Karsten Januszewski on 'sxsw'

Check Out ChaCha

Karsten Januszewski — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:47:00 GMT

Last year at SxSW, I discovered Twitter, which has since grown tremendously and continues to gain momentum. My discovery at SxSW this year? ChaCha. ChaCha is a free service that adds a human factor to a search. Where it really comes in handy is on your phone. Basically, you can text any question to ChaCha and, within 5 - 10 minutes, you'll get an answer, which is usually spot on. For those that don't have internet access on their phone, this is great. But even if you do have internet access, the responses you get from ChaCha are better because they are filtered and parsed by a human. I found their answers quite good and often with a sense of humor as well. Checking out their website, I found out that anyone can become a guide for ChaCha, making $0.20 per answer, which works out to between $4 - $10 an hour. So that is how they scale and how they have people answering questions 24/7.

Pulse: Silverlight 1.0 Mash Up For SxSW

Karsten Januszewski — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:20:00 GMT

Announcing Pulse, which I worked on in conjunction with Frog Design for SxSW Interactive. It is an interactive online community hub for the 2008 SXSW Interactive Festival, keeping users up-to-date on the latest event discussions, videos, and news. The site features premium content from SXSW, including video clips from keynotes and discussion panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site as dynamic as the event it celebrates.

Of course, couldn't help but to do some ego twittering:

Speaking of ego twittering, I saw a fair amount of ego twittering at MIX08 with Flotzam too:

And speaking of Twitter, I'm doing a lot of twittering here at SxSW. Twitter really makes sense at conferences. So, if you are down at SxSW and twittering, let me know: I'm looking for people to follow who are at the conference.

Back to Pulse: Hat's off to the Frog guys for writing a really cool website that is an example of doing AJAX programming with Silverlight. For the video upload and display, we used Video.Show. We are actually running Video.Show in a multi server configuration, which I had to tweak some code to get working. I also turned the video processing application, which was a console app, into an actual NT Service that runs on the encoding server. Another thing I did to the code was remove the requirement to log in for uploading videos or commenting on videos. Now you can do all that anonymously. I will add all of these changes to the codeplex project, although probably not until after SxSW.

2008 SxSW Interactive: Check Out My Session "Why Microsoft Doesn't Suck"

Karsten Januszewski — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:31:00 GMT

I've got a session proposed for the 2008 SxSW Interactive Conference called Why Microsoft Doesn't Suck. More philosophical than technical, this session, if picked, will be a culmination of some ideas that I have been cogitating on for awhile, many of which will start filtering out into this blog. Reading folks like Yochai Benkler and Geert Lovink has inspired me to think beyond code. I am hoping that the re-launch of this blog will provide a place for some of these ideas to come to fruition. First up: what is a rhizohm anywhy? Stay tuned...