hesketh.com CTO Steven Champeon Recaps SXSW 2000 Interactive Festival

OK, gang, I've been home for a few weeks now and have had sufficient time to reflect on the events of SxSW (South By South West), which I recently attended. SxSW is a conference for music, film, and -- you guessed it -- "Interactive", which means that the usual Web geek crowd was in attendance, along with a whole bunch of - to me - new faces.

< http://www.sxsw.com >

I spoke on Jeff Veen's "User Centered Design" panel with Peter Merholz (epinions.com, peterme.com) and Katherine Jones (milkshakemedia.com) and I think it went well. My role was that of curmudgeonly programmer- type who was surprised at all the fuss being lavished upon the idea of "user testing" and "taking the user's needs into account when designing a Web site", because, frankly, that's the way it should always be done, by default. Anyway, it went well. No new insights, really, just the usual advice:

don't line-item anything that is absolutely vital to a project's success, or someone will try to cut it. (would you line-item "telephone overhead" or "electricity"? don't do it with testing...)
always take your audience into account when determining the site design, UI, layout, functionality, etc.
involve the audience if possible (through user testing, focus groups and other tactics)
good design brings techies and visual and words people together during the process
a site isn't a book or shrink-wrap software program, it has the potential to evolve and change unlike anything we've ever known

On that last note, nothing in recent history has highlighted the ever changing nature of Web sites as much as the "weblog". Call it hype, a new brand for a old thing, the future of online publishing, the latest in a long line of sites that build a personal brand, whatever. Forgive me for the gratuitous use of domain names in the following sections and above, but I want to highlight something here.

I attended the "Weblogs panel", featuring our own Jason Kottke (0sil8.com, kottke.org) and Matt Haughey (haughey.com, metafilter.com) along with Meg Hourihan (megnut.com, blogger.com), moderated with an iron hand by Derek Powazek (fray.*, powazek.com, kvetch.com, etc.) I showed up mostly to stir things up, to ask why everyone was so bent on taking conversations and in-depth exploration out of interactive forums like this one and out onto the larger Web. Rant, rant, rant.

I lamented the way that the weblog was basically taking away from the existing communities, and in the process, building personal brands at the expense of ongoing conversation. I also complained about how the weblog was making it difficult to follow conversations, because there's often a shared understanding among daily readers of a certain group of weblogs that is lost on the new reader. I don't want to have to chase down a conversation by visiting fifty different sites. I don't like MTV, for the same reason. Too many jump cuts, not enough substance. Or so I thought a week ago. Browsing the various blogs of the folks I met, looking for perspectives on what happened at the conference, I was confirmed in that belief.

I played with the idea of making this rundown available as small and loosely connected snippets on twenty different pages, modeled after a few choice weblogs. But I realized that few people would notice. :) Maybe if I made it available with greeking? Oh, never mind.

The panel was interesting in a couple of ways. One, it seemed that most criticisms of weblogs contained the implicit idea that they are all "a snarky comment and a link", over and over again. On the other hand, it seemed that much of the praise afforded weblogs had to do with their "efficiency", or the appeal of a short-form, low-investment Web content format (for both the reader and author).

Oddly, neither of these had much to do with my main complaint, as I've found a lot of great information on weblogs, and even some very detailed, if somewhat single-sided, discussions. My second biggest complaint about weblogs is that they assume you read them day to day. If you want to find something again that you think you may have seen on thisblog.com or thatblog.net, how do you find it? (I can hear the webloggers now, saying "but we're not Yahoo, we're just doing this for ourselves". Oh, okay. So a weblog is just a bookmark list organized by date the link was found? Heh.) And for every salient detail you probe at, looking for a solid place to launch an attack, there's an exception (or a dozen) to it.

weblogs destroy conversations (counterexample: metafilter.com)
weblogs are all snarky-comment-and-a-link (lots of counterexamples)
weblogs don't take any time to make
weblogs aren't searchable (many are) etc.

It's worse than trying to arrive at an understanding of postmodernism.

I've noticed since SXSW that the weblogs I read usually belong to my friends (Jason, Rafe, Peter, for example) and now that I know a few of these people a little better, it's easier to read them. As Heather Champ points out, it's easier if you can imagine the author reading the 'blog aloud. It's even easier if you know the person from real life, or -- and this is important -- from online communities. Even on the Web, which is supposedly so much richer than email, tone matters. I'm sure McLuhan would have something to say about this...

Ben Brown (benbrown.com) practically had a nervous breakdown in the panel, when he admonished the webloggers present to stop killing the Web, to write and design full speed ahead, to pour their hearts into it the way he does. It made me feel like I was witnessing something amazing, like Neal Cassady driving. Ben (red feather boa, studded dog collar and all) is my new patron saint for the Web.

Jesse James Garret (weblognation.com, jjg.net) remarked that the Web is "not a zero-sum game", where one form of media simply replaces the foregoing, to which I replied that for some of those who we used to look up to for new and amazing things, it is. Jason Kottke served as a handy example - from the intense weekend a month when he used to produce a new 0sil8, he's gone to daily updates at kottke.org. So, for Jason, it is very much a zero-sum game. And where some decry the death of ten thousand word essays or finely crafted Web site design concepts, or where I bemoan the loss of community that I find via email (or, in the old days, via Usenet) the game is already noticeably thinner on both of the foregoing. How many fray.com stories have been posted since Derek started his blog?

And, because I know I've opened myself up for criticism here (it's been more than two years since I wrote anything for jaundicedeye.com) I want to point out that I spent those two years doing my best to build the webdesign-l community and my company, wrote a book, etc. So I know it's never as simple as "fray - powazek" or "0sil8 - kottke.org". I've three or four aborted attempts at a relaunch in the hopper, and none of them have come to fruition.

The Web has always gone through its evolutions, and this one, too, will pass, leaving its mark on the general tone of the Web as a whole. I'm a lot less critical of weblogs as a phenomenon after my experience in Austin. But I reserve the right to maintain my original criticism, that conversations should be shared in a medium like email, not spread out across a few dozen sites.

Oddly, I also realized that weblogs are about /hypertext/. I've been a fan of hypertext as an art form and as a useful medium since the early days of Hypercard and my readings of Ted Nelson, but still don't think that it is the proper medium for conversation. It's a better medium for reference; fractally revealing more and more about a given thread as fits the interest of the reader. In a sense, weblogs are the purest expression of the principles of hypertext we've got yet -- and I say this after having spent a lot more time reading more and more of them recently than I ever had in the past. All of the strengths and all of the weaknesses of hypertext, in full relief.

A Hypertext Pop Culture Encyclopedia, if you will. (Oh, never mind, I guess that's already been done. http://www.altculture.com — NOTE 3/11/04: This server is no longer responding.)

So, anyway, presented in the spirit of the moment, here are a few disjointed and incomplete thoughts.

The irony behind the weblog as a time-saving device is that it often assumes that your readers have more time to read than you do to write.

I'm an email person, not a Web person. I want conversations. Contrary to what many will allege, it's not all about me having a stage.

Bryan Boyer is the same age as I was the last time I went to Austin, ten years ago.

I like Blogger better than I like that Dave Winer guy's product, and I'm sure it has something to do with liking the folks at Blogger a lot more than I like Dave.

Now that more people I know have weblogs, I visit their sites more often. So, for me, that's a big deal, as I don't surf that much.

Projectors! I want a projector. Ben used his to play video games that were projected against the side of his garage. Bryan used his instead of a television, for watching movies or whatever. The whole idea just makes me tingle - every time I see a monitor, or TV, I want it turned into a projector. What an excellent way to hide the TV. (I hate it when I go to people's houses and their entire living room is arranged around a set - the dynamics are all wrong and everyone just ends up watching the tube instead of talking.)

It's difficult to sleep in hotel rooms. For me, anyway. Maybe it was all the coffee during the day and all the Shiner Bock during the evenings. Maybe it's because I spent the last couple hours of each day typing on an ancient laptop with bad keyboard action and the worst 28Kbps dialup connection I've ever had. That always keys me up (if you'll pardon the pun). I dunno.

Anyway, that's all for now. I'll leave you with a few more URLs, for those of you who want more SXSW madness. I apologize if I left anyone out.