You could just use twitter search to search for the #sxsw tag but this is one of the interactive and design events of the years so surely there is some exciting new way to see what is going on. Enter pepsicozeitgeist for a deliciously interesting visualisation, I especially like the swarm!

The report talks about the different categories of use that these digital youth have for and around different activities. It talks about how their digital messing around is actually essential in learning how to use and utilise all the possibilities for learning and research which surrounds them online.

The report cautions those worried about teens and younger kids seemingly just hanging out with their friends online, showing that this hanging around is an essential step in creating a comfortable existence online allowing the digital youth to grow and learn in this environment.

Of course one of the things I saw in the report which I found amusing was the image of my friends and I at one of our places a few years ago. Half a dozen of us all with laptops, swapping links playing songs and videos for each other mailing and IM-ing. So geeky and when another guest arrived who wasn’t such a geek she couldn’t understand us all. But it was so natural just pull out the laptop extension of your mind and communicate. I guess all kids growing up today can be as comfortable and more (much more) than we are with digital tools.

Tomorrow is an interesting place.

But this is not just a standard tag based system either. When a user first selects the rate it button they are presented with a list of adjectives to describe the talk they have just seen. They are also told they have three votes to allocate to these listed adjectives, either one vote each to three different ones or divided between two or less. This lets the user feel a great deal of control over how they are rating a talk. Especially on the first time rating where the user has not yet seen the ratings screen.

Once the user has entered their votes and submitted them they are then presented with a tag cloud of terms showing how they and everyone else has voted.

So some people would think that calling this tagging is a mistake in terminology, but I think the name fits. A user is still tagging the media with their choice of terms, they just have a more limited vocabulary to work from. Is this a useful way of rating talks, well I think yes and it could also lead to some very useful ways to navigate the site based upon these ratings.

But how could it be better? Well apart from some simple UI points concerning small hit areas for the ratings boxes, required explanatory text and the ratings method being un-obvious, I think the greatest area for improvement is around the controlled vocabulary itself. How about a system where users were allowed to suggest more terms if they thought they had somthing more appropriate. The system could remain a controlled vocabualry system in that various methods could be used to control the flow of new terms. firstly the mere fact that a user would have to enter the new terms themselves would lead to them being less common, but if certain ones keep appearing then the offered vocabulary could be extended, or altered as some terms removed if little used. Editing of tag submissions could also eradicate synonyms and the appearance of extra tags on the ratings cloud could prove interesting for users. For users of course most of this would be invisible, they would just have an option at the bottom of the form to add their own tag.

Of course one of the cutest things was when I found out who the guy giving the talk was. It is the guy behind the textfiles website, which is a fantastic archive of some of the early BBS communications and apart from a great historical resource can be a hilarious read.

But watch the talk if you get a moment. It is a very interesting look at people’s needs to communicate in their own way.

Plus sage (feed reader extension for firefox)… Why don’t I have all my feeds in netvibes? How is my use of sage different from the way I use feeds in netvibes? The feeds that I have in netvibes are mostly aggregating feeds ( like reddit ), or really frequently updated ones ( like boing boing ). I put them all together so that I can tell at a glance when they have
updated, and also see the headlines without opening each feed one by one. The sage feeds on the other hand tend more to be more often single authors or less often updated magazines ( like ALA ). These feeds more often have single articles which I might read at my leisure, rather than a list of new posts to scan and only read a few of.

I have though thought about bringing all my feeds into netvibes but haven’t gotten very far. The such new feeds tab contains a few new feeds, bit also a couple of tools. So really that tab is more of a mish mash than a real experiment. Having said that though, I did have a couple of those feeds in my sage list at first which didn’t work out so well

The whole upshot of all this is that for me at least, I consume different ways. Ways which depend upon many factors, from update frequency to feed content. The way that I use my rss feeds mean that just one way, such as netvibes doesn’t work for me. But could it? Working on several different computers means that my unread feeds on sage are always out of sync. Perhaps what I need is a full page feed reader widget for netvibes. So there is a project I could do…

Meanwhile the tools tab is really underused by me at the moment. There are times when I use it, mostly job related times. Like if everyone at work is using google calendar or RMTM todo lists then I use the tools tab quite a lot. Mostly though it is neglected.

As for the delicious tab.Well all I use this for is when I have too many tabs open and I decide to send the bookmarks to delicious so that I can remember that I haven’t read the articles. Not tremendously efficient and not really a great way to use delicious but it beats having 150 tabs open.

So on that note, tonight I am upgrading my netvibes to the new version, ‘ginger’ we’ll see if it changes me…