D.I.Y. Media: Consumer is the Producer

The title of this entry is also the title of a panel I’m moderating at the Interactive portion of the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, at 3:30 on March 14.
The panelists include Phillip Torrone and Natalie Zee from O’Reilly’s Make magazine, Cameron Shaw from AOL, and Limor Fried from EYEBEAM (and late of MIT’s Media Lab). The panelists will be talking about how consumers of media are becoming producers of media (and media objects).
I’ll talk a bit about how blogs and wikis and other online social media are putting people at the center of their own information ecosystems instead of relegating them to the fringes of a mass-media dominated discourse, but mostly I’ll be introducing the other speakers and keeping time.
I’m not sure how well the SXSW banner fits the design of this site, so I’m going to let it gradually scroll off the page along with this entry instead of stowing it in the sidebar.

Why youth 'heart' MySpace

danah boyd has posted her “crib notes” for a talk she gave at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in February, Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace.
Worth reading for everyone curious (or fretting) about MySpace’s popularity with the young.

Google Analytics offers tips on traffic and conversion

Google Analytics has posted a few white-paper type articles to its Conversion University section, grouped under Drive Traffic and Convert Visitors)
(Link via Terry.)

Bill Quick's claim to fame a fraud?

No, you’re not the guy who named the blogosphere.
Get over yourself.
(Oh the things you learn when catch up with Kottke’s blog.)

Kottke's grand experiment flounders

Despite the first flush of support when Jason Kottke announced his plan to make his blog his full time job, News.com reports that Full-time blogger Kottke throws in the towel.
Sorry to hear it.
No doubt Jason will continue to make an excellent blog the way most of us do it, in our copious free time.

AIGA relaunches GAIN journal of business and design

AIGA, a designers’ professional association is relaunching its web journal, GAIN:

The Gain journal is dedicated to stimulating thinking at the intersection of design and business. Through rigorous case studies and thoughtful interviews, the journal demonstrates how the process of design can be used to solve business problems, foster innovation, build meaningful customer relationships and differentiate products from competitors.

Gain has a new team: managing editor, Karen McGrane, and mailing list moderator, Jeff Lash….

[R]eaders are invited to join a discussion through a new mailing list, AIGA-Gain –an informal, open discussion on topics at the intersection of design and business. The mailing list will focus on one topic per week.

A little CSS diversion

Stu Nicholls has created a little web-native video game powered by CSS. It’s maddening, though. I can’t seem to win.

Video for the people

The good folks at Participatory Culture have unveiled a key component of their “Democracy Internet TV” platform, the desktop Democracy Player software (for Windows only, so far):
> This Windows version, while still in beta, means that we now have a complete set of tools for democratizing online video — and marks the beginning of our campaign to establish a free, open-source video platform.
>
> We’re re-naming the desktop software Democracy player (formerly DTV)…. We hope you agree that open tools for publishing, watching, and sharing video are important for the future of online media.

A writer's dream

Last night I had one of those long elaborate dreams with several movements in it. Near the end, though, just before I woke up, I was in a big bed after a long night and Oprah Winfrey showed up in my hotel room I think it was. She was going to get in bed with me and I remember thinking to myself, “This probably won’t hurt my career.”

Web 2.0 as hype

First of all, Web 2.0 is definitely hype. It’s a marketing concept whose meaning varies depending on who you are talking to. For some it means web-as-application-platform, for others it means social web (or living web), and for others still it means a new round of VC investment and rags-to-riches tales.
So let’s get that part straight: Web 2.0 is hype. But Is Web 2.0 Just Hype?
Is web 2.0 just hype? That is the question:

It’s interesting to me that while the Web has been around for 10 years, we’ve only gotten to version 2.0 in the last year or so. I mean, with the advent of the Internet, it seemed like most software was getting a new version every couple months, not once a decade. And yet, Web 2.0 is on a lot of lips these days. But what is Web 2.0? According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is “what some people see as a second phase of development of the World Wide Web, including its architecture and its applications.” It is often defined by the technology that is used to create the applications that are considered Web 2.0 – such as AJAX and SOAP. In fact, the word application is often what defines a site as a Web 2.0 site. It is not just a static repository of information, but rather an application that customers use to get more information, make more information, or interact with existing information in new ways.