The one thing Google doesn't rule at: partying

There are many great parties here at SXSW. Last night's Google party was not one of them.

The search giant does a lot of things brilliantly: Maps, e-mail, even their RSS reader are genius. But their party last night at Light on Congress was one of the lamest events in recent memory. Where else can you have a giveaway for a 16 gb iPhone and the "winners" don't even want to stick around till the end of the free drinks to find out if they won?

The music was awful, a barrage of all the most repulsive sounds and beats from Techno's Most Annoying Hits. Except these were never hits. It was music that defenders of waterboarding deem inhumane.  Numbers that make "Sister Ray" sound like Mozart. The Boredoms would have shielded their ears from the noise. No amount of free liquor could have made up for the shoulder-to-shoulder masses of people having to withstand the industrial "musics" that would have even made robots queasy.

So let's look at the pretty car above, for that was really the only nice thing to say about last night's party.

(Zuckerberg and interviewer Sarah Lacy)

Today's main event, and possibly the most anticipated and well-attended event of the festival's interactive portion, was a keynote interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy. As it turned out, the interview ended up being more about Lacy than Zuckerberg, a switcheroo that the audience wasn't so jazzed about.

Lacy, 32, who has a book coming out about Silicon Valley's rise from the dot-com ashes, seemed at times — or really, for the whole thing — to treat Zuckerberg, 23, like a child rather than what he is: one of the tech industry's most powerful businessmen and perhaps its most innovative thinker. 

Early on, Lacy told a story that felt like an attempt to let the audience know who the grown-up was.  Interrupting his answer to her own question about Facebook's philanthropic goals, she said:

The first time I ever interviewed Mark, it was so awkward. 

[To Zuckerberg:] We'll get back to you in a minute.

So I’d talked to him on the phone before but never met him in person. When I'd talked to him on the phone, he was really ballsy and out there. So I was expecting this brash, punk, outspoken kid. He was so nervous. He was wearing a white T-shirt, and it was sopping wet by the end of the interview. He sweat through his shirt!

She went on about how difficult it had been to elicit long answers out of him that time, and how she'd reached a point where she'd frustrated him so much that a nervous tic emerged — “he kinda does this thing,” said Lacy, jerking her head back and forth. “Like a bird.”

Soon she told another story about another interview she'd done with Zuckerberg at Facebook headquarters. "The place was disgusting. There was pizza on the floor. ... It was like a tornado had come through."

Zuckerberg was a good sport through the whole thing, including Lacy's multiple references to his age, his status as the world's youngest billionaire, and Facebook's embarrassing privacy episode with its Beacon advertising service. On Facebook's oft-touted $15B valuation, Lacy opined, none too objectively: "I love Facebook. I use it all the time. But you don't actually think it's worth $15B, do you?"

(To Lacy's credit, she did throw him some curveballs — how applications being generated for Facebook have become frivolous and sort of useless; Zuckerberg's tendency to fire managers he doesn't like; and how Facebook might help stem terrorism.)

Then she brought up Zuckerberg's journal-keeping habits. He apparently writes his plans and ideas out longhand in bound books. Nothing too crazy there. Still she stuck to the topic, arguing with Zuckerberg about whether or not he burned the books when he was done with them.

Finally someone in the audience had had enough:

"Talk about something interesting!" 

Listen to the bit here:

After that, Lacy lost her cool a bit, sounding defensive about the session — especially after an audience member asked, "Other than really rough interviews, what is the biggest obstacle that Facebook faces?" (The audience cackled.)

"Can somebody send me a message later about why exactly it was that I sucked so bad?"

"What is your e-mail address?" the questioner responded.

It was, once again, an "awkward" scene.

If I had to weigh in, I'd say that Lacy played a little too fast and loose with the adversarial questioning and poking fun at Zuckerberg. She was probably trying to be hip and edgy.

So yes, it backfired.  But did the thousand-member audience's decision to gang up on her make things any better?  I happen to agree with her that her job is pretty tough, and it doesn't get any easier when the people you're trying to inform start going e-mob on you.

Yesterday, David touched on the massive amount of paper products (a.k.a. advertising) that fill the SXSW shwag bags, which are ironically made from reusable canvas, but holy God, take a look at how many there are!

According to Paige Steen, the crew chief of promotional materials,  there are about 5,000 bags put together for the film fest, 7,000 for interactive and more than 25,000 for the music attendees. The bags themselves are so heavy (5 lbs for either the film or interactive sacks, 20 lbs for the music behemoth) that those of us who have signed up for multiple events are encouraged to claim just one bag at a time when we check in at the ground floor of the convention center. [update: SXSW is now saying that the actual amount of bags are  12,000 for music, 6,000 for interactive, and 5,500 for film]

Bags are filled with magazines, notepads, bracelets, fliers, CDs, DVDs and even a Chinese take-out box with a fortune cookie. Steen said that volunteers spend hours packing the tens of thousands of shwag bags days before the festival.

Henry Jenkins, the author of a bunch of books on new media culture and an MIT media heavy, gave the  keynote interview today along with Steven Johnson.  Not only is Jenkins full of interesting insights, but a lot of them tend to be optimistic about digital culture revolution (unlike, say, Lee Siegel's) -- which is one reason why all these SXSW geeks (me included) think he's the lolcat's pajamas.  Here are a few excerpts from the discussion:

On whether the digital culture is 'troglodyzing' our kids:

Never underestimate the desire of parents to see their children as dumb.  We see our children at their worst moments in the course of their lives ... it’s very easy to imagine our children as failures -- and because they go into worlds that are unfamiliar from our own childhood, we see them in some ways as threatened.

That creates a context where as a parent you’re looking at young peoples' engagement with this technology and there’s a sense of fear ... because as a parent you fall back on -- in these moments of crisis -- the things you were taught and the world you grew up in.   And that sense of a conservative reaction to things that were alien to your experience is a very real-world one.  It only takes one instance — a Columbine or a Virginia Tech shooting -- and what comes out of that is the beginnings of a moral panic. A moral panic is what happens when you stop asking questions because you assume you know the answers.

There are new literacies that are emerging in this generation that are so powerful, but that parents don't understand. 

On why standardized tests don't make sense anymore:

The problem is that the whole structure of assessment has been wrong for the kinds of skills that we're talking about.   We're still starting from the assumption of the individual learner, the autonomous learner ... the person who knows everything.  And as you move toward an era of collective intelligence, the capacity of people is to process knowledge together -- to communicate ideas with each other, to pool resources ...

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

The first thing that hit me about South by Southwest is the sheer amount of recording. I'm talking video, audio, photo, blogging, twittering, pownceing, dodgeballing,  and I even saw one guy taking notes with a pencil.

In a way, it makes sense: This place is a locus of tech innovation culture, and what's big in tech now is rich media -- that is, being able to create and distribute any kind of media you want, to as many people as you want. The ease with which we can all do this now makes everyone into a kind of reporter.  Just speaking for myself, I've got my laptop, iPhone, digital voice recorder, digital still-slash-video camera, and a notepad.  I'm like a full-service media organization.  But in that regard, I am totally un-special.

A few minutes ago, I saw Mahalo Daily's reportrix Veronica Belmont  being interviewed by a guy with a camera (I forgot to write his name down, and she couldn't remember who it was either!) in the hallway with a camera. Right after that interview she turned around to be interviewed by Brian Tong of CNET, and after that I approached her about an interview about everyone interviewing everyone else.

"It's not all that new," she said of the meta-media phenomenon, "but I think it's just a lot easier now with the way technology is evolving."

Seemingly everyone here has a blog, vlog, show, or website.  During a panel on whether to quit your job and pursue video blogging professionally, one audience member approached the microphone to ask a question. Or was he an audience member? The guy had a video camera and he was taping himself asking the question.

(My picture of a guy taking a picture of Brian Tong interviewing interviewer Veronica Belmont)

The guy's question was: what advice do you have for aspiring vloggers?

"What's your name?" asked panelist Lindsay Campbell of the video blog Wallstrip online news show Moblogic.tv. 

"Brian Agosta dot com," said Brian Agosta.

"Yeah," said Campbell, her main piece of advice illustrated: "Promote yourself." 

SXSW: Zuckerberg's avenging audience

(Zuckerberg and interviewer Sarah Lacy)

Today's main event, and possibly the most anticipated and well-attended event of the festival's interactive portion, was a keynote interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy. As it turned out, the interview ended up being more about Lacy than Zuckerberg, a switcheroo that the audience wasn't so jazzed about.

Lacy, 32, who has a book coming out about Silicon Valley's rise from the dot-com ashes, seemed at times — or really, for the whole thing — to treat Zuckerberg, 23, like a child rather than what he is: one of the tech industry's most powerful businessmen and perhaps its most innovative thinker. 

Early on, Lacy told a story that felt like an attempt to let the audience know who the grown-up was.  Interrupting his answer to her own question about Facebook's philanthropic goals, she said:

The first time I ever interviewed Mark, it was so awkward. 

[To Zuckerberg:] We'll get back to you in a minute.

So I’d talked to him on the phone before but never met him in person. When I'd talked to him on the phone, he was really ballsy and out there. So I was expecting this brash, punk, outspoken kid. He was so nervous. He was wearing a white T-shirt, and it was sopping wet by the end of the interview. He sweat through his shirt!

She went on about how difficult it had been to elicit long answers out of him that time, and how she'd reached a point where she'd frustrated him so much that a nervous tic emerged — “he kinda does this thing,” said Lacy, jerking her head back and forth. “Like a bird.”

Soon she told another story about another interview she'd done with Zuckerberg at Facebook headquarters. "The place was disgusting. There was pizza on the floor. ... It was like a tornado had come through."

Zuckerberg was a good sport through the whole thing, including Lacy's multiple references to his age, his status as the world's youngest billionaire, and Facebook's embarrassing privacy episode with its Beacon advertising service. On Facebook's oft-touted $15B valuation, Lacy opined, none too objectively: "I love Facebook. I use it all the time. But you don't actually think it's worth $15B, do you?"

(To Lacy's credit, she did throw him some curveballs — how applications being generated for Facebook have become frivolous and sort of useless; Zuckerberg's tendency to fire managers he doesn't like; and how Facebook might help stem terrorism.)

Then she brought up Zuckerberg's journal-keeping habits. He apparently writes his plans and ideas out longhand in bound books. Nothing too crazy there. Still she stuck to the topic, arguing with Zuckerberg about whether or not he burned the books when he was done with them.

Finally someone in the audience had had enough:

"Talk about something interesting!" 

Listen to the bit here:

After that, Lacy lost her cool a bit, sounding defensive about the session — especially after an audience member asked, "Other than really rough interviews, what is the biggest obstacle that Facebook faces?" (The audience cackled.)

"Can somebody send me a message later about why exactly it was that I sucked so bad?"

"What is your e-mail address?" the questioner responded.

It was, once again, an "awkward" scene.

If I had to weigh in, I'd say that Lacy played a little too fast and loose with the adversarial questioning and poking fun at Zuckerberg. She was probably trying to be hip and edgy.

So yes, it backfired.  But did the thousand-member audience's decision to gang up on her make things any better?  I happen to agree with her that her job is pretty tough, and it doesn't get any easier when the people you're trying to inform start going e-mob on you.

Yesterday, David touched on the massive amount of paper products (a.k.a. advertising) that fill the SXSW shwag bags, which are ironically made from reusable canvas, but holy God, take a look at how many there are!

According to Paige Steen, the crew chief of promotional materials,  there are about 5,000 bags put together for the film fest, 7,000 for interactive and more than 25,000 for the music attendees. The bags themselves are so heavy (5 lbs for either the film or interactive sacks, 20 lbs for the music behemoth) that those of us who have signed up for multiple events are encouraged to claim just one bag at a time when we check in at the ground floor of the convention center. [update: SXSW is now saying that the actual amount of bags are  12,000 for music, 6,000 for interactive, and 5,500 for film]

Bags are filled with magazines, notepads, bracelets, fliers, CDs, DVDs and even a Chinese take-out box with a fortune cookie. Steen said that volunteers spend hours packing the tens of thousands of shwag bags days before the festival.

Henry Jenkins, the author of a bunch of books on new media culture and an MIT media heavy, gave the  keynote interview today along with Steven Johnson.  Not only is Jenkins full of interesting insights, but a lot of them tend to be optimistic about digital culture revolution (unlike, say, Lee Siegel's) -- which is one reason why all these SXSW geeks (me included) think he's the lolcat's pajamas.  Here are a few excerpts from the discussion:

On whether the digital culture is 'troglodyzing' our kids:

Never underestimate the desire of parents to see their children as dumb.  We see our children at their worst moments in the course of their lives ... it’s very easy to imagine our children as failures -- and because they go into worlds that are unfamiliar from our own childhood, we see them in some ways as threatened.

That creates a context where as a parent you’re looking at young peoples' engagement with this technology and there’s a sense of fear ... because as a parent you fall back on -- in these moments of crisis -- the things you were taught and the world you grew up in.   And that sense of a conservative reaction to things that were alien to your experience is a very real-world one.  It only takes one instance — a Columbine or a Virginia Tech shooting -- and what comes out of that is the beginnings of a moral panic. A moral panic is what happens when you stop asking questions because you assume you know the answers.

There are new literacies that are emerging in this generation that are so powerful, but that parents don't understand. 

On why standardized tests don't make sense anymore:

The problem is that the whole structure of assessment has been wrong for the kinds of skills that we're talking about.   We're still starting from the assumption of the individual learner, the autonomous learner ... the person who knows everything.  And as you move toward an era of collective intelligence, the capacity of people is to process knowledge together -- to communicate ideas with each other, to pool resources ...

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

The first thing that hit me about South by Southwest is the sheer amount of recording. I'm talking video, audio, photo, blogging, twittering, pownceing, dodgeballing,  and I even saw one guy taking notes with a pencil.

In a way, it makes sense: This place is a locus of tech innovation culture, and what's big in tech now is rich media -- that is, being able to create and distribute any kind of media you want, to as many people as you want. The ease with which we can all do this now makes everyone into a kind of reporter.  Just speaking for myself, I've got my laptop, iPhone, digital voice recorder, digital still-slash-video camera, and a notepad.  I'm like a full-service media organization.  But in that regard, I am totally un-special.

A few minutes ago, I saw Mahalo Daily's reportrix Veronica Belmont  being interviewed by a guy with a camera (I forgot to write his name down, and she couldn't remember who it was either!) in the hallway with a camera. Right after that interview she turned around to be interviewed by Brian Tong of CNET, and after that I approached her about an interview about everyone interviewing everyone else.

"It's not all that new," she said of the meta-media phenomenon, "but I think it's just a lot easier now with the way technology is evolving."

Seemingly everyone here has a blog, vlog, show, or website.  During a panel on whether to quit your job and pursue video blogging professionally, one audience member approached the microphone to ask a question. Or was he an audience member? The guy had a video camera and he was taping himself asking the question.

(My picture of a guy taking a picture of Brian Tong interviewing interviewer Veronica Belmont)

The guy's question was: what advice do you have for aspiring vloggers?

"What's your name?" asked panelist Lindsay Campbell of the video blog Wallstrip online news show Moblogic.tv. 

"Brian Agosta dot com," said Brian Agosta.

"Yeah," said Campbell, her main piece of advice illustrated: "Promote yourself." 

More on the SXSW Shwag Bags

Yesterday, David touched on the massive amount of paper products (a.k.a. advertising) that fill the SXSW shwag bags, which are ironically made from reusable canvas, but holy God, take a look at how many there are!

According to Paige Steen, the crew chief of promotional materials,  there are about 5,000 bags put together for the film fest, 7,000 for interactive and more than 25,000 for the music attendees. The bags themselves are so heavy (5 lbs for either the film or interactive sacks, 20 lbs for the music behemoth) that those of us who have signed up for multiple events are encouraged to claim just one bag at a time when we check in at the ground floor of the convention center. [update: SXSW is now saying that the actual amount of bags are  12,000 for music, 6,000 for interactive, and 5,500 for film]

Bags are filled with magazines, notepads, bracelets, fliers, CDs, DVDs and even a Chinese take-out box with a fortune cookie. Steen said that volunteers spend hours packing the tens of thousands of shwag bags days before the festival.

Henry Jenkins, the author of a bunch of books on new media culture and an MIT media heavy, gave the  keynote interview today along with Steven Johnson.  Not only is Jenkins full of interesting insights, but a lot of them tend to be optimistic about digital culture revolution (unlike, say, Lee Siegel's) -- which is one reason why all these SXSW geeks (me included) think he's the lolcat's pajamas.  Here are a few excerpts from the discussion:

On whether the digital culture is 'troglodyzing' our kids:

Never underestimate the desire of parents to see their children as dumb.  We see our children at their worst moments in the course of their lives ... it’s very easy to imagine our children as failures -- and because they go into worlds that are unfamiliar from our own childhood, we see them in some ways as threatened.

That creates a context where as a parent you’re looking at young peoples' engagement with this technology and there’s a sense of fear ... because as a parent you fall back on -- in these moments of crisis -- the things you were taught and the world you grew up in.   And that sense of a conservative reaction to things that were alien to your experience is a very real-world one.  It only takes one instance — a Columbine or a Virginia Tech shooting -- and what comes out of that is the beginnings of a moral panic. A moral panic is what happens when you stop asking questions because you assume you know the answers.

There are new literacies that are emerging in this generation that are so powerful, but that parents don't understand. 

On why standardized tests don't make sense anymore:

The problem is that the whole structure of assessment has been wrong for the kinds of skills that we're talking about.   We're still starting from the assumption of the individual learner, the autonomous learner ... the person who knows everything.  And as you move toward an era of collective intelligence, the capacity of people is to process knowledge together -- to communicate ideas with each other, to pool resources ...

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

The first thing that hit me about South by Southwest is the sheer amount of recording. I'm talking video, audio, photo, blogging, twittering, pownceing, dodgeballing,  and I even saw one guy taking notes with a pencil.

In a way, it makes sense: This place is a locus of tech innovation culture, and what's big in tech now is rich media -- that is, being able to create and distribute any kind of media you want, to as many people as you want. The ease with which we can all do this now makes everyone into a kind of reporter.  Just speaking for myself, I've got my laptop, iPhone, digital voice recorder, digital still-slash-video camera, and a notepad.  I'm like a full-service media organization.  But in that regard, I am totally un-special.

A few minutes ago, I saw Mahalo Daily's reportrix Veronica Belmont  being interviewed by a guy with a camera (I forgot to write his name down, and she couldn't remember who it was either!) in the hallway with a camera. Right after that interview she turned around to be interviewed by Brian Tong of CNET, and after that I approached her about an interview about everyone interviewing everyone else.

"It's not all that new," she said of the meta-media phenomenon, "but I think it's just a lot easier now with the way technology is evolving."

Seemingly everyone here has a blog, vlog, show, or website.  During a panel on whether to quit your job and pursue video blogging professionally, one audience member approached the microphone to ask a question. Or was he an audience member? The guy had a video camera and he was taping himself asking the question.

(My picture of a guy taking a picture of Brian Tong interviewing interviewer Veronica Belmont)

The guy's question was: what advice do you have for aspiring vloggers?

"What's your name?" asked panelist Lindsay Campbell of the video blog Wallstrip online news show Moblogic.tv. 

"Brian Agosta dot com," said Brian Agosta.

"Yeah," said Campbell, her main piece of advice illustrated: "Promote yourself." 

SXSW: Henry Jenkins, guru of convergence culture

Henry Jenkins, the author of a bunch of books on new media culture and an MIT media heavy, gave the  keynote interview today along with Steven Johnson.  Not only is Jenkins full of interesting insights, but a lot of them tend to be optimistic about digital culture revolution (unlike, say, Lee Siegel's) -- which is one reason why all these SXSW geeks (me included) think he's the lolcat's pajamas.  Here are a few excerpts from the discussion:

On whether the digital culture is 'troglodyzing' our kids:

Never underestimate the desire of parents to see their children as dumb.  We see our children at their worst moments in the course of their lives ... it’s very easy to imagine our children as failures -- and because they go into worlds that are unfamiliar from our own childhood, we see them in some ways as threatened.

That creates a context where as a parent you’re looking at young peoples' engagement with this technology and there’s a sense of fear ... because as a parent you fall back on -- in these moments of crisis -- the things you were taught and the world you grew up in.   And that sense of a conservative reaction to things that were alien to your experience is a very real-world one.  It only takes one instance — a Columbine or a Virginia Tech shooting -- and what comes out of that is the beginnings of a moral panic. A moral panic is what happens when you stop asking questions because you assume you know the answers.

There are new literacies that are emerging in this generation that are so powerful, but that parents don't understand. 

On why standardized tests don't make sense anymore:

The problem is that the whole structure of assessment has been wrong for the kinds of skills that we're talking about.   We're still starting from the assumption of the individual learner, the autonomous learner ... the person who knows everything.  And as you move toward an era of collective intelligence, the capacity of people is to process knowledge together -- to communicate ideas with each other, to pool resources ...

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

The first thing that hit me about South by Southwest is the sheer amount of recording. I'm talking video, audio, photo, blogging, twittering, pownceing, dodgeballing,  and I even saw one guy taking notes with a pencil.

In a way, it makes sense: This place is a locus of tech innovation culture, and what's big in tech now is rich media -- that is, being able to create and distribute any kind of media you want, to as many people as you want. The ease with which we can all do this now makes everyone into a kind of reporter.  Just speaking for myself, I've got my laptop, iPhone, digital voice recorder, digital still-slash-video camera, and a notepad.  I'm like a full-service media organization.  But in that regard, I am totally un-special.

A few minutes ago, I saw Mahalo Daily's reportrix Veronica Belmont  being interviewed by a guy with a camera (I forgot to write his name down, and she couldn't remember who it was either!) in the hallway with a camera. Right after that interview she turned around to be interviewed by Brian Tong of CNET, and after that I approached her about an interview about everyone interviewing everyone else.

"It's not all that new," she said of the meta-media phenomenon, "but I think it's just a lot easier now with the way technology is evolving."

Seemingly everyone here has a blog, vlog, show, or website.  During a panel on whether to quit your job and pursue video blogging professionally, one audience member approached the microphone to ask a question. Or was he an audience member? The guy had a video camera and he was taping himself asking the question.

(My picture of a guy taking a picture of Brian Tong interviewing interviewer Veronica Belmont)

The guy's question was: what advice do you have for aspiring vloggers?

"What's your name?" asked panelist Lindsay Campbell of the video blog Wallstrip online news show Moblogic.tv. 

"Brian Agosta dot com," said Brian Agosta.

"Yeah," said Campbell, her main piece of advice illustrated: "Promote yourself." 

SXSW: Bag swag

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

The first thing that hit me about South by Southwest is the sheer amount of recording. I'm talking video, audio, photo, blogging, twittering, pownceing, dodgeballing,  and I even saw one guy taking notes with a pencil.

In a way, it makes sense: This place is a locus of tech innovation culture, and what's big in tech now is rich media -- that is, being able to create and distribute any kind of media you want, to as many people as you want. The ease with which we can all do this now makes everyone into a kind of reporter.  Just speaking for myself, I've got my laptop, iPhone, digital voice recorder, digital still-slash-video camera, and a notepad.  I'm like a full-service media organization.  But in that regard, I am totally un-special.

A few minutes ago, I saw Mahalo Daily's reportrix Veronica Belmont  being interviewed by a guy with a camera (I forgot to write his name down, and she couldn't remember who it was either!) in the hallway with a camera. Right after that interview she turned around to be interviewed by Brian Tong of CNET, and after that I approached her about an interview about everyone interviewing everyone else.

"It's not all that new," she said of the meta-media phenomenon, "but I think it's just a lot easier now with the way technology is evolving."

Seemingly everyone here has a blog, vlog, show, or website.  During a panel on whether to quit your job and pursue video blogging professionally, one audience member approached the microphone to ask a question. Or was he an audience member? The guy had a video camera and he was taping himself asking the question.

(My picture of a guy taking a picture of Brian Tong interviewing interviewer Veronica Belmont)

The guy's question was: what advice do you have for aspiring vloggers?

"What's your name?" asked panelist Lindsay Campbell of the video blog Wallstrip online news show Moblogic.tv. 

"Brian Agosta dot com," said Brian Agosta.

"Yeah," said Campbell, her main piece of advice illustrated: "Promote yourself." 

SXSW Conference: Blog or be blogged!

The first thing that hit me about South by Southwest is the sheer amount of recording. I'm talking video, audio, photo, blogging, twittering, pownceing, dodgeballing,  and I even saw one guy taking notes with a pencil.

In a way, it makes sense: This place is a locus of tech innovation culture, and what's big in tech now is rich media -- that is, being able to create and distribute any kind of media you want, to as many people as you want. The ease with which we can all do this now makes everyone into a kind of reporter.  Just speaking for myself, I've got my laptop, iPhone, digital voice recorder, digital still-slash-video camera, and a notepad.  I'm like a full-service media organization.  But in that regard, I am totally un-special.

A few minutes ago, I saw Mahalo Daily's reportrix Veronica Belmont  being interviewed by a guy with a camera (I forgot to write his name down, and she couldn't remember who it was either!) in the hallway with a camera. Right after that interview she turned around to be interviewed by Brian Tong of CNET, and after that I approached her about an interview about everyone interviewing everyone else.

"It's not all that new," she said of the meta-media phenomenon, "but I think it's just a lot easier now with the way technology is evolving."

Seemingly everyone here has a blog, vlog, show, or website.  During a panel on whether to quit your job and pursue video blogging professionally, one audience member approached the microphone to ask a question. Or was he an audience member? The guy had a video camera and he was taping himself asking the question.

(My picture of a guy taking a picture of Brian Tong interviewing interviewer Veronica Belmont)

The guy's question was: what advice do you have for aspiring vloggers?

"What's your name?" asked panelist Lindsay Campbell of the video blog Wallstrip online news show Moblogic.tv. 

"Brian Agosta dot com," said Brian Agosta.

"Yeah," said Campbell, her main piece of advice illustrated: "Promote yourself."