SXSW Day 2 - Cool tools and dudes
Walked my feet off today traversing this Astrodome parading as a convention centre but gradually getting the hang of SXSW. Still , got locked out of a 1,000 seat break-out today despite arriving 15 minutes early. This joint is something else. Yesterday forgot to mention Meebo www.meebo.com , an Instant messaging (IM tool) that connects to all the others and is in heavy use here.
In between sessions I visited the main Trade Show and also the Screenburn gamers trade show, purely to make the young dudes back home think ‘what a waste on the Old Fart’.
Some session highglights
John Zittrain – Civic Technologies and the Future of the Internet
Highly entertaining guy from the Harvard Law School, arguing that the internet is inevitably headed for more controls via ‘civic technologies’ because its current chaotic nature will eventually lead to its collapse otherwise, in turn leading to economic disaster.
Had planned to be at The Search for a More Social Web run by Dave Morin from Facebook and arrived 15 mins early only to be locked out as a 1,000 people (literally) arrived at least 20 mins early.
Curating the Crowd-Sourced World – Panel comprising Jen Bekman - Jen Bekman Projects | 20×200, Paddy Johnson - Art Fag City, Nion McEvoy - Chronicle Books, Dustin Hostetler – skinnyCorp, Gina Trapani - Lifehacker.com http://us.lifehacker.com/ (also Aus version – lots of good content for our website here)
Groovy online publishers talked a lot of sense about drawing the line on mindless democratisation of content and often argued for a smaller, informed audience to get the best out of a subject instead of chasing audience per se. While most survived on the labour of interns (i.e. volunteers) they emphasised that they still had to be intelligent as well as passionate and required expert guidance, which is more of your precious time. Practically sacrilege here, but Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Facebook etc were all put in their contextual place as adding to the noise but not necessarily to the signal. The guru of such things, Seth Godin, author of Tribes, was invoked on more than one occasion.
Managing Online Forums - Patrick O’Keefe – iFroggy Network http://www.ifroggy.com/
Apparently we should be nice to people who provide us feedback. He’s written a whole book on it, if that point was too subtle.
Now entirely anxious to be in the room for the next Ballroom session, I caught the standing room only (and major ovation) conclusion of the session by Tony Hsieh from www.Zappos.com , who’ve built a substantial online business mainly using social web techniques.
The Future of Social Networks – Charlene Li – Thought Leader (now there’s a title) – Altimeter Group
Her paradigm is that in the future social networks will be like air. (Clouds and vapour kept springing to mind.) Essentially her thesis is that the future social web will centre on the individual, via something like Open ID, which will pull together all the various versions of ‘you’, which will be shared on a ‘need to know’ basis that you will control. She argues for a new social algorithm, mediated by levels of closeness and permissions. The most worrying aspect of this model is that she argues that ultimately we have no choice but to subscribe to ‘In Google We Trust’ as the search platform for this Brave New personalised World and it will happen because it will be driven by money. Yikes!
Social Media Nonprofit Return On Investment (ROI) Poetry Slam
Highly entertaining and instructive panel exercise on how to measure ROI on social web-based campaigns, based on nonprofit case studies, and judged by an expert panel, and all done in poetic form. The most original and effective workshops I’ve been to in many a year and achieved in the graveyard shift of 5pm. Chaired by Beth Kanter in grand form and case studies from Danielle Brigida - National Wildlife Federation, Wendy Harman - American Red Cross - National Headquarters, Carie Lewis - The Humane Society of the United States, and David Neff - American Cancer Society Key measurement tools used by all included Technorati, Radiant 6, Feedburner, and blog back-end tools. New social media sharing application to me: Utterli http://www.utterli.com/u/get_started
Tags: nptech.sxsw
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