SXSW Archives - Page 4 of 17

SXSWi Outgrows Its Space

SXSW Interactive is growing and growing and growing. The recently published schedule for the event reveals that all that success means the conference has outgrown even the huge Austin Convention Center.

The solution is to use 10 nearby venues such as the Hilton, The Courtyard Marriott, The Radisson, several other hotels plus the AT&T Conference Center as extra ‘campuses’ for SXSWi events. Maps to all the locations will be in the conference materials. Most are within a half-mile of the convention center. There will be three shuttle buses to help you move from one location to another.

Similar themed programming is in a specific location, which will make finding your areas of interest easier. For example, the business themed panels and events will be in the Hilton.

The schedule will be searchable by theme (that’s coming soon), which will also help you figure out where to head for the content you want.

Networking your conference

SXSW provides networking tools at SXsocial. That will help you find and connect with the people you really want to meet while you’re in Austin. I urge you to make full use of the tools they provide.

If you’re a first timer at the conference, check out the SXSW First-Timers Guide. As a multi-year veteran of SXSW, I suggest you prioritize your goals for the conference and focus on accomplishing them. There will be many distractions. My other advice is don’t drink so much you start every day with a hangover. While you’re in Austin, be sure you eat at Chuy’s – best Tex-Mex in the world!

9 reasons why you should go to SXSWi

SXSW Interactive. What’s the big deal? Why should you go?

Here’s the story in pictures. They should explain everything.

1. You can hear great presentations.

2. You can meet people from around the world.

3. You can hear experts explain how they do what they do.

4. You can chat with everyone and find contacts.

5. The keynote speakers are awesome.

6. Geeks and tech toys are everywhere.

7. People like to do what you like to do – be nerdy.

8. Some of the panels are really great.

9. AND, there are parties!

Party Photo credit: (CC) Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com.

Find the perfect font combinations

There’s FontFuse and there’s WebINK. They go together like oatmeal goes with brown sugar. One of them suggests pairs of fonts that look really good together. The other one offers up the fonts for embedding in your web pages at a reasonable price.

FontFuse offers great font pair suggestions, like this one:

They invite you to submit your own ideas for font pairs to the site. Right now, WebINK is sponsoring a font pairing contest on the site. To enter, create a font pairing and submit it for the design community to vote on. The entrant with the most votes by Feb. 25 will receive a VIP trip for two to the 2011 SXSW Interactive event in Austin, TX in March. More details on the contest.

Which brings us to WebINK. What are you supposed to do once you have a nice font pair in mind? Why, get them from WebINK, of course.

WebINK has fonts, lots of fonts. And their pricing is pretty darn good.

You get the fonts at WebINK and embed them in your page using CSS.

Use the @font-face rule in your CSS.

@font-face { font-family:'BluejackURWTMed'; src:url('http://fnt.webink.com/?drawer=9499E74E-1234-EFAP&font=1D852-7559-20B3');}

Style any element with that font:

body {font-family:'BlueJackURWTMed',san-serif;}

WebINK may not be any better than any other font source out there – I’m not trying to convince you of that. But they get points for the creative use of the sister site FontFuse. In a world where a good marketing idea can take you a long way, this seems like a winning idea to me.

I am not affiliated with either of the sites mentioned, nor did I receive anything in return for this review.

Useful links: High Ed Websites, Knowbility, SXSW podcasts

Showcase of Academic and Higher Education Websites at Smashing Magazine lets you see quite a few academic sites that pass Smashing’s standards as being well designed.

These fine folks, with Knowbility Executive Director Sharron Rush at the top left, are the Knowbility crew who managed the Knowbility booth during the Trade Show at SXSWi. The Accessible Insights Blog from Knowbility recently moved, so check them out in their new home.

In an astonishing feat of speed, SXSW is already making podcasts of some of the main events such as keynotes available. See SXSW Interactive Videos and Podcasts.

My thoughts on SXSW interviews

Remember the incident at SXSW with the way Sarah Lacy interviewed Mark Zuckerberg? This year it was Twitter founder Evan Williams being interviewed by Umair Haque. There wasn’t a huge uprising of anger this year, there was just a mass exodus from the room because it was sooooooo boring. Look at the remarks on Twitter about it. The SXSW audience wants a particular question or set of questions asked. Or they want an interviewer who injects less ego into the conversation. Whatever the reason, when attendees don’t get what they want, the interview is effectively over or is slammed in the backchannel.

One solution, of course, is to drop the interview format from SXSW keynotes. Maybe the audience at SXSW is just too critical to accept any interviewers work.

But another solution occurs to me. Set up a system in advance through Twitter or by some other method to take questions from the attendees. Maybe the 20 or 30 best questions get asked by the interviewer, who is nothing but a conduit for the questions the audience wants answered. BlogHer has done this with interviews of people like Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sibelius and it works well. At BlogHer, they even name the names of the people who submitted to question. This puts the ego issue in the audience’s lap, yet lets the most interesting questions reach the person being interviewed.

I feel sure Hugh Forrest and the organizers at SXSW are going to give this year’s mass exodus interview scene lots of thought. So, Hugh, here’s my two cents on the problem.

Women at SXSWi

Where are the women in tech? They are at SXSWi.

The South by Southwest Interactive Conference (SXSWi) ongoing in Austin the last few days is famous for several reasons. It’s a gathering place for techies of every stripe, but the techies I want to bring to your attention today are the women. A hallmark characteristic of SXSWi is its equal treatment of women.

There were four keynote speakers. Two were women: danah boyd and Valerie Casey. They talked about privacy and publicity and about the role the interactive community can play in sustainability. Two brilliant and inspiring women giving the important keynote talks this year.

There were some BlogHer faces you might recognize. One panel on 8 Ways to Deal with Bastards featured Karen Walrond, and Catherine Connors (herbadmother) and Susan Wagner were in the audience, as was I.

I randomly ran into fascinating women all the time. I sat down at a table to check my schedule and started chatting with this woman.

She works for Oxfam International and had all sorts of interesting things to say about the work and campaigns that Oxfam is involved with. When I asked her if she knew about Beth Kanter from BlogHer, she was full of praise.

In the Trade Show, there was one tiny booth with no bling and no hoopla. It was a space for Women Techies United and featured information about women2.0, She’s Geeky, Women Who Tech, Girls in Tech, devChix, LinuxChix, NCWIT, Astia, Digital Sistas and the Anita Borg Institute.

This group of Women Techies United threw a small get together during the conference. Some of the action at that event is shown in the accompanying slide show. Each women took the opportunity to tell who she was, what she was interested in, give contact information. The talk veered toward who was willing to speak at those conferences where there is less dedication to making sure women are on the program than you see at SXSW. From there the conversation branched out into all sorts of other interests shared by women.

One of the most informative and helpful panels I attended (and there are plenty of those) was on Black Blogging Rockstars and featured two women, DeDe Sutton and Gina McCauley. I happened to sit next to Skye Kilaen at this panel, who was working on doing tech support for the BlogHer Ad Network while we waited for the panel to start. Just one of many people who snatched moments away from the action at SXSW to do their normal work.

There were many other women at SXSWi, I’ve hardly scratched the surface. I took a lot more photos than these and posted them in a SXSW 2010 set on Flickr or in the previous few days of slideshows. I tried to capture a feeling of what it’s like to attend SXSW with these photos. You may see some familiar faces in the crowds.

Cross posted at BlogHer.

SXSW Interactive: 15 March 2010

SXSWi photos from My Flickr.