Archive for March 2010
Five Things I Learned at SXSW Interactive
It’s been a terrific five days at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival — so much energy, so many things to learn, so much chaos to navigate. My friend Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, who served as a panelist this year as well as representing Digital Book World, summed it up nicely by calling it “chaotic mix of truly inspired presentations, thinly veiled sales pitches, over-the-top demagoguery and/or self-promotion, filtered through an incredibly diverse range of creative disciplines and strategic philosophies.”
Here are five of my initial takeaways from the conference:
1. Geolocation is the next frontier. Much of the talk during the week was around two geolocation smartphone applications, Foursquare and Gowalla, and which of the two might emerge last geolocation app standing (assuming there’s not room for both). At an excellent conference on mobile content and social media, I learned of another application, Hot Potato, which allows one to participate in a live feed at an event — essentially a contained Twitter-like feed in which people at the same sporting event or concert can communicate, where you could conceivably crowdsource questions like “How many fouls does he have?” or “What’s this song?”
2. The future of magazines is uncertain. At one panel I attended — called “Could the iPad Have Saved Gourmet?” — the panelists concluded that new technologies might not be enough on their own to save magazines. The key, according to the panelists, was to solve the problem of decreased ad revenue in a recession — yet they didn’t offer any helpful answers to how to do that. They did acknowledge the iPad may synch with magazines in their current form, plus their websites, into some sort of magical triangle of content — but again, no specifics on what possibilities might be in store. A presentation earlier in the week by Wired, however, showed some possibilities for the iPad ushering in a new era of magazine. This post gives you an indication of some of the oohs and aahs in store.
3. The future of books are also uncertain. Another intriguing panel, on the future of books and book publishing, suggested that the editors of today may shift into more of a producer role. The query/idea phase of a book likely will include not just what the book’s about, but what format it will be in, what medium or media it will be published in, and what all might be sold under the “brand” of the book — think how movies are now marketing themselves, with offshoots like movie-themed toys at fast food chains, and you’re in the general neighborhood. Also, if authors come to a publisher with their own “tribes” — such as social media gurus like Seth Godin — they’re better off in the new era.
4. 90 percent of our days are spent looking at glowing rectangles. I’m not sure that this “stat,” from the “Mobile Content is Social” panel, is entirely accurate or applicable to everyone. But it’s a fairly accurate assessment of how I live, and I can’t imagine I’m not the only one who lives like this. Be it a computer phone screen or a smart phone screen, we’re certainly finding them to be more and more indispensable — and a lot of the smart folks who gathered in Austin are making sure we stay that way.
5. Content is king. For all the new platforms and shiny things and SEO strategies out there, people won’t bring you to your site if you don’t have something to offer. One of my favorite moments of the week came in the panel on Viral Videos, in which OK Go’s Damian Kulash explained that the amazing “This Too Shall Pass” video — involving a team of engineers, quite literally (you can see them cheer at the end of the video) — was born of the impulse to make something seemingly impossible happen. While not every piece of content can be that, it’s positively delightful to create a Twitter link on an embedded video in Facebook that shouts to the world, “Hey, look at this!” Ultimately, that’s what we should hope for our content to be.
