Michael was working at an Australian law firm when he got a call from Barack Obama’s team to take a job as a political campaigner.
He was thrown in to the thick of the campaign; speaking at university rallies, giving stump speeches at conventions, lecturing on policies and organising outreach programs as he was promoted through the ranks of the Obama political machine.
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(From the artistic interpretation of Chris Anderson’s talk with Guy Kawasaki.)
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail (and a recent article about giving things away for free) talks to some Linux people and tech bloggers about open source, free software and free things in general. (The official title is Rebuilding the World with Free Everything.)
It’s a topic of particular interest to me right now because I’ve been working on an article about Brett Gaylor, a filmmaker whose documentary is all about copyleft, open source and intellectual property.
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So, just what is SXSW? I gave a brief explanation in my first post, but for a more detailed look at the conference, here’s a setup article I wrote for the Montreal Gazette.
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Kind of a no-brainer panel topic for someone who works at Digital Eskimo, although this was a classic SXSW example of brilliantly-titled panels being less-than-brilliant.
The panelists were: Jon Lebkowksy of Social Web Strategies; Rob Reed, who blogs on Max Gladwell; John McElhenney of Clear Green Technologies; and Emily Gertz, the journalist who maintains the global warming blog at Change.org.
A slow start with too many definitions (although, an interesting definition of sustainability: “Applying knowledge, rather than labour, to materials”) turned the audience sour — which they indicated on Twitter, which the panelists were watching.
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There’s rarely an easy thesis to identify in a SXSW panel, and that’s especially the case in “core conversations”, which more than anything involve a diverse group with a shared interest in a topic … well, conversing about it.
This morning’s chat about privacy and personalisation, led by Loomia’s David Marks, was one such event. Lots of very interesting thoughts, but no strong narrative to weave them together.
… Which enables me to list the thoughts in point form. Read on!
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I’ve been looking forward to this panel for a while. Author and prof Clay Shirky is an icon in the new-media punditry scene, and I’m keen to hear what he has to say not about newspapers, but books.
Again, I’m from the school that says the specific medium is unimportant, so the lessons here will be broadly applicable. Other panelists: John Fagan and Ivan Held from Penguin, Peter Miller from Bloomsbury Books and Deborah Schultz, a new media marketing consultant.
There’s a lot of Penguin types here, so they’re surely using this event to make a splash with some big interactive plans. Oops, nope, they’re apparently here to learn, one of them just said. (Update: The audience later yells at them for the misleading title: New Think for Old Publishers, and on Twitter someone calls it “audience-funded brainstorming”)
Update 2: Great exchange between disgruntled author in the audience (”publishers are like record labels — they’re no longer relevant”) and Shirky, who says “publishers are just a filter. And the internet means we’re not going from Filter A to Filter B, but from Filter A to Filters A through Z. So if the publisher filter doesn’t create good signal, it doesn’t deserve to exist”.
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Here we are at an afternoon panel moderated by Scott Kirsner, who runs the Cinematech blog. The basic question it aims to answer is: how do filmmakers, musicians and artists successfully create audiences online?
Someone in the audience called it an anti-marketing panel as all the panelists have taken grassroots approaches: They are Markos Moulitsas, aka Kos of the massive US politics blog Daily Kos (he’s also third in Forbes’ top 25 web celebs); artist Natasha Wescoat; musician Johnathan Coulton; Burnie Burns, creator of game-culture comedy video site Red vs. Blue; and Brett Gaylor, a filmmaker friend of mine from Montreal, whose film Rip: A Remix Manifesto is premiering here.
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Sunday morning’s panel selection was a bit of mixed bag, and so I’ve randomly walked into one about content partnerships between brands and filmmakers. Some of us (like me) cringe at content-brand synergy, but let’s be courageous.
The more general topic might be something like “brands and content producers” — I always argue that the specific media is unimportant. And, really, the significance of this to anyone whose site involves content is high — advertising revenue and content models are both changing whether you like it or not.
(Also, there must be 500 people in this room, which is so full they’re sitting on all available floor space.)
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I’m now in an SXSW “salon”, their formal term for an informal, more interactive conversation about a topic. This one is titled “Friendship is Dead”, and here’s what’s so cool about SXSW: there are 200 people sitting in a circle discussing whether social networks and the internet have changed the way we define our friends and relationships.
The obvious answer is “of course”: people have hundreds of friends on Facebook, hundreds of followers on Twitter, and therefore share information with a much larger pool of people.
But it’s more complicated than that. We think about Facebook “friends” differently than, say, our “best friends”. Or do we?
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My DE colleagues and clients alike know that I love the New York Times website. It sets the standard for journalism on the web, and continues to push for better ways to use design to share information with the public.
This afternoon’s panel with Tom Bodkin, the NYT’s design director and assistant managing editor, and Khoi Vinh, design director of the website, was a must-see, therefore.
Bodkin and Vinh don’t quite see eye-to-eye. Bodkin’s clearly more invested in print; I liked his insistence that the print medium has attributes that can endure even as information moves online — that we shouldn’t always try to make print versions more like the web.
Vinh defined the design mission:
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