A Twitter Vacation

There comes a time when what's brewing under the surface breaks through. For me the breakthrough is the need for a little Twitter Vacation.

I love Twitter, the friends I have on Twitter and how connected I am through it, with people in Milwaukee and around the world.

Now, I'm not going to leave Twitter forever. Rather, this will be a 3 week experiment off of the service to see how being Twitter-free effects me.

Why the Vacation?
I've sensed lately that I need to take a step back. I've caught myself constantly checking my Twitter mentions, working very hard to tweet something of value and scanning my live feed in Tweetie for something, anything interesting to read.

While that's typical Twitter user behavior, I've felt this incessant attraction to scanning random tweets and re8-2010plies at all times to be distracting my focus from more important things in my life right now.

As you may know, we've added a baby girl to the family, which is wonderful and understandably, quite time consuming.

Couple our 3 month old baby girl with a stack of personal projects and plans to be made for SXSW Interactive in March -- it all adds up to a pile of important things I must focus on.

So, as an experiment, as of February 1, 2010, I'll be leaving my Twitter feeds sit idle while I catch up on everything else in my life.

I'll come back in 3 weeks, on February 22nd and report my findings here.

Week 1 Update (Feb 8, 2010) — My first week of Twitter vacation has been an interesting experience. On more than one occasion I've wanted to share an idea or a photo, with Tweetie on the iPhone, only to stop myself.

I've missed reading tweets from friends I follow. After reading Michael Lopp's excellent post, A Story Culture, I'm understanding how much I enjoy weaving stories together from 140 character snippets of information. In some ways it's like stitching stories together while listening to the radio.

I have also noticed an increase in productivity. I'd expected this might happen however. Those little distractions add up over time, so whatever plan I set for myself after the 21st will include limits on usage.

Sketchnoting SXSW Interactive 2009

Doom and gloom. Meltdown of the global economy. Real estate prices dropping, layoffs, businesses closing and more bad news bombards us daily.

2008 was a rough year and 2009 is off to a rocky start. These are challenging times.

In spite of the bad news around us, I've decided to focus on the positive. To focus on the opportunities in this new year and not let the negativity dominate my outlook or perspective.

For me, this begins with SXSW interactive in Austin, Texas, March 13-18, 2009.

SXSW Interactive Official Sketchnoter

One hugely bright spot in 2009 is the honor of being the Official Sketchnoter to SXSW Interactive. In 2008, my first ever SXSW, I used my Moleskine pocket sketchbook and G2 pen to live capture several of the panels and sessions in sketchnote form.

At the time I was capturing the event for myself and the small band of followers who enjoyed my work from SEED 1 and SEED 3 conferences and other events I'd captured in 2007 and 2008. What surprised me was how popular the SXSW 2008 sketchnotes became. Just a week after posting the sketchnotes, they appeared on 80+ sites, including Daring Fireball, R.BIRD, FrogDesign, Jason Santa Maria and Boing Boing!

I'm very excited about working in an official capacity this year. I think the toughest challenge will be which panels to attend and capture. I have a list of panels I'm looking forward to, but I also know how panels often overlap. It should be fun. :-)

Get In Touch

I'd love to meet new people at SXSW, so if you're attending and would like to talk over coffee at the event, drop me a line with SXSW in the subject line and say hello, and if you like, follow me on Twitter.

I'm attending the 2009 Avalonstar Bowling Extravaganza on Saturday, March 15th, and my co-conspirator Brian Artka and I are organizing some kind of small gathering at an Austin location during SXSW Week, we'll announce soon.

Stay Positive!

Be thankful for what you have in your life. Be ready for opportunities. Circumstances can bring you down — don't let them ruin your outlook. Stay positive!

Related Links
SXSW interactive
SXSW Interactive 2008 Sketchnotes
SCHED.ORG
SXSW Ning Group
2009 Avalonstar Bowling Extravaganza

BarCampMilwaukee3 Final T-Shirt Design

After receiving not a single entry in the BarCampMilwaukee3 T-Shirt design contest, I decided late last week that I ought to come up with a design for the shirt, and quick.

Below is the final BarCampMilwaukee3 T-Shirt design for 2008:

How did I Get Here?

The deadline for ordering shirts and submitting some art was looming, and there were no submissions to the contest to speak of. It was last week Thursday when I opened my sketchbook and started to doodle. What came out in rough form was a design vaguely similar to the design above.

I wanted something a bit organic, fun and round. I remembered that Pete Prodoehl had "tagging" space on name tags at the first BarCampMilwaukee in 2006. I took his idea a step further by embedding the tagging spaces right in the shirt design.

At the Web414 meeting that evening, I saw Jordan Arentsen wearing a charcoal gray t-shirt from a recent Adobe AIR event, and loved how the shirt looked. I checked his tag (with his permission) and found it was a Gildan Ultra Cotton, the same shirt I've been using with all of my projects for the last few years. Excellent!

Design Iteration v1.0

When I got home, I was wired from the Web414 meeting, so I began working with the sketch I had, and generated a v1 design iteration. I quite liked the feel of this first iteration — the rounded shapes and tags, white backing color and the use of the BarCampMilwaukee icon on the back.

As I look back, James Carlson gave me some inspiration with a Wiki character he's sprayed on a large sheet of paper and showed at the Web414 meeting. It had eyes on stalks, which influenced my decision to add similar circles/eyes on stalks to the t-shirt design.

However, I wasn't sure of the dark blue color, and decided to sleep on the design until Friday.

Design Iteration v1.1

In the morning, I had the idea to try another color. Since the BarCampMilwaukee logo takes inspiration from the Milwaukee Brewers Blue & Gold colors, why not try a retro 1980s Brewers medium blue?

That's what I did, and I really loved the feel against the white and the charcoal gray shirt material.

I also wanted to describe the idea visually to the BarCamp core team, so on the v1.1 iteration, I added some sample texts in the balloons for my name, Twitter handle and 5 tags that represented my interests.

Design Iteration v1.2: Final

Feedback from Web414 and BarCampMilwaukee people was very positive this weekend, so tonight I've finalized the EPS art for t-shirt printer, complete with the sponsor list for BarCampMilwaukee3.

Thanks to everyone who helped with this project, especially Pete! I will follow-up when the shirt goes to print with photos of the shirts hot off the presses.

BarCampMilwaukee3

Woohoo! We're just 2 months away from BarCampMilwaukee3, on October 4th and 5th at Bucketworks, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

This morning I've updated the BarCampMilwaukee3 logo and icon designs, and am starting to ponder ideas for the t-shirt design for this year's event.

What's a BarCamp?

In a nutshell, a BarCamp is an event where technology people come together and share what they know, in a low-key environment. There are no keynotes or special speakers — anyone who attends has an opportunity to present their ideas and knowledge. There is a heavy emphasis on sharing with others at BarCamp events. It has earned the name "unconference" because it turns the conference idea on its head.

How much is it?

It's a free event, paid for by sponsors, which makes it easy for anyone who wants to come to be there. It's also a great way for sponsors to give back to the local tech community, and already we have a number of sponsors signed up. If you're interested in sponsorship, a donation of $200 to $500 gets your name on the website, t-shirt, and a sign and mention at the event. Not bad!

What will I eat & drink, where can I stay?

Food and beverages are provided for free. Sponsors provide many of the meals and snacks and several of the attendees bring along food and beverages to share if they like. If you want to save cash on a hotel room, you can crash for the night at the event, all you need is a sleeping bag and a pillow.

Where and when is it?

It's taking place at Bucketworks, the "World's First Health Club for the Brain" at 1340 N. 6th Street in Downtown Milwaukee. It's taking place October 4th and 5th, 2008, with a kick-off party happening on October 3rd (my birthday!).

BarCampMilwaukee2 Video

Here's a video by my friend David, from BarCampMilwaukee2:

Come to BarCampMilwaukee3!

You are invited you do come to Milwaukee and experience BarCampMilwaukee3. It's a great opportunity to learn, share and connect with others who love technology, the web, hardware and social media as much as you do.

Questions? See the Getting Started section of the BarCampMKE3 site, or Join the BarCampMilwaukee Yahoo mailing list. You can also leave a comment here and I'll do my best to answer your question.

Clay Shirky & the Power of Disposable Attention

Thanks to Derek Dysart, I was able to hear Clay Shirky's "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus" talk from the Web 2.0 Expo, embedded for your viewing pleasure:

Clay's assertion is that like gin sold from pushcarts helping Londoners cope with the sudden shift from rural farming to urban industrialization, the TV sitcom helped post-WWII society cope with a new surplus of leisure and free time:

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before — free time.

He argues that society is awakening from a focus on TV sitcoms, and is realizing that they are in a position to create the content they want. They are able to contribute to the discussion, in ways not possible before:

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

What Shirky calls a cognitive surplus, I like to call disposable attention. Some may choose to spend attention on one-way activities like TV, but this is changing with the new generation. Shirky shares this story about one young girl's reaction to TV:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

I'm fascinated at how deeply this 4 year old has been impacted by interactivity in her life. She so wanted to have an impact on the TV show she was experiencing that she had to "find the mouse" in an effort to make an impact. Consuming was not enough for her — she wanted to interact.

There are many new opportunities available to us that were not available 10 years ago. We have the power to create. We have the power to write our own stories on blogs, tell them in podcasts and show them in videos. We can contribute to larger projects like Wikipedia or attend BarCamps.

The encouragement to me in all this is we're moving beyond the stage of simply sitting on a couch, accepting what's being presented. We're given the opportunity to create and share our own stories, finding there are others like us out there, interested in our stories and willing to share theirs with us.

Here are a few great parting quotes from Shirky's talk:

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

Related Links
Transcript of Clay's talk
Book: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Mark Bernstein: Shirky and History