Andy Baio: if you've ever heard of the django programing framework, it's named because @adrianholovaty loves jazz guitar
Adrian Holovaty: is playing us guitar instead of speaking
Adrian Holovaty: my internet music story started when I got my dad the MacGyver box set, and I arranged the theme for guitar
Adrian Holovaty: my video on the YT homepage in 2007. 10% positive; 20% you suck; 20% self promo 30% MacGyver humour; 30% Tabs PLZ
Adrian Holovaty: I posted a jazz piece and commenters complained they wanted more 80s theme songs. So I did ducktales.
Adrian Holovaty: Richard Addrisi who wrote "Never My Love" emailed asking me for an MP3 of my version.
Adrian Holovaty: A guy in France on the New Years Eve show used my recording of the America's Funniest Home Videos theme 6M saw it
Adrian Holovaty: People should do more Internet to real life arbitrage. I was the top result for Gypsy Jazz on YouTube, got gigs
Adrian Holovaty: After I played a wedding, I recorded 'here comes the bride' and got lots of requests for the MP3. So I sold it.
Adrian Holovaty: I get about one sale a day for $10 for my Here comes the Bride mp3, and about 1 a week for the Tabs
Adrian Holovaty: A huge proportion of the comments on any guitar piece on YouTube is "can I have the tabs?"
Adrian Holovaty: Guitar tablature misses out all the rhythmic information in standard music notation. So I made soundslice.com
Adrian Holovaty: Guitar tablature misses out all the rhythmic info in standard music notation. So I made soundslice.com
Adrian Holovaty: The intersection of musicians with musician fans and not widely pirated is what Pitch Perfect sells
Adrian Holovaty: We have tabs verified by the artists, sell those and give 70% to the artists: http://www.soundslice.com/pitch-perfect/
Vi Hart: blends maths and music in such a succesful way on YouTube
Vi Hart: just tummeled the entire audience into singing harmonies with her and clapping along
Vi Hart: I did a talk about computational balloon twisting to make a perfect icosohedron
Vi Hart: I have a frozen presentation/and I don't know what to do/but with audience participation/i can make it about you
Vi Hart: I thought "Vi Hart" was my name, but i've been told it is now a brand and not my name any more
Vi Hart: If you're not facespacing your tweetbook then no-one will love you
Vi Hart: when people are in real life you can't just ban or block them.
Vi Hart: If you don't tell people to like your stuff, how will they know they like your stuff?
Vi Hart: I'm releasing all my videos as torrents so I'm not surrounded by youtube stuff
Vi Hart: Reddit attracts a lot of judgmental people because the site is all about judging things
Vi Hart: This song is in AABA form, and the A part is AABA too, and the A is AABA too. It's in fractal form.
Jack Cheng: I worked on a novel in my spare time on nights and weekends for about 3 years, while founding a company
Jack Cheng: there are multiple levels of gatekeeping in publishing. Even a completed book it can take 18 months to get to print
Jack Cheng: it's good to honour examples of success, but we shouldn't worship them
Jack Cheng: JD Salinger wrote Catcher In The Rye while working in counterintelligence in WWII—weeding out the phonies Holden hates
Jack Cheng: Salinger wrote Catcher In The Rye while working in counterintelligence in WWII—weeding out the phonies Holden hates
Jack Cheng: when we make art, novels or songs, they are the purest mirrors of ourselves
Jack Cheng: You don't have to quit your job and go all in on your art. If it's about healing+self discovery you can do it lifelong
Evan Williams: In 1993 I picked up a magazine, Wired. Saffo said "text is the cool new medium" It may have influenced me more than I knew
Evan Williams: In 1993 I made a video about how to get on the internet. I lived in fear for 10 years that someone would find it.
Evan Williams: I worked on blogger for about 6 years. It wasn't about blogging, but realising the promise of the net
Evan Williams: The promise of the net was that everyone could share their thoughts and knowledge with everyone. Blogging did that.
Evan Williams: Back in my video, I described the internet as a puzzle made from computers, from information and from people
Evan Williams: Computers are still part of the internet, but we don't ever see them. We don't even see the wires any more.
Evan Williams: Back then there used to be people on the internet, and people who weren't. Now it's in the air: we make connections with it
Evan Williams: The internet is connections. Not just the links, but every song you play, everything you read, makes a recorded connection
Evan Williams: the internet is a giant machine to get people what they want. It makes human desires easier to fulfil. Convenience.
Evan Williams: Convenience on the internet comes from speed and cognitive ease. I don't want to wait and I don't want to think.
Evan Williams: part of the reason twitter was more convenient was that it reduce cognitive strain by eliminating so many choices
Evan Williams: Google makes it fast and easy. There's one box. You don't even need to spell what you want correctly
Evan Williams: Apple took one click from Amazon, and ruthlessly negotiated with the labels to make it all the same price - cognitive ease
Evan Williams: if you want to make a million dollar internet company, which is why we came to XOXO, make an old desire more convenient
Evan Williams: If you think that the internet superhighway just led to a convenience store, isn't that depressing?
Evan Williams: Agriculture freed us up to do many more things [clearly agriculture is a theme this year]
Evan Williams: the internet can enable us to compete against the conveniences made by mass industrialism. So lets make it worthwhile
Andy Baio: @boingboing must be one of the longest running internet publications. It's impact on culture is very deep.
Glenn Fleishman: BoingBoing was founded as a zine in 1998 by Mark - photocopied, stapled and distributed in record stores and head shops
Glenn Fleishman: the zine had a paywall - you had to fill out a paper form. They also sold t-shirts.
Glenn Fleishman: when California was legalizing marijuana, we thought about starting Bong Bong
Mark Frauenfelder: I wanted a zine that covered my interests - cypherpunks, comics, all the things geeks liked as well as computers
Mark Frauenfelder: instead of buying zines, I ended up trading subscriptions with people and met lots of writers that way
Mark Frauenfelder: What I was interested in about punk was not so much the music as the do it yourself ethos
Julie Uhrman: Television has already changed, we're seeing a new creativity, but it hasn't happened in my creative industry, games
Julie Uhrman: The game consoles are getting very expensive - they want to be the centre of your digital life now
Julie Uhrman: Ouya has been described as "the Sundance of video games"
Julie Uhrman: I can't sing, I only dance in clubs, I don't paint or make games, but I want to enable it
Julie Uhrman: How do you describe Amazing Frog? it has no category - a frog jumping around a carpark in Swindon doing tricks
Julie Uhrman: Astronaut Rescue's lead developer is an 8-year-old boy called Noah
Julie Uhrman: we launched a matching program for Kickstarter projects. We so did not think of all the ways people could take advantage
Julie Uhrman: one thing I can say about our mistakes is that we'll keep making them. We're young and scrappy
Julie Uhrman: the reason you bring your games to Ouya is that every reddit thread, every tweet every blog about it we read
Julie Uhrman: we learnt along the way that there is not much you can plan for. You have to react quickly, but think first.
Julie Uhrman: theres nothing more powerful than a large group of people who believe in you
Andy Baio: there are four Ouya's to be given away at XOXO, tell us what you would like to make with it
Andy Baio: a theme here is fighting Imposter Syndrome - these speakers are just like us, but have something they want to make
Marco Arment: Instapaper was the first 'read later' service. I ran it for 5 years and it was a bit stressful
Marco Arment: there is a stress in running a large web service, and knowing that if you mess up millions of people will be upset
Marco Arment: The problem with parsing web pages is that HTML coders are crazy. They do insane things, and it's your problem
Marco Arment: The Apple Store rejecting your app is a big stressor - they can do it for any reason or no reason
Marco Arment: Apple change the rules all the time. They can add one at any time that bans an important feature of your app
Marco Arment: Then there's these guys, patent trolls [shows Nathan Myhrvold, audience boos] #fixpatents
Marco Arment: whatever patents are supposed to do to promote innovation is a load of crap, and a tax on creators
Marco Arment: My biggest fear is a FedEx overnight envelope, because they always come from lawyers
Marco Arment: for a while Instapaper was unchallenged, but then the others came by, and I didn't take it well
Marco Arment: save for later became a feature of everything - I went from competing with 2 10-person teams to Apple, Amazon et al
Marco Arment: All that competition didn't matter in the end. What mattered was what I did with my product
Marco Arment: Palm, Rim, Sega, 90's Apple all failed because they stopped executing, not because of the competition
Marco Arment: Marketshare doesn't matter - if you have enough people to sustain your business
Marco Arment: You don't need everyone to like you. You don't need everyone to like *only* you. Competition is often additive
Marco Arment: Why am I so bothered that my category became crowded? I have a distaste for doing what everyone else is doing
Marco Arment: I loved You Are Boring by Scott Simpson: http://the-magazine.org/4/you-are-boring#.Uj87s2SY7BQ
Marco Arment: it's easy to be the only coffee snob you know in real life… well, maybe not here. But online they're all there.
Marco Arment: rather than avoiding the crowd, I need to ask if I'm adding anything. Do I need to be there?
Marco Arment: If I'm not adding anything, that's good - I can stop doing it and do something else
Marco Arment: Of course I'm making a podcast app. Because podcasts are awesome.
Marco Arment: Everything is a low barrier to entry in the podcast market
Marco Arment: Podcasts are a very intimate medium. The audience thinks they know you.
Marco Arment: Talking on a podcast is easier than writing, there are a lot of smart people who talk on podcasts before writing.
Marco Arment: big media web publishing is a terrible business - look at all the bullshit on the page of business insider
Marco Arment: the economics of big media web sites is terrible. Podcasts don't allow publishers to do assholish things for money
Marco Arment: the top shows in podcasts will get hundreds of thousands of listeners, but they will be great fans
Marco Arment: Podcasting is a very human medium. No-one is "engaging with your brand" - you can be a person.
Marco Arment: platform n. - A middleman seeking to capture control
Marco Arment: The podcast world is pretty crowded already There's already Apple, Stitcher and others
Marco Arment: Apple has been asleep at the wheel with podcasts for years.
Marco Arment: the more I ask around, the more I hear that nobody loves their podcast app. I'm only 60% happy with them
Marco Arment: with podcast apps there are tons of tiny design decisions to be made along the way
Marco Arment: I'm making my favourite app. If you like it to that's great
Marco Arment: My podcast app is called Overcast - it's about halfway done, but the back end half. http://overcast.fm
Christina Xu: the Awesome Foundation is an international group of guerilla philanthropists
Christina Xu: I don't have an epic origin story. I'll tell you James Erwin's - it started with a reddit comment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Sweet_Rome
Christina Xu: James Erwin lost creative control of Rome Sweet Rome when it got optioned as a movie, so now he's writing Acadia
Christina Xu: We only just worked out what Breadpig is. Rather than being the high and mighty publisher, you are our client.
Christina Xu: if you create a system that only rewards trailblazers, you reward the hugely creative and the already privileged
Christina Xu: The Tyranny of Struturelessness means that the system you can't see is worse than the one you can
Christina Xu: hashtags were a norm that users created [@blaine threatened to filter them out of tweets at one point]
Christina Xu: we need to complicate this idea of disintermediation. Its not just getting rid of the middle man, but changing the system
Mike Rugnetta: the best part of XOXO is watching @waxpancake be exasperated
Mike Rugnetta: I write an internet TV show called Idea Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/pbsideachannel
Mike Rugnetta: the successes of others can give permission to make things
Mike Rugnetta: People describe the internet as D-word tech [andy banned saying 'disruptive]
Mike Rugnetta: Disintermediation implies that there was infrastructure there that is being deconstructed.
Mike Rugnetta: the constructive internet is not a wrecking ball, it's a pathway.
Mike Rugnetta: Shakespeare and Nietzche had fandoms, but the internet makes it possible for them to be with each other
Mike Rugnetta: there must be a fandom without canonical media. There is. That fandom is furries.
Mike Rugnetta: not every creator sets out to create furry media, and the community debates what counts as part of furdom
Mike Rugnetta: the internet has changed the way that people can construct themselves.
Mike Rugnetta: you only know what you think and beleive based on your experiences
Mike Rugnetta: the internet is a tool that lets us peel away all our layers to get to that inside… thing
Mike Rugnetta: the internet is a tool that lets us peel away all our layers to get to that inside… thing