The podcasts of most SxSW 2008 panels are now available. I'm looking forward to catching several of the panels I missed due to scheduling conflicts.

South by Southwest interactive ended with very strong panels. I went to panels on the future of multi-player online games, secrets of javascript libraries, and scaling web applications. The last panel of the day about scaling was one of the best panels of the entire weekend. Between a couple of the panels, I spent time building and playing with Bloxes (shown in the picture).

Cool ideas from today:

• 2d games have a much higher market penetration because they don't require special hardware to play
• In the "Real World", people complain about buying $1 DRM songs. In Guitar Hero, people are gladly paying $2 for DRM music.
• Browser sniffing in javascript in general is a bad thing. Use Feature sniffing.
• "Drip" that can be used to locate javascript memory leaks.
• Some bands are using bit torrent data to determine which cities have the largest number of fans to help schedule their tours.
• Wikipida publishes all their configuration data and database schema.
• Wordpress still rents all their hardware.
• We need to figure out how to install mogilefs at the chronicle.
• Bottle necks are almost always either Disk IO or database issues.

 

Today my panels were on how to defend your reputation in the online world, online communities, and how to Pimp a nonprofits website. I also stuck my head in a global warming panel just long enough to know I didn't belong there. They started off by stating the science was in and anyone who doubts "their" science has no intelligence.

Today's high points include:

• Companies should embrace user feedback
• Make sure there are enough good things on the web to drown out any bad things
• When used properly, non-profits can mobilize their efforts and get a lot of money by using online social communities like twitter, facebook, myspace, etc...

Ed Schipul gave me a silly purple hat to wear during the day to help promote his non-profit panel, The silly hat was fun and I continued to wear it to the after parties. I was amazed at the number of people who where looking to meet people who would come talk to me just because of the hat. I tried to win a wii at the Opera party, but alas, my hat was no help.

Today was another full day. I went to panels on Designing Interactions, how Science Fiction both leads and learns from design, the value of logos, and SEO. My favorite takeaways are:

• Give the user metrics on the behavior you want from them. (ie, comment counts, blog entry counts, friends, etc)
• Do not give the user metrics on behavior you do not want from them.
• Science fiction has been the leading force to some very neat technology.
• While having a professional looking logo is important, the exact details (shade of colors, size, image) are not worth the time most startups invest in them.

I was lucky and missed Sarah Lacey's melt down of an interview of Mark Zuckerberg. However, it was a prime topic for the rest of the night. From the dozens of people I talked to, it sounds like she just did not understand her audience.

 

The fun continues.

The biggest thing I learned today was you don't need to use the flash display to make use of the flash libraries. Slideslare.net has made extensive use of flash on their site in non-traditional ways. One thing they do is call the flash upload libraries from javascript so they can provide feedback to the user as to the progress of file uploads. Ingenious!

In the afternoon I spent time in the game room playing Call to Duty 4. On one side of the room they are holding tryouts for players who would like to be picked up by a professional team. These guys are good. I almost felt uncomfortable playing in the same room.

Everyday after the panels, there are tons of sponsored parties in the area. The party we went to was holding a drawing for a Xbox 360. One of my co-workers, Lina won the Xbox 360. I'm so happy for her. Maybe next year she will be able to try out for the pros.

We ended the night at the Frog Design party where they had fire dancers. Check out David Herrold's blog for some good video

The first day of South by Southwest was fantastic! They claim almost 8000 people were scheduled made it this year and I would believe it.

My highlight was watching "battle decks". A handful of people ad libbed five minute power point talks to random slides they had never seen before. It was the best comedy I've seen in a long time.

My other panel was on how games are using wikis to promote community. They said you only need a handful active users to make a wiki successful. These users will create 80 percent of the content. The other users will flesh out the wiki and build the community.

The picture is of the South by Southwest Interactive play pen where there is a giant pile of Lego's ready for idle hands.

More SxSW pictures.