EchoDitto

I feel as if I am in a secret club.

Backstory: One of my best friends, Sarie, works at MoMA, and pretty much anything I know about contemporary art is due to our friendship. Things like: the new Olafur Eliasson microsite that user Flickr to sort user-generated photos, or the fact that you can get AudioGuides on your iPhone or on iTunesU, or PopRally. Aka the secret club.

PopRally describes itself as

a program of events at The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center that features collaborations with artists and musical acts, performances, film screenings, receptions, and special viewings of exhibitions at moderate prices.

MoMA hosts amazing events featuring art, film, performance and music, with free booze for $8, aimed at a younger, hipper audience.

South by Southwest was an absolute blast. I could go on and on about the panels I attended or the people I met, but I'll just say they were all awesome. Instead this will be about what I saw as the overarching themes of the conference: accessibility and data ownership/transferability.

Big Point #1: Everyone is online. We're all aware of this, but too few of us produce work that is accessible to anyone besides english readers in standard web browsers. What about assistive technologies? What about non-english readers? How will we deal with localizing our work? There are some great projects to help with the creation and maintenance of content in multiple languages. More and more, we're going to have to make use of these things.

Well, you may not know this, but I'm quite the baker and crafter. My parents call me "Martha, Jr." I've been supplying the DC office with sugar cookies for the last 18 mos and I have to say no one has complained. Although Ben is quite the cook as well - he's definitely challenging me for the title of "office baker." Where am I going with all this?

A few weeks ago, I read an EchoDitto Labs blog post about Dorkbot DC, which prompted me to search for a NYC equivalent. Bingo! Dorkbot NYC meets the first Wednesday of every month only a few blocks from our office. Perfect, for someone like me who is essentially lazy.

What is Dorkbot?
dorkbot-nyc is a monthly meeting of artists (sound/image/movement/whatever), designers, engineers, students, scientists, and other interested parties from the new york area who are involved in the creative use of electricity. dorkbot meetings are free and open to the public. Since we started dorkbot-nyc in 2000 many other dorkbots have sprung up around the world. See them all at: http://dorkbot.org

I have a confession to make.

For the past year or so, I have been merely "going through the motions" of using the newest social networking technologies.

True, I have been dutifully maintaining (ok, "maintaining" may be too generous) my MySpace and Facebook profiles. I signed up with Twitter and I've even twittered more than 20 times (granted, that's over the course of two months; I've already been chided for my lame tweets). I use the EchoDitto del.icio.us feed, and even started a personal one. One thing I'm on top of: I'm a dedicated updater of my Gmail status messages.

But the usefulness of all of this just hadn't clicked for me. Until today.

I just flew in from Barcelona, and boy are my arms tired!

Well, not really - actually I got back about two weeks ago, but what with finalizing development and launching President Clinton's newest site and the Bears beating the Packers, I haven't had a lot of time to collect my thoughts and set them down via an interblag. Well, now that things have calmed down slightly, I figured I'd give it a shot.

First of all, Barcelona is an amazing city. It's incredibly metropolitan - sort of like New York on a smaller scale and with more spanish, although most people with whom I interacted spoke great English. It's really easy to get around, which was good since the conference was taking place at CitiLab Cornélia, on the outskirts of the city.

Quick! Got a TV near you? Our latest project, MyCommitment.org, is going to be on TV today! Oh, and President Bill Clinton will be introducing it. Along with Martha Stewart. On her TV show. For almost a full hour. I'm not kidding, and, as you can imagine, it's making all of us a bit giddy.

MyCommitment.org launched this morning in conjunction with the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City. The idea is simple: Global leaders, CEOs, organizations, and heads of state all come together each year to make massive commitments to help solve the world's greatest problems. But rather than letting the big whigs have all the fun, MyCommitment.org invites everyday citizens to participate in the pledging process with their own ways to make the world a better place. And just like at the CGI summit, every commitment that an individual makes must be specific, relevant, and trackable.

As a follow-up to my last post on teaching, let’s fast-forward a few decades: from the youth to the “wise”. A couple days ago I had a long compelling conversation with Jim Moore and his son Graham about the elderly and technology that got me to thinking: how can we use technology to connect the un-connected elderly with those of us living a more digital lifestyle? Then I saw this post about the Nintendo Wii in nursing homes and it’s clear: technology offers oblique opportunities to engage the elderly.

I don't know about you - but I'm overwhelmed by our social media. So many blog posts, so many friend requests on Facebook and LinkedIn, so many emails. In the month of August, I received 2,960 emails directly addressed to me – that’s excluding spam, excluding bulk email lists, and excluding emails where I was CC:ed. I replied to 1,231 of those emails.

I vaguely recollect somewhere reading that the average human being can process approximately 150 relationships. I have 329 friends on Facebook, 15 pending friend requests, and 25 group invitations. Am I anti-social, or is this just crazy?

Summer's almost over, but I and my fellow Ditto geeks remain as pale as ever. We might not have gotten to the beach as much we'd've liked, but we did manage to put some interesting things up on EchoDitto Labs. Here are a few of 'em:

• Asterisk for Web Developers
• The command line: perpetually more powerful than you realized
• An overview of the goodies that Drupal 6 promises to bring
• Tying Yahoo Pipes to an external PHP web service
• Getting full-text feeds out of the Freakonomics blog
• and finally, an RSS-to-AIM bot

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