Archive for March, 2007

Now that SXSW is over and I’m back home, I’ve had a chance to ‘digest’ the conference and thought I’d post some of my thoughts.

This was my second SXSW and I learned a few things from last year:

• book your hotel early: last year I was a 1/2 hour cab ride away. This year, I was about a block from the convention center – it made a huge difference plus they had a great breakfast buffet
• pace yourself: there is some much to see/do at the conference, expect to not do it all. Despite my best laid plans, I still managed to miss some panels I wanted to see due to other things going on that weren’t planned – like great chats with new friends in the hallway

This year they tried these new ‘power sessions’ that were about 1/2 hour long. Unfortunately, some of the best topics this year were power sessions which means it was hard to really get a lot of them since they would just get going and it would be over and we’d be shuffled out of the room. Also a lot of the sessions were more free-form discussions rather than formal presentations.

While these are okay, I’d prefer more lectures than ‘discussions’. As with last year (although worse this time), there were many panel blocks with 2-3 panels I was interested in so you had to pick one and hope it would deliver. Fortunately, they record most, if not all the sessions and seem to be posting the videos and podcasts much faster than last year so if you missed a session (or couldn’t make it to Austin) you can get some of the flavor that is SXSW.

Twitter was the darling of the conference and I tried to use it to keep in touch with the other Canucks during the panels but between the flaky wifi and the unpredicable delays caused by our Canadian cellphone providers, we just couldn’t rely on it. We ended up using the ole ‘meet you near the bathroom’ after the panels approach. We suspect Twitter was also having some growing pains with so many people using the service. The plasma displays were cool though.

So here are the highlights on a day by day basis:

Thursday:

• a travel day that started at 3am
• chatting on the plane with Gino and his wife about Flickr
• a coworker and two friends were going this year so it was cool to all meetup in my hotel room in Austin
• ended with dinner with the guys and Mardi at the Rio Grande
• went to bed very late considering the time change and long travel

Friday:

• first official day of the conference that started with a crazy long lineup for registration
• picking up the ‘big bag’ of conference material – the nicotine gel was bizarre and creepy
• lunching at the Paradise Cafe on Sixth Street
• seeing KK and the flight crew on the Snakes on a Plane panel
• going to the Porter Novelli Opening Party at Six which according to the homeless person that offered us directions is owned by Lance Armstrong.
• I think we ended up at the Iron Cactus to call it a night

Saturday

• great day for panels that included Online Publishers & Ad Networks, Getting Users to Consistancy, Kathy Sierra‘s Opening Remarks, Grids are Good, Web Hacks (one word: horse-fisting – watch for the podcast), and Production Companies 2.0.
• after hearing about Expression Engine at Northern Voice, we headed to the Moonshine Grill for a gathering of EE users put on by EllisLabs and had a great time meeting/chatting with a ton of people about EE, Canada, and the web in general while enjoying the amazing food. Cheers Rick, Derek, Peter, Seamus and Susie to name a few!

Sunday

• another great day for panels including Why We Should Ignore Users, Design Workflows, Mobile Design, Learning Interaction from Las Vegas and Self Marketing with Gina from Lifehacker.com
• tacos at the Web Awards pre-party at the Hilton

Monday

• WordPress Matt‘s Scaling Your Community was a highlight for today. A close second to Kathy’s session for me during the whole conference. Also checked out the Ajax Kung Fu/Accessability Feng Shui session, Bullet Tooth Web Design (wish it had a little more substance but it was a 1/2 hour session) and How to Create a Kick-Ass In-House Design Team
• you can’t go to SXSW and not go to Iron Works for BBQ…mmm good.
• watching Frank get responses to his Canucks sweater
• the Mozilla party was fun, PayPal’s was not and South by Northwest lived up to the hype – kudos to Robert, KK and co for a great event! Had a chance to talk with a bunch more people….but like many others have already blogged, the after parties can be a challenge to ‘talk’ due to the loud music and sheer ‘volume’ of attendees. Robert told me they had 1400 people at the Iron Cactus!
• RainCity Studios also had the best t-shirt at SXSW in my opinion…might have something to do with the cactus in the logo

Tuesday

• interesting browser session with panelists from AOL, Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft – too bad Apple wasn’t there, Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer, No Such Thing As the Mobile Web
• getting to play with the OLPC at the Make booth
• Opera gave away their Wii….I didn’t win but Kevin got the second prize of a Motorola cellphone

Wednesday

• travel day
• lots of geekspotting at the Austin Airport as the mass exodus had begun
• had a good chat with Charles McCathieNevile from Opera after enjoying a chopped beef brisket sandwich from the Salt Lick BBQ at the airport – if only all food court food was this good!
• spoke briefly with Kathy Sierra in Denver
• got home around 10pm which was really midnight to me

Goodnight! See ya’ll next year. More pics in my Flickr set.

SXSW 2007 is over and I’m back home now…I already miss the Texas BBQ. This year exceeded my expectations and was bigger and better than last year. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to make it a hat trick next year.

There were apparently something in the neighbourhood of 6000 geeks in attendance. I wonder how many websites went down while we were all in Austin suffering with the overloaded conference Wifi.

For the second year in a row, Kathy Sierra was at the top of my list of best sessions with her amazing ‘opening remarks’ on Saturday afternoon. The podcast has been posted and she just made a blog post covering part of it. I especially liked the WTF button and the ‘canyon of pain’ she talked about.

The first leg of my flight home on Wednesday was through Denver and Kathy happened to be on my flight. After getting off the plane, I summoned some fanboy nerve and decided to approach her and tell her how awesome her session was in person. She was very gracious and I appreciated that she asked me my name and shook my hand.

The last thing I said to her was ‘kick ass!’ and I meant it as homage to her concept of making users kick ass in using your website/app/product/etc. because I feel that she has helped to make me feel like I’m kicking ass when I can grasp her concepts and apply them to my work but I think it ended up sounding like some weird football fan yelp or something….”Booyah!” or something like that.

Hopefully she got what I meant and wasn’t scared for her safety.

The trade show at SXSW is always a great place to get swag. Usually you get a suitcase full of t-shirts and this year is no different.

It’s also a good place to find some new companies doing cool things. My only issue with the the trade show is that there are a lot more film and music related booths than interactive (web). The line is definately blurring in some respects as the web becomes more like your own personal tv channel (among other things).

There was some fun booths put on by the ‘good’ browser companies….strangely Microsoft was absent (so was Apple for that matter).

I bumped into some nice folks from Opera Software at Starbucks on my way to the convention center this morning. I still haven’t been able to use their browser on my desktop/laptop on a regular basis (but it is good) but love it on my Nintendo DS lite and Wii….I even went to the lengths of buying the DS browser from eBay since it was only available (at the time) in Japan. It’s also been a fun way to kick back on the couch and surf on my Nintendo Wii. They were giving away t-shirts, some fun underwear (tighty whiteys) and cool Wiimote straps (probably meant for cellphones).

That said, I still like Firefox the most on the PC platform which I use at work. As I wrote in a previous post, I use Safari/Firefox/Camino on my laptop (Powerbook) and mostly Safari on my desktop (iMac).

At Screenburn, I was given some ‘bling’ in the form of the ‘K’ logo from the Killer NIC guys…they make a specialized network card that bypasses the Windows networking drivers and is supposed to be optimized for online gaming.

Too bad I’ll never find out since I have a Mac and they sell a PCI card for Windows machines. Should be interesting going through customs with this thing in my bag.

Another cool company I came across is Lucky Oliver who sells stock photos and illustrations for cheap. You can also submit your own works and get paid when people buy them. That’s pretty cool and there is a good chance you’ll find something unique instead of what the big sites have that everyone uses. Yeah they gave me a shirt if I would blog about them but I think it’s a cool idea. The shirt is nice too.

Despite getting a ton of free shirts, I still bought one from the guys from the Creative Commons…it’s a good cause and they need to keep doing it. Plus the shirt was green…I can never have too many green t-shirts.

AOL had a unique contest too. Despite my not being a user, they were giving away nerd shirts (promoting their dev.aol.com site) and if you came back to the booth at a specific time wearing it, they were going to give away an iPod Video to someone. I figured why not and came back and put the shirt on. There was only about 25 or so people that did so my odds were pretty good…even though I already have one, a free iPod would be cool for a gift or eBay. They gave all the shirt wearers a playing card and we tore them in half and put them into a box. I didn’t win and they ended up giving away a Video, a Nano and two Shuffles. They gave everyone that participated a free 1gb USB key so it’s not so bad being a nerd.

I’m glad I brought a big suitcase this year….I’m going to need it.

Finally all settled in Austin for SXSW which starts later today.

Very happy with the hotel I’m staying at this time which is basically in the shadow of the conference centre (which I can see from my room). Last year, due to booking the trip late, we ended up at a hotel out on the highway and a long cab ride away. This time, I learned from that mistake and am looking forward the convenience of being so close…plus they have a much better free breakfast bar at this hotel.

Keep an eye on my Flickr stream for photos during the event.