I session-hopped; too many interesting sessions this morning.

Cliff Figallo talks about “Putting conversation to work.” He’s one of the founders of The Well and lived on The Farm, a well-known hippy commune, for years; Stewart Brand, the creator of The Well, wanted people with communal experience running it, not businesspeople.

“Attention is energy,” he says: the person being attended to gets energy from it, including people who are being jerks.

Conversations that work, he says, are different than ones where people connect for enjoyment. He’s thinking of conversations as something that organizations do to get their jobs done. “Power imbalances destabilize conversations.” In business conversations, there’s often an imbalance. Thus a “subtext” develops in which you can read the disenfranchisement. To keep a business conversation going, the business has to evolve into something more egalitarian. But within the conversation, first you have to acknowledge the power imbalance. Second, you should have a “full value contract”: everyone agrees that they’re going to listen to one another, respect one another, and do what they can to encourage one another speak.

Warren Spector (“Deus Ex”) and Richard Vogel (“Star Wars”) are talking about games. Spector says that the next step in facial expressions is on the way, coming first maybe from Valve (Half Life 2).

Someone in the audience recommends there.com where you get control over your character’s emotions, but apparently there’s nothing actually to do. Spector says that he thinks Star Wars on line will be the first massively multiplayer game in which “game designers haven’t completely abdicated their duty.”

Spector has had so little success finding writers who can write that now he’s hired programmers who can write. “Thief and Thief 2 are literature with regard to their writing,” he says. (Well, I’ve played Thief and it’s a good game but it isn’t literature. Now, No One Lives Forever is different issue.)

Spector sums up the latest Game Development Conference: Sequels, online stuff, and the process issues involved in game development, and how to come up with games that put players in charge (“Grand Theft Auto”).

Vogel: Agrees. GTA3’s gameplay is “awesome.”

I didn’t go to Po Bronson’s “How to live your life” session because I don’t want to live my life. I want to live Po Bronson’s life.

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The Radisson I’m staying at in Austin has a single meeting room set up with ethernet Net access. So, last night after the excellent EFF party, which I left as soon as the band started up and all conversation ended, I went there to pick up my email. It was about midnight and a handful of 20ish guys were there, along with one similarly-aged woman. The guys turned out to be the band “Trouble Is” who were on their way to LA to play a gig at the Troubador (I think).

I’ve never heard of them, of course. But what a polite group of young people. They worried about my Net connection, apologized for “disturbing me,” and offered to share their vittles. After about 45 minutes, I gave them the “MP3 is not a crime” bumpersticker I’d bought at the EFF party and told them they were giving rock ‘n roll a bad name by being too polite.

And when they began talking about doing a road diary, I got to tell them about weblogs.

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At the 20×2 event, Neal Pollack used his 2 minutes to kick off a campaign to get every weblogger to make fun of Lynn Cheney on April 1 in response to the White House’s heavy-handed attempt to censor a parody of her at WhiteHouse.org.

Fine idea, although we’ve gotten to the point where blatant attempts at censorship by the White House now are way down on my list of Things to Worry About. Sigh.

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At a party at SXSW last night — actually, it was a bizarre event called 20×2 in which twenty people (including me) each gave a 2 minute presentation on the theme “What are you waiting for?” — I talked with a visiting Dutch businessman. After introducing myself by apologizing for my country’s behavior, he said that he was surprised by the loudness of the drumbeats. His example was CNN’s official title for their coverage: “Showdown: Iraq.” “It’s as if they can’t wait for it,” he said. Good point. A showdown has to have an outcome in which someone wins and someone loses. America would never “backdown” from a showdown. But this is a showdown only because we have insisted that it be one. CNN calling it a “show down” ain’t journalism.

What does CNN think it is, a blog?

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Joshua Davis (praystation) gave a keynote that featured beautiful images, mainly drawn programatically in Flash, and sometimes involving multiple transforms between Flash and other graphic apps. Some astounding stuff.

But I found his presentation style grating: a lot of riffing in pursuit of outrageousness. On the other hand, the audience loved him. It’s probably a generational thing. Bring on the fuddy-duddies!

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Cory has pulled together links to various bloggings of the sxsw conference. (At the moment, Josh Davis is revving up his keynote…)

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Thoughtful panel on the future of book publishing.

A single idea from it: Karen Bickner shows a scan of a Whitman draft and compares it with a Microsoft Word document with rev tracking turned on. She says that the publisher doesn’t necessarily have to be the one who preserves the electronic drafts with all the edits in it. She points out that the Whitman draft was preserved not by the publisher but by a collector. Perhaps, she suggests, publishers should work with collectors to save the drafts.

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I popped into four out of the five 10am sessions. I was most surprised by the one on CSS, by far the most heavily attended. The panelists were trying to convince us that style sheets are a good thing. They had excellent demos of how easily you could transform an ugly page into a pretty one just by using CSS to define and re-define the elements. 100% agreement. But why would this audience of Web designers need to be talked into the value of CSS? I hope that the panel was just aiming too low. (One of the panelists pointed to favelets, small utilities including some that will help CSS designers; it requires the use of Microsoft IE, preferably on a Mac.)

I ended up spending the last half of the time segment in the discussion of computers in the classroom. Interesting hard-to-summarize conversation with a lot of healthy skepticism about the effect of plopping computers into schools. E.g., a panelist points out that kids’ non-educational experience of computers encourages speed: “Hurry and get to the next level.” That, she points out, isn’t exactly conducive to learning.

Philip Tarlow, the co-author of Digital Aboriginal, suggests that kids are learning to multitask in a PhotoShop sort of way, i.e., with “layers.” Interesting simile.

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Doc has compiled a list of blogs and comments on World of Ends. I’ve fallen hopelessly behind because I’m at a conference, so I’m especially glad that Doc has been diligent. Oy caramba!

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Stu Rubinow located the page I was looking for that details the gap between Bush’s words and deeds. Why the press focuses on whether Kerry ever said he’s Irish instead of on this is beyond me.

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