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more sxsw breadcrumbs: video+music »

Sunday, March 18th, 2007

  • 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.

sxsw:breadcrumbs »

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

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.

sxsw - day one »

Monday, March 12th, 2007

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