3pointD.com

Dan Catt’s mapping panel was a very cool session that was difficult to synthesize at the speed it went by, but I think I got most of what the panelists said. All very 3pointD.

Moderator: Rev. Dan Catt, from Geobloggers.com and Flickr
Panelists:
Tom Carden from Random Etc.
Aaron Straup Cope from Flickr
Jerry Paffendorf from the Electric Sheep Company
Ian White from Urban Mapping Inc.

Catt first asked everyone without laptops to stand up and shake their hands in front of them in order to wake up, then groan quietly like a zombie, then louder than the person next to you. Two questions before you sit down: Who objects to swearing, say boo. Those who don’t object to swearing, say Fuck Yeah. (You can imagine which was louder.)

Cope talked about how we tell where things are. Shows a quote from Douglas Coupland’s Shampoo Planet. “History and geography are being thrown away.” Cope: This is wrong.

Cope: Geography helps set the stage for an experience, history gives an experience context and nuance. We have theselocation devices that tell you where things are. I could care less where the nearest Starbucks is. I don’r eally care about driving directions either. But if I’m at a place, I would love to be able to see what came before and have a sense of its history. (more…)

I looked in at the Games + Entertainment Brands panel for a few minutes before I started feeling too rumpled and had to duck out. Here’s what I heard while I was there (some of it was even interesting):

Moderator: Robert Nashak of Yahoo! Games
Panelists:
Charles Merrin, VP NA Games at RealNetworks
Brian Ring, GM Interactive Content at Scope Sevem
Chris Charla, director of business development at Foundation 9 Network

As I arrived, Nashak was mentioning the importance of user-created content in building a brand around a game. Merrin, on the other hand, warned that brands were often wary of user-created content out of fear that it would hurt the image of the brand, and that this would be true for some time.

Charla talked about procedural safeguards. Sony has apparently done a lot of work on their new PS3 home service toward preventing untoward uses of user-generated content. Their Little Big World platform [which introduces something Sony seems to be calling “user-definable gaming”] allows users to create and upload levels, and to vote on other people’s levels. “Butit’s difficult to get swear words in there,” Charla said.

Ring related an experience he’d had recently when moderating a panel with someone from Whyville, who have spent years creating sophisticated technology, including nine proprietary algorithms, to filter all the chat sessions that run through the service.

Nashak: “Whyville is one of my favorite things. It’s basically a tween site for girls pretty much, and for the first time they seeded a product into the world, a Toyota car. It was the first time you could have a car in Whyville. Whyville counted on the nag factor, that girls would talk about it so much that parents would want to buy one for themselves.” He didn’t know whether the initiative had been a success.

Ring also mentioned virtual worlds like Second Life. “What we’re seeing is a lot of these things calling themselves ’social games.’ That’s where I see a big thing happening. That’s where user-generated content has a big role to play.”

Merrin also spoke about Second Life. “It’s incredible what this tapestry allows you to do. It’s almost the brand within the user-generated content, rather than the other way around.”

Nashak: “What you’re going to start seeing is brands taking very seriously that their passionate users want to co-create the brand with them.” He advised brands to “think about creating engines for people to express themselves around brands,” and mentioned Bix.com, a Yahoo! property where users do things like create content for each other. “It’s infinitely scalable because users are creating it, you don’t have to keep feeding in content.”

I came into the panel New Dogs, New Tricks: New Media Goes to the Movies just slightly late, but caught most of it. It looked largely at marketing and promoting films in the new media environment, but didn’t seem to go very far past current services like YouTube and several recent launches represented by the panelists. The MTV rep, however, did venture into the land of new modes of storytelling that new media might make possible.

Moderator: Scott Kirsner from Variety
Panelists:
Rick DeVos from Spout.com:
David Gale of MTV New Media
Scilla Andreen of IndieFlix
Seth Nagel of iKlipz

When I came in, Kirsner was asking about who the new power players would be in the new media space, where long-form downloadable content was concerned.

Rick DeVos from Spout.com didn’t see any big new players in long-form downloadable content. Rick believes in the power of social recommendation and word of mouth to hook up niche filmmakres with niche audiences, which is what Spout is trying to do.

David Gale talked about what he looked at at MTV, which covers everything “from short films to a gaming mechanism. MTV launched the Daily Rage this week, wher the audience can win money in a gamelike mechanism.” They also bought a company recently that takes comic books and graphic novels and turns them into cool new media versions. “There’s a whole opportunity to take what’s been traditional media and turn it into new media. It really opens up another way of telling stories. Film is still its traditional media thing [in terms of MTV’s business]. My division is about taking anything that is not film- or televison-originated and looking at the platform and how you can create things in those mediums.” (more…)

First Screenburn panel, first transcript: Terraforming the Internet, When 3D Models Meet Business Models kicked off at 10:00am Central Time here in Austin, and I got pretty much all of it for your reading pleasuere (thought I ducked out as the audience questions were starting in order to try to find some Internets that actually worked.

Moderator: IBM’s John Tolva
Panelists:
Jan D’Allesandro from Meez.com
Eric Rice, Slackstreet Studios
Bill Victor of Halcyon Worlds
Ben Batstone-Cunningham, of Alt-Zoom Studios, who formerly worked for Linden Lab, makers of Second Life

Tolva opened with a question about whether 3D virtual worlds were the next Internet (i.e., a replacement of it), or an appendage to the page-based Internet.

Rice: I don’t believe the page model is going to die. While [virtual worlds are] not by definition purely gaming, it’s certainly in a space where there’s this sense of presence [as in gaming]. It’s like watching a funny movie by yourself or watching it with someone else. The energy of people around you affects your experience. I think it’s another path, but I don’t think it’s a replacement.

Tolva responded that there are page-based communities that represent collaborative space, though that space is not physicalized. What differentiates There.com and Second Life from very social spaces like MySpace.

Rice: It’s that live presence, spatialized, where you can see reactions. (more…)

Well, the Electric Sheep Company’s Jerry Paffendorf starts off his South by Southwest with this years First Geeksleeper of the Year award, for having the presence of mind to snap the shot at left, which shows fellow Sheep Meg McGrath dozing off while the rest of the crew partied on around her. If you’re not familiar with the grand tradition of the geeksleep (as if anyone could have missed this cultural imperative that has swept the nation over the last 12 months), dial on back to geeksleep #1, which was taken by me at last year’s SXSW. What is geeksleeping, I hear you ask? According to the description I posted on Flickr back then, it’s the following:

Geeksleep: (noun) 1. the act of sleeping during a technology conference or while involved in any geek-like activity. 2. sleep performed by anyone who could be described as a geek. (verb) 1. to capture a geeksleeper on camera and post his/her picture to Flickr with the “geeksleep” tag.

Seems Jerry’s new geeksleep hasn’t had a chance to make it into the Geeksleep stream yet, but no matter. Congratulations are due, and you can give them personally if you wander over to the Electric Sheep booth in the Screenburn arcade. Meanwhile, get your geeksleep on. Shouldn’t be hard for the assembled to get at least one more of these a day up on Flickr for the rest of the week. If not, it means you’re not partying hard enough in the evenings.