ReadWriteWeb

This is the final post from SXSW, by Sean Ammirati of mSpoke. I'd like to thank Sean for the excellent coverage of SXSW! Also, a disclaimer for this post: FM Publishing is the main topic in the post and Read/WriteWeb is a part of this advertising network.

Yesterday I attended a panel which I've been thinking about constantly, ever since the panel ended. The panel was entitled "Why Marketers Need To Work With People Media" and it had a set of rock star panelists (in the SXSW interactive, not music, sense of the word!). The participants were:

• Tony Conrad of Sphere
• John Battelle of FM Publishing
• Toni Schneider of Automattic

While the panel referred to it as 'people media', it could also be described as 'social media,' 'read/write media', 'conversational media' (as John Battelle has been describing it lately) or even 'user generated content' [Ed: that last term is beginning to get unpopular]. Regardless of what you choose to call it - and I'll use the term 'People Media' in this post because of the panel title - these sites are a significant part of online traffic and so delivering high-value advertising is key. Note that John Battelle covered most of the material from the panel in a recent post. 

Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.

This morning I attended a presentation by Matt Mullenweg, the Founder of WordPress, on 'Scaling Your Community.' Matt started by defining scaling your community as "being as useful to the last 100k people as you are to the first 100k." He talked about the four steps a community goes through as they scale.

The steps he laid out for leaders of a community were:

1. Build a Good Foundation
2. Bootstrap
3. Let Go
4. Personalize

Step 1: Principals for Building a Good Foundation

The principals that Matt emphasized to build a solid foundation all revolved around taking a simple idea and articulating it clearly. Also he said that once you, as a leader, commit to a set of simple principals, it is essential to make sure all of the product development is consistent with that vision. Matt made the point that while this is very straight forward, it is often difficult to execute on. For example, at Word Press they have committed to "all free features will always be free". Unfortunately, this has proven difficult at some points because users have leveraged the system in ways they never expected (such as unique ways to track their blog's activity). Because of their commitment, they have decided to continue offering those features for free.

Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.

On Saturday we covered an SXSW panel called Web App Autopsy, which examined four live web applications (RegOnline, FeedBurner, Wufoo, and Blinksale) for things like conversion rates and revenue per customer. Today there was a similar seminar entitled "Barenaked App: The Figures Behind the Top Web Apps", which looked at 5 web applications and what it took to build and release those products. This time the focus was very much around the financial costs to build and deploy these web applications (as opposed to elements like lines of code or revenue). It also touched on what it costs in monthly maintenance. Here is an overview of the data they shared:

• DropSend: Build $48,012 / Monthly $3,625
• Freshbooks Build $20,000 / Monthly $46,000
• Maya's Mom: Build $70,000 / Monthly $30,000
• Mobissimo: Build $60,000 / Monthly $150,000
• Wesabe: Build $200,000 / Monthly: $3,000

One other interesting thing shared was that FreshBooks cost $430k total to build and maintain, until they reached break even ($140k of those expenses went to marketing).

Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.

Today's keynote was a conversation between Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries and Phillip Torrone, the senior editor of MAKE magazine. In the conversation, they discussed a new movement called 'Open Source Hardware'.

Definition of Open Source Hardware

Open Source Hardware involves releasing all of the information necessary, to allow individuals to acquire the individual components of a device and understand how to assemble them together into a functioning device. Also, many individuals end up then extending a device to incorporate entirely new and novel uses. Limor talked about multiple types of open source hardware - including releasing the following:

• mechanics in an open interface markup file under creative commons;
• circuit level design in an open format released under creative commons;
• firmware source code (more like traditional open source licenses);
• data sheets and parts lists including where to find the parts (it is increasingly becoming hard to find each of the individual parts);
• finally there is the firmware and APIs, again under a more traditional open source license.

Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.

This morning, I attended a panel titled "Using RSS for Marketing". The panel had a great set of participants including: Tom Markiewicz CEO, EvolvePoint (moderator); Emily Chang Co-founder, Ideacodes; Bill Flitter Chief Mktg Officer, Pheedo Inc; John Jantsch Owner, Duct Tape Marketing; Greg Reinacker CTO/Founder, NewsGator Technologies Inc.

Tom's style of facilitation (at least for this panel) guided the conversation to cover a broad range of topics extremely quickly. However, at a high level, the panel discussed:

• Where are we in terms of user adoption / understanding of RSS
• Reasons marketers should syndicate content
• What are marketers and publishers doing wrong?

Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.

The last panel I attended on the first day of SXSW was entitled "Web 2.0 and Semantic Web: The Impact on Scientific Publishing". The panel was moderated by John Wilbanks from Science Commons. John did an excellent job showing how a number of general internet trends are effecting scientific publishing. Specifically, I was impressed by three major projects the panel touched on:

• Open Access
• Connotea
• SemanticWiki on People at Ontoworld

Open Access

Melissa Hagemann, the Program Manager for Open Access at the Soros Foundation, was one of the panelist. If you aren't familiar with Open Access, it is an initiative trying to get all scholarly research available for free on the Internet. Melissa explained that many supporters are now requiring the research they support via grants, to be provided under Open Access. In fact, the US Congress is considering legislation to require all research supported by the United States Government to be distributed under Open Access. The reason is that the government and other funders are realizing they are paying for the research twice. Firstly, they are paying to have the information created and synthesized for publication. Then they are paying again to allow other researchers to get access to that knowledge.

Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.

After attending a panel on collaboration earlier this morning, I attended the panel "Under 18: Blogs, Wikis and Online Social Networks for Youth". The moderator was: Andrea Forte of the Georgia Institute of Technology. The panelists were: Danah Boyd PhD Candidate, USC Annenberg Center; Anastasia Goodstein Publisher, Ypulse; Kate Raynes-Goldie TakingITGlobal; Erin Reilly Exec Dir, Platform Shoes Forum; and Elisabeth Sylvan Researcher, MIT Media Laboratory. The presentation started with a slide which read "Young People Online are ... a constant mortal danger or fulfilling their inner potential?" This was a pretty good summary of the conversation.

Background Context from Danah Boyd

Each panelist opened with a brief presentation. Danah Boyd's opening provided great context for the rest of the discussion. She talked about how a hundred years ago 14 - 17 year olds participated in society and were mentored by adults. Then during the great depression the government instituted a policy of forcing 14 - 17 year olds to attend high school. She talked about how this began a process of creating a dynamic she called 'Age Segregation'. The concept behind this segregation being that society creates separate activities for teenagers. This however didn't change the fact that 14 - 17 year olds still yearn to participate and express themselves to society at large. The difference is that in the last few years they have begun doing it online. She pointed out 4 things that make this unique:

Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.

This afternoon I attended an amazing panel titled "Web App Autopsy". This was one of the panels I was most excited about when I was getting ready to come to Austin.

The panel examined four live web applications (RegOnline, FeedBurner, Wufoo, and Blinksale) at an amazing level of depth. If you are involved in any part of designing, building or marketing a web application, then you really need to go download a copy of the slides.

While the entire presentation was packed with useful information, the data I found most interesting was around the conversion of site visitors to customers - both free and paying customers. The slide below shows a summary of the data the panel presented.

Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.

The SXSW conference has multiple panels going on at the same time. I started my SXSW experience by attending the "World Domination Via Collaboration" panel. The presenters were: Jory Des Jardins Co-Founder, BlogHer LLC; Betsy Aoki Program Mgr, Microsoft; Jessica Hardwick Founder and CEO, SwapThing; Lisa Stone Co-Founder and Pres of Operations and Evangelism, BlogHer LLC; and Jenna Woodul Co-founder, LiveWorld

Overview

Jory Des Jardins opened the panel by stating that in 'web 1.0', community was a "nice to have". In 'web 2.0' the new reality is that community is "the business". The panel then jumped in, focusing back and forth between two topics:

(1) Tactics and policies to build a community organically, and 

(2) How to convince other individuals in your organization to actually spend time and resources developing a community.