SXSW Day 3,4,5

March 14, 2006 @ 09:03 pm

http://www.felocity.org/blog/article/sxsw_day_345/

Okay, I'm on a flight home right now, and so everything has been very chaotic. I'll do my best to pull together Sunday and Monday in order to try and get a handle on the whole thing. As the week wore on, my brain got more and more tired. By Tuesday, neither Patrick or I wanted to move when alarms went off at 9, then 10, and then 11. Finally we got checked out and I got to the airport very early. I had no desire to reproduce the horror that was my flight over to Austin. With 3 hours until flight, I caught up on everything email and work wise since the testing of bank data migration will be either tonight or tomorrow. If all goes well, the bank (which has been in testing for a month now) can go live Wed midday or Thursday morning. And that would be Tuesday. Let's rewind back then to Sunday and pick up the report where we left off.

Sunday

Sunday was good to me. We slept in a lot thanks to the wicked party the people at Newsvine, Blue Flavor, Bryght, and Raincity Studios threw. Unfortunately, this also meant that I missed Matt's podcasting panel. One more panel to find the notes for, since it would be great if Gaia would podcast their convention panels.

Smaller, Lighter, Faster: I chose this one over Women's Visibility on the Web since I knew others were going there and we could swap notes. The SLF panel was actually very low key. It covered a lot of ground though, going back over why web application development has gone (and is going) the direction it is now.

After the panel, we went to a Thai / Vietnamese restaurant. It claimed to be the best in Austin, something River. It was the blandest bowl of Pho, watered down jackfruit, and a total of 3 hours in the restaurant. It made me deeply miss San Jose. I did get to spend a lot of time talking to James and Zach though. Because of the thai though, I missed the panel on mobile web with Cameron Moll. I really wanted to see how designers can approach the diverse world of mobile devices.

Making Web 2.0 Accessible: I've been a long time reader of Derek Featherstone's Site since the days my boss at the tutoring center started pushing for professors to pay heed to 508 and the WAI in the intro to web design courses. Of course, while nobody faculty-minded wanted to deal with those issues since they were content with building web pages using Fireworks, the students took it upon themselves to become familiar with web accessibility guidelines and the challenges of the web for people with disabilities. It was through all this learning and research I first found Derek's site. The presentation was great, and I'd have to say the biggest takeaway from the entire thing was accessibility is much more than "does it work on a screen reader". The presentation was full of great corporate examples from Bank of America, and client stories of accessibility and its impact on a web site.

Holistic Web Design: While not a designer by nature, I wanted to see this panel for two major reasons. The first of these being the opportunity to see how a design is done by a collaborative team, the second to see the IA stage of the process. Why people behave certain ways, or why certain interface elements are expected is incredibly interesting. Plus, this was an opportunity to see the documents- physical pieces of the design project I was never exposed to in college. It's good to see the other side of the coin.

SXSW Web Awards: First off, congratulations to Bryan and the folks at 9rules Network for your category wins. On the whole, the awards were partially entertaining, but the organization and pacing seemed very off. I often found myself talking to the people around me since it wasn't totally clear what awards were up, who was winning, or how it was working. I actually left during the "trivia" because I was bored to tears. With free time on my hands, I did more Wordpress work and decided to make an early night of it.

Monday

Once again, the amazing ability to sleep won out, and I missed CSS Problem Solving in the morning. I did however, pick up on the day right after.

Building Buzz: I should have gone to Microfotmats. This presentation was dirty and left me feeling like slime. As an avid gamer, the collective community has been up in arms over companies that pay people to go into forums and communities and plug their products. In complete opposite fashion of the panel on passionate users, instead of letting your enthusiastic users naturally promote, the speakers at this panel promoted the idea of referral bonuses. When the topic of link spamming came up, along with SOE, they told a room full of people that not only did this work, but to tell people spamming your link to include a line or two of text as well. In fact, Jessie S even has an automated system which will submit that URL to google for page rank spamming. He then informed the room that Google "didn't care" about that sort of behavior. Like I said, I felt dirty even being in that room, and I hope they never come back to speak. That is simply the wrong message to be telling startup businesses.

Content Distribution on the Mobile Web: Exactly what I was hoping for, this panel included Buzznet, Shozu, Opera Mini, and Rabble. It included talks about being an on deck / off deck service, as well as what kinds of methods of content they have been working with. For almost all participants, the solution was vert direct with a J2ME item being the most common by far. With data plans on mobile carriers offering plans a hundred times better than their text messaging counterparts, even off deck applications have a toehold on the market. Rabble really interested me since it's a social networking platform for mobile phones which has already gotten on deck status.

Design Eye for the List Guy: This was my panel for relaxing. I could simply sit back and enjoy. And I did enjoy. Everyone on the panel was a good speaker, and seeing craigslist get a proper redesign was an amazing trip. They all had so much respect for Craig, that you could hear in their words how much they wanted to keep the community, style, and feel of the site pure while adding professionalism and value. Craig was in the audience no less and they brought him forward onto the panel as well. The Design Eye Site will have the redesign in all its glory.

After the panel, a couple of people went up to my room and we took a breather before the Avalonstar Bowling Competition. Finally, it was time.

Avalonstar Bowling

This was it: the big event everyone had been waiting for. We assembled in front of the Hilton, walked to the bus stop on Congress, and made our way up to the Union Underground. There were people everywhere, lots of who might not be bowling straight away (or at all). Nevertheless, we made the most of it. The first brackets were started, and then Bryan had to bowl, so I offered to keep scores. Years of helping run Anime Conventions kicked in, and the brackets were in the computer in simplified form and on paper for scoring. As for Team Freestyle, well, somehow we got a bye in the whole thing. Thankfully, Hit or Miss scored high enough we could put them straight to the finals. Instead of 3 finalists, there were 4, but we still made do and everyone got their bowl on. Team Refresh took home the #1, so a big congratulations to them.

Since it was post midnight, we walked back to the hotel. We took a roundabout way which let me get some pictures of the capitol building. When we made it back to the hotel, a few of us bounced back out for some table soccer and drinks. Let it be known that "Faruk":http://www.kurafire.net is wickedly good at table soccer. Finally, the bars closed, and we called it a night. For me, this marked the end of SXSW since my Tuesday was rather bare.

Wrapping Up

We're starting to go down towards San Jose soon, and I'm looking somewhat forward to getting back to work. the past 5 days have been amazing and I don't know why I missed it last year. Never again though, as I intend to start making plans for 2007 as soon as possible. A thousand thanks to Patrick for being an awesome roomie, Bryan Veloso for his bowling night, and everyone I met who helped make this a great first year. As a seasoned convention veteran, I'm familiar with "Con Lag", the idea that you come back from an event and still are on the convention's time schedule. I'm feeling it really hard right now, I want to be at the Media Temple closing party and get last drinks with so many people. I'll know for next year though to stick a day on either side. Come in day before, leave a day after. Oh, and party all night long, no matter how tired you feel.

Felocity

SXSW Day 3,4,5

Sunday

Monday

Avalonstar Bowling

Wrapping Up

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