Electronics. Entertainment. Gadgets.
New Media Addict
By Dave Thomas
About David
Dave Thomas is the online editor-in-chief of E-Gear. When he's not tracking online trends he likes to make movies, eat pasta or just sit around watching Doctor Who.Silver's Screen
The Great Laptop Rescue
Mar 12, 2010A Boston man used ingenuity- and special software- to recover his laptops from thieves...
The Letter Box
The Thin Blu Line
Sep 8, 2009The line between technology and content continues to blur....
SXSW 2008 - Day One: The Web Just Got Really, Really Scary
On day one, I attended the ”Weird Turn Pro” panel hosted by Derek Powazek, author of the seminal social network tome Design for Community. These days Powazek is centered on crowdsourcing, which, in one form or another, was a major theme of this year’s conference. He talks about the success of Threadless, which allows users to post competing T-shirt designs, creating and selling the winning shirts online, and now in brick-and-mortar stores. This is now a multimillion dollar business.
He also warns of the backlash when you cross an online community. When Yahoo! decided to create a page dedicated to the Wii, they added a stream of photos tagged “Wii” by Flickr members. They didn’t ask permission, but legally they didn’t need to (Yahoo! owns Flickr). A group of miffed Flickr members started tagging photos of the words “Yahoo! Sucks” with “Wii”, turning Yahoo!’s Wii page into a photo stream of Yahoo! hate. Had Yahoo! simply asked users to add their photos to a “Wii Flickr Group” and posted the results, they would have probably received a ton of submissions with no hard feelings. Sometimes, says Powazek, you have to go beyond what is legal. (You can see the full slideshow from Powazek’s panel here.)
Online communities can turn sour in far more horrifying ways, however. The ”Online Extremism - And the Muslims Who Fight It” panel was one of the most educational and frightening I’ve ever attended, though it came with more than a dash of hope. It began with a presentation by iDefense Middle East Analyst Mohamad Hluchan that bore the scariest PowerPoint title of all time - “Jihadism and Cybercrime: Emerging Synergies.” Terrorist organizations have been working with criminal syndicates for years (although am I the only one that didn’t know that Hezbollah worked with cocaine cartels in Columbia?), so it seems inevitable that they’d team with black hat hackers eventually. Turns out they’ve already dipped their toes in credit card fraud, though their software is rudimentary (for now). Hluchan warns that the longer authorities wait to try to infiltrate the cybercommunities linking terrorists with hackers, the harder it will get.
Terrorists are also comprimising the efforts of Muslims trying to counter jihadist rhetoric. Mohammed Suleiman Khan founded Hadithuna.com in 2006 with the intention of promoting a positive image of the Islamic community via a network of blogs. All was going well until a series of increasingly radical and violent blogs began to appear in their network. While trying to balance issues of free speech, Khan deleted the blogs and worked with the FBI to try to root out the radicals.
Frank Cillufo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, introduced some of the most refreshing thought on the topic, stating, “We can’t simply kill and capture our way to victory.” He said that we need credible Muslim voices (Islamic scholars, for example) who can show how tenets are being misinterpreted by jihadists. “We need to decouple religion from ideology.” The government cannot do this, he asserted, but Muslims can. From an online perspective, he explained, “This is not about clamping down. It’s about opening up.” His strategy relies on getting more voices involved, not fewer, in order to deconstruct the terrorist narrative because, as he discovered by asking a couple of questions, the audience in the room was more aware of counterterrorism issues than many counterterrorists he knew.
This approach is already appearing to produce results. Bin Laden’s spiritual advisors are denouncing him, fatwahs have been issued in opposition to terrorism, and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s spiritual advisor Sayid Imam al-Sharif, who wrote two of the primary texts on jihad for al qaeda, recently wrote a book renouncing terrorism. That this is not common knowledge speaks to Cillufo’s point about the need for more open dialogue on the Web.
SXSW.com should have a podcast of this amazing session up soon, but for now, Unmassed has a good liveblog of the event.
The much less frightening “Video Production for the Web & Mobile Devices” touched on communication between the storyteller and the audience in the form of taking plot suggestions from viewers (which apparently used to happen with some soap operas back in the day) and legal mashups of pre-existing video (see Filmocracy). The surprising outcome of all this was that, when asked, virtually no one in the audience expressed any desire to interact with video. They want it where they want it, when they want it on whichever device they want it, but the “it” should stay as it is. How representative this is of the audience at large is anyone’s guess, but to judge by the limited success of some of these early forays into interactive video, it’s probably not far off.
This session also produced one of my favorite quotes from SXSW 2008. Referring to the proliferation of crappy video on a democratic Web, David Todd, V.P. of content and strategic partnerships for the online video mash-up site Eyespot.com, said, “I definitely agree that 99 percent of almost any creative enterprise is not worth watching, but I think almost all of it is worth doing.”
A full podcast of that session here (when it suddenly goes silent, that’s me in the back asking about fanfic).
Finally, one cool revelation from the “Behind the Scenes at the Onion News Network” panel. Since real actors were too lively for the dead-eyed wooden quality they were going for in their video anchors, who had to imitate the dead-eyed wooden quality of real cable news network anchors, they found actual news anchors. One of them was so good, they got snatched up by CNN.
He also warns of the backlash when you cross an online community. When Yahoo! decided to create a page dedicated to the Wii, they added a stream of photos tagged “Wii” by Flickr members. They didn’t ask permission, but legally they didn’t need to (Yahoo! owns Flickr). A group of miffed Flickr members started tagging photos of the words “Yahoo! Sucks” with “Wii”, turning Yahoo!’s Wii page into a photo stream of Yahoo! hate. Had Yahoo! simply asked users to add their photos to a “Wii Flickr Group” and posted the results, they would have probably received a ton of submissions with no hard feelings. Sometimes, says Powazek, you have to go beyond what is legal. (You can see the full slideshow from Powazek’s panel here.)
Online communities can turn sour in far more horrifying ways, however. The ”Online Extremism - And the Muslims Who Fight It” panel was one of the most educational and frightening I’ve ever attended, though it came with more than a dash of hope. It began with a presentation by iDefense Middle East Analyst Mohamad Hluchan that bore the scariest PowerPoint title of all time - “Jihadism and Cybercrime: Emerging Synergies.” Terrorist organizations have been working with criminal syndicates for years (although am I the only one that didn’t know that Hezbollah worked with cocaine cartels in Columbia?), so it seems inevitable that they’d team with black hat hackers eventually. Turns out they’ve already dipped their toes in credit card fraud, though their software is rudimentary (for now). Hluchan warns that the longer authorities wait to try to infiltrate the cybercommunities linking terrorists with hackers, the harder it will get.
Terrorists are also comprimising the efforts of Muslims trying to counter jihadist rhetoric. Mohammed Suleiman Khan founded Hadithuna.com in 2006 with the intention of promoting a positive image of the Islamic community via a network of blogs. All was going well until a series of increasingly radical and violent blogs began to appear in their network. While trying to balance issues of free speech, Khan deleted the blogs and worked with the FBI to try to root out the radicals.
Frank Cillufo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, introduced some of the most refreshing thought on the topic, stating, “We can’t simply kill and capture our way to victory.” He said that we need credible Muslim voices (Islamic scholars, for example) who can show how tenets are being misinterpreted by jihadists. “We need to decouple religion from ideology.” The government cannot do this, he asserted, but Muslims can. From an online perspective, he explained, “This is not about clamping down. It’s about opening up.” His strategy relies on getting more voices involved, not fewer, in order to deconstruct the terrorist narrative because, as he discovered by asking a couple of questions, the audience in the room was more aware of counterterrorism issues than many counterterrorists he knew.
This approach is already appearing to produce results. Bin Laden’s spiritual advisors are denouncing him, fatwahs have been issued in opposition to terrorism, and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s spiritual advisor Sayid Imam al-Sharif, who wrote two of the primary texts on jihad for al qaeda, recently wrote a book renouncing terrorism. That this is not common knowledge speaks to Cillufo’s point about the need for more open dialogue on the Web.
SXSW.com should have a podcast of this amazing session up soon, but for now, Unmassed has a good liveblog of the event.
The much less frightening “Video Production for the Web & Mobile Devices” touched on communication between the storyteller and the audience in the form of taking plot suggestions from viewers (which apparently used to happen with some soap operas back in the day) and legal mashups of pre-existing video (see Filmocracy). The surprising outcome of all this was that, when asked, virtually no one in the audience expressed any desire to interact with video. They want it where they want it, when they want it on whichever device they want it, but the “it” should stay as it is. How representative this is of the audience at large is anyone’s guess, but to judge by the limited success of some of these early forays into interactive video, it’s probably not far off.
This session also produced one of my favorite quotes from SXSW 2008. Referring to the proliferation of crappy video on a democratic Web, David Todd, V.P. of content and strategic partnerships for the online video mash-up site Eyespot.com, said, “I definitely agree that 99 percent of almost any creative enterprise is not worth watching, but I think almost all of it is worth doing.”
A full podcast of that session here (when it suddenly goes silent, that’s me in the back asking about fanfic).
Finally, one cool revelation from the “Behind the Scenes at the Onion News Network” panel. Since real actors were too lively for the dead-eyed wooden quality they were going for in their video anchors, who had to imitate the dead-eyed wooden quality of real cable news network anchors, they found actual news anchors. One of them was so good, they got snatched up by CNN.
Topics:
 |
