You had to be there. Ephemeral content takes the stage. (photo by Lisa Park)

The sixth issue of Pop-up Magazine hit the stage at the SF Davies Symphony Hall the week before last, playing to an audience numbering more than 2,700. I was lucky enough to grab a golden ticket for this sold-out, live event that goes unrecorded, showcasing writers, documentary filmmakers, photographers and radio producers — from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to This American Life and Pixar — in a magazine content format. As soon as tickets went on sale, the online box office promptly crashed due to the avalanche of traffic hitting the site. After dozens of failed attempts to gain access, I finally got through and had my ticket in hand. Success!

Three years ago, Pop-up Magazine got started in the humble 364-seat Brava Theater. It’s since morphed into a grand affair: Folks like me are more than happy to queue up virtually to fork over 20 dollars and change for a chance to be a part of an exclusive club, one that runs for one night only.  The founders have clearly struck a chord with those in attendance seeking to hear, see and experience never-before-aired-or-published stories that are here today, gone tomorrow. Attend one of these literary events (I’ve been to two), and you’ll feel a strong sense of community plus a whole lot of buzz, excitement and goodwill — as if we’re the lucky few going on a great ride.

And a great ride it is, providing plenty of chills and thrills as well as a few lasting memories. Pop-up Magazine covers topics ranging from food and foreign affairs to sports, science and work life. Short pieces kick off the event, with longer features taking up the rear. Most of the stories are good. Some are incredibly well-crafted. Meanwhile, the majority of the contributors — from Pixar director Lee Unkrich to NPR journalist Annie Murphy in this latest issue — skillfully combine oral  storytelling with video and audio to enhance their already robust and engaging narratives.

It’s clear that the key to Pop-up Magazine’s success is a clever repackaging of an age-old art, oral storytelling. The event’s creators/editors have managed to refresh the theme or concept of oral storytelling by renaming it with what’s hot now: a pop-up. And on top of that, they’ve made sure to curate the heck out of the content — with fresh and compelling narratives that speak to their audience.

These winning formulas certainly resonate with content strategists. After all, part of our mission is to find ways to refresh and update legacy content, concepts and themes to make them relevant and engaging for our audience. It’s vital that we understand who our target audience is in order to give them what they want. And if we can give them what they want — in the form of curated content — our business and the bottom line will benefit.

The proof is in the Pop-up Magazine pudding.

What sets a social network apart from its peers? (photo by josemanuelerre)

Though it’s almost hard to imagine now, there was a time not too long ago when the most convenient way to make travel arrangements was to call a travel agent who could look up airfares and hotels in a specialized computer system and find you the best times, locations & prices. My travel agent was a friend who mostly worked with business travelers, but was willing to use her expertise (and access) to help her buddies plan trips. Once she was helping me book a last minute flight to Los Angeles and she mentioned that a mutual friend of ours was going to be there at the same time.  This was a pleasant surprise and I was able to meet up with him in LA. Shortly after that everyone switched to making travel arrangements online. It was more convenient and possibly cheaper, but we lost that serendipity factor.

That is, until services like TripIt came along. Here’s how Tripit works: you forward your confirmation emails to the site from any number of airlines, hotels, train services, or general travel sites and it creates a trip itinerary with all the times, addresses, contact info and confirmation numbers in one place. You can also link to people in your network, and it will alert you if someone you know will be in the area during your trip. When I book a flight to Austin for SXSW, from any travel or airline site, I send it to Tripit. Along with all the data it stores about my trip, it lets me know which of my contacts will also be there during the conference.

I have to admit that when I was first invited to TripIt, I didn’t see a reason to join. I was already on Dopplr, a friendly, elegant and delightful site that also let me enter travel plans and connect to my friends and colleagues. It seemed to facilitate the same kind of serendipitous discovery, but it was a very manual process to keep it updated. I couldn’t imagine entering that information on two different sites. What won me over to TripIt was the email capability. With minimal effort on my part, nearly all the information I would need for my trips was automatically entered into the site and gathered in one place. I wouldn’t even have to print everything out before going on a trip. That made it useful in a way that went well beyond the social aspect. As you can imagine, I let my Dopplr account grow dormant.

But I was kind of sad about it. Dopplr’s aesthetic and social features are much more elegant than TripIt’s. It has more interesting travel metrics, visualizations, and other features which provide information and inspiration for the adventurous traveler. TripIt’s visual design seemed awkward by comparison, and was crowded with upsell opportunities. Dopplr should have been the frontrunner.

Subsequently, Dopplr has added the ability to submit trips by email, SMS and Twitter. But on top of being late to add this fundamental usability feature, it still lacks many of the other basic features that are critical to business travelers. As a result it even lost ground in the one area where it initially had a competitive advantage – the social realm. My network connections have all gone elsewhere.

While we’ve come to expect our online tools to include social connections, there has to be something more to a digital experience in order to make it truly engaging. The service and content it offers has to provide an inherent benefit to the audience because we all already have dozens of ways to connect to people. No one’s going to take the time to join a social network of “people who buy groceries” unless the service addresses other unmet needs. The value of these two sites as social discovery tools depends on deep connections to your social network, but also on the quality and thoroughness of everyone’s travel data. What makes people diligent about keeping their data complete? The personal benefits and ease of use. TripIt won the majority of the audience not by being the first to market, not by being the most delightful, but by having the more self-centered product.

A quadcopter hovering. (photo by esciphul)

“It’s interesting that drone journalism has captured our imagination, when it’s cell phone journalism that’s changed the game,” noted Chris Anderson, Wired magazine’s Editor in Chief, at a recent Hacks/Hackers event on the subject of “Drone Journalism: Reporting from Above.” He’s right. Nothing like a tricked-out, high-tech, whirring object that can fly — and has a multi-thousand-dollar price tag — to thrill an audience. Especially when the audience comprises software developers, journalists, content strategists and a few hardware folks, all eager for the possibility of obtaining shiny, new content — the breaking story. (Just in case you’re wondering, drones are unmanned aircraft either controlled autonomously by computers in the drone or by the remote control of a pilot on the ground.)

Of course, any journalist — or Joe Schmoe for that matter — armed with a smartphone and Internet access can and successfully has delivered valuable and vital news almost as soon as it’s happening. Witness reporting from the Arab Spring and other recent events hit social networks such as Facebook and Twitter ahead of leading news outlets. The overall impact of this ever-increasing connectivity has been positive, in that it’s given voice to and shed light on parts of the world that were once isolated and disenfranchised.

But back to drones. Will they play a part in new media’s future? I’m thinking the odds are slim to none. Drones are not only costly — with pricetags running up to tens of thousands of dollars — but they can also pose a serious danger to the public if you don’t know how to build and/or operate them. Anderson, who’s also the founder of 3D Robotics, an open source robotics company, and website DIY Drones, warned, “Before you get too excited [about drones’ potential, be aware that] the blades can whack off your fingers. Drones are flying lawnmowers.”

Matt Waite, a former journalist and currently a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, agrees. And yet, like Anderson, he has embraced a possible future with drones used for civilian purposes, having launched a drone journalism lab at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications last year. Waite says he had his a-ha moment when he witnessed a demo at a digital mapping conference in San Diego. The demo blew him away, and opened his eyes to drones being “perfect for any biblical event.” He believes they have real public-purpose applications, particularly in the area of post-disaster coverage: “Imagine what could have been if we had drones following Hurricane Katrina. We could have changed public perception.”

He has a point. Drones, which are unmanned, can fly into the aftermath of a natural disaster without risking the pilot’s life. According to Tyler Brown, who builds drones at Occucopter, you can fly them extremely close to the terrain, getting footage that you couldn’t get via any other aircraft.

The other cool thing is that anyone and their mother can make drones. “Something that was once military and industrial is now within [our] reach,” said Anderson. “We’re having a homebrew computing club moment.”

But here’s the thing: Never mind that drones have a limited battery life of around 10 minutes—meaning you’d have to have a bunch of them to effectively cover a lot of ground. The real problem is that you can’t fly them for commercial purposes—at all. So unless you’re a hobbyist flying them for fun below 400 feet, within visual line of sight and away from populated areas, you’re out of luck when it comes to getting a license to put a drone in the air.

Besides the fact that they’re flat-out illegal for commercial use, Jennifer Lynch, attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, believes that sooner or later the issue of what’s considered in or out of bounds in terms of surveillance via drones will come to a court of law. And based on recent judgments favoring the privacy of individuals (California v. Ciraolo, Kyllo v US, etc.), drones will likely lose the battle.

Is this then a lost opportunity for content creators and consumers of that content? Anderson doesn’t think so. He says attaching a video camera to a balloon and lofting it in the air to cover demonstrations will do just as well. I wholeheartedly agree: Folks will always find other ways to get and create content, if not with drones then with smartphones or some other handy device or contraption.

And so it seems that the rise of civilian drones — with all of their geek appeal — and the lively discourse around them have been mostly about sparking the imagination of a wide cross-section of hacks and hackers. Never mind that drones and new media will probably never mix. It’s kind of like playing the lotto—even if it never comes to fruition, it’s fun to think about the possibilities. Isn’t it?

We tried this ice cream for you. We think you’ll like it. (photo by cybertoad)

Not so long ago, the news arrived through set media channels and at set times. You could read the morning paper at the kitchen table, listen to the morning news on the car radio during your commute, and then watch the evening report on TV before or after dinner. And that was pretty much it.

Whether you cared most about technology, were hungry for more fashion updates, or needed to cram about Lebanon for a school paper, you got the same news everyone else got—and at the same time, too.

The last decade brought technology advances that made it possible to watch and listen to previously aired news broadcasts at any time on a connected device. DVRs, podcasts, and even YouTube lent a new freedom to the consumption of news by making the news available when and where users had time to watch or listen.

The Stones Were Wrong

As we enter the era of personalization—the ability to actively select and refine our personal preferences for the news we choose to expose ourselves to—those once-exciting technology advances are starting to seem quaint. Now, when it comes to the news, you can always get what you want—whenever you want it. So what’s wrong with that?

In a post on Own Local, blogger Jeremy Mims cautions that  “… news personalization inherently creates an echo chamber for bad ideas, reinforces preconceived beliefs, and may actually lead people to believe they’re making informed decisions because ‘everyone’ agrees. It will also tend to radicalize and become even more limited over time, because it naturally funnels down to the news you really like.”

In a direct response to Mims, blogger Evan Willms counters that personalization makes it “…possible to explore the big world of diverse opinions in a gradual way by using the topics you’re already interested in to branch out and provide a variety of viewpoints and subject matter.”

Both use the metaphor of publisher-as-nutritionist to drive home their positions. Mims likens news personalization to allowing children to eat only ice cream, while Willms believes publishers can act as “smart nutritionists” who can “…expand your love of chocolate ice cream with other types of chocolate product.” Culinary metaphors aside, both have a point. So what’s a content strategist to do?

Networked News

In addition to the issue of limitation vs. exploration, we believe there’s another consideration when it comes to the personalization of news: that of tool vs. network.

A tool performs a function for users (think NPR’s Infinite Player). You engage with the interface, enter or select some criteria, and get something back. Maybe you refine your results over a certain period of time, or maybe you’re done in one click. Either way, it’s just you and the tool.

On the other hand, a network offers the functionality of a tool but also connects you to other users, and, by extension, to their ideas and preferences. The thought is that a network should offer a “stickier” experience—if your friends are on there, inspiring you and stretching your interests, you’ll be more likely to stay. Additionally a network can also act as a sort of community police for our better selves. Who wants to broadcast that they’ve just read another article about the Kardashians?

But what if your friends aren’t on your news network? Smart editorial strategy can help. The Washington Times’ news personalization service Trove doesn’t make connecting with friends, coworkers and influencers as seamless as it should be. But through “this or that” functionality, editors’ picks, and a smart search box, it does do a nice job of suggesting and encouraging content I wouldn’t otherwise have thought to request.

Personalization can be used to either reinforce our existing beliefs and interests, or it can expand our exposure through influence and encouragement. In other words, it can be reactive (and allow us to limit ourselves) or predictive (and inspire and encourage us to expand our horizons).

Extra, Extra!

It all comes down to strategy. Why limit news personalization to what I’m looking for right now? In a post on disambiguation for Contents Magazine, Rachel Lovinger, Content Strategy Director at Razorfish NY, states “Traditionally, one obstacle has been that sites like the New York Times didn’t have access to as much data…as sites like Amazon or Netflix. But that’s changing with deeper social integration. Now, if you sign in with Facebook, the Times will have a better idea what articles you like, share, and comment on. So, why aren’t they making use of that data to provide their readers a more engaging experience?”

Indeed. Why not use my current interests to preview and suggest what I consider “stretch” content—essentially what I asked for and more (e.g., my love of Spanish shoes may suggest an interest in Spanish food, and if I click on that content, I may also be intrigued by Spanish economics on a subsequent visit).

Of the options for news personalization I’ve tried so far, Zite is probably the frontrunner. I logged in with Twitter, and the iPad/iPhone app pre-filled my feed with Social Media, Technology, Content Strategy, Strategy, and Marketing. Pretty accurate for taking just a couple of seconds with a single input. Zite also offers “Featured” content types from which you can add more topics.

It’s a great tool, but as a network it ultimately falls short, only including your Twitter friends’ news posts and also which articles are getting the most buzz in its algorithm for external influence. Additionally, Zite gets “smarter” as you use it, learning from your behavior, so it’s unclear whether this perpetuates the echo chamber effect, or if it’s somehow more nuanced and helps you explore more interesting content.

When a news personalization service—tool or network—develops an algorithm, who are they catering to, our current selves or our ideal selves? I’m hoping they’ll start to do both. A primary goal of a news organization is to make us care about things we didn’t think we cared about.

As content strategists, we can help. By understanding the limits and possibilities of a tool vs. a network, we can better guide our clients and co-workers to choose the more effective option for their goals. Our editorial expertise can help inform a smart editorial strategy that is built on something bigger than showing “what’s hot right now”. And of course, our experience with metadata and taxonomy can help teams design sophisticated algorithms that do more than just serve up what the user wants right now. In other words, with the influence of content strategy, news personalization services can start to show us not just who we are, but also who we want to be.

The moment I’m referring to – the one that Margot Bloomstein hits on time and again in her new book Content Strategy at Work  –  is that even if someone up top in an organization is willing to overlook content as a strategic asset, everyone on a digital project is now on the hook for raising their hand and saying, “Hey! What about the content?”  Be they designer, project manager, information architect, account manager, SEO specialist or CMS developer, the success of so many digital projects hinges on a thoughtful and multifaceted approach to working with content. And each one of the professionals mentioned above will and probably should be collaborating with a content strategist, or at least someone who is wearing that sexy hat.

Bloomstein’s work is filled with well-drawn content-oriented case studies and should be considered required reading for anyone whose work overlaps with content, and any content strategist who is looking for meaty in-the-trenches examples of how content strategy is grappled with and applied to projects big and small. The diverse set of examples, which she pulls from practitioners at several consultancies and digital agencies*, highlights just how deeply content is embedded in digital work today. From communications strategy, to qualitative and quantitative content analysis, to editorial design, content creation, management, governance, SEO and social media strategy and more, content strategy, is shot through digital project work.

In the Moo case study, we learn how a message architecture can help focus content and drive design decisions. In the Johns Hopkins Medicine case, we are pulled into the challenges of scoping for content strategy, a conundrum many of us face. In the Bows N’ Ties case, we witness the tension between content strategy and search engine optimization. The case studies are informative and fun, skillfully demonstrating the intersection and interdependencies of content strategy with other disciplines. Bloomstein peppers the book with solid and often difficult questions that we should all have written on our whiteboards, perhaps the most urgent one being, “What does the content need to accomplish?”

Bloomstein is at her most thought provoking when she shines the light on complex projects that present a host of strategic, editorial, design, organizational and technical challenges.  For example, the case of the television network that wanted to comingle its programming content with encyclopedic information, a goal that required the active use of nearly every wrench and screwdriver in the CS toolkit. It demonstrates the highly strategic and supremely tactical nature of content strategy in a single project, including a healthy portion of organizational challenge, a common byproduct of smart content choices.

In Content Strategy at Work, Bloomstein frames the cases with meaningful context, crisp approaches to problem solving (I will definitely be cribbing from her message architecture client exercise, which she generously shares) and genuine curiosity. In tackling so much, however, she misses out on a couple of hot spots.  I wish, for example, that Bloomstein had done more exploration of how user research can drive and influence content strategy and how companies are measuring the success of content efforts. Both areas are top of mind for many of us in the field and I hope Bloomstein tackles them in her next work.

Those who practice content strategy and as Bloomstein likes to say, FOCS (Friends of Content Strategy), should revel in this moment, linger over the accomplishments and take pride in the acknowledgement of our discipline.

So now what? Our next challenge, should we choose to accept it, says Bloomstein:

“The goal is to engage in a project or process that will result in a better user experience, one that transcends channel, campaign, or budget cycle. The goal is to establish a sustainable publishing model for your clients and their customers. The goal is to facilitate better, more useful communication, and that cannot happen without content strategy.”

Now get to work.

*Full disclosure: While my Razorfish colleagues Rachel Lovinger and Erin Scime are quoted in this book, I do not have a direct connection with Content Strategy at Work nor did I have any knowledge of its contents prior to publication.

Ilona Hiila (left) and Ida Hakola, of Vapa Media (photos by Jason Scott)

The Breakdown: Welcome to the first in a series of posts on “Content Strategists of the World.” Most of the Content Strategists we know are operating in North America or the UK. Since my personal resolution for this year was “to think about content strategy more globally,” I thought it would be interesting to share profiles of people who are practicing CS in the wider world.

In this first installment, we profiled Ilona Hiila & Ida Hakola, founders of Vapa Media in Helsinki, Finland. I met them in February when they hosted Sisältöstrategiaseminaari 2012 (in English: “Content Strategy Seminar 2012”). It was the first ever Content Strategy event in Finland, and it was co-organized by the University of Finland.

Their background

Ida and Ilona met in University, where they studied communications and journalism. Since then, they have each held various jobs in media, including in the newsroom of a newspaper, custom publishing, and broadcast media. But they also both worked in PR and communications. This is unusual for Finland, where most writerly people choose to go either into media or marketing, but not both. They both chose not to choose.

The idea behind Vapa Media

They also share a fondness for travel. While traveling in South America they started thinking about starting a company together. They shared the perspective that PR messages weren’t working, and talked about how things could be done differently. Since they also had a background in journalism they thought, “What if we bring the laws of journalism to marketing content?”

About two years ago the timing worked out and they started Vapa Media. In Finnish “vapa” means “rod” – as in fishing rod. Their word for the Web is the same word they use for “fishing net” (and of course, we’ve been known to refer to it as “The Net” in English too). That brings to mind a sort of passive way of capturing an audience’s attention, while the rod – a much more directed and active way of catching fish – is a better representation of their philosophy.

How they learned of Content Strategy

They had already publicly presented Vapa Media, they were looking for an office space and they were doing some industry research. They found Kristina Halvorson’s book (Content Strategy for the Web), my own Nimble report, and other publications. They started following Content Strategy discussions online and they were relieved to discover that other people were tackling the same issues.

The concept of Content Strategy was unknown in Finland, where it’s called “Sisältöstrategia” (a challenging word even for Finnish people!) No one was using the word until Ida and Ilona started writing about it and organizing local events, and no other agencies were working with content this way. The experience that galvanized it all for them was attending Content Strategy Forum in London in September 2011, and confirming that this is something that people actually do. “Are we crazy that we think this way?” Ilona had been asking herself. “In London we realized ‘No, we’re not. This is important.’”

Their work

Vapa Media produces content, but they also do web strategy. Ida & Ilona help companies figure out what they should be saying and employ journalists to create high quality content that aligns with their client’s business goals. They also do design and wireframing to support their concepts.  Vapa operates somewhere between digital agencies and communications/PR agencies. They also work with a wide range of clients, mainly B2C and some NGOE. They’d like to work with more B2B clients, but in Finland many of those companies aren’t yet convinced that they need a strong, content-driven online presence.

Practicing Content Strategy in Finland

What makes practicing CS in Finland particularly interesting or challenging?

• Language. Without hesitation, Ida and Ilona both mentioned that you can’t outsource content production in Finland because so few people outside the country speak Finnish.
• Technology. The country is very tech focused, with a strong startup culture. This can be both a challenge and an opportunity. Sometimes tech drives decisions more than content considerations and clients fall into the trap of thinking the technology will solve everything. They’re willing to invest more on trying the latest thing than on developing a strategy.
• Experimental. The positive side of this strong interest in technology is that Finnish people and companies are open to trying new things.

Where we’ll hear from them next

On February 8^th, the day of the seminar, they published a trend report called Hiljainen Signaali (“Silent Signal”) that “discusses the digital revolution and the multiplicity of consequences it has for the lives of companies, consumers and media.” It’s available in Finnish and English.

This coming fall they’ll be publishing the first Finnish book on digital content and Content Strategy. The title is still to be determined, but it will be published by Sanoma Pro, a division major European media company, Sonoma Group. Look for it in late August/early September.

The founders of Vapa Media are continuously trying to set an example for thought leadership and entrepreneurship. So you can also read more from them on a daily basis on their website (some of the posts are even in English), Facebook, or Twitter (@VapaMedia, @idahakola, and @IlonaHiila).

What they’d like you to know about Content Strategy

• Ida: “It’s, in the end, quite concrete. Although the word might sound like consultant bullshit at first, pardon my French, it’s actually a very useful tool for gaining insight into a company’s web content and the content the audience creates. I was very pleased to know that there are actually processes, really material things that are considered. It’s like a guidebook to yourself of yourself.”
• Ilona [To all communicators, marketers, or brand managers]: “Content Strategy will make your life easier.”
• Ida [For executives who have struggled with the pain of publishing online]: “This actually supports your ideas and your business strategy.”
• Ilona: “Content  strategy is something that takes their hand and says ‘It’s ok. You’re going to make it.’”

What they’d like you to know about Finland

• Ilona: “We are the center of Scandinavia. We have two languages – Finnish and Swedish. So if companies want to invade Scandinavia, Finland could be a good base for that.”
• Ida: “Finland has a lot of technological potential. Now that we’ve started to spread the word about content meeting technology, I think we can create something big.”
• Ilona: “Third thing: There are no polar bears in Helsinki.”
• Ida: “Nor penguins.”
• Ida: “Good saunas.”

In case you didn’t make it to SXSW in person (image via shelbysdrummond)

The Breakdown: It’s been a week, and we’ve just about recovered from SXSW. This year we asked Amy Todenhagen to share her thoughts on her first foray to Austin for the biggest interactive extravaganza of the year. Amy is an Associate User Experience Director at Razorfish in NYC. She and her colleague, Neal Gorevic, led a discussion on the role of digital technology in urban mobility at SXSW 2012 (“Connected Cars, Connected Cities and Urban Driving”).

Rachel told me that I would be overwhelmed. Still, I was stunned by the number of people, the amount of information, and the extent of activity that surrounds the SXSW conference. As a first-time conference attendee and a first-time presenter I threw myself into the experience. Here is a summary of themes from the presentations, panels and conversations that I attended.

Combine the expected and the new

With multiple channels and multiple voices, it is difficult for brands to maintain a consistent message and provide value. Several presentations addressed this issue and offered solutions. My favorite was one titled “Brands as Patterns.” The panelists in this session put forth the idea that a consistent brand today can only be achieved by creating patterns. These patterns should be:

• distinctive (ownable, signature expressions)
• relevant (personal, meaningful)
• active (delivering, doing, moving)

The pattern language should also always follow a consistent story. While the channel and goal of the communication may change, a tightly defined story framework, and an ownable pattern language, can convey a focused brand.

The power of patterns as a branding element was best demonstrated by Walter Werzowa (@walterwerzowa), a composer on the panel. He illustrated, by breaking down Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, that repeating the same series of notes would be boring but varying the basic motive resulted in emotion and engagement. With brands, as in music, one needs the right combination of what is expected and what is new to convey an engaging message over time. See the slides from this panel for more information.

David Hogue (“The Complexity Curve: How to Design for Simplicity”) and David Womack (“Does Your Product Have a Plot?”) stressed the importance of combining the expected and the new in interface design. Simplicity (the expected) drives ease of use, while emotion (the new) creates meaningful complication that keeps the user engaged by providing a more interesting and valuable experience.

How does emotion translate into digital product design? David Womack’s recommendation was to give digital products a plot and to tell a story with the experience. He used the example of an e-commerce site to illustrate his point. An ecommerce site starts with an introduction of the characters (shopping online), progresses to conflict (they don’t have what I want), builds to a climax (let’s try this out) and ends with resolution (your online purchase shows up in actual physical space). Check out the Unified sketch notes from Womack’s talk.

As a UI designer it isn’t totally clear to me how this story pattern can translate into many of the experiences that I am trying to build. What did resonate with me is that conflict and climax in interaction design can increase user engagement. As with music and brands, interface design needs the right combination of simplicity and meaningful complexity (what is expected and what is new) to maximize engagement.

Design for data

The importance and difficulty of data was also a reoccurring theme this year. Panelists in “Data is the New Oil: Wealth and Wars on the Web” encouraged businesses and entrepreneurs to disrupt the status quo through innovative use of data. However several barriers were discussed:

• Data ownership: ambiguous rights to data
• Privacy: the difficultly of making data truly anonymous
• Unintended consequences: politicizing, and misinterpretation of data
• Data exhaust: filtering out irrelevant data
• Data acquisition: getting ahold of data from institutions that are reluctant to release it

As a user experience practitioner I walked away from these discussions with two things to think about:

1. Data is an extremely valuable commodity. How can we incentivize users to provide the data necessary to build our products? What can we give back to the user that adds value, but also respects their privacy?
2. Gathering data is difficult. When designing products, we should optimize the points of data capture to insure that the information gathered exactly meets the product goals. Our interfaces should be capturing the right data, not all data.

Be a good citizen

No theme was more interesting to me personally than the role of citizens in developing digital solutions for the public good. In panels like “Austin 2032: Shaping Future Cities with Mobile Data,” representatives of government at many levels came to the conference to inspire the SXSW community to solve problems in the public sector. Several roles for citizens were outlined:

• Donating data
• Collecting data on behalf of the city
• Championing projects and persuading government agencies to release data
• Taking jobs in public service
• Donating time or money to develop digital solutions

In one of the SXSW keynotes, Jennifer Pahlka (@pahlkadot), founder of Code for America, rallied the community to get excited by government. “You guys have this exuberance, this willingness to experiment… [and] if you see something that’s broken, you want to fix it.”

She highlighted that as a nation, we spend $140 billion a year on government technology, many times more than what Apple pays out to developers of apps per year (about $2 billion). Pahlka acknowledged that the tech community isn’t interested in working with the government because of the difficulties and bureaucracy that comes with it. She stressed, however, that government is changing and highlighted cities and communities that are bringing more innovation to government and making more public data available through APIs.

Startups can focus more on civic software. Citizen programmers can contribute to building a better government by writing code. Pahlka reminded the audience that government is what we do together. We are not just consumers of government, we are citizens. You can hear the full recording of her keynote speech, “Coding the Next Chapter of American History,” online. Also keep an eye out for recordings from an impassioned conversation between Sean Parker (of Napster fame) and Al Gore.

That wraps up what I learned at the actual SXSW conference this year.  As you may have heard already, or know yourself from attending, the official presentations and panels are only part of the South by experience.   I was blown away by people, conversation and energy at the conference and reminded, once again, of how exciting it is to work in the field of digital technology today.

The Breakdown: In our final SXSW Q&A of 2012, we come full circle. We started the series with a Q&A on eBooks. Here we talk with William Burdette of the Digital Writing and Research Lab at UT-Austin, about his panel The Present of Print: Paper’s Persistence (with some extra commentary from panelist Fritz Blaw, owner of motorblade). We discuss the ways paper and print are still relevant in the digital age. This concludes this year’s SXSW series. Thanks for reading, and enjoy SXSW!

S/G: Can you introduce each of the panelists? What do you anticipate they’ll bring to the conversation?

Will: Nathan Kreuter is an assistant professor at Western Carolina University.

Travis Hartman is a photographer and photo editor who lives in Brooklyn. He still shoots film and makes prints. He also set up a photobooth called Please Shoot Yourself.

Frazier Fritz Blaw is an entrepreneur who started a business called motorblade in 1989 that manages a network of paper bulletin boards.

I’m a grad student and I work in the Digital Writing and Research Lab at UT-Austin. I like looking at how writing technologies overlap.

All of us will be talking about various ways that paper and print still thrive, and have value, despite digital technologies.

S/G: What is it that makes print special? Beyond, nostalgia, what makes us value printed works of art?

Fritz: A static paper image still holds appeal in the sensory-overload environment we have now. The poster imparts a flavor of the performance/event that is more grassroots in feel. And the cost of digital media is more than many artists can afford, so paper is still an inexpensive alternative.

Will: I’m not sure about art, but I think paper has value in just being, like everything else, part of our ecosystem. It starts out as part of our “natural” ecosystem as plants and trees, and it continues as part of our cultural ecosystem as posters, books, prints, and other artifacts. (I used quotes around natural to suggest that there isn’t really a clear line between natural and cultural.) Anyway, many of those artifacts continue to live and circulate online. Print, as a technology, is still pretty remarkable. As a technology, print allows for copies, but it is not quite as easy to create and circulate those copies. That makes things printed more expensive than things digital. It costs trees to make them and gas to move them around. (There is certainly a material costs to working in digital media, but it seems less heavy.)

With increased cost we’ll see printed things become both precious and obsolete. The things we decide to keep making and buying (like all the prints at the Flatstock poster show) will become precious because people are still willing to shell out for the materials and the finished product. Then there are things, like a printed confirmation of an order or a printed phone book, that I think we will just stop shelling out for because they can be better done online and they just aren’t that special.

S/G: You mention projects that “capitalize on the permeability of the boundaries separating manual, print, and digital realms.” What are some examples of works where digital and print are seamlessly integrated?

Will: For my part, I’m talking about cookbooks. There are a few ways that print and digital are integrated when it comes to cookbooks. For one thing, there are scores of people on Kickstarter trying to get funding online so they can make a printed cookbook. The version of this phenomenon writ large is Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine. [Editor's note: for more on Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine, see our Q&A with Peter Meyers.] He didn’t go through Kickstarter, but he made a ton of money in the digital realm, then he decided to push the print envelope as far as he could by making a $450 set of cookbooks.

As illustrated by the images, the book is more a revolution in photography, printing, and publishing than it is food. If you watch Myhrvold on Jimmy Kimmel, the Rube Goldberg method he uses to cook a burger doesn’t seem to satisfy Kimmel, but the argument he makes for scientifically engineering a burger, and then documenting that process, is pretty interesting, if not compelling. But it is important to realize that there is not really that radical a break between digital and print culture when it comes to cookbooks. For example, Joy of Cooking, which might seem like a stable book, is actually a pretty fluid piece of media. Only 18 recipes from the original book are in the most recent edition. And portion sizes have grown alongside the so-called obesity epidemic. (If, for some reason, you want to hear more on this, you can listen to my most recent podcast.)

S/G: Photography seems to be caught right in the middle of the digital/physical question. So how about a little thought experiment: how would our relationship to photography have developed differently if photography and photographs had been exclusively digital, all along? What would we have gained or lost?

Will: I will tell an anecdote. Travis and I have known each other since high school. After 9-11, he came to visit me and my wife at our home in Fort Worth, TX. He snapped a picture of us hugging out front of our house and there is an American flag framing the right side of our bodies. That flag was put there by our roommate, and we objected to it, because we were not in the flag-waving camp after 9-11. But we also weren’t about to take it down, because we believed he had the right to express himself. So we lived with the flag. The pic Travis took captured that moment so well. He made a print for us and it has been on our mantel ever since. So we continue to live with that flag, long after we lost contact with that roommate and long after the 9-11 flag-waving died down. I’m not sure we would have lived with a digital version of that moment for so long.

On the flip side, my stupid cat jumped up there the other day and knocked the picture down, shattering the glass, breaking the handmade frame, and scratching the print. I’m not sure that could have happened with a digital photograph, although he could have walked on the keyboard and accidentally deleted a digital image by stepping on the command and delete keys while the image was selected. That seems way less likely, though. So there are gains and losses.

S/G: What are you looking forward to at SXSW?

Will: I hope I meet Austin Kleon this year. What he’s doing with newspaper blackout poems and the combinatory nature of creativity dovetails nicely with what we are talking about. Frank Warren’s PostSecret is another project that fuses manuscript (or hand-written) culture, print culture, and digital culture.

It’s great to see [Jeffrey] Zeldman become the first one in SXSW Interactive Hall of fame.

Personally, I’m interested in seeing what Jane McGonigal’s SuperBetter can do. My wife got hit by a car last year; McGonigal developed SuperBetter to help her recover from her own injury. Maybe bringing some game concepts into physical therapy can help with the healing process.

I’m super-excited about some of the comedy that’s happening. I hope to see Marc Maron and Mike Birbiglia.

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2012 Q&A Series.

Image credits, from left to right:
Austin – by Brian Warren
Badge – by adactio
Microphone – by hiddedevries
Xtranormal – by nan palmero
Texas waffle – by rachel lovinger

The Breakdown: in this Q&A we talk with Justin Ellis, assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. Justin is the moderator of the panel It’s Not News, It’s Business. Panelists from GOOD Magazine, IDEO, and The Washington Post will discuss money, news, and the future of journalism.

S/G: Can you give us an idea of how the vocation of journalism has changed in the past 15 years?

Justin: The biggest changes in journalism have been in how stories are distributed and paid for, and the root cause of it has been the internet. The average reader no longer thinks of specific news organizations as the chief source of information, and that has changed people’s willingness to pay for news as well as advertisers’ desire to place ads. At the same time there have never been more news sources and readers have greater access to information. That’s obviously a good thing.

S/G: Journalism isn’t the only written content we consume online. Content farms, forums, social content, and other information sources compete for our attention (and for advertising dollars). What can a journalist offer that other content producers can’t?

Justin: What journalism traditionally offered was what we’re now fond of calling “curation,” which is to say reporters and editors selecting which news to share with readers in their community. The same is true today, only the competition is much more intense. What journalists can offer in addition to that is knowledge and skill in reporting news and providing context in a timely way. We also know The Elements of Style, which just sounds cool.

S/G: How do stories change when they become products?

Justin: News companies are now developing products beyond stories to inform readers, connect communities, and help their bottom line. That includes the use of raw data, holding events, acting as agencies, and obviously building apps around news. What we want to talk about is how these products are conceived, marketed, and whether news companies have the people and mindset necessary to experiment. We also want to see what journalism can learn from entrepreneurs, start-ups, and others about product development.

S/G: Can you introduce the other panelists? What does each of them bring to the conversation?

Justin: Justin Ferrell is the director of digital, mobile and new product design at The Washington Post, and he’s currently on leave studying journalism innovation as a Knight fellow at Stanford. Ann Friedman is the executive editor of GOOD Magazine, where they’ve enjoyed some success in nontraditional products around news. Colin Raney is a design director and location lead for IDEO Boston and works on designing new experiences and services in tech, retail, and finance companies.

S/G: What are you looking forward to at SXSW?

Justin: This is my second time at SXSW. I spent a lot of time running around chasing story ideas and interviews my first go round. I’m gonna try to be smarter in setting up interviews and stories this time, but make sure to leave time to enjoy Austin. I’m really looking forward to talking with people around the conference, whether on panels, in the halls, or over BBQ.

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2012 Q&A Series.

Image credits, from left to right:
Austin – by Brian Warren
Badge – by adactio
Microphone – by hiddedevries
Xtranormal – by nan palmero
Texas waffle – by rachel lovinger

The Breakdown: Our one-time colleague Andrew Lewellen has moved on from Razorfish, but he’s still doing content strategy and he’s still pushing the boundaries of what it means to create literature in this new digital landscape. This year we spoke to him about his Next Stage panel “Tear It Up: How to Write a Digital Novel,” making him our first repeat Q&A subject!

S/G: Last year you organized a panel on transmedia, this year you’re speaking about how to write a digital novel. Clearly there’s a connection. Can you describe the progression for you?

Andrew: To be honest, last year I didn’t set out to organize a panel on transmedia.  The topic was Interactive Narratives, and I felt that was a large umbrella under which transmedia fell.  It wasn’t until I started working with the presenters on the panel—particularly Rob Pratten and Esther Lim—that I realized the influence of transmedia on the landscape of digital storytelling.  Because of Rob and Esther’s participation, the panel focused on transmedia.  There was actually some contention amongst the presenters: Rob and Esther saw themselves as transmedia practitioners. Josh Koppel, co-founder of ScrollMotion—a company that develops digital versions of books, magazines, greeting cards and annual reports for tablets and smart phones—saw himself as a publisher.

For that presentation, we created a new media version of the Three Little Pigs, with an iPad app, Facebook profiles, and audience participation via Twitter.  In the process of doing that work, I sketched out a prototype of an application for a digital novel—which I kept to myself because it was still just an idea.

One of the things I learned from the presentation was that my interest in digital storytelling is not specifically transmedia.  Transmedia, to me, has a large “gaming” element. I’m not a gamer. I’m a reader and a writer. What compels me about technology is how the tools—particularly tablets—can be used to fracture the confines placed on novels by the printed book and allow writers to create new forms of stories.  So after the presentation—like the day we presented—I decided I wanted to submit an idea for SXSW 2012 based on this prototype I’d developed.  So that’s what I did.

S/G: How hard is it to go from being a traditional novelist to being a digital novelist? What kinds of skills should people develop to make that transition?

Andrew: I think the most inherent challenge is surrendering authorial control. This is something we’re going to address in the presentation.  Traditionally, a writer interested in writing novels, screenplays, plays, and so forth is creating a story that will be consumed by a passive audience.  You have full authority over creating the story. With other forms of storytelling—particularly video games—the creator surrenders control to the user; the user creates their own experience via their interaction with the world of the game.  And they are able to do that because the creator developed a world with certain fixed elements and certain malleable ones.

Writing a digital novel requires you to give up traditional authorial control. Whereas with a printed novel, the reader will start at page 1 and end at page X—and you’ve created the story to move in that established physical format—even if the narrative does not—with a digital novel, you will allow the reader/user to explore the story in their own unique way. You might create multiple points of entry or allow readers to go down a rabbit hole by discovering something unique about the character.

At the same time, you still need to maintain a defined narrative structure, otherwise the story will make no sense, lose narrative drive, and people won’t read or experience it. So to create a successful interactive experience, you have to learn to balance when to control the story and when to allow people the freedom to explore it in the way they want.

S/G: Read any good interactive books lately?

Andrew: I’ve been inspired by the work of the people on the panel with me; that’s why I invited them to present.  Matt Kennedy is the President of 1|K Studios, and his company has done some unique work to adapt novels to the iPad, including Atlas Shrugged and On the Road.  The app they developed for Atlas Shrugged actually won Best Fiction App from the Publishing Innovation Awards.

I’m also really inspired by the application the other two panelists, Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro, are creating: Penumbra.  It’s an innovative blend of text and video, an example of people creating an entirely new and unique story experience by utilizing the features and functionality of the Tablet.

S/G: Which genres of literature best lend themselves to becoming interactive experiences and why?

Andrew: Rather than specific genres, I think there’s an opportunity to use different writing techniques to create a good interactive experience.  Point of view stands out to me as a key technique to utilize.  A novel written through multiple points of view—either first person or third person—can easily be adapted to a touch screen.  Think about a book that uses multiple points of view, like Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory.”  In printed form, you meet the characters in the story, you read their Point of View, as you read forward in the book.  What the tablet or eReader allows you to do is to present all of those points of view at once—say as primary navigation elements.  A reader can choose which person’s POV he wants to read at any time, and suddenly she can experience the story in a way that’s entirely different than reading a printed book.

Another key narrative element to utilize is plot.  “The Power and the Glory” also serves as a good example for this idea; the story unfolds through the characters’ interactions with a specific priest who is trying to avoid persecution by the government.  In a digital novel, the priest could be an object through which the story could be navigated.  This could be done by something as simple as hyperlinking text related to the priest, allowing people to navigate via that priest to another character’s point of view.

S/G: What are you looking forward to seeing at SXSW this year?

Andrew: Any person or presentation interested in exploring ways to adapt story content—particularly written content—to the new media landscape.  This is one of the greatest challenges and opportunities facing writers and storytellers; there’s a whole new frontier of storytelling, and people are figuring out how to create stories for it. I’m excited to experience all the ideas about the topic that will surely abound at SXSW.

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2012 Q&A Series.

Image credits, from left to right:
Austin – by Brian Warren
Badge – by adactio
Microphone – by hiddedevries
Xtranormal – by nan palmero
Texas waffle – by rachel lovinger