Everybody piled into the ballroom today at the Austin Convention Center to hear Spotify CEO Daniel Ek give the final keynote interview of SXSWI of 2010 fully expecting to be blown away with the release of the peer-to-peer music player. Instead, we got somewhat evasive and allusive answers on when to expect a U.S. version and were left looking to yesterday’s announcement of MOG’s move to mobile , with full knowledge that Napster is nipping at its heels. Sponsor At the same time, while we’re all awaiting the U.S. launch, it looks like many of the tech savvy already have gotten their hands on the Europe-only application. Interviewer Eliot Van Buskirk started out the session by asking who in the audience had used Spotify and more than most of the crowd raised a hand in the air. Ek said that he was very surprised by the number of people that had used the software. Ek said that he thinks that the day that we allow music to be seamlessly transported between platforms and carried around on mobile devices would be when we saved the music industry. “Music that I really love, I tend to want to buy and own still,” said Ek. “I don’t necessarily want to own it in the format it used to be, like in a dumb plastic disk, but I’m more than happy to pay $100 to get a box set with a t-shirt and notes.” He explained that, while many seem to criticize Spotify for giving music away for free and adding to the problem, “it’s not free” and that “with all those listings on the Spotify platform, the artists get paid every time” their music is played. Ek argued that he thought that the music industry would be “radically bigger” today if users could legally have music on any device, using the metaphor of music as flowing water. We did, however, get to see a quick demonstration of Spotify for Android, but it was a bit quick to glean much in the way of usability. It did, indeed, play music. In the end, though, we have to wonder why we’re all holding our breath for Spotify to land on U.S. shores. By the show of hands, it certainly doesn’t seem that hard to acquire and we have some valid alternatives, like MOG and the soon-to-be Napster platform, as well as their web counterparts . If you’re that worried about getting Spotify, our suggestion would be to go get a proxy service set up and get to it already. Discuss

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Today at the South By South West festival in Austin, three finalists competed in the Microsoft BizSpark Accellerator finals in the “Innovative Web Technologies” category. The companies, RecycleMatch , Siri and Skimble argued their positions on stage in front of three judges and tonight the winner will be announced at 6pm CST. Sponsor The Accelerator competition is in its second year and started out with a list of 32 finalist companies in three categories. While all three categories have some strong entries, we wanted to check out the innovative technologies to see what was, well, innovative. RecycleMatch First, Chad Farrell, co-founder of RecycleMatch, showed off the web solution that we hope takes off solely so it can help save the world. RecycleMatch, the only of the three that is not an iPhone app, is an online marketplace that helps match up waste materials with recyclers and manufacturers that need those materials. “There’s really no place to do this now,” said Farrell. “Let’s say I’ve got this piece of polyester fiber waste but I don’t know anyone around who can use it. It’s the perfect use of the internet – to connect people like that.” We can see this not only having a great impact on the world, but certainly stepping into the ever popular “green” genre and sticking around. Siri Up next was Dag Kittlaus with the digital, voice-activated personal assistant software Siri. We think Kittlaus’ introduction says it best: “For decades, Hollywood has been paintinh this picture of machine assistants with Hal 9000 – what Siri is doing is taking some steps to make that a reality,” Kittlaus said. As our own Frederic Lardinois has written before about the iPhone app, Siri is “one of the most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years.” You simply hold the phone up, hit a button, and tell it what you need and it translates your speech into text, uses natural language processing algorithms to determine what you need and then launches the appropriate services. Whether you want to schedule a taxi pick-up, make a dinner reservation or remind yourself of that Monday morning appointment, just ask Siri and it will do it. “What if you could make it easy to ask your phone to do something?” asked Kittlaus. “It’s all about simplification.” While the app looks to simplify your life, the technology behind it is anything but simple and it makes us feel a little bit like we’ve finally arrived in the future. Skimble The final contestant to take the stage was Skimble and if there’s one thing we can say, it’s that co-founder Maria Ly did it with style, back-flipping and dancing to the ‘Mission Impossible’ theme song before putting both legs behind her head and doing push-ups. Yes, you heard that right – she did push-ups with both legs behind her head. This woman is living what she’s preaching, that we can attest to. “We would like to inspire active lifestyles across the board,” she started off in her explanation. Skimble is a hybrid social network, physical fitness tracking app, that lets you track your physical activities, whether running, doing yoga, or playing kickball and compete with your friends. As you keep track of your activities, you can compare with your friends on a leaderboard and even compete to win real-world prizes. As with Siri, Skimble is primarily an iPhone app, although it has an accompanying website with additional features. Our Pick We have to say, Siri takes the cake in this category and we’re going to have to call it early. If the digital personal assistant doesn’t take the prize, then it’s only because it’s too good and just doesn’t need the start-up funding to continue. That almost seemed to be the line of questioning from the judges – why would something as impressive as Siri need to win this competition, with the funding and functionality it’s already showing? All Siri needs to do, in reality, is start a bidding war between Google and Apple and it has it made, the judges half-jokingly but half-seriously said during the on-stage interview. For the final word on what company will take the top prize, watch live tonight at 6 pm CST or check out the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator page. Discuss

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Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia , will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can’t be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment. But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources? Sponsor Even Moka Pantages , the communications officer for the WikiMedia Foundation , said she agreed with this sentiment when she spoke this morning at the South By South West festival in Austin, at a panel entitled ” Process Journalism: Getting It First, While Getting It Right “. Here’s the thing – we have to say that everything she said before answering this question seems to say otherwise. Tackling Real-Time Content The panel featured journalists from the New York Times , SeattlePI.com , Journerdism.com and Gizmodo and a common theme was that user-created content – whether tweets, YouTube videos, or otherwise – could and should be used in breaking news coverage. The panelists all agreed that this content should be verified in some way and should be presented to the audience with a high degree of transparency. Each panelist spoke about a specific case study – the New York Times’ coverage of last summer’s protests in Iran, for example – and discussed how they gathered crowd-sourced information and attempted to verify its authenticity. Robert Mackey, the reporter for the New York Times, gave examples of translating chants heard in YouTube videos and matching up street signs that flashed on screen with Google Maps. Once he was sure of its validity, he said, he would add it to the coverage. “When you’re sitting in an office in New York and you’re trying to confirm that something was shot in Tehran that day was actually shot in Tehran that day, you’re not going to be able to verify that,” he said. “The idea is that it’s a conversation on the web about this event.” The Newsroom Moves Online Monica Guzman, a reporter for SeattlePI.com, spoke similarly about her website’s breaking coverage of a shooting and the subsequent day-long man hunt. SeattlePI, formerly a print publication, has existed solely online for nearly a year now. Most of the breaking information that day, she said, came from Twitter. “The media collaborated with itself and it was one big swirling newsroom on Twitter,” said Guzman. “We ended up using tweets as starting points. And Twitter did end up breaking a bunch of stuff.” While SeattlePI was able to send reporters out and verify some of the information in person, how was the rest of it verified? “Common sense,” she answered. The Seattle Times, she said, had more than 500 people collaborating on Google Wave to gather information on the same story. Wikipedia Takes On The Mumbai Terror Attacks Then came Pantages’ turn to discuss how the Wikipedia community addressed the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai . While it is said, as we started out with, that Wikipedia just shouldn’t be trusted, the case we heard for its coverage of a breaking news situation far surpassed what you might often see on your average blog or even traditional newspaper. One particular user, Kensplanets , was a driving force behind the coverage, using breaking news from IBN.com as a source. In cases such as this one, the crowdsourcing aspect not only allows multiple points of view, but also allows aggregation from multiple points in a number of different languages and locations. “It’s not just U.S.-centric information,” Pantages explained, “You have the New York Times, Reuters, Times of India – they’re all there.” According to Pantages , by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article’s life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. While this could seem like a situation rife for misdirection and misinformation, the constant discussion swirling around the creation of an article, Pantages explained, is “really similar to what you would think should be in a newsroom.” Nonetheless, we still disparage Wikipedia as an untrusted source of news. Wikipedia As News Aggregator Just like other news aggregation services, Wikipedia takes many sources and puts them in to a central location, but with the added benefit of human curation instead of algorithmic collection. “There’s no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it’s real-time aggregation,” Pantages said. So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site. Then the hundreds or thousands of editors continue to scrutinize the information, discussing edits and potential changes in the back channels. The news we read in our daily newspapers, on the other hand, is curated by only a small number of people. Surely, there is the question of qualification, but many of Wikipedia’s contributors and editors are, themselves, professionals. In contrast, we often accept news from other blogs as immediately trustworthy, while a Wikipedia article such as this one, which is transparent in its creation, its sourcing and its transmutation over time, we dismiss as flawed from conception. Today, the 2008 Mumbai Attacks article sits at more nearly 43,000 words with over 150 different sources cited and 1,245 unique editors. While Pantages argues that “Wikipedia should not be a source, it should be a starting off point,” we would have to argue the same for news media in general. In this crowd-sourced news environment we’ve entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow. With that said, if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content – whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else – as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own. Traditional media get bits of breaking news wrong all the time, but we accept that as part of the game. To vilify Wikipedia for the same errors sets unequal standards and besides, you’ll likely never see the same level of transparency in traditional media about where it went wrong. With Wikipedia, it’s all laid bare for the world to see. Discuss

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During today’s SXSW keynote , social media research Danah Boyd , who works for Microsoft Research New England and is a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talked about online privacy. Specifically, she focused on how users can navigate issues around online privacy and how developers can help them to do so. Sponsor Boyd, who has researched how mainstream users use social media for the last couple of years, argued that developers have to focus on questions about privacy and publicity as they use and develop these new applications and experiences. According to Boyd, privacy is not dead and users care about it – both online and offline – and often react quite violently when their expectations of privacy are broken. Google Buzz: Privacy Fail Looking at the example of Google Buzz , which she called a “privacy fail,” Boyd argued that Google didn’t do anything technically wrong when it release Buzz. Instead, Google made a number of non-technical mistakes that interrupted a set of social expectations its users had. Google’s mistakes: Building a public system in an environment that most people consider to be private (their email service). A lot of users actually believed that once they started using Buzz, Google would expose all of their private emails to the world. Google assumed that users would simply opt out if they didn’t want to participate. A lot of Google users, however, thought that they would cancel their Gmail accounts if the opted out of Buzz. Technologists assume that the optimal solution is the best and forget about social rituals. Boyd noted that users expect to be able to choose their friends, for example, a social ritual that Google interrupted when it automatically populated its users Buzz accounts with people they tended to send a lot of emails to. To explain these issues, Boyd distinguished between articulated networks (address books, Facebook, Twitter), behavioral networks (based on common behavior, location, etc.) and personal networks. According to Boyd, people don’t necessarily want to bring all of this info together (which Buzz did). Instead, they want to be able to separate different groups. It’s also important to remember that private and public are also not always clear binary opposites. While technology often makes it looks like this, in real life, things tend to get a lot messier. If you are out in a café, for example, you are in a public space, but you expect a certain community to be there – while you don’t expect others to be there – and you still expect a certain degree of privacy while you are talking to your friends. Facebook’s Privacy Fail Users generally don’t handle change well, which can have serious privacy implications. When Facebook asked its users to reevaluate their privacy settings a few months ago, the default choice was “everyone.” People encountered the Facebook popup with a notification about these changes, however, clicked through without reading it and suddenly all of their data was public. According to Facebook, only about 33% of users made changes. As Boyd noted in her talk, most Facebook users simply didn’t understand the privacy settings. Public by Default, Private by Effort By default, most conversations on social media services are now public, while making them private takes a conscious effort. By and large, teenagers, according to Boyd, are more conscious about what they can gain by being public, while adults worry more about what they could lose. That, however, can lead to shortsighted decisions and have serious consequences – something developers need to think about as they create their social media applications and especially aggregators. The Public-By-Default Environment is Not the Great Democratizer Just because something is publicly accessible, for example, doesn’t mean that people want it to be publicized. The launch of Facebook’s news stream, fore example, caught users by surprise as it broke the social contract on Facebook. While the data in the news stream had always been available, aggregating it violated the privacy expectations of most users. Developers, according to Boyd, have to ask themselves how the people whose content they are remixing and aggregating would feel if all of this data was suddenly available in one place. What Can Developers Do? There is no magical formula: privacy exists in social contexts and these contexts are complex and change constantly. For technologists, this is what makes it so hard to deal with these problems. Developers, said Boyd, have to learn to navigate these complexities and interact with their users. Developers also have to consider that privacy slip-ups can have real-world consequences for users. Developers have to ask themselves how they would feel if this information they aggregate would be disclosed. Just because you can see somebody, doesn’t mean they want to be seen. Wanting privacy is not about having something to hide, but about control and creating space to open up. Discuss

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A ReadWriteWeb Guide Ever since its inception, the Internet has blurred the boundaries between author and audience. Whether you’re a blogger, a pillar of the printed word, a podcast coinnaseur or a developer dealing with the latest CMS, navigating the next step in Internet publishing can be a feat. So, hit up these 10 events at SXSW Interactive 2010 to say goodbye to Gutenberg and hello to the interactive, multimedia, real-time, crowdsourced and community-funded future of online publishing. 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! ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income Wanna ditch that desk job for the cubicle-less life of a professional blogger? What better way to kick off your SXSW Interactive 2010 than with a book reading from the editor and founder behind ProBlogger , Digital-Photography-School.com , and Twitip , three blogs that collectively reach over 3 million unique readers a month. Before you get into any panels predicting the death of this or that, let’s start off with how you’re going to start a blog and become rich, wealthy and wise. The Revenge Of Editorials If book readings aren’t your bag, then how about a workshop on how to get to the bottom of all this content we create by the second? “As the Internet has accelerated the creation of all types of content, it’s become more and more difficult to sift through that content and find something of quality. We’ve tried it with machines and even mass consensus but the results are either wrong or lowest common denominator. The irony in all this is that we really need other humans to help us. The vast breadth of content on the Web only highlights what we’ve always relied upon: the valued opinion of others.” Critical Tits: Rights, Cameras and the Immediacy Age What happens when every member of an audience suddenly becomes an author? Eyes from every angle and a battle over the right to create versus the right to privacy. Come watch as CNET News ‘ Daniel Terdiman and Burning Man’s Andie Grace surely take two separate sides on this issue. “The EFF recently argued that Burning Man’s not as open or nurturing as people think, and uses the DMCA to control photographers’ rights. This caused a firestorm of controversy, forcing Burning Man to say its interests are protecting its trademark and attendees from being exploited by unscrupulous photographers. This panel will explore the tensions and the legal/community issues this controversy raised.” Funding Your Projects from the Crowd “Crowdfunding inverts much that is wrong with traditional funding by breaking down the barrier between creators and audiences, and turning fundraising into a interactive experience. This panel brings together several perspectives from the world of crowdfunding to explain different approaches to raising money from the audience for bloggers, artists, podcasters, developers, filmmakers, musicians, and more.” Wikipedia Gets an Upgrade: Collaborative Video We can’t really get away with talking about the wild world of online publishing without mentioning one of the founding fathers of all that is interactive and communal – Wikipedia . But can Wikipedia really take the next step and go to video? “Wikipedia is the most successful collaborative experiment in human history. Now it’s getting a big upgrade: video. OGG Theora video paired with open source tech by Kaltura is evolving the wiki and prompting some big questions. Can wiki video work as well as wiki text? What does video mean to the Wikipedia community? How long until Grandma can hop in and improve the video entry on her favorite old crooner?” Transmedia 2010: Are We There Yet? While we’re at it, not only have we left the printing press in the dust, but our standard categorization and assembly of media may be on the way out too. So, let’s throw the baby out with the bathwater and get to talking transmedia . And you thought Wikipedia might be complicated. “The promise and possibilities of transmedia storytelling have been on the horizon for several years. The concept involves immersive storytelling that utilizes multiple media outlets concurrently to enhance and advance the narrative. Some see this as a better way of totally involving an ever more fragmented and distracted audience. So join us for a “late breaking” assessment of the state of the movement. Has transmedia finally arrived?” ReadWriteWeb’s Party Continuing along with the idea of traditional and less-traditional media, we’d love it if you stopped by our party on Sunday night! We’re cohosting with NPR, PBS and a few others at KLRU’s Legendary Austin City Limits Studio. We’ll have live bands, Tex-Mex nosh, margaritas – the quintessential Austin experience. Free shuttles will be available at the Hilton. How To Save Journalism With Drew Curtis of Fark , Jeff Webber of USAToday , Kelly McBride of The Poynter Institute and Matthew Palevsky of The Huffington Post , find out how the Internet is going to save, not kill, jouarnalism. “Much has been said about the death of journalism, but little has been offered in way of solutions. This panel will focus on solutions instead of problems, consensus viewpoints from both old and new media, and offer new insights into the operational structure of journalism and media for the 21st century.” A Brave New Future for Book Publishing Bringing it back down to a realm we’ve almost forgotten, what about the life of the good old book? What’s coming next? Will we break out of the binding? “Call SXSW 2009′s infamous ”New Think for Old Publishers” (aka ”Geeks School New York”) a missed opportunity. How did book publishing become the last media industry to embrace digital and how will this change? New publishing models, strategy and a brave future for books and we who love them.” R.I.P. Content Management System What better way to end your SXSW 2010 with a timely prediction of the death of CMS as we know it? “The medium is the message. On the web, the medium is community. This shift has made legacy CMS products as outdated as scribes and printing presses. Open source technologies are disrupting this market and moving into mainstream enterprises. Join Drupal founder Dries Buytaert as he discusses how social publishing will bring content and community together.” Those are our SXSW Interaction recommendations for publishers of all stripes. If you’ve got suggestions or feedback, let us know in the comments! See you in Austin, folks! Discuss

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