Back of the head of one of the volunteers at SXSW. When I asked if I could take a picture (camera phone), he agreed, but only under the proviso that if I posted it, I would do so under a fully open Creative Commons license. So here t’is – republish to your heart’s content.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution2.5 License.
Although there was nothing remotely Mac-related about the SXSW sessions, amazing to see that 70-80% of all laptops in the crowd were PowerBooks or iBooks. Traditionally, this would probably be explained by pointing to “the creative types,” but the crowd breakdown was weighted more to developers than to creatives. As Tim O’Reilly started noting a couple of years ago, the “alpha geeks” have been adopting the Mac at a rate much, much higher than the general computing population. And SXSW was alpha-geek-central. Other than not having to feel like a leper, some nice side-benefits of being at Mac-heavy conference:
– Being able to use Bonjour/iChat for the back-channel.
– The SXSW organizers built a really cool scheduling system: Once logged into their site, add sessions to your online calendar. The SXSW database kept track of how many people had logged interest in the session. Then subscribe via iCal to your own SXSW preferences and get an ideal iCal interface mapping out your week. Click an event and see not only the room number, but also how many attendees were expected to show up. Now overlay a second calendar for parties and a third for personal meetings, and you have a very slick organizational tool for conferences.
Loose notes from the SXSW 2006 session: Burnie Burns Keynote
“What happens when you employ video game technology to produce narrative, episodic content? The reigning expert in this form explains the many new possibilities brought forth by this brave new world of machinima.”
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Loose notes from the SXSW 2006 session: Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Interviews Craig Newmark
Missed most of this session due to other obligations, and I’ve seen him speak quite a few times already, but wanted to post one of his remarks (not a direct quote; from memory):
I’d like to be more involved with some of the higher-level stuff, like exploring the journalism connections, but I spend all my time sorting out arguments in the dog-owners forums. You’d think the really heated debates would be in the political forums, but those are nothing compared to the ones between the people who think it’s OK to breed dogs at home vs. those who don’t.
Loose notes from the SXSW 2006 session: Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps
High-powered session with folks from Flickr, Six Apart, Odeo, Measure Map. Focused on the iterative process and release cycle for web apps that thousands of people depend on. How much can you change and how quickly, without alienating users. How much iteration is driven by user feedback vs. internal goals?
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More than a mile down, hanging out near thermal vents off the coast of Easter Island, scientists have discovered a creature “so distinct from other species that they’ve created a new taxonomic family for it.” The “furry lobster,” which has pincer arms twice as long as its body and which has only vestigial membranes for eyes, may use its fur to trap bacteria, which it then consumes. Or maybe not. This kind of thing fills me with awe.