South By South West 2009

Categories:

SXSW

Tags:

austin, expressionengine, mad men, sxsw, sxswi, twitter, wasp, watchmen, zappos

Published:

10:01am on Friday 20th March, 2009

Thanks to a four-hour layover in Dallas Fort Worth, I’m able to take the opportunity to write up my notes and thoughts on the rest of 2009’s South By South West while it’s still fairly fresh in my mind. Hopefully a lack of sleep and too much coffee will not overly affect my, uh, you know. That thing. Being good. With words.

Saturday (Day 2)

Friday was a late one after Dan Rubin‘s Watchmen outing (despite an automatic knee-jerk reaction to any deviations from the comic book, I actually really enjoyed it; I want to see it again before giving a full review, though). The weather wasn’t great either—cold and rain I have at home, Austin!—but once safely inside the Austin Convention Center, the upgraded infrastructure coped admirably well with the 10,000 attendees’ wifi requirements.

The afternoon keynote, by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, was extremely inspiring, although guaranteed to frustrate anyone without a direct line to the people able to really drive the kind of change described by Hsieh and implemented by him at Zappos. The stories he told about how their staff live and breathe the company culture and values, and how the steps that his team have taken to build a brand that will bring happiness, were great, and once the video is up on SXSW it should be required viewing for company MDs anywhere.

The worst panel I saw this year was Designing For Irrational Behaviour, which was oddly pitched between interface design talk and psychology lecture. The self-confessed tech noob college professor would have been great to listen to in the right context (i.e. college), but really struck a bum note for most of the attendees in the panel; I wasn’t alone in feeling bad for the panelists as their room haemorrhaged people throughout the scheduled hour.

I had assumed that Building Your Brand would have been at least a little relevant for someone looking for business brand tips, but instead it was purely focused on social media personal brand management. I seemed to be in the minority by not having a clue who any of the people up on stage were (okay, I know of Loic Le Meur through the LeWeb conference, but by name only), but it was an entertaining panel anyway—not least due to the presence of live Twitter search up on the jumbotron, allowing both those in the audience and around the world to participate and/or trade insults in real-time. I even got to join in—well, you can’t let someone get away with a statement like “Twitter is the new phone” without calling them on it, can you?

Sunday (Day 3)

Whenever I start to feel guilty about sunning myself in Austin on the company tab, I remind myself that I’m voluntarily spending my entire weekend working. It’s 10am on Sunday, but I’m learning about Interface Lessons From Games. Commitment, right?

There are some talks that you just know are going to be great, and Jared Spool never fails to deliver. His Journey To The Center Of Design show, complete with human bell curves and a bold takeaway (“User Centered Design is dead” according to Jared), was a definite highlight of the conference.

I also sat in on the iPhone Development panel, hoping to learn how easy it might be to build a native application. The Objective-C development platform doesn’t look too depressingly complex, and the IDE makes it easy to drag-and-drop interface elements to wire up your app quickly (ah, now I see where Atlas comes from!), but it was disappointing to hear that effectively everything they talked about is probably going to become redundant as soon as Apple releases the next version of the SDK. Still, it’s an area I plan to investigate in the medium term.

After failing to get into any of the smaller panels in the afternoon, we ended up listening to Gary Vaynerchuk do his thing in the large ballroom. I love what the guy does, and completely respect his commitment to his passion, but I don’t think I could deal with him in person every day…

(Some) Geeks (kind of) Love Bowling

My third year at SXSW bowling (and I believe its fourth year overall) was substantially more subdued than past events,  with barely half the lanes in use and a much smaller concentration of geeks than last year. It was a pity that it was up against so many other parties that night (including the Facebook and Tumblr parties), and I hope that Bryan can rebuild it to its previous heights for next year, as it was always a highlight of the week for me.

Monday (Day 4)

Now in its third year, the Browser Wars session was a frank exchange of views and opinions by representatives of Mozilla, Opera, Chrome and Internet Explorer. The moderator asked some tough questions, particularly of Microsoft’s Chris Wilson, but it was great to hear about the kinds of things that they are thinking about, particularly concerning how the specs get debated and agreed. The IE discussion continued at the WaSP Annual Meeting where Aaron Gustafson summed up the work that Microsoft have been doing this year concerning version targeting—Craig Cook asked why IE8’s “IE7 compatibility mode” is subtly different from IE7 itself, and apparently they (MS) plan to fix all the bugs still relating to those discrepancies.

I had another great lunch at Iron Cactus with the guys from EllisLab (plus a few other EE enthusiasts), and later Derek Allard took us through a demo of ExpressionEngine 2.0. All I can say is, wow—it is so much more than just a port of EE 1.6 to the CodeIgniter framework. Some of the features they have added (many with great jQuery-powered interactions, Derek’s been busy!) are going to cut development time in half when you’re setting up that new EE project. I can’t wait until it comes out, and what I’ve seen means I really don’t care what the price uptick ends up being—I want this CMS!

After most of the regular sessions had ended, Alex Jones from Refresh Austin led a Core Conversation on Energising Communities. It was great to have the opportunity to participate as part of a smaller group, and there were some really interesting discussions with people from Refresh Denver and some UK-based groups too.

Tuesday (Day 5)

If there is one word that sums up SXSW this year, that word would have to be: Twitter. In virtually every panel, every conversation, and on every corner, Twitter was being heralded as the saviour of the internet. Me? I don’t think it’s jumped the shark quite yet, but it’s certainly putting on its water-skis.

The Guy Kawasaki keynote really didn’t appeal, so instead I went to the Mad Men on Twitter panel, which was really good. I’m a big fan of Mad Men, and an admirer of what I had always assumed was a carefully managed media campaign on Twitter, so I was really surprised to learn that the people behind the multitude of Mad Men characters living on the social network have absolutely nothing to do with AMC or the PR firm for the show. Of course, it’s no coincidence that many of the people who spotted the opportunity and value in twittering as their favourite characters work in the PR and marketing industry, but as @PeggyOlson pointed out it’s still surprising that more production companies (or even writers) aren’t making use of Twitter to extend their brand and character development to a sub-section of fans.

Apple’s James Craig closed out my final day of the conference with an interesting look at Universal Design, and a reminder that accessibility can often have a much bigger impact than simply making your site or app [more] usable for visitors with disabilities. Nothing new, perhaps, but sometimes you just need reminding that there are many simple steps that you can take to make life easier for people.

Summary

I had yet another great year in Austin; despite the initially poor weather it brightened up eventually, and staying right on 6th St (with Derek, Paul and Mike) really made for an ideal central location, convenient for both the Convention Center and the parties. Speaking of parties, yet again they were awesome—97bottles Happy Hour, South By North West, and the MediaTemple closing party were chock-full with friends old and new. And I finally made it to a Breakfast with Dustin at the IHOP, which ticks off another experience on my list of “quintessential American places to visit.”

I should also thank Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast for putting up with me for large amounts of the time and hanging out all week—you rock, and I probably won’t show that photograph to too many more people. ;)

Roll on SouthBy 2010. [original photo by Lan Bui]