SXSW Interactive Community Blog

I’ve posted a recording to the Internet Archives of Kyle Marchulis demoing his teledildonics device in a hotel room in the Drikill Hotel on Saturday night at SXSW 2006.

http://tinyurl.com/znc5a

Kyle runs the open source teledildonics website www.slashdong.org and was a panelist on “The Secret Sex Life of Games” panel this year.

Click here to find out how:

 http://www.nodrugtesting.com/

Enjoy the rest of the Fest!

-shannon batson

Hey there. I’m kicking myself for not getting into Austin today to see this weekend’s jammin’ Interactive panels. This year I wanted to get a taste of the Music Fest, so not getting in till Sunday.

Hope many of you will turn out for the darknets panel at 11:30 am Monday morning. I’m no fan of panels where they line up two Official Spokespersons from one side to face off against two Official Spokespersons from the other side. So you’ll forgive us if we try to move beyond the way this question is usually framed — file-sharing pirates vs. digital anarchists — and tackle more interesting questions, about the limits (if any) of online privacy, whether “lightnet” values can work in a secure private network, whether freenets can serve as a bulwark against corporate interests, and whether artists can benefit from enclosed or public p2p networks.

We have some cool panelists, including Ian Clarke, in town all the way from Edinburgh, Scotland, and Kori Bernards from the MPAA.

Catch me in between sessions this week and ask me about the latest goings-on with Ourmedia.org, the nonprofit grassroots media community.

Besides our presentation on how we are giving away $25,000 to innovative cancer fighting ideas on  the Adobe Day Stage, we are also hosting a “Geek Lunch” series where we will talk about some of the technology our org is using in innovative ways. Hope to see you at either of these events. You can RSVP here for both of those events: http://upcoming.org/event/62240/

Tags: SXSW:Futuring:non-profit tech 

I’m Paul Chaney and I’ll be moderating the How to Make $$ With YOur Blog Design Skills session featuring four of the best blog designers on the planet. (In fact, they may be the ONLY blog designers on the planet, not sure.) Their names are Joelle Reeder of Moxie Design Studios, Lisa Sabin or E. Webscapes, Peter Flaschner of The Blog Studio and last, but certainly not least, Susie Gardner, of Hop Studios and author of the book Buzz Marketing with Blogs For Dummies.

If you are a web designer who has ever considered designing blogs, we’d like to invite you to attend this event. These people are all terribly overworked and want to see some more blog designers join the party. The session is Saturday, March 11, from 3:30 - 4:30 in room 18D. We’ll see you there.

Earlier this week, I interviewed Shawn O’Keefe of SXSW Interactive. Listen to him discuss the upcoming festival and various issues in our interactive world.

Here’s a little bit more about Ektron’s Day Stage presentation for web developers and designers, “Putting Buzzwords to Work on the Web.”

Ektron’s chief technical officer Bill Cava, a former architect at Lycos and a man with a serious passion for Internet technology, software architecture and user-centric interface design, will be discussing Web 2.0 buzzword technologies, such as blogging, RSS, tagging, AJAX and threaded discussions, and their practical application using web content management tools.

During the 30-minute session, Bill will take you through:

·         The promise of interactive websites – what the whole Web 2.0 concept can mean to your organization
·         Content, content, content – create, organize, search, syndicate
·         Community-building with your website – building community is about facilitating conversation between you and your site visitors and among the site visitors themselves using site membership, structured blogging, threaded discussions (AKA forums), surveys, alerts and RSS, and other cool social networking tools
·         Common challenges in site design and development – what do you want your website to do?
·         Knitting disparate technologies together – many individual Web 2.0 technologies work on an ASP/hosted service model, but you need to keep control over your data, uptime and security. What can you do?
·         The importance of standards – current standards can help you gain some benefits around search-ability, accessibility, reach (cross-browser and cross-device) and maintenance/scalability
Come see the show at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, March 12, or 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, March 14. You can also talk hot web technology with Bill in Ektron’s booth, #L5, and register to win one very hard-to-get Xbox 360.

Here’s a great SXSW Interactive win-win: Enter to win an XBOX 360 AND discover the Web CMS that’s being used to power some of the most buzz-worthy interactive sites on the Web today. How? Stop by Ektron’s Booth at SXSWi (Booth L5) to get your name in the game for the XBOX giveaway. At the same time, spend 360 seconds with us to see the Web tools behind sites such as Dove’s worldwide Campaign for Real Beauty and DecibelMagazine.com (up for the Best CSS Site in the SXSW Web Awards).

You can also catch Ektron on the Adobe Day Stage Cafe twice during SXSWi for “Putting Buzzwords to Work on the Web.” These 30-minute sessions cut through the hype and show you how Web 2.0, blogging, tagging, AJAX, and other buzzwords can be put to work in your Web projects using new Web content/site management tools. Times for Ektron on the Day Stage Cafe are:

• Sunday, March 12, 4:30 to 5 p.m. and
• Tuesday, March 14, 11 to 11:30 a.m.

Hey All,

You may remember my earlier post, but if not, my name is David Neff and I work for the American Cancer Society. We are having a great presentation about what it means to foster change and innovation in a non-profit enviroment. And what you can do to help. Anyway we now have our mini-site up and running and our presentation will be held on the Adobe Stage on Monday, March 13th. So be sure to drop by and check us out.  

 MONDAY, MARCH 13
11:00 am - Noon: Futuring & Innovation - the American Cancer Society Coffee Break
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm: Bloggie Awards
2:15 pm - 2:45 pm: SXSW Film Fest Trailers
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm: Adobe Creative Suite 2: The complete design environment for print, web, and mobile publishing
4:45 pm - 6:00 pm: Spout Reception

Coming off the back of our experiences with podcasting our web design conference, WE05 last year, my business partner John Allsopp and I decided to organize a panel for this year’s SXSWi called How (and Why) to Podcast an Event. Eric Meyer, most recently of An Event Apart fame, but who also spoke at WE05 is helping us out with the public speaker and educator’s point of view. But we’re relatively new (albeit enthusiastic!) hands to podcasting. The panel’s also going to feature the experience of Matt May, the creator of the CC music podcast, Staccato, as well as Alex Williams of Corante Events, who’ll be keen to talk about his most recent project Podcast Hotel.

Everyone’s heard of podcasting, but many people who organize events are going to have reservations about using it. There are practical/technical concerns, and then we had much deeper, and harder to resolve, business and strategic issues.

While our Sydney based conference last year grew into a reasonably large event, with almost 450 people over three days, we continue to take what we call “the professional grass roots approach”. This means we solve problems with inexpensive solutions which are “good enough”. Our podcasting program was a great example of this. At the panel we’ll explain just how straightforward it is to make good quality content available. Budget constraints are your friend here: they will encourage you to create solutions which are simple and appropriate to the task.

What I really like about podcasting is that it is a fine example of the simplest rule for success of any web enterprise: create benefits for your business by giving away high quality content for free. There’s two parts to that sentence. You must give away something of genuine value. It’s hard to believe this still has to be said in 2006, but if you try to generate interest by giving away nothing more than thinly disguised advertisements for your event, no matter how slickly produced they are, you will fail. And then you also need to think through what the benefits to your business might be. Traffic is great, we all love traffic, but turning traffic which is listening to audio content into direct, accountable financial return is a real challenge.

To be honest though that isn’t really what we focussed on with the WE05 podcasts: we just saw them as a simple and inexpensive means of “giving back”, and we were so delighted that all of our speakers agreed to this in a heartbeat. Our conference is all about overcoming the tyranny of distance and bringing geographically dispersed Aussie developers together. Receiving notes of thank you from developers all over the world, many of whom could never hope to travel to Australia, but who were able to get a taste of our event via the podcasts, really was extremely important to us.

No matter what size event you’re thinking about podcasting, we’d love to see you on Sunday morning at 10am for How (and Why) to Podcast an Event.