FLOATING | Floating barefoot. | via pulphope

• Juiceboxxx (video above) thoroughly rocked the house at the BuzzFeed party, though it was hard to tell sometimes with everyone seeming more focused on taking great photos than dancing. We thought it might just be the Flickr-pro SXSW crowd, but Juiceboxxx mentioned to Jonah after the show that it was the same for him at a recent show in Williamsburg, where he didn’t know that the crowd liked his show until he read about it on all their blogs the next day. “No one lives in realtime anymore,” he said.
• We almost didn’t have a Juiceboxxx show that night: someone had misplaced the turntable cartridge at the venue, and there was no way for him to spin his records. Luckily, my lovely wife Rae, who went to school outside Austin, thought to call the nearby Waterloo Records minutes before the store closed at ten, and Molotov’s owner ran the four blocks on foot to buy the part and save the day.
• “Does Chuck know what he’s doing?” Chuck Olsen’s behind the scenes footage of the Rocketboom Dan Rather interview is totally brilliant. In the right remix, that quote could be the “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” for the vlogger generation.
• Nerd jokes: Ask a Ninja’s video for the SXSW Web Awards. “Kevin Rose has underwear older than Web 2.0!”
• Grabbing some coffee one morning at the hotel, met the guys from Toronto’s Uncut, who were playing a number of shows that week. I liked how one of them told me their band’s name. “Uncut?” (with a shrug). Listening to their music, I’d say they should have said, “Uncut!” with a fist in the air.
• On Friday night, we had a surprise birthday party for Casey McKinnon in a weird roadhouse karaoke place in North Austin. Lots of vloggers there, including a funny reunion of four of the vlog deathmatch ladies, captured on video by Lan Bui. You can see me walking dorkily out of the frame when I notice the cameras rolling.
• Finally, whoever booked The Little Ones for Yahoo’s SXSW party deserves a promotion.

Why does everything have to change? Ze ends a year of the show. What a great year it’s been. It’s hard to know what to say about it, except that a year ago, things were so much different, for him and for many of us watching. I owe Ze a lot — it’s safe to say I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now, may not have been able to make it all happen to move to NY and start the new company, if it wasn’t for him, and I know lots of people who have been inspired and touched by the show. That’s pretty unbelievable. Bravo, Ze. We love you. Can’t wait to see what you do next.

Favorite episode? Hard to say, but the debt and ray are two from the last few weeks that I really loved.

So many interesting people, conversations, and ideas these past few days at SXSW. No way to make sense of it yet, but some links left behind:

• Justin Hall’s Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG), now available for testing. I’ve been playing with this since his presentation yesterday, and it’s probably one of the more influential ideas I’ll take away from the show. We’re talking and thinking a lot about play and rewards systems at Next New as well, and it was fun to catch up with Justin again, one of my favorite people I don’t really know very well.
• Best panel of the show: Building an Online Fanbase, mostly because of the smarts of filmmaker Lance Weiler and some of the other panelists. I’m hoping that Micki Krimmel writes more about it soon; she was taking prodigious notes, and we couldn’t help talking aloud at more than a few points about how good some of the ideas were.
• Mashery: the easy way to think of this is Feedburner for APIs - but for companies like ours, something like this could add a lot more value. Worth checking out.
• Pretty sure I annoyed the heck out of my twitter friends not at SXSW — we all must have. A friend whom I wish I could credit suggested that twitter add groups, and make the group you’re in temporal — that is, all twitters go only to your subgroup (say, your friends who are at sxsw) until a certain amount of time passes or you leave the group; meanwhile, we thought you could send twitters outside the group with a command (like “d all”).
• El Sol y La Luna had by far the best food I ate in Austin. Again.
• There are some really fine bloggers and journalists covering online shows and networks at this early phase, especially the very smart Liz Gannes, Jackson West and Alex Delyle. Seeing them embedded all over SXSW only confirmed this.
• When you find a decent $199 camera, buy an extra one. You never know when someone might need one.
• The three finalists in Robert Rodriguez’ Grindhouse trailer competition all turned in better entries than the Eli Roth trailer that Rodriguez showed at the end. The winner: Hobo with a Shotgun.
• For the record, the “Ze Frank party” Saturday night was sponsored by Buzzfeed. Check out the site and thank them.
• Most of my favorite moments were not Flickr’d — I almost never think to pull out the camera when I’m having fun. But when I remembered to, I snapped off a few. All collected here.

Not much time to blog, but took a few photos.

We’re having a lot of fun producing promos for our networks (like my favorite so far, “Bill Hayes,” now playing on PulpSecret). I got a kick out of this one today, though — a promo for Fast Lane Daily, our car news show, based on the popular Line Rider videos.

The new episode of Galacticast (now officially the one I “instantly produced“) is up this morning, and it’s a doozy, a funny mashup of Super Mario Bros and The Sopranos. Since I worked on some The Sopranos mobile games for HBO, I especially dig being connected to this one. If you don’t love this, well, something’s just not right with you. Special thanks to Casey and Rudy for being cool and offering for me put a plug in for our new network (PulpSecret, launching March 8th).

Now I throw the gauntlet to the rest of you: who is going to get them that lunch with Robert Rodriguez in Austin this weekend? We’ll be there and Rae has some tenuous hometown connections to him we might be able to put into play — don’t make me show you all up again.

Rob and Corinne, featured above, were the first people to walk into Next New Networks to meet with us about a show, and I couldn’t be happier that they were the first people to launch on one of our networks. Anchoring ThreadBanger, our network for people who make their own fashion, Rob and Corinne have put up three great episodes of Thread Heads so far, and I really look forward to seeing each new one come in.

Worldwide Fido, which launched in beta this past weekend, is a new kind of dog show. Anyone can enter their dog to win prizes and unending glory by uploading videos and nominating their dogs for categories like Best Trick, Waggiest Tail, and Best Tickle Spot. Worldwide Fido is all about love of dogs, not love of breeds, and was a lot of fun to work on. Produced by Worldwide Biggies with design by Threespot and development by Davidville, this was the last freelance project Emil and I did before our new NNN gig.

If you love dogs, there are lots of fun ones to meet here — please vote for your favorites, and join up if there’s a special dog in your life you’d like to win.

(watch the video)

This weekend at Comic Con, we got to fulfill a wish for some really nice and talented people (more on the Galacticast blog). It was a pleasure all the way; Kevin Smith couldn’t be a cooler or nicer guy, and he clearly genuinely appreciates things like this. There’s a very funny second chapter to this story, actually, involving his overzealous volunteer honor guard, but you’ll see that soon enough, when we launch PulpSecret.

update: anyone hearing about Galacticast for the first time, it’s a very funny videoblog made by Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan that features ingenious sci-fi parodies every week, all made at home on shoestring budgets. The excerpt you see in the beginning here is from their soon to be classic Galactifund episode.