• Intelligent Content 2010 (Feb) – I wish I had submitted a proposal, but I didn’t. Hopefully I can go as an attendee.
• SXSW (March) – Nothing concrete yet, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’ll be involved with aspects of both the Interactive and Film portions of the festival.
• PAX East (March) – I plan to attend this Boston-based version of the popular West Coast gaming convention.
• Content Strategy Forum (April) – I’ll be co-leading a workshop and giving a talk at this 2-day conference in Paris, organized by STC France.
• Tribeca Film Festival (April) – Once the schedule is posted (sometime in the Spring), let me know if you need movie recommendations!
• ROFLcon II (April) – I’ll be attending this epic internet culture conference as it returns to its city of origin (Cambridge, MA).
• Semantic Technology Conference (June) – In its 6th year, the conference moves to San Francisco, and I hope to once again be a speaker.

Oh yeah, and I’m in discussions with some people to organize an exciting event of our own. More updates to come as plans get firmed up!

If you’re going to be there, come see my talk, Content Gone Wild! at 9:45 in Salon A. It’s part of the Strategy Track and I’ll be talking about the embarrassing kinds of things that can happen when you don’t have a good content strategy!

SXSW likes to have the community get involved in deciding what panels will be chosen for the conference, so they use this Panel Picker to let people indicate which ones are of greatest interest. It’s free and easy to register to vote, so please consider voting for these proposals:

• Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For – my solo presentation
• Content & Semantics: The Wild, Wild Web of Data – a dual presentation I’ll give with Rahel Anne Bailie of Intentional Design Inc.
• Why Your Content Sucks and How to Fix It – a panel I’ll be on, moderated by Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic
• Let’s Talk About CS: Understanding Content Strategy – a panel I’ll be on, organized by Elena Melendy, an Independent Content Strategy Consultant
• Tales from the Basement: Makers of Geek Documentaries – a panel in the SXSW Film conference which I hope to moderate, organized by Jason Scott of Bovine Ignition Systems

While you’re in there, here are some other really interesting panels by some of my friends and colleagues. Please consider voting for these as well!

• Adventures in Text and Filmmaking: Making GET LAMP, Jason Scott, Bovine Ignition Systems
• Web Re-Design Cage Match: Refreshing the Online Experience, Anh Dang, New York Times
• Conserving The Web’s Social Ecology: Theory and Practice, Tim Hwang, The Web Ecology Project (plus a few other cool presentations by Tim)
• Your Cell Phone is Your Sugar Daddy (Controlling Diabetes), John Pettengill, Razorfish
• The UX of Mobile, Kyle Outlaw, Razorfish
• Social Networking for Dealers: Cultivate Relationships First, Mary Butler, Razorfish
• Context Strategy: Wrangling Content Gone Wild, Patrick Nichols, Razorfish
• Greening Your Content: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rahel Anne Bailie,Intentional Design Inc.
• Content Strategy FTW, Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic
• Oh, Go Service Yourself! Interactive Content for Humans, Colleen Jones,threebrick
• Keep ‘Em Coming: Courting Customers with Content, Colleen Jones,threebrick

There are many others that will probably be amazing, and I haven’t even touched on all the ones about the Semantic Web (will have to write a separate post for that), so get started voting now – you only have until September 4th!

After the article came out, Semantic Universe posted video from a lot of the talks that I mentioned. Very interesting, if you want more detail:

• Tom Tague’s Keynote about OpenCalias’ first year
• An executive round table on Semantic Search
• The Publishers Panel
• Closing Keynote with The New York Times announcement

More changes to this blog coming soon.

Under Movies, you could see everything that was playing that week, read reviews, and check local theaters and showtimes. Ok, there are lots of sites and services that let you do those things on a mobile phone or smartphone now. Here’s the part I really miss – I could easily save any of the movies to “My List” and then, when I wanted to go see something, instead of having to search for it, or sort through everything currently playing in theaters, I just looked at My List and asked myself “What do I feel like seeing today?”

When I watched a movie, I would deselect it. If I didn’t get around to seeing it and it left theaters, it would automatically drop off the list. Very convenient. Each week, I’d sync my Palm to the computer (or sync it wirelessly, once I had the Treo) and the showtimes would update, and new listings would be added.

Why do all the current movie showtime services out there assume that I know exactly what I want to see and am willing to search for it every time?  Is it because most theaters in the US are playing the same half dozen movies on every screen? Is this problem I’m having unique to cinephiles in NYC?

I’ve spent several hours this evening looking for a mobile app – or even a mobile-enabled website – that will let me do this. None of the apps I found let me save movies. Of the sites I’ve looked at that have showtimes, a couple of them let you save movies to a list, but they have a lot of problems. Here are the two I tried.

Movieweb

On the plus side

• They have a very handy list of New Releases which you can view by week or month, going backwards or forwards from the current date. It even includes a lot of obscure movies, not just the mainstream ones.

On the downside

• It’s an awkward, multistep process to add a movie to your list. You have to go to the movie detail page, find and then click the button that says “add to my list”, and then select which list you want to add it to.
• The list doesn’t have any indication of the release dates or of whether movies are still in theaters, so there’s no distinction between current movies, upcoming movies, and movies whose runs are already over. You’d have to manually maintain that yourself.
• There’s no mobile version of the site, so on my phone’s web browser I had to scroll through tons of navigation, and the thumbnail image that accompanies each movie on the list makes it impossible to see more than one item at a time – not a quality I’m looking for in a list.
• The “showtimes and tickets” functionality of the site is not working. There’s a message when you go that page that says “This section is down for the moment being.” Aside from the fact that they made up a phrase, there’s no indication how long this condition may last. It simply states that they’re “upgrading the system for a more feature rich experience.”
• It’s possible to make an RSS feed of the list, so I briefly toyed with the idea of making the list, subscribing to the RSS feed of the list, and then looking at that on my phone… and then I realized that this is so inconvenient, it’s not worth the trouble, especially when after choosing a movie from your list, you’d then have to go to a separate website to find out where and when it’s playing.

Yahoo! Movies

On the plus side:

• I already had a Yahoo login, so it was easy to try it out without signing up for yet another service. 
• The lists you create include a column for status, which let you know if each movie is currently in theaters. 
• Clicking on the movie name takes you to a detail page which includes showtimes and, depending on the theater, the ability to buy tickets.

On the downside:

• While big movies with a designed page, like Angels & Demons, have a button that says “Add to My Movies”, most of the movies don’t have any way to add them from the detail page. So, you can’t just add movies while browsing around, you have to go to the list page and search for the movie there. (Confusingly enough, they do have an “Add to queue” button, which takes you to Blockbuster, where you’re asked to create another account).
• Whether you select one of the big movies from the detail page, or go to your list and search for a title, it’s still an awkward, multistep process, and you don’t end up on the list page when you’re done, so you have to find your way back if you want to actually see the list you’ve made.
• Yahoo! Movies does have a mobile version, but it’s so stripped down, it doesn’t let you see “complicated” features like the list you painstakingly made on their website. So, you can look at the list on a computer but not, you know, when you’re outside, where the movie theaters are!

Is it too much to ask for a mobile service that lets me easily manage a list of movies I want to see that are playing in my city? If anyone knows of an app or mobile-friendly site where I can perform this simple task, please let me know!

I was quite proud of this talk – it was visual, funny, personal and conversational. It was a different kind of presenation than I usually give, and it provided me an opportunity to evolve my speaking style. It wasn’t perfect, but I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. People had repeatedly suggested that I post the slides on Slideshare, but at the time I could not get speaker notes to disaply, and I didn’t think the talk would make much sense without them.

Well, Slideshare has been working to resolve the mirad issues they were having with that bit of functionality, and yesterday I got notice that it now works for PowerPoint 2007 presentations. So you can now view my talk, A Personal Journey Towards Datameaningfulness, with speaker notes. Don’t be intimidated by the fact that it’s 97 slides. It’s very visual (and you don’t have to read the speaker notes if you don’t want to. You can just flip through and look at the amusing pictures).

NOTE: I just realized that, although the speaker notes are showing up, after the first slides they’re all misaligned (the notes from slide 2 onward are from slides about 8 pages down the line). I have no idea how to fix this. In the meantime, people seem to be enjoying the slideshow anyway.

moot at re:publica '09, photo by christian.pier

So, moot (founder of 4chan.org) won Time magazine’s audience poll for most influential person. He got over 16 million votes, with an average rating of 90 out of 100 (the next highest rating anyone got was 47). If you’ve never heard of moot, you’re probably wondering how somoene you’ve never heard of can get such a high ranking and so many votes. If you know who he is, or you’re familiar with 4chan, you know that his community is huge, internet savvy and very, very active when it comes to causes they care about. An internet poll is just the place for them to show up in force and make their opinion known.

If you’ve met moot, you know that he tends to be quiet and unassuming, but he’s tremendoulsy insightful. He’s young, but he’s seen things that most of us could probably never imagine. He’s charming, but experience has led him to be a little reserved with people.  He’s also got a streak of dark humor, tempered with genuine friendliness. Last time I saw him in person, he expressed condolences that my mother had recently passed away, and then he quietly told me that he had read through her blog and thought it was really well written. 

Beyond all that, his Time-Poll-Winning influence stems primarily from the fact that he started 4chan, now one of the biggest online communities, when he was 14 years old. He’s been running it ever since, creating a forum that has spawned or germinated nearly every internet meme you’ve ever heard of (Rickrolling and LOLcats are the two that are usually referenced). It’s a community that’s purile on some levels, but also lets people address some serious issues related to online anonomity and identity. As I mentioned, they’re a pretty active crowd, and sometimes that action leads to goofy pranks, and sometimes those pranks are about serious political and social issues. You may not agree with everything they’ve done, but you have to respect their ability to express their point of view. 

Last month I went to the IA Summit, where Michael Wesch gave an Opening Keynote about the influence of user generated media and online culture. He devoted a good chunk of his talk to the activites of the members of the 4chan community. You can listen to the podcast on Boxes & Arrows.

So, how did Time Magazine describe this fascinating young man who won their audience poll, and whose influence far surpasses the number of people who have actually heard of him, or know anything substantial about him? Well first of all, the profile was written by Rick Astley. It’s primarily about Rick Astley. In the 330-word piece, the only things you will learn about moot or 4chan are:

• moot is 21
• moot is mysterious
• moot created 4chan
• moot won the poll

At the end of the piece, they throw in a fun fact that “4chan.org gets 13 million page views a day and 5.6 million visitors a month”. There, I’ve just saved you the trouble of reading it!

But the fact remains that I do go to a lot of conferences. I prefer to think of myself as a conference enthusiast, though, not an aspiring professional. Most of the conferences I go to are in the realm of tech, internet, digital culture, digital arts, or popular arts. I include film festivals too, because, well, I love them.  Some are more professionally oriented, and some are more social. In both cases, though, my goal is the same: to meet interesting people and to be inspired. 

Here are some the conferences and film festivals that I’ve been to so far in 2009: 

• Sundance (January)
• ROFLthing-NYC (January)
• IA Summit & Content Strategy Consortium (March)
• Enterprise Data World (April)
• Notacon (April)
• Tribeca Film Festival (April/May)

And here are several that I’m planning to go to, or thinking about going to later this year:

• Web 3.0 (May)
• Semantic Technology Conference (June)
• Open Video Conference (June)
• Toorcamp (July)
• Defcon (July/August)
• MIMA Summit (October)
• Web 2.0 Expo (November)

I know, you’re probably thinking, “There are whole months in there with no conference plans at all.” But it’s early, yet, and there are a lot of interesting things going on out there.