Development Seed Blog

Over the past few months, spam has become something like a daily conversation topic for us. It's now a nearly ubiquitous part of internet experience, showing up most prominently in email inboxes, website comment threads and discussion boards. Since we can’t seem to avoid it (and frequently get questions about it), we thought it would be worth addressing how we're thinking about spam in general and then sharing some of our plans for dealing with it.

One of the common questions we get is, “Why do spammers even bother?” It’s an honest question, since (most likely) neither you or anyone you know has clicked on a link from a spammer in a long time. So why do they keep at it? Where could the money possibly be?

SXSW is over (at least for most of us geeks…it’s still going strong for the rock stars). The ends of things always seem worth recapping, so that’s what I thought I would do here.

What was the biggest thing that everyone was talking about at SXSW this year? At least at the sessions I went to, I’d say it was the disappearance of the internet from our lives and what it will mean for everyone. Not that it will cease to have a presence in our lives, but exactly the opposite — that the web’s pervasiveness and its full integration with other technology is nearing a crucial point, after which we will gradually start forgetting it is there. With the internet having been a novelty for the past decade, this paradigm shift will have a huge impact on advocacy organizations and campaigns (and everyone else). Like the telephone and TV before it, simple use of the media will not establish anything special. Using the internet well will increasingly have more to do with being clever and with serving constituents, and it will have less to do with buying the fanciest new tools.

At any given time at SXSW, starting at 10 am and ending some time close to 2 am, there are 8 or more events happening simultaneously. It gets exhausting after 5 days, but there have been some great highlights.

Mobile conversations of all kinds have been interesting, ranging from designing applications and sites for the mobile web and mobile devices to using a single mobile phone to provide internet and telephony access to an entire village in Sub-Saharan Africa. Taken together, the “point” appears to be that the distance between mobile devices and our desktop computing is blurring, and will continue to do so. Integrated communications technologies and strategies will be the way of the future.

Some of the really neat ideas that I’ve heard discussed:

SXSW is officially two days under way, and it’s been a great time so far. After thousands of people stood in line for hours on Friday to get their badges, the real activity started yesterday. (Friday night really, but that’s a different story.)

I’ve been to two standout presentations so far: “Turning Projects into Revenue Generating Businesses,” and the opening plenary session with Kathy Sierra of CreatingPassionateUsers. Neither had obvious correlations to building sites in Drupal for NGO’s, but I was surprised by amount of crossover. It’s always good to get perspectives on your work from people far outside of your daily network of interactions.