Once again, SXSW Interactive dropped a huge pile of swag on all attendees.
The first year I attended, I ended up having to get an additional bag for all the goodies on the way home. Where possible, I brought extra swag for coworkers that didn’t make it to the conference and it was much appreciated…even if it ended up as a cubicle feeding frenzy once I dumped it out on my desk.
Last year, I planned ahead and had a lot of extra room in my main bag (I packed lighter for the warm weather) and which was overweight upon checking in at the airport to come home (by 5 pounds) so I simply pulled out some magazines and put them in my carry-on.
This year, I just brought a bigger suitcase and was still 16 pounds over upon leaving. I brought an extra carry-on for all the books and pulled it and the paper goods out….and the check in attendant let me go even though I was still about 4-5 pounds over.
Aside from a pile of free t-shirts from all kinds of places, here’s a few shots of some of the stuff that was picked up on the trade show floor – a few purchased items from the Make store or via donations to Creative Commons (CC/Mozilla Moleskin FTW!) and a few trinkets from my brief stopover at BarCamp Austin:
Here’s a video of me dumping out and going through the swag bag you get as an Interactive attendee. If you attended the Music, Film or had a Gold/Platinum badge, you’d get additional bags for those events too.
I shudder to think how much paper was wasted (and not recycled) from the thousands of bags issued to attendees:
By now, if you pay attention to the tech news at all, you’ll have heard about the absolute train wreck the Mark Zuckerberg keynote was at South by Southwest. I’m not chiming in with anything particularly new I don’t think, but I did want to offer up my take, especially after taking some time to digest it and talk to some people about it.
The general consensus is that Sarah Lacy of Business Week did a shite job. Her interview was pure fluff and was completely lacking in actual questions. More than once, Zuck said “was that a question?” It was almost as though she went out of her way to embarass the poor guy and was more interested in landing a piece of him for herself than she was in actually asking questions that mattered to the three rooms full of geeks watching.
Zuckerberg has been very very carefully media trained, and whoever he worked with did a good job. He stayed on message, never ever deviating, and was about as flat as he was on 60 minutes. I think that’s his “interview” face. Or his schtick – one or the other. He’s still very young and needs some more time to become better at the interviews, better at answering questions without sounding like he’s simply repeating what he was taught. I don’tparticularly like it, and agree with the twitterer in BlogHaus who said “Zuckerberg is about as articuate as a rock”, but I’ll cut him a tiny bit of slack because he is so young.
My problem was with Sarah and the fact that she acted like a ditz; twirling her hair, asking about his thoughts on his “Forbes Youngest Billionaire” status and doing the leg-uncross-recross-and-lean-in-show you my-cleavage move. Telling stories about Mark that sounded like she was trying to prove to the audience that she knew him and that in turn, managed to embarrass him. There was nothing good about the interview (scratch that, it wasn’t an interview; it was a conversation between two people, only on stage) and it set twitter on fire with people talking about it and riffing on the in room hecklers.
The one redeeming thing that Zuck did was to co-opt some time at the Facebook Developers conference and do an Open Q&A. I haven’t heard, or looked for, many response to this move yet, but I’m applauding the move from a PR point of view.
I’ve discovered that my panel, New Media: Collaboration in Business, will be moderated by social media guru (and hilariously witty) Monica Hamburg, and I’ll be alongside Linda Bustos (super e-commerce blogger), Rob Cottingham (of Social Signal and responsible for those great Facebook comics) and Warren Baxley of Intercall, with whom I’m unfamiliar but I’m sure I’ll learn more on the day of the panel.
To attend this portion of the conference, you’ll need an All Access pass.
This is my first SxSW experience and it’s nothing at all like i expected. I stopped going to the panels after my first two (tho I did make an exception for Blame Canada…) and hung out in the hallways, on the tradeshow floor and best of all, in the AMD sponsored BlogHaus.
Difficult little room to find, but once you got in there, snacks, beer (or coffee in the morning) power strips, internet connections, Guitar Hero III and internet A Listers abounded. The Austin Conference Centre is laid out in the oddest way. When you first come in, you go from the first floor directly to the fourth. Bloghaus was on the 3rd floor. For the first day, I was actually fairly convinced that Texas just didn’t bother to use the numbers 2 and 3. It’s not that everything is bigger in Texas, it’s just that they can’t count.
I met a good portion of my Twitter friends on this trip, and hung out with the Vancouver tech contingent more in Austin than I do at home. John Biehler, Peter Andersen, Tod Maffin, Phillip Jeffrey, Roland Tanglao… there are a TON of Canadians here. Last year, Twitter was the rock star of SxSWi, and everyone was trying to predict what this year’s Twitter would be. Canada is this year’s Twitter. 2008, we’re the rock stars of SouthBy.
I completely started a trend at SouthBy this year. I didn’t mean to, it just happened!
We were headed to the Red Eyed Fly for the Fray Cafe Sunday evening. Walked past this fabulous tattoo parlor and decided just to go check it out. Called True Blue Tattoo, it had a very cool vibe and best of all it was relatively empty. Mind you, 8 pm on a Sunday evening, and I suspose that’s to be expected.
I’ve wanted to get Latin for breathe on my wrist for a while now. Spur of the moment decision, on Sunday night, I got it done. Quite small, inside my wrist, and in a great script, i now sport new ink “inspire”. Totally love it. I was with Greg and he decided to get a tattoo as well, and began designing his while waiting for me. Justin, whom I met through Twitter and then face to face at the Sundance Film Festival this year called while I was waiting to get it done and came over to watch and be my official photographer. He went and got his done on Monday night. Greg went back to Jim at True Blue and got his done on Tuesday night.
Definitely not the souvenier I expected to bring home from SxSWi, but hey, it rocks!
