Great blue sky weather greets attendees today coming to Austin, TX for South by Southwest 2010. The interactive, film and music festival has gained the reputation for being the most interesting conference around for creative folks of all stripes.

Ties and suits are frowned upon here, while Chuck Taylor sneakers, scruffy beards and muted T-shirts rule the scene. Attendees find any electrical outlet they can, plop themselves on the ground, open what is typically an aluminum Mac laptop and start searching away:

Where’s the best party? What’s the next interesting session? Where’s the best party? Who’s at what bar? Did I mention, where’s the best party?

Some reflections before things get fully underway:

This Sunday I’ll be giving a talk on Wikipedia, one year after I launched my book at SXSW 2009 (The Wikipedia Revolution). The title: Can Wikipedia Survive Popular Success and Community Decline? Not exactly the most optimistic topic, but it’s a necessary look at the significant statistical shift in contributor numbers, and perhaps introduces a new phase of Wikipedia’s existence.

Even though the SXSW sessions haven’t started yet, there are some interesting trends just from people-watching:

• This year is the coming of age for Digital SLR HD video. The number of “rigs” being carried around SXSW is pretty impressive: Canon EOS 5DMkII full frame and EOS 7D crop frame video systems are prevalent, often with external audio recorders to capture better audio than the auto-level input allows on the camera. I’m eager to hear from filmmakers at SXSW how much DSLR HD video is changing their industry. Just think, for less than $3,000 you can get a jaw-dropping 1080/24p quality video. In the past, you would have to start in the five figures to get access to the same type of lenses at that resolution. This is a rather interesting twist in the DSLR wars — for a while it seemed Nikon finally had found its edge over Canon, by creating better professional gear at reasonable price points (ie. D300). But with my experience at last week’s Venice, CA, Philip Bloom meetup which paraded an amazing array of Canon video gear setups, I’m convinced long term Canon’s experience in video (and Nikon’s lack of it) will lead Canon’s comeback punch in this area. It could very well be why Canon dominates again.
• There’s a more commercial feel this year. Pepsi, Chevy and AOL are taking up the premier spots in the lobby area where attendees tend to hang. Not bad on its own, but Chevy’s displaced the legendary LEGO Pit! What used to be front and center, entertaining kids and adults alike, is now a lounge with leather seats and power plugs. Each day the Lego Pit used to be the meeting point for folks to go to dinner. No longer. SXSW has always been about play — last year there were spontaneous fusillades of elastic foam finger rockets in the hallways. I hope it keeps that character. The LEGO Pit has been spotted elsewhere, but not nearly as central to the “freeway” of SXSW.
  

  Lego Pit always a crowd pleaser at SXSW. It's been moved to lower traffic location.

• FourSquare maturity. The location-based, game-themed social networking service is now fully entrenched as a way to find out where the good parties are. Many bars and hotels here show over 100 “other” people there, and you can get an instant readout as to how long lines are at the popular places. CNET’s Buzz Out Loud calls FourSquare old news at SXSW, with last year being the big splash. Other mainstream outlets are just catching on. Gowalla is making a play in this space too, and I’ve seen more than a few references to it by users here.
• Badges at SXSW now carry a QR code (2D matrix code) so you can quick scan someone’s badge with an iPhone or Android app and it will save it to your my.SXSW list of folks you met. So you should be able to do away with business cards, says SXSW. In theory, at least. It scores a FAIL since it uses a service called DUB in between, and requires a user to enter a username/password to my.SXSW before it works. Most people will likely just give up because it’s too much of a hassle. I did. Not a good user experience to present a blank white screen with username/password. As I told CNET’s Dan Terdiman, at least some basic user info should show up to spark that “Aha!” factor to convince you it’s worth your while. I predict the abandonment rate will be quite high, and few will use the QR scanning feature. The tactility of business cards, especially among creative types, still has resonance.
  

  Example of a QR code on the badges of SXSW attendees

That’s just from walking around before the conference starts.

More to come as the day goes on.

Ever wonder why the weekly ad circulars for Best Buy and Radio Shack use valuable space for promoting expensive HDMI cables, right next to $1000 flat screen TVs and BluRay disc players? The not-so-secret secret — cables are one of the highest margin products in electronics retailing, with markups of 80% not uncommon.

Best Buy/Magnolia advert for a 4 foot HDMI cable: $149

Back in the analog era of turntables and 1st generation CD players, there was some reasonable debate about getting high end, $200 speaker wire, stereo RCA cables or coaxial connectors. In today’s digital age, there is very little to this argument. With digital interconnects, it either makes it or it doesn’t. For any connection less than 6 feet, you should never be paying more than $15.

This week on NBC LA TechRaw, I talk about HDMI cables, used to connect your consumer HD camcorder or BluRay HD DVD player to your flat screen TV. Outlets where I found good cheap HDMI cables for less than $10 include Amazon.com and their AmazonBasics line, Frys Electronics and even Ross Dress for Less. Others in the tech sphere have had luck with Monoprice for their cables.

The bottom line is that you should never be paying the $149+ for digital interconnects (with the very rare exception that you’re doing long runs of 50 foot home installation cables behind walls)

View more news videos at: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/video.

Today’s Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog has a piece about Ron Livingston’s lawyers filing a lawsuit against an anonymous Internet user, in an attempt to identify who’s been editing his Wikipedia article to add rumors that he’s gay. The best legal description I’ve found is at the Copyrights & Campaigns blog:

The complaint includes claims for libel, false light, and violations of Livingston’s statutory and common-law right of publicity, and seeks actual and punitive damages. Presumably Livingston will seek discovery (IP and email addresses and other identifying information) from Wikipedia and Facebook, which they hope will identify the poster. Livingston can then name the individual in the complaint, and proceed against him. Section 230 won’t protect the individual; it only shields the service (i.e., Wikipedia or Facebook) that hosted the material.

The suit is here, as Coupleguys, Inc. vs. John Doe.

In being interviewed by the reporter of the piece, I explained the Streisand effect to him. He mentioned this phenomenon of Livingston trying to combat edits that he’s gay but perhaps bringing more attention to this rumor in the process. The sticky situation about Livingston’s lawsuit (at least according to LGBT groups) is whether calling someone gay is actually “maliciously altering” his article.

My comments about the case pertained instead to the sticky issue of people notable enough to be in Wikiepdia, but not enough to have legions of watchdogs.

According to Andrew Lih, author of “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia” (Hyperion), inaccuracy or vandalism problems are difficult to stop for people who are “notable but not extremely famous,” a category Livingston, best known for his roles in “Office Space”and “Sex and the City,” falls into. Lih, a registered Wikipedia editor and one of 1,000 administrators who oversee the site [his wife is also a reporter for the Journal], said Madonna’s Wikipedia page may have dozens of people watching out for abuse, whereas someone like Livingston rarely receives that kind of attention.

This is roughly the same dynamic that led to the Seigenthaler case, where a fairly notable journalist didn’t have throngs of passionate folks looking out for his article.

And perhaps that’s my worry about a smaller user community than was here in 2007. As the number of articles increase, are there enough watchdogs to keep article quality high, or are other technical measures (flagged revisions, semi-protection, et al.) needed for maintaining quality?

Erik Zachte and Erik Moeller of the WMF blogged recently that contrary to other studies, the core “active editors” has remained stable of late.

On the English Wikipedia, the peak number of active editors (5 edits per month) was 54,510 in March 2007. After a more significant decline by about 25%, it has been stable over the last year at a level of approximately 40,000

Is it enough for that community to have the same numbers, year on year, when that same period saw a growth of over 500,000 articles?

I cannot say that I know, but it is something that gives me pause.

While most gadgets are “Toys for Boys,” I reviewed one that you can share with your spouse. Literally.

The iHome IP88 is an iPod clock radio alarm and speaker system setup for his/her iPod charging. While the sound quality isn’t spectacular, it is nice to have a compact, functional way to charge and play from two different iPods or iPhones. It can even sync the time from your handheld device. Price of $149 a bit high, but if you’re a CostCo member, it can be had for $99.

This week on NBC LA TechRaw I review the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-ZS3 which has the trifecta of what I’m looking for a compact point and shoot:

• Wide angle and long zoom lens (25mm to 300mm in film terms)
• 720p high definition video, optical zooming works while recording (!)
• Beautiful optical quality (Leica lens)

It finally is a decent all-in-one package for journalists in terms of visual quality. The only missing element is an external microphone jack for great audio interviews. It lists for $349, and can easily find it for less than $300 at online retailers.

View more news videos at: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/video.

The Wikimedia Foundation has responded to the recent press attention started by the WSJ piece about Wikipedia participation on the decline.

The main takeaway from chief data analyst Erik Zachte and deputy director Erik Moeller is that the decline has happened since March 2007, but the number of participants seems to have stabilized at around 40,000 making at least 5 edits a month. (The English language Wikipedia seems to have a slight downward trend over the last two years, but this may not be statistically significant)

This is in contrast with researcher Dr. Felipe Ortega’s numbers, where he measures a participant as someone with at least one edit, which would of course make for a much more jittery number. He calculated a departure of 49,000 editors. His stats aren’t wrong, but is the interpretation of them right? This brings up the question — what does it mean to “depart” Wikipedia?

There is a Missing Wikipedians page that has been maintained for many years now, to document people who haven’t been seen for a while. It’s often a big guess as to whether people are dormant, coming back, or long gone. Wikipedians typically do not depart with a definitive reason or declaration of their disillusionment.

Even with a stable number of “active” contributors, what does this mean as the number of articles keeps growing past 3 million? Journalist Jennifer 8 Lee of the NY Times asked me in Twitter, is the ratio of editors per article important, or is editors per number of edits?

How do bots, and other technical features such as semi-protection and autoconfirming editors aid in relieving human editors from the drudgery of vandal fighting, and augment editors’ ability to add useful editorial content? The role of bots is tough to measure, but merits more research. With roughly 2 edits per second in the English Wikipedia, human efforts alone cannot keep up with the traffic. It is possible the technical systems implemented during the decline since 2007 have compensated for the community decline. There’s lots for further study here.

Today’s WSJ has an article by Julia Angwin and Geoff Fowler: Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages and the associated Digits blog post. It’s one of the best reported stories so far on the dropoff in numbers in Wikipedia (and it’s not just because they quoted me).

The article taps all the right folks: founder Jimmy Wales; WMF’s Sue Gardner and Frank Schulenberg; WMF board of trustees members Sam Klein and Kat Walsh; and many researchers of the project ranging from Mathias Schindler to Ed Chi. It’s hard to argue the plateau is something that can be dismissed lightly.

Perhaps the greatest fear is that Wikipedia will decline not with a bang, but a whimper. Why? Wikipedia has usually made its big strides from reacting to massive public relations “bangs.” Whether it was the Seigenthaler incident that restricted anonymous editing, or upped the requirement for verifiability and reliable sources, Jimmy Wales has been able to push through tough community changes in reaction to obvious public problems.

The alarming thing about a slow decline in Wikipedia’s quality is that there may be no flashpoint to rally around. A slow, low-level infiltration of spam and non-neutral edits may be occurring that the shrinking community may not be able to police.

At SXSW 2010, I’ll be doing a solo talk on this exact topic: “Can Wikipedia Survive Popular Success and Community Decline?” I welcome any and all theories related to this question, either in email or as comments to this post.

Here is an extended video interview I did with the Journal’s Angwin about this.

Last night I joined CNN’s Campbell Brown to comment on China, Google, and Green Dam software. I’m glad she asked more than the usual basic questions when it comes to filtering and censorship. See the link or the clip below (which may not work in Safari on Mac):

In my latest Tech Raw device review, I conclude the Apple Magic Mouse is like a high heeled shoe: beautiful if a bit impractical.

I’m getting more used to this low profile, nearly flat mouse but it’s a heavy aluminum and plastic unit that still falls short of a real three button, scroll wheel mouse. Its swipe gestures while nifty, may not be that useful for many folks. When more people use Snow Leopard MacOS X 10.6 the “momentum scrolling” the advantage of this mouse might be greater.

You can see the original Tech Raw site, or read my extended review.

View more news videos at: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/video.

Today I did a video review of Apple’s Magic Mouse for NBC News Raw (video to be posted later), but here’s a more detailed overview.

Apple’s had a bad modern history with designing mice.

It stemmed from Steve Jobs’s stubbornness from the 1980s to avoid a second button on the original Mac mouse. When Apple finally relented in 2005, and a second button capability was added, it wasn’t a physical switch but a finicky touch sensitive part of the surface of the Mighty Mouse. In an attempt to provide scrolling capability, it sported a small “scroll ball” about the size of a ball bearing, which proved far inferior to the scrolling wheels on much cheaper mice.

Magic Mouse side profile

That brings us to the Magic Mouse, which promises to transcend the physical shortcomings of mice past by making the entire top “Multi-Touch” and promising iPhone like functionality from an external device. Its features are impressive but its fashion forward design undercuts its usefulness.

There’s no doubt about it, this is a beautiful device. With a low curved plastic piece on top of a rather heavy aluminum base, it’s certainly $69 worth of quality. The mouse body is not much thicker than an iPhone, which is one of its problems — you find your hand is not very comfortable manipulating something so flat, curved and narrow. While Logitech and Microsoft have optimized their generations of mice to create thicker, more hand fitting shapes, Apple’s gone the opposite way by making something resembling half of a Dove soap bar.

As a Bluetooth mouse, it communicates with modern Macs without a pesky USB dongle and pairing it with your computer is simple. The left mouse button and right mouse button work as expected once you configure things in the System Preferences. If you swipe a finger down the middle of the mouse, it scrolls down any web page or list. You don’t get the positive physical feedback of a true wheel, and it takes some time to get used to. Swiping with two fingers across the mouse while keeping it stationary with your thumb and pinky takes a bit of practice, as it’s a motion no one has ever had to do before. If you’re successful, it helps to navigate web pages by moving forward and backwards through your browsing history. This is where the Magic Mouse’s heft comes in. With an aluminum base, this is one heavy mouse for its size, but it means it doesn’t slide too much when you’re swiping its surface. Gone on this mouse are the two side squeeze buttons that came with the Mighty Mouse which could be configured but typically brought up Apple’s Dashboard utilities. It’s odd to see Apple remove features like this it previously touted.

What the mouse lacks is Windows support, the ability to simulate a third middle button and any type of zooming functions by pinching gestures on the touch surface  (ala the iPhone). There is a “momentum” feature that does mimic iPhone functionality by simulating the physics of page scrolling, but this is only possible in MacOS Snow Leopard 10.6. It uses two AA batteries and Apple claims that power lasts up to four months.

In the end, is it a worthwhile device? People who love using mice with the Mac will probably be happy with the Magic Mouse, and perhaps those in graphic arts who use Photoshop and other design programs. For everyday use, however, the position of the flat and low mouse is awkward, and I can see getting cramps and a gnarled hand.

Like women’s high heeled shoes, this mouse is beautiful and dazzling, but questionable for long term wear (Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo come to mind). Just finding a Magic Mouse in stock was actually tough in the Los Angeles area. In the end it was at the Apple Store at The Grove, among high end boutiques and fashion stores that had one unit reserved for me. And perhaps that’s exactly the way it was meant to be.