Highlight of the day today was Bruce Sterling's lowlights of our future. I'd try to summarize his melancholy rant, but I'll just give a few choice quotes and post Austinist's coverage of the talk.

On authors and audiences:

My concern is not so much for the death of the Author, but the death of the audience... my Twitter audience is probably a better audience than you.

On social media and connectivity (i.e. Twitter):

Look at cell phones. Even the poorest people are densely connected. [In the near future] connectivity will be a signifier of poverty rather than sophistication.

I'd highly recommend listening to the podcast of the talk once it's available.

Two things today:

(1) There's been a lot of talk at the conference about data visualization and using APIs to allow developers to get at data. The keynote today was an interview of Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, who did statistical analysis of polls and other information to correctly predict all but one state in the 2008 election. I love data visualization, too. But I'm fearful of putting data into the hands of people that aren't trained to use it in meaningful and accurate ways. Nate alluded to the media's broad statements and lack of meticulous analysis during his interview and I couldn't agree more. I would, however, like to hear his thoughts on whether or not what people are doing with current APIs to visualize data is genuinely helpful. I look at sites like Swivel and graphs of unrelated data that give false impressions about relationships and wonder if we're letting ease of use cancel out intelligent results.

(2) There's been a trend towards quoting Ghandi's "be the change that you believe in" and then asking people to give 10%:

• Alex Bogusky talked about his employee devoting 10% of his time to a pet idea of an urban bike-sharing program.
• Lawrence Lessig talked about us devoting 10% of our time to helping to create a citizen-funded democracy
• and Tony Hseih of Zappos talked about devoting 10% of his time to finding out what happiness is all about.

Each of these speakers seemed to imply that we should also devote 10% of our time to their same idea. "You only need to take 10% of your time..." is tossed around a lot. But you know what? 10% is a lot. Especially if I need to spend 10% of it trying to be the change that I believe in, 10% helping foster citizen-funded democracy and 10% trying to figure out the root of happiness. Granted, I can get back that 30% if I just be the change all the time, fix democracy and figure out what happiness is, but I don't see that all happening any time soon.

What a kickass day of sessions at SXSW. If I haven't mentioned it on twitter already, I have to say that this is the most intelligent level of dialog that I've experienced at a conference in my life. In this "most" I'm including two NTEN's, a barcamp, two Drupalcon's, a Nonprofit Project Management conference and a Nonprofit Developer's conference. That's not to say that there weren't intelligent people at those gatherings, it's just to say that the level of dialog here is consistently rather than sporadically intelligent. It's just badass.

Part of that badassity (credit @TheLastLow for the word) was today having had the honor to witness (in order):

(1) A presentation on how to create faster websites by Steve Souders, the creator of Yslow (an app for figuring out why your page sucks at loading quickly) and now a Google employee, who got right into real, actual code to show how to asynchronously load and execute javascript instead of thumb-twiddling.

(2) A presentation on why changing American democracy to be a citizen-funded election system is the first step to solving the corruption of good souls in our government, given by Lawrence Lessig, the creator of Creative Commons and all around brillance machine. Do checkoutchange-congress.org and sign up to refuse to donate to any more political campaigns until politicians stop accepting money from lobbyists and other special interesting groups.

(3) A presentation by one of my favorite shtars of zee veb, Merlin Mann, on how to publish creative content with credibility. He gave it alongside John Gruber and it was well thought-out, intelligent, creative and engaging - all with no slides.

All three presentations were amazing. Mann's presentation was, for me, the closest I've ever been to a celebrity. Granted, he's more of a micro-celebrity (Rose has no idea who they are) - but in my world Mann, Scott Simpson and Adam Lisagor of You Look Nice Today are three of the more hilarious people that I've ever heard and today I got to meet and really talk to all three of them in person after the presentation.

I don't usually affiliate pictures of me with the blog, but this one I couldn't resist:

I did also get to tell John Gruber of Daring Fireball that I'd procured the shitsandwhich.es domain, after hearing him mention his own post regarding the iPhone's lack of SDK announcement at the 2007 WorldWide Developer's Conference as a "shit sandwich". I offered to hand it to him for free... he didn't bite. Alas.

Time for bed. More tomorrow...

A few notes about SXSW on day 1:

1. If you register for Interactive, Film and Music, you get three bags. That's a lot of bags. So is this:
   
   
2. Fedora's aren't just optional, they're a tad bit necessary:
   
   
3. In any given question and answer period, at least one of the following two fun-sucks will ask a question:
   (1) Security guy
   (2) Accessibility guy
   Look. We're talking about new, interesting shit on the internet. You don't need to ruin it with your questions about security and accessibility. We'll get to that stuff when we need to. Sit down. Stop asking those questions.

Saw some very inspiring and interesting stuff today: A cool presentation on emerging user interfaces (one panelist a former 10 yr ILM veteran), a talk on adding Easter eggs to sites to enhance user excitement by one of the guys from clearleft and a presentation on industrial-design-driven bike sharing by Alex Bogusky of Crispin, Porter and Bogusky who is, apparently, a big deal. All three were excellent.

I spent the last week or two wading through the 1,045 songs in the SXSW torrent to try to find new bands that I was interested in.

Quicksilver and its iTunes integration were a huge help in this process. If you have a mac and you're not using Quicksilver, shame on you. If you have a PC, there are plenty of other app-launcher/productivity applications that you could be using. I'm not going to do your job for you. Just Google it. Amongst other things, Quicksilver's iTunes plugin lets you use simpl key combinations to go the next song and rate songs without leaving your current task to flip over to iTunes.

In any case, by the time all was said and done, here's the breakdown of the rated songs:
4 stars: 12
3 stars: 50
2 stars: 143
1 star: 208
0 stars: 416

You can listen the top 12 by going to the combination of "mp3" and "sxsw" in my deli.icio.us tags here:
http://delicious.com/elgreg/mp3+sxsw
There's a little slideout player in the bottom.

I also uploaded the top 10 to a drop here:
http://drop.io/sxsw_top_10

Of course, the moment that I went to blog this, I found that a "late additions" third torrent was out there with another 214 songs. Looks like I have my work cut out for me today.

A month or so ago, I went on a little spending spree of .es domains. They were on sale for $1 each for a year... so, it was kind of a bargain basement sort of deal. In any case, I'm now seeking suggestions on what I should do with any and all of the following domains (see image). For the moment, I'm listing "audiences".

radl.es <- great for subdomains, like c.radl.es and umm.... yeah
hotflash.es <- for your mom
ruckus.es <- underground fighting
crutch.es <- bad healthcare
jumbl.es <- something to do with scrabulous
sash.es <- Pashminas for your mom?
cssthem.es <- design nerding
latch.es <- Locksmith!
shitsandwich.es <- probably the best
backgroundprocess.es <- Systems Administration
ditch.es <- Digging
mismatch.es <- Dating
sons-of-bitch.es <- Douchebags
benchpress.es <- Pump iron!
ellips.es <- Grammar
monkeywrench.es <- Handymen/repair work
sonsofbitch.es <- Jerks
blotch.es <- Forensics
newsi.es <- News!
spazz.es <- Uppers
blowtorch.es <- Dudes who work on shows that are on the Discovery Channel
fiddl.es <- Fiddlers
ossthem.es <- More design nerd
splotch.es <- More forensics
brachiosaurus.es <- Paleontologists
floati.es <- Bad swimmers
parenthes.es <- More grammarians
trampl.es <- Elephant Herds
brug.es <- People who love ritzy Brussels locales
floozi.es <- Sluts!
relish.es <- Other condiments
trespass.es <- Those who forgive us
coozi.es <- Warming beers
grumbl.es <- Mutterers
rhinoceros.es <- Big Game Hunters
zoomlens.es <- Photographers

I might as well start documenting my happiness re: having an administration that I agree with. At this point, I'm just going to clip and link to articles that I find fanciful.

Last post was the day Obama won and this one is a picture from the day I got to witness the inauguration. I'm hoping revamp the blog a bit soon, linking to some different projects that I've been working on.

Big news is that I just finished up a site called addnetflix that allows twitter users to direct message 'addnetflix' to add movies to their queue (and specify their position). It gave me a chance to try out the codeigniter PHP framework as well as toying around with Open Authentication and the Netflix API. If you have Netflix, it's almost worth joining twitter to give it a try. Once you have both, check out addnetflix.moltbedesigns.com and start adding movies. I used it twice yesterday during lunch!

The takeaway: OAuth is a bitch, but there are some good libraries out there that make it a little less of a bitch. I'm talking mostly about a little one called OAuthSimple, which I can't recommend enough as it saved my ass towards the end.

Even better about the Obama win is that he carried Arapahoe county, which hasn't gone blue since 1964 and is where I spent Monday and Tuesday canvassing. Granted, lots of others did far more than me - but I feel honored to have been able to help. I know of at least three voters ballots that wouldn't have been cast if it hadn't been for me knocking on their door and watching them fill out their mail-in ballot so that I could deliver it to the country clerk. This makes me feel like I got to vote for Obama four times.

R and I found out the news via the twittersphere by about 11pm (though, I called it as soon as ABC projected Ohio.) After a celebratory drink at the restaurant where we were eating, we made our way back to the hotel bar and found a less enthusiastic crowd to drink amongst before heading up to our room and watching the joy unfold the rest of the night.

R is training in Denver all week, so this morning I drove back up to Estes Park and hiked up the side of a mountain to look at Mills Lake.

You can see the Flickr photo set of the hike, but any pictures of yours truly are reserved for flickr contacts, so log into Flickr before looking!