Geek Gestalt

As someone who attends a fair number of conferences in many different cities, it's become painfully clear to me that, in general, the confabs' organizers have not yet climbed fully aboard the green train.

That is to say, conferences are often not the best examples of a focus on taking care of the environment.

For example, while I was told at the recent South by Southwest that its efforts to be green were improved from a year earlier, the endless sea of attendee bags on display--each with a small mountain of literature inside--was a visceral testament to the fact that it has a long way to go.

At South by Southwest 2008, there was a nearly endless sea of attendee bags, each of which was full of literature that would largely end up being tossed away.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

That's why I was pleased to see a post today on the official Web 2.0 Expo blog announcing that event's new attempts to address its impact on the environment.

Note: The Web 2.0 Expo is an official partner of CNET's Webware 100 Awards.

"It's a bit hard on the old conscience being employed in an industry (that) creates as much waste as the events industry," wrote Web 2.0 Expo general manager and co-chair Jennifer Pahlka. "Much is made of the carbon footprint of an event, but I'm well aware of an even more daunting measure, the ecological footprint, which looks at the sum total of resources used. Take a look at all that goes into producing an event the size of Web 2.0 Expo (including what our sponsors, exhibitors, and speakers bring) and you can either get depressed or try to tackle the problem. We're doing both... We have a long way to go, but I thought I'd share some of the changes we've implemented this year."

Among the changes Pahlka mentioned: Using 100 percent recycled materials for the program guide, attendee direct mail, attendee bag, and event signage; reducing the program guide by a third; recycling badges; providing water coolers and encouraging attendees to bring their own bottles; and more.

Of course, even Pahlka acknowledged that the efforts are only a start. And I do wonder how many attendees will bring their own bottles or recycle their program guides--another initiative.

"One thing I've become painfully aware of is that recycling is a good step, but not generating the waste in the first place is orders of magnitude more beneficial to the earth," Pahlka wrote. "That's why 'reduce' should always be the real goal. We're working with sponsors on further steps for reducing, and with our vendors on all three Rs. In some areas, we're aware we're taking risks. For instance, we've tried to limit the print run of the program guide this year, so there's a chance we'll run out if people don't follow our lead and leave their used guides for others to reuse. We hope you will all be tolerant of any errors we make in support of this effort."

Well, a start is a good thing, and I would love to see other confabs do the same thing. Or more.

Anecdotally, I heard that the Office 2.0 conference has put on a fully green event, though I couldn't find any direct evidence of that.

But if you've got good examples of conferences that are making impressive strides toward the greening of the industry, I'd like to hear about them. Please leave a comment or send me an email to daniel dot terdiman at cnet dot com.

As I reported here a few weeks ago, professional video gaming leagues and organizations are hoping that, over time, their industry can be seen as a sport on par with soccer, baseball, football, and so on.

The Championship Gaming Series says it will open a training center in Wuhan, China.

(Credit: Championship Gaming Series)

Now, one of those leagues, the Championship Gaming Series, has decided to up the ante by creating a training facility and a dedicated game playing arena in the booming Chinese city of Wuhan.

I talked to Andy Reif, commissioner of the CGS, the other day, and he explained that the idea behind building the training center is essentially that you can't build a new sport without also having what amounts to an incubator for talent.

That's why the league is setting up its facility in Wuhan, a city that Reif told me has more than 50 universities and more than 1.5 million students. Truly.

The training center itself will be structured around bringing in potential players and testing them and training them on skills needed to compete at the highest levels of the nascent sport.

Really, that means looking for and developing players' hand-eye coordination, as well as training players on the games themselves.

In addition, the league is building a 1,000-seat arena that will be used exclusively for matches.

The CGS got started with an inaugural player draft at the Playboy Mansion in June 2007, and it did its second draft at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

The Championship Gaming Series conducted its inaugural player draft at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles on June 12, 2007.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

And while the league has managed to pull off some high-profile events and has some big money behind it--Microsoft, DirecTV, and others--I'm a little skeptical of the idea of building an arena and a training center.

On the one hand, it's probably not that expensive to pursue such a venture in China, and it's a good place to look for new talent, given the high degree of interest in that country in video games.

On the other hand, I kind of think video gamers are the types of people who are self-taught and might not respond well to the kind of indoctrination of a training center.

For its part, Wuhan seems like it must be an interesting place these days. Not only is it the CGS' choice for setting up shop, it's also where Second Life land baroness Anshe Chung has set up headquarters for her growing business. Among other things, Chung is using her facilities to train people to create content for Second Life and other virtual worlds.

Disclaimer: My wife works for Second Life publisher Linden Lab.

These Moo notecards are an example of the kinds of products being sold by companies whose users do all the creation and design of the things they buy.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

AUSTIN, Texas--Why invent the wheel by yourself if you can turn instead to a group of peers and solve it together?

That was the premise of a gathering here of executives from most of the leading companies in what might be called the "people-powered" industry.

These are companies like CafePress, Moo, Etsy, and 8020 Publishing whose business is manufacturing physical products designed by customers. CafePress, for example, makes T-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, and many other products emblazoned with logos and designs uploaded by users. Moo makes business and greeting cards adorned with users' own photos and images, and 8020 publishes photo and travel magazines full of readers' work.

But each of these outfits has until now had to solve a set of problems unique to this nascent industry--legal issues, community management processes, and even questions of nomenclature.

So as many of the people behind these companies prepared to go to Austin for this year's South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival, Moo CEO Richard Moross decided that maybe this would be a good time and place to get everyone together and discuss whether a cooperative investigation and search for solutions to common problems would be a good thing for everyone involved.

After all, there's strength in numbers, right?

... Read more

Jane McGonigal, Tuesday's keynote speaker at South by Southwest Interactive, and one of the world's leading designers of alternate-reality games, dances on stage, doing the Soulja dance at the end of her presentation.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

AUSTIN, Texas--Game designers may be the professionals best suited to help humans find happiness in the future.

That was the thesis of world-famous alternate-reality game designer Jane McGonigal's Tuesday keynote address at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) here.

McGonigal began her talk by looking at the idea that happiness is something scientists and sociologists are increasingly studying and that embedded in the mechanics of games may be the very things that people need to be happy. And quality of life will likely be a key consideration of many interactive media projects.

An artist's rendering of SXSWi Tuesday keynote speaker Jane McGonigal and the points she made in her presentation.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

"Because positive psychology will be a principal, explicit influence on interactive design and development," McGonigal said, "we're also going to see communities forming around different visions of a real life worth living....We will see communities forming around different brands, platforms and visions....Value will be defined as a measurable increase in real happiness or well being. Well being becomes the new capital, something we can trade, and which might increase or decrease."

So designers might benefit from heeding and incorporating into their games what McGonigal defined as four distinct things that make humans happy: satisfying work, being good at something, spending time with people we like, and having the chance to be a part of something, she said.

"What just completely blew my mind was the realization that nothing in the whole world gives these four things in higher quality than games," McGonigal said. "Games give you satisfying work, (players can become very good at them), multiplayer games give you time spent with people you like and games give you the chance to be part of something bigger with their mythologies...I'm pretty sure that most of us in the game development business are in the happiness business."

A second artist's rendering of McGonigal's keynote address.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

A big part of the picture, McGonigal added later, is that games have the power to kill boredom, alienation, anxiety and depression.

"Games have a value as an aid to quality of life even greater and more direct than has hitherto been suspected," a slide from her presentation read. "The ordinary routine of playing a game is fatal to conditions of depression, existential angst, human suffering and other serious afflictions of real life."

One part of her keynote that many attendees were particularly taken with was a description of "ten strengths mapping ARGs against what scientists say is needed for happiness."

McGonigal proposed ten strengths that game designers would do well to understand when trying to build games that help people seek happiness.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

These were: "mobbability," an ability to collaborate and coordinate on really large scales; cooperation radar, the ability to decide who would be an ideal collaborator for any given mission; the ping quotient, which measures your ability to reach other people in a network, and your ability to respond to people reaching out to you; "influency," the ability to adapt someone's persuasive strategies to specific and distinct individuals since each community requires different motivations; "multicapitalism," an understanding that people are increasingly trading in new currency systems; "protovation," an understanding that failure can be fun because that's when people learn the most; open authorship, a comfort with giving content away and knowing it will be changed; signal/noise management, an element of games that is able to handle large amounts of "noise," and to be able to detect right away which data are relevant in the moment; "longbroading," an ability to think in much bigger systems, bigger cycles and bigger scales; and "emergensight," being able to spot patterns as they emerge and take advantage of them.

McGonigal suggested that the next thing for game designers to do would be to look for systems that incorporate some of these ethos and others that allow users to seek happiness.

Based on her talk, McGonigal proposed several takeaways.

McGonigal said happiness science has been incorporated into several recent books, and that game designers could help themselves prepare for games geared at improving quality of life by reading these books and other such science.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

First, she said, most game designers will "soon be in the happiness business." She suggested that such designers spend some time reading many of the recent books on happiness science in order to prepare for when that science is in demand in the game industry.

Second, she said game designers have a head start on providing additional quality of life because that pursuit is built into virtual worlds and simulated environments.

And finally, she said alternate realities signal the desire, need and opportunity for people to redesign reality for a real quality of life.

"It's our responsibility to hear that signal," she said, "to say you're right and that life doesn't work as well as games. It's our job to fix" that.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

'The Lost Ring' is a new alternate-reality game that is tied to the Olympic Games and which tasks players with discovering a 2,000-year-old sport lost to history.

(Credit: The Lost Ring)

AUSTIN, Texas--To players of alternate reality games (ARGs) like I Love Bees, Tombstone Hold 'em, A World without Oil and others, Jane McGonigal is a household name.

If the people at the International Olympics Committee, McDonald's, and worldwide brand experience firm AKQA have anything to say about it, the list of people who know McGonigal and her work will soon expand geometrically.

Jane McGonigal giving the keynote address on Tuesday at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

That's because she's the lead designer on The Lost Ring, a new ARG that launched earlier this month that is tied to this summer's Beijing Olympics and which McDonald's, AKQA and the IOC are partnering on with McGonigal.

The game is built around the fictional concept that more than 2,000 years ago an Olympic sport was lost to history and that now, five Olympic-caliber athletes have turned up in corn fields around the world, amnesiac but sure they've been tasked with some great mission.

Players of The Lost Ring, then, are similarly tasked with helping these five people figure out their identities, and in the process, rediscovering this lost Olympic sport.

On Tuesday, McGonigal was the keynote speaker at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here and talked at length about the philosophies she uses to guide her game design approach, as well as to talk a little bit about her new project.

Afterward, she sat down with CNET News.com for an interview about The Lost Ring, in which she talked about how she hopes the game will change the perspective of people around the world and how she expects this game to be by far the largest game of its kind in history.

Because the game is still in its infancy, however, she didn't want to talk much about the process of its creation or about working with corporate partners like the IOC and McDonald's. Instead, she preferred to focus on how the game is innovative and what players can expect to learn from it.

Q: Talk about how The Lost Ring came about.

Jane McGonigal: I should say, we're not talking a lot about the process, because we want to keep the focus on the game itself, we don't want to get meta on process yet. I definitely want people to be thinking about the experience, and to have the experience before we get deconstructive.

Where the idea for the game come from?

McGonigal: AKQA has developed ARGs in past, on smaller scale. They really believed that this was the new genre to invest in, and to take seriously as a creative form. So they decided to talk to the different partner organizations to see who else might get this idea. McDonald's and the IOC said, 'We don't understand it, but we love it. It sounds risky but if anything is going to be the next big art form, this is it.' That all happened before I got involved. They decided to make the biggest most global ARG ever. It made sense for these gigantic global organizations, this idea to bring the world together through play...and with collective intelligence. And the Olympics brings the world together, but through sports.

For me, I thought, 'Oh, my God, this is the greatest opportunity ever,' because I knew working with those two organizations meant it would be huge, and that they were committed to making it truly global. That this would be the chance to make ARGs what they want to be. We talk about making them global, but so far, they're not really. But you have the Olympics everywhere, and McDonald's is everywhere. I just knew this would be the one that would just blow up the scale and possibility of ARGs. And obviously, with the Olympics theme, you couldn't ask for a richer, more historical theme to design for.

When did it begin?

McGonigal: I started working on it last June, right at end of World Without Oil. I was very happy that AKQA, McDonald's, and the IOC approached me on the heels of World Without Oil because it meant they wanted to make a project for good.

How much control did you have?

McGonigal: It was an intense collaboration process. They didn't have design ideas, but every time we had an idea, we were like, 'Is this cool?' And, 'Is this exciting?' But to some extent, one of my colleagues at AKQA said there's only one person who knows where this is all going. I have a lot of this stored in my brain exclusively. And I think McDonald's and the IOC feel like they're going on a ride. We can't wait to find out what happens.

You've told me that you think this game will be orders of magnitude bigger than any previous ARG. How so?

McGonigal: We're taking everything we've seen work in ARGs and amplifying it so more people can have the experience. We've seen ARGs in five cities, but now it's going to be on five continents. We've seen puzzles in other languages, but this whole game is in eight languages. Every piece of content will be translated into eight languages. And localization has been a huge part of the development process, and it's very challenging, but so rewarding. The first week of game, a whole faction of players from Argentina who have never been participants in ARG forums (became very active) on Unfiction....And people wrote in and said, 'This is amazing, this game is showing us how small our world really is.'

This seems like a pretty good example of collective intelligence at work.

McGonigal: We talk about collective intelligence, but you need a diversity of participants to really make it work. It's not just intellectual diversity, but also gender diversity and age diversity. One of the things this game can do is show what the truly geographically collective intelligence really looks like. I don't know that we've really seen one. The Wikipedia articles, maybe. In this game, everyone's writing the same article, to use that metaphor. So we just sit around thinking about how lucky we feel to be doing this.

How many people are involved?

McGonigal: Last weekend, after one week, we had 1,000 players. That's not a lot. We want millions of players. So we're putting the trailers online, and we're hoping tens of thousands of people watch those and that it grows from there. By Beijing, we hope there will be millions. That has to happen.

But it's a slow ramp up?

McGonigal: Yeah, one of the things I learned about I Love Bees is how important it is to respect the ARG community and give them the opportunity to play with something first, and kind of get things organized, and set up for when someone who's never played before shows up. So we sent out The Lost Ring rabbit holes--a box of clues to the game--to about 50 all-star players to get them going. It's not we were advertising on TV. So by time other players show up, they won't get lost. We're thinking about how to make this huge narrative experience not be overwhelming.

So the game is for people at any level?

McGonigal: Yes. I'm so excited about the historian podcasts. If someone did nothing but listen to the historian podcasts, which blend history with our alternate reality, if they did nothing but listen and then take the quiz, take the poll, if that were all that you did, you would have such a great experience of the summer Olympics. Your head would be full. You'd be like, I know the secret reality. I definitely hope that when people put the Olympics on the TV, they'll feel they're not vicariously experiencing it, but feel, 'I'm in it, it's not something I'm experiencing remotely, I'm having my own true, real Olympics experience.'

What can people learn from the game?

McGonigal: They're going to learn about their own strengths. We're going to help them learn what they're good at and then give them missions that are totally customizable to their personal strengths. That's the part of the game I'm most proud of, that innovation. In the ARG world, you don't always know what you're supposed to do. You spend a lot of time waiting and waiting. So we wanted it to be so that for everybody, every time you come to one of the game sites, you know exactly what you're supposed to do, and that we need you because this is what you said you were good at. But that part hasn't started yet.

How can this game impact someone in China or India?

McGonigal: The answer to how any ordinary person will experience this game lies in the Lost Sport podcast. It will be the first alternate reality podcast. It appears that this ancient sport has been lost for 2,000 years, and if people can figure out how to play it, this new sport will be something anyone in any country can play. And the experience of playing it is going to be a very big part of the mainstream experience.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

At SXSWi this year, Twitter has emerged once again as the technology everyone is using to organize themselves.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

AUSTIN, Texas--After last year's explosive arrival on the geek scene at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) of Twitter, a lot of people wondered what technology might take the conference by storm this year.

Well, after three-and-a-half days of SXSWi, I'd say we have an uncontested winner.

Announcing the technology that more than anything else has governed how the thousands of attendees here are organizing themselves, finding out what their friends are up to, weighing in on the merits of keynote address interviewers and so much more.

Drum roll please.

It's Twitter. Again.

I have never seen anything like it, not even last year.

Part of that has to do with the fact that even though Twitter dominated at SXSWi 2007, it was still new to many people. This year, it is absolutely ruling this event.

Everywhere you go, people are talking about how they heard about this event, or that unofficial party or this controversy or that rumor on Twitter. People are stopping in their tracks to read Twitter posts on their phones and some of the more talked about happenings here are generating hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Tweets, all in an entirely organic and uncoordinated manner.

Basically, I think a lot of people must be wondering how they managed to get through SXSWi before Twitter came along. It's like trying to imagine the days when there was no email.

In practical terms, Twitter has been terrific, particularly when it comes to the many social events that are wrapped around SXSWi. For example, as my colleague Caroline McCarthy wrote, once people began finding that the lines to get into some of the more popular evening parties were too long, they began using Twitter to find out where new, unofficial gatherings were taking place.

On Sunday, meanwhile, Twitter became a battlefield of sorts as many people used the service to vent their frustrations at Sarah Lacy, the journalist who was interviewing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for the day's keynote address.

While discontent was spreading rapidly throughout the packed ballroom where the keynote was being held--and through at least two overflow rooms--about Lacy's interviewing style, those were able to get online were firing away at her on Twitter.

I won't repeat those postings here, but suffice it to say that people were angry and belligerent and were using the service to express themselves.

Afterwards, Lacy herself turned to Twitter to express her own feelings on the matter.

"Seriously screw all you guys," she wrote. "I did my best to ask a range of things."

A day later, even, Twitter is still the best place to find people's evolving thoughts on the Lacy controversy, as many people are posting--including lots who aren't even in Austin for SXSWi--about what happened, about where they can find video of the interview and about their responses to an interview Lacy later gave about what happened.

And while Twitter has been a terrific source of information about what's going on around SXSWi, it is not always accurate.

For example, earlier today, I saw a Twitter post from uber-blogger Robert Scoble in which he said he thought that Zuckerberg would be holding a make-up Q&A session.

I blogged the news--careful, however, to not state categorically that it was true.

That turned out to be a good thing, as, in the end, Scoble had gotten it slightly wrong. In fact, Zuckerberg was taking part in a previously-scheduled Facebook developers' event that was not open to the public and which didn't seem to be a response to what had happened on Sunday.

In part, however, I had been at fault for writing about the potential Q&A session without confirming it and without looking more closely at what others had Twittered after Scoble's original posting.

All of which gave me a lesson that what happens on Twitter doesn't stay on Twitter and that therefore, it's worthwhile to reality-check what you read there.

As SXSWi heads towards its conclusion--there is still a little more than a day left of the event--I have no doubt that Twitter will continue to be the single most influential organizing factor.

But there's also other technologies at play here, as I'm sure some will be quick to point out.

Pownce, for one. Meebo for another.

And, believe it or not, the telephone and even e-mail.

Late last night, as some friends and I were trying to figure out where the crowds were, we found ourselves without the ability to get Twitter feeds.

But we had cell phones and through a painstaking process of calling people, checking email and pure luck, we ended up getting the word that we'd been waiting for.

Still, we all knew that if we'd simply had Twitter, we could have gotten the information a whole lot quicker.

Looking ahead, then, at what might be the Twitter of SXSWi 2009, I'm putting my money on a relatively young technology that not long ago, no one had heard from.

Yes, it's Twitter.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

The PostSecret project encourages people to write secrets on postcards and send them to the project's curator, Frank Warren. Over the years, he has gotten more than 200,000 postcards and has published four compilations of the cards.

(Credit: PostSecret)

AUSTIN, Texas--Here's my secret: I cried during Frank Warren's keynote speech.

Of course, I wasn't alone. All around the ballroom where Warren, the founder of the PostSecret project, was giving Monday's South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) keynote address, people were misty-eyed. And for me, things he said throughout his talk had tears rolling down my face.

It's not surprising, though. For those unfamiliar with PostSecret, it's the project Warren has been doing for several years where he encourages the public to send him anonymous postcards with some sort of personal secret. Over the years, he has collected more than 200,000 of the cards, published four compilations of them, and created a blog community where people can view many of those cards and the secrets they contain.

PostSecret project founder and curator Frank Warren delivering his keynote address at SXSWi on Monday in Austin, Texas.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Warren began his talk by explaining some of the things he's learned over the years since he began the project. In a short, emotionally moving video that expressed the three surprises that have emerged from the project: That he's seen so much "soulful" art incorporated into the postcards; that people have "tons" of secrets; and that he has been "astonished" by the frailty and heroism of ordinary people, Warren set the stage for the afternoon and for talking about what the project has meant to him and to so many of the people who have participated in it.

"I think we all have secrets," Warren said, "and I like to imagine us keeping them in a box. Each day we face a choice to bury (them) down deep inside it, or find the box, bring it out in the light, open it up, and share the secrets with the light."

To illustrate what he meant, and to show the audience how personal the secrets can be, he read a series of the postcards he had brought with him.

One, a picture of a sonogram with a child in it read, "I passed her at the store the other day. I wonder if she knows. I almost had his child. I wonder if I should tell her."

Another read, "My boyfriend is deaf, and when we have sex, I scream my ex's name."

Warren explained that the cards don't all come in a traditional postcard form. Many, in fact, take altogether different forms.

For example, he said he had received secrets on parking tickets and that he'd gotten six different secrets written--and jumbled--on mixed-up Rubik's cubes. For those, he said, he had to break the cubes open and put them back together in order to read the text properly.

One non-postcard favorite, he said, was written on a Starbuck's coffee cup, and read: "I serve decaf to customers who are rude to me."

Warren said he has always been impressed by the way PostSecret's participants incorporate art and imagery into their postcards.

(Credit: PostSecret)

Still other cards express how angry people can be at the circumstances of their lives and the little things they do to strike back.

"I put lipstick on my boss' shirt," read Warren off one card, "so his wife would think we're having an affair, even though we're not."

And on the side of the card, its sender had added, "This sounds crazy even to me."

Still another card, from a baggage handler somewhere, read, "You called me an idiot, so I sent your bags to the wrong destination. Whoops! I guess you were right."

"There's a lot of wisdom and knowledge you can extract," Warren said, "from thoughtful, soulful confessions."

Before the keynote speech began, attendees had the opportunity to write their own secrets on cards and turn them in. So Warren read a few of the ones people had dropped off. Some of them were devastating in their honesty and their commentary on business and society.

"Work paid for me to come here," one attendee wrote, "but I'm actually here to find another job."

"My company, a large one, sent me to SXSW in order to steal ideas from start-ups," another card read. "I'm pretending to be a freelancer."

This one was greeted by loud hisses from the packed house.

One of the two large drawings based on Warren's keynote speech that artists created during his talk.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Warren said that over the years and with all the cards and secrets, he's felt that two themes have emerged from all he's seen.

The first, he explained, is that when people think they're keeping secrets, the truth may be that the secrets are keeping them, and could well be affecting relationships and the way people see the world.

"The other part of the story," he added, "is that it shows we all have the potential in one courageous moment to change our life...and to liberate ourselves."

He then explained how the PostSecret project began. He said that he had handed out cards on the streets of Washington, D.C., and had put some of the very first ones on the wall at an art gallery there.

"The most common" thing he encountered in handing out the cards, Warren said, "was people who said, 'I don't have any secrets.' But I always made sure they took a card, because they have the best secrets."

After exhibiting the cards and getting very positive responses, he said, the cards started to come from people he'd never even handed them out to. The project had taken on a life of its own, he explained, so he started his blog, a site that has now made it possible for anyone to see how bare people lay their souls when sending in the cards and the secrets they contain.

The second artistic drawing done based on Warren's keynote address at SXSWi.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

He then talked about how, after the blog became a phenomenon, HarperCollins publishers approached him about making a book out of the project. And while many of the early cards were included in the first book--there are now four--there were some that didn't get included for several reasons, including too much sexual content or potential copyright violations.

So he showed off a few of his favorite book reject cards.

One read: "I work with a bunch of uptight, religious people, so sometimes I don't wear panties, and I just have a big smile on my face."

Another said, "I like to watch Dr. Phil. Drunk."

And a third read, "All my life I wanted to look like Liz Taylor. Now Liz Taylor's starting to look like me."

To Warren, the most gratifying moment in the entire project's history was when he got an e-mail from the man who had founded a national suicide prevention hotline saying the hotline was out of money and needed help.

So Warren posted the plea on the blog and within a week, he said, readers had contributed more than $30,000, enough to keep the hotline afloat.

Warren opened up the talk to audience questions, and for anyone to reveal their secrets, and the first person to do so came up on stage and proposed to his girlfriend. She accepted the proposal, and the two walked off-stage engaged.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

"So the next time someone says virtual communities don't make a difference in the real world," Warren said to cheers, "they do, every day."

One thing that comes up frequently with the project is that the cards arrive at Warren's house with bar code stickers added by the post office covering some of the words of the secrets.

That annoys a lot of the blog's readers, Warren explained.

"Frank, peel off the white stickers," pleaded one blog reader who wrote Warren. "The post office puts them on, not the people sending the cards."

"And then I can't read the rest of the message," Warren said, because it was hidden behind one of the post office's stickers.

The crowd erupted with laughter.

Finally, Warren finished his prepared remarks, and said he was ready to turn the microphone over to audience members with secrets to share.

And one had apparently gotten in touch with him before the talk, because he was standing in the wings, waiting to come on stage.

The man got in front of the audience and proceeded to propose to his girlfriend, holding out a large engagement ring.

After a brief pause, in which the man said, "I'm shaking up here, hurry up," the girlfriend came up on stage to join him where they embraced and he put the ring on her finger to huge applause.

And, as you might expect, the tears were everywhere. Including streaming down my cheeks.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

AUSTIN, Texas--According to Robert Scoble, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to do an open Q-and-A this afternoon at South by Southwest Interactive.

This, of course, would be a follow-up to his Sunday keynote here, which went awry when the audience turned on his interviewer, journalist Sarah Lacy.

I don't have a lot of details, and apparently the open Q-and-A may be going on right now, though Scoble Twittered that he thought it would be at 4:30 p.m. local time.

But for Zuckerberg to make this move would surely go over huge here at SXSWi, where the talk since the keynote Sunday has been about almost nothing but the "train wreck" that was the on-stage discussion.

UPDATE (12:22 PM PDT): Kind of, but not quite. Facebook has planned to hold one of its "Developer Garage" events in conjunction with SXSWi for some time now, and representatives from the company announced on Monday that Zuckerberg would indeed be speaking at the get-together.

It will also, as reported, be at 4:30 PM Central time, but it won't be a massive event. Priority admission, according to Facebook representatives, will be given to those who have already responded to the Developer Garage.

(Editors' note, 1:10 PM PDT: Earlier Monday, Zuckerberg chatted one-on-one with CNET News.com's Caroline McCarthy. An account of that conversation is posted here: "Breaking even with Mark Zuckerberg.")

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

While CNET News.com reporter Caroline McCarthy and I have been busy writing up our many observations of the goings-on and happenings at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), CNET TV, too, has had its journalistic eye on the event.

Click over to this CNET TV video of a panel on making a living through video blogging or this one on how motion is breathing new life into computing a la Guitar Hero.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).