I had a pretty good time at SXSW this year. It’s deeply satisfying to be around so many intelligent, creative people, and well, to get drunk with them. Jeremy Keith made the comment in the How to Rawk SXSW about how he felt he was amongst his tribe at the festival, and that’s certainly the way I felt - just hanging out with so many progressively minded, technically literate, enthusiastic and media-savvy people was a great feeling, and a reward in of itself. I also came up with a brilliantly catchy business-speak way of describing it, but Mark stole it for one of his tweets, so it’s dead to me now.
(At the same panel, Ben Huh asserted that without a doubt, at some point in the festival we would all end up in a strange car with strange people at 4am, to which I thought - bullshit; our hotel was 2 minutes from the conference centre, right in the middle of downtown where all the parties were happening - what possible reason did I have to get in a strange car. Then on the 4am Wednesday morning, I found myself in a strange car with a bunch of strangers. It’s funny how things turn out sometimes).
Anyways, here’s some of the talks I enjoyed:
- The panel Moon 2.0: The Outer Limits of Lunar Exploration was great not just because of the engaging and novel subject matter, but also because I got to ask someone who actually works at NASA a question. If I ever go back in time, I’ve finally done something my eight-year old self would be impressed by.
- Twitter’s Mark Trammell gave a great, inspiring talk in What Can Carl Sagan Teach Us About The Web?, making extensive use of Cosmos to illustrate points about design, engineering and team-working.
- Bruce Lawson and Martin Kliehm demonstrated the awesomeness of HTML5 in HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches. Let’s hurry up and kill Flash, eh? Just shoot it in the head or something. Twice.
- How The Other Half Lives: Touring The Digital Divide - Jessamyn West and Jenny Engstrom gave an interesting talk on their experiences as librarians in rural and urban America, acting both as sometimes the only point of access to the internet for their communities, and as de facto trainers for a generation with no online experience whatsoever. Notes here.
- And I have to mention Memory Matters: How Do Elephants Do It by Mark Channon and Paul Duncan, not only because it was good and entertaining, but because it was a big part of the reason I got to go.
Supposedly, most of these are going to be podcast at some point, but I can’t find them at the moment. All well worth listening to if they do ever appear, however.
