I said I’d be keeping you updated from SXSW but it was such a busy, sleepless time that I didn’t get a chance. I’m writing this from a patio in Costa Rica – we came here to kiteboard for a bit of a break after then madness of SXSW.
SXSW was another amazing experience and one that has re-inspired me. It’s not so much the panels as the people you meet and the connections you make. It’s amazing how you can spend 4 days with some people and feel like you’ve known them forever. I guess that’s where ever-connectedness of our lives comes into play, where we can live ten thousand kilometres from someone but still talk to them every day and see them around – although rather than in cafes and bars, you run into them on instant messenger, flickr, twitter and blogs.
The first day of SXSW started with me going to Jeremy Keith’s session on bluffing your way through web 2.0. It was a great start to my SXSW and it got me thinking about the geek world and how tight we all are. We were laughing at the in-jokes of pisstaking web 2.0 and feeling quite smug because we “get it†but I wonder how many people outside our little circle even know anything about web 2.0? And more to the point, do they need to?
Unfortunately I missed a few of the panels I wanted to attend as our panel was on that afternoon and I retired to prepare for it. I was really excited to present at SXSW as it’s an audience of our peers and the people I respect the most in our industry. As I mentioned before, I was presenting on a panel From Tags to Riches with Maxine Sherrin moderating, and Cindy Li, Scott Gledhill, Molly Holschlag and myself as panelists.
I was really happy with how it went, I thought Maxine did an awesome job at moderating and tying in all the answers back together and getting a consistent thread out of our answers. Cindy had her own cheer squad sitting in the front row, and it was great to look out and see so many familiar faces in the audience. Scott had a lot of relevant information to the audience (or so I gathered from people talking to him afterwards) and I actually surprised myself by having a lot of fun up there.
I’m really glad our panel was on the first day as it meant we could really let our hair down for the rest of the conference.
One of the big themes I got out of this SXSW was about how far it’s moved from technical advice (you need to structure divs like this) to how into the business side of things, it really shows a maturing of our industry. A lot of the panels this year were about career advice, being smart at the business side and how you have to market yourself. One of my favourite panels was How to create a kick arse inhouse design team. This was perhaps the most relevant panel for me and I was really inspired with some of the advice they gave. The most prominent piece of advice was the self promotion you have to do within your company, it’s not enough to just make good websites, you have to let everyone know what you’re doing. I know at previous jobs I’ve fallen into the path of knowing I was creating an amazing site and being frustrated that noone else understood web and so didn’t know how cool it was. I usually would just keep quiet about it as I knew it was good but it’s all about being an internal agency – if I was an external agency to the company I wouldn’t think twice about singing the praises of the site but you tend to be more humble when you work somewhere and assume that people will notice good work.
Dana Boyd and Henry Jenkins made a really interesting panel about convergence, privacy, web 2.0 and digital rights. I didn’t always agree with Henry Jenkins but he is a fascinating speaker and Dana Boyd made a great interviewer.
I’m going to leave the roundup there as there are a few themes I want to expand on but I don’t want this blog post to be too long. Until next time…
This post is tagged under: Conferences, Speaking engagements
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