SXSW, Tuesday March 15

Rebecca here. On Tuesday we actually had a chance to experience some of the panels for the interactive part of SXSW. There are some very exciting ideas floating around about the future of the internet. What impresses me is how much these ideas are centered on how technology can serve ideas instead of the other way around. Yesterday I went to How to Grow an Online Community (with Craig of craigslist.org fame) and How to Create Activist Technology.

On Tuesday morning I attended an inspiring panel discussion on the Art of the Video Blog. Rocketboom.com is a good example of vlogging. There’s also technology that allows you to subscribe to vlogs so your computer downloads your favorite content overnight and when you arrive in the morning, you have all the freshest stuff waiting for you.

I hopped over to the Ars Electronica panel as well – they have a museum and institute in Austria that gathers and showcases the best of the juxtaposition between art and technology from around the world.

The Flash Video panel gave me some great ideas about how we might combine Meatrix animation and live video in the future.

I went to lunch with Diane and Louis. This great small asian place called Veggie Heaven tucked between McDonalds, Wendys, etc. I’m not vegetarian but I won’t eat meat if I don’t know where it comes from or something about how it was raised. Doing this work and learning about the issues makes it impossible to chomp on any old chicken – it grosses me out.

We returned for the keynote speech on how technology can help create a better world. Alex Steffen and Bruce Sterling were entertaining and hopeful about how technology and design can possibly turn back much of what’s been done to hurt us and the environment. They mentioned treehugger.com as a good place to get information about the little things you can do.
I have to admit that I came here expecting a sort of self-obsessed geekiness, but have found that there’s a lot of informed creativity.
We met up with Louis in the filmmaker’s lounge for one last meeting before he had to get his plane. Then Diane and I walked through town (to get labels for our postcards announcing our web win!) and ate great tapas and talked to our bartender about Austin.

We had to hit 2 parties tonight. Hard work, but we made it through. The interactive closing party was at this strange American Legion Hall that looked ripe for some deer heads on the walls and kegs with frat boys attached. But we had a good time, talking to John Allsopp for a while. He’s a real veteran of this stuff – he’s been involved in web design for 10 years and had just spoken on a panel about the future of web design. As Diane mentioned, he was also a judge for the web awards and loved the Meatrix. He said it was great to be in Austin from Australia. He’s been emailing with some of these other web geeks (a compliment, especially here) for 10 years, but met some only this week.

We moved onto to closing film party with a rowdier scene. We talked to some of the great volunteers for the fest who gave us some insider tips. I spotted a shorn Elijah Wood with entourage, looking smiley. We saw our friends from the Austin TV network again, who said they would send us the tape from Moopheus’ interview.

We got into the secret party lounge on the 12th floor, where people were very excited about the pooping keychains, which scored us passes to the lounge for the rest of the week. Finally crawled into bed at 4am and dreamed that Moopheus was trying to hand me his businesscard but I couldn’t get through the screen to get it.