IN BIG WEB SHOW ? 115 on Mule Radio, I talk with Anil Dash, a hugely influential entrepreneur, blogger, and web geek living in NYC.
Things we discuss include:
How government, media, and tech shape the world, and how we can influence them in turn. Our first meeting at SXSW in 2002. How selling CMS systems teaches you the dysfunction at media companies and organizations. Working for the music industry at the dawn of Napster. RFP-EZ. The early days of blogging.
Designing websites for the government—the procurement problem. If we’re pouring all this time into social media, what do we want to get out of it? How big institutions work and how to have an impact on them. Living in “Joe’s Apartment.”
Why, until recently, federal agencies that wanted a blog couldn’t use WordPress or Tumblr and how the State Dept got on Tumblr. Achieving empathy for institutions. Being more thoughtful about what I share and who I amplify on social media. The launch of Thinkup, and a special offer exclusively for Big Web Show listeners.
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 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…
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.
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.
“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. …
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
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).
He brought us The Web Standards Project, A List Apart, Designing With Web Standards, A Book Apart, and so much more. Now legendary blogger, designer, and creative gadfly Jeffrey Zeldman brings us a SXSW panel.
You, the people, have spoken. We will not let you down.
Voting is underway for next year’s SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX, and members of Happy Cog have proposed eighteen panel ideas shown here. Follow the links to vote for your favorites, increasing the likelihood you’ll see them on the schedule in March 2011. Voting ends 11:59 PM CDT on Friday, August 27, 2010.
Yes, because sxsw offers a chance to see options for the future—amazing gaming, interactive software, inventive marketing, creative content development and deployment. But as Will Schwalbe … said, “If publishers come to sxsw to create their own sessions track, they’ll learn nothing. If they come to attend panels on subjects about which they know nothing, they’ll learn an enormous amount.”
The PDF version of the April issue includes additional SXSW coverage (with nice things said about our panel and A Book Apart), data on how different generations find books, search engine conversion strategies, and more.
