My SXSW panel, High Class and Low Class Web Design, is over now, and I can now share a little bit of about how I and a few others think it went.

Some bloggers who attended the panel have already published their own notes and reviews, too, so if you want to skip what I think and just read some outside opinions, please do so.

• Sam Felder (very thorough raw notes)
  
• Fast Company/Brian Reich (good comment/discussion here)
• Scot Hacker (raw notes plus interesting commenters)
• David Panarelli (nonplussed)
  
• Laura Creekmore (nice real-time commentary)
  
• Liz Henry (very thoughtful insights)
  
• Mani Sheriar (some personal insights)
• Gordon Luk (unique and interesting perspective)
• Brett Roegiers
• Kathleen Waugh
• Matthew Magain
• Scott Fiddelke (very long raw notes)
• Sara Smith
• (more as I find them…)

And if you attended the panel yourself, I’d love to hear your thoughts, both about the panel and the subject itself, in the comment area.

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A strange part of the US real-estate boom is the housing construction boom. Across America, brand-new housing developments are sprouting up like kudzu vines, tearing down forests and farmland to build new housing as fast as possible. Behind this are many factors: immigration, ongoing white flight from the cities, the growth of suburban sprawl, the emergence of technology boom towns, and other geographic and economic factors.

The dominant architectural style of this new growth has an overt “country” look, a kind of caricature of 19th century quaint Americana: gabled roofs, whitewashed siding, twisting rolling streets with absurdly Anglophilic names like “Greyswallow Terrace” and “Cedarpost Square” (names obviously generated by a computer program, as they have absolutely no relevance to the actual landscape or history of their location), plenty of grassland (although, generally, a sad lack of trees). They stretch across the landscape as far as the eye can see, and the consistency of their style strongly evokes the conformity of the 1950’s Levittown housing model.

Sometimes they are single-family standalone dwellings (”McMansions“, the fatter and more ostentatious cousin of what I’m talking about here), sometimes they are multiple-unit buildings with a single-family façade. Occasionally these “homes” (they never call them “houses”, always “homes”) will have a slightly-urban “townhouse” feel, with splotches of red brick and perfunctory sidewalks, but even these units will generally be topped off with the requisite white siding and pointed roofs.

The general style seems, I think, to be a hybrid of the country estate and the urban housing project, marrying the illusion of landed aristocratic luxury with the logistical efficiency of cookie-cutter subsidized apartment life.

Unfailingly, this housing trend always reminds me of the movie Back to the Future Part II. MORE…

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On election night last week, we were channel surfing and comparing the coverage by the various networks. We ended up for a spell at Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert exchanged snappy banter with each other in a kind of parody of network news coverage.

Surprisingly, there was a part of me that found it a little tiresome, and I thought to myself “Why don’t these guys just talk like normal people and tell us about the election results, instead of all this rehearsed repartee?”. They were acting out scripted set-peices and skits, or riffing on the results by digging into a selection of pre-planned gags and jokes.

Of course, this is Comedy Central, so the scripted quality of the “reportage” is to be expected. Still, despite our deep appreciation for CC’s two “anchors”, we grew impatient and craved the hard news coverage that only a real network can offer. So we resumed by surfing on over to Oppositeland: Fox News.

I immediately noticed that the narrative and theatrical quality and structure of Fox’s coverage was really no different from Comedy Central’s. Each pundit was talking to the other pundits as if the other person didn’t already know what they were going to say, and yet it was clear that everyone knew exactly what everyone else was going to say. Their conversations were fake in every way — not quite scripted, exactly, but so incredibly contrived as to be basically a kind of vaudeville act. MORE…

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On Election Day (Tuesday!), please bring a camera with you to your polling place and take some pictures of American democracy in action. Then submit your photos to the ingenious Polling Place Photo Project, which will document every one of America’s election locations through good old fashioned web-based citizen journalism.

I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of the kinds of fascinating, inspiring, and troubling things this project will potentially reveal about America’s crazy democratic process, both the good and the bad: the rogues gallery of different kinds of voting methods and machines, the long confusing lines, the aggressive party electioneers, the intimidating highway patrolmen, the hard-to-find locations… and the dedicated voters waiting as long as it takes to vote, the helpful volunteers managing the process — maybe we’ll even see some well-designed signage. Not to mention the pride in seeing the faces of American voters doing what is admittedly an inconvenient but ultimately rewarding civic obligation. I really look forward to seeing the results of this project.

To learn more, please visit the project’s official site, which has lots of helpful information about how to legally photograph your polling place and how to submit your images to the project’s web site.

Oh, and while you’re hanging around your polling place taking photographs, you should vote. Probably for a Democrat. Unless you live in Vermont’s Windham-2, in which case you should vote Progressive. Thank you!

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It seems laughably obvious that this supposedly cutting-edge voting device will feel positively ancient in only a couple of years. It already looks like a cheap peice of crap to me, hardly something worthy of being integral to the American democratic process. And believe it or not, this photo was taken in 2004 — even though it looks a lot more like it’s from 1994 (think Windows 3.1).

In 2004, Behavior worked on a web site for the Smithsonian Museum of American History’s special exhibition Vote: The Machinery of Democracy. The exhibition focused on America’s “voting patchwork”, the broad range of voting technologies used state by state, county by county. It was an enlightening experience working on the project, and I encourage you to visit the site to learn about how we got to where we are now.

The current range of voting technologies in use today includes:

• Paper Ballots
• Gear-and-Lever Voting Machines
• Punch Cards
• Optical Scan Ballots and Readers
• Direct-Recording Electronic Ballots

It’s widely assumed that the most modern technology available is obviously the best option — that is, that we should be using touch-screen direct-recording electronic voting machines. But maybe this isn’t the case — counterintuitively, perhaps an older technology is the best approach. MORE…

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WWBFD? Benjamin Franklin took for granted that part of his role as a technologist with access to mass media (he was, after all, a printer and publisher) was to make public arguments about his own political views. If he were around today, and I know that this isn’t an original thought, he’d almost certainly be a blogger. Ben Franklin is far and away my favorite “Founding Father”. BFF!

It’s almost cliche by now to talk about how the Internet has empowered regular people by giving them the tools to reach a broader audience than was possible in ye olde tymes, particularly in the realm of politics. I am still surprised, however, that so few popular bloggers bother to express their political thoughts online.

I write about politics here fairly often, for two reasons.

The first reason is self-centered: Writing about politics is personally clarifying and cathartic. It allows me to take my jumbled thoughts and emotions regarding what I read in the news and form them into a concrete opinion, which in turn gives me a sense of clarity about my views, forcing me to attempt to answer the not-so-obvious questions. It also simply lets me rant and get things off my chest (something that can probably be said about almost every blog post ever written by anyone, political or not).

The second reason is outwardly-focused, and perhaps a little idealistic: I want to use my voice to actually effect change in the world, to have some impact on the thoughts and opinions of other people by inspiring them to say and do things knowing that there are other people who think the same way. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t imagine that my little blog posts will reach the desks of important politicians and inspire them to change their positions on issues I care about. Nor do I think that my scintillating political writing will inspire millions of people and sway elections. I’m not delusional.

But I do think I can have a more modest kind of impact among the hundreds of people who read graphpaper.com regularly: By publicly articulating my opinions, I hope to (a) give some degree of moral support and maybe even a little boost of courage to others who share that opinion, and (b) provide the rhetoric and logical arguments to help them clarify their ideas and even to share them with other citizens via discussion or even debate.

You see, I believe that one of the main reasons politics is so messed up in America today is because most of us are afraid to discuss politics in public. We’re afraid of talking about it with our friends, coworkers, and families. And because we don’t discuss it, we don’t think about it and we don’t take action. And because of this lack of debate, bad stuff happens.

For example, the reason why the Iraq War happened in the first place, and the reason why it was allowed to be managed so incompetantly for so long, was in some part because the taboo against talking about politics prevented people from saying out loud, or even articulating internally to themselves, what they suspected in their hearts: that Bush’s vision for success in Iraq was (at best) a shot-in-the-dark fantasy. Those who might have opposed the war in the first place looked out among their friends and across America for voices of opposition and heard almost nothing, primarily because not enough people were taking the simplest of all political actions, talking.

I think it’s every American’s duty to make their political opinions known to their friends and peers, and to engage in political discussions, whether in the form of civil debate or plain old righteous argument, with their closest associates. I think this responsibility extends particularly to those of us with above average voices, that is, to those of us who blog.

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