GlitchNYC

While at SXSW, C.C. Chapman created a video series called SXSW for Newbies using mDialog.

Here’s my interview with him, where he asked for advice for Newbies:

We also recorded a quick demo of Nanoloop, the Gameboy music creation cart I’ve been working with.

Watch the nanoloop demo

I’m gearing up for my trip to South By Southwest, and I’ve set up a new blog for the occasion! I’m going to be clip-to-blogging everything interesting I see around SXSW and Barcamp Austin, so I don’t want to flood my loyal readers here. If you’d like to follow along, you can check out the “Skiff at SXSW” blog or subscribe to the feed.

By the way, if you’re going to SXSW and you’re not heading to Barcamp Austin, you’ve seriously got to come check it out. Sure, you’ll have to skip a few talks at SXSW to attend, but there’s going to be some seriously smart and passionate people sharing ideas at Barcamp. You’ll be very glad you came.

SXSW has come and gone, but I’m still catching up on the sessions I missed by listening to the podcasts. Just the fact that you can listen to many of the keynote talks on your own time on your own device is pretty amazing and there’s lots of good stuff to hear, but many of the conversations that I’m really interested in happened outside the traditional keynote sessions, and don’t appear to have been caught on tape. Perhaps more will show up as part of IT Conversations, caught by attendees.

In the meantime, things are rocketing along here, Flu and Bronchitis be damned! Sara and I spent yesterday with some of the other wonderful “Felt Up” crew and churned out at least 3 great bits, which means that with the pilot, we’re good for an April 1st launch! I’ve been hesitant to talk too much about Felt Up here on the blog for fear of over-hyping it before it became a reality, but at this point we’re 95% of the way there and it’s looking amazing!

For those that don’t know, Felt Up is a short-format internet comedy series for portable video devices featuring puppets.

That’s a mouthful, so I’ll explain. We know a lot of great comedians here in NY, and our network of friends includes filmmakers, writers, and other amazing creative types. Getting everyone together (especially the hyper-busy comedians,) is really tough, but getting them to lay 5-10 minutes of audio down (whether reading a part for a sketch or improvising) is pretty doable. Once we’ve got funny audio by notable comedians we can act it out with puppets, taking our time with multiple takes, lots of angles, etc… While we’re at it, we get to play around and improv our own sketches as well!

You can see some production photos over at the Flickr tag FeltUpTV and keep your eyes on FeltUpTV.com, we’ll be launching soon!

Grr. I really have to learn to save more. I just lost a great long post, but it’s going to force a rewrite and two separate posts here, which is a good thing.

Short summary: I’m in a Do It Yourself panel right now that’s giving me a lot of great advice. I’m sorry to have lost some of the earlier quotes, but them’s the breaks.

Rheingold: TESS is the US patent trademark search site. It only costs 360 dollars to trademark your logo or wordmark.

Rheingold:”Just signing up for a domain name doesn’t mean that you have any right to use that mark.”

Hudack / Rheingold: “You don’t need to have lawyers involved. 2 sentences on paper with some witnesses and signed works.”

Keeler: “you really have to follow the bloggers who are influential .

Attendee: There’s a great site for doing trademarks and legal things yourself called nolo

I’m sitting listening to Henry Rollins speak right now. He’s got a lot of great stuff to say, and is

“I think it’s lazy to randomly hate someone. I don’t like Ann Coulter because I’ve read her books and I’ve read her online column. As much as I’d like to spank that ass… (laughter) And I think on some level she’d enjoy it. I hate her because I’ve read her stuff and I know she’s a psycho.”

“INTERVIEWER: You’re the jack of all trades…” “No, I’m the jackass of all titles.”

“On ‘action’ I kinda went ‘yeagh HAH!’ (flails arms) and the director practically jumped across the couch, and the assistant was like ‘oh god call security’. I come out of the audition room sweating and just go (breathes heavy) ‘break a leg’”

The longer I’m in Austin, the more I like it.

There’s an expectation you have of Texas when you live in the northeast, that it’s this place of sand and sparse grass and bleached white cattle skulls.

So far, Austin is simply like a smaller new york. Actually, I think it’s fair to say that Austin, TX and Rochester, NY share the most similarities of all the towns and cities I’ve been in. The only real discernible difference here is that the older cars look better. I saw a 1988 Honda accord that made me drool! It was in perfect condition, with none of the rock salt body rot that we face in New York.

I’m writing this from a bus stop, sitting outside in 78 degree weather and just soaking in the breeze.

Let me go back a second.

I’m writing this from a bus stop.

I’m on a open wireless hotspot, provided by chiropractor across the street. It’s one of many. in fact, Austin was voted “most wired” city of 2005. I met John Cooper at barcamp, who is working on extending that reach even further, and building out a full coverage wireless mesh network with access points hanging from the lamp posts, which would provide access to every square inch they deploy it over.

How do you make money giving away wifi? Well, many businesses find that it simply attracts customers (in fact, sometimes it attracts them a little too well! Coffeehouses sometimes have to kick the cybersquatters out after a few hours without purchase.)

With a city wide mesh network, you’ve got an added advantage. You know what node the user is connected to, and you know where that node is. You also know what businesses are local.

Imagine firing up your laptop (or maybe even a smaller device) on any street in your city and having full fast access to the Internet. When you fire up the connection, you hit the portal page, which welcomes you by giving you access to great community tools like a local wiki, customer review site like citysearch. The unobtrusive ads on the sidebar show you tasty looking sushi from a restaurant called Oslo.

You look up. Oslo is right across the street.

There were lots of great talks at barcamp, and as usual I had many more great conversations over a beer or during dinner. Doc Searls, blogger and senior editor of Linux Journal, sat two seats away from me for two presentations, and hung out most of the event.

Not bad for the free little upstart blocks away from the official conference.

Well, my bus is here, but I’ll leave you with some links that tell the story a bit better.

GlitchCast 23 features a BarCampAustin wrapup and music from the funny and excellent Pirate Party Band, “The Jolly Garogers”

The Flickr photostream has hundreds and hundreds of photos from the event. BarCampAustin was the #1 tag as of 4:30 yesterday.

Two weeks ago, I participated in an ad-hoc un-conference called BarCamp (photos). BarCamp was basically my ideal conference: plenty of space (generously donated by CollegeHumor.com), lots of good presentation tracks, brilliant people, and no vendors pushing Schwag and products you don’t need. Best of all, it was free - the only rule was that if you came, you had to present.

I decided to present on the same thing I was working on at the time: figuring out how to make MySpace work for the GlitchCast the same way it works for indie bands. I was learning how to “game the system,” and I’d written some open source code to do just that and was treating the entire operation as an experiment in marketing.

John Resig was planning on presenting something similar and got in contact with me, and soon we were collaborating via wiki on “Subverting Social Networks.” It turns out that John’s actually a brilliant coder and had written and studied tons of these little apps, so we’d had a great mix of shared experiences and differing points of view. We worked together at BarCamp to shape the presentation, and I think it came out pretty well. Our talk was pretty well attended, and we got some great discussion and some good laughs.

It turns out that there was a prize for favorite presentation, and in the after-event voting, John’s and my presentation won! Considering the caliber of the other presenters and topics, I’m somewhere between surprised, flattered, and ecstatic. The prize is a ticket to the HUGE interactive, film, and music festival South by SouthWest (SXSW Interactive) in Austin, TX. It turns out that Sara was planning to head to Virginia that weekend anyway, so it looks like I’m going. John unfortunately had to decline due to costs (travel to TX and hotel are still factors).

I’m super excited to get to meet more amazing people on the bleeding edge of the internet, music, and culture, and I think it’ll be a great venue to talk to people about The GlitchCast and my latest crazy venture (which I’ll announce here soon, I promise!)

By crazy circumstance, it turns out that Marianne, Colleen, Carol, and Robin will all be in Austin for “Staple” just a few days before! What are the odds? Looks like we’ll be passing in the air unless you guys want to stay in Austin a few extra days.

I just want to take a final moment here to thank the organizers of BarCamp for putting together such a brilliant event. The orchestration of everything from the space to the sponsors was herculean, and I’ve seen $300 a day conferences that had 1/10th the value that was packed into those 2 days in Tribeca. I’m still going back through and processing everything I learned, and now I get to continue my adventure.