As you may have realized from the sidebar on the right hand side, I'm SXSW bound!  This will be my first time heading down to Austin, Texas and mingling with the technological, film, and musically inclined.  SXSW is somewhat of a long time dream of mine and starting tomorrow it will be fully realized.  Much of what I'm interested in both personally and professionally intersects with all of the different aspects of SXSW.

For the Film portion, I'm into seeing the movies that pull me back to my high school days.  During the late 90's, I watched movies all of the time.  I would head to the now defunct Video Library out in Lenexa and pick up a movie 6 pack for the weekend then veg out on the couch.  After awhile, I got to the point where mainstream movies just weren't enough.  I wanted to see the influence of great directors and actors, I wanted to see off the beaten path movies, and I wanted to tap into an underground that couldn't otherwise be known if it weren't for the 5,000 plus title Video Library sported.  It was an age of discovery for me.  I hope to relive that with the Film portion.

The Interactive portion is all about cutting edge technology and more importantly how it affects people.  Most people come away from this event with more than just the latest, hip social media trend.  Workshops are all over to walk through attendees on some of the best practices in development or the latest methods to integrate bleeding edge tech.  New technology will be on display as each big player brings out the best they have to offer.  This is the meeting of highly proficient minds and what spins out from that collaboration and networking can be something special.

My passion for technology and how new ideas affect people and hopefully improve their lives came from my college days.  I used to work in the only profitable division at Kansas State besides the athletic department:  the distance education department.  Because of the money we made, we got to preview and implement tech before it saw the light of mainstream.  We're talking smartboards and video captured lectures using carts, cameras, and computers.  I always remember the impact it on the teachers utilizing that tech to help teach their content.  Hopefully,  I will see what new items (more than likely in the mobile realm) that will help people and their daily lives down in Austin.

The  Music portion speaks for itself.  Whereas the Interactive portion's sessions usually start around 9am, the Music portion's sessions start at 1pm.  The brunt of the showcases won't end until the last encore song bleats out over the PA system at around 2am.  It's all about bands and musicians coming together and sharing their voice.  On top that, they will share the methods and discuss topics on how to best use their voice.  The collective voice for SXSW will hear over 1000 bands joining in the song.

I've always been trying to find my voice.  Whether it's in technology, music, or just my day to day actions.  I sport a decent amount of music equiptment that grows each day, but I've never found it sounding right to me.  Morever, I've also found it hard to share my voice with other people.  Courage will always be a hard thing for me.  I'm thinking that a chorus of over 1000 other bands may just help me join in and sing my song.  What better way to find my voice?

Half the fun of finding my voice is the path I take to get it..  That path leads me to SXSW.  Most of what I identify with will be represented in some form down in Austin.  I'm lucky enough to go down there and take part.  What do I hope to accomplish?  I want to start a new age of discovery.  I want get my hands on new technology to help others.  I want to mix with peers and jam out with them, whether it's tech, film, or tunes.  Most of all, what I want to do on this trip is to bring back fresh inspiration and make some new friends.

This is a great opportunity for me to mix with like minded people and I'll be bubbling up the better things from the event right here.  I'm going to do my best to document much of the road trip and the conference so be prepared for an onslaught of content.  Please feel free to share with me what you think.  If you are going down there, hit me up and let's have some fun.  SXSW is like Mecca to me, even though I've never been and I don't pray toward Austin every day.

If you haven't noticed in your Google Inbox recently, there is a new feature that popped up in there.  It's called Google Buzz.  What is it?  It essentially takes the best of real time update technologies and integrates in with most of Google's core group of software.  I'm not going to break down the ins and outs of Buzz.  But what I will do is talk about two features that I find the most attractive.  One's bringing an old favorite Google App of mine back to the forefront, the other is just stroking my ego.

So let's start with my ego first!  Awhile ago I talked about the '@' symbol and how it's become the mainstream mode to reply to or address other people or systems in communication.  Flash forward to today.  If you notice above, the comments show the '@' symbol used to address another Buzz user.  Even better, once you type the '@' symbol and another letter, a dynamic list of your Buzz friends and Gmail Contacts pop up for you to choose from.  If you are a developer building a new app, especially one that hinges on social interactions, you will have to include this feature to be successful.

Okay, the next feature that changes the game is the simple integration across all of Google's Apps and Buzz.  My Google Profile has been filled out for a couple of years and for last year I've been wondering why.  Buzz now pushed the Google Profile to the forefront.  More importantly for me, however, is the massive integration with Google Reader.  If you've been around here recently, you know my love for Google Reader.  I have friends in Gmail that use Gooogle Reader, but they never show up in Google Reader correctly when they share stories.  Buzz not only takes care of that, but also brings in Buzz users in to the Google Reader application.  This makes picking up shared items that my peers curate much, much easier.

Now, Google Buzz is not without its drawbacks.  Everyone's been complaining about privacy, but I'm starting to get bothered by the massive drag it brings to my Gmail.  I'm an Inbox Zero cult follower and seeing new Buzz pumped in at an amazing rate is starting grate my nerves.  I hope they follow through on pushing it out as a separate app.  The folks at Google are already iterating changes, so if they are going to make a change, it will be fast.  That said, Buzz is a great addition to my set of apps from Google I use.  Not because of the app itself, but because it makes my other apps better.

I've been using Google Reader as my news aggregator for some time now.  Now some people might say that feed readers are dead along with RSS, but I beg to differ.  It's the best way for me to catch up on news using a uniform interface for easy scanning.  If I want to go in depth, I can read the whole article there or open in a new tab.  I had a hard time sharing any articles I find worthy of telling others about.  The same thought leaders of today who say RSS is dead are the same ones who exclaim that Twitter is the king of up to second news.  Until the middle of last year, there was no way for me to share links in a fast and easy way plus post it to my Twitter followers.  Now I can with Google Reader's 'Send To' feature.

The 'Send To' feature announced last August enables Google Reader users to send articles to any kind of service, including Twitter.  Programs like Tweetdeck, Seesmic, and Twitterrific had options to post interesting links and shrink them to fit Twitter's 140 character limit.  I always thought that was cool, but it wasn't enough for me to leave my Google Reader ecosystem.  With the 'Send To' feature, I now can share links to my personal Google Reader feed then send it to Twitter as a shrunk link in Bit.ly.  I'm getting the best of both worlds.

Please check out Lifehacker's guide to the 'Send To' feature as they do a better job than I would on how to get the most out of this cool feature.  If anyone out there currently doesn't use a feed reader, I suggest you do so.  Not just for this indirect Twitter integration, but it is a great way to catch up any piece of content that utilizes RSS feeds.  Your favorite companys, blogs, friends websites, etc. can all be centralized in one main information scanning application.  You could even subscribe to podcasts and listen to them in Google Reader.  So give a whirl and start sending stuff back out into the Twitter echo chamber.

While I was going through the twitter round up, I couldn't help but notice that the semantics used to address other tweeps include the @ symbol.  That got me thinking about how the @ symbol shows up not only on some web services, but also email, blog comments, and even in the Getting Things Done methodology.  I also recalled someone saying that the German name translated to "monkey tail" instead of the widely used "commercial at."  After some research, I discovered where the ubiquitous nature of the @ symbol symbol fits and where it potentially could grow.

To get a good handle on the @ symbol, we need to look back and see where it came from.  Not much is known of the exact time it showed up, but different theories all point to the @ symbol used to represent something more efficiently.  An Italian merchant used it to give it a name for a certain quantity of jar stuff.  Another story is that monks used it to combine the word at to one letter.  How verifiable each origin is seem irrelevant.  The point is that the @ symbol makes things more efficient.

The @ key showed up on the typewriter then IBM keyboard.  It's called commercial at because of what accounting institutions use it for.  It's in the ASCII set.  What's even crazier are the names.  A monkey tail and elephant trunk and the like.  Some countries call it another animal.    There's always some lore for the @ symbol.  There is a special meaning between languages.

The @ symbol took on another meaning in 1972 when Ray Tomlinson used it for the very first email address.  He was looking for something to point a message to a machine.  Since the @ symbol literally meant at or commercial at, it seemed like a logical placement.  So he fired up some code and thus began the use of the @ symbol in electronic communications.

Today we see the @ symbol used in a couple of different communication contexts.  We of course use it for the email address.  But now we can use it for comment replies in message boards.  We can use it when we designate a user on a machine.  In some other cases, it can be used to address others individually in email messages to groups.  More importantly we can see its use blowing up on Twitter.

When I mentioned contexts, it opened the door to the @ symbol's use in the Getting Things Done methodology.  David Allen created GTD as a task management/productivity system.  Part of what he preaches is the use of a Next Action list.  With each list you can group actions to locations and other objects.  The system is agile enough to account for multiple lists of actions designated by a noun.  He suggests the @ symbol for these special lists while organizing so it can show up first in the folder listing on a computer.

The great thing is the suggestion also helps marry the @ symbol with the context with which it precedes. Now you can have lists for @Home or @Office or @Phone if you need to call somebody.  While originally it was a listing workaround, now the @ symbol has more an integral role for context definitions on GTD.

We are beginning to see patterns develop at how the @ symbol is taking on a powerful role in communication.  We are seeing the @ symbol used to tie context not only to locations, but also to people.  Where in GTD you have a location, now with Twitter or email addresses you have a person.  The use of the @ symbol is becoming a gray area of distinction between a person and a place.  The  word after the @ symbol is the noun.

Now you can see where the action or verb takes place.  In GTD you have an action to do at a place or context, now you can send a message or 'tweet' to a person.  When you're responding to someone else that drops a comment in a blog post, you are responding @ the user.   When you see a tweet pop up and you are compelled to respond, you type out @ and the user name to respond to their post.  What does this mean?

This paradigm shift of acting on a noun shows the idea of a context is more prevalent than ever.  The lines have blurred between machines and people.  There is a singular unifying context for people now.  Because of that, there is more consistent applications across different media and communication.  What this roots down to is better organization for social organization.  I can email guy@aplace.com or just twitter @guyplace or note in my system to call @gplace in my @Communication list.

The more use that comes from it, the more common it will be.  Even Twitter founder and CEO Ev Williams talked about how the @user response wasn't in the design of Twitter to begin with but that it naturally bubbled up from the community use.  The paradigm naturally evolves to what we are most comfortable using.  In Twitter Ev saw that and responded by giving it more meaning within the Twitter ecosystem.

Where can this take us in the future?  Perhaps there will be a time where a service will be attached to a user on the domain.  So if you email me at mike@hoketronics.net, you may actually send it as email@mike.hochanadel@hoketronics.net.   Or if I'm not there it could be forwarded to twitter@mike.hochanadel@hoketronics.net, or phone@ or facebook@ or myspace@ and so on and so forth.

My initial thoughts lead me to what the open ID folks are doing (save that for another research post), but I'm not sure if they've incorporated this simple,  powerful, and  NATURAL paradigm of using to the @ symbol to address nouns.  Hopefully they will.  But what we can see is that the use of the @ symbol to address nouns will grow stronger and will almost become subconscious.  What great leaps and bounds we have come from a silly little monkey tail.

It's been quiet the last month or so but I have been active online in another format: Twitter.  So here's a couple of resources I've been using and my thoughts on them.  I grouped the sites by different actions or contexts.  The river is wide in tweet-dom so I need some tool that can help me follow like minded twitters.  Because there's so many, I also would like to see where I rank among the them.  A couple of utilities would be nice to help manage my Twitter account.  Finally, there's a growing set of applications for Twitter so I need a place to look up any new apps that might fit in whatever mode I am twittering around.

Find and Follow

First up is a service called Twubble.  Hitting up the page, it asks for you login information, which many of these services do, and will grep your followers to see what similar users match your flavor.  The page generates a list and gives you the option to follow if you so choose.  The neat thing about this is that you can expand the list out on the fly if you want to add more, although there is a limit to how many times you can expand.  I like this site but wish the had a 'Follow All' button.

Tweepler takes another approach and process the list of users that follow up but you are not following.  So say Gold's Gym finds my profile appealing (as it should) and follows me but I miss the email notification.  Tweepler will compile that list and give you a choice to either follow or ignore the user.  If you're lazy you can follow or ignore all in the list.  The unique interface gives you a box like interface to push the followers to the left and the ignore box is on the right.  Tweepler is the choice when you want to catch up to your account after some time off.

Mr. Tweet takes and even more unique approach to find and follow management.  All you have to do is follow Mr. Tweet on Twitter and after some time you'll get a direct message saying you profile is all ready to go.  When you get to your page, you're presented with three choices:

1. Check out a list of similar tweets to follow
2. Check out people you're not following
3. Review your profile and stats.

Mr. Tweet combines a couple of find and follow management tools but I'm not sold on its usefulness.  The profile you can review at rank specific pages.  You aren't provided a Follow All option for relative and following tweets.  Lastly, it updates every two weeks.  I would use this product more if they let me arbitrarily updated on the fly.  I would almost even pay for it.

Finally, lists are a great to follow tweets abound.  I'm really into software development and music.  So after a quick scan of Google Reader, I came across some nice options to find fellow Tweeters.  On the software side, Jurgen Appelo's list of 100 software development users helped me out immensely.  Kudos go to Jurgen for building and maintaining a list.  He also produces some great lists like RSS feeds that are helpful for software development.  On the music side,  Gabriel Nijmeh keeps a spreadsheet up at Google Docs that contain a running list of Twitters for all things music.  Go check it out and follow Neil Diamond.  Thanks Gabriel!

Rank

After a following frenzy, some users will follow you in return.  So naturally I wanted to see where I ranked in terms of Friends and Followers.  The first site I went to was Twitterank.  You can enter your Twitter account name and it will present you with a some floating point number.  If you present your credentials, you can tweet it as well.  After I get the number, it also tells me what my percentile is.  After playing with it the last couple of weeks, all I can say is that the number and percentile appears to be created on a random basis and provides no really useful information.  That said, check out my twitterank here.

The big daddy of Twitter ranking is where I ended up with Twitterholic.   Twitterholic has the running list of top twitters on the front page.   After checking out the list, you can enter in your Twitter account name and it will tell you where you are on the list.   Each time you crawl your stats, Twitterholic makes note of it and presents you a simple chart of your follower progress.  I really prefer this method of statistical analysis and recommend Twitterholic for rank usage.  Check out my Twitterholic rank here.

Utilities and Applications

I really only came across this utility last week and I have to say SocialToo will stay in my tool box for a long while.  To sign up, you get one big page that asks for credentials for not only Twitter, but also for Identi.ca and Facebook.  After entering the pertinent information and setting domain specific settings, it jumps you to your home page.   You can turn on and turn off features but the main feature you should keep is the auto follow action.  When enabled, a twitter user who follows you will get a direct message thanking them and then you will auto follow the user.  Much of the previous features for find and follow become obsolete when this is enabled.

Now that I've setup my Twitter account and followed like minded tweets, I want to find the best application to post content up on my Twitter feed.  There are a couple of wikis out there that have running lists of applications.  Twitter Fan Wiki and the Twitter Apps Db at Twitdom are nice destinations for your app needs.  The one app I've consistently been using is Twitterfox.  Twitterfox is an extension for Firefox that installs a small status icon that the bottom of your Firefox window and gives you the ability to receive updates and post tweets.  It's small and out of the way, which provides just enough distraction for me when I need it.

So finding and following Twitter users, setting up the proper utilities and applications, and checking out where I ranked is all taken care.  The last piece is content.  All this is great for power users, but to truly grow and get the benefit of Twitter you must post content.  I currently use BrightKite to post status and have popped in and out on occasion to drop a quick note.  There is room for more content and that will happen much easier now that I've gone through the previous steps.  Follow me at @hokey and tweet me line!