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A ReadWriteWeb Guide OMG! Kevin Rose just touched my shirt! Don’t lie – we know you get butterflies at the thought of bumping into iJustine or Robert Scoble at a tech conference. We’ve pulled together a nice little cheat sheet just for you, friends. Whether you want a simple handshake, and autograph on your iPhone or a chance to pitch your idea for the Next Big Web App, here’s ten places, panels and parties where you can track down the Internet famous at SXSW 2010. Don’t forget to leave your tips in the comments! Sponsor This is part of a series of ReadWriteWeb guides to SXSW Interactive 2010. If this guide isn’t your cup of tea, be sure to check back for more information soon! Justine Ezarik, a.k.a. iJustine Longtime lifestreaming queen iJustine is famously an Apple fangirl, but it’s Intel that’s giving you the key to tracking her down at SXSW. She’s and Intel Insider, and she might be stopping by some of the Intel Insider events , like Frank Gruber’s Johnny Cash party or Chris Heuer’s Social Media Clubhouse . We don’t have hard and fast details on Ezarik’s whereabouts, but wherever she is, she’ll probably be tweeting, so keep an eye on her Twitter accounts . Christopher Poole Pool may not be a household name in and of himself, but there’s nary an Internet user who hasn’t been in some way effected by the fun and foul play on 4chan. “4chan – often referred to as a ‘meme factory’ – has been responsible for the creation of countless Internet memes but is perhaps best known for its exploits. In this conversation, we’ll explore the game mechanics of online communities. What fosters creativity in an online community? What design elements can we incorporate to increase interaction? How is the game played?” Baratunde Thurston In “How to Be Black,” The Onion web editor and star of Popular Science’s Future Of series Baratunde Thurston will “touch on the black online experience (if there is such a thing) included memes, statistics on usage patterns, popular destinations and issues of representation. For example, are black people as represented among the creators, developers and builders of our future or are we more consumer oriented than average?” Violet Blue Our favorite sex blogger will be kicking off SXSW with a presentation on “How to Not Be a Douchebag at SXSW Aimed at both first-time and long-time attendees to SXSW Interactive, this biting and humorous, yet useful panel takes a look at the common actions and behaviors to avoid if you don’t want to be described as ‘doing it wrong.’” Kevin Rose This year, the Digg founder returns to host Diggnation Live at Stubb’s. The Bigg Digg Shindigg was certainly one of the largest events at SXSW 2009, with fans crowding around the large outdoor stage to take pictures and watch Rose shoot the Diggnation episode. But don’t expect to meet the man himself unless you’ve got VIP status for the party. Chris Messina In his talk, “ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here?,” Messina will explore the nuances of the real-time web. “From Facebook’s newsfeed to Twitter’s relentless real-time updates, the metaphor of the ’stream’ has taken social networking beyond blog posts and on to rich social activities. Learn about ActivityStrea.ms – the open format adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Windows Live – and how it’s fundamentally changing the social web.” Leah Culver This young developer and successful entrepreneur will be hosting the Web Framework Battle Royale. “Which web framework will rule them all? As an audience member you pick the winner! We will present an introduction to a variety of web frameworks including Rails, Django, Catalyst and Sinatra. You can vote for the best web framework in categories such as URL handling, database integration, forms, HTML templating, documentation, testing and deployment.” Gary Vaynerchuk The WineLibraryTV founder is a true Web guru and an inspiration to entrepreneurs and content creators around the globe. He’ll be giving one of his signature, unforgettable presentations again this year as part of the Interactive Speakers Series. Evan Williams Three years after his web app hit it big at SXSW 2007, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams takes the main stage to be interviewed by Havas Media Lab director Umair Haque in front of a live audience . All we have to say is that you’d better get there early if you don’t want to get stuck watching a simulcast in an adjacent room! Molly Wood A last-minute stand-in for Natali Del Conte at this event, BOL founder Wood has a fanbase of her own. “CNET’s Buzz Out Loud will broadcast live from SXSW. While discussing the day’s tech news, hosts Tom Merritt, Jason Howell, Molly Wood and others will chat with the audience and invite special guests to talk about what’s happening at the show and beyond.” Bonus Round! If you stalk him on Twitter, Foursquare, Plancast and Gowalla, you might get to bump into Robert Scoble , as well. Or, you can catch him at the Rackspace party Monday evening. And of course, while we don’t consider ourselves celebrities, the RWW crew will be present and accounted for at the PBS/NPR/RWW party Sunday night ! Those are our SXSW Interaction recommendations for web celeb stalkers of all stripes. If you’ve got suggestions or feedback, let us know in the comments! See you in Austin, folks! Discuss

Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times’ Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. The company will offer location-based services through its own mobile applications and developers will be able to use this data to develop their own location-based apps on top of a new Facebook location API. Sponsor How Will Facebook’s Users React? It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s users – who are famously averse to change – will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook “has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns.” From Facebook’s Privacy Policy : Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate. When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Location-based services have long suffered from the impression that sharing your location online can be dangerous and services like the Foursquare-based PleaseRobMe have only strengthened this sentiment among many users. Even though Facebook offers relatively sophisticated privacy controls, it will be interesting to see if the service’s users will warm up to the idea of sharing their location with their friends. A lot of the success of this service will depend on how well Facebook can educate its users and how it implements this feature and the privacy controls around it. Will Facebook’s Users Care? It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s users are even interested in sharing this information. While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn’t seen a very strong response from users and developers so far. Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.? According to the New York Times report, Facebook isn’t trying to compete with location-based networks like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare, however. Instead, Bilton argues, the company is far more interested in competing with Google for small-business advertising. This will surely raise additional privacy concerns among Facebook’s users. It’s also important to note that Facebook’s API, will allow intrepid developers (including Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt) to develop interesting location-based services on top of Facebook, however. Discuss

Digital activism is defined by the newly launched Meta-Activism Project as “the practice of using digital technology for political and social change.” One of the leaders in the field of digital activism is Mary Joyce , the founder and executive director of the Meta-Activism Project. Joyce is among the most knowledgeable and experienced digital activists in the world. She also founded DigiActive.org in 2007, a volunteer organization for grassroots activists. In 2008, she was New Media Operations Manager for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. As a lead-up to the upcoming event in New York City with Chinese digital activist Ai Weiwei , Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and yours truly, I interviewed Mary Joyce about the strategies and success stories of digital activism. Sponsor RWW: You recently moved on from DigiActive in order to create a new organization for digital activism. Can you tell us more about what that will be? MJ: The new organization is called the Meta-Activism Project (MAP) and its goal is to build the field of digital activism by catalyzing a body of strategic knowledge unique to the field.  Today’s digital activist is in an untenable position: caught between the 100-ton rock of pre-digital strategy and the thousand slippery pebbles of highly-contextual tactical knowledge that focuses on a seemingly endless stream of new social media applications.  We want to build a new body of activism strategy that recognizes the radically different communications infrastructure of the digitally networked world. I am really excited to announce the official launch of the Meta-Activism Project on ReadWriteWeb! The site – http://meta-activism.org – went live at the end of last week and, though it is pretty bare now, we’d like it to be a central location for people interested in building a body of knowledge about the fundamental mechanics of digital activism. RWW: We’ve heard a lot about Twitter being used in Iran last year, and the subsequent blocking of social media services like Twitter and Facebook in China. What other countries have social media tools had a big impact in, for digital activism? MJ: Judging impact is quite tricky in the field of digital activism, as few cases of digital activism are actual successes.  Usually we judge the success of an activism campaign by whether the activists achieved their campaign goal.  However, in almost all of the famous cases of digital activism “success” – the post-election mobilizations in Iran and Moldova in 2009 or the 2008 general strike in Egypt – while activists did successfully mobilize using social media, they did not achieve their campaign goal, be it to overturn an allegedly fraudulent election result or the wide range of social and political reforms demanded by the strike organizers.  Mary doing digital activism training at Video Camp Goa The measuring of impact thus becomes extremely subjective.  Digital activism proponents want to count mobilization as success even when the goal is not achieved, while skeptics and pessimists point out that, by traditional measures, most digital activism campaigns are failures.  Though I am certainly a proponent of digital activism, I would actually side with the skeptics here.  In order to really push the field forward, we need to set high standards for digital activism success and not be satisfied with half-measures.  RWW: Facebook and Twitter are the two most high profile social media tools being used for digital activism. Are there any other Internet tools that have had success, that perhaps people aren’t as aware of? MJ: I could tell you, but that tool would probably become outdated in a few months, or would prove useless out of its original context.  That’s the problem with tactical knowledge: tools change, contexts change, and activists are forever playing catch-up.  Probably the greatest factor which determines the utility of an application to activists is scale and “use neutrality.”  Scale means that the tool needs to reach a certain critical mass of users before you will have the network effects that will either make it likely that activists will become aware of it (in the case of something like Tor or proxy servers) or, in the case of social platforms, that enough people will be on the platform to constitute a meaningful audience for an activist message. “Use neutrality” means that it can be easily co opted, that its architecture can facilitate a wide variety of interactions and does not dictate the content of hosted files.  YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger are use neutral, LastFM and Bloglines are not.  Mary at the Women’s Leadership and Technology Conference , Sharjah, UAE RWW: Over the past year or so, can you describe a couple of success stories for digital activism using web tools. MJ: Ha! More about measuring success. With the lack of true success, it is no wonder that people are so eager for these stories.  I think the traditionally-defined successes in this field (i.e. when the campaign goal is achieved) are much smaller and less dramatic – NGO meets fundraising goal through online donations (multiple cases), bloggers get a corporation to withdraw an offensive advertisement (e.g. Motrin), a social network lifts a questionable national block (e.g. LinkedIn in Syria).  In the high-stakes activism campaigns that intend to make dramatic changes at the national and international level, I would say that we have cases of successful mobilization – Iran, Moldova, Egypt – without successful campaigns. RWW: In terms of China, a lot has been written about the censorship there – both the Great Firewall that blocks certain sites and domains, and the self-censorship that many companies have to do in order to survive. Currently Google is trying to challenge censorship , but we’re not sure how successful even a hugely influential company like Google will be. So what, if anything, can ordinary people do in terms of digital activism to support the freeing up of the Chinese Internet?   MJ: I am not an expert on China, but it seems like the best strategy for defeating the Great Firewall is to make it obsolete: create so many ways of getting around it that it no longer successfully censors Chinese Internet users.  This means both creating new circumvention tools – more Psiphons, proxies, Tors, FreeGates – and finding new and innovative ways to get those tools to Chinese users. RWW: Thanks Mary for this illuminating interview. We at ReadWriteWeb wish you the best with the newly launched Meta-Activism Project! Discuss

Testifying before a congressional hearing in late February, Mike Altschul with the Wireless Association was blunt : Federal mobile phone privacy policy is undefined and the privacy guidelines for location-based services written in 2008 are obsolete. The hearing on consumer privacy was the fifth in a series that seeks to evaluate and eventually legislate location-based privacy issues. It comes none too soon. The recent flood of location based apps and services has significantly shifted liabilities from mobile carriers to app developers and end-users. As Congressman and hearing chair Bobby Rush of Illinois said, Yesterday there was Facebook, and in the not-too-distant future we will be encountering something more akin to a “Placebook.” Sponsor While the Wireless Association works on its 2010 guidelines, and while Congress deliberates, what’s going on with all our geolocation privacy rights? Do we have a right to control what location-based advertisers do with our info once they have it? Do we have a right to ensure that law enforcement and government agencies don’t abuse our easily obtained mobile data streams? Are our children safe? What does social science research say about all these changes? These are the many questions that this congressional hearing sought to address. Here’s a breakdown: What does the privacy research tell us? Lorrie Cranor, direct of CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory at Carnegie Melon University testified about her research into how end user’s react to the implication of privacy loss due to location-based technologies. She also reported on her survey of the most popular applications and systems. “In August 2009 we evaluated 89 location sharing applications and systems to determine the types of privacy protections each offered,” she said. “Overall, we found that most of these applications provided fairly limited privacy controls and about a third of them did not provide readily accessible privacy policies on their websites. We reviewed the websites for these applications again in February 2010 and found similar results for the 84 services still in existence at that time.” Who will have access to our information? Last Tuesday we reported in our Ads with Eyes post about a report by the Center for Democracy and Technology on advertising abuses that mobile end-users may face. The center is also concerned about abuses of law enforcement and government agencies related to their use of location-based information. At last week’s hearing John B. Morris, general counsel for the center presented the case for why the Electronic Communications Privacy Act should be updated to protect location information from inappropriate disclosure to government. He highlighted how recent court proceedings and local government surveillance protocols are creating contradictory rulings, unclear jurisdictions and generally snowballing into a fundamental lack of privacy protection for U.S. citizens. What’s the latest wording of potential new laws and guidelines? The preliminary language of almost all future U.S. laws begin in hearings such as these. In his testimony, Tony Bernard, VP of Useful Networks, sought to outline some of the most essential elements of this new language. “In order to derive an end user’s location from any source, the end user must be presented with notice of how, when and by whom location will be used,” he said. Additionally, said Altschul, senior VP and general counsel for the Wireless Association, “Notice must be provided in plain, easily understood language. It must not be misleading, and if combined with other terms or conditions, the portion pertaining to the location-based service must be conspicuous.” How will kids and young adults be affected? Anne Collier, Co-Director, ConnectSafely.org testified that new technologies are not as much of a threat to children as we may believe, and the real issue is the quality of parenting and supervision that kids are getting. As far as kids’ potential for future use of location based services, she presented startling data. “U.S. teens now send or receive an average of 3,146 text messages a month and 9- to 12-year-olds 1,146, according to the latest figures from Nielsen,” she said. “For them, a text isn’t like a phone call, it’s part of a conversation as well as of the ongoing flow (or seemingly 24/7 drama) of school life. But texting is only one of young people’s social tools. There is as yet no data on teens’ mobile social mapping or LBS use, but we know that more than 65 million, or about a third, of Facebook users of all ages currently access the social site through their mobile devices.” What comes next? At the end of the hearing, Rush said, “In closing, let me state clearly, for the record, and especially for those interested consumer groups, industries, and government regulators who have been monitoring our series of hearings that, with the information we’ll obtain from today’s hearing, we have now learned enough to take the next major step.” What should that next step be? Are you ready for more clearly defined location-based privacy protections? How can companies who are currently building applications and services keep themselves out of the courts? Do we really need more regulation to resolve this? What do you think? Hands photo by Monika Leon . D.C. photo by Barb Ballard . Discuss

Last week the New York Historical Society opened the first large-scale exhibit of material from the Grateful Dead Archive. The archive will be managed by the University of Santa Cruz with special access to four decades worth of videotapes, recordings, fan letters and even a note from President Obama. What is surprising about the archives and the band itself, is that this classic group of rock icons is being touted as one of the first businesses to take an active role in viral marketing and brand influence building. Sponsor Beyond the iconic imagery of the Uncle Sam skull, the dancing bears and the jester, the Grateful Dead are so well known for their viral influence on fans that entire academic careers have been spent studying the band as a sociological phenomenon. In a recent article entitled, Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead , writer Joshua Green outlines how the band’s willingness to allow its music to spread via taped concert recordings is similar to that of many of today’s startups. Said band lyricist John Perry Barlow, “What people today are beginning to realize is what became obvious to us back then–the important correlation is the one between familiarity and value, not scarcity and value. Adam Smith taught that the scarcer you make something, the more valuable it becomes…The Internet doesn’t behave that way…If I give my song away to 20 people, and they give it to 20 people, pretty soon everybody knows me, and my value as a creator is dramatically enhanced.” The freemium model was implemented with the assumption that merchandise and concert sales would follow. Although the band sought legal action for commercial bootlegging, the group knew that attempting to hold back regular fans from making personal recordings would not only be foolish, but it would be impossible. Instead, an open recording policy for concerts not only pleased Deadheads, but it paved the way for some of the band’s best advocates to recruit others. It’s estimated that recordings for 2,200 of the 2,350 Grateful Dead concerts exist and many of them are available online. Given the fact that all of these recordings required no overhead from the band, it was a great way to crowdsource distribution and increase influence. The group even went so far as to reserve an on-site spot for tapers in a special section behind the soundboard. This reserved space can be likened to a consumer-facing startup community’s willingness to offer viral tools such as blogging buttons, bookmarking widgets, Facebook fan pages and Twitter integration. The idea here is that a company reserves a space for free distribution in order to gain mindshare and find a conversion funnel for paying customers. In the startup world, the point of conversion has always been up for debate. Said investor and entrepreneur Dave McClure, “There is a role for freemium, but unless you missed the TPS report the FREE part is only a loss-leader for the MEE-YUM part — it’s a test-drive before you buy something. If your users are just kicking the tires then you need to kick them to the curb eventually.” That being said, as proven by the Grateful Dead, freemium content and permission to redistribute can trigger a mechanism for broad influence. Because influence generates perceived value, startups may find it easier to overcome barriers for customer acquisition by offering limited teaser content. After all, if the Grateful Dead can overcome wallet friction from more than 40 years of psychedelic drug users, surely a groundbreaking experience can rally loyal (and paying) fans. Photo Credit: Jim Marshall from the Grateful Dead Archives Discuss