sets the standard for journalism on the web, and continues to push for betterways to use design to share information with the public.
This afternoon’s panel with Tom Bodkin, the NYT’s design director and assistant managing editor, and Khoi Vinh, design director of the website, was a must-see, therefore.
Bodkin and Vinh don’t quite see eye-to-eye. Bodkin’s clearly more invested in print; I liked his insistence that the print medium has attributes that can endure even as information moves online — that we shouldn’t always try to make print versions more like the web.
Vinh defined the design mission:
Deliver news in as readable and usable a form as possible
Deliver news with maximum elegance and minimum ornamentation
This panel discussion features Dustin Hostetler from Threadless, the hyper-popular crowd-sourced t-shirt design site, Gina Tripani from Lifehacker, artist Jen Bekman (whose projects include 20×200), Paddy Johnson from Art Fag City and Nion McEvoy from Chronicle Books.
While discussing the tools they use for crowdsourcing, Bekman just lamented that Twitter, though her (and the others’) preferred means of reaching audiences, “was getting a bit too big to handle”.
Trapani made an interesting observation: when you have a strongly devoted and involved crowd, there’s a risk of homogeneity, or of creating an “echo chamber”, in which popular ideas get more popular and interesting fringe ideas are muted.
I’m in LAX airport as I write this, held up from getting to Austin, Texas, and the South By Southwest conference as a result of a flight cancellation.
It’s a bad thing in that 11 hours in an airport is excruciatingly boring, but a good thing in that it gives me time to give some background on SXSW — since I’ll be blogging about it here quite a bit in the next few days.
(Oh – who am I, exactly? Briefly: I’m a producer at Digital Eskimo with a background in web, journalism and new media.)
SXSW began 23 years ago as a music conference, but wisely expanded into a media conference about a decade ago, adding a film festival and an interactive sub-conference to their schedule.
Our first DE Talk* speaker was Sohail Dahdal: an award winning filmmaker, new media artist and interactive designer. He’s been described by AFTRS as “a leading force in bridging the gap between the new forms of interactive multimedia and the traditional art of filmmaking.”
Sohail spoke about one of his recent projects: the online component of First Australians; a powerful, moving and innovative online experience that compliments the historically important documentary series screened on SBS in October 2008. If you’re interested in the process one must go through to get a large scale online production off the ground through funding bodies like SBS in Australia then the Q&A at the end will be of particular interest.
We are also looking to help Sohail and SBS spread the message that this tool is for Indigenous Australians to tell their stories. There are great features allowing the uploading and editing of stories. So get the word out. We’d also like your help in letting people know about this, all Aussies need to interact with this and learn more about this country’s past so …
*Digital Eskimo is hosting a series of fresh and stimulating talks to inspire you. We want to create an opportunity for people with a passion for design and sustainability to gather, listen to a short talk, have a lively chat and take away new ideas to spread through our community.
The eskimos wanted to contribute in some way to the Victorian bushfire effort and decided we could help by sending more people over to the Red Cross Bushfire Appeal. So we’ve been beavering away in between projects on this little DIY Bushfire Appeal widget (its not a Red Cross initiative).
The widget asks people to pledge an amount (which is recorded) and then links them across to the Red Cross site where the actual donation occurs with 100 % of funds going to the appeal.
You can see our appeal in action on the right. Feel free to donate!
If you’d like one for your site please email us and we’ll modify it for you and send you one to embed. You can then edit the amounts and so on easily with a text file.
With hundreds of lives destroyed by the fires they need every cent we can muster so the appeal is far from over. It would be great to have your support as the victims begin to rebuild their lives.
Last night’s greenups was a great success with well over 100 people cramming into the Falconer for a four hour jam on all things green. It was great to see lots of familiar faces, a few old friends and to meet new green people from incredibly diverse backgrounds.
It was exactly the kind of mixed crowd we were hoping for and showed just how hungry Sydney’s green ‘movement’ is to connect with like-minded people who are passionate about sustainability and the green change we’re all a part of. (We gave just 5 days notice)
A highlight for me was meeting a couple (one of which is an electrical engineer and the other a Doctor) who came to connect with people in the hope that they could utilise their skills in green projects in the near future. That was exactly the kind of connection i was hoping to make. Ben and the crew at the uber-cool sustainable cafe, The Falconer, excelled themselves serving local and low carbon beers and tastey locally sourced food.
Work will begin soon on the next one as we take on the feedback and develop a more structured evening to help our green friends connect, create and inspire each other.
