Todd Sattersten :: Astronaut Projects

More Space on YouTube

I had to find out what all the hubbub was about with YouTube. I have been watching videos there, but I was interested in see what it was like to post video. The results are below. I used the video we created for More Space

I thought it was very simple. It was not immediately available, but that wasn't a big deal. From a content creator standpoint, I can see why people are big fans of YouTube.

SXSW - Monday

Yesterday was spent seeing people more than attending events. There are some publishing folks who live in Austin who I had breakfast and lunch with.

The one session I did get to was Making Your Blog Your Business. My friend and designer-extraordinaire Phoebe Espiritu was one of the panelists. The subject of the panel how people had turned their blogs into businesses. The sentiments reflected here were the same as many other panels.

• Blogs allow you to aggregate demand for products and services
• These businesses are very small and are things you do in your spare time.
• You need to try things to see what will work

At the end of the day, I also caught How to Blog For Money by Learning From Comics. I thought it would be something interesting and different. A couple of interesting points from their talk were:

• Merchandise works well, but can be a pain to manage
• People often want to support sites. A site (missed the name) offered T-shirts and added micropayments. They found success with micropayments, but their merchandise sales disappeared. Apparel is much more profitable and the micropayment experiment was terminated.
• There are tribes on the net for everything. Sometimes, these comic creators would have a storyline or reference and draw huge crowds (one mentioned Firefly). The trouble is they don't stay. The story there is play to your audience.
• The last one is create great content. There were all these questions on "How do I get advertisers?" and "How do you handle printing of T-shirts?" People so quickly forget that you have to make good stuff.

Tags: sxsw2006

SXSW - Sink or Swim - Five Most Important Startup Decisions

Good morning.

I am starting my day at panel on startups. It was the star power that got me. Evan (Odeo), Joshua (del.icio.us), Cabel (Panic), and Joel (Fog Creek) are all speaking.

This is another one of those panels that gets interesting in the Q&A.

None of them had a business background nor do they really have business plans.

Joel - Paul Graham won't give me to a company that doesn't have at least two co-founders.

Cabel - MacWorld Test - If you can't explain it in a single sentence, you are screwed.

Joel - Forget about coupons and affiliate programs, write the next version of software. They generally double sales when they release a new version of software.

Joshua - The best decisions were the choices not to add features to del.icio.us.

Cabel - They always made software that they wanted to use, either because what was out there was bad or because it didn't exist.

Tags: sxsw2006

First Real Evening in Austin

I had all sorts of trouble getting into Austin on Friday, so the only thing I could do was make the Blogher meetup.

Last night, I hung out with John Moore of Brand Autopsy. We talking blogging and business books. You might have seen allusions to his upcoming book Tribal Knowledge and I am sure see his many reviews.

After dinner, he took me to some great spots. Whichwich is a really interesting sandwich place. John wanted to make sure I saw this place. You can read his post on why he thinks they are so cool. I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusions. My only addition would be that this is designed to scale.

Our next stop was BookPeople. It is an outstanding independent bookstore here in Austin. I really enjoyed the experience. The story of store owner Steve Bercu and his campaign to Keep Austin Weird is a great story. It has been told a number of places, most recently in Starting From Scratch. Bercu managed to expose and rally the community here against a $2 million economic package that was being given to a developer. The development included a Borders bookstore. You can read Bercu's letter to the editor at Publisher's Weekly. It might scare you to know that we stood in the business book section for about an hour talking about titles.

We then walked over to Amy's Ice Cream. This is another Austin original. Each store has it's own culture and the employees are themselves. Each person behind the counter was wearing a different hat and all of them were spending time with customers. There was a line out the down and employees didn't start hurrying people through. Notice that the last thing I am telling you about is the product---the ice cream was good. Again, I will give you another book reference if you are interested in finding out more. You can check out Donna Fenn's Alpha Dogs.

The last stop was Gingerman. It has a great atmosphere and an amazing selection of beers.

Thanks John for hosting!

SXSW - Kathy Sierra

Here are streaming thoughts from Kathy Sierra on Creating Passionate Users:

It is not about the product--it is about helping them do.

What can we help people kick ass doing?

If you help users be passionate you get the some of the spillover passion.

You need to get past the brain's crap filter.

Chemistry---people need to feel something, think about how you are communicating...weird, novel, different...keep the brain thinking that it is something important...the brain likes the unresolved. Funny..faces...beautiful...sexy...scary

Conversation beats formal lecture.

Talk to the brain not the mind...

Get people past the Suck Threshold and the Passion Threshold. There is an image of experitse, a meaningful benefit, and a series of steps to get there.

To get people to remember, you need to use emotion.

Need to balance challenge versus knowledge and skill.

How do we keep users in flow?

Get There Attention
Challenging Activity
Payoff

You need levels to keep people going.

Levels don't need to be obvious.

Hero's Journey

• Life is normal
• Something happens to change that
• Things really suck
• Hero overcomes bad things
• Return to the new normal

Create Playful Work

T-Shirt First Development - people want to identify themselves with you

Give them something to talk about? Make it ambiguous. Coldplay, Fair Trade, and the two black rectangles...

It doesn't matter what they think about you...it is about how people feel about themselves.

If spend more time in flow, they have happier lives

Tags: sxsw2006

SXSW - James Surowiecki

I am listening to James Surowiecki's talk on The Wisdom of Crowds.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
Experts correct 66% of the time
Crowd correct 91% of the time.

Examples of tapping into collective intelligence:
Iowa Electronic Markets
Sports Trading.com - predicted all 50 state and 33 of 34 senate races
HP - sales forecast
E Lilly - drug trials
Siemens - predict software development cycles

Needs for collective intelligence to work:

• Method to Aggregate People's Judgement (all people equal, capture collective)
• Diversity - more diversity means smarter crowds (all people bring different perspectives)....investment clubs--male/female clubs did better single sex clubs...experts can't see their blind spots...exceptions bridge players and weatherman...
• Independence - you want to people to use their own knowledge and experience...when we work hard to reach consensus, you sacrifice the best decision...this is hard---humans by nature are imitators....reputation is important to all of us...if we do what others do, it is lower risk

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SXSW - We Got Naked, Now What?

More Space authors Evelyn Rodriguez and Jory Des Jardins are speaking on a panel called We Got Naked, Now What? They are talking about blogging and the combination of personal and business lives.

Evelyn and Jory have had pretty positive experiences. Laina Dawes says she was fired for complaining about not getting a raise. She did not talk about the company specifically, but people at work knew she had a blog. She is certain her comments and opinions led to

Elaine Liner worked as an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University. She was teaching a writing class and asked students to start blogs. At the same time, she decided to start a blog. She started telling about stories about things she was seeing on campus--binge drinking, cheating, petty theft, drug use, eating disorders. SMU chose not to renew her contract.

Liner does not know for certain that blogging was the cause. The university did hire lawyers, but quickly found their was no grounds for libel. Students shared stories about the university hiring PIs to tap phones and scrub her computer.

Interesting stories...

Happy Birthday Mom!

Mom wasn't big on the photo last year, so I will just send birthday wishes and a picture of the grandkids.

From SXSW

I am at SXSW this weekend.

I'll give you my thoughts on the happenings over the next four days.

The first panel I am checking out the Beyond Folksonomies. They spent the first half of panel talking very philosophically about tagging (Zzzzz). The interesting parts include:

• The other 99.5% of the world is not using tagging. (All of us forget that).
• Mary Hodder from Dabble (video bookmarking) says their users look that two things to determine what they will watch - tags and clip length. This is unique for photos, audio, and video. Text search can do pretty good on blogs, but other forms of media can really benefit from tagging.
• More people need to think about uses. Do we need a 45th social bookmarking site?
• If you look at the folder structure on someone's computer, they are using folksonomy already.
• Folders are hierarchical, and tagging is better because it is flat and can show multiple relationships.

Tags: sxsw2006