Now that I've fully recovered from SXSW, it's high time I start cleaning up.  The schwag mountain spilled over and caused some damage but I got it under control.  So now it's time to spring clean my workflow and social media usage.  I subscribe to this, follow that, or just end up trying to fill up big holes in my life with tiny sand distractions that it gets way too overwhelming, as I'm sure others can identify.  Once I realize that, then I know it's time to pare down my workflow and regroup.  It's not a perfect system, but when it comes time for a change I'm ready to make it.  So how am I doing this?  Glad you asked.

First off, Twitter, it's time I change my relationship with you.  You see, I enjoy trying to follow as many tweeps as I can to match some of the other D-Grade web celebs follow counts, but it's just not working out.  What happens is a undending stream of garbage and links to articles I already read.  True, you've had lists for a while but I'm sorry I didn't pay attention to you earlier.  That's okay.  I think the change will be made for the better for both of us.  That way, when we have conversations with each other, it can be meaningful.  Here's what's I'm doing.

The dribble will be cut out.  I'm going to use a couple of handy tools like JustUnfollow and Mr. Tweet to cut out the bad and bring in the good.  Most of the time when I tweet, I get no retweets, replies, or direct messages.  Now, part of that is my fault, but another part is the list of followers I have don't match my core values.  So while Tim Bray might stay, Verified Alf is outta here.  Also, if a tweep blasts out multiple links in spurts, I'm unfollowing them and I may even block them.  I will be ruthless so if you get unfollowed don't take it personally.  If you get blocked, then please take it personally.  Especially if you are an SEO Expert or social media marketer.

Because I fell so behind using lists, I will play some catch up to make them more important.  This will be built on the fly and will break out to a set of maybe 10 or 15.  That's about all I can handle.  Then I can check up on certain lists and be able to interject and interact with greater precision.

All of this in the name of meaningful usage.  Most people when they talk about Twitter, they get some kind of value of messaging people.  I don't nearly get as much bounce back as they do.  Even my girlfriend who recently converted is getting better usage than me.  So, I will cut down and build some lists that I can follow easier which will enable me to tweet more effectively.  Included in that effectiveness will be more personalized messages from my link tweets.

On to Google Reader.  Whatever gets missed in Twitter ends up in the RSS catcher.  So whenever I read blogs or hear suggestions of sites from others, I end up subscribing to more and more RSS feeds.  Fortunately with Reader's Trends section, I can see what I use on a more frequent basis and cut back on the feeds that I barely touch.  This again hits at matching my feeds to my core values.  It's easy to lose focus when I spread myself around so I need to keep myself in focus and in check.  It happens to all of us so it's always great to go back every once in a while and clean things up.

Next up, the desktop.  My laptop rocks the house.  It's a beefy Sony Vaio that already paid for itself many times over.  I can run so many things at once, it's a multitasker's dream.  The problem is that I usually have Pidgin and Tweetdeck up going and flowing.  It's incredibly easy to glance left or right on my screen to see what's coming and get distracted.  So what I will be doing is turning them off.  For some it's easy, but I have always had my instant messenger open in more than one location at all times since college.  That's 10 years.  So it will be a huge change.  I'm thinking that when it's time for a break, the starting and stopping of these programs will be a great physical switch.

It's amazingly easy to get distracted and let projects clutter up your mental space.  At least once a year, we need to clean it all up.  Much like our physical space, the junk in your mental space will make it harder to move around quickly and get projects done.  I encourage people to try these methods out to help clean up all mental junk.

Okay, so I kicked this one off a little later than usaul, but that's because I logged in the fullest day so far here at SXSW.  The official tally is 6 panels, 2 happy hours, and 1 wet party.  I'm a little under the weather this morning but that's due to the massive amount of stuff that I and my lovely girlfriend did and the rain storm that hit us last night.  Don't fret, however, we are taking it easy this morning and heading back down to the convention center to try and make a couple of more panels and keynotes on the last day of the Interactive portion of SXSW.  There's much to go over, so I'll try to make it condensed.

First off, we are very proud that we actually made a 9:30 session.  Due to the schedule plus daylight savings and such, we ended up missing some of the opening day panels.  The first one saw me hit up Jake Marsh, a developer that did ShopSavvy, talk about porting your mobile applications across multiple platforms.  With a comic book analogy, he described the plusses and minuses of each mobile platform.  What I came away with on this panel was that if you want to do multi-platform development then you should build for each platform instead of one consistent code base.   It will be much quicker to start from scratch as well.  Since each platform has its own UI style, you gotta build toward it.

The next panel say Dries Buytaert, the founder of the CMS Drupal, talk about how awesome Drupal was.  Seriously, half of the talk went over how lame it was to build content for the web.  The other half was Buytaert telling us that Drupal solves all of the problems.  I've rolled out Drupal to multiple clients.  I know how awesome it is.  I really didn't need examples of other site usage.  Someone did ask about Drupal 7 and it seems to improve on much of the drawbacks of Drupal.  We're talking usability, multiple database support, and other things.

I skipped over to the Courtyard next to hear a talk about open sourcing consulting models.  What I expected was strategy in selling open source to your clients.  What I got was strategy into open sourcing more than just your software.  Internal processes, hourly rates, and other items were talked about by Alexandra Samuel and how it helped their consulting company.   It was really engaging to think about open sourcing processes and focusing on execution.  Plus, due to the group talk nature of the panel, I got to hear how some consultants charge with open source software anyway.

Monday's keynote with Ev Williams of Twitter did not seem so exciting to me, so I skipped it.  I headed upstairs to hear a talk about pre and post production for game audio.  I have not been exposed to anything in the video game industry so this was my first stab.  I have a bunch of music software and to hear Alexandar Brandon talk about the latest game engines and process to mirror the game dev side of things was pretty cool.  He even suggest use source code control for audio files to help.  Apparently I need to check out Real Time Mixing for games as well too.

Next up saw an Objective-C crash course and demo.  I am not an iPhone developer so I had no clue how complicated the syntax was for iPhone development.  Joris Verbogt blew through some basic information on Objective-C as a language.   He went through it pretty fast and I'm fairly sure I got all of it down.  Then Verbogt showed off a demo.  After all of information and demoing, I still am unsure just how to develop for the iPhone.  Well, plus I need a Mac to do it.  The last panel of the day helped contrast between this and what I can do in terms of development.

The last panel of the day was a real treat.  Jonathan Stark of Stark Consulting went through a process that web developers could use to built almost native-like apps for the iPhone.  Stark first demoed jqTouch, which is a jQuery library designed to emulated the browsing behavior of the iPhone.  What does that mean?  It means the transitions, buttons, and animations on the iPhone can be used on a web browser.  Next up he talked about PhoneGap.  PhoneGap is a library of code used to setup an encapsulated web server as a native app.  You can drop your web code into an exposed www directory and build natives apps with only web technology.  Many oohs and ahhs from this one.  It was fantastic.

So after all of that, there was still some more stuff to do.  I popped into the Wired Magazine's mixer afterward to meet up with my girlfried.  There we had a nice conversation with a guy from the Nonprofit Technology Network.  He definately out does me in terms of passion.  Oh, I also won a pretty sweet schwag bag there.  I got a bunch of clothing stuff and an iPod Touch!  Looks like the schwag bucket will pay for the trip.  After a quick bite at Serrano's we headed to one of the must do parties for SXSW.

My girlfriend and I love the Found Footage Festival and when we heard they were throwing a party at SXSW, we were instantly sold.  So we headed out to Club Deville to be first in line for the festivities.  We met Nick and Joe there and even got their autographs on a crappy video they did!  They had a hard time setting up the projector for the rocks outside, but the rain that started pouring stopped that and pushed us indoors.  We stuck around for most of the party and headed back.  Nick and Joe were great in person and we're stoked about seeing them again in Lawrence.

The fourth day of SXSW was by far the best one so far.  I learned so much in new technology trends and techniques.  The fill of schwag is over capacity.  We actually got into parties and met one of our heroes in bad movie comedy.   This day reminded me just how awesome life can get.  Everything that I identify with in terms of life and career converges here in Austin.  It's not even half over and it's totally worth it.

With most of the road behind us, the first part of the first day of SXSW found us driving from Denton, Texas down to Austin.  The second part found us smack dab in the middle of Austin and then smack dab in the middle of SXSW.  I'm  going to do our best to gloss over the last part.  All in all a great kick off to my first ever SXSW, even though my feet are super sore at the moment.

The only way to kick off this day right was with a hearty breakfast and we hit it off right.  The Best Western my and my girlfriend stayed had an average continental breakfast plus a waffle iron that made waffles the shapes of the state of Texas.  Everything in Texas is all about Texas.   I scarfed that down with a breakfast burrito and we were ready for the road.  And my, was the road so beautiful.

I'm not sure if it was the fact that the weather in Kansas City was consistently dreary for last 4 months, or weather it was a bodily need to feel the kind of sun and warmth we felt on the drive through Texas.  The sun was out and it was about 70 degrees.  I'm leaning toward a bodily need because my bones felt good with the cool wind and the gentle sun stroking my skin.  Spring needs to show up back north real quick.

We got into Austin and instantly felt the traffic crush.  Sure, the traffic stunk in Ft Worth but we expected that.  Austin was mega crowded.  Now part of that was the conference crowd, but I think the other part was our lack of knowledge on the area.  The crunch of cars reminded us that Austin was a college town as well as a capital city town.  Never fear, we negotiated it pretty well and pulled into Mellow Mushroom for lunch.

If you have not been to Mellow Mushroom, GO THERE!  The pizza was fantastic.  Every pizza joint has the traditional fare like pepparoni, meat lover's, or combination style pies.  Mellow Mushroom puts the specialty over the top with it's choice ingredients.  We opten for the Philosopher's Pie and didn't regret it one bit.  The atmosphere, too, made us feel like we were back in college jamming out to some old records again.  There's leftover in the fridge I'm staring at while I'm trying to type this at the moment and I may just grab it.

We paid our tab and hit the hotel.  After we unloaded we opted to walk the distance to SXSW.  The walk reminded us of the 39th West part of Kansas City.  There were lots of tiny knick knack shops and corner vendors pumping out home cookin' and home fashions.  The walk ended up being much longer than what we expected but we made the trip without breaking too much of a sweat.  Now on the meaty part of the day.

We grabbed our platinum badge, after getting lost and finding our way in the convention center, then grabbed all three of our schwag bags and made off to the registrant's tent.  Because of the traffic and pizza eats, we missed the first two sessions of the day.  So we pounded our beers and parted ways to make off to the 5pm events that caught our eye.  The registrant's lodge was just a little to compact and we can see getting worse here in the next couple of days.  Inside, however, it was easy sailing to my very first SXSW Session.

It was a battle between either a design session or a future of communications session.  The abstract session won out.  My brain wasn't ready for nuts and bolts so a tasty little big picture thought bounce seemed the best route to take.   The session was called Wave and Communications (R)evolution:  Better than Being There? It was moderated by Jared Goralnick and featured Casey Whitelaw, Daniel Raffel, and Jay Cuthrell.

The talk revolved around three aspects of future communication:  The engineer's building view, the sofwtare manager's cooking, and the real world's take on the whole shebang.  I liked where the panel was going with their ideas on making communication easier to use and swallow, while giving the power to whoever uses it to chop and cut and mold it to whatever they want.  The only problem with the session is that ended being a big Google Wave slam fest.

Whitelaw is an engineer on the Wave project and most of the questions from everyone poked at why no one was using Wave as much.  A lot of the examples brought up to support why came from other talks or other data.  It all pointed to Wave being to much up front and scaring everyone away.  They talked about the need to dampen such heavy feature blasting.  It also seemed that the panel accepted email as a foothold that was way to strong to upend.  Cuthrell pointed to a poll that suggested most managers and CEO's see email being around for 35 years.  Jinkies.

The problem I think the panel is missing is the builder's dilemma.  When the builder of a software project, or more broadly, a creative project works toward thier view of the end point of the project, they tend have a difficult time when the user or universe takes that project toward another end point.  The builder has a hard time of letting go.  When Twitter was made, no one envisioned Retweets to become as big as they did.  The users grew it out.  Google Wave has yet to find that kind of dilemma because in part, the builder's want to build in the user growth but also becuase of the admitted issue with up front complexity.

The Wave and Communication talk was a good tip of the ice berg for me and now my brain is ready to think in terms of tech here in the next couple of days.  My lovely girlfriend had an equally exciting time as during her sesison someone yanked the fire alarm and caused an evacuation in mid session.  After the day events, we grabbed another drink at the Registrant's Lounge then made our way to try to watch some films.  We missed out on all the films we wanted to due to long lines, tiny room, and more than 1 1/2 hour line waits.  So yeah, we need to work on our line mojo for the upcoming music events.  Outside of that, the day was a succes and we are getting our feet under us pretty well here in Austin.

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!