I’ve been taking pictures of events for almost a year now and SXSWi was clearly the biggest event that I had undertaken. South by Southwest is both rewarding and grueling in the sense that meeting great folks, learning new things, trying to upload photos in somewhat real time while trying to get sleep is pretty difficult. You can sleep when you’re dead…
I’m not taking pictures for anything other than fun and personal enrichment (and to give something back to the folks who give so much of themselves to putting on these events). I really enjoy the work that Kris Krug [kk+] and Scott Beale [Laughing Squid] have been doing for years and hope to be as good as they are some day. I’m really thankful for all the tips and tricks that they have shared with me in the last year.
Not all the photos are gems, but I cut this group of pictures down from 700 pictures that I took down to about 160. If you want to see with folks on Flickr like best, go here for my 12 most “interesting” photos from South by Southwest Interactive 2008.
My pals Lee and Sachi LeFever of CommonCraft have done it again, just in time for SXSW. These guys do a really great job of explaining difficult topics in “plain english.” These videos are really great if you are just starting out trying to figure out this strange online world.
At last year’s SXSWi in Austin, TX, Twitter broke for the first time, err, um, was a break through product that helped people quickly figure out where the cool parties were and helped them track down their friends without calling them.
Since then, Twitter has been quickly adopted (and broken) by at least some of the masses (myself included).
I didn’t really get Twitter at first and I thought that it represented all the worst things about blogging (navel gazing, echo chamber). Here is a link to the day I spent talking about my cat in protest of Twitter. I even annoyed myself.
Eventually, I came around…
So, what the heck is Twitter? If you follow me on Facebook, you’ve probably seen my rapidly changing status. That’s coming from Twitter. And while I do kid about the Twitter uptime, by and large, they’ve created an incredible service based on something very simple.
Free beer, nerds and a new lens to try out, what’s not to like. Chris Pirillo (of Lockergnome, Gnomedex and TechTV fame) helped organize a get together of over 150 Seattle area bloggers for a little sit down with the “old media” types at KOMO 4.
Great conversation with lots of “aren’t you famous on the internet?” and “stop twittering this.” Oh, will the wacky hijinks never cease?
Seriously, thanks to KOMO for putting on the event and getting me out of the house. Speaking of which, favorite shirt of the night? Clearly the “Stay at Home Blogger” t-shirt Jen Zug was sporting. Now, where is that photo?
God, it was everything in my power not to put an animated gif up. Instead, I leave you with a relic of the late 1990s.
I’m working on a redesign of Stewtopia based on Dean J Robinson’sRedoable template. Good stuff, but it’s taking a while to get everything up and running.
I hope to have this finished by early next week… I hope to actually blog again before then.
So, I hadn’t really intended to go to a Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows launch party. I’m actually one book behind and my wife was getting the book (pre-ordered months ago) from the company that should not be named today.
But, after a great late dinner at Siam Lotus, I remembered that Booksmith was open for the event and I couldn’t quite go to bed yet. We wandered over at 11pm and the party had already started.
You gotta give it to Booksmith. This is why stores like theirs are still around despite deep discounts and giant booksellers like Barnes and Noble. To quote Samuel Jackson, personality goes a long way.
I suspect they might be around once Amazon has put Borders and Barnes and Noble out of business.
This morning, Moo’s latest product, Moo Stickers went live. They are promoting the stickers with free shipping for the rest of the month.
If you’re not familiar with Moo, they’re the guys that take your Flickr pix (or Fotolog, Bebo, Vox, etc) and make them into half size business cards. They’re fun, small and a great conversation piece when giving out business cards.
Yay! Stickers
I’ve got a special place in my heart for stickers these days. If you’ve got kids, you know what I’m talking about. I’m not sure what the fascination my little girl has with stickers, but I seem to recall getting sticker books when I was a kid.
Anyhow, I need to find some fairy princess mermaid ballerinas to take pictures of for Olivia. Moo has made it easy to make them into stickers for hours of entertainment.
(Oh, I’m sure they have other uses too, but 3 year olds have priority)
Special thanks to my pal DeniseWilton over at Moo for getting me a preview of the fun.
If you’re a data/information infrastructure nerd like me, you’re gonna love Freebase.
Here’s a bit from O’Reilly:
But once you understand a bit about what metaweb is doing, you realize just how remarkable it is. Metaweb has slurped in the contents of several of the web’s freely accessible databases, including much of wikipedia, and song tracks from musicbrainz. It then turns its users loose on not just adding more data items but making connections between them by filling out meta tags that categorize or otherwise connect the data items, using a typology that can be extended by users, wiki-style.
It’s really freaking cool.
Anyhow, I’ve got 5 invites, so if you are interested, let me know. I know there is a fair bit of pent-up demand for these invites, so if you’ve got an invite to Spock or some other invite only Web 2.0 site, I’ll probably favor a request with a trade than one without.
Thanks to Tara Hunt for giving me an invite to Skitch. I’ve been jonesing to use this ever since I saw Guy Kawasaki demo it back in the beginning of the year.
Nothing too meaningful to say about it yet, other they’ve just completely replaced the aging, somewhat Macintel compatible, slow-as-molasses Snapz Pro. God, I can’t wait to uninstall that app. This is already so much easier and useful to use.
If you want to veg out in front of the web this Friday afternoon, the brilliant Twittervision (and Flickrvision) guy, David Troy has put out a 3D version of the app. Not really useful, but really pretty and an impressive use of what you can do on the web these days with APIs and an active imagination.
I’m a big fan of alternative means of watching television. Hell, I launched a separate (now sorta kinda abandoned) blog about it. So when ABCannounced that they were going to do high(er) definition versions of their show online, I was stoked.
I tried it out on launch day and got this image (which I thought was pretty funny):
Now, maybe it’s just me, but “advertisements not available” sounds like a feature, not a bug. Still, the fact that ABC is upping their video quality and offering a limited number of ads on their online programming is pretty cool.
See… I’m back on the bike. Really, I blog regularly… really.
Tonight in Seattle for one night only, Ignite! If you are a geek in Seattle and haven’t made it out to an Ignite Seattle event, you are truly missing out.
If you are in the social media scene, Chris Heuer will be on hand leading a meeting of the Social Media Club. He’s in town tonight to meet up with Seattle’s movers and shakers in the social media scene.
In either case, if you are perpetually late like me, don’t be late for the Ask Me Later presentations, which are guaranteed to be good, well, at least if they’re not, they only last 2 minutes. Being a little ADD addled, 2 minutes for an idea, a pitch, or a cause is a great way to get creativity flowing.
I’m pretty excited about going tonight as the first one was so much fun and I regretfully missed the second one, which was even bigger than the first.
Apparently, Twitter has been severely hobbled from the convergence of nerds in Austin for SXSW.
I’m still not sure I’d use the service as much in my day to day (maybe Stuart can change my mind), but man I can see it’s use here at a big conference. At smaller shows, like Northern Voice or Gnomedex, Twitter might be less useful, but sending status and finding your friends here in Texas seems to be really handy.
I’m stewtopia on Twitter if you want to help make my txt messaging bill go through the roof.
So first off, if you haven’t used Google Adwords, I highly recommend it. Besides being a great user experience, you can learn quite a bit about search terms that you might be interested in.
To feed the ego, I now have a sense of how many people are searching for ‘Randy Stewart’ on Google over the last month. I didn’t realize that Google showed this data, but I guess it makes sense to know what you are paying for.
So, Ziki…. how much are they paying for my name? Well, I’m not an SEM specialist, but given that I have the third position when you do a search on my name and I know how much I pay when someone clicks, I’m imagining that Ziki is paying slightly less than I am.
How much am I paying, let’s just say 6x the copper version of Abraham Lincoln. I’m still interested in what Ziki is doing and I think it’s a really smart marketing campaign. They haven’t reached their 10k goal in signups just yet, so there is still an opportunity to get in on their campaign.
Given Ziki’s marketing gimmick, I’m curious just how cheap it is to buy an ad for my name on Yahoo! or Google. I’ve never used either AdWords or Yahoo! Marketing Solutions personally, so it will be a fun way to see if I get any clickers. No fair clicking on my ad if you are reading this, but feel free to click on the Ziki one ;-)
I’ll let you know how it turns out in the next few days.
