tdog.blog

There’s a different air about this SxSW, that’s for sure. Last year, we had the Zuckerberg/Lacey disaster, where the audience was tweeting away while the oblivious panelists just kept yammering about irrelevant stuff. This year, we had panel after panel (including mine, “Your First Year in Freelancing”) using Twitter to gather instant feedback and questions from the audience. 

The Small World Labs guys did it right — Sam Eder served as e-moderator (twitterator?), keeping the panel moving along by gathering and sythesizing tweets. I had a much smaller group (a room for 20 had 40 folks in it) and had set up a few hashtags (#geektopeak and #g2p) and at some point, the questions and conversations with those hash tags got too much to follow, so I went back to the audience directly. 

Here’s another thing I noticed: everyone is talking about ROI in social media. Realism. Pragmatism. It’s quite energizing, really. We’ve had these tools for a while, now we’re trying to make sense of them. Some of us are working at places where social media is the next big scary thing, and just being with folks who are also grappling with all this stuff fills me with hope. We’re on to something important here, and now there’s just this confident air that we will get it right, eventually.

In the “Selling Social Media to the Man” panel, I loved what Peter Kim had to say: “Either be the catalyst for change with social media, or get a new job.” I think he’s started something interesting. There’s going to be a huge shift of people and talent from old, stodgy places that put their thumbs down over to more progressive firms that embrace not only these new tools, but the new outlooks and DNA that these tools represent.

One of the things I’ve said since the beginning of Triple Dog Dare Media was: Fail fast. Don’t linger and dawdle. Figure what does and doesn’t work. Throw out what doesn’t. Move, move, move. And social media is like that, which I deeply respect. However, most corporate cultures don’t allow (or reward) failure. These places are going to have to deal with all of us out here who have been imbued with these technologies and philosophies.

SxSW Interactive 2009 is only half over, and I’m already brimming with ideas, plans, and thoughts about the future. After such a crappy 2008, it sure is good to feel good.

Comments(0)

Got home to a surprise…it looks like my latest book, Mac OS X Unix Toolbox, just arrived at the house. Got a box with 10 copies in it right in time for SxSW 2009!

I’ll carry some of these, some Professional CodeIgniters and some other books when I come in on Saturday…see you all there!

Comments(0)

I’ll be speaking on March 14, from 11:30 to 12:30 on the topic of my book From Geek to Peak: Your First 365 Days as a Technical Consultant.

I hope to see you there! My talk will be one of the Core Conversations held at SxSW 2009. Here’s a little preview of what these are about:

The informal discussions that pop up in the hallways between, during and after panel sessions have traditionally been one of the most productive parts of the SXSW Interactive Festival. In 2008, we formalized this process with the Core Conversation program — thereby making it easier for more attendees to participate in these hallway-type exchanges of information by letting them know what kind of discussion is happening when and where. For 2009, each of these hour-long Core Conversation sessions will have its own room, which should eliminate most of the noise problems from last year.

We anticipate about 75 total Core Conversations for 2009, so check back to this page frequently for updates on additional sessions. A day-by-day schedule of when these Core Conversations will occur should be posted on this page in mid-December.

Comments(1)

So there we were at iPhone DevCamp Austin (an official satellite of the iPhone DevCamp going on in San Francisco), trying to come up with a nice little app we could put into the Hackathon Contest for the weekend. The idea is, could we, a bunch of iPhone noobs, code something up in a weekend and submit it by Sunday at 4pm central?

Well, we were all miserably hot (it was like 104 degrees outside, with 20 developers crammed into a room with a Mac Pro and countless MacBooks, and a projector) and feeling a bit spiky about the whole NDA mess (our individual NDAs didn’t allow us to show each other our code or even talk about the iPhone SDK), so Chris Cooley, Steve Stedman and I got together and put together iHrrl.

The game is really simple. There’s a rat in a box. The idea is to agitate the rat so that it gets to a certain level of nausea. Once it gets into the “zone” you start making points. If you stop agitating the rat, the nausea level goes down, as do the points. Agitate the rat too much, and it hurls, game over. Let’s just see who had enough control to score the highest points.

The process broke down like this. Stedman did all the art in Fireworks. Marvelous rat, as you can see from the screenshot. I clarified the initial idea (a rat in the box that you make hurl) into an actual game that required skill, with some outside advice from our friend Joe Licari. I was also put in charge of animating the eyes, limbs, tail, and mouth of the rat. Chris did all the heavy iPhone coding, with me doing a bit of XP-style QA as we neared the deadline.

Now, I can’t talk about how he coded things up, as that would break the NDA. And I’m not sure where the game is posted right now (we emailed it to the committee in San Francisco, who laughed when they played it) so you could see it or play with it (not that you could unless you had an iPhone, as it requires an accelerometer). But take it from me, it’s DAMN funny, especially when the rat hurls.

In any case, now you see what you’re dealing with…a twisted, twisted mind.

Comments(0)

If you’re a writer, editor, author, publisher, or somesuch wordnerd, and you’re in Austin, join us next Thursday at the Dog & Duck. Here are the event details. It’s free, and there’s beer, but the beer isn’t free. Just wanna clarify.

Also, if you’re on LinkedIn, feel free to join the Writing Mafia group. As long as you work with words professionally (copywriter, copyeditor, author, book publisher, blogger, technical writer, hack, flack, wordsmith, novelist, yada yada yada) then you’re welcome! We’ve grown from 7 members to 130 in about 2 weeks, so we must be doing something right!

Comments(0)