Digg this photo-op we stumbled upon!
Talk about a power summit. Tonight was the Digg party at the Pure Volume Ranch. Mark Cuban was there, bands played, free booze was served. But the most fascinating moment was when the head honchos from Reddit, StumbleUpon and Digg all got together, shook hands, and posed for a picture or two.
Here on the last night of SXSW Interactive, it was very sweet (truly) to see three young competitors, all of whom have excellent Web presences, acting civil and professional toward one another. Kevin Rose (second from the right) was a gentleman and a gracious host to Alexis Ohanian (far left), co-founder of Reddit; and Garrett Camp (second from the left), founder & chief product officer of StumbleUpon.
All three sites help funnel huge amounts of traffic throughout the Web by allowing their users to vote on the most interesting and important stories of the moment. The ultra democracy where one user gets one vote has become a revolution in the Web 2.0 era. Although Digg has become the leader in regards to numbers of users (and therefore influence), Reddit and StumbleUpon aren't far behind, which made this meeting an interesting one, indeed.
Update: (more pics from the Digg party after the jump)
Where Are They Now: Friendster Edition
Good old Friendster! For those of us old enough to remember the first social network but young enough to have actually wanted to participate in social networks in 2003, it holds a permanent place in our hearts.
It was the first place many of us experienced the strangely ephemeral pleasure of getting a request from a long lost friend, or the more egocentric kick of methodically boosting our friend count to meaningless levels. It was the birthplace of the verb "to friend" -- which as we know was a poor development for the more senior noun.
Friendster, to borrow a piece of its PR lingo, began as an experiment which grew into a company, which became an industry. Only thing was, while the industry was exploding, Friendster was imploding. It more or less vanished from the scene in 2005.
So then: Where have all the Friendsters gone?
To get the answer, start digging a hole, and don't stop. Or just read the rest of the post.
The RVIP Lounge - The Funnest (and Weirdest) Way to Get Around SXSW
In a town with so many ways to get around, and during a festival where the majority of everything you want to get to you can get there by foot, it figures two youngsters from L.A. would invent a way to make commuting fun. Like most cities, Austin has cabs, buses, rental cars; you can even strap on a helmet and take a spin on a Segway. But why not hop on a rented RV and take a ride with perfect strangers as they drive you the looooong way to your destination while you drink booze, eat and sing karaoke with the cool kids?
Welcome to the RVIP Lounge & Karaoke, the most fun way to get around SXSW. Only problem: It might take you hours to get to where you want to go, but when you get there you will have a huge smile on your face, a full belly, a pretty good buzz and a story or two to tell.
Pics and video after the jump.
T-shirt fashions of SXSW Interactive
As SXSW Interactive tears down today to make room for SXSW Music, I thought it would be interesting to see the differences between the two groups in regard to fashion. Namely T-shirt fashion.
The Interactive attendees are not known for their fancy duds. However, some of the kids sported some T-shirts that made me laugh. And some of the booth babes had T-shirts that really made us stop in our tracks.
Above we have a gentleman wearing an anti-MySpace T-shirt that reads "Tom Is Not My Friend." Below a member of Opera (a search engine of Ron Paul-like cult status) wears a shirt parodying Metallica's "Ride the Lightning." Of all the new ways to brand, Opera's use of a generic metal font reeked of irony and nostalgia.
After the jump are some more styles that you missed out on.
Jason Segel front and center
Judging by reactions at the SXSW world premiere of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," the new Judd Apatow-produced heartbreak comedy, the film's star is certainly not the person listed on its marquee. That is, protagonist, Jason Segel (of "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared" fame).
The real star of the movie is what a Harlequin romance novel might refer to as Segel's "manhood."
"Sarah Marshall" showcases the comedian in his full frontal glory -- four times, he is shown completely naked, to be exact. And here at SXSW, every time Segel was presented unsheathed, he nearly brought the house down with laughter.
Contrary to conventional comedy wisdom, Segel is nude and sobbing in three of the four naked moments after getting dumped by his girlfriend of five years (Kristen Bell as the titular Sarah).
The guy's clearly comfortable with his body, even though his absence of gym-toned abs brings to mind what Vince Vaughn probably looks like au naturel after a weekend of binge drinking.
Encountered at a jam-packed party for Facebook, one of the film's supporting cast, the British comedian Russell Brand (who plays the English rock star whom Sarah cuckolds Segel's character for), admitted certain regrets about the film's beefcake quotient. "If I had known there was going to be so much male [genitalia]," the flamboyantly bouffanted Brand said, "I probably never would have agreed to be in it."
-- Chris Lee
Facebook party: fun for the ladies
Facebook's party last night at the chichi Austin hot spot Pangaea was the swingingest SXSW party I've been to. I'm guessing it was better than Google's, at least according to the dispatch from L.A. Times blog czar Tony Pierce, who didn't give it the thumbs up.
Even though there was no sign of famous, and now slightly more infamous, FB founder Mark Zuckerberg, there were plenty of interesting folks there, an endless fountain of Red Bull-based drinks, and some pretty great bass-booming music supplied by DJ BT and company.
I was certainly grooving to it. And I wasn't the only one:
Honestly, I did not cherry-pick this photo -- pan left or right and you'd see the same. Semi-surprised at the dancing crowd's demography, I looked around to see if there were any females who might help me figure out what was up with the dude-o-rama.
PostSecret's Frank Warren shares some secrets
It's no secret that Frank Warren is one of the trailblazers of the Internet. His hugely successful PostSecret website, blog and books are the perfect blend of user-generated content and the power of the anonymous voice.
The PostSecret blog, often not safe for work, features postcards mailed to Warren that reveal some of the darkest thoughts and feelings of the human condition. Some of the secrets are painful, some are beautiful. Warren receives thousands of cards a week and chooses a few for the blog. From those postcards, he has compiled four books. Meanwhile, the blog is ranked No. 14 in the world, just two slots behind TMZ.com.
Yesterday, Warren delivered a keynote speech during the South by Southwest Interactive Festival here in Austin. Definitely living up to being interactive, a random gentleman politely interrupted the speech to propose to his loved one. Why would someone do something like that in the middle of a Frank Warren speech? Maybe it's because Warren has a peaceful, easy, vibe about him that makes it easy to open up.
Below we have three short video interviews with Warren, who talks about the phenomenon of PostSecret and the dramatic wedding proposal during his keynote address.
Checking out the Brain Machine
Mitch Altman, the genius behind the universal remote control (which can be hilarious when put in the wrong hands), has developed a new product meant to help you trip out and hallucinate in the comfort of your own home.
Here in the upper level of the Austin Convention Center inside the Make booth, Mitch explains how to put together the Brain Machine, a contraption that didn't really give me any hallucinations, but I'm sure I looked wacky to passersby. Unfortunately, all I experienced were flashing red lights and an annoying drone in my ears. Sort of like what a fly stuck in the punch bowl might have experienced at the Google party.
Regardless, of all of the booths in the trade show area, the attendees in the Make booth seemed to be sporting the widest smiles. Maybe they had come prepared for the Brain Machine. -- Tony Pierce
Hitchcock, Rain and "Super High"
Torrential rains wracked Austin today, sending many festivalgoers scurrying for cover in movie screenings or at the SXSW Interactive Conference. At the very least, the wet weather persuaded a lot of people here to reluctantly accept free plastic rain ponchos being handed out by Zappos.com emissaries who savvily anticipated the rainfall as a branding opportunity.
Temporarily gone with the rain are thousands of black birds who blot out the sky, swooping and bombing in unison from tree to light post to telephone wire around dusk in Texas' capital city. For some inexplicable reason, these starlings and grackles travel in hordes. A bunch of them came at your humble correspondent the other evening, casting a pall of Hitchcockian fear over him that wasn't soon shaken.
Austinites will tell you this aggressive bird behavior comes about in part because of the competition with legions of local bats - both are looking to eat 10,000 pounds of insects every day.
And now another potentially contentious battle -- over intellectual property, not bugs -- has threatened to rear its head at the festival.
Gossip panel deemed 'best SXSW panel ever'
Although it didn't get as much buzz in the Twitter circles as the Facebook fiasco, the Gossip panel at SXSW was lively, fascinating, funny and fun. And it all started with one simple "boo."
Seconds after the hilarious Heather Gold introduced the panel she was moderating, she heard someone boo the intro of Valleywag editor Owen Thomas. The heckler was none other than Star magazine reporter Julia Allison, who was almost immediately invited on the stage, and when it became obvious that there were no empty chairs, Gold offered a lap, which Allison playfully accepted (pictured).
After that, the discussions were heated, revealing, intense and hilarious as industry leaders, panelists (from the N.Y. Times to TMZ), and attendees tried to figure out why we are interested in celebrity and Internet gossip and what is appropriate and what is juvenile and wrong. Strangely the entire spectrum played out right in front of us.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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."
