Today I am at South by Southwest.
Yes, you can tell I’m a noob because I didn’t refer to it as just “South by.” Perhaps when this event is done I’ll write a bit of a contrarian post about SXSW. The quick takeaways are.
1. Spring break for the internet: W000! Show me your A.P.I.!
2. The Ikea of tech conferences.
Regardless of that – it’s always a blast to see folks like Matt Thompson, Patrick Thornton, Sean Blanda, Will Sullivan, Dan Gillmor, Tristan Harris, Joe Edelman, Matt Mireles, Raines Cohen, Scott Rosenberg, Jonathan Berger Scott Hocker, and more. You’ll just be walking down the hall and boom, there they are. Working on the Internet often means you don’t get face-t0-face time with your colleagues. Even though I don’t directly work with any of these individuals, I consider them allies in a changing media landscape which we are all defining and redefining. Being able to shake a hand or give a hi-five never hurt. I’m sure I’ll run into more good folks tomorrow.
Meanwhile my geek out moment today was seeing Bruce Sterling breeze past me. Almost stopped him while he was walking just to say “thanks” without giving that a qualification.
Tomorrow I’m giving a talk on community funded reporting with Lynn Headley. My quick powerpoint is below. But as I often say: “Power corrupts and PowerPoints corrupt absolutely. Still – they provide me a mental map of things I want to cover.
Also a few of us are organizing a journo-meetup on Sunday at 5pm at Opal Divine’s – 700 W sixth St. I’m told everyone organizes something at Sunday at 5pm. Furthermore that everyone does it at Opal’s – so it should basically just be a bar where we will run into each other.
From here I’ll be going down to Columbia Missouri to visit the Reynolds Institute of Journalism. No doubt I’ll speak with more interesting journo-media-folk. I’ll try and grab some video/photos to share later. I used to make sure that at every conference I went to I would grab one good interview – even if it was five minutes nonchalant. Lately I’ve let that practice go. I hope to revive it.
There is lots going on in the life of Digidave. I also hope to revamp this website. Spot.Us though remains priority number one!
I have been a bad personal blogger as a result of this priority. I can’t say it will change dramatically anytime soon and I think most folks who follow this blog understand that and support what I’m doing with my work. Still – I owe you more.
Also note: I have started a more quirky personal blog: Digidave’s Quickies. These are mostly cool videos, links, etc. That space will be for personal rants, raves, links and more. I’ll keep this one more professional and of course the MOST professional stuff will be on Spot.Us since – that’s what I do in my day-to-day.