South by Southwest 2003 XIV

Karl Deckard, Cory Doctorow, Maitresse Elise, and Jim Munroe: Why I Dig Working in the Cultural Gutter

Deckard is a senior game designer who has worked on Metroid Prime for Nintendo and Half-Life. Doctorow is outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a contributor to Boing Boing, and author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Elise is an adult actress and writer of erotica. And Munroe was managing editor of Adbusters before writing novels and making video games. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion:

Munroe: My name's Jim Munroe. I've written three novels. One of them is about another guy who goes to another planet to teach English. But when I'm at parties, I find myself saying I write novels. And I say it's science fiction-influenced stuff. I'm interested in my own tendency to sidestep that sort of stuff. I'm very interested in people who are involved in things that are not terribly highly regarded by society in terms of the arts.

Doctorow: I'm Cory Doctorow. I'm a blogger, a science-fiction writer, and I work for a nonprofit organziation called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I write science fiction, and not just science fiction, but science fiction for Slashdot readers that will get published on the Internet. That can be seen as one step below self-publishing. It's considered scraping the bottom of the barrel. But if there's hope, it's in the trolls. Will someone care about the poor Slashdot reader? I write for them. You need to be involved in Internet culture to understand it. I'm fairly unapologetic about using terms and jargon that comes out of that milieu. I get surrounded by people at science-fiction conventions by people who wonder what I'm smoking.

Science-fiction writing doesn’t pay for shit. Roald Dahl sold his short stories one at a time for enough money to feed his family of four for a month. Asimov's pays about enough to feed a family of four for a meal. But occasionally, the New York Times discovers you and what you do. Fuck you gutter, the New York Times thinks I'm cool

Elise: Ive done a lot of things in the adult entertainment. I'm on this panel as a porn actress. I've done four adult videos. Two were bi and two were lesbian. I've done stripping. I write erotica. I've done the modeling. I've done the Internet.

I also have a Ph.D. in romance linguistics. The adult entertainment industry got me through school. When people ask me what I do, I say translation. That is one of my jobs. But that pays nothing. If someone's truly interested, I'll go into detail about what I do, but if it's just anyone, I'll say I'm a writer. If they ask what I'm writing, I'll say true-life adventure stories. I'm not ashamed, but sometimes you do have to protect yourself.

Deckard: I design video games. I worked on the PC game Half-Life and a game for Nintendo's console Metroid Prime. What is this gutter? Who are these people who look down on all of the careers were talking about today? And why do we care?

Munroe: The cultural gutter is just something I made up. I made up this idea of there being gutter genres. I've always been attracted to science fiction, but people generally remember the crappy science-fiction movie that they saw and stigmatize the genre as a whole. I'm drawn to the genre with the interest in defusing that as much as I can.

When I got involved in video games and started talking about video games, talking about them as art, I realized that I'm drawn to these genres because they have a basis that keeps drawing people back to them. Because I like violating these cultural norms, it’s a perfect place for me. For unconventional thinkers like Elise, instead of following a traditional writing career with a smattering of erotica, she did what she did.

When I write a science-fiction novel, I feel free. You get to write about robots, for Christ's sake. There's a fundamental fun element that draws me to it. I have a lot more freedom in terms of what I can do.

Elise: I've really been enjoying the BDS&M I've been seeing in the mass media lately. I don't mind the lesser stigma. My sister understands what I'm doing a little more. My parents appreciate some of the writing I've done, but they don’t know everything I'm doing.

It's a huge fantasy being a porn star. It's fantasy being a stripper or a dominatrix. You get to be a schoolgirl, a teacher, a nurse. My life is not boring.

Doctorow: Who are the people looking down their nose? And why does it matter? It only matters when it matters. I used to work at a science-fiction bookstore, and I used to hang out at the science-fiction library. "Speculative fiction" is one of those shame words. "It's not a comic, it's a graphic novel!"

When I was 12, it was a great place to hang out. But when I was 20 and applying to a writing program at York University, saying I wanted to write science fiction was fairly embarrassing. In Canada, much of the writing is supported by arts grants. And they don't award grants to genre writers. That can mean the difference between a writer having time to finish writing a novel or not having the time.

I like having the freedom to write about the things that excite me. You guys are my tribe, and it's not necessarily the case that this is weird. But in the larger world, there's a bit of disdain for such unbridled technology-related enthusiasm. Not having to be apologetic about being enthusiastic about technology is good and refreshing. The rewards of fiction writing are so slim that if you didn't love it there'd be no reason to do it. I'm glad to be in the gutter to write like I feel like writing.

Deckard: The kind of work I do I don’t necessarily want it to be talked about at dinner parties. I want people in cool smoky lounges and subway stations to talk about my work. That's my tribe. That's who you should be doing your art for: the people like you. There've been a lot of times in my life where I've noticed that there is definitely a "them" spoiling things for me. I don't know who they are.

I've worked in Seattle and in record stores for a lot of my time. When the Nirvana record "Bleach" came out, we all loved it. Then some jerk at Rolling Stone dubbed it the Seattle grunge scene. We were wearing flannel because it's cold and wet in Seattle. It's hard to keep creativity when you have to filter it through so many people.

Doctorow: Working in the gutter is working out of scrutiny. William Gibson got an honorary Ph.D. from the Rhode Island School of Design. William Gibson's start in the genre is actually pretty interesting. He used to draw single-panel comic strips for fanzines. We are all geeks under the sin. It's nice to avoid the scrutiny.

Elise: What we have in common is that we enjoy extreme fantasy. In the leather world, there's a huge crossover between the leather community, science fiction, games, and Ren fair. I consider myself to be a big geek in a big way. Put me in a costume and I'm happy. Is there a bigger stigma being a sci-fi geek or being a porn enthusiast?

Doctorow: Do we really need to measure? My pain is like… [He gestures with his hands.]

Elise: This isn’t about pain.

Munroe: If you're at a rock concert, it's cooler to know a lot about porn than it is about science fiction. Fantasy is an interesting thing. It's assumed that they're immature. A lot of people's enthusiasm for it and dismissed. Everyone has that inside them. We go on a binge/purge thing. We watch a couple of Hollywood movies and then we read a very important novel. You know how there are writers who are light, but filling? I like to think of myself as the falafel of science fiction readers. I enjoy it when someone says, "I don’t like science fiction, but I like your books."

Doctorow: I thought you were science fiction influenced!

Munroe: I'm over that. I've come to terms with that. The fantasy of it is its strength. The media is heaping attention on, say, Grand Theft Auto. But I feel like it's like it was with comics 10 years ago when Watchmen came out. 10 years later, people don't really think about comics the same way. The stigma remains. Because these genres are fantasy based, they slip towards the gutter. They may have a moment in the spotlight, but then they fade away. I think that's a good thing.

Deckard: It's not interesting to me that these people are pushing these things back into the gutter. That’s being driven by people who might not understand any of these genres. If you've never seen this film that you say is so bad, how do you know it's so bad?

Question: When you got into what it is you do now, did you have a community there to begin with that you felt supported by?

Elise: you know how they say if you're going to smoke pot, then you start heroin? If you become a stripper, the next step is porn. I didn't have any stripper friends, but being in the leather community, I was very comfortable. And I didn't start stripping under I was 31. My leather friends thought it was great. When I started doing movies, I had huge support. I don’t know if I'd want to move to Southern California and just do them with anyone.

Doctorow: Science-fiction writers in Toronto are really lucky. When I was 12, I was hanging out at the Spaced Out Library. By the time I was 16 and got to alternative school, I was in a writing workshop.

Munroe: I just met Cory a few years ago. I didn’t really have any contacts with the science-fiction community. I grew up making zines in the punk-rock community. I started self-publishing and ended up with a full-length novel. I published my first novel with Harper Collins, and it didn't work out that great, so I decided to self-publish my second novel. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if it weren't for zines. Self-publishing is OK.

Deckard: I basically grew up my whole life playing video games. I knew it was something I wanted to get into. In college I studied graphic design. It was a natural step to get into game design. I moved out to Seattle to work for Nintendo and did graphic design for their magazine and players guides. And then I got a job in game design.

Question: There's a good deal of economic force behind what you do. Yet you perceive it as being in the gutter?

Munroe: The economics are just an indicator for the appetites that exists for these things. The guilt that I'm performing is just a mirror of how socially as a society we aren't comfortable acting out these fantasies. We cordon it off.

Doctorow: If the gutter is just right, you have no scrutiny, and there's vibrant economic activity.

Elise: The money is a driving factor in the adult entertainment industry. But a lot of people go into it just out of curiosity.

Deckard: When my wife and I were talking about this, she said, "Haven't you already stepped up onto the curb?" Because video games do sell well.

Doctorow: The urge to transgress is the urge to step back into the gutter. They've mainstreamed Grand Theft Auto, but can they mainstream Journey Through the Cancerous Colon?

Deckard: Games are a much more family thing in Japan. It's not just little Timmy buying games. It's mom. And it's a bunch of games. It's the same for comics and porn. One section of the gutter that's not included here today is board games. Board games are huge in Germany. I end up having to import games and translate them so I can play them.

Question: I would argue that you're doing this to indulge yourselves. If you make money, great. But if you didn't make money, would you still be doing it?

Elise: I would still do it, but less often.

Doctorow: I started submitting science-fiction stories when I was 16, and I didn’t get accepted until I was 26. When I got my advance for the novel, I got a check for a three-paragraph piece in Wired. The check from Wired was $100 less than my advance.

Munroe: People aren't in this for the money.

Elise: There are people in it for the money in my field, and they're not happy.

Question: What do you guys think is the difference between the cultural gutter and the cultural leading edge? Historically, it's always been such. Bright interesting people find bright interesting things and then the broader culture caught on.

Doctorow: William Gibson writes about denuding the counter culture landscape. The last scene he saw get co-opted was punk. That took 18 months. Then came grunge. That took three weeks. Staying on the transgressive edge makes it harder to participate in the denuding of the counter culture landscape.

Question: Why are some things, like being a fantasy football player, accepted, while other things are scary?

Doctorow: I think people wear Star Trek tunics because they're proud. The signifier of a Star Trek tunic is "I am incredibly proud of being distant from your pop culture. Screw y'all."

Munroe: It's also a matter of not having a clue and not caring. There's nothing secret or attractive about the secret society of Star Trek.

Deckard: A lot of times, people don't care what those other people's opinions are. I've been a big skate punk since I was a little kid. People kind of look at us weird when we come up on our skateboards. I don't care what they think. It's kind of sad to see that lost. Just as grunge got big, you start seeing cheap skateboards in K-Mart and Target. All of a sudden it becomes less us. You do everything you can to make that not happen.

Doctorow: Then some bastard came along and made Tony Hawk Skating. Those bastard video game makers sucked out all the life out of skating.

Interlude: South by Southwest 2003 XIV
After last night's Fray Cafe and the last two days of active transcribing, I'm feeling a little burnt out. While I went to the "Computers vs. Blackboards: Net Learning or Not Learning?" panel discussion this morning after meeting Scott Heiferman for breakfast, I did email for work instead of taking notes. Then, after lunch with Don Jarrell, the coordinator of the Austin Company of Friends group, I skipped Joshua Davis' keynote entirely in order to meet deadline for the May CoF events calendar. If anyone comes across any notes or transcripts for these two events, let me know. I'll at least link to them. Sorry I couldn't keep this up the whole conference.

South by Southwest 2003 XIII

Carrie Bickner, Ben Brown, and Kevin Smokler: Book Culture

Bickner works as assistant director for digital information and system design at the New York Public Library and runs Rogue Librarian. Brown co-founded So New Media. Smokler works as a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and runs Where There's Smoke. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion:

Smokler: Please address all publishing questions to the publishing panel at 5 o'clock this afternoon. Thank you.

Brown: Bling bling.

Bickner: Happy happy.

Smokler: Joy joy. Good morning, everybody. My name's Kevin Smokler, and I'll be your moderator this morning. We'll be talking about books and the Web. Are they friends or enemies? Friends or lovers? Friends with benefits?

When I came to South by Southwest in 2000, I was a failed writer and looking for something literary. I was looking for something book related, and they had an e-books panel. That was three years ago. The e-book issue has largely been put to rest. It's more or less considered a failure in publishing circles.

We never think now about publishing and the Web in terms of the Web supplanting books. We're looking at how the two relate rather than will one dominate the other.

Bickner: I am with the New Your Public Library digital library program as the assistant director for digital information and system design.

Smokler: Ben Brown is a Web rock star, personality, and all-around good guy. But for our purposes today, he's the co-publisher of So New Media, an exciting, interesting new model of publishing. The very definition of being published has changed thanks to the Web.

Bickner: I am by training a librarian, but I'm also a writer. How I got into librarianship, initially I thought I'd be a special collections librarian, an archivist. It turned out that I actually knew a lot about technology. Now that I'm in the digital library program, my job is almost what I started out to do. It's preservation. How do we preserve our digital cultural heritage? 50 years from now, how are we going to be able to find these objects?

Brown: I'm a Perl programmer by trade, but I have a creative writing degree. When I started doing a lot of writing and looking for places to publish, it's not a great market for the kind of stuff I write. I was living in New Zealand at the time and I pitched a lot of articles about book culture. Magazines there just weren't interested. So I started a magazine. I did it myself. I did it punk-rock style, and we sold several hundreds of copies. When I got back, my partner and I started So New Media to primarily focus on writers who mostly publish online.

Smokler: I'm a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and until last week was working on Central Booking. We also used that forum format and software interface to have authors come visit. Our readers would post questions and the authors would answer them.

Where should we start? The four main areas we've brought up in terms of where books and the Web intersect in interesting ways are promotion, dissemination, preservation, and selection vs. publishing. Three years ago, there was a lot of talk about print on demand. Before we could do that, seeing your book was some mark of quality, some mark that you had in fact made it as a writer. Your book had passed through some sort of selection process no matter how good or bad it was.

The Web has turned that entirely on its head. What does that mean? Now that everybody can be published, what does it mean to be published? Now the question isn't who can get published and is that worth reading, but, as a reader, how do we select what's worth reading?

Brown: We have a pretty rigorous selection process. We get hundreds and hundreds -- OK, many many -- submissions every week. We've done 12 books or something. We can't read all of the submissions that we get already. One of the major things we evaluate is: Does this author already have somewhat of an online following? Beyond that, it is very much my personal tastes in books. My hope is that the people in our audience will have tastes similar to what I have and just buy everything we put out. We've done everything from personal narrative to science fiction. But they all fall in moderny categories.

Another thing is dealing with the authors and how enthusiastic about the book. Some people are like, "Yeah, yeah, I'll put out a book." And other people are like, "Yeah! I'll go on a world tour, I'll visit 200 cities and put on a circus act in every city." Those are the people we publish.

The first people we published were members of the high-click personal Web site community. They had a decent audience. Our goal was not to sell books to viewers of the Web sites. The goal was to get writing on the Web already into the hands of people who buy books at the bookstore.

It's not new, but there are thousands and thousands of books being released every week into the bookstores. There's no distinguishing between your book and another. You've got to get out there and do a little song and dance for people.

One of the first people we did was Greg Knauss. He did a 40 Web log tour. Every day he'd do a virtual reading and write a piece for all these different sites. He got a lot of press because nobody had ever done that before. It was a tremendous promotional vehicle, and Greg could stay at home with his kids.

Smokler: that’s a more creative promotional effort than 90% of New York publishers have thought of. Until the last year and a half, very few publishers' Web sites had anything other than the season's catalog. If you've ever been to a reading, you know that readers just salivate over any information about the writing process. The Web is able to hone in on that in ways that other media cannot.

Neil Gaiman did a blog while he was writing American Gods. Robert Olen Butler wrote a short story live on a Web cam. The science fiction community has embraced that first for obvious reasons, but it's only the beginning.

We know how the Web has changed how books are made. Let's talk about the reverse.

Bickner: One of the most exciting things that happened in my career took place at the New York Public Library. We took in a box of papers from Malcolm X after his trip to Mecca when he rethought a lot of his ideas. These ideas have been unexplored because of a lack of material. This box was found in a storage locker in Florida. The storage owner sold the stuff, and it eventually ended up on Ebay. Through a lot of negotiation and other work, the New York Public Library acquired the collection.

That the box survived was an accident of the stuff the material was written on. Once we got the collection, we started getting calls from people who also had boxes of Malcolm X materials. I began looking for the analogous accidents and the analogous materials in the Web world and it's not there.

Let's say Josh Davis has a flood in his basement. Does someone save his CPU? We're not taking steps now to preserve digital materials. 20 years from now, how are we going to understand Cory Doctorow's editorial process?

Smokler: The way authors compose their books is changing. The number of authors who compose their books with pencil and paper is shrinking. There's a group of people called the Pencil and Paper Society, but those writers are rare.

Bickner: This is something that we just photographed at the New York Public Library to digitize. It's Walt Whitman's copy of Leaves of Grass. The pencil marks you see are his editing comments for the second edition. This physical object shows you what his process was like.

My own manuscript shows tracked changes in Microsoft Word. The Walt Whitman book is physical. With this, it's not just about saving the Microsoft Word file, it's about having the technology to read these tracked changes. 20 years from now, is someone going to want to see the email that I sent Tanya, a friend who helped me with the book? What do you save? What part do you save? Do you really want to save it for later? What is the digital object?

Smokler: In the future, will a rare books library be a collection of G4's? What if its format isn't compatible? What if Microsoft Word doesn't exist? Pens and pencils doesn't get evolved out of existence.

Brown: You're going to kill me. We do one print proof of our books. We delete all the changes and then we use that file to publish the book. That's all there is.

Smokler: Do people like Ben, Carrie, have the resources to do this sort of thing?

Bickner: Some of the resources are less expensive than you might think. Publishers do have a responsibility to preserve a part of their cultural heritage. Publishers print books on acid-free paper. Open standards are a pretty good bet. It's difficult. If you have to exchange with people working in proprietary software like Microsoft Word, it can be difficult to collaborate.

Brown: We just have to start saving everything instead of emptying our trash every morning

Bickner: Or find someone to save it for you. The collectors are the people who are going to have this stuff. Josh Davis puts out a CD-ROM every year. You know someone is collecting those.

Smokler: History is an incomplete story. We save what is most illuminating and most helpful. Ben, 20 years from now you may not want the first few books published by So New MMedia.

Brown: This is one of our first books. It was done by my partner James, who co-founded the company. It's a collection of short stories, and it's bound by a used envelope that he found at the office he worked at. He made photocopies at work and stapled them at his desk. That one's wrapped in plastic.

This one is one of the later ones we did. We upgraded to having our own expensive laser printer in our house. We bought a fancy-pants German saddle stapler. The most recent books, we've finally upgraded and are doing perfect bound real books. We just send them off to printers.

Smokler: That’s Neal Pollackl

Brown: his first book was put out by McSweeney's, and he's got a novel coming out at Harper Collins.

Bickner: It's interesting to me that someone who's on both sides of the publishing world thinks that putting something in print is a way of exalting the work.

Brown: I have been publishing my work online for many, many years. It doesn't compare to holding the book in your hands or selling your book to someone. The micropayment future never showed up. We sell a book for $6, and we send the author $2 or $3. I don't make any money at all. I just sent Adam Rakunas several hundred dollars so he could pay his rent.

Smokler: We still have a bias that things printed on paper are more worthy than publishing online. We don't have the New York Times Book Review for people who publish online. It's seen as a haven for people who can't cut it in the real world.

Brown: Most of the people we publish will probably get book deals in the future. The fact that I'm willing to put the money up indicates that I at least think the writing is quality.

Smokler: I hope we're nearing a day where writers see the Web as a viable way to promote their work. Publishers just now are starting to clue into that. Publicists at most publishing houses are young, terribly ambitious, horribly overworked people. They've got 30-40 books under their tutelage, and a lot of books get swept away by the tide.

Brown: And promotional budgets are about 10% of the overall budget. Let's say your advance is $12,000. That means your promotional budget is $1,000.

Smokler: The attention to promotion needs to come from you. The Web allows writers to promote themselves.

Brown: Neal Pollack's first book was promoted exclusively online. He did online promotion and went on tour. The tour was promoted only online. He did a tour diary on his Web site, and he sold a zillion copies of the book. This book is very much the same. The power of the Web as a promotional tool for books is underestimated by people even like myself.

Bickner: I have a non-literary example of how this might play out. There was a health information publisher who specialized in AIDS and HIV information to be distributed in African countries. The publisher's question was: How do we create the content, print it, and then get it where it needs to be? They decided to create the content in PDF's, send them where they needed to be, and then print them.

Smokler: We want to do Q&A, but does anyone have anything else to say?

Brown: I have a project I'd like to talk about. You don't write and you don't do Web logs because you're a socially adept person. You also don't spend years and years of your life writing a novel because you're partying every night. We're doing these events now where they force authors into the punk-rock or indie-rock musician role. We have a monthly series now in which writers perform with bands. It changes the way people think of our company. We don't just publish books. We entertain people. You're not just interacting with the author, you might even dance.

Smokler: We used to say that the production of literature happens in private and the celebration of literature happens in public.

Question: How would you distinguish vanity publishing from what we're talking about?

Bickner: I haven't heard that term in such a long time now. It's not as costly. These alternate delivery mechanisms are getting more and more respect. We don't have those easy distinctions to make anymore. My worry about which of this stuff do we save is a confusing one.

Smokler: Most bookstores have a policy with publishers that whatever they can't sell they can return.

Brown: Or destroy.

Smokler: You have no such agreement with self-published authors.

Brown: We have run into a little about that. People say, "You publish your own books?" I say, "No, I publish other people's books." It's changing because there are a lot more independent presses. There is still a stigma. If someone comes up to me and says, "I published my own book. Will you look at it?" I'm sorry, I don't have enough time.

Also, I can't call up the newspaper and say, "Hey, I published this book by another guy." They won't talk to me. That's why I have a publicist. There's a stigma against promoting yourself in the literature world. The Onion gave us an insanely good review of Neal's new book, and it was available on Amazon yet. It is now on Amazon and in bookstores, but it was a panic.

Question: What is the place of the book critic?

Smokler: I get asked a lot by aspiring authors how do I get my book reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle. Book reviews are at best a questionable method for promoting your book. What if it's lousy?

There's still a place for experts on books. The space for those experts is underutilized. We have maybe a dozen book reviewers that a publisher would run out and slap for a jacket blurb. That is too few. Who is book blogging? The Amazon thing is a diffuse way of doing that.

Bickner: You might have one or two of your friends review your book on Amazon.

Brown: That's not an unusual thing. Log out as Michael Crichton, log back in as Joe.

Smokler: Where do you find out what to read next?

Bickner: I have to have a couple of people suggest something before I read it. It's gotta be, "Here, you really must read this." If I had more time I would probably read book reviews.

Brown: I have a pretty healthy network of people to recommend stuff. I also go to the Amazon recommendations. I do that "I have this book, and I like it," thing, so my recommendation list is a finely tuned machine. I also buy anything anyone recommends on their blog. I read Boing Boing. I read Heath Row's Media Diet. Shout out to Heath.

Kevin's already blogged about his panel experience. Carrie's posted her notes online.

South by Southwest 2003 XII

Heather Champ, Jason Nolan, Katharine Parrish, and Ana Sisnett: Conceptual Firewalls

Champ is creator of the Mirror Project. Nolan co-edited the forthcoming International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments. Parrish researches the use of multimedia environments as spaces for non-narrative literary expression. Sisnett is executive director for Austin Free-Net. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion:

Parrish: We're going to limit our concerns today to blogs. Blogs are such a powerful symbol. Today we'll consider blog technologies, cultures, and communities to address these questions: Can anyone publish anything at any time? What aspects of accessibility might we be overlooking? Does anyone publish anything at any time? If we removed any limitations, would people blog anything? How much do we really know about the breadth and depth of experience communicated by blogs? What do we do with this information?

If we make the claim that everyone has access, it becomes our problem. Some of it is beyond our direct control. It's still incumbent to ask, are there things that we do that maintain inequities? If the revolution will be bloggerized, what will its impact be? We must be careful when we say "we." This is a very particular "we." Do we want to see everyone blogging? Do we want everyone to have access to some vehicle for voicing dissent? Is there something inherent in blogs or blog cultures that don't translate well to other cultures?

One of our panelists, Cameron Marlowe can't be with us today. But he sent us his comments, so I'm going to keep talking. If you're familiar with Blogdex, you're familiar with Cameron. I can't find it on my laptop. Maybe I won't deliver Cameron's comments.

Champ: My name is Heather Champ. My Web log is is Harrumph.

Nolan: I will just talk in teacher voice. This is a picture that you have in handout. What I'm talking about is the Null and Hidden Curriculum. I've written about the Null and Hidden Curriculum of the Internet. Curriculum speaks to how we learn in any environment. Most of my work is around the types of learning that go on in non-school environments, such as online communities.

The hidden curriculum looks at what goes on beyond what is explicit. You have to be acculturated. You have to know how to participate in that environment. The Nolan Curriculum is a little more insidious. It's based on the idea that learning involves opportunitites as well as lost opportunities. The Null curriculum is what you did or did not choose.

The tools that we use to create limit what is said as well as offer opportunities for new forms of expression. The tools we use and the language we use influences the way we think. We can express ourselves in a varity of different ways.

As big a fan of blogs as I am, blogs are also tools for silencing and othering. How can tehre be democracy without access and representation? Are blogs reporducing dominant cultural norms as well as taking steps to challenge them? Blogs, from my experience, don't always expand cultural horizons. There's a natural difficulty dealing with foreign languages and the immediacy of online communications. I can't set up Moveable Type in Japanese because the instructions are in Japanese.

There are usually multilingual plug-ins, but they always start with English. The Internet can do two languages at once: English and another language. I want to create technology-based environment that do not privelege first.

How do we overcome the English-ness that's built into the Internet itself? I don't think we can. If you send an email message in Russian, the message gets sent with this HELO from server to server to server. Imagine if you had to greet everyone in a foreign language. The letter "a" in ASCII stands for American.

I don't want everybody to be equal. But I want there to be equal access. I want to foster and ensure communication. Can we overcome bias? No, but we can be conscious of it in the tools we create. My facetious question would be: Why shouldn't everything on the Internet be tied to the American way of life?

We are very much interested in other cultures, and we very much want to interact with them.

Sisnett: Katharine has touched off what has become a big change in my life. Before she contacted me I had only visited one blog consciously. It was Dr. Tom Ferguson's blog, and he's sitting right here in the front of the room. Katharine wrote to me and asked for my participation in this panel basically as a reality check.

What keeps me in the room is the issue of community. There is so much time spent on blogging, I wonder do these people have jobs? As much as I write, I don't spend that much time writing about anything. But for the last few weeks or so, I have been blogging like crazy. What became as a potentially adversial relationship has now become a love affair.

I am someone who is on the other side f the frewall. I am in community technology. I build bridges to people who may may not know how to use computers, know how to type, know English. There's another layer of questioning that has to do with the political implications of putting one's information out there.

If you're considering using Web logs as part of training programs or as a community-building tool, you need to consider whether the people you're serving are interested in using the tools. How do people stay in touch with each other? Is it the ideal form of communications? A lot fo the people we work with would rather have a spaghetti lunch or a face-to-face discussion. Most of the people don't use these tools, don't use them efficiently.

Access becomes an issue. Access to information. Access to technology and training in the use of those tools isn't available. The Mirror Project was a great alternative because it's about photographs. Then the question becomes "Who's going to pay for the camera? Who's going to develop the film?"

There's also a fear factor. If someone's an immigrant, they're going to be concerned with what they say and how they say it online. Some other questions that were raised include: Do I have to sign up to see blogs? What about privacy? What tools do I have to know how to use? I haven't used HTML since Java came around. What's interesting is that it's come back around to a text-based tool like what I first used: Telnet and Pine. Who gets to access my blog? Can I password-protect my blog? What if somebody wants to hack my blog? Can I protect it? The last question is the reliability of the information. How do you know how to trust the information? How do you know the blog wasn't set up for another sinister reason?

The work that Jason and Katharine have done is very relevant to a friend of mine. She works for a black college with scant resources. It takes three weeks to set up an email. There aren't enough accounts for students. They're all setting Yahoo accounts. The letters are taped to the keyboards. Imagine going to a college without enough computers?

The level of critical thinking I've found on the Net is something I don't always have in my day to day. Even if I disagree with it, at least it's something I can bounce off of. But ultimately, is it useful? What am I going to do with it?

Parrish: I'm just going to briefly outline some of Cameron's thoughts. One of the reasons I was interested in having Cameron on this panel is that Blogdex is an index to blog content and communities. There doesn't really exist any scientific statistical information on the content of Web logs.

I validate each and every blog that's added to and indexed by the system. This past year was the year of the oppressed, with the largest increases in Iranian, Chinese, and American conservative populations. It might be interesting to unpack how new communities online can be quellef by the larger existing groups or become central to the online world.

We're dealing with a monster here when we start asking these questions. I hope you can see that these are interrelated questions. Please bear with us. We're eating away into time to respond. These questions are best answered over beer.

I would like to ask Heather. I never became conscious of myself as a gendered individual. I knew I was a girl. I knew I was performed as a girl. But I never really considered my gender until I began working with technology, when I realized that I behaved as culturally female. How conscious are you of your gender?

Champ: I want to back it up a step to conferences. In 1995 I went to Internet World and Mac World. The most strongly I feel the division is at conferences and in the materials that are handed out to me. Last year, when I came to SXSW, I felt like it was predominately a white male conference. It's so terrible. Look, it's Joshua Davis, but where are the women? This year, SXSW has made more of an effort to find a balance.

I'm concerned about women who are coming after me, who look at these materials, and who feel whether these events speak to them. Anil recently posted a photo of Dave Winer's recent panel at Harvard, and it struck me that it's white, it's male, and they have beards. There were two women there? Those people don't speak to me. Is this the face of blogging?

Nancy White: It's about exposure. I work with young women in high school in Seattle to think about themselves in technology work. Do blogs give us this opportuntiy to try out if we imagined ourselves to be in another way? Is this a safe place, an incubator? When we offer new technologis, can there be a safe place to see what the ramifications are? If we don't give them a chance to try it, we'll never see their faces. Is there a space in between public and private?

Sisnett: I think it's two different things, though. There needs to be energy put into diversifying the attendance of conferences. Advertising dollars have not gone to newspapers owned by people of color for SXSW. Is it assumed that people of color don't care about SXSW? There aren't a lot of women who look like me in this entire building. It's about racism. It's about sexism. We need to say that and deal with it if we want it to change.

Nolan: For educators, the goal is just to get people online and blogging. I ask my students, "Why is this useful to you?" I have a freat student who's going to eclipse me in 30 seconds, and she never touched technology before. She was very hostile to working with technology. She was very hostile to blogging. Now she wants to work with women to blog to each other in a network segregated from the Internet. These are women who might live 50 meters away from each other, but they may never see each other. And the men don't want them to get online, because they know what the Web is for: porn. We've got a lot of great opportunities when we engage people who don't think it's important to be blogging.

Question: You made a comment about dragging your students kicking and screaming into blogging. Why? Only a minority people find it worthwhile writing in the first place.

Nolan: I teach mostly grad students, engineers and technology people. They're afraid of expressing themselves. I think they need to experience using technology before they can develop and design tools for others to use.

Question: Blogger was originally created by a man and a woman. Do you think that attributes to its success?

Nolan: You could say the same thing about Moveable Type. I can't speak to whether the genesis of a given tool based on gender has a role in their success.

Parrish: Teachers, particularly English teachers, are always forcing their students to journal and then interrogate them. There haven't been enough good thinking behind that. Most of my lack of sleep I've experienced in my teaching practice stems from forcing my students to journal. With blogging in the classroom, you're forcing people to bring something that is private into the public.

The way that we culturally think about out private thoughts and what happens when they're brought into the public space has a tremendous effect on how people perceive blogging. My students see blogging as a threat. The very concept was not enjoyable at all.

Nolan: You kept bringing up the notion of journal writing as being a specifically female-centered form of writing. In English and Japanese culture, men aren't diarists. But novel writing was very hard for women. They could get diaries published, however.

Sisnett: My first attempt searching blogs based on race ended up finding angry white men blogging about affirmative action. I was pretty underwhelmed by what I found to begin with. It didn't stop me, but it wasn't a welcoming effort. It turned out that two white men answered my questions in very thoughtful ways.

How do I bring all this great stuff back into my communities. And is it my responsibility? We don't tell people what to do. We let people know what tools are out there and leave the decision up to them.

[At the end, Lisa asked a question about privacy that turned into a brief discussion of Nolan's work with Steve Mann on sousveillance. In fact, Nolan had set up his Webcam to capture footage of the panel audience -- and Lisa behind the camera -- during the session. Here's a snap from his footage.]

South by Southwest 2003 XI

Lawrence Lessig: Add Sanity

Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's center for Internet and society. He is also Creative Commons' chairman of the board of directors. Here is a rough transcript of Lessig's remarks:

Last month, in February, this man, Jack Valenti, appeared at the Duke Law School and gave a lecture. We could call it a sermon. In this lecture, Jack told students about morality. This is what he said

democratic nation

greatness

moral compact

moral imperative

duty

honor

integrity

These values, Jack said, are corrupted. They are corrupted, he said, by the Enrons of society. Second, these values are being corrupted by "sharing." By "file-sharing." By the "terrorists." These are our children. These terrorists are sharing content on the Internet.

This, he said, much change, for "Man is the only animal … who understands the difference between the way things are and the way things ought to be."

1998 was going to be a great year. Work from 1923 was going to enter the public domain 75 years after it was created. 75 years is an odd number because in 1923, copyright was for 56 years. 85% of copyright holders didn’t extend their copyrights.

Every time Congress extends public domain, it is in effect tolling the public. Of all the work produced in 1923, no more than 2% was commercially exploited. The rest of the works stay invisibly in that space because it wasn't commercially produced.

In 1930, 10,027 books were published. In 1998, 174 were still in print. That left 9,853 books out of print and invisible. The copyright system continued its control.

Between 1923 and 1946, 97.7% of books are no longer commercially availble. 93.2% of films are no longer commercially available. The commercial publishers basically give us 10% of what was produced.

1998 would change that. In 1998, that work would pass into the public domain and the situation would heal itself. Others could take it and build it by redistributing it or building on it with derivative works. [This would have affected] playwrights … archivists … researchers … music companies … and finally, a father.

A man named Eric Eldred. A man who, for the last few years, was developing works for his daughters who were bored with English. He began this career of building works on the Internet in the public domain, spreading knowledge. Works that were not easily available. They were building from the work in the public domain the way our framers intended it when they wrote that part of the Constitution that has now been erased.

This is nothing new. My favorite hero did this in 1928. My hero Walt created this heroic character Steamboat Willie. Steamboat Willie inspired Mickey Mouse. And from Mickey Mouse, we got the Disney empire.

Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., was explicitly ripped off by Walt when he created Steamboat Willie. This is creativity. It's a creativity we should embrace and praise. Walt Disney creativity takes and builds on what went before. It's a brilliant form of cultural expression. It was the birth of the cut and paste culture, the rip, mix, and burn culture that the Apple Corp. sells us.

More than parroting existing films, all of his works build on works that previously existed in the public domain. We should call this Walt Disney creativity We take and we express differently. This is the expression of what our culture is about. He had this freedom, and we don't.

In the next 20 years, 1 million patents will enter the public domain. Not one copyright will enter the public domain. We have 20 more years to wait to release this content that was built under the expectation that copyrights would expire.

They say something was stolen from them. They say that something was stolen from us. They say that in this bargain that was struck, this exchange of 75 years of protection, this promise has been broken because work that would have entered the public domain won't. Congress took this work and gave it to particular people who have green things that they give to campaigns.

Where was Jack when this theft happened? Where was Valenti when these values were stolen? Where were his ideals when money broke the promise? Where was Jack? Jack was on the hill arguing for the copyright extension act.

"It was our duty," he said, "to extend these copyrights." This is what he said

duty

service

honor

integrity

pity

pride

compassion

sacrifice

That wasn't their bargain. Their duty. What we struck was an exchange for a protection for a limited time. That deal has been taken from these creators.

Jack believes this is moral, this taking. Regardless of whether you believe this is moral for the 2%, I want you to consider the 98%. That 98% is locked up in copyright today with extraordinary cost to even identify the copyright holders for no productive reason at all just because this money bought an extension for 20 years for works that were supposed to be protected for a limited time.

Copyright law has been transformed to be an extreme. Originally intended to benefit authors, it no longer functions like this. It protects not authors, but publishers. It enables a control over the creative process that produces a homogenization of this culture.

This concentration is new. 80% of music is distributed by five companies. 80% of television comes from six firms. We have never had a history in our time when fewer interests created more of the creative process.

Does it make sense for creators?

Before the Internet, I don't think this change mattered much. What could you do except turn to commercial publishers? It didn't matter much to your production. After the Internet, this change matters lots. The kind of creativity enabled by the digital consumer is radically different. Millions now are in the position to be the creators and distributors of content. Before the Internet, this was simoly not possible.

What blocks this creativity is this kind of regulation. This digital creativity is Walt Disney creativity.

[At this point, Lessig showed a snippet of Bush and Blair's rendition of "Endless Love."]

These guys are the beginning of what we'll be able to do. These guys are tiny. They don't have any money. In the world that we live in, in a world that's as defined by Disney and Coca-Cola as it is by George Bush, we have no freedom to take these expressions and ideas and build on them in the way that Walt could in 1928.

What explains removing those freedoms from us now? We can do it technically, but we can't do it legally. Why? We could do it legally if only we could get the law out of the way. We tried to get Congress to do something sensible, and that failed. I, the last naïve law professor in the country, went before the conservative Supreme Court. That ideal was given to us 210 years ago, and it was taken away from us today for no good reason at all.

It's time to try to do something new. Something new inspired by GNU. This is the space of the Creative Commons. There are three kinds of people out there. Some who believe that all of their rights need to be protected. Some who believe that none of their rights need to be protected. They just gave them away. And some who believe that some of their rights need to be protected -- but some can be given it away.

Most of the time, we look at the extremes. What I want is something in the middle. We need something here to get some sort of balance that leads the extremes back to the extremes. We need to stop solving for the extreme case and start building an architecture that recognizes the middle. That's the function of the Creative Commons.

The Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that will have thousands of ideas for how people can reasonably build on existing ideas.

I believe in something different than the extremes that Jack Valenti sings for. Here, some people talk about incentives. Here's one of my favorite guys who talks about incentives: Cory Doctorow. He sold many, many books in bookstores for a first novelist. But he had 70,000 people download his book from the Net.

The people who assume the law would be reasonable are people who don't know about the law. The layers that CC licenses enable are layers of expression. Tomorrow we're going to announce new versions of the license. One is a sampling license. One says explicitly that we don't want to oppose restrictions on people in developing nations. They don't even have money to buy things.

We've also talked about building more artists into this system. Davis Guggenheim has joined the board because he has a vision of how to best take film content that allows other to use content to build documentaries in the way that documentaries should be made.

Valenti is the third reason you should participate in this project. Whether you have a personal incentive, whether you want to enable innovation or not, in this world of extremists, we need a way to say "I believe in free." We need to express it so we can look out into this space and say that the world is not divided into those who believe in total control and those who believe in no control.

We can change the way this debate happens in Washington. We need to express the space in which creators operate. We need to enable other to build and mark a space in the middle. I feel an extraordinary frustration in my own world. The ideals that the legal tradition talks about in terms of balance have been exploited.

We can change that failure because we can succeed here. We can succeed in just the way Jack said. We are the animals that know the difference between the way things are and the way things ought to be.

Artists do not control. Artists are not free. Culture is not free. This is where we are. We could be back in a world where culture is free. Not free where artists don't get paid but free in the way that speech is free. The only thing that stands in the way is the people I make for a living.

Let me tell you about us. We believe in control. We create structures of control. It makes us feel good. This ideology of control now permeates the law. This control is our security.

This control is not the environment of creativity. You know that. This extreme of control is not the environment in which creativity can flourish. You know that. You need to stand up and push us out of the room. You need to reclaim this space for you. We don't believe in this space. Our laws enable the most powerful in a way that will stifle and kill diverse, decentralized creativity.

We have ideals, too. We believe in a democratic nation. We believe that greatness is earned through respect and criticism. We believe in a moral compact in which people are free to express criticism. We believe in a moral imperative and duty to build this freedom back into our culture. The honor of our nation has been the honor of free people who can speak about freedom without calling their lawyer -- who can speak about integrity and mean it.

That freedom is at our fingertips. But that freedom has to be fought for. 210 years ago they gave it to us. We have lost it. Only if we build the revolution they gave us 210 years ago, can we reclaim it.

South by Southwest 2003 X

Doug Lenat: Understanding Common Sense

Lenat is founder of Cycorp. Here is a rough transcript of Lenat's remarks:

I'm going to tell you about the last 30 years of my life in 45 minutes. I'm going to tell you about building an artificial intelligence, how we're doing it, and why. In a way, this is a talk about the relationship between computers and common sense. It's an adversial relationship.

I got bitten by the bug to do this while watching the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001. By far the most interesting character was Hal. Human beings would be more effective if only computers worked like that. If we could amplify the ways our brains work, we'd be smarter.

There'd be a qualitative change in how smart humanity is. You look at the last time there was a change like that, and it was the introduction of language. Let's go even further back to Alan Turing. In 1965, Joe Weizenbaum's work with a program called Doctor or Eliza took another step.

In the latest runs of these Turing type competitions, there's no trouble telling the human from the computer apart. If you ask "What color is a blue car?" there's a garbled Eliza-like response that's just parroting back what you just said. The programs are good at manipulating bits, but they're not really understanding what they're manipulating.

Intelligence requires immense knowledge about the world. Why does natural-language understanding require huge amounts of common sense? There are differences in the order of quantifiers hidden in the English language. Why is the Turing test so hard? Intelligence -- even just keeping up your end of a conversation well -- requires having lots of knowledge and applying it fast.

We forget things. We do arithmetic slowly. And we make mistakes that are random. There are dozens of these translogical phenomena that make it harder to simulate human thinking. Early hominids were pre-rational decision makers. Only the later hominids became rational. We are the early hominids.

The question is: Is artificial intelligence a dodo or a phoenix? 20 years ago, anyone who could spell A.I. was working on it. Nowadays, I'm optimistic about A.I. even though it's kind of rude to talk about it. Why am I optimistic? I knew we had to codify some of the common sense. We need to bridge the gap between people designing expert systems and fundamental philosophical questions about existence and time and space.

In terms of finding information by inference, I'm talking about asking a question like, "Find me a picture of someone smiling," and getting a picture of a man watching his daughter take her first step. That requires knowing that parents love their children and that taking your first step is an accomplishment.

It's not complicated reasoning. It's two- or three-step reasoning. Something called predicate calculus converts queries into their operative parts. Some things may not violate the date type of the relational database, but they violate common sense.

We also combine information from multiple sources. You can do fairly shallow reasoning and answer a question experts couldn't answer without drawing on those multiple sources.

How do we educate Cyc? The more you know, the more you can learn. To get to that crossover point, we'd have to follow the ugly duckling approach and cram knowledge into the program.

[At this point, Lenat's colleague Robert Kahlert demonstrated Cyc, running a scenario looking for ideas of how Lenat could use his new Segway while attending SXSW.]

I'm going to skip the first seven lessons we learned and go straight to the eighth and last lesson. We had to give up global consistency. Inconsistency seems like a bad idea, but when you have hundred rules, they're hard to keep straight. And maintaining thousands of rules is humanly impossible.

We're not trying to make trying to make the knowledge base as large as possible, we're trying to make it trying it as small as possible. We've still had to add millions of pieces of information to the system by hand.

Our original motivating applications are still our motivating applications. We've been automating the white space instead of the black space. What did the author already know about the world?

We've gotten half of our money from government and half of it from commercial sources. Nowadays we get more from government because corporations are less interested in looking far ahead into the future.

The system is not done, but it's done enough that it can attend to its own growth. And you can help.

South by Southwest 2003 IX

Josh Benton, Dan Gillmore, Matt Haughey, J.D. Lasica, and Evan Smith: Old Vs. New Journalism

Benton is an education reporter for the Dallas Morning News and maintains Crabwalk. Gillmore is technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and writes a blog for SiliconValley.com . Haughey founded Metafilter. Lasica is senior editor of the Online Journalism Review. And Smith is editor and executive vice president of Texas Monthly. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion:

Smith: This panel is misnamed. Blogs: Old Vs. New Journalism. I think we'll find that it's all journalism. I'm an editor for Texas Monthly. So I represent old media. What we're doing is nothing like what these four gentlemen are doing.

We're joined up here by four people. And rather than introduce them, I'll let them talk about their blogs, their philsophy of blogging, and how that reflects itself in their blogs, which might not be the same thing.

Down on the end is Josh Benton, who by day works for the Dallas Morning News. To his right is Dan Gillmore, who does a blog that's under the umbrella of the San Jose Mercury News. It's basically part of his work for the San Jose paper. To his right is J.D. Lasica, who writes for Online Journalism Review, but he does a blog that's independent of his work for the Online Journalism Review. Then there's Matt Haughey, who has no connection to traditional media.

Benton: I probably have the least connection between my blog and my day job, which is writing about education for the Dallas Morning News. Of the panelists, I might be the most pessimistic about the opportunities for news organizations have Web logs. When you think of Web logs as journalism, you probably think about the independent blogs online. I'm probably the least optimistic. I see the form of blogging as not being incredibly distinct about what journalism already does and has done for quite a long time. The old world of media is probably a lot more interactive than people give them credit for. When I write a story for the Dallas Morning News, I get a lot more feedback than I do when I write something for Crabwalk. The form of blogging is not really all that new.

Gillmor: I just came from a meeting of the East Coast Liberal Media Conspiracy, and I'm sorry you weren't invited. I love Web logs the way I loved talk radio when it started. I don't like a lot of what I hear on talk radio, and I don’t like a lot of what I read in Web logs. It's nice to have the Web log sponsored , bought, and paid for by my employer. I've been fortunate. People ask me what the business model for Web logs is, and I say it might be the same as community theater. There might not be one.

The most important thing about this is the transformation from the traditional lecture model in which someone is speaking to a group, and one in which people are talking to each other. In the end, we might end up with a better version of the truth. The collaborative filtering and conversational aspect is why I'm interested in this. My readers know more than I do. That's not a threat. That's an opportunity.

Lasica: [Walked into the audience to take a photo of Ben and Mena Trott, the creators of Moveable Type] The barrier between audience and panelists is really artificial. That's what's going on with old and new journalism. We're more part of a conversation, which is different than the traditional model of journalism, which is top down.

I do a blog called New Media Musings. I interviewed 30 people for an article about RSS feeds for Online Journalism Review, and I decided, why not publish the 30 transcripts in my blog?

How many bloggers are in the audience? How many are blogging right now? If you're doing something more than blogging transcripts, adding commentary or any kind of synthesis, you're engaged in a random act of journalism. I want to get away from the idea that there's a top-down approach that has to be done.

The folks up here are sort of concerned that blogging is journalism because there's so much bullshit out there. Not all bloggers are journalists. I don't even think some newspapers are journalism. You don't need to write for a professional publication to be a journalist. All you need to do is go out there and report something the best that you can, add some commentary and analysis, and you're a journalist.

Haughey: I'm Matt Haughey, and I do Metafilter. I never had any aspirations to do anything that was even remotely like journalism. New journalism and blogging tends to turn readers into writers. Old journalism is more like broadcast.

Metafilter has some journalistic tendencies. These are like story leads. People do research, domain experts might have something to say, but no one really gets around to writing an article and publishing. Old journalism is going to have to take on some of the qualities of new journalism.

Smith: Is this a case of new journalism becoming more like old journalism and old journalism becoming more like new journalism? You are setting the standards for some of the new sites that are out there. There are a lot of old media sites trying to add aspects of blogging. Even those extremely liberal democrats at the National Review [laughter] are starting to blog. Is the mountain coming to Mohammad or the reverse?

Lasica: I think it's both. In the next year or two, we're going to see an intersection of Web logs and old media. You've seen a little bit in terms of old media trying to co-opt the form, like Web blogs on MSNBC. It goes the other way, too. Web loggers who want to practice journalism can learn something from the old guard such as ethics and conflict of interest.

Haughey: You're starting to see Web loggers pick up the phone. They're trying to do their own kind of reporting. That's something we'll see more of.

Gillmore: Which has happened in one or two cases one or two years ago. One is the Casey Nicole story, which was the hoax of a young woman who died. Web loggers thought this seemed awfully strange and started doing reporting. One Web logger went to the county seat in Kansas. They ended up breaking a story that the mainstream media only picked up after the Web community had done all of the reporting.

You mentioned the National Review. The Right wing has been far ahead of the Left in terms of using technology as long as I've been using technology. They were the first on bulletin boards in the '80s. Talk radio is dominated by the Right. And most of the best political Web logs, in terms of quality and quantity, are on the Right. Web logs attract people who feel like outsiders even if they're not.

Smith: Do you consider Matt Drudge a Web logger?

Benton: I would say that Matt Drudge is a journalist, but I don't think he follows the Web log form. I would argue that he might not be a particularly good journalist, but he is a journalist. It's much easier for someone to do what a journalist does than it was 10 years ago. I get more than 100 emails every week from people who want to talk to me about what I do in journalism. You don't need a Web log to get that interactivity.

Smith: To what extent do you feel torn between the day job that pays your bills and the Web log that might claim your attention?

Benton: I've rethought the wisdom of attacking my employer. I'm supposed to be completely objective in what I do. I'm in a slightly different situation than Dan, who's a columnist. Whatever opinions I have I need to keep to myself. There was an error in a Dallas Morning News story that I posted something about, and an editor, who's an active reader of Crabwalk, scarily enough, emailed me saying there might be a better way to deal with this.

Gillmor: The reason that attacking a competitor is an issue is that journalism does a really lousy job covering journalism. Media doesn't do a very good job covering media. That's a shame.

It's true that I have a lot more freedom because I'm a columnist. I'm encouraged to say what I think. I have considerable leeway in what I write. Are there things that I won't do? Sure. While I have attacked my company in print on an issue that I thought raised serious ethical questions, there are things that I won't write about. It’s not that it's filthy laundry, but it just feels like it's not my place. If I saw something that made me feel sick to my stomach, I would either quit or do something different. I wouldn't work for an organization I considered unethical.

Haughey: In terms of these newspaper-attached blogs, there are definitely conflict of interest issues. There were two law suits this year that involved posts that were borderline libel or slander. On independent sites, you need to quiesion people's motivations for saying what they're saying and doing what they're doing. Is it self-promotion?

I always have to talk to the lawyer. There are no real laws. People are starting to work on blogging ethics, just throwing out ideas about we should do that we should do this. I've tried to pave the way by saying Yahoo message boards are just opinion. It's not speech that's actionable.

Lasica: I think a bigger issue is credibility. How do you know what to trust, what to believe online? A writer for the Washington Post said that people are never going to turn to blogs for news and information in great numbers because bloggers don't have the same standards and values. I think she's wrong about that. There are webs of trust. People build up brands just like a traditional news organization. All of our Web logs, if you visit long enough, you'll know what you can get.

Too many people believe what they read on a Web log. They're just not that skeptical. People believe what the believe. We just need to edit ourself.

Gillmore: When someone gets burned by what they read, there will be the same bullshit filters that we have with people that we meet. With some sites, there will be a confidence that a fair amount of time, effort, and money went into making something correct.

Smith: Is there a New York Times of blogs?

Gillmore: There are a number of blogs that I find credible within their realm. Glenn Fleischman writes a blog about 80211 wireless networking, and it's the best source to go to for information about that. They tend to be more niche. Nick Denton and his folks in New York are doing a lot f niched blogs like Gizmodo and Gawker.

Haughey: Web logs are transparent, I think. Especially when there are comments or a community, people will say what about these links that contradict what you say?

Lasica: There's not just one ultimate blog out there. All of us have our blog rolls. You can discover all these niche sites.

Benton: It seems in a way reflective of something that's happened in the broader journalism world. People are looking for sources of news that's more in line with what they already believe. That's a potential problem with Web logs. Anything that takes away editing, you can get caught in a world that just focuses on their side of their question. You can hear just your own voice.

[At this point, my PowerBook froze, and I needed to restart. I didn't lose a lot of the conversation, but lesson: Save often.]

Lasica: I don't think any of us are saying that Web logs should supplant other journalism. But if you're looking for news and information, the mainstream media isn't the only place for you to go.

Question: As media becomes bigger, it becomes more general because you can't piss off your advertisers. Web logs work well because they are small. Journalists have let us down because they've stopped covering niched things. They're not covering the library down the street.

Benton: I would disagree with that. There's a myth that there was a golden age of journalism. Go look at a newspaper from 30 years ago. Look at the archives. There was a lot of crap out there. I agree with you that it's great to have a granular voice. That's terriffic.

Smith: There are a lot of shitty Web logs with no ads. And there are a lot of shitty newspapers with ads. I don't think advertising is the problem.

South by Southwest 2003 VIII

Brad Fitzpatrick, Scott Heiferman, and James Hong: Trends in How the Internet Connects People

Fitzpatrick founded LiveJournal. Heiferman co-founded Meetup. Hong co-founded Hot or Not. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion:

Heiferman: The guy who organized the panel, Hugh, emailed me and asked if I wanted to be on a panel. I said sure, and he said, "What do you think should be about?" And in half a second, I said "How the Internet connects people." I thought that we would enter into a lengthy process to work out the topic, but then I later saw it in print: How the Internet involves people. We don't really know what this panel is going to be, but we'll start by sharing the properties we're involved in.

Meetup is a platfrom that organizes real-world gatherings about anything anywhere. It's about eight months old. It's very user powered. A user creates a topic, say Buffy Fans. The system allows people anywhere in the world to meet locally about Buffy. Meetups can happen in 500 cities in 34 countries. Nearly 200,000 people have signed up for Meetups.

Supporters of Howard Dean took to us like flies on something. Dean supporters organized Meetups in something like 80 cities. In my hometown, New York, 400 people got together, and even Dean showed up. Now the Dean campaign is paying Meetup to help support their organizing efforts. They're using Meetup to grassroots organize. Meetups are on a cycle, a monthly cycle. Dean happens to be the first Wednesday of every month.

It's not just about New York, Boston, and San Francisco, it's about St. Louis, Charlotte, and Fort Dodge, Iowa. That's Meetup 101 basics.

Fitzpatrick: Basically LiveJournal is like a blogging tool or something. The interesting thing about LiveJournal is who your friends are and who you want to read. People can leave comments on things. That's the addictive nature of it. That's my experience with social networks.

Heiferman: If you're a good hype person, you can sign up as Brad's hype person.

Fitzpatrick: I'm not business minded at all. That will probably be my demise. But I don't really care about that.

Hong: I run a Web site called Hot or Not. I started it with my roommate as a joke about two and a half years ago. I had this theory about the two-way Web, which is people communicating through the Web in more than a one-way publishing model. My roommate and I built this site. We had the idea on a Monday. We launched it the following week. And then we were in Salon, every newspaper in Europe, and then People magazine.

This person, she's pretty hot. I'll give her a 9. She's got a rating of 8.3, and she last checked her score 10 hours ago. It's not a communication tool to foster communication, really. It's a communication of "Here I am." And then it's a communication of "You're hot" -- or not. We took that a step further and added Meet Me at Hot or Not. You can add a profile and add a Do You Want to Meet Me? If I click Yes on someone, you can only write the people who click Yes to you if you click Yes to them. We call it a double match list. And one person has to be a paid member for them to talk to each other. It's like being in a bar. Clicking Yes is like smiling at a girl.

We don't really call it a dating site because most people don't use it for dating. They use it for finding friends. The Meet Me is like a superset.

Heiferman: We all agree that the heart of the Internet is about connecting people. It's not just about the computers being connected. Whether it's buyers finding sellers on Ebay or job hunters finding job listings on job sites, blogging isn't just about people publishing, it's about connecting people and the links. There's a difference in writing something and writing something for all the world to see so connections can happen.

What are the trends that we're seeing?

Fitzpatrick: In the last couple yers, it's become more accepted. When I started LiveJournal, my mom said That's stupid, who's going to want to write about themselves online? Now she says that she's wrong because it's so mainstream.

Hong: How many people in the room have met someone online that they've met offline later. Pretty much everyone. Society is changing. Society doesn't really change by new technology. Sometimes everyone adopts it really quickly, but sometimes it's something the younger generation grew up with. It was always there. When they grow up, the things that were once novel become mainstream. It was always there for them.

It's very clear for me. I'm 29 years old. I run a Web site where the average user is maybe 20. The attitude of using the Web to meet people is very different for the younger crowd than even for me.

Heiferman: I don't think it's generational or age based. This is a critical mass medium. The nature of the network effect is that meeting people online is OK because there's a critical mass of people out there. Our little experience with Meetup is that it's all organic growth to 200,000 users. It's growing really fast right now. If you're some Buffy fan in London, if there are 20 people signed up, you're willing to go. A crowd attracts a crowd. You hit that exponential curve of acceptability and usability.

Fitzpatrick: There's a bunch of LiveJournal clone sites using our code base. People went there for awhile, but they found that the community was so small. Those people came back to LiveJournal because we have more people. Friends attract friends.

Hong: There are also more people interested in publishing about themselves online. But because we're a dating site, maybe we attract younger people because they're looking for love. Also, younger people are more apt to put a photo of themselves online. That form of content is accessible to people. The opportunity to get involved with each other is a connection.

Heiferman: The idea of the Internet connecting people goes beyond the dating thing. The whole idea behind the anti-war and anti-globalization activism is totally organized through technology. That's a whole new thing in the last few years. Howard Rheingold wrote a book called "Smart Mobs." A mob gets smarter because it's organized through technology.

I showed up at this Howard Dean Meetup and there were 400 people in a New York bar. It was fully acknowledged that no one would be there if the idea hadn't spread through the viral nature of the Web. The fact that we're thinking about the 2004 campaign in March 2003 and organizing so quickly shows that this stuff is really changing the face of politics. It wasn't just young people showing up at these Meetups. Democracy happens through people connecting regardless of whether it's face to face. Seeing this Dean thing was like All Your Base Goes Real.

Question: I've attended a couple of different people who only know each other online meet face to face. If you get the critical mass, it can continue. But if it ever fails, it's viewed forever more as it's not going to work. If you go on a bad online date, you might not try online dating again. How do you see the impact of negative stuff?

Fitzpatrick: For the first Meetup for LiveJournal in Portland, so many people signed up that the Meetup system broke everyone up into multiple venues.

Heiferman: Sorry.

Fitzpatrick: It was supposed to be really popular, but because some venues didn't work, it took awhile to become popular again.

Hong: For dating, almost everyone in the world has gone on a bad date before. I don't think that has anything to do with online dating.

Question: You all have popular Web sites and applications. There seem to be a lot of synergies. What's on your radar in terms of how you integrate your services and features? The LiveJournal groups are the biggest groups on Meetup.

Heiferman: Let's look at War in Iraq in Toronto. If you google that, the first listing is No War in Iraq Meetups. Brad and I did something interesting. I don't know why we're slow [online]. Let's do something easier that we know exists. Like Buffy. Brad built in something where people who list Buffy as an interest, there's a link to Buffy Meetups. And in the Buffy Meetup area, we link to Buffy fans on LiveJournal.

Hong: Brad and I talked about that a long time ago, something about hosting photos.

Fitzpatrick: It's basically done.

Hong: I just did a Google search for "hot girl" and Salinger, because I like Salinger, and the first link is people in Hot or Not who like Salinger. The back end of Hot or Not is entirely done using a Web services architecture. We have everything done in Soap, so if we want to do an integration with someone, it's very easy to do. We have a Web service that's "Show me a picture of someone who likes Salinger," and that very easily pops up.

Question: How did each of you address the first mover problem?

Fitzpatrick: With LiveJournal, I just used it myself. When Scott told me about Meetup, I said, um, good luck. Meetup depends on a lot of people using it. LiveJournal's not really the same way. Blogger doesn't have a friends list. But LiveJournal grew a lot because of people's friends lists.

Heiferman: We knew we were getting ourselves into a hairy situation. We needed serious numbers before people in Spokane or Tallahassee who are breast cancer survivors or Harry Potter fans can meet up. We've never spent a dime on advertising. But in our first three weeks, there were three key events: Bloggers took to us, LiveJournal users took to us, and Slashdot took to us.

Slashdotters were into the idea of having the Slashdot Effect in the real world. They loved the idea of all showing up at a bar and having the Slashdot Effect in real life. The groups that you think would be least interested in it are actually more interested in being "meaty."

Hong: I've been to some Meetups where there are 30 people, and I've been to some where there are three. At Hot or Not, very few people need to submit to service new people. Someone might only look at 30-40 pictures. All I really need are 30-40 new pictures a day.

With regard to Hot or Not getting a lot of press, that's what we did to defend ourselves. There are a lot of Hot or Not copy cats. We don't mind. We spent the first two or three months getting press so everyone who writes about these sites knows that Hot or Not came first. You won't see an article about rating systems without seeing a mention of Hot or Not.

Question: What happened when those 400 people showed up at the bar? And what do you think Google's purchase of Blogger means for what the three of you do?

Fitzpatrick: I can't really speak for Blogger, but Evan said that Google bought them because they thought was cool.

Heiferman: I think it means that Google becomes more real time and personal. When Google is smarter about space and time, and your blog is better cataloged than Google, rather that just catalog the Chihuahua sites, Google will be able to make the Web more alive and timely.

Hong: A lot of people have been talking about the Google/Blogger thing. Larry Page once said that they really sucked at getting timely content into the system. At the very least, this deal gives them access by more of a push basic than a pull basis. They don't need to crawl.

Fitzpatrick: I don't think they have a problem crawling. I write something, and it's in there the next day.

Hong: That's because you're popular. If I started a blog today and wrote something, it might be a month before they crawl me. Google has an impact on people meeting because people can more easily make connections by finding people online.

Heiferman: What happened with the 400 people? We had the NYPD wondering why there were 400 people there -- and why there was a line outside.

Question: Was it a political thing? Was it a meeting thing?

Heiferman: If you get people in a room who are passionate about a cause or a candidate, the Meetup isn't just a social event. It's mobilization. These people who support this candidate, they're going to figure out what they need to do locally. All you need to do is get them into a room.

Hong: That's all the Internet is: One big room. All Meetup or LiveJournal or Hot or Not is are corners of that room. Another reason Google bought Blogger has nothing to do with search results. They are trying to improve their ad words capability to determine what ad words to put on a page.

If you go to Google Groups, their interface to Usenet, do a search for Windows administration. They have these sponsored links. You can look at a post, but they have ads at the top. They're not just ads, they're specific to the content of the page. They look at the content of the message. They're talking about Citrix in this post, so here's an ad for Citrix. Basically Google is turning into Overture. They're very into this ad word thing. They're an ad site.

Heiferman: I'm going to highjack this for 30 seconds to show you guys something. Some friends and I do a site called Fotolog. It's small, maybe a couple thousand people who post photos. There's a fotologger Brooklyn and one in France who met and they just announced that they're having a baby. Talk about connecting people.

Fitzpatrick: I'm always getting wedding invitations.

Hong: Three days after we launched Meet Me, we had a woman fly from Iowa to LA. They'd talked on the phone for a few days, and then they were in Las Vegas getting married. I don't know if they're still married.

South by Southwest 2003 VII

Jon Lebkowsky, Adina Levin, and Nancy White: Effective Social Networks

White is founder of Full Circle Associates and has been researching and practicing online facilitation since 1996. Levin is in charge of strategic marketing and product planning for SocialText. Lebkowsky, founder of Polycot Consulting, has been involved in online communities since 1990. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion:

Lebkowsky: The thing with online communities is that they work really well for conversation and exchanging knowledge to some extent, but when it comes to actually getting something done, it's a little more difficult. One of the things we've been doing is giving some thought to how these things work, what their real value is, and whether you can transcend geography. Traditionally we've said that the real value of online communities in business is that you can bring people together online. It's a different way of working together. It's more agile. You can add layers of connectivity. You're building networks that are big and multi-dimensional.

However, this can bring challenges. The one we're probably most familiar with is the control challenge. It's not hierarchical. Everything goes flat.

White: I see networks as a container. It's moveable and squishy. It kid of floats out there. If I had to play charades and give a physical representation of a network, I would be stumped. There's some point of gravity in a network that's a node where things can happen and groups can form. When I look at a network as a group, there's a whole. But when I look at it as a whole, it gets squishy.

One of the amazing things about networks is their ability to contain and facilitate reciprocity. Everything can be flowing in the same direction, or everything can be flowing in different directions. I want to share with you what happened to me in Central Asia. I got an email from a guy who'd seen something I'd written on my Web site. He told me that he'd been given the job to build online communities in post-Soviet Union republics.

We entered into a dialog and came up with a plan to look at the power of the network. We introduced what online interaction can do. The next phase of our our work was to set up a face-to-face interaction. Two of the guys involved were using Hotmail to arrange informal prisoner exchanges. They legitimized the relationships that they had online.

There was no network before. We pulled the people together to create the network. Recognizing that this medium allowed them to cross the physical boundaries that they weren't allowed to cross helped them realize that this medium had potential. Some people were catalysts and were willing to take leadership. The Internet can have power even in a highly disconnected community.

They didn't really trust the aysnchronous tools at first. But the synchronous tools like instant messaging gave them the sense that they weren't alone when they really needed help. It hasn't supplanted face to face, but it's really expanded what they can do in their countries.

Levin: You said something interesting when we were preparing about how the people used the network in a way that was consistent with the hierarchical nature of how they worked otherwise.

White: This medium allows power to spread out to members of the network. One of the things we started with was building groups through networking. Then we moved into facilitating.

We were very severely limited by bandwidth. We tried to move people outside of email to make visible the work of the group. Email is very one to one. We used WebCrossing and IM, and we let people use any language they were comfortable using. Helping people move their ideas about processes from offline to online was really useful. We need to make our patterns explicit so we can move them online.

Lebkowsky: Adina has been working with her own company SocialText to build their network.

Levin: Nancy talked a little bit apologetically about the simplicity about the tools that the teams were working with. Part of the tradition of groupware is to build a complicated set of tools. If you look at what people have used over the years, even in the orgs that have a lot of money, people use email more than anything else. The simple tools often work the best.

I also want to talk about the idea of how groups form out of a network. SocialText grew out of a group of people who met through a quasi-professional network. That group is a networking group that doesn't have any particular goal or purpose. But a member sent a message to the group about a business opportunity that involved using blogs within corporations. Blogs are the simplest way for an individual to publish online. We also looked at how people could use Wikis. Wikis are one of the simplest way to collaborate online. We run SocialText using the tools that we're researching for our clients.

The place I worked before, Vignette, was a very whiteboard-centric culture. People would take turns writing on the wall, and by the end of the meeting, we'd have made a decision, and the writing would be on the wall. The Wiki enables us to collaborate on just-in-time documents wherever we might be. We're also able to have a living library of what we're working on.

Part of the point here isn't one specific tool but that there's a set of processes you can use for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.

We see a set of concentric circles around SocialText. There are the employees. We have a board of advisors. Then there's a broader community with which we use the SocialText Workspace to keep in touch with people. That broader network is extremely valuable. Your closest network you already know -- and already know what they're thinking. If you want new ideas, you need to look at the broader network.

Lebkowsky: There's not so much competition as there is collaboration.

White: When you all work in the same building, you get to think the same way. When your organization lives in network, there's more creative abrasion.

Lebkowsky: Clay Shirky wrote a piece in which he talked about the A list of bloggers. What's going to happen? Is there going to be a group of bloggers that everyone reads and the others sink to the bottom?

White: Bloggers for president!

Lebkowsky: Joichi Ito also wrote a paper about emergent democracy to start talking about how bloggers relate to each other. At some point, there was going to be a teleconference, a telephone call. I don't really get excited about teleconferences. You get the audio cues, but I want to type at people. What Adina's people came up with was a Happening, a multimodal event that was a combination of the teleconference, a chat space, and a voting or polling tool involving green, yellow, and red cards.

A lot of times, you never have a sense of whether people are there or paying attention. We knew just was going on. If someone stopped doing their cards, you got the sense that they were paying attention to something else. We also established a Wiki, where we could plant things and store things after the fact. I even transcribed the telephone call because I'd taped it.

We also used QuickTopic. QuickTopic is a very cool little tool that allows you to start a little discussion thread ad hoc. It also involves a document review tool. You can post documents, and people can comment on them. It was almost more effective than the Wiki because it was easier to keep track of comments.

The Emergent Democracy paper was written. It's in version 1.2. But we haven't continued to work. There's not much activity on the mailing list. People have gotten distracted. And there's the question about emergent leadership. Joi was kind of the emergent leadership, but he turned his attention elsewhere.

White: We haven't quite figured out how to take that vision and translate worker bee energy online. There's a thing we struggle with offline, and when we put it online, the warts become apparent.

Lebkowsky: If we're only going to have a democracy of clueful intelligent people who communicate well online, that's not going to work.

White: It depends on how you define heirarchy. There's a question of consistent standards. Are we attracted to this environment because we want to take ownership of our work and other people don't?

Corollary: Blogging About Blogging LII
Earlier this month, Anil Dash offered an interesting commentary on Project Blogger that considers the positive aspects as well as the negative. It's one of the first balanced analyses I've seen. Kudos.

South by Southwest 2003 VI

Dana Robinson: User Not Found

Robinson is online community manager for a nonprofit called Starbright that provides media-based products to seriously ill children. She is currently developing a Web site devoted to the death of online friends. Here is a rough transcript of the discussion:

Nobody else wanted to be on a panel about dying and death, so it's just me. When we talk about experiencing the death of our online friends, we have to go into it believing that these friends are real and legitimate. I don't want to go into the whole Ripper/IRC/Webcam suicide thing. While it's unclear whether what he did was suicide, the fact is he did die. He took huge doses of Methadone and Oxycontin while he was on a Webcam and on IRC. There was a huge debate whether it was a suicide or whether he was just being dumb with drugs.

I'm also not trained to treat grieving. I'm wanting to learn from you as much as I want you to learn from the conversation. I decided to do this project not because I'm gothic. Although I do wear black and have black hair. It started back in 1994. I was using a Telnet-based, Mud-like chat system. I became friends with this guy David who was chronically ill. He was popular within the community, and one day he just stopped coming in. One guy called his parents, and they told him that he had passed away. He wanted the Mud to know that he'd passed away, but his parents didn't know who to call.

I decided to write an essay about it for a journalism class, and I called a bunch of sociologists. They didn't even know what email was so I couldn't do the project. Two years ago I started talking to this guy in Chicago named Timothy. He was 34 and had cystic fibrosis. We talked on the phone a few times, and then he stopped answering his phone. Then the phone number went away. I wondered what was going on.

Online, relationships can be anonymous. You can know a lot about someone, but you might not know how to reach them in real life. Then I got interested in the topic again because of the work I do for Starbright. We hook terminally sick kids up online. Not a lot of kids living with sickle cell [anemia] live in Iowa. Online, they can find other kids with sickle cell, talk online, and feel like they're not alone. One of the kids we got really close with was Bianca. She was dealing with her third bout of cancer, and she'd call us every day to talk to our staff. She was online 7-8 hours every day. When she passed away, I didn't really think I'd feel emotionally invested in one of our users. Her mother told us that my boss and I were in her last thoughts. It was really, really rough.

Our relationships are really getting more intense online, and we need to know more about how to deal with death. User Not Found is my site where I post essays while I'm doing research. The killing off of the persona is another thing I'm looking into. There aren't a lot of people doing this research. There's nothing that's been written. So it's really weird.

In doing my research I've found that online communities in a couple of different ways. They may keep the account up so nobody else can use that ID. And if there are profiles, they may keep the profile available, maybe marking it with a RIP and the years they were alive. They might also set up memorial pages, living obituaries that talk about what they did, how they remembered. And a lot of the gaming communities may have annual memorial events where they have their own little events where they have a memorial avatar. They put down their weapons, come to a central meeting place, and mourn the loss of one of their users.

And some online communities don't do anything. They take no action. And that's unfortunate. With Starbright, we need to be careful. You can't step on parents' toes. Some parents want their children to learn about death in a more controlled way. We're looking into having some sort of a memorial garden that would be online as well offline. They could plant a virtual tree online and write some words about their friend who died. And we could send them a packet of seeds so they could plant a real tree of their own.

At my job, we handle the taboos around death by making jokes around it. That can be even worse. If we don't make jokes, there's no way we can make it through our days. People need to start talking about this and having these sorts of conversations. Clearly it's an issue. The more we interact with people online, experiences like this will become more and more relevant. Now more and more people are accepting the fact that the friendships are legitimate. They have real feelings of grief and mourning. They feel like these feelings aren't legitimate. I would argue the opposite. You probably know them better because you have this veil of anonymity. It may be more impactful if the friends are online.

Some ISPs have policies in place where they require proof of death certificates. It's hit or miss company to company.

Now let's talk about the online cries for help and the community's responsibility to react to those cries for help. Sometimes the intent is not to die but to get some attention. In one instance, a woman took too many pills to be well, and a community member called 911. They tracked down her phone number and were able to get their in time.

Brad Fitzpatrick: I'm Brad from LiveJournal. I had to deal with a lot of those emails saying there had to be a way we could track her down. We were able to get her address from a payment she'd made via check or something like that.

The community was able to rally together and were interested in saving her. If you read the chat transcripts from Ripper on IRC, people thought he was fooling around and didn't really want to kill himself. As he was passing out, people started saying maybe they should call someone. If they'd called somebody, they could have sent someone over quite easily. They had ways of getting ahold of him. But because of their not gettign involved stance, he ended up dying.

Is it overstepping the bounds of the online relationship to bring in the authorities? One of the problems is the hoaxes that have been covered. Because of all the publicized hoaxes, people don't take real situations seriously. The reality is that there aren't many hoaxes. There are more realities than hoaxes. Community managers have a responsibility to investigate further. In the community that I manage, if a kid even mentions suicide, we call their parents and bring in a specialist.

Cory Doctorow: When Google wrote its algorithm for what comes up when you type suicide, they put a lot of thought into it. Right now, the top results are suicide hotlines. But sometimes, when the algorithms aren't working right, it's pages of people telling each other how to kill themselves.

Matt Haughey: It's interesting that when attempts are visible -- there's a Webcam -- they're taken more seriously because you can actually see it happen.

How Americans deal with death is so unhealthy compared to a lot of cultures. And how children deal with death compared to adults is even more different. Children deal with death so healthily. Everyone could learn a lot by talking to these kids.

Paul Bausch: I think it was in the Tipping Point, but if someone dies because they committed suicide and newspapers put it on the front page, it can be seen as permission to kill yourself.

If you over-memorialize kids, and kids view suicide as a way to escape from their illness, you have to be careful how kids take those memorials. You don't want to over-romanticize it.

Another thing I'd like to talk about is when people who aren't really that active in a community die and the community rises up to recognize them. On Fark, there was a guy who didn't post much at all, but when he died in a car accident, the community rose up. There were so many posts about this kid, and nobody knew him. It made me start thinking: Does a person's usage in a given community correlate with how the death is received. Do accoladed users receive more memorials? I think that's how it happens in communities. The community feels a definite impact from that loss. But it's sort of disappointed when someone who's not a big user passes away.

Question:I think it's important to look at the quality of someone's activity. Some people might not post much, but they post well.

Smaller users can make deeper connections with individuals, but it impacts the community in a different way. Active users impact the entire community. On Starbright world, the kids are much more willing to talk about it than the adults are willing to ask them to talk about it. Adults kind of present barriers where there don't need to be barriers.

If you thought that one of your online friends died, how far would you go? Where would you draw the line between doing your own personal research and overstepping the bounds to impose on someone's privacy? Would you contact the family? When we contacted David's family in 1994, most families would have been closed to being contacted by strangers in their time of grieving. For you, as a person, to be able to move on, you kind of have to know what's going on.

There's a service called Died Online. You register. And you choose the increments on which you check in on the site. If you fail to check in twice based on your increments, the service contacts people you've listed to let them know that you haven't checked in for awhile and they might want to check in with you.

For my job, we're working in prevention as well as what to do if it's already happened. It's tough. You have to take it on a situation by situation basis. It's hard to come up with a protocol that you'd follow consistently because if you know the individual. It can be different in every case.

Only now are we even really at a point where we can have these conversations. Things change so rapidly. Maybe a year from now we'll have this conversation and it will be totally different.

Brad Fitzpatrick: Whenever someone dies on LiveJournal, and it's happened maybe a dozen times now, the last post will get hundreds of comments.

That's one of the healthier things I've seen. It's grieving. It's sharing. And it brings the community together so people don't have to deal with it themselves. The only deaths I've experienced have been online. Friends, family. I've only experienced death online. That might be why I'm so interested in this.