Geek Gestalt

"Yay."

That's one of the colorful and energetic buzzwords that Moo.com, a U.K. company mostly known for its whimsical user-generated business cards, has used to get people excited about its products.

And now, it might well be the grateful word coming out of the mouths of its American customers--who make up about half of the company's sales--because Moo.com has finally decided to open a U.S. operations center.

Until now, those of us on the western side of the Atlantic ordering Moo cards, as they're known, have had to wait, sometimes for up to two weeks, to take delivery. That's fine if you don't have any kind of time crunch, but one way that many people use Moo cards is to quickly order up a set to take with them to an event. If, like me and a few people I know, you're not always on top of your to-do list, this often didn't work because the cards wouldn't arrive from Moo's London facility until it was too late.

With the opening of its operations center in Providence, R.I., however, Moo should be able to get cards into U.S. customers' hands much quicker, something that should help keep customers happy and returning again and again.

The decision is also a good sign for Moo--and perhaps for other companies that focus on so-called "people-powered" products--since putting resources into a U.S. expansion shows that it is doing well enough during the recession to warrant crossing the ocean.

The company said it will open the center sometime during the first half of 2009. Until that happens, however, plan well ahead for any kind of Moo cards you might want to order. And if you want some for South by Southwest, which is coming up in less than three weeks, you'd better move fast.

When you think of things related to science, music may not make the top of your list.

But the folks involved with a small collective called ArcAttack would like you to change your associations.

ArcAttack is all about one thing: building singing Tesla coils and crafting entire musical performances around them. For some time, at events like Dorkbot and other geekfests, the team--Joe DiPrima, Oliver Greaves, and Tony Smith--had been pulling off straightforward demonstrations of their creations. But they were synchronizing the machines to other people's music and not adding much in the way of their own innovations besides the singing Tesla coils themselves.

Now, however, ArcAttack has a whole ensemble mixing science and music and plastic--the Tesla coils, a pipe organ made from PVC, a robotic drumset--and putting it all together in short concerts with original music.

"We've got a solid 45 minutes or so of original content," DiPrima, an engineer at the University of Texas, told me recently, "and sometimes we'll incorporate themes from popular songs or do mixups with video game music.

When you see the singing Tesla coils, it takes a minute to really understand what you're watching. At first, you don't hear the tunes in the crackling of the electricity. But after a few moments, you realize what you're hearing and it's startling--especially if you have any experience with Tesla coils--to see these scientific wonders spitting out little bits of lightning with a beat.

"I've always loved music--playing it, and electronics too," DiPrima said. "I've been in a lot of bands, along with the other guys in the group, and this is probably the most fun we've had out of any other project we've been in. The way people respond to the coils playing real music with other instruments involved is amazing. People love it."

In particular, DiPrima suggested, ArcAttack's performances give their audiences--both in person and on the Web--a sense that music and science can indeed blend in a way that teaches something.

"It's...a great way to get people interested in the science behind it," he said, "to present a Tesla coil, not just (as) an 'air core resonant transformer,' but (as) an effective tool for high intensity music."

It seems that the future of tech conferences is on a lot of people's minds these days.

On Friday, I ran a story here about how to survive and thrive in the so-called "Conference 2.0" era. The idea being that even as a multimedia backchannel made up of live, online chat on services like Twitter, IM, Meebo, and others proliferates at conferences and makes audience members feel empowered to demand more direct participation in keynotes and panel discussions, it doesn't have to be a disruptive force.

In fact, experts I talked to for the story told me there is plenty of opportunity for savvy conference organizers and speakers to find a way to leverage the backchannel in order to make things more interactive and progress toward more decorum than we've seen at some events recently.

Well, according to a blog post by Web 2.0 Expo co-chair Dave McClure, these topics were very much on his mind and the minds of several others at a dinner held Sunday evening in San Francisco. Among those who seemed to have been in attendance at the dinner were Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Laughing Squid blogger Scott Beale.

(The Web 2.0 Expo is an official partner of CNET Networks' Webware 100 Awards; CNET publishes News.com.)

While a little jealous that I couldn't be at the dinner, I nonetheless am very interested in McClure's post, and I hope to be able to talk to him sometime this week and then elucidate further here.

Suffice it to say, some of the general topics under discussion as those at the dinner attempted to chew on how to make Conference 2.0 more useful for everyone involved included: "conf speakers / content don't meet expectations of audience," "sometimes speakers / organizers don't know / don't survey what audience wants to hear," "audience has an opinion, sometimes vocalizes it loudly (lately, via Twitter / Chat / Blogs)," "online tools may magnify negative opinion--does this create 'witchburning effect?,'" "sometimes you have to run the show and can't always pay attention to the backchannel," "how are we soliciting feedback on conf content / sessions BEFORE the event?" and many more.

Again, while I wasn't in the room, I can't say for sure, but it seems as though one topic on everyone's mind was how to deal with situations like the one that developed at the recent South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, when the audience at a keynote discussion there between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy became dissatisfied and extremely vocal with its displeasure.

So, at the dinner Sunday night, McClure seems to have posed the question of what expectations the audience at that South by Southwest keynote was led to have and, I surmise, how managing those expectations could have changed the eventual unpleasant outcome.

These issues are going to be increasingly important to iron out in the coming weeks and months as the backchannel evolves and as audiences become more and more used to having their say when they want to have it.

Many people think this is a bad thing, fearing that it turns over power to "the mob," but my sense is that a lot of very smart people in and out of the tech conference business feel that there are ways to manage this that can help everyone avoid repeats of what happen in Austin.

More to come. Stay tuned.

There's no fighting it. Conference 2.0, as some have called it, is here to stay.

The term refers to tech confabs where audiences communicate about what they're witnessing via a vibrant backchannel on Twitter, blogs, IM, and other forms of live media.

But while this new form of conference interactivity--where audiences are using the online tools to demand to be heard--may best be known for ugly scenes at South by Southwest this year or at Gnomedex last year, there's no reason participants can't turn the emergence of this backchannel into something positive for everyone.

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, consider this: Today, there are so many ways to communicate that even in a conference ballroom where there's no Wi-Fi, many audience members likely have smartphones they can use to Twitter their impressions of whoever is speaking. Add working Wi-Fi and you've got a full-throated echo chamber of people who aren't at all shy about making every last thought public.

So, if they're not happy about what they're seeing onstage, or feel they're not getting to ask the questions they want, audience members are increasingly venting their frustration in the backchannel--and from time to time, that irritation has manifested itself in some rather unfortunate exchanges between audience members and those onstage.

Blame it on the sense people have these days that every conversation is interactive and participatory.

"It's interesting now that it's being pushed right into the room," said Jennifer Pahlka, the general manager and co-chair of the Web 2.0 Expo. "Conferences are media. People expect to be able to comment on articles online, and they expect to be able to comment in conferences while they're in them." (The Web 2.0 Expo is an official partner of CNET Networks' Webware 100 Awards; CNET publishes News.com.)

To some, this is a warning sign that the traditional order of things has changed irrevocably and that audiences can no longer be controlled.

But others see it as a harbinger of new opportunity, of finding ways to let audiences take part like never before and make any public conversation richer and more interactive than many would have thought possible.

"I think when people try to fight it and put up resistance, it becomes more challenging," said Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club and organizer of numerous BrainJams unconferences. "That's really at the heart of it, people sitting in an audience, finding their voice online."

In fact, if the backchannel is properly managed, a conference organizer, panel moderator, or speaker can use it to reach out to audience members and bring them into the conversation.

For example, well-known blogger Robert Scoble said that when he's speaking to large groups, he will sometimes stop every 15 minutes or so for a "Twitter break," to see what people in the room are saying about the talk--and about him--and to see if there are questions being raised in the backchannel that he can address.

"That can give you more audience empathy," Scoble said, "and (you can) see how you're being perceived."

Scoble's way of tackling the issue is illustrative of something a lot of conference-goers would probably like to see: speakers who are there to add value to attendees' experiences.

"Part of it is just having audience empathy," Scoble said, "understanding what the audience is thinking about you, looking into their eyes and gauging their reactions. And if it goes south, not arguing with them. Because you can deconstruct it later. At that moment, your role is as a representative of the audience. You have to put yourself in their shoes right then and there."

Heuer agreed.

"People know the difference between a good presentation and a bad one," Heuer said, "and they want a good one. Time is our most valuable asset, and if it's being wasted, we're not going to take it. We want our time to be well-invested. When we choose a session at a conference, we're expecting the people on that panel to be talking about what's described in the description."

There are many lessons to be learned, then, about how to manage the new conference dynamic.

One part is that speakers would do themselves a service to stick to what the audience came to hear them talk about, as Heuer suggested.

But there are also plenty of ways to incorporate the backchannel itself.

One idea, Heuer suggested, would be to ensure that someone, be it the panel moderator or someone working on behalf of the conference itself, monitor the backchannel and look there for clues that the audience isn't getting what it came for. Or, conversely, that a number of people in the audience are itching to ask questions, and are voicing that desire.

Of course, just because people in the audience are getting antsy in the backchannel doesn't mean that a speaker, moderator, or conference organizer has to turn the mike over exactly when the room demands it. But if someone is monitoring the mood of the room, as expressed in the various online venues, that can mean it's possible to take a break and let people ask questions or offer observations for a couple minutes and create some good will.

That said, Heuer acknowledges that the backchannel has a high noise-to-signal ratio--and he said that conference organizers would be wise to follow the lead of a slightly older medium for clues on how to handle backchannel chatter.

Specifically, he said, there are lessons to be learned from how producers on radio call-in shows handle the flood of people trying to get on the air while a host and a guest are talking.

"We can learn a lot from other forms of live media," Heuer said. There's "a parallel to radio and other forms of live event production."

Several people intereviewed for this story pointed out that some conferences, including Tony Perkins' AlwaysOn events, have long provided visual access to the backchannel, often in the form of projecting an active IRC channel on a screen behind the speakers. To be sure, the discussion content on IRC during AlwaysOn sometimes verged on snarky color commentary, but it did provide a window into the thoughts of the audience.

But some, like Scoble, find that it's problematic to have the chat displayed behind them.

"With the chat screen behind you, I found that hard," he said. "I would rather have had that in front of me, so I could follow along."

Scoble also said there are a lot of advantages to maintaining an open dialogue with the backchannel--especially at tech-savvy conferences where nearly everyone in an audience has a laptop and finds it easy to get distracted by what's on their computers.

"If you want to compete with that," Scoble said, "provide visuals, or things onstage, that are more interesting" than what's on their computers.

Or, he added, speakers or a moderator could engage the backchannel by offering participants an online poll about some aspect of the panel or speech.

"That way, it actually uses the interactivity of the audience," he said, "so (people will say), 'I'm going to listen to him, now I want to hear what he has to say.'"

And if someone onstage can find a way to engage the audience that's already active on Twitter by replying to posts there or offering their own thoughts, that can also give speakers an advantage.

"People listen better, because they realize (the speaker) is listening to what's going on," Scoble said. "So they pay better respect to you onstage. I've been in audiences and I felt like I'm being treated like a captive, like I'm being talked at...For a Twitter- or blog-savvy audience, that rubs them the wrong way right away."

For someone like Pahlka, who is knee deep in planning a conference for a very tech-savvy audience, this is an extremely challenging moment in time.

She said that she and her colleagues have been talking about how to manage the backchannel for some time, and that finding the right balance is a delicate matter.

That's partly because it's obvious that sometimes individuals hijack the backchannel to attack speakers, while other times it can be a fantastic way to pass on helpful tips in real time.

"Ideally, in a conference context, with a room of 700 people," Pahlka said, "you would recreate that feedback in such a way that the speaker can adjust on the fly and make a better presentation."

Regardess, though, Pahlka said she and her team planning Web. 2.0 Expo are aware that they have to give people the tools that let them have expectations of being heard. As she said, audiences have much greater expectations that their voices will be heard than just five years ago.

"I think what we're going to see in the next year is that different events are going to experiment with different models," she said. "And hopefully what we'll end up with is not, 'Here's the new way of doing it,' but, 'Here are several new ways of doing it.'"

These days, Twitter is a worldwide phenomenon, a household name, and has even spawned a verb, "to Tweet."

But before the second week of March of last year, when thousands of geeks began arriving in Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSWi), few people had even heard of the nascent microblogging service. Within days, however, Twitter had taken the conference by storm. The story of how Twitter took over SXSWi, and how it spread to the outside world because of the many influential early-adopters in attendance, is well known.

"People see what happened with Twitter last year," said Hugh Forrest, the SXSWi conference director, "and want to be the Twitter of 2008."

Whether it's because of Twitter's SXSWi emergence or all things cybergroovy becoming part of pop culture, one thing is certain: SXSWi has gone mainstream. Does that mean it's also lost its edge?

Let's start with the mainstream question: There's little question SXSWi has hit the big time. In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be keynoting, a certain coup for the 11-year-old event. It's not a Bill Gates keynote, a la CES, but he's certainly a borderline household name.

"He is the most 'it' person we've had," said Forrest. "As with a lot of things that happen at SXSWi, I think it is the right match with the right person at the right time. Facebook wants to reinforce their message with the cutting-edge crowd that attends the Interactive festival."

Hmm...Not to take anything away from Zuckerberg, but Facebook is not really cutting edge anymore. Not with many tens of millions of users, cover stories in national magazines, and a market valuation of $15 billion.

So the answer to the "edge" question depends on who the newcomers are. If most of the first-timers are legitimate interactive media and technology movers and shakers, people who are well-wired and who simply had never managed to make it to SXSW before, then the growth may well be a boon for the conference's street cred as a central location in the larger geek and interactive media conversation.

"Hangers-on and sycophants"
But if the newcomers are corporate suits looking to cash in, SXSWi could go the way of R.E.M. after its 1988 album, Green and, dare I say, blogs after The New York Times started blogging in earnest.

"If there are a lot of industry hangers-on and sycophants--investors, shameless self-promoters, or wannabes," said Andy Baio, the founder of Upcoming.org, "it'll make it harder to randomly find interesting people at parties and in the hallways. (But) if you already have a strong social network, it shouldn't impact you."

Make no mistake about it--despite a calendar of panels, sessions, and keynote speeches that dwarfs any SXSWi has had in the past, the real engine behind the event is the social scene. Parties abound, with several scheduled each night. For many attendees, these soirees are the most important place to make connections, meet new and old friends, and find out about cool new technologies. This year alone, parties are being hosted by Gawker Media, Facebook, Google, Flickr, Moo, and Digg, to name a few. (The festival also has a tie-in with Microsoft's new Silverlight Web technology.)

But with huge crowds showing up at each successive shindig, SXSWi can stop feeling like an annual reunion of friends.

"Two years ago, I stood in the hallway (and) saw nobody I knew," said Molly Steenson, a Ph.D. student in architecture at Princeton University who will be making her 11th visit to SXSW, "and started yelling, 'Others! Others!' (a Lost reference about unfamiliar people showing up in the middle of a well-established group of people) at the top of my lungs when I did make eye contact with an equally freaked out friend."

Yet Steenson also argues that the growth may well be a good thing. "Last year was particularly good because there were so many people who had never come before," Steenson said, adding that she had been pleased to see old friends finally make it to SXSWi.

"More and more to absorb"
For a first-timer like Carly Eiseman, coming to Austin for the conference is a chance to finally take part in something she sees as "an American cultural institution for independent art." While she acknowledged that SXSWi has likely changed a lot over the years, she isn't worried that she's missed the event's best days.

"With these things, it's never too late," said Eiseman, editor of the travel blog TheLobby.com. "It's just a matter of what you expect from it. I sort of expect it as a kind of place where I'm going to absorb so much, and each year, there's more and more to absorb. What you get out of things, whether they're small or large, is a personal experience. And I don't think that changes."

One thing that has many people excited about this year's event was that Forrest and his team of organizers were overwhelmed with submissions for panels and sessions. Rather than have to sort through and make all the choices themselves, they relied in large part on what is known as the "panel picker." This system allowed members of the SXSWi community--even newcomers--to vote on the panels they wanted to see selected.

In the end, the majority of the conference programming was selected by the community, and there are so many panels and sessions that Forrest and his crew have had to rent far more space at the Austin Convention Center than they have in the past.

With so much going on, one thing that is necessary for SXSWi survival is to keep careful track of everything going on. Making the rounds is a mashup called Sched.org that pulls information from the official SXSW schedule and allows users to easily select the sessions, parties, and keynotes they want to attend. Once finished, Sched.org creates a personalized, Web-based schedule that attendees can share with their friends and colleagues, a feature that helps people figure out what's worth going to.

"I'm using a combination of Upcoming and Sched.org," said Baio of his organizational planning. (He no longer works for Yahoo, which purchased Upcoming.) "Sched.org is a brilliantly designed scheduler for the panels and official events, so I've been using that for scheduling my daytime programming. Upcoming has all the unofficial events and gatherings, and is social, so I can see where my friends will be."

Of course, event organizers are making use of many different services to get word about their gatherings. When I got my invitation to the Digg party, it said to be sure to RSVP on Upcoming. (Is Digg still edgy? I'll have to go to the party to find out.) But Beth Murphy, Digg's director of marketing, said the company has been tech-agnostic in its promotion strategy.

"We are promoting the Digg SXSW party on Facebook, Pownce, Twitter, traditional e-mail, and Upcoming," Murphy told me by e-mail. "In addition to Upcoming, we've asked for an RSVP on Facebook and Pownce."

In all likelihood, there will be many hundreds, if not thousands of people at the Digg party, which takes place Tuesday night as the last SXSWi gathering. A large number will be longtime SXSWi attendees.

Still, first-timer Eiseman is expecting to get value out of the conference.

"You have to check it out at least once," Eiseman, who had only recently arranged housing for the conference, said. "But if you talk to me at the end of it, I'll probably (be able) to tell you where I'll be staying next year."

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

One of my favorite people in the world of tech culture has always been Make magazine senior editor Phil Torrone.

Over the years, I've done a number of stories about his various exploits, including Roomba Frogger at South by Southwest 2006, his laser-etching business, his jamming of TVs at a hotel in Austin, Texas, and his work in helping organize Maker Faires. Beyond that, I've always enjoyed talking with him, as he's a world traveler, a top-notch intellect, and a world-class culture jammer. He's just my kind of guy.

And there's certainly one thing about Torrone that is evidenced in the things he does for fun and for work: he is not shy about pushing social and cultural boundaries. In fact, based on my personal observations of him, he kind of revels in doing so.

So when I saw a Boing Boing post on Tuesday reporting that Torrone was seen at this week's ETech conference in San Diego with a carry-on bag that has a fully formed imprint of a handgun on it, I was both shocked and not at all surprised.

What I would have given, I thought, to have seen him take that bag through airport security; to see what I'm sure was his straight-faced gaze as Transportation Security Administration personnel encountered the bag.

As Boing Boing blogger David Pescovitz put it in his entry, "Fortunately, (Torrone) made it through security with enough time to catch his flight."

I bet he did.

To be fair, Torrone's bag is a production model from the Dutch firm Vlieger & Vandam, and I'm sure he's not the only person traveling around with one. In fact, the firm makes the bag in three colors and also has one with an embossed knife.

But holy cow! What chutzpah. Especially because we all know that airport security don't take things that make them think of weapons lightly. Witness what happened to MIT student Star Simpson when she wore a shirt with some home-made electronics built-in to the Boston airport last year.

And I'm not at all surprised. If you recall, during this year's Consumer Electronics Show, the gadget blog Gizmodo caused a huge uproar when it ran a prank turning off TVs at the show, including those being used for a major Motorola presentation.

Gizmodo took a massive amount of flak for the prank--though its profile was also raised immeasurably--but one thing was lost in the mix.

As Gizmodo itself reported in its initial story on the prank, "when Make offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn't help ourselves...Thanks to Phil Torrone for the gear."

When I read that, I had to smile, especially after the firestorm of controversy that erupted afterward, not one single bit of which was targeted at Torrone. But I knew that somewhere, he was laughing his behind off at what he had wrought.

The reality is, Torrone is one of those people worth watching, no matter where he goes because he's always up to something interesting.

I'm sure there are those who think his brand of humor and sense of boundaries is anti-social and even dangerous. Having been there for the Roomba Frogger episode and having read the many, many comments readers left after I wrote about it, I actually know that for a fact.

But at the same time, I think that society's conventions need a little tweaking from time to time, and it takes people with a little chutzpah to do so, people who aren't afraid of the kind of response their actions will engender. And I also know that Torrone would never actually put anyone in danger.

So all I can say is, if you happen to be heading to Austin later this week for this year's South by Southwest conference--where I know Torrone will be--keep an eye on him. You never know what might happen.