So I’m at Starbucks, behind a cop waiting for his double mocha-frappa-hoohaa. His tie is a little askew so the baristas, who clearly know him, start giving him a hard time about it, saying it looks like a clip-on, ha ha ha. Schoolyard-bullying (of a man with a loaded gun). He goes along with it and then yanks it off completely. Velcro! Oh then the name-calling really begins.

And then he explains that the last thing a cop wants around his neck is a built-in noose.

Duh. Laughing stopped.

You gotta think this was learned the hard way after some cop-on-bad-guy fracas, somewhere.

Apologies to ZZ Top.

Lots of people and companies want to know how to put together a great online community. Or scale an existing one way up. Not as many people consider what happens when a community goes bad. This was the topic of a great presentation by Chris Tolles at SXSW called When Communities Attack.

Here are a few points I found interesting.

The tone in discussion forums gets more friendly if posts are geotagged. The rationale, while not proven, is that a degree of anonymity is lost this way and that no one wants to associate a shameful post with their vicinity (or perhaps even suffer being located).

Lots of people have “conversations” with themselves in online communities using alternate screen names to establish credibility.

The word for the non-machine-readable letter grid that is often required for users to input to validate themselves is called a “captcha”. Didn’t know that.

Registration often works against decorum by keeping out good posters who prefer anonymity and by encouraging flamers since registration implies that this community has something good going on inside of it.

I’ve been noodling on this question from a different panel, called Bridging the Online Cultural Divide, since Austin:

Do social networks conjoin communities — i.e., technology facilitates connection where it could not be accomplished before — or does it merely create closed communities by allowing like-minded folks to cohere and separate from the ‘others’? Put another way, is a social network inherently based on segregation or inclusion?

Post title from this great paper by Clay Shirky.

That’s it for recaps of SXSW. Back to the other stuff …

Kudos to Boingo for treating my request to not be signed up for a monthly charge not as a problem, but an opportunity. No, no. I am an Unlimited Upsell! Consider the possibilities for this hapless day user!

The browser window itself was called Click Capture. At Boingo, they are all about giving it to you straight. Straight somewhere.

A great last few days here in Austin. SXSWi has just wrapped up and I’ve got a bucket of notes, unvisited links, and ideas to sort through. Which is exactly the way I like it. Ingest complete, begin digest. Look forward to a few excreted posts in the coming days.

A few morsels.

Twitter, oh my goodness Twitter, was the darling of the festival. Literally everyone was using it to catch up with one another or just buzz softly in the great hive mind. There were screens set up in public areas that provided a steady flow of tweets. It definitely took the place of the room-by-room IRC channels from previous years. In a way, Twitter is just really slow IRC. But you can already see where this is going. Eric Rice is right when he says that a fest like SXSW is perfect for Twitter (especially given the overloaded WiFi) but that the long-term usefulness of such a dump of minutiae may be questionable.

There was a lot about virtual worlds this year — more about that soon — but it wasn’t completely dominated by Second Life, which is good. There was a lot of buzz about an impending Google metaverse (what with the Earth renderer, Sketchup, and their purchase of Adscape Media). Of course last week’s announcement of Sony’s PS3 Home got a lot of people talking, mostly skeptically. And the Wii is simply adored.

Hardware DIY was big, especially given the deification of Phil Torrone for his Frogger hijinks on 6th Street last year. He and Limor Fried provided one of the keynotes. The Open Source Hardware movement is very interesting indeed. Fried demonstrated an illegal cell phone jammer to a room full of astonished geeks. I gotta get me one of them.

Last year’s darling — tagging — was scarcely heard from this year. Tag: tired.

As always the best part of SXSW is what happens away from the convention center. This year’s dorkbot meetup was especially well-done. You simply can’t beat drinking free beer to the sound of humming tesla coils. Though the conference grew in size by almost 80% the parties didn’t seem any more crowded than usual.

Should have heeded the warning

Best way to make a friend at SXSWi: pull a power strip out of your bag.

Overall, wonderful. I knew more people this year, but met fewer. I’d prefer to meet more, but that’s the dark side of an expanding social network I suppose. My only complaint is that the size of the fest is such now that they’ve had to expand into other, very hard-to-reach areas of the convention center. It made for long slogs from panel-to-panel and also cut down on the mingling.

Special thanks to my panelists, by the way. A great discussion.

Been wanting to do that since last year.

See also the view from above.

More of heaven.

Some people misplace their car keys. I misplace my car. Often. See, I don’t drive very much, commuting to work by train as I do. And I park on the semi-anonymously gridded streets of Chicago. Add to that the frequent dustings and dumpings of snow and loaning it to friends in the neighborhood and it can be damn hard to find.

Enter Twitter. I’ve been wanting to do something with this much-buzzed, nanoblogging tool, but I really didn’t think my daily minutiae interesting enough to submit. (And I still don’t.) Hell, this blog is boring enough.

But as a mini-blog of my car’s location, it is absolutely perfect. I give you …

twitter.com/MySweetRide

Don’t steal my car please. Oh, and someone add geotagging to Twitter. That’d be nirvana. (Update: thank you very much.)

All that is solid melts into air.

Time to review the resolutions from 2006. Last year I went 7-for-12 with two partials. And this year?

1. Cook.
   Done. Not every night, not even every week. But a few dozen times is more than zero. And no reports of foodborne illness.
2. Visit San Diego, Philadelphia, Portland, or Santa Fe, all US cities I have never been to.
   Thank goodness for the or. Got to Santa Fe in March. (But Los Alamos was cooler.)
3. Rip DVD collection.
   I’m going to call this complete. I didn’t do the whole thing. In fact, not even close. But I did rip several dozen. I did all the children DVD’s in the house. (These have been uploaded to TiVo for easy access. No more ruined DVD players from kid-smarm.) I also ripped anything that I knew I’d want to watch while traveling and any I wanted to send back to Neflix immediately to plow deeper into my queue, usually to stock up for travel.
4. Get to know the south side of Chicago.
   Uh, no. Apart from a few trips to the University of Chicago and Pilsen and some bike routes I barely stepped foot south of Congress.
5. Look into Italian dual-citizenship.
   I have the link. Does that count?
6. Shave head.
   Well, not completely. But I’ve gone quite short. Call it a partial.
7. Visit Xian, China.
   Nope. You’d think with four trips to China this year I could have done it. I even called this a “safety” resolution last year. Jeez.
8. Find Jim LoBianco.
   Task complete. Took barely three months. God bless The Google.
9. Run a half-marathon.
   Ha! No. Worst fitness year ever.
10. Teach sons how to swim.
    Gonna go for the stretch on this and say complete. Could I thrown them in a lake and walk away? No. (Well, not without pulling a Susan Smith.) But they can wear floaties and putter around the pool and that’s all I was going for.
11. Call (not ping, not e-mail) my mother more often.
    Um. She reads my blog. Ruling?
12. Return to home winemaking.
    Yes, though we made no wine. Our brew this year was cider. Same gear, same principals.

Yikes. 6-for-12 with one partial. At this rate I’ll be 0-12 by 2012. Now that’s a goal!

A few trinkets for your stocking.

After over a year shuttered, the Division Street Russian Baths are back open. The “renovation” is somewhat underwhelming. The classic, mildewy old entrance is gone, replaced by a brokerage or something. I sauntered into a room full of cubicles and thought “can’t be.” Indeed, it wasn’t. The entrance is now through what used to be the women’s spa. The new upper floor is a vast, soul-free community era decorated in stunning what-do-you-do-for-style-after-communism Russian cheese. The sauna benches have been rebuilt and enlarged. Yes, the charm of worrying about hooking an appendage (ok, the appendage) on a rusty nail popping through the slats is gone. As is the old tiled Russian and Turkish Baths sign. The eucalyptus steam room ain’t working and the cold bath looks like the holding area for the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Granted, I visited two weeks ago, so maybe things have improved, but Russian Baths 2.0 is definitely still in beta.

On a recent ground stop in SFO (weather in Chicago, imagine that) I had a few hours to talk to the pilot. He told me about all the shit that’s hit his plane’s windshield during flight. Birds, obviously. But also fish over Cleveland that had been sucked up in some Great Lakes equivalent of a waterspout. He’s also had a snake smashed into the glass, dropped from a bird of prey presumably. Snakes on a plane, indeed. Then there are the animals in the plane. The pilot told me about all the legally-permissible guide animals — animals that are not required to be caged. Dogs, obviously. But also guide pigs (small) and even a guide falcon, which sat (hooded) on his owner’s shoulder the whole flight. I suggest that the person behind the falconer was not about to complain about a too-reclined seat.

The ‘tubes have been good to me this year. I’ve reconnected with my roommate from Rome in 1993 (one resolution, complete), my best friend from high school who I haven’t seen in 20 years, and a student I taught freshman composition to in 1996. Is anyone still saying the Internet makes you antisocial?

The shooting at a law office in the Chicago Loop last week over a patent misunderstanding has gotten me thinking about the value of ideas these days. The business of patents — creating them, licensing them, suing for them — is gigantic, billions of dollars annually. And yet, they are only ideas, most never to receive material or methodological implementation. It’s no wonder — though certainly tragic — that a sociopathic gunman didn’t understand that just because a truckers’ toilet hadn’t been built didn’t mean it hadn’t been patented. The patent system clearly needs an overhaul, but so do people’s expectations of the value of a single idea. Innovation ain’t worth much if it isn’t paired with insight and implementation. And for those of you who think your life has been ruined because of a stolen idea, perhaps check Google’s new patent search first?

A view of our holiday track layout. Complete with derailment.

Music: ’76 aka The Slow Train, Lemon Jelly