SXSW Wrap-up and Report: Part the First
My friend Leslie Guttman attended her first SXSW Interactive this year and volunteered to write up her findings for this here blog…
Our SXSW journey began Friday in Dallas, when we spotted the distinguishing markings of the tribe: wire or Clark Kent glasses, black leather and L’Oreal Excellence HiColor RedHiLights … We landed in Austin, and after a quick luggage drop-off, headed out to the Salt Lick for barbecue, where we learned that meat is a side dish: “I’ll have the meat … and the meat.” … Home to peruse the beloved Skymall catalog taken from the seat pocket before dropping off. It’s hard to describe how much we love, and have always loved, Skymall. The newest nifty item on the list is the “Alive Chimpanzee” robot from The Sharper Image. “So real, it’s unreal!” (pg. 29).
Meanwhile, Saturday found us at Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s presentation: “How to Do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times.” He gave the following formula: Expected Happiness = (odds of gain) X (value of gain). We found this panel both entertaining and esoteric, yet the gist seems to be in making good choices and filtering your own mind. For example, 7,380 people drown each year, according to Gilbert’s statistics, as opposed to 90 people dying yearly in tornadoes, yet of course, TV coverage has our minds focusing on the latter as more of a scary possibility. He also noted that variety makes decision-making laborious: In one experiment which you may have heard about previously and which this space would dub the Whole Foods Theorem, people were more likely to buy gourmet jelly when they had six kinds to choose from rather than 24. Moving on … we made our way over to Wisdom of Crowds with James Surowiecki. There, it boiled down to mimicking Google when it comes to decisions and solutions – randomize your connections for an aggregated body of knowledge representing the best criteria possible from which to choose from. Sort of like Skymall.
Noted: At the women’s panel on increasing visibility on the Web: As soon as a Web page flashed on the PowerPoint screen showing a comic of a woman saying “If I had a hammer, I’d smash patriarchy,” one of the three brave guys there (two of which were no doubt journalists), got up and said, “Later.” And in other news, our leftover chicken from the Salt Lick was still in the car and needed to be tossed. After “tossing the chicken” became our new catchphrase, and we sang Copa Cabana in the car on the way home substituting Austin’s beloved Taco Cabana, we went to bed in a quiet neighborhood south of the Convention Center where people don’t lock their doors and a big dog slept well.
Monday found us: Listening to porn princess Joanna Angel talk about how she made her site a success with viral marketing, and watching the discomfort, awe, fascination, admiration and uncomfortableness of the crowd. Full disclosure: For this poster, porn is exploitive, not libertarian, no matter how many truly beautiful tattoos and well-written music features and reviews it has on it.
Nerve co-founder Rufus Griscom told us how he got Louis Rossetto to invest in the start-up days – asking for a tiny amount but the privilege of leveraging Louis’s name, and a bigger chunk of cash, said Griscom, then came in later. And then we headed over to a citizen journalism lunch spearheaded by Adam Weinroth of Pluck, which is bringing traditional media companies in the blogosphere, and no longer kicking and screaming.
OK – what more can we tell you about our stay in Austin? Beautifully bat-infested, cowgirl capitol, people whose warmth is equaled only by their generosity. A reporter friend was just standing at the airport curb waiting for a Supershuttle when three nice ladies on their way to a basketball tournament decided to give him a ride. We found the SXSW organizers frighteningly efficient, totally normal, and possessed with good fashion sense. Like every good Southerner we grew up with, they know how to throw a party. We’d toss our chicken here anytime.