10 Good things at SXSW Interactive 2008

Here are some highlights:

1: Utterz Madness

I decided to don the bovine togs when Sim from Utterz mentioned that they were trying to figure out which staff person was going to have to don the cow suit, as if wearing a cow suit was a chore, not a delight. I immediately offered to help out, and soon had Scott Stead suiting up. We tore all over the Austin Convention center getting people to moo into our phones as we recorded utterz from every nook and cranny of the building. Here’s a pic of Scott experiencing Mitch Altman’s Brain Machine.

Here’s an audio excerpt of the madness:

2) Meeting people:

Here are just a sampling of the people I met:

Derek Powazek.
Dave Delaney
Eamon O’Connor
Max Haot
Becky McCrae
Andrew Hyde
Bryan G. Rhoads
Lindsay Campbell and Adam Eland
Liz Strauss
Jeremiah Owyang
Rebecca Caroe
Rohit Barghava
Adele McAlear

3) Reconnecting with old friends and contacts:

One reason that SXSW Interactive makes so much sense for me is that it attracts people from various scenes I’ve been part of: Edutech, Performance, Social Media, NYC geeks, Nonprofit Tech, Mainstream Media, Videoblogging, the DC Tech scene . It’s a super efficient way to reconnect to all those scenes in one place. Here are some people I reconnected with:

Irina Slutsky and Eddie Codel
Dennis Crowley
Lia Bulaong
Beth Kanter

Robert Scoble
Jane Quigley
John Geraci
Steve Garfield
Chris Brogan
Susan Kirkpatrick
And many more!

4) Core Conversations:

Core Conversations are roundtable discusssions featuring anyone who feels like showing up and yapping about a particular topic. I went to one called “10 Ways to Piss off a Blogger” led by DC’s own Rohit Barghava.

5) Panels:

I guess I lucked out: Every single panel I attended rocked. The panel which most entertained me: Worst Website Ever competition. Although my, Happy Net Box”, did not win, I do have to give props to Merlin Mann who won with his completely vacuous effort “Flockd Up.”

6) Meeting Internet Idols

Forget Warhol. In the future everyone will be famous to 15 people. Well, I met two people who are famous…at least to me. The first is the creator of Little Yellow Different, Ernie Hsiung. OK, actually, my wife is the true fan of this guy. But I felt vicariously thrilled to meet him. His take on gay culture Chinese-American P.O.V. is droll as a soup dumpling

The second guy I was thrilled to meet was Derek Powazek who has been encouraging community around storytelling on the web and live in meatspace for years. I got to get a little stage time at the Fray Cafe, where I recounted my true life story of that time when some Belarusian goons beat the crap beat out of me back in the 90’s. Always good fun that story.

7) Crazy Keynote Action:

When you come to give a keynote at SXSW Interactive, you better do your homework, and you better be ready for some serious audience participation. It’s an INTERACTIVE conference. People expect to be part of the proceedings. The keynote conversation featured Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who was interviewed by Business Week’s Sarah Lacy. Lacy did pretty much everything wrong. She asked Zuckerberg questions that the audience didn’t care about (about the $ and biz aspects of Facebook), she kept promoting a book she was writing, she was overly familiar with Zuckerberg, and then she insulted the audience when they started to get aggravated. Zuckerberg himself didn’t help matters with his canned, PR-vetted, answers. Finally, Lacy, extremely ungraciously, succumbed to audience pressure and opened it up to our questions. As all this was going on the multitudes of twitterers and bloggers in the audience were venting like crazy. I was one of them, and I found out later that one of my tweets ended up in
the “National Enquirer for Geeks”ValleyWag. To the charges of being quotable, I plead guilty. Here is the aforementioned crowd, before it got ornery:

As many noted, the big screw up was on the part of the organizers of SXSW who should have found someone better suited for this crowd to interview Zuckerberg. It was a grand spectacle though, and I did like the way the audience finally asserted itself and salvaged the event.

8) The BlogHaus:

This room on the 3d floor was a nexus of hot A-list blogger action, but open to all. A great idea: One room, continuous food and beer, open to bloggers. Met tons of people here. Heaven.

9) Parties

OK, a lot of these were kind of boring—tons of people, free crappy well drinks, lousy music, but a few of these were great. NPR’s soiree at Austin City Limits had great food and music. The Frog Design party had a great salsa band, and the 16-bit party featured an old time freak show, which while a little disturbing, at least had some character.

10) Fellow pilgrims

The cool thing about the festival is that it takes on the character of a pilgrimage. And what is a pilgrimage without companions? As day blends to night to early morning and day again over and over, you find yourself checking in with certain people over and over again to see where they are, what they are doing, how they are doing. For me those people were Gerry T., Scott Stead, Kroosh, and Shashi. It was great wandering the streets, hallways, and clubs with you. Thanks for being there.