Jemima Kiss and Robbie Clutton at SXSW 2011

Lanyrd started as a side project for developers Simon Willison and Natalie Downe, but it became clear from day one in September last year - with 14,000 visits in the first two hours - that it deserved a life of its own. This year’s SXSW has been an intense special project for the pair, who’ve been exploring new features on a dedicated SXSW microsite during the week that will now be rolled out across Lanyrd. In three weeks up to SXSW, that microsite has recorded 15,692 unique users and 90,000 page views; not bad (even taking duplicated users into account) when the total number of SXSW Interactive delegates was 19,364 this year.

“The starting idea was that it is hard to find conferences to go to and that you’re interested in, but we follow friends with similar interests on Twitter,” said Downe. “Lanyrd pulls in the social graph and shows events friends are speaking at or attending.” Lanyrd socialises, organises and documents conferences. “Conferences are an inefficient way of sharing information. People put a lot of effort into talks, but often that is only shared with those in the room or, if they are posted online, that’s not collaborative. We give a permanent URL to every session at every conference so we can be useful before, during and after the conference and all crowdsourced by the community.”

The pair successfully pitched for Y Combinator funding in the batch announced two months ago, with an initial investment of $17,000 and a small stake for Y Combinator, then won $150,000 in additional funding from Russian investor Yuri Millner of Digital Sky Technologies. “Lanyrd proved way more popular than we’d expected and we needed to turn it into a company,” said Willison. What the pair didn’t know about the investment scene, marketing or sales, Y Combinator provided mentoring and support during a three-month bootcamp, including weekly dinners with business leaders that explained growing a business, acquisitions and investments.

From launching the site during honeymoon in Casablanca, Lanyrd now has 27,000 registered users and lists 7,000 events. The real coup for Lanyrd could be if major events, like SXSW, could adopt the service as its official session planner.

Simon Willison and Natalie Downe of Lanyrd by jemimakiss

"SXSW Interactive 2011 had 19,364 attendees, the SXSW press office has told me."

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:59:27 -0500

“SXSW Interactive 2011 had 19,364 attendees, the SXSW press office has told me.”

What did geeks do before the web?

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 18:02:37 -0500

The mainstreaming of geek culture
15 March 2011, 11am
2 / 5

The Facebook film, Doctor Who, Lord of the Rings - what used to be at the fringes of culture has been co-opted by the mainstream along with the rest of the technology industry. This rambling discussion would have benefitted, like most of SXSW’s lower-profile specialist panels, from clearer talking points rather than unfocused reminiscences about the geek days of old. The panel, of course, asserted their geek credentials by kicking off with various references to Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, early affairs with Star Wars toys and comic culture.

• Austin resident and journalist Brendon Boyer said the first 15 yeast of his life was about seeking out people who liked the same stuff, and when he did it was “like a ray of sunshine”. He got his Mum to drive him to a night where he could find other kids in ‘Halo Benders’ t-shirts. “I used to write 20-page letters to people because I needed that feeling of connection and there was no electronic way to do that yet. We [geeks] were stranded geographically until 1997, but found pockets of zine culture. The internet can let us define ourselves purely by our interests and that can get into weird dangerous fetishy things if you only stick to those things.”

• Isn’t mainstreaming geek culture just making it more accessible to people with money? Games, phone, merchandise and gadgets are expensive, but that said much geek credibility comes from DIYing gadgets, plus smartphones are relatively cheap these days. “It doesn’t matter how much money you have, but geeks find a way,” said Sanders.

• Microsoft community director Kathleen Sanders looked like she realised she was being a bit too candid about Microsoft’s management: ”Look at the senior leadership of Microsoft and they’re not modern geeks - more classic geeks. You see people saying they want your ideas, but the fact they have to have one day like that a year rather than an entire culture of innovation is telling. As the company becomes more profitable, the more it’s the dollar signs they are interested in.”

• Sanders asked whether the mainstreaming of the geek would result in better geeks; will they continue to develop and evolve, or will that culture get diluted? Geekdom is a lifestyle, rather than a culture, said one questioner, who asked whether the mainstream geek references might be more about patting homage to its new credibility than carelessly jumping on the bandwagon; if the mainstream is going to try and talk geek though, it has to get the details right.

• Does mainstreaming just mean Chatroulette? It should mean that geeks find it easier to get other people interested in things like gaming, where it had been hard to find other girls, said Morgan Romine of Ubisoft. “We want more women making video games - diversity benefits new genres, not just shoot-em-ups and platform games. Like Kelly Santiago and Flow - that was a different groundbreaking thing that came from a guy and girl working together.”

How Wikileaks changed the world

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 17:34:00 -0500

Wikileaks: the website that changed the world
15 March 2011, 12.30
4.5 / 5

Carne Ross, who resigned as a diplomat in 2004 after giving secret evidence about how the UK government had put forward an exaggerated case for war, dominated the session organised by the Guardian about the impact of the Wikileaks site.

• Describing the cables as of “unique political and diplomatic significance”, Ross said the newspapers were not the ideal manager of this information and went on to push that point many times. “The cables have reinforced the government argument against transparency because several of them should not have been released - one detailed the aftermath of an attempted terrorist attack on an embassy in Yemen, and one nuclear sites in Spain. I can’t see any public interest, just value to potential attackers.”

• Rather than methodically analysing the cables, Ross argued, the papers picked out stories by searching for keywords, indicating that plenty of less obvious stories will not have been covered, while the NYT missed a significant and explosive story about the US government conducting secret aerial surveillance of Hezbollah on behalf of the Lebanese government, while a British paper misinterpreted a story about the US offering british nuclear secrets to the Russians during disarmament talks. Given the falling resources of newspapers, they are not equipped to properly manage this type of release said Ross: “There needs to be an intelligent network of experts to look at the cables, ensure damaging ones are not released and that the full set are analysed. They should work with people in Western Sahara and Sudan - the New York Times and Guardian should not be the arbiter. And given the amateurishness of Wikileaks as an organisation and how arbitrary it has been in its decision making… we need new forms of transparency and to think imaginatively about credibility.” But he also said that if Wikileaks has shown governments that they can and will be breached, we can hope that they will begin to realise their obligation “to do in private what they say in public”.

• Ross tapped an upswell of feeling among the mostly American audience who felt the NYT had broken its trust with readers by, according to one, holding back stories on the US decision to go to war because it was two weeks before the US election. That just proved Ross’s point further; that established institutions, from the press to Congress to NGOs, have failed to hold power to account. “There has been an abject failure there - the old ways don’t work. We cannot rely on traditional freedoms and there should be a collectively richer discussion that is promoted in an intelligent way.” The cables, he said, ultimately show self interest on behalf of Assange and the newspapers who need to sell copies.

• Guardian deputy editor Ian Katz, who has the honour of being the “last person at the Guardian on speaking terms” with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, opened by explaining the steep learning curve of dealing with the vast amount of data involved in the 250,000 diplomatic cables made available through Wikileaks. A team from the Guardian’s technology department were brought in to make an accessible database out of the raw data, though attempts to use ‘burner’ style mobile phones to communicate securely (as inspired by The Wire) were farcical, not least because no-one could remember the changing numbers.

• Over the course of a year, the working relationship with the New York Times grew from guarded to close. The relationship with Assange, now famously severed, could not have been handled any differently though, Katz concluded. “That’s partly because of the personality he is, but also when your source becomes the story there’s an inbuilt tension there.” Katz did say that in retrospect the paper “wished it had covered more extensively and energetically” the case of Bradley Manning, who allegedly leaked the cables to Wikileaks.

• With only a slight interruption from a peculiar drumming through the audio system that could have been the supernatural presence of Assange, Katz described Assange as “an impresario… giving out data to create maximum impact” but also found himself of positioning the white-haired Australian hacker. “People have been tough on Julian - he’s damned if he does and if he doesn’t. He started saying he wanted to dump all the documents and people rightly criticised him for confidential sources. So he needed to find a mechanism to make documents safe, which was working with us.

• Issandr El Amrani of the Arabist reminded the room that the kind of freedoms provided by both Wikileaks and the Western press are very far removed from the reality of many Middle East regimes: “In egypt the public archives of documents has not been open to the public since 1952… these papers don’t have a lot of Middle East experts going through these documents to put them into context but are privileged in Britain and the US to be able to act like this… The media ecosystem in the Middle East is just far less complicated.”

• ProPublica’s Stephen Engelberg predicted than Wikileaks will one day surface a fabricated document unless its material can be subjected to scrutiny and contextualised. Engelberg showed he was prepared to accept a very basic definition of a journalist by saying that ‘obtaining and publishing documents’ was enough to classify Assange as a journalist, though “dumping data isn’t journalism”. As for the responsibility of the papers in choosing what to publish, he doesn’t doubt that they would take the blame if a seemingly related terrorist attack came six months after publishing Wikileaks-sourced information.

• Audio of this session is available on the SXSW site

Chapel Club by Robbie Clutton

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 10:05:34 -0500

Chapel Club by Robbie Clutton

Eight Things That Hip-Hop Taught America - Panel

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:41:34 -0500

By Robbie Clutton

I was intrigued by what discussions would take place on the music festival panels after being at the interactive conference this week and I picked one that both sounded interesting and in an area I knew nothing about and I was rewarded with possibly the best talk I’d seen all week. Dan Charnas led the panel and the audience through the concepts which run through his book ‘The Big Payback’, which examines the influences of how hip-hop changed American culture.

The first half of the talk was a compare and contrast exercise showing pictures and video from the past and breakthrough moments for cultural change. First up was the desegregation of the music business and how hip-hop became more mainstream. One video advert we were shown was a Houston radio station saying “what if you could throw away all the hip-hop and chatter and leave the good stuff like Phil Collins”. Just another day in paradise indeed.

The second point was ‘the browning of America’ and Charnas showed front covers of mainstream glossy magazines and how they had changed. Third was the birth of street teams and how one record label could propel an artist to success without radio play and how this has affected the advertising campaigns of today with the use of flyers and talking to people on the street.

This led nicely onto the ‘rise of the super-empowered artist mogul’ like Puff Daddy, who had managed to get better deals with record labels leading to the switch of an artist needing to become part of a label to a label wanting to be part of the artist.

The final points were starting to move away from the music business and more onto cultural change. The first is the breaking of the Hollywood colour barrier with Will Smith landing the lead role in Independence Day and the second was the election and inauguration of Barak Obama.

I’m really glad I took a chance of this session, it was enlightening to see this self-reflective view through the eyes of a subject I don’t have any in-depth knowledge of and a culture I’ve only seen from the outside.

The Foo Fighters and the night that almost wasn't

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 10:56:23 -0500

By Robbie Clutton

I had the fortunate luck of relieving a friend’s VIP pass that they had won to see the Foo Fighers on Tuesday evening as they were leaving SXSW a little early. We arrived at the venue at 8.30 as described by the company who were giving the passes away to find a VIP queue. It wasn’t too bad especially compared to the public line that stretched about three blocks. So we went to the end of the line and was told it wasn’t the right line and we were sent back to the gate. Back at the gate they sent us back where we’d just been but a helpful staff member came with us and got us into the right place. The queue was slow moving, but we had been told that the Foo Fighters would come on stage around midnight, so we wasn’t too worried.

By the time we’d got halfway down the line a band struck up. No-one in the queue around us had knew the song being played, so we all happily told ourselves it must be the supporting band. When the second song came on, it dawned on me that it was the new Foo Fighters single. There was little we could do apart from listen, but the taco stand serving where we stood cheered us up with Stubbs famous BBQ sauce.

The line started moving quicker and when we got to the front, the reason for the speed became evident with the many scraps of paper with guest list names on it in no apparent order. As the door staff scrambled through the papers it looked like our names were not on the list. The bouncer seemed to take pity on us when we asked if we could just get through without the VIP pass, and we slipped in.

Two friends who had queued from 6 were already inside and as we jostled into a decent view of the stage we walked straight into them. Not a band turnout all things considered. Others had conceded defeat to the giant queue and had found an ingenious alternative of standing at the top of a multi-story car park opposite the venue. I’m not sure how much they would have seen, but being an outdoor gig I think they would have heard it quite well.

As for the gig itself, the Foo Fighters seemed to be really trying to cover as much as possible. There were two bands supposed to play after them and we had heard rumours of a midnight closing. Then Dave Grohl said the first words of the night (that I had heard after missing the first few songs) “That was the new record, now we’re going play some massive hits for a little while” before launching into My Hero. The Foo Fighters played for around 2 hours in total, closing with the track “where it all began”, This is a call. The stand out moment for me was when Dave Grohl, knowing it was the last night of the Interactive festival shouted “Come on you nerds, dance!”

All in all not bad for a gig in what is effectively a beer garden, but Texas style.

The ‘new’ map of Texas

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 08:43:04 -0500

The ‘new’ map of Texas

Video

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 08:42:09 -0500

Texas mythology

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 08:42:09 -0500

Texas mythology

The Broken Spoke

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:16:02 -0500

The Broken Spoke