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A brief overview of my SXSWi 2011 experience

posted on March 20, 2011 by in Archive, Digital, Social Media, work

So last week I was in Austin, Texas for my second SXSW Interactive experience. I’m not going to go into much detail just now, but thought it would be useful to share a list of the sessions I attended so that I can reflect and elaborate on them at a later stage…

Day One – Friday March 11th

Day Two – Saturday March 12th
Day Three – Sunday March 13th
Day Four – Monday March 14th
Day Five – Tuesday March 15th

That might seem a reasonably impressive list (it’s pretty intense going to so many sessions over five days as there is just so much to learn and see) but to give you some sense of the scale of SXSW for those who haven’t been – the number of sessions that I wanted to see vs. the number of places I was physically able to be at any one time made for some difficult choices. These are the ones I was interested in but couldn’t make it to:

Day One – Friday March 11th
  • My Kindergartner Markets Better Than You #kidsmarket
  • Education 2.0: How Media Drives Your Child’s Success #teenedu
  • Not My Job: The Ultimate Content Strategy Smackdown #notmyjob
  • The Potential of Augmented Reality for Education #eduar
Day Two – Saturday March 12th
  • How Many Rungs? Social Change and the Engagement Ladder #howmanyrungs
  • Using Twitter to Improve College Student Engagement #twesearch
  • Marketing in the Moment #mktgmoment
  • Are Your Customers a Crowd or a Community? #zappos
  • Coming of Age Social: Opportunity of Teens Online #comingofage
  • Social Media Data Visualizations: Mapping the World’s Conversations
  • Bloggers vs Journalists: It’s a Psychologial Thing #bvj
  • All These Worlds Are Yours: Visualizing Space Data #realspace
  • Web Anywhere: Mobile Optimisation with HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript #html5mobile
  • Welcome to the EGOsystem: How Much are You Worth? Brian Solis
  • The Secret Lives of Content Sites #skimlinks
Day Three – Sunday March 13th
  • Too Small, Too Open: Correcting Wikipedia’s Local Failure #localwiki
  • The Science of Influence
  • Influencers Will Inherit The Earth. Quick, Market Them!
  • Media Tomorrow: The Message is the Messenger #personalbrand
  • Recommendation Engines: Going Beyond The Social Graph #discoverytalk
Day Four – Monday March 14th
  • Method Tweeting for Non Profits (and Other Players) #methodtweet
  • I’m So Productive I Never Get Anything Done
  • Everyone’s Wrong About Influence. Except your Customers #sxsw-influence
  • Curation Nation #curationnation
  • OAuth, Open ID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices #authenticatoindesign
  • Visualizing Our Future: Space, Media and Web Exploration
  • The Future of Content is Personal
Day Five – Tuesday March 15th
  • Innovating and Developing with Libraries, Archives and Museums #sxswlam
  • Branded Entertainment: Do Brands Hurt Good Storytelling #brandsvsstories
  • Flexible Morality of User Engagement and User Behaviour #moralflex
  • Real-time Marketing in a Connected World #sxswrealtime
  • The Death of the Brand Website #sxsworgbrandsites
  • Steve Krug Explains It All for You #skrugsxsw

Hopefully I will hunt down some info from the sessions I missed to post here also. If you went to SXSW and attended any of the sessions I didn’t make it to, please do post a link to your notes and let me know your thoughts!

And just for a bit of filtering… my highlights were:

Being surrounded by clever, inspirational, fun people made me feel so alive and highlighted for me how much I like to live by the “work hard, play hard” philosophy. There isn’t really any other option in Austin!

My blogging mojo was on vacation…in Austin!

posted on March 19, 2010 by in Archive, Social Media, Web, work

So it seems that a while ago I lost my blogging mojo – turns out it was just on holiday… in Austin! It’s now back in my possession (for the time being) and over the next few days, I hope to have a few SXSW related blog posts for you.

SXSW is a massive festival in Austin, Texas which includes interactive, film and music events. I was there for the interactive element (12th – 16th March) with a great gang of people from the West Midlands and have come back with a few things to say about the experience. I thought a good place to start would be a list of the sessions I attended (with links to the event details on the SXSW website)…

Friday

  1. The Young and The Digital (Book Reading), S. Craig Watkins (details)
  2. Content Strategy: What’s in it for You?, Margot Bloomstein (details)
  3. DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (Book Reading), Anya Kamenetz
  4. Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For, Rachel Lovinger, Karen McGrane (details)
  5. Wave and Communication’s (R)Evolution: Better Than Being There, Jay Cuthrell, Daniel Raffel, Jared Goralnick, Casey Whitelaw (details)

Saturday

  1. The Era of Crowdsourcing: Guiding Principles, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Scott Belsky (details)
  2. Universities in the “Free” Era, Glenn Platt, Peg Faimon (details)
  3. Mind Control: Psychology for the Web, Ben Scofield (details)
  4. Opening Remarks: Privacy and Publicity, Danah Boyd (details)
  5. BBC Digital Planet Live, Gareth Mitchell, Michelle Martin, Bill Thompson (details)
  6. New Publishing and Web Content, Jeffrey Zedelman, Erin Kissane, Lisa Holton, Mandy Brown, Paul Ford (details)

Sunday

  1. Africa 3.0: A Look at the Future of a Connected Africa (details)
  2. Influence and Innovate: Transforming Media Education, Cindy Royal, Tyson Evans (details)
  3. CrowdControl: Changing The Face of Media or Hype, Lila King, Pete Cashmore, Randi Zuckerberg, Joseph Kingsbury, Jason Rzepka (details)
  4. Sunday Keynote with Valerie Casey (details)
  5. Fans, Friends and Followers: Creating Your Own Cult (of the Non-Apocalyptic Variety), Scott Kirsner, Gary Hustwit (details)
  6. Improving Social Media with Live Streaming Video, Brad Hunstable USTREAM (details)

Monday

  1. Open Science: Create, Collaborate, Communicate, Tantek Celik, Natalie Villalobos, Ariel Waldman, Jessy Cowan-Sharp, Kirsten Sanford (details)
  2. Indirect Collaboration: Collective Creativity on the Web, Tom Lillis, Joe Alterio, Andrea Grover, Joshua Glenn, Riley Crane (details)
  3. Student Start-Ups: Entrepreneurship in the University, Hung Truong, Ellen Chisa, Ben Congleton, Rishi Naryan (details)
  4. Gary Vaynerchuk Presentation (details)

Tuesday

  1. UKTI Digital Mission Great British Breakfast
  2. Pervasive Games and Playful Experiences: Rendering the Real World, Simon Johnson, Clare Reddington, Nina Steiger, Duncan Speakman, Toby Barnes (details)
  3. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr (Book Reading) (details)
  4. Interactive Infographics, Eric Rodenbeck, Casey Caplowe, Ben Fry, Shan Carter (details)

(The ones in italics were the most enjoyable/relevant to me and I hope to elaborate on them in a future blog post)

It was a rather packed schedule with so many sessions to choose from for each time slot that it was often hard to narrow it down. Sometimes I would find myself sat in a presentation watching the tweets from another session and having a bit of session-envy! Fortunately much of the content should be available online for me to look up but it doesn’t compare to actually being there!

Anyway, I hope to spend a bit of time over the next couple of days hunting for links to presentations online, reflecting on some of the things I learnt, and writing a few things down including the social aspects and some general comments on SXSW and things I would do differently next time… so please visit again in a couple of days (and hope that my blogging mojo is still with me!)