I THREW A PARTY on the last night of SXSW Interactive 2012 to celebrate my induction in the Hall of Fame. Photos © Annie Ray, annieray.net. The entire photo gallery is available for your viewing pleasure at http://cog.gd/3m0.

Also at Flickr and on Facebook.

Pardon My Linkage

For more about this year’s SXSW Interactive, my induction in the Hall of Fame, and “Go Forth & Make Awesomeness,” my session with Leslie Jensen-Inman, see:

• Jeffrey Zeldman tribute video – on his induction into the SXSW Interactive Hall of Fame (Vimeo)
• Austin Chronicle: Where No Man Has Gone Before
• The Interactive Awards Pre-Party and Ceremony Presented by HP (Lanyrd)
• Jeffrey Zeldman to be Inducted to SXSW Hall of Fame at 2012 Interactive Awards (SXSW)
• .net Magazine: Zeldman inducted to the SXSWi Hall of Fame
• An Interview with Jeffrey Zeldman (Cognition)
• Go Forth & Make Awesomeness: Core Values & Action – a session at SXSW Interactive 2012
• COMPLETE AUDIO from “Go Forth & Make Awesomeness”
• The Impossible Year
• SXSW Ceremony
• Of Austin Fame and Marches (Dolls for Friends)

Filed under: Acclaim, events, Hall of Fame, photography, SXSW, Zeldman

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Jeffrey was looking for us to do a more tailored, short run of the doll we had initially designed of him-215 to be exact. They were to be given away as gifts at the Hall of Fame after party being held at South by Southwest (right about now is where you can hear our jaws drop to the floor).

Here was the opportunity to put handmade work into the hands of 215 web designers and industry gurus at one of the largest interactive design conferences in the world-South by Southwest. Are we interested? Hells, please! So, after hashing out the details and specifics we set into work on the very complicated and detailed project. Below are just a few of the pictures we took documenting the process…

Of Austin Fame and Marches | Dolls for Friends.

Filed under: A List Apart, Acclaim, Appearances, Design, events, Hall of Fame, SXSW, Zeldman

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JOHN MORRISON:

Jeffrey Zeldman with Mini-Zeldman Doll

Polaroid SLR 680SE / Impossible PX-680 Color Shade

Jeffrey became the first person inducted into the SXSW Interactive Hall of Fame. Afterwards there was a party with mini-Zeldman dolls.

The Impossible Year | Jeffrey Zeldman with Mini-Zeldman Doll Polaroid…

Filed under: "Found Objects", Acclaim, Appearances, Hall of Fame, links, photography, Publications, SXSW, Zeldman

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LESLIE JENSEN-INMAN (@jenseninman), Assistant Professor, The University of Tennessee, created this panel and graciously invited me to be her guest. An alternate name for the panel could be Quit Bitching and Go Make Cool Shit. It’s about personal creative empowerment via sweat, the internet, and the communities it engenders.

Discover how to: embrace your passion, define your purpose, foster your promise, and engage your pursuit. Find out how to do this in a creative environment that encourages collaboration.

HASH TAG

#GoForth

WHEN

Time 5:00pm–6:00pm CST
Date 11th March 2012

WHERE

Ballroom A, Austin Convention Center
Austin, TX

INTERVIEW

Happy Cog Interview

LANYRD LISTING

Go Forth & Make Awesomeness: Core Values & Action at SXSW Interactive 2012 | Lanyrd

Filed under: Advocacy, Design, SXSW

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SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST Interactive (“SXSWi” or simply “South by” to its friends) has somewhat brazenly announced that I will be the first inductee in its new Hall of Fame. The induction will take place during the 2012 Interactive Awards presentation in March of next year. There will be flowers and virgins. Well, flowers.

SXSW Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology. Founded in 1995—the same year I started this website—the Austin, TX-based interactive festival attracts tens of thousands annually.

I hope this announcement will not negatively affect attendance.

Filed under: Acclaim, SXSW, Zeldman

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Mandy Brown, Roger Black, Daniel Mall and I discuss the state of web design and publishing at SXSW Interactive, Sunday March 13, 2011.

Photos courtesy Adactio. Audio element courtesy HTML5. Sorry, no transcript is available at this time.

Filed under: Authoring, Best practices, business, conferences, content, Deck, the, Design, Standards, State of the Web, SXSW

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This ad appeared on the back cover of the SXSW Interactive 2011 guide, given to all 20,000 attendees of SXSWi in March, 2011.

An Event Apart SXSW Interactive 2011 ad on Flickr

Filed under: Advertising, An Event Apart, Design, SXSW

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“WE KICKED OFF WITH a discussion on web platforms, perhaps the most widely-changing aspect of the web in the past 18 months. Zeldman began with a story about his efforts to check in to his upcoming flight to SXSW from a taxi cab in New York. He entered his details into his airline’s mobile app and clicked the ‘log in’ button, only to be taken to their desktop website which required Flash to log in, which inevitably, his iPhone didn’t support. How did this kind of user experience failure occur? …

“Moving on, the panel began to discuss publishing. The advent of plugins like Readability and a new product Roger Black is working on called TreeSaver allow readers to specify how they want to see content, and the advent of web standards means that content is generally separated from presentation, to the benefit of the reader. Zeldman made the point that the entire platform is for content, which makes it odd when some products are designed with the content being the last thing in mind.”

“The paywall quickly came up and the overwhelming ethos from the panel was “if you have exclusive great stuff, people will pay for it”. Dan Mall suggested that traditional publishers didn’t understand alternative modes of publishing and were attempting to price them at the same rate as their paper-and-ink versions. Mandy Brown joked that many publishers saw the iPad as their saviour, just like they did with the CD-ROM back in the 90s. She also made the point that despite its web-savvy audience, the A Book Apart project’s sales were 75% print. …

Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Design Panel (13/03 @ 5PM)

Paul MacInnes is the editor of the Guardian Guide and Matt Andrews is a client side web developer at the Guardian. Full coverage of SXSW 2011 at guardian.co.uk/sxsw

Filed under: Acclaim, Appearances, art direction, Design, Publishing, SXSW, zeldman.com

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20110312-NodeXL-Twitter-sxsw by Marc Smith.

From: www.connectedaction.net.

Connections among the Twitter users who recently mentioned sxsw when queried on March 12, 2011 scaled by numbers of followers.

A larger version (zoom for details) is available here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/5521097041/sizes/o/.

Filed under: "Found Objects", Community, SXSW, twitter

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SXSW INTERACTIVE is an amazing festival, conference, and annual gathering of the tribes—a place to see, be seen, and find out not only what’s happening on the web, but what will happen in the coming 18 months. The festival’s explosive growth—from minor music festival adjunct to megalopolis attracting over 20,000 interactive attendees this year—mirrors the miraculous growth of the internet itself. And the festival’s challenge echoes the challenge all internet community faces: in a word, scale. Not just the mechanics of scale, but the gauntlet of obstacles that must be overcome if a community is to grow wildly while remaining true to itself.

It is hard for someone who has not attended to imagine the scale of the thing—I flew here from New York on a JetBlue jet whose every passenger seemed to be attending this show; it was like a flying blogroll. For that matter, it’s too big for attendees to completely comprehend. It’s like New York City that way: you can visit, get a taste of it, you can even move there and be part of it, but you can never take it all in. And of course it is impossible for current attendees who missed the early years of SXSW Interactive to picture what the conference was like in the old days, when almost everyone attending knew everyone else personally or by reputation.

Each year I wonder if this will be the year the festival gets too big for its own good (or too big to be good), and each year SXSWi remains great—but great in a different way than before (again, just like the internet). Each year I salute the people behind this show. I could not even dream of putting on an event like this. I am a boutique guy at heart. I know how to make small things good for a select group of people with a certain taste and interest. The people behind SXSW cater to select needs and special tastes, too—but they also do massive. I’m looking forward to this year’s show, which begins today, and to my own panel and the panels and presentations of my friends (including friends I haven’t met yet).

As for the lost intimacy of SXSW that some of us long-time attendees lament, it isn’t really lost. The first trick is to show up on Thursday, before most attendees get here. Register early with short lines, then buy a water and sit anywhere in the vast conference center. Within five minutes, you will meet new people; within ten, you’ll see old friends. You can then go off with these new or old friends and enjoy a luxurious lunch table at a place you won’t even be able to get into after Friday.

Always arrive a day early. You will not regret it. My experiences yesterday and the memories I will take with me have already more than justified this year’s pilgrimage here.

And once the festival begins? Don’t be afraid to occasionally skip a panel and go off with people you bump into (whether that bump takes place in the hallway or on Gowalla and Foursquare).

Coffee drunk, cold pills swallowed, mischief managed. All right, SXSW. Thrill me, baby.

• My SXSW calendar on Lanyrd
• My SXSW calendar on Sched.org

Kristina Halvorson on the porch at Moonshine on the afternoon before SXSW Interactive begins. Part of this complete breakfast.

Filed under: Culture, Design, events, State of the Web, SXSW

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