SXSW Interactive Community Blog

In addition to checking out what’s new in interactive, film, and music, I am also attending SXSW Interactive for work. Are any e-learning, information/instructional design attendees on here? Maybe we can get together for lunch or a happy hour during the festival.

I’ve written some restaurant recommendations. I’ve downloaded all the movie trailers and have a songs bit torrent loaded from the SXSW Web site. Does anyone have any panels other than their own that they’d recommend? I haven’t been to SXSW Interactive in a few years. Things like Podcasting, SEO, and such has happened. Anything else that might be good to look into this year?

If you’d like to get a bit more into the influences that inspired me to propose the Beyond Folksonomies panel, listen to the podcast that Tom Parish recorded with me last week in his south Austin studio. I’ve also written  a bit of an intro on the BeyondFolksonomies blog.

Also, while I’ve got your attention. I noticed that there isn’t a general panel discussion for how to get the most out of SXSW-interactive this year. Evidently, the number of proposed panels, and the number of attendees has skyrocketed over last year (woo hoo, good signs). The biggest motivation for proposing this panel was my attendance at SXSW-interactive for the first time last year.  It was fantastic, but I wanted to know how I could connect with people more consistently on the topics that were presented. That’s how I got started on the folksonomies track, and now, well, I guess you could say I’ve become a bit of an evangelist!

Guess who’s biz-ack . Last year’s Blogging While Black panelists are back for another round. This year we’ll discuss the how of identity blogging: the face you present to your audience and the larger blogging community.

Specifically (assuming we have time, of course), we’ll discuss:

• To reveal or not reveal? Private vs. public self, virtual vs. real self and why do we make the connections we do?
• Who is your intended audience and who are you actually reaching? Are you writing for others like you or for everyone?
• Individual or collective? Tensions between speaking for yourself and speaking for your identity group.
• (How) Do you reconcile your various identities online?
• Dealing with unvited guests: Flames, arguments and ways of handling them.

Stop by and see us. Our panel is scheduled for Sunday, March 12 from 5 - 6 p.m. This year’s panelists:

• Tony Pierce
• Lynne d Johnson, BlackThoughtWare
• George Kelly, All About George, Negrophile.com
• Jason Toney, Negro Please
• Monique Judge
• Tiffany B. Brown, BlackFeminism.org

Just a quick note to cordially invite all web developers, web designers, information architects and others interested in XML to our Saturday morning panel entitled “Looking for XML in all the Wrong Places.”

Basically, we’re going to talk about all the bad things that can happen if you’re not careful with XML–in fact, there will probably be no shortage of bad things that we’ve seen happen on projects.

Panelists include:

• Thomas Myer, founder of Triple Dog Dare Media and author of No Nonsense XML Web Development with PHP.
• Simon St. Laurent of O’Reilly and author of (among other things) XML: A Primer and Building XML Applications.
• Giussepe Ferrigno, systems architect with Hart Intercivic.
• Jennifer Linton, XML consultant with ComTech Services (JoAnn Hackos’ crew).

The panel starts at 10:00 am on Saturday March 11, 2006. Hope to see you there!

OK, I’ll be the first to say it. Some of the best BBQ in Austin is Artz Rib House, 2330 South Lamar. Great food. Good music. West Texas atmosphere (some would say South Austin atmosphere). The real deal.

Best French restaurant in Austin: Chez Nous, 510 Neches, just a block or two from the Hilton. Doesn’t take reservations, but if you get a table, you can sit there and talk all night, just like a Parisienne. My wife and my favorite restaurant.

I’m Joel Greenberg. I’ve been talking at SXSW Interactive since the first one, I think it was around 1995 or so at the Hyatt Regency. Back then, I spoke about cross platform development–how quaint. This year, I’ve put together a panel on What People are Really Doing on the Web with some top notch researchers answering that question with real data. OK, I’ll say it, they’re research superstars!

I’ve been involved in interactive…whatever…since before there was a QuickTime 1.0. Anyone remember Interactive Video Disk? (Beat you there, too, Molly. Smackdown!)

I track trends in society, culture, and technology at the Austin ad agency, GSD&M. I have a small podcast where I interview interesting people at Friends Talking. Sometimes I blog at MIT’s Convergence Culture Blog. Sometimes, I hang out in Second Life.

Welcome to Austin! Stop by, say hi.

I made it (finally) to my first SXSW last year. Spoke on two panels. Met a few heros. Saw a few bands play live. Had a great time. This year I’m moderating the final panel on the final day… we’ll see who straggles in. It should be a good one, though, featuring a few people from Make Magazine and a few other D.I.Y. media production types. The panels called “Consumer as Producer” or something like that. More on this when I’m not in a hurry to get out of my office and get to a political meeting. (Or didn’t you know that Democracy for America is still going strong?).

Meanwhile, check out my personal blog, of course, or the one I write for the man!

David Swedlow here. Second year in attendance, but hard to believe given that I’ve lived in Austin since the very first SXSW. What the hell was I thinking. All I know is that I won’t miss another!

And the only reason that I attended last year was that I had one of the honest-to-goodness voice-from-above experiences. I had a family vacation to Branson, MO all planned out with the wife and kids, and the day before departure, I realized that I just had to attend SXSW. I sent the family off without me and I had the best 5 days in recent memory.

The only thing that I could think of that would have definitely improved my experience was some way to connect with others of similar interest. Thinking about that issue since last March eventually led to me proposing the Beyond Folksonomy panel as a way of investigating how we can better harness the collective intelligence. The surprise is that not all of the solutions are technical.

Check out the panel on Saturday and the blog at beyondfolksonomies.com. We’ll be posting info for a dinner gathering to discuss the issues further for those interested.

My personal blog is at: opposablemind.typepad.com