I already have a couple of amazing panelists in mind:

David Weekly: Had a number of small ventures before building PBwiki (now PBworks), which “had more attention in two weeks than [his] year-and-a-half old project.” More on that in a presentation by him.

Paul Bragiel: Founded Meetro, a location-based IM client. Then, shut it down and took the lessons learned, and the same team, to then build Lefora.com – a hosted forum solution.

Please provide your input in the comments section of the panel picker. Who else is an expert on fucking up?

When you’re done voting, tweet this:

Find out “How to Fuck Up Properly” in @kadavy’s SXSW panel. Vote for it here: http://tr.im/wMDL

Other Panels of Interest

Online workteam building and management platform, oDesk is heading up an interesting panel on remote-work best practices, called Kill Your Cubicle.

Online dating tips expert Russ Ruggles plans to explain his theories in a presentation called How to Get a Date Online.

Go vote! Thanks for your support!

It all started with a Blogger account (I’ve since migrated platforms twice). I still get a kick out of reading the first blog post:

Okay, I’m finally trying out this blog thing. I don’t really have any particular intentions for this blog, except to ramble (and perhaps inform) about design, web design and the like. I looked around and saw some very impressive blogs all organized into categories and I was pretty intimidated…only to find out blogger.com seems to make all of that pretty easy. I’m glad I decided to just jump into it. I have a tendancy (sic), when I’m learning something new, to try to take in every detail of something before I attempt it. The result is a sort of paralysis. So, since I don’t know much about blogging yet, and it seems there is a decent amount to know, I’m just going to barf this out and clean it up later.

My favorite part is where I say “I’m just going to barf this out.” It’s amazing how a tiny little snowflake of an impulse can snowball into something greater. When I started this blog, so many people in my life were downright confused as to why I would put my precious evenings, weekends, and even an entire week of vacation time, into doing essentially the same thing I did for a living (I’m not sure if that sounds strange to people – but if it does: keep in mind, I grew up in Nebraska, which I connect to the fact that almost nobody surrounding me had genuine interests or passions that they actively pursued). I had no explanation for them – nor for myself – other than that I couldn’t think of not wanting to do this. I felt a sensation not unlike hunger in the pit of my stomach, and restless urgency in the first knuckles of my fingers.

But it’s those things for which you can stay up until 4am – those things that make you get out of bed in the middle of the night because you can’t get them out of your head – that are most worth pursuing. Having this blog provided a place where I could do things my way. Whenever I may have been coerced throughout the work day to cut corners and sacrifice quality – or to not take risks – to not let things be fun, there was always the blog. Through this blog, not only did I hone professional skills that enabled me to escape the cornfields of Nebraska to work in the richest entrepreneurial environment in the world, I was also able to unlock an undiscovered passion for writing, for sharing knowledge, and – in turn – helping others.

I’m still hungry and restless; but to me this is much more than just a blog. It serves as a reminder that you can’t connect the dots moving forward. You have to have a mound of clay (or barf) before you can make a sculpture people. Barf it out!

So, to all of you kadavy.net subscribers (I love you, BTW): yeah, sorry for not telling you sooner, but you probably already know if you’re following me on Twitter. No, sorry (or don’t worry – depending on how you look at it), I won’t be updating you here every time a new episode comes out. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel, where you’ll see the show, as well as a few bonus videos here and there.

From any given episode of 8 Things This Week, you can expect to get a cool tip or two, some random observations from my week, and an amusing song; and hopefully a laugh or two. Please pass it on to your friends, let me know what you like, let me know what sucks, and let me know if you want me to just stop altogether.

The first two episodes are below:

Here’s some general instructions:

• Make/find your beard design. Draw a picture on my face with skitch. Or just find an nice beard pic on the web. Just have some visual representation you can link to.
• Submit your design. Twitter an @reply to @kadavy, and add the hashtag #kadavy30
• Tune in to see what designs win.

Also, you can use this template, designed by Arlo:

Facebook disabled my account, and didn’t tell me why. The other day, as I was trying to comment on a Lifehacker thread using their super-cool Facebook Connect integration, I received this message:

HUH?! Disabled? How could my account be disabled? How could they take away from me my main means of communicating with my friends back in San Francisco, and everywhere else? Now I can’t even play Scrabble with my own mother!? Oh, yeah, AND WHY THE FUCK WAS MY ACCOUNT DISABLED?

At first I thought maybe it was this Tweet:

I figured, probably the words “teen sex”, followed by a link, set off some sort of flag when it was syndicated to my status message. One would think they would have a more sophisticated system for screening these things, but whatever. I sent them a message explaining this may have been it.

Then it was pointed out to me that since this tweet started with an “@” it probably wasn’t syndicated to my status message. The mystery continues.

Then I remembered a message I got a few weeks ago, regarding a video I posted that included a song by Spoon.

Hello,

We have removed your video entitled “Proportional Design Technique Time Lapse” uploaded at 8:20pm February 4th, 2009. We did this because we learned that your video might include copyrighted material owned by a third party, such as a video clip or background audio.

If you are the copyright owner, or have permission from the rights holder to upload and distribute this material on Facebook, you may file a counter notice of alleged infringement by following the link below.

Please note that if you re-upload this video without filing a counter notice, or if you upload another video that infringes on the rights of a third party, our system will again remove the content. This could cause your access to the Facebook Video application to be disabled, or your Facebook account to be disabled.

For any other questions, view our Help page.

The Facebook Team

“Okay,” I thought. A little anal, considering the video is only being shared with my friends, but whatever. Typical sort of language for this thing: “this could cause your access to the Facebook Video application to be disabled, or your Facebook account to be disabled.” Surely this language is for flagrant offenders. Anyway. Done deal. I can go on with my life, and spend the rest of my days throwing as many sheep at my friends as I wish.

Well, I guess there was one other video I had up that had a copyrighted song. A little experiment I did with processing.org and a Crystal Castles tune. I uploaded this video well before the Spoon one, so I didn’t think to take it down. Besides, they’ll just take it down and send me another message. Right? Right?

So, I’m left to assume that this was the egregious violation I had committed – putting up a video with a soundtrack that included a copyrighted song. By a group that, incidentally has had some copyright troubles themselves.

It’s been about 48 hours since my account was disabled, and still no comment from Facebook, or response to my inquiry. It’s as if my very existence has just gone into the ether. All those comments from my regular status updates via Twitter – shall be no more. Unless I get my account back.

Oh yeah, and that Facebook application that I spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours developing (which was also just about killed by the new API) what happens to that?

• Something is fucked here: yes, I did violate the Facebook Terms of Use by uploading a copyrighted video. In fact – TWO of them. But really guys? Disable my account? And cut off access to a portion of my business without word of when, why, whatTF? That’s a dick move. Would the same happen were I to publish a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night, or a picture of The Lone Cypress?
• Everyone should know: Facebook needs to know that if they are going to encourage users to invest their entire social lives in their platform, and to entrust them with housing and managing all of this personal data, those users – excuse me – PEOPLE are going to need to know that access to their own personal data isn’t going to be destroyed on little more than a whim.
• So, those of you on the inside can you start one of those Facebook group thingies? Join this group (thanks, Fayza). Get the word out that Facebook is very unforgiving with their policies, and can destroy this account you hold dear without notification.

If you’re on Twitter, please tweet this:

Save @kadavy! Facebook disabled his account: http://tr.im/h7Ji Please ReTweet!

Be careful what you trust Facebook with. After this experience, I made this video about it:

Photo by willgame

Or, if you don’t have 20 minutes to spare, here’s a SlideShare version, complete with summarized comments:

1. The SustainLane presentation I spoke of is now available on the Green Festival website. Just click on the “launch greenfestival radio” button and find it in the player. It’s currently in the track #42 position. If you’re itching to skip ahead to my part, I start right around the 7:15 mark.
2. I was recently a special guest on Be A Design Cast by my friends Nate Voss and Donovan Beery at Be A Design Group. It seems the internet tubes that the sound was traveling through from San Francisco to Omaha caused somewhat of an echo – they should really install some drapes or carpeting in them.