Jen Reeves, Joy Mayer, and I did a short UStream broadcast on social media and journalism education at the Social Media Clubhouse in Austin last week on the first day of SXSW. We all shared some ideas of what we do and it’s worth a listen. I talked about my “classroom without walls” method, and this is a forerunner to what I’ll be submitting to the SXSW panel picker next year.

Yes, SXSW is barely over and I already know what I want to submit next year. Heh.

from on .

Some things I didn’t want to put in the SXSW Interactive wrapup post lest it get too out-of-control long:

• Year 2 was definitely better. I went with a plan to make my own conference based on themes that emerged from the schedule, and it worked. I highly recommend this approach. But I highly recommend whatever approach you have too. Whatever works for you.

• Having a buddy in the process is great. I spent a great Saturday with Joy Mayer hitting some community sessions, but getting to hear about her work at RJI was also great. On Monday I walked the trade show with Jen Reeves and found myself having lunch with the great folks at Adobe. The people part of SXSW makes it great, and it opens up those weak-tie networks to help you meet more people. Read more

I’m slowly returning to sea level after my second South By Southwest Interactive festival, but I didn’t want to let it get away without doing a wrapup post about the experience.

I learned a lot from last year and went with a plan, as I noted in my first post. I went looking to learn more from others about community engagement, activism, and stories. I learned so much from those sessions, and this is an attempt to start putting it together. This is not, of course, the end of the process. I have a lot of thinking to do.

The interesting thing about my SXSW experience is that the final panel I attended was a perfect way to tie together everything I had learned. The panel was “Better Crowdsourcing: Lessons Learned From the3six5 Project” and featured folks from the 3six5 project and sixitemsorless. These two projects use user contributions to help tell a larger metastory (you can read more about the latter project in this piece by Heidi Hackemer, who was on the panel at the SXSW session).

I am really blown away by these two projects. Read more

So Day 2 at SXSW was pretty awesome. I lined up a bunch of community panels and went looking for inspiration. It’s hard to let go because there were some amazing journalism sessions scheduled and I followed their hashtag streams with envy, but I wanted to learn more about engagement and community building.

I had a buddy in the process too, albeit accidentally. Joy Mayer, whom I mentioned yesterday is exploring the very question of community and engagement in her RJI fellowship this year, had a lot of the same ones on her plan, so I tagged along and it was great. Sometimes it’s good to bend your mine and hit something unusual by yourself, but days like Saturday when you have someone to bounce ideas off of and talk about sessions are one of the cool things about SXSW too so don’t ignore the possibility. Read more

I’m happy to be back at SXSW for the second consecutive year. The learning curve on how to digest the festival itself can be steep and ongoing, and using some of the things I learned last year I have put together a plan to improve on last year’s experience.

Essentially I’ve come down to this: there is so much going on here that you are always going to miss something, so the best approach is to make your own conference. Most time blocks have 25 or so sessions happening at the same time, and several them are awesome, so I’ve got a two-pronged approach to making my schedule.

First, I’m looking for themes that interface with my teaching and research. So I’ll be hitting some journalism panels, but not as many as last year. I’m looking for inspiration in the unknown application of technology to journalism, or in the component parts. So I’m going to be attending a lot of panels on community engagement and crowd function. It’s all over the schedule and I’m thrilled about that. I’m also looking at several panels on parenting and raising kids, because it is a nice area of research for me (not to mention that I’m a dad-to-be). And of course there are some great education panels as well.

Second, even with that plan there is a ton of overlap and it’s hard to decide. Read more

South By Southwest’s panel picker opened today, so I officially have SXSW on the brain until next March. I wanted to talk a little about a panel I proposed and also plug a few others that I have voted for.

A shameless plug for our panel: If you like what you hear, please vote for us using the link a couple grafs below this one. It requires a short registration but you aren’t obligated to attend the event in Austin. Ours is the only panel tagged “journalism education” and so I think we bring a lot to the table here. Read more

Matt McKeon’s jarring graphical look at Facebook’s privacy evolution has been making the rounds this week. If you haven’t seen it, check out the link and look through the years via the animated version. The evolution away from default private in a person’s network and toward what is now public is pretty interesting to see.

Three weeks ago I engaged my Media & Society class here at Lehigh in a discussion about and privacy. I asked them how many considered their photos, status updates, and wall posts to be private. More hands were raised than not. I asked them how many thought their email was private. All but one hand went up.

Then I asked the kicker question: Why the difference? The minute you send that message, whether it is an email or a wall post on Facebook or clicking to “Like” something, you are losing control of that information. Several students looked alarmed, but I pressed it further: the only privacy you have is in your head. The minute the things you think become the things you say, you lose control of those bits of information.

This one has been on my mind since SXSWi, when danah boyd delivered an excellent keynote address about privacy and social networks (full text). The definition of privacy, boyd argued, is having control over how information flows. Using as an example, boyd argued that when services take a system that is understood as private and makes the information shared on those networks public they are violating a user’s sense of privacy.
Read more

Ran across some really cool news today. Huffington Post announced that it is implementing a badge system as part of a way to build up its user community. For now you have three possible badges on the site: one for having a lot of social connections across the site, one for adding a lot of comments, and one for flagging inappropriate comments that ultimately lead to deletion.

This is huge, and I can’t state this enough. It’s taking some of the game-oriented concepts found in location-based apps such as Foursquare or Gowalla and implementing them in news delivery. These simple games build on the notion that object collection in gaming can be rewarding, and by applying them to news formats HuffPo encourages behaviors complementary to what the news site wants to accomplish.

When I got to Lehigh I hardly imagined being the guy advocating gaming concepts in news, but here I go again. I have already said quite a bit about gaming and news, such as the potential with Foursquare, Gowalla, and transmedia as a way of bringing context to our news (the latter of which is an offshoot of a great panel at SXSW), but it’s emerged as a running theme on this blog over the course of the year

This is not an entirely new idea. Gawker, for example, uses tiered comments by giving the community’s best users a star icon. Gizmodo also recently unveiled a tiered system where valued users get better placement in the commenting thread. It’s a recognition of a lesson we’ve learned in blogland: comments and community are content that should be valued in a same what that the original article should be valued.

Here’s what I love about HuffPo is doing by taking this to another level: the gaming aspect has a purpose.

The third badge, called “Moderator,” is given to those who are on the lookout for comments that clash with the site’s mission of civility. The concept of community moderation in comments is not new, of course, with Slashdot being a good example of how it can work well. The badge isn’t given for random flagging, though, but rather for flagging posts that eventually get deleted. Quality over quantity when it comes to moderation.

I wonder whether in doing it this way it also helps teach the user community about the site’s values by having people flag inappropriate comments with the site’s values and mission in mind. At the SXSW “Future of Context” panel we talked about gaming as a type of learning about the news, but this could be an extension of that by showing users what it means to be a user in a news community.

At the same time, the “Superuser” badge (boo for stealing that one so shamelessly from Foursquare) is given to prolific commenters. So right away you have two badges that work together to increase comment volume while also allowing for ways to up the quality.

There are good reasons to think HuffPo’s system is going to work. Nieman Lab noted that by emphasizing quality in comments it actually led to more and better comments in the Gawker universe of products. This makes logical sense; if I think my post is going to be buried by the community, I will try to make it entertaining, witty, insightful, etc.

The one I’m excited about is the “Networker” badge because this is at the heart of the scholarly stuff I think about. My dissertation argued a new type of social capital known as Web-network social capital, which basically consists of the networks and ties created in user communities for the purposes of building that online community. The badge looks like it has potentinal to start increasing and rewarding network ties. We’ve already started seeing people thinking about Farmville and the potential for building social ties through gaming. WNSC has the potential to explain some of what we’re seeing, and sites that look to build it are helping to create something unique in the process.

When I argued for WNSC, I was looking broadly at social networks and blogs. What excites me about gaming entering the news is that this is a further area for study and a potential growth area for news sites interested in building up communities that help serve a site’s core mission.

HuffPo says it will be adding more (my suggestion: “I’m on a boat”). Of all the new avenues I’ve seen in news this year, Gowalla tours and this effort by HuffPo are two that have my eye. Gaming holds a lot of potential for news outlets, and I hope they’re paying attention.

I already posted some of my lessons learned from my first SXSW, but I didn’t want to let the moment get away without chronicling my thoughts in general about the experience. I already said I should have done this a long time ago. I should add that I definitely will be back. This is a brain dump, in a way, trying to get at some of the sense of why I just liked being in Austin for this thing.

On the first day I attended a session called “How to rawk SXSW Interactive.” Much of it was fairly run of the mill (wash your hands to avoid the dreaded SXSW SARS, etc.), but one part stood out. They said that the best parts come in conversation, not in panels, and so doing it right means networking. A lot.

“This is your tribe,” one of the panelists said. “This is where you can talk about ideas and projects you’ve got and people won’t get glassy-eyed or want to run away.”

I thought the statement was silly. Tribe? Really?

Really. Read more

I should have done this sooner. If there’s one lesson ringing in my head as I’ve immersed myself in the awesome experience that is South by Southwest, it’s that. Although I was a poor grad student, I should have done this sooner.

I’m back in town and have a few more blog posts bubbling about things that interested me at SXSW. But for now, since I like lists here’s my running list of things I learned at my first SXSWi …

Noobs call it “South by Southwest” or “ESS-EX-ESS-DOUBLEU.” The wily veterans call it “Southby.” I was tagged the entire time. Must spend all year practicing.

Drink. A lot. (of water) … and don’t forget to snack. Energy is vitality here.

At the same time, go the extra granola bar. Easy way to strike up conversations and network between sessions. You have to eat, but having an extra to share is good karma and will make you friends.

It pays to know a veteran. The illustrious Jen Reeves gave me great advice beforehand so I was a little more prepared, but she knows the tricks. Bring a powerstrip to charge the laptop and make some friends by not being an outlet hog. Talk to EVERYONE. She even knew where all the free food was.

Make the plan minimal. I planned a lot of panel surfing, but I found myself sticking to it less and less. Find your 4-5 core sessions and plan for those. After that, be the ball and let it come to you. Ask what sessions others are hitting

For journalists, try to stay away from panels on your discipline. Honest, most of the journalism panels su-huuuucked save for a couple. The sessions that blew my mind were in the areas of gaming, marketing, PR, social media, and augmented reality. I found threads in the keywords based on stories and storytelling, but they weren’t about journalism. And it makes a lot of sense; I’m not at AEJMC, I’m at Southby (a-ha!). I want to think about new avenues for doing journalism, not think about the same old stuff. I’m here to get my mind blown.

There are a lot of stickers here. A lot of them. This isn’t sustainable.

Talk to anyone who will talk to you. I met people doing all kinds of stuff that isn’t in my area, but that’s OK. At worst you practice networking. At best, you’re making it possible for serendipity to take over.

Know when to arrive. If it’s in a small room, get there 10 minutes early. If it’s in a big room, make it 15.

Don’t forget to blog. I had bigger plans for blogging, but it was overwhelming to find time. I finally found a rhythm with the schedule toward the end. I’ll have a better idea what is realistic next year.

Big-time everyone not at SXSWi. Make sure to mention in every conversation via e-mail and Twitter with people not there that you’re at SXSWi in Austin. Just kidding, don’t do that. That would make you a jerk. Seriously, though, totally do this.

Play! Seriously, try new stuff. Some of the most fun I had was playing with apps that were being promoted there. I did a walking tour of Austin on Gowalla and won a Hot Wheel car (and a little love on iReport). OK, so the Hot Wheel car isn’t great, but one of the nice things is that you can TRY new stuff because it’s available and companies are careful to make sure the experience is good. I got a lot of ideas for journalism courses just from doing a walking tour. Where else can you try so many things like this with a journalist’s eye?

Plan meetups. I did a horrible job at this. I met really good people and waited to catch them again to do some sort of coffee or lunch gathering. But there are thousands of people there, and the chance of running into them isn’t as good as it could be. Set up plans in advance. And maybe even organize a meetup beforehand. I think we need a journalism educator meetup for sure, unless one happened and I didn’t know about it (which is totally possible).

Look for student connections. While I was sitting in on sessions, looking through the schedule, and networking I had one of our students, Andrew Daniels, in the back of my mind. He’s a graduating senior and the current editor of the student newspaper, and I think he would thrive in places like this. There were a few people who would have liked to have gotten to know him too, I think. So I’m wondering if there’s a way to identify students who would benefit from this experience and then figure out ways to get them to SXSW (fundraiser, grant, etc.). This festival isn’t for everyone, but the ones who are interested in interactive media and have that natural curiosity that is impossible to teach would have a good time here.

Tacos! They’re excellent and abundant in Austin. Seriously. Tacos.

I have to be honest: I was pretty disappointed by most of the journalism-specific panels I attended at SXSWi. It’s not that the info wasn’t good or vital, it’s that I expected a lot more forward-looking or cutting-edge stuff. I blogged about a particularly disappointing one (not so much the panel’s fault, I think, as much as it was the tone set by the questions), but that was fairly typical. The best sessions that I could use were in non-journalism arenas such as gaming and marketing.

One panel I have been looking forward to actually exceeded my high expectations. “Future of Context: Getting the Bigger Picture Online” with Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson, and Tristan Harris was everything I was looking for here at SXSWi: important questions, big ideas, and a focus on discussion and solutions. No teeth-gnashing over stale questions like “Will bloggers replace journalists?” and other such important chatter from 2005.

I’m not going to reinvent the wheel and recap this thing. Elise Hu at the Texas Tribune did an excellent liveblog summary of the panel and discussion, and if you want to hack the raw tweetstream check out what the audience was doing with the hashtag. What I want to do here is briefly sketch out the argument and where my mind has been going with this since the panel spoke.

Rosen had the best visual description of the context problem facing our journalism today. Imagine, he said, downloading a software update to your computer for a program that isn’t installed on your machine. The absurdity of such a situation should be self-evident. The update does the user no good because it’s an add-on to a program that doesn’t exist on the machine. It’s a waste of the user’s time, it’s a waste of resources, and it doesn’t accomplish the mission set out for the software patch. Read more

Although SXSWi got going on Friday, Saturday was really the first full day here. I hit a number of interesting panels, all of them dealing with different ways of doing media.

“Community Funded Reporting” with David Cohn was excellent.

Cohn is the founder of the excellent Spot.Us, a site that allows the audience to fund stories that are meaningful to them. Lots of useful info here. First, I didn’t realize that Spot’s code was free for distribution, meaning that if you wan to replicate what they do then you can. And in fact Cohn basically dared someone to try this nationally, saying that it’s more lucrative than the hyperlocal project he’s doing.

The more meaningful stuff to me was how Cohn talked about the concept of CFR. He sees each story, pitched by the potential author, as a type of campaign. You’re selling the value of the idea and the audience gets to vote. It’s a model we don’t do enough in media. Second, he noted they’re working on other ways of funding, such as having users interact with advertisers so they can earn credits, and those credits are ad dollars that users can spend to fund stories. Really interesting.

The standout: Users don’t fund ideas that suck or are obvious. This is something tradmedia could do more.

“Universities in the “Free” Era” with Glenn Platt and Peg Falmon was intriguing.

They argued that as we go toward more networked ways of learning and information exchange, we are facing either a complete remaking of education or a total meltdown. The disconnect, they say, is that we sell a mountaintop-with-the-guru experience even while information and specialization are flattening in a digital world. They offered seven tips for being a new kind of professor. The standout was that professors need to be linking students with collaboration and lab experiences, and be “experience creators” with students (i.e. helping them create the education they need). And they also shredded the idea of tenure. Really fascinating time.

“Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies” featuring, among others, Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos and David Carr of the NYT

I was provoked by the panel title, but really disappointed with the questions. They spent too much time asking the stale old question “Can bloggers do investigative reporting?” types of questions that are so five years ago. I didn’t like the moderator’s questions at all. It seemed a bit dismissive of the blogosphere (typified by him referring to Gawker’s Nick Denton as a “former journalist.”). Fortunately the panel was saved by the banter between Markos and Carr. I think Carr is more new media savvy than he was getting credit for, but Markos made a good point: the blogosphere wants the NYT to survive and succeed so long as it does its job.

I have a separate post bubbling about a session on augmented reality. It was probably my favorite of the day, but I want to collapse it with another post so that is coming.

I finally made it to Austin. The only travel thoughts to share here is that Detroit’s airport is horribly boring. But I did finally earn the Jet Setter badge on Foursquare. So I have that going for me, which is nice.

Tomorrow is the first day of SXSW Interactive, and I’m like a kid on Christmas Eve. Before I dive in I wanted to pound out some thoughts about how I compiled my schedule and a few panels I’m psyched about going into the festival.

Generally, I’m here to learn. I want to hear more about some of the ways people are using interactive media to create content and share information, but I also want to get a lay of the land about SXSWi in general. With stuff lke this I use the same approach I do when I’m new to listservs: I lurk a little and slowly dip my toe in as I learn how things work.

At the same time, I am here to network. I want to make some contacts with people that will help us put smartphones in our students’ hands for Multimedia Reporting at Lehigh. I’m also hoping for networking contacts that will help me in the research realm. So I’m here to lurk and network, which will be a challenge.

SXSWi has a bazillion different offerings and it was overwhelming to go through the schedule. The panels have to number in the 500s or so. Given the time constraints, you can’t hit them all. So my process in narrowing it down was twofold. It made the cut if the topic was interesting for my work or teaching, or it made the cut if the people presenting were interesting.

Social networking, online communities, Government 2.0, citizen journalism, and multimedia reporting were common topics that made the cut. Two new topics also cut my eye: augmented reality (AR) and transmedia storytelling. I’ve heard of AR before but don’t know much about it, so I’m really looking forward to learning about it a little bit more. I also have some qualms about it making its way into journalism based on how it’s been described to me, but I don’t claim to be an expert on it so I’ll be doing a lot of listening. Transmedia storytelling is a term I’ve heard before but it seems like it’s gaining steam as our technology options get better. I added a few sessions on both these topics.

The second category is interesting people who see the media differently than a lot of journalists, and I think it’s helpful to hear people who offer that different kind of perspective. The panel I’m most looking forward to is the provocatively titled “Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies” featuring DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas. Other interesting folks I want to see include Ana Marie Cox, Clay Shirky, Mark Briggs, and Jeff Jarvis.

Obviously there’s no way I can hit everything on my schedule, but here are a few key panels that are on my list of definites:

• “Community Funded Reporting” (Saturday, 9:30 a.m.): Features David Cohn of Spot.us
• “Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies” (Saturday, 3:30 p.m.): A panel of five including Moulitsas
• “Online News of Tomorrow” (Sunday, 11 a.m.): A panel of five that includes Jeff Jarvis and Adrian Holovaty. This was a brutal choice because Clay Shirky is also presenting at the same time (“Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data“) and I’d love to hit that one, but I think the panel I chose is more up the alley of why I’m here. I may change my mind on this one based on how the votes come in on my last post.
• “After Magazines: WIRED’s Digital Rebirth” (Monday, 11 a.m.): Looking for some ideas of how publications are remaking themselves. Really hoping to hear something about the iPad or eReaders in general.

Digital media? Social media? Interactive media? Yes please!

This week I get to cross something off of my bucket list.

I leave Thursday for my first-ever trip to South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX. This one has been on my to-do list for a while but the costs just weren’t workable for someone in graduate school during my PhD student days (even if you are an early bird the conference alone is still about $400). So I am thrilled to be going; this is my own personal Nerdstock.

What is SXSW? From what I’ve been told (and from looking at the awesome schedule of events) it’s something like a cross between a conference and a festival with a focus on media. There are three facets to this thing that run together: one is a five-day portion called Interactive followed by another five-day portion called Music. Running concurrently with both of those is the Film portion. You can buy an individual badge for one of these three portions or an über badge that gives you access to all of them.

The event is a little bit of everything. It brings in leaders from each of these areas, practitioners, educators, devlopers, theorists, and so forth for panels and demonstrations. There is also plenty of time to network during some of the daytime happy hour events and the socials at night. If you’re a newbie like me, my colleague Jen Reeves at Missouri has a bunch of helpful tips about how to rock this event. Read more