CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman wearing a bowler hat in Austin, Texas, during the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival. His chapeau was a dead ringer for one being worn around town by players in a project called 'The hat game.'
(Credit: Chris Taylor)AUSTIN, Texas--"Is that the hat, Mr. Terdiman?"
My inquisitor was Alice Taylor, a prominent British video game journalist and, like me, an attendee at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here this week. But the bowler Taylor--whom I know through professional and social circles--had spotted on my head and was asking me about was most definitely not the hat she thought it was.
And she was hardly the only one seeing this black chapeau resting atop my dome and thinking that it was something other than a stylish headpiece. In fact, all day Monday, strangers and friends alike had been coming up to me after spying it on my head and asking me about it.
"Excuse me, sir, but I do believe you have my hat," one eager forty or fiftysomething SXSW male volunteer with salt-and-pepper hair had rushed over to say to me in the halls of the Austin Convention Center earlier that day.
"No, I don't," I told him confidently. After all, I knew for a fact that my bowler actually belonged to my friend Chris, a local, who had lent it to me for the day. After a moment of the gentleman looking confused, a group of his fellow volunteers burst out laughing, and one woman said to me, "You're going to get asked that a lot."
Indeed. And that's just exactly what I had planned.
It turns out that an outfit called Arts Council England had sponsored a group of UK companies to come to SXSWi to showcase the state of interactive and creative work being done these days in Britain and as a visceral way of doing so, had commissioned a small games company called Simon Games to create what became called "The hat game."
This was one of a number of so-called pervasive games that companies or small independent teams had sprung on SXSWi this year. Others involved companies like Zappos, FreshBooks, Iridesco, and SocialBomb, and tasked players with things like trading cards, snapping pictures of Robert Scoble, and playing a geek tech version of bingo.
"The hat game" revolved around a bowler hat embedded with a GPS chip, and the idea was that somebody would be wearing the hat around Austin, tracked live on the Internet, and when someone privy to what was going on would see them, they would come over and inquire, "Excuse me, sir (or madam), but I do believe you have my hat."
Discovered, the bowler wearer would hand it over, photographs and e-mails would ensue, and eventually the person who had managed to hold on to it the longest would be declared the winner.
When I told Chris about that, he said he had a bowler and I should wear it around the conference to see what trouble I could get in. I certainly do love a little culture jamming and gaming of games, so with a big mischievous grin crossing my face, we both knew I had to do it. And write about it of course.
That explains why, not long after the salt-and-pepper gentleman suggested that I had his hat, another fellow, this time much younger and with a thick British accent, approached me and said, "Would I be close in asking for your hat?"
At least that's what I think he said. He spoke too softly to understand fully.
A spin-off of "MooseHunt"
Being SXSWi, where serendipity rules, I found myself in line for lunch Tuesday next to Alex Fleetwood, a pervasive games festival organizer from England who had helped out with the creation of "The hat game." I couldn't resist explaining that I had spent the previous day gaming the project, and asked if he could tell me more about it.
Fleetwood, who created the Hide&Seek festival in England, got me in touch with Simon Johnson, from Simon Games, and we sat down a little later to talk about the project.
Johnson--fully informed that I was hacking his game--explained that the basic mechanics of "The hat game" had been lifted from a game, called "MooseHunt" that he and his business partner had created for IGFest, another street and pervasive games festival in the UK. He said that for that project, his partner walked the 80 miles from his home to the town where the festival was being held in a moose suit.
Like the hat, the suit had a GPS chip in it and could be tracked on the Internet. Players could send a text message and get an online map of where the moose was at any given moment, and if they managed to find him and take a picture of him before he took a photo of the player, they would win.
So, looking for a way to create a game for SXSWi that would borrow the mechanics of "MooseHunt," but that involved something small that could be easily passed around between people, Johnson and his partner settled on the bowler hat.
Over the course of the three days that "The hat game" was played, it was always possible to load the game's Web page and see where in Austin the hat had gone. According to Johnson, the very first person who found the hat--Johnson began the game wearing it around--was a teenage Austin girl. Having acquired the bowler, she promptly got in a car and drove off for parts far from downtown, where SXSW is being held.
"We had no expectation that anyone outside the festival would be involved at all," Johnson said, "so it was great to see that kind of (local) involvement."
He said he asked the girl how she had found out about the game, since she wasn't in any way connected to SXSW. She told him her uncle, who lived far from here, had heard about the project and had called her, telling her that since she lived in Austin, she should keep an eye out for someone wearing a bowler.
And, of course, if she spotted it, to say, "Excuse me, sir, but I believe you have my hat."
Johnson said that over the three days of the game, about 12 people had had possession of the hat for some period of time, and that one had it three times. He explained that one man had spent $35 on a taxi to follow a woman wearing the hat, eventually knocking on doors on the street he was sure she had ended up on. He got the hat.
This woman, named Erica, won 'The hat game' by holding on to the bowler for four hours, seven minutes and 39 seconds.
(Credit: Arts Council England)The winner, meanwhile, a woman named Erica, managed to hold on to the bowler for 4 hours, 7 minutes and 39 seconds. And several others had it for more than two hours.
But back at the Convention Center, I was walking around, innocently wearing my own bowler--okay, not that innocently--when out of the corner of my eyes I saw a woman see the hat on my head and spring into action. I moved forward, and she followed, eventually circling in front of me and saying, "Is it over?"
"Is what over," I said.
"Excuse me, sir, but I believe you have my hat," she said.
To which I replied, shaking my head, "I'm afraid not."
The woman grimaced, embarrassed.
My plan was to wear the hat all day, especially at the Convention Center, where I knew that there would be the highest probability people would see it and make the connection. But even there, only the tiniest fraction of conference attendees knew what was going on. That's because knowledge of "The hat game" was spread mostly through word of mouth, although a BBC reporter had done a story on it on Saturday that included a video and which had risen to a top spot on the BBC's Web site. That, in fact, was where I had first come across it.
At the end of the day, the plan was for me to go to one of Monday night's parties, where Chris was a volunteer, and return it to him. It was to be as simple as that.
A few more times though, I was approached, and each time, I had to tell the rather excited person asking me for the hat that, no, it wasn't theirs.
Finally, evening came and I made my way to the party. And being SXSWi, where, as I mentioned, serendipity rules, Chris was working the door when I arrived. I walked towards him and caught his eye.
Without missing a beat, Chris said, "Excuse me, sir, but I believe you have my hat."
Indeed I did. I took it off and handed it over.
A project undertaken by several people to Twitter as characters from the hit AMC show 'Mad Men' became a phenomenon, despite it being entirely fan fiction. Three of the authors appeared at SXSWi Tuesday to talk about the lessons that can be learned from the experiment.
(Credit: Twitter)AUSTIN, Texas--For many fans of the hit TV series "Mad Men," one of the biggest events of 2008 was the sudden emergence of a number of the show's characters on Twitter.
At first, it seemed as though whoever was posting regular tweets from within the fictionalized 1960s world of the AMC network show was doing so on behalf of the producers. But as is well known now, they were a group of people who had taken on the task themselves, and who quickly found their project shut down. As is equally well known now, a public outcry and some fancy footwork by AMC's digital marketing agency eventually allowed them to continue, as they do to this day.
On Tuesday at the South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSWi) here, three of the people involved in the so-called fan fiction appeared on a panel to discuss the experience of Twittering deep from inside the "Mad Men" story line, and to share their thoughts on lessons that producers and marketers alike could learn from the project.
First up to speak was Carri Bugbee, who Twitters as Peggy Olson, one of the leads on the show. Bugbee was honored with a Shorty Award--which rewards the "best content producers on Twitter"--last month. She won in the advertising category, which is ironic, given that Bugbee undertook her turn as Peggy Olson as a fan and not under any official "Mad Men" auspices.
Bugbee talked at length about the genesis of her participation in the project, explaining about the levels of detail she and others who were Twittering as "Mad Men" characters would follow in order to make their posts feel as authentic as possible. She said she told almost no one about what she was doing, and that keeping the Peggy Olson account alive and vibrant--before and after it was taken down and reinstated--was extremely time consuming.
As a public relations professional herself, Bugbee said she thought there were a series of lessons producers and marketers could learn from the "Mad Men" fan fiction.
First, she said, producers should strive to reserve the Twitter accounts for all the characters in whatever show or film they're making. "I can't believe that any of us would have to say that," Bugbee said, adding that for fans, "if you have a favorite TV show, you could probably go reserve (any character's) name on Twitter" even now.
Next, she admonished producers and marketers by saying that if they haven't already reserved all the accounts for their work's characters, it's probably too late to retrieve the names if they've already been taken by someone else.
"Once someone's got it, they've got it," she said. "You could certainly engage in some copyright battle to retrieve it, but it wouldn't" look good. AMC can certainly attest to that.
Another lesson, she said, was that if you're a producer or marketer caught up in a controversy like what happened with AMC forcing Twitter to shut down the fan "Mad Men" accounts, it's best not to "bury your head."
"If the media's swirling around you, and wants to know stuff," she said, "give them something. Speculation isn't good."
Bugbee also advised that producers overcome their institutional need to control all aspects of their work and "use your fans to your advantage." That, she said, is such an obvious thing to do, yet most filmmakers, producers and marketing or advertising agencies seem stuck in a previous era where it was anathema to let anyone else monkey with your properties.
And finally, she said that those in control of brands need to put the resources into monitoring what people are writing about them on Twitter. "If you're not following what people are saying about you on Twitter," Bugbee said, "you're missing out on a treasure trove of data."
Betty Draper, aka Helen Ross
Next up was Helen Ross, who had been prolific Twittering as Betty Draper, the wife of Don Draper, another main character on "Mad Men."
Also an advertising executive, Ross explained that when she'd first heard about the "Mad Men" Twittering, she assumed that it was yet another in a string of clever marketing moves AMC had commissioned for the show. Among them, she recalled, was an effort to litter New York City subway cars with Don Draper business cards that promoted the show, and in another case, AMC was able to wrap a subway car with large images about the show.
"I thought maybe ("Mad Men" creator) Matt Weiner was casting for Twitter writers," Ross said. "He is so brilliant, and the show is so brilliant that I thought maybe he was having this idea about Twittertainment."
Ross said she had also started Twittering using additional accounts beyond Betty Draper in order to create little "mini-dramas" with her various characters. By steeping herself in the show's aracana and its voice, style, and story lines, she was able to build extensions of the show's arc that felt realistic to many readers.
And as a result of that experience, she said, she advised anyone participating in fan fiction like this to take over several characters in order to control the development of outside-the-lines dramatic evolution.
"It seemed like we were extending the fictional world," Ross said, "by making (the) characters live between episodes and between seasons. It revealed (the characters') mundane, everyday activities, and everybody knows that Twitter is good at" that.
"This enabled 'Mad Men' fans...providing them with commentary from the characters," Ross said. "All of us have strived to remain parallel to the 'Mad Men' universe, and to not interfere with the story lines. I can't say enough about how much research and devotion to detail this entails. I now have a whole collection of 1960s cookbooks."
Ross also cautioned potential fan-fiction Twitterers to remember that the work done by by people like her and Bugbee and fellow panelist Michael Bissell is only half of the picture. The other half, she pointed out, is the fans.
"Our 'Mad Men' on Twitter wouldn't be very exciting if it was just us talking about what we're eating for breakfast." Instead, she said, doing the project well involved give and take via Twitter with fans, allowing those fans to feel involved and close to the characters.
As someone who's actually in the advertising industry--the "Mad Men" milieu--Ross said there are further lessons producers and marketers need to draw from the "Mad Men" Twitter experience. Perhaps most important, she suggested, advertisers need to "stop siloing." In other words, they need to understand that to get their message out, it is necessary to spread it across a wide variety of platforms.
In the 1960s, she said, a marketer could reach 80 percent of the audience by airing one spot on the three TV networks. Today, she said, it would take putting advertising on about 100 different networks to get the same result. And that means using TV, mobile devices, Twitter, Facebook, and more.
"Building this relationship (with fans) is so important," Ross said. "Loyal viewers not only watch more of your show, but they'll also sit through the commercials and engage with your advertisers."
Finally, Ross said, "What we're doing, we think, is transforming fan fiction into a new kind of marketing. It's not just fan fiction. It's brand fiction."
Roger Sterling, aka Michael Bissell
The last to speak was Bissell, who had Twittered as Roger Sterling, Don Draper's boss on "Mad Men."
Bissell said the major lesson he thinks he learned from the project was that it's really important to do your research and stick to details. For example, he said, he discovered by being chided by readers, that the Long Island Iced Tea hadn't been invented by the 1960s, meaning that Twittering that Sterling was drinking one was impossible.
He also said that anyone who thinks they can examine how something like the "Mad Men" on Twitter project happened and decide they understand exactly how the medium works is fooling themselves.
One example of that, he pointed out, is that when the project was first getting going, the most-followed Twitterers had perhaps 40,000 followers. Today, those numbers are in the many hundreds of thousands, meaning that the scale of the medium, and what's possible, is vastly different than it was even last year.
"People who say they've got this figured out," Bissell said, "are assuming the world isn't going to change again."
AUSTIN, Texas--A couple of days ago I wrote a story suggesting that the Twitter saturation level here at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival was so high that the service's value was being affected.
Now, after four full days here, I think that conclusion is worth a reality check: Twitter is out-and-out dominating SXSWi.
To be sure, the massive numbers of tweets that are being posted using the "#sxsw" tag is making it more difficult for those using Twitter to find specific information than was the case at SXSWi 2007 or SXSWi 2008. But the reality is, if you're part of the conference this year, it feels very much like you simply cannot do anything, go anywhere, talk to anyone, see any panel or have a meal without Twitter having played a role.
From the 32bit party Monday night to people's reactions to science-fiction author Bruce Sterling's annual SXSWi rant to alerts of free ice cream being handed out on the streets of Austin, the collective agenda is being directed in 140-character bursts, even if it takes a little more work to find out what you want to find out.
Add that to the fact that the iPhone has proven a magical and nearly ubiquitous device on which to conduct that 140-character orchestra, and you've got a seriously hard-to-topple-off-the-throne combination.
Of course, there are many other communications media at play here. Besides the introduction of FourSquare, the launch of iPhone interactivity for Facebook Connect and other social networking services like Britekite, Whrrl and Meebo, there's certainly been no shortage of e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging and, believe it or not, phone calls.
But through it all, Twitter is the backbone. It is the organizing principle of SXSWi. And while the SXSWi crowd would seem to be the vanguard of this level of all-encompassing Twitter devotion, it is clear that this is just the proving ground for what will be coming for many other parts of connected society.
After all, just a year ago, nearly all of the most-followed Twitter users were members of the digerati. Now, it's nearly all mainstream celebrities or personalities. Can Twitter handle this? I don't think anyone knows.
But what I'm seeing here at SXSWi is that the service, even without a developed revenue stream and even with a recent history of functional instability and even with so much traffic that it can simply be overwhelming, has become indispensable. Take Twitter away from the crowd here suddenly, and I think the conference would grind to a halt.
It would recover, and pretty quickly. This is an resourceful group of people. There are other options. No one should believe for a minute that the advent of Twitter or other social media neuters the digerati's ability to communicate with traditional analog tools. But if Twitter were suddenly gone, there would be one heck of a hiccup.
Last year, I wrote that despite many companies' desire to repeat the incredible debut Twitter had at SXSWi 2007, there was no denying that Twitter circa 2008 was the new Twitter.
And despite my misgivings about what is clearly a saturation problem, I have to conclude that here in Austin, in 2009, Twitter is once again the new Twitter.
AUSTIN, Texas--IMDb founder Col Needham said the massively popular movie database has set as its major goal for the future to add one-button streaming for all of the 1.3 million titles it indexes.
Obviously, the vision is a long-term one, Needham acknowledged, and it faces hurdles from the slew of content owners who control the vast library of titles the Internet Movie Database provides information about, but as a leading movie-oriented site, it's a very important goal to articulate in public.
Needham was speaking Monday afternoon at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival here. Oddly, though his talk was part of the film festival, the room was packed almost entirely by attendees of the associated SXSW Interactive Festival.
Speaking at SXSW on Monday, IMDb founder Col Needham said the site hopes to eventually offer streaming at the push of a button for all of the 1.3 million titles in its database. Clearly, this vision will take some time to come to fruition.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)Ostensibly, Needham was talking about the history of IMDb--from its founding even before the advent of the World Wide Web, to its launch as a dot-com site to its being bought by Amazon.com. But late in the talk, he explained how he wants to make it possible for the 57 million monthly unique visitors to the site to watch, with the click of one button, all the movies, TV shows, and other video content indexed on the site.
It will be difficult to fulfill the vision, Needham said, "because many of the films may not exist anymore and many may not be available for streaming."
But these days, free or paid streaming of movies is available from a number of sources, including: Netflix, Hulu, TV.com (a part of CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News), Amazon, iTunes, and others. Each of those sources, though, has its own arrangement with the content owners, so for IMDb to get access to the entire library would be a massive undertaking.
Still, rather than being a throw-away line that didn't carry any weight, Needham reiterated at the end of the talk that the vision was one of the company's major goals for 2009 and beyond.
Already, IMDb has begun adding streaming content to the site, a program that began in September. Right now, Needham said, there are 14,000 full-length TV episodes and a couple of thousand full-length movies available on the site, as well as 120,000 other pieces of video content, many of which are movie trailers, interviews, and featurettes.
And he said that the site is adding thousands of new pieces of video content per week.
At that rate, however, it's sure to take the site quite some time to achieve the goal. Needham said he imagined a time three years from now when we will all look back at early 2009, when so many media sites are trying to solve the problem of making content available to those who want it in the face of resistance from the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America, and we'll shake our heads at where we were at.
"We'll laugh at how little we knew about what business models would work," Needham said.
Playfish's 'Who has the biggest brain?' was one of several iPhone applications launched at SXSWi this week. But for each company, there were never any guarantees that the apps would launch in time, given that Apple has been famously unconcerned with developers' event-oriented deadlines.
(Credit: Playfish)AUSTIN, Texas--Given that you can't walk more than a couple feet at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here without stumbling into someone tapping away on one iPhone application or another, it's easy to forget that just a year ago, there was no such thing as an official iPhone "app."
But now, of course, iPhone apps are one of the hottest technology segments of all. And since SXSWi is ground zero for cutting edge social media and the people who are often the earliest adopters of such technology, a series of companies have used the conference as the launching pad for their own apps for Apple's ubiquitous smartphone.
That the companies--FourSquare, Audioboo, Playfish, Whrrl, and Facebook--chose to launch their apps here is noteworthy, not least because it's well-documented that Apple isn't particularly interested in app developers' deadlines, and for the most part, any success that those developers do have in getting their apps out in time for events seems to be a whole lot of luck.
That's not to say, however, that Apple is entirely unconcerned with developers' needs. In some cases, knowing people inside the company seems to help. But still, after talking to some of the people behind the apps launching here, it appears that the best chance a company has in getting an app out in time for something like SXSWi is getting started on the project well in advance.
FourSquare managed to get its iPhone app up on Apple's App Store the night before SXSW began.
(Credit: FourSquare)Over the last few years at this tech-centric conference, Twitter has been the most used social media tool, with thousands of geeks spending incredible amounts of time typing out 140-character updates on what they're doing, where they're going, what interesting panel they're in, or where wine video blogger Gary Vaynerchuk is giving out cases and cases of wine.
This year, however, many have found that there is a serious case of Twitter overload, and so people have been looking for alternative solutions to getting word out to their friends about what's important to them at the moment. And that's why it was so important to the founders of FourSquare, a brand-new social media service, that their iPhone app be available to SXSWi attendees.
"We were getting worried about" the app not being launched in time for SXSWi, said Naveen Selvadurai, a co-founder of FourSquare, adding that he and his partner, Dennis Crowley, felt that "if it didn't go live at SXSW, it would be a bit of a disaster because everyone would have to use SMS."
And that, of course, would have been its own nightmare for FourSquare given that AT&T's service--which is what iPhone users are relying on--has been spotty at best. Fortunately, the FourSquare app did go live at 11 p.m. last Thursday night, just hours before SXSW officially opened.
But Selvadurai said that there simply had been no way to know ahead of time whether the app would be added to the App Store in time for the conference. He and his team had submitted it to Apple on March 1, and then had heard very little about its status.
Audioboo had its iPhone app rejected twice in advance of SXSW but eventually managed to get it approved by calling on friends at Apple.
(Credit: Audioboo)"You send it in and you just wait to hear back," Selvadurai said. "We were on the phone with them, asking about the status. 'What else can we do?' They said it's in their team's hands, and that there's nothing else they can do" to give better insight into the app's destiny.
"It's both frustrating and very professional at the same time," he said. "And I've heard that about Apple. They don't let too much information get out."
Apple did not respond to a request for comment about its policies regarding iPhone apps and the App Store.
For Mark Rock, the founder of a British company called Audioboo, getting his iPhone app out in time for SXSWi was also a major priority. The app, which is essentially the mobile front-end for the company's social audio blogging platform, and which is intended to be the "YouTube for the spoken word," launched Friday morning, the first day of the conference, said Rock.
But it was not always certain that it would be ready in time. Rock said that the app had actually been rejected twice by Apple, first for using a kind of button that Apple doesn't approve of, and then because Apple discovered that it was possible to record and broadcast swear words with the app.
"We got around that by doing a bit of moderation," said Rock. And finally, he said, the app was approved, and in time for SXSWi, because Audioboo "had some high-level contacts at Apple Europe."
Facebook launched its Facebook Connect service for the iPhone on Saturday at SXSW.
(Credit: Facebook)Facebook makes news on the iPhone
Though SXSWi isn't known primarily as a venue for making news, Facebook certainly stole some headlines on Saturday with the announcement of its Facebook Connect for the iPhone. The service now makes it possible for participating partners to connect friends through their own iPhone apps. So, for example, users of the popular Urbanspoon app--which helps people find restaurants in specific local areas--can rate and share their thoughts on diners and such through Facebook directly on their iPhones.
Games are also a big part of the Facebook Connect program, and so one of the apps that launched at SXSWi was "Who has the Biggest Brain?" from Playfish. The game, which had already been popular as a regular Facebook application, now allows people to compete against each other using their iPhones.
And, lastly, Whrrl also used SXSWi as the logical venue for launching its own iPhone app, which is also part of the Facebook Connect ecosystem. Designed to let people "capture (their) experiences as they happen and organizes them into a lasting story for everyone in (their) life to share in and enjoy."
For these companies, getting the apps out in time for the conference was crucial, given that this small area in downtown Austin is completely saturated with many of the world's leading social media innovators and early adopters. Where better to get an app off the ground and build a huge amount of buzz with a minimum amount of effort?
Another app that is part of the Facebook Connect program is from Whrrl, a social notification service.
(Credit: Whrrl)And the downside of missing the deadline? A loss of that free buzz, something that could only be replicated at a very small number of other events.
So what was FourSquare's backup plan?
Selvadurai said that even if people hadn't been able to get the app, they could still have used the service on the mobile Web on the iPhone, though that obviously would have been a less-than-ideal situation. And, short of that, they could have used text messages to interact with the service, and their friends.
Fortunately for FourSquare, that wasn't necessary, at least not as the primary option.
"We got super lucky," said FourSquare's Selvadurai, "that it was approved and that it would go live."
FiveThirtyEight.com blogger Nate Silver (right) was the keynote speaker at SXSWi on Sunday. He was interviewed onstage by Business Week writer Stephen Baker. Silver's blog was home to some of the most accurate statistics about the 2008 election.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)AUSTIN, Texas--If there was one name that stood out on the agenda of speakers at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here this week, it was famed FiveThirtyEight.com blogger Nate Silver.
Known as a statistical wunderkind, his models predicted the final outcome of the 2008 presidential election to within .4 percent of the final popular vote. But more important to many Democrats who had their hopes for electoral victory dashed by George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, FiveThirtyEight.com--which got its name from the total number of electoral votes available--was able to provide daily affirmation that Barack Obama was really winning, even when many were tempted to believe he would be overcome by Sen. John McCain.
Silver was SXSWi's keynote speaker on Sunday, and he and interviewer Stephen Baker of Business Week went onstage in front of an audience of about 2,000 fans, most of whom were there to hear Silver talk about the secret sauce behind his hugely popular blog.
What many might not know is that Silver first came to prominence not in the political realm, but in baseball, where he authored Baseball Prospectus, a well-regarded baseball statistics site. Many might see the connection between baseball and politics as far-fetched, but to people like Silver, it's a very direct path.
Still, before starting FiveThirtyEight.com, he wasn't entirely a political neophyte. Silver had already begun to make a name for himself in the liberal political blogosphere with a series of data-rich posts on DailyKos. When he began to recognize some significant holes in the national polling establishment, he decided to step in to fill the void.
After his keynote interview, Silver sat down with CNET News and talked about the election, how his site got started, and more about the philosophical similarities between baseball and politics.
Q: Many Democrats were emotionally tied to what you were doing, in the sense that your data kept them calm during the election. Did your own numbers keep you calm?
Nate Silver: Yeah, I think so. I'm just one of those people that likes to try and dissect a problem and once you started to dissect, some days you feel better about it. If I ever get cancer, the first thing I'll probably do is go on the Web and collect a bunch of data about different survival rates. I just feel better about things when I do them that way. It's a nerdy kind of thing to do.
Q: We were able to get up every day and look at the data and see what was going on. And this is not something you could do because it was your own data. How your own data affect how you felt about what was going on?
Silver: I wouldn't be frustrated by it if McCain or Obama picked up points on a particular day. Sometimes you get frustrated if you know that something you did reveals something about your model. When something doesn't feel right, and you go and make changes. And we made a lot of changes over the course of the campaign where, even as recently as two weeks before the election, we were tweaking little parameters, and what started out as a pretty simple system--taking weighted averages of polls--became much more complex over time. But, yeah, we were never saying we had the perfect answer. We were always trying to improve things as we went along.
Q: The blog had an overt liberal position, but you always said the statistics were objective. What kind of feedback, if any, did you get from conservatives?
Silver: We had a pretty good balance. We had probably about a 2-1 ratio in terms of liberal versus conservative readers, based on the comment threads. Now that we're not in an election, I think it's swung more toward the liberal side, both in terms of my writing and what people are reading about.
We try and be fair. That's the main thing, we try and be forthright. There's so much commentary from conservatives, also from liberals, that is just entirely disingenuous about certain things. It's a lot of cheerleading and cherry-picking of data. We're trying to present a case that by and large is a liberal's case, because it's my case. It's how I see the world. But we're trying to use data to do it where a lot of people just make bad arguments.
... Read moreAUSTIN, Texas--If you wanted to see tesla coils rocking out, Dorkbot was the place to be Saturday evening at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference here.
The local art collective Arc Attack had its singing tesla coils turned up loud and it put on several demonstrations of its machines at this celebration of "people doing strange things with electricity."
The highlight of the group's show was either a rendition of the "Dr. Who" theme or perhaps the Imperial march music from "Star Wars" (see video below--and give it a few seconds to get past the head sticking up in front of the lens).
Update at 10:20 p.m. PDT, Sunday, March 15: Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that AT&T will add wireless capacity in downtown Austin to deal with the "unprecedented" demand.
AUSTIN, Texas--If there's one thing that's been made clear after two full days of the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference here, it's that AT&T clearly didn't get its network up to speed for the throngs toting iPhones around.
You could hear it being talked about everywhere: it was nearly impossible to call anyone inside the Austin Convention Center because the cell service was so poor. And because it seemed like nearly everyone at the conference has an iPhone, that meant that very few phone calls were going through.
Oddly, that didn't mean people inside the convention center weren't able to Twitter or IM or use the Web on their iPhones, or their iPod Touches. That's because SXSW really got its act together this year when it came to Wi-Fi. I've been to a ton of technology conferences over the last few years, including three previous SXSW gatherings, and I've never seen a stronger, more consistent Wi-Fi setup.
Even in Saturday's SXSW Interactive festival keynote address by Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh, with about 2,000 people in the room, the Wi-Fi service was strong. Very impressive.
But AT&T's network has not been nearly as impressive, and that's a shame. I suppose there's a reason, but it would seem logical that the company could have put in the effort to ensure that the thousands and thousands of people at SXSW--which may constitute the highest concentration of iPhone users anywhere on Earth--could get good cell service. Alas, that wasn't the case.
Still, people seemed to be able to communicate with their friends anyway. Among what is probably the most accomplished group of interactive media professionals in the world, that shouldn't be surprising. But the grumbling about AT&T could still be heard everywhere you went.
AUSTIN, Texas--By now, the story of how Twitter exploded onto the scene at the 2007 South by Southwest festival is legend in technology circles.
But here at SXSW 2009, the notion of the perfect match among community, service, and event seems flipped on its head. Many people are discovering that a monumental oversaturation of tweets is reversing the value that Twitter offered at SXSW 2007 and SXSW 2008 for finding friends and great parties.
At SXSW, the standard is for everyone to include the tag "#sxsw" in their tweets. For example, on Friday, I was looking for sources for a different story and tweeted, "If you are launching an iPhone app at #sxsw, or know someone who is, please let me know. Thanks!"
That's a great convention because it allows anyone wanting to know what's going on to search Twitter for posts using any search term important to them. That has proven useful for people wanting to find out what's going on after earthquakes, the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the Hudson River airplane crash, and many other events. At SXSW in 2007 and 2008, this was a big part of how people navigated their experiences.
At a conference with scores of panels and seemingly just as many parties, being able to determine what's worthwhile is crucial for people trying to get the most out of their time here.
This year because of the conference's impressive growth and Twitter's broader mainstream appeal, it has become almost impossible to find the same value as in the past. I did a search for the "#sxsw" tag on Saturday afternoon and found that there had been 392 tweets with the term in just the previous 10 minutes. That number mushroomed to more than 1,500 in the previous hour.
There were nearly 400 tweets using the #sxsw tag in just 10 minutes during the SXSW conference on Saturday afternoon.
(Credit: Twitter)While those numbers demonstrate that people here are without question using Twitter like never before, it also means that it's never been harder to find what you're looking for amid the flood of posts about the panels, barbecue, Web celebrity spottings, and deep thoughts about social media.
This has forced people accustomed to relying on simple Twitter searches to get creative to find the nuggets they need.
"I've been purposefully putting the ("#sxsw") tag...to as many things as I can, even just going to my hotel," said David Kadavy, a user-interface designer from Chicago. "I started looking (for the tag) at first. But there was just so much of it that I started just looking (for) the people I'm following and filtering for the (tag)."
That's fine for people who are sitting at a computer, but many people using Twitter at SXSW do so on mobile phones. And being the cutting edge of the digerati set, the most common device in evidence here is the iPhone. But Kadavy said he hadn't found a way to do the kind of filtered search he wanted, and as a result, seemed hard-pressed to accomplish what he'd need to while on the go.
Some at the conference have found themselves being aware of the oversaturation dynamic and have been trying to reduce the number of tagged tweets, hoping to cut down on the flow.
"I was definitely guilty yesterday," said Andie Grace, a senior staffer with the Burning Man organization. "I grabbed my phone to tweet that I was grabbing my luggage (at the airport)....But I stopped myself from Twittering and I thought if everybody did this, it's going to be useless. So I stopped myself because I would like to search and see what panels my friends are finding interesting and where they're planning to be."
To be sure, there are plenty of ways people can see what their friends are tweeting. But the never-ending flow of tweets with the "#sxsw" tag are forcing attendees to find alternatives.
That, of course, has presented opportunities to other services to gain the kind of passionate users that Twitter engendered during SXSW 2007 and SXSW 2008. In fact, some services are even incorporating Twitter, creating a way to get the best of both worlds.
"I just got (to SXSW) but have been watching from afar, and it did seem a little crowded," said Mario Anima, the director of online community at Current.com. "It seems like (a lot of) people are also using Brightkite and Foursquare to keep in touch."
Anima said that Foursquare, a brand-new service from the team that created--and then sold to Google--Dodgeball, is particularly useful for navigating SXSW because it allows people to post updates about what they're doing and where they're going that are then incorporated into their Twitter feeds. That way, their Twitter followers can see what they're doing without also being a Foursquare member.
Of course, SXSW 2009 may well prove to be where Foursquare itself explodes, a la Twitter in 2007. The service was under wraps until just a few days ago, and its iPhone application was added to Apple's App Store just in time for the conference.
Using this method to see what your friends are up to at SXSW, Anima said, frees people to use Twitter for broader purposes. For example, he said, it means that instead of trying to find within the "#sxsw" search flood what friends are doing, users can look for trends, like what people are saying are good panels.
Even that method might be overly cumbersome, however, given the hundreds, or thousands, of tweets being sent each hour at the conference.
To Laura Roeder, a consultant from Venice Beach, Calif., there's another solution altogether.
She said that she's been following SXSW Baby, a blog and Twitter account where the best of SXSW is being aggregated, allowing followers to restrict the information overflow.
"Last night, they re-tweeted a Gary (Vaynerchuk) party," Roeder said, speaking of what have become famous impromptu wine parties at SXSW, "so I knew about that."
AUSTIN, Texas--The future of news is not breadlines for journalists, a lack of reporting on politicians' scandals, and a dearth of coverage of what's really going on behind the lines of wars around the world.
In fact, a surprisingly optimistic author Steven Johnson said Friday during his talk, "The Ecosystem of News," at the South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSWi), there's actually a bright future for news and the best hope for a vibrant, effective, and worthwhile news-gathering community is to look back at the model set over the last decade or so in technology journalism.
Steven Johnson
These days, there's no shortage of signs that the news business is collapsing in on itself, unable to develop a modern business model, and confused by how to tackle the threats posed by online classified sites like Craigslist and amateur bloggers posting news items obsessively and continuously.
And where many see these signs pessimistically as proof that the news business as we know it is dead, Johnson, whose books include "The Invention of Air" and "Emergence," sees the same fate as a good thing. After all, he suggested, why cling to failed systems when new ones that are rising to meet the needs of the future are emerging all on their own?
Johnson began his talk by framing what he called "old growth media," the traditional combination of newspapers, magazines, and television news. He recalled how, when he was in college in the late 1980s, he used to stalk his local bookstore around the same time every month, eager for the latest issue of Macworld.
Back in those days, he said, the best way to get the most recent news about what Apple was up to was to read periodicals like Macworld. Yet, with the long lead times of monthly magazines, that latest news was always several months late, Johnson said. Later, when things like CompuServe came along, he was able to compress the timeframe for getting the most up-to-date Apple news to a few days by downloading the most recent issue of Macweek.
And then along came the Web, and sites like MacInTouch.com, Apple's first site, rumor blogs, and fan sites, Johnson said, which made it finally possible to get the latest Mac news in near real-time. "Now the lag is seconds," Johnson said, "thanks to people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Steve Jobs speech."
Today, he said, many people are panicking as newspapers fail left and right, and as they see the likelihood that as a result, the crucial newsgathering role played by professional journalists will disappear with their dying employers. Yet the example set in technology journalism should give such pessimists something to feel good about, Johnson said.
And just because the impressive advances in newsgathering on the Web were seen first in technology journalism doesn't mean they won't spread to more mainstream--read: important--topics like local government, crime, and so forth.
"The Web...just has a tendency to cover technology first," Johnson said, "because the first people to use the Web were much more interested in technology than" things like school board meetings.
The point? That the model is established, and that for consumers of news, the example set in technology news should be cause for optimism, even if not for the health of the traditional news business. And the proof? Johnson pointed to politics, and the coverage of presidential campaigns.
He said that the first campaign he followed closely was in 1992. His main sources for the most up-to-date news were TV shows like CNN's "Crossfire" and magazines like Newsweek, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. At the same time, he said he watched each of that year's debates religiously and stayed up late to devour the post-game analysis on networks like CNN.
And while all of those outlets still existed during the 2008 election (except "Crossfire"), someone sticking to them last fall would have been hopelessly out of the loop compared to the millions of people who were obsessively glued to the Internet, which was delivering an unbelievable amount of coverage of all kinds about the election.
Johnson talked about how blogs like TalkingPointsMemo.com, HuffingtonPost.com, FiveThirtyEight.com, DailyKos, and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish--one could determine his political bent by the sites he mentioned--served up a steady flow of breaking news and in-depth analysis never before possible during a presidential election. Add that to the fact that he could watch the debates with "a thousand virtual friends Twittering away with me" and the fact that as many as 8 million people watched President Obama's famous race speech on YouTube, and it's obvious that the political news ecosystem, like that of technology, has found a way to move past the antiquated models of just a few years ago.
"What's happening with technology and politics is happening elsewhere as well," Johnson said, "just on a different timetable."
Local news, once the lifeblood of newspapers, is unlikely to be so in the future. Papers like The New York Times can no longer afford to cover neighborhood stories that interest a small subsection of a much larger readership. Yet, it's those very issues that are of most interest to the people in those neighborhoods, Johnson said.
"Most of what we care about in our local lives is in the long tail," he said, referring to the ability of the Web to bring news about the smallest events to those who want it. And, of course, even the Times itself is now starting to cover neighborhoods with blogs.
"Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half-mile of my house," Johnson said, "and I don't get an e-mail alert about it within half an hour, it'll be a sign that something is broken."
And as more and more of this long tail-type of news is covered by those other than professional journalists, Johnson argued, it might well free up those professionals to work on the very kinds of stories that people worry they won't be able to do in the future: war coverage, investigations, and the like.
The key, then, will be for the traditional publications to serve the role of public gatekeepers, or filterers of the flood of information coming in from the amateur Web. And that, Johnson suggested, would be a natural task for the editors of institutions known for their authority: newspapers and TV news networks. And while the readership of physical newspapers has plummeted, the numbers for those publications' online sites has risen dramatically, proving that the audience is still there.
In the end, however, it will be the entire ecosystem of news that will bring the full value to news consumers. It will be social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, which can serve as link circulators, as well as large group filters like Digg and, yes, professional journalists and editors. All together, the news will get covered, Johnson said.
The problem is that what should have been a 10-year ecosystem evolution for the news business has been forced into a much more compressed timeframe by today's financial exigencies. And this sense of panic has caused us, as a society, to lose sight of what, in Johnson's view, is a very positive long-term change.
"We need to remind ourselves that there's a lot of value" in this ecosystem and what it will become in the future," Johnson said. But "it's tough to live through transformations."
