SXSW: Day Three

And on the third day there was a billionaire man-child, a crowd of unruly tech fanboys, a Hawaiian with a twisted sense of humor and some other stuff. Just another day here in Austin.

Things kind of got off to a slow start this morning. Saturday night’s parties and the first morning of Daylight Saving Time combined to make the convention center somewhat of a ghost town for the first sessions of the morning. Of course, being an old man, I was there for the first panel of the day.

A little design talk in the morning

Everyone’s a Design Critic – The first panel was given by Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert, two pretty funny and enlightening guys. They talked about handling counterproductive feedback and design criticisms from project clients, dispensing some advice and tips that I’ll no doubt find helpful as I launch a major project of my own over the next couple of months. At least, I hope they’ll be helpful. Either way, it was pretty entertaining and a good way to start off the day.

Make It So: Learning from Sci-Fi Interfaces - After that, I hiked across Travis County to the other side of the convention center for a discussion about the give-and-take relationship between interface design in real life and popular science fiction. The panelists, Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel, briefly talked about the history of interface evolution in movies and television and then talked about how science fiction has in turn inspired innovation in the devices of today, such as cell phones and real-time mapping displays.

It was a great talk, including references from works like Metropolis, Star Wars, Star Trek, The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fifth Element, plus a whole bunch of others. You could tell they were just scratching the surface of their work, but it was still pretty interesting.

After lunch, I hit the Trade Show that opened up at noon. It wasn’t terribly fascinating – I’m not really in the market for most of the services on display, but it was good to walk around and discover a few new things of interest and some other random things.

Speaking of random things, they have an area tucked away in one of the corners on the first level devoted entirely to LEGO and people’s LEGO creations. Pretty cool.

And then a little disaster in the afternoon

The main event of the day was tke keynote address by Facebook founder/CEO and general wonderboy Mark Zuckerberg. Actually it was more of a sit-down interview, moderated by a writer. And that’s where things went south.

Both the train wreck of an event and some of the aftershock have already been blogged ad nauseum, but I realize most of you guys don’t routinely read tech blogs, so I’ll recap the whole sordid affair briefly.

The room filled up pretty quickly. I got there thirty minutes before the start time and managed to grab a great view of the back of the head of the guy in front of me. Well, if I leaned over I could get a very distant view of Zuckerberg’s shiny little head. And some blurry photos with my zoom lens.

Anyway, Zuckerberg is obviously a brilliant guy and probably pretty fun to hang out with in a small group, but he has the stage presence of a stunned rainbow trout. When he did give polysyllabic responses, he awkwardly danced around questions by rehashing a couple of obviously memorized talking points that were vaguely relevant. In one of his few deviations from the preprogrammed company line, he offered the unique theory that the root cause of terrorism is “a lack of connectivity”.

Some people have been critical of him because he’s not interested in playing the corporate wealth game. After hearing him speak, he seems dedicated to fighting the revolution for enhancing interpersonal communications, even if it means he doesn’t earn a dime. He views Facebook as a tool for spreading peace and love through free and open communication among the peoples of the earth. I admire his optimistic and altruistic view of Facebook’s mission, but at the same time, I’m not convinced the company will be around in ten years if he doesn’t step aside and let someone else mix a little real business into his modern high-tech hippie co-op.

Anyway, he’s like a nervous schoolboy on stage. Perhaps because of that, they brought a journalist with a lot of personality – perhaps a little too much, it turns out – to hold his hand through his hour-long event for the SXSW crowd. It became apparent fairly quickly though that Sarah Lacy thought she was as much of an attraction as Zuckerberg.

There were several points in the conversation when she stopped asking Zuckerberg questions and just shared irrelevant anecdotes. Lacy seemed to be on a mission to boast about her own importance and some sort of inner-circle friendship with Zuckerberg. By the time she mixed in a shameless plug for her forthcoming book, the crowd had heard enough.

It started with some general guffawing and gentle booing. Soon it burst into open and widespread heckling. After a while, even Zuckerberg commented that Lacy should ask him a question if she wanted him to talk. After berating the crowd several times, Lacy gave up and opened the session up for questions from the audience. At least one audience member used his time at the microphone to scold her.

I guess the crowd got a little out of hand – there was a bit of feeding frenzy once the heckling started, but Lacy certainly didn’t help things out with her confrontational attitude on the stage (and afterwards). And Zuckerberg kind of just sat there on the sidelines.

I don’t think it was the event SXSW organizers were hoping for when they brought they brought him in. But people are certainly talking (and blogging) about it.

U can has fun wif cheezburger. kthkbye

Blogs, Buzz and Buddy Lists – After that, I went to a joint film-interactive panel that was about promoting your film through online conduits. I’m not a filmmaker, but I though maybe some of techniques discussed might be applicable to some of the stuff I do at work. Boy, was I wrong.

It was a snoozer of a panel, but not really through any fault of the panelists themselves. They were fine, the topic was just a little too basic to make for an interesting discussions: Blogs? You should have one. Building relationships? It’s a good thing. There, I just summed up the whole panel discussion. (Oddly, they had a big sign prohibiting people from taking pictures in this room, so I’ve got no visual evidence of it.)

But then, the final presentation of the day salvaged the whole afternoon. It was freaking awesome.

LOLWUT? Why Do I Keep Coming Back to this Website?- The guys behind internet phenom icanhascheezburger.com (a personal favorite of The Wife), founder Eric “cheezburger” Nakagawa and company CEO Ben Huhgave quite possibly the funniest, most frank and insightful discussion ever of a web start-up’s journey from obscurity to international phenomenon.

Imagine Harold and Kumar creating an overnight internet sensation with goofy cat pictures and bad grammar. That’s basically how their story played out.

They outlined their modest beginnings, their numerous struggles and how they continue to refine their product - a product that depends entirely on goofy pictures of cats(and now other items). But it’s evolved far past just their site – spawning tons of imitators and a whole new sub-language of LOLspeak used by thousands of fans across the globe.

Afterwards, they greeted fansand signed autographs. And gave free cheeseburgers and veggieburgers to everyone.

And then I came back to the hotel and grabbed some sleep. Can’t wait to see what happens tomorrow.