Simon Willison's Weblog: sxsw

Is Quora an effective tool for participating in realtime conversations at SXSW?

2013-10-02T10:45:00+00:00

My answer to Is Quora an effective tool for participating in realtime conversations at SXSW? on Quora

Not really. Quora tends to deliberately under-emphasize the time aspect if when something was posted - I'm still seeing unanswered questions from SXSW 2011 popping up in my feed!

Tags: sxsw, quora

What new apps were used most at SXSW 2013, and why?

2013-02-28T11:19:00+00:00

My answer to What new apps were used most at SXSW 2013, and why? on Quora

Lanyrd will be at SXSW again this year, and we've continued to refine our unofficial schedule guide and session planner for SXSW Interactive. Here's our site for this year:

http://austin2013.lanyrd.com/

If you sign in with Twitter, we'll show you the people you follow who will be attending SXSW Interactive this year (we list over 2,000 Twitter attendees, increasing all the time) - we'll also show you the sessions they are presenting.

You can then build your own personal schedule by tracking or plan-to-attending sessions - and get suggestions based on the schedules built by your contacts.

We've added rich topic metadata to the schedule, so you can slice and dice it in different ways. For example, here are sessions about marketing on Sunday: http://bit.ly/13p8c0g or Workshops about HTML5: http://bit.ly/XmtHK7

We're also running a neat location-enabled now and next app - hit http://now.lanyrd.com/ during the conference and we'll geolocate your phone and show you what's on now and next at the venues closest to you - pretty handy at a conference taking place across most of Austin!

We've also built a snazzy grid view, so you can see the full schedule, your personal schedule or the results of a search as a grid (making it easier to spot sessions that clash). Here's a grid of the sessions I'm considering attending on Saturday: http://bit.ly/Y2gyTr

Your personal schedule will also be available in our iPhone and Android/Mobile Web apps, which both include offline support so you can still see the schedule even if you don't have a reliable data connection in Austin. More about these on our blog: Get more out of SXSW Interactive 2013 with Lanyrd

For us, SXSW is a great opportunity to showcase what our event platform can do. It's a particularly good stress test - if you can handle the 2,000+ speakers and 1,400+ sessions at SXSW, any other event should be a breeze!

Tags: android, iphone, mobile, sxsw, quora

Are there specific elements of SXSW that make it a successful conference?

2013-02-27T13:17:00+00:00

My answer to Are there specific elements of SXSW that make it a successful conference? on Quora

SXSW is a great event because of the people who go. There is no other technical/creative conference I can think of which attracts talented, interesting people at the same scale (20,000+ attendees).

Part of the secret here is the reason many people complain about SXSW: the panels. A majority of the sessions on the schedule are panels with 2-5 speakers. These often aren't as well planned as a solo talk (running a really great panel is actually very hard, see What are some tips for moderating a panel?) but that's OK: the real purpose of a panel is to get those 5 people to come to Austin for a week so that you can talk to them in the bars afterwards!

Tags: conferences, sxsw, quora

How do I get out of being on panel at SXSW?

2012-10-15T15:37:00+00:00

My answer to How do I get out of being on panel at SXSW? on Quora

People drop out of panels all the time - it's not a big problem, provided you give the organizers a good amount of notice so they can find a suitable replacement. Let the panel organiser know ASAP. Even better: offer to help them find a replacement panelist.

Tags: sxsw, quora

What tech and/or start up events are you attending at SXSW '12?

2012-02-10T11:30:00+00:00

My answer to What tech and/or start up events are you attending at SXSW '12? on Quora

Our unofficial sxsw schedule site currently has 66 sessions with the "startups" topic - you can browse and search them here: http://sxsw.lanyrd.com/?topics=s...

If you sign in to the site with Twitter you can also see which sessions the people you follow on Twitter are speaking at, tracking or planning to attend - and you can search or filter that list by the Startups topic as well.

Tags: sxsw, quora

What are the best SXSW blogs?

2012-02-04T12:47:00+00:00

My answer to What are the best SXSW blogs? on Quora

http://www.sxswbaby.com/ has been running for years and is always full of useful information and tips.

My co-founder has put together a very useful Twitter list of SXSW blogs and twitterers: https://mobile.twitter.com/lanyr...

Tags: sxsw, quora

What Y Combinator companies are going to SXSW this year?

2011-03-07T15:41:00+00:00

My answer to What Y Combinator companies are going to SXSW this year? on Quora

Lanyrd (W11) will be there, we're promoting our SXSW schedule planner / coverage tracker tool: http://sxsw.lanyrd.com/

Tags: sxsw, y-combinator, quora

Which Bay Area startups are going to SXSW 2011?

2011-02-19T12:45:00+00:00

My answer to Which Bay Area startups are going to SXSW 2011? on Quora

http://lanyrd.com/ will be there - both myself and Nat.

Tags: san-francisco, startups, sxsw, quora, sanfranciscobayarea

What are the differences between GDC and SXSW? Which one is better for a web entrepreneur?

2010-11-20T16:18:00+00:00

My answer to What are the differences between GDC and SXSW? Which one is better for a web entrepreneur? on Quora

I haven't been to GDC, but it's a game development conference. SxSW interactive is almost entirely web stuff, so it would be a better fit for a web entrepreneur.

Tags: conferences, entrepreneurship, startups, sxsw, quora

Why would or wouldn't SXSWi be worth attending in 2011?

2010-11-10T09:43:00+00:00

My answer to Why would or wouldn't SXSWi be worth attending in 2011? on Quora

Yes, it's worth attending every year.

I finally came round to this last time I went in 2009, when I realised I had been every time for the past 7 years and had complained about the quality of the panels every single time.

I was talking to Kellan-Elliott-McCrea about this, and he explained that SxSW's panels are basically a brilliant hack. The more panels there are, the more smart people get to convince their boss to send them to SxSWi - and hence the more smart people there will be to talk to in the bars in the evening. The actual panel content isn't important, it's all about getting the largest number of interesting people together in one place for the social side.

Tags: conferences, sxsw, quora

Why are tech conferences so expensive to attend?

2010-09-27T09:25:00+00:00

My answer to Why are tech conferences so expensive to attend? on Quora

Large conferences with big name speakers are expensive to organise. They are also priced to what the market will bear.

If you don't want to spend the money, look in to BarCamps. They are free to attend and usually have extremely high quality talks. I've been to over a dozen in the past few years and I've learnt just as much at them as some big budget events.

http://barcamp.org/ is the official site for the BarCamp movement, and you may also find our list on http://lanyrd.com/topics/barcamp/ useful.

Tags: conferences, events, sxsw, quora

Help! My iPod thinks I'm emo - Part 1

2009-03-30T10:11:47+00:00

Help! My iPod thinks I'm emo - Part 1

Detailed write-up of one of my favourite panels from this year’s SxSW, on music recommendation engines.

Tags: music, recommendation, sxsw

List of SxSW 2009 panels with "social" in the title

2009-03-14T23:02:54+00:00

A Hard Sell? Social Media & Your Boss
Can Social Media End Racism?
Digital Urbanites: How To Become Part of the New Social Capital
The Future Of Social Networks
How Social Networks Are Killing the Revolution
Making Whuffie: Raising Social Capital in Online Communities
The Mix at Six Hosted by Social Media Group
Mobile Social SXSW BBQ
My Boss Doesn't Get It: Championing Social Media to the Man
PBS' Interactive Social Media & Online Video Studio
The Search for a More Social Web
Security for the Social Set
Social Engineering: Scam Your Way Into Anything or From Anybody
Social Gamers: Away From the Keyboard
Social Media For Social Good
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
Social Media Nonprofit ROI Poetry Slam
Social Media: If You Liked it, Then You Should Have Put a Digg on it...
Social Networking in Health: e-Patients, Data & Privacy
Social Patterns and Antipatterns For the Win
Suxorz '09: The Ten Worst Social Media Campaigns
Twitter for Marketers: Is It Still Social Media?
Using GPS & Location to Enhance Social Networking
Using the New Digital Social Media to Accelerate Sustainability

Tags: presentedwithoutcomment, social, social-media, sxsw

Django at PyCon

2008-01-21T21:54:29+00:00

Django at PyCon

Unfortunately I’ll be missing US PyCon this year (I’ll be at SxSW and Webstock in New Zealand though)—but it’s great to see that there’s a strong line-up of Django related presentations.

Tags: conferences, django, pycon, python, sxsw, webstock

SXSW: Web App Autopsy

2007-03-13T00:39:30+00:00

SXSW: Web App Autopsy

Conversion rates and revenue per customer for RegOnline, FeedBurner, Wufoo, and Blinksale.

Tags: sxsw

The Figures Behind The Top Web Apps

2007-03-13T00:37:41+00:00

The Figures Behind The Top Web Apps

DropSend.com makes $100,000 profit a year, before tax. Ryan’s slides also have cost-to-build data for Freshbooks, Maya’s Mom, Mobissimo and Wesabe.

Tags: dropsend, ryan-carson, sxsw

Flickr without the Flash

2005-04-10T03:29:46+00:00

One of my favourite panels at SxSW this year was the Flash vs. HTML Game Show, in which a team of HTML/JavaScript gurus took on a team of Flash gurus showing off pre-prepared solutions to tasks set for the panel. One of the challenges was to come up with enhancements to Flickr using the team's assigned technology.

The JavaScript team were happy to admit that Flickr's use of Flash was extremely smart. In addition to the incredible Organizr, Flickr uses Flash to power the annotations attached to images. Chris Wetherell on the HTML team showed off a partial implementation of this feature, and emphasized that with a little more time it could duplicate the Flash implementation.

I don't know if Neil Kandalgaonkar was at SxSW, but he's taken the inspired step of combining a JavaScript reimplementation of Flickr's annotations with greasemonkey. The result is Lickr, by far the most impressive userscript released to date. Lickr hooks in to Flickr, removes the Flash annotation interface entirely and replaces it with a HTML/JavaScript/Ajax equivalent. Get this though... the JavaScript one is better than the original Flash. It loads faster, feels smoother and allows you to open dozens of photos in new tabs without your browser slowing to a crawl.

Be sure to read Neil's notes on the implementation. He had to reverse engineer the communication between the Flash file and the backend server, and ended up producing a mini-JavaScript API to manage the interactions.

Neil also touches on the fascinating cultural issues brought up by userscripts:

Lately I've been considering Lickr as an experiment in web politics. Exactly how far can the users go in controlling a website? Right now I'm at the point where I can stop thinking about just duplicating Flickr; I can think about adding features.

Adding Persistent Searches to Gmail has already demonstrated new features enabled by userscripts, and that's evidently just the tip of the iceberg. Plans are underway to provide greasemonkey with its own persistence mechanism. Once that happens, the sky's the limit.

Tags: flash, flickr, greasemonkey, javascript, neil-kandalgaonkar, sxsw

PyCon observations

2005-03-28T17:08:22+00:00

I'm back from my two week stint in the US, and currently suffering from vicious jet-lag (my body wants me to go to sleep at 5am and wake up just past noon). Herewith some observations on PyCon, SxSW and the differences between the two.

PyCon 2005 was a great conference, and a very different one from SxSW Interactive the week before. While SxSW was one big social party with panels thrown in to fill the gaps, the sessions in PyCon were the main event and the social stuff (with the exception of the sprints, which I didn't really experience) was much less prominent. For the first day of the conference I actually found it quite hard to spark up conversations with strangers, something I'd been doing for pretty much the whole of SxSW. Things got better on the second and third days, but the lack of any organised social events and more reserved atmosphere meant I didn't have nearly as many random social experiences as at SxSW.

The PyCon sessions really were excellent: three great keynotes (the IronPython keynote was my favourite), an excellent web track and a whole smorgasbord of interesting topics spread over the three days. I have only one big complaint: all sessions apart from the keynotes were half an hour in length. For most sessions this worked fine, but some of the more experienced presenters were obviously shackled by the half hour requirement. Bruce Eckel's presentation was the most noticable in this regard - I love the stuff he covered, but it's obvious he could have gone on for a lot longer without losing the attention of the crowd (he obviously thought the same).

My suggestion for next year would be to keep most of the sessions at half an hour, but schedule a small number of 45 minute sessions for presenters who are obvious candidates for longer talks. I talked to Steve Holden (this year's organiser) briefly about this and he mentioned that 45 minute sessions lead to scheduling difficulties, particularly with respect to coordinating the different tracks. I personally think that the benefits of longer sessions for certain key topics would outweigh the scheduling disadvantages.

A few other PyCon observations:

There were over 400 attendees, at least a hundred more than last year. This slightly exceeded the capacity of the conference center, and they'll be moving to a larger (as yet undecided) venue for 2006.
I only attended one of the two lightning talk sessions, but it was great fun and a refreshing change from the regular panels. The highlight for me was the guy who strapped a computer to the back of his motorcycle and drove 7,000 miles across America... with Python to coordinate all of the pieces. You can read more on his site, or in this article on Py.
The two (sometimes three) tracks were well arranged, with few clashes between things that I wanted to see. This was in contrast to SxSW's 5 tracks which had serious clashes pretty much all the time.
Everyone was hiring! The conference package we got was stacked with job brochures from the conference sponsors, and the whiteboard by the registration desk had new jobs added to it every day. Sure-fire evidence that Python is finally starting to gain significance in the job market.
The lunches, included in the conference price, were excellent. The price itself was great value too - early bird for students was $125, and $175 for regular attendees. Even late registration was only (from memory) $275.
The largest venue at the center, used for the keynotes, had no WiFi! Coverage throughout the rest of the conference was good however.
I finally got to join Ted Leung and friends in a SubEthaEdit session during the Python at Google keynote. It was an electrifying experience watching each slide transcribed in to the notes within seconds of it appearing on screen, with multiple lines developing at the same time. The results of our labour can be seen here. Someone really needs to put together a screencast of this kind of thing so the rest of the world knows what they're missing.
Despite my observations about the less social nature of the conference above, I met some very interesting people and had a really great time.

It seems to me that Python and SxSW could learn some tricks from each other. Lightning talks and Birds-of-a-feather sessions would be a great addition to the SxSW lineup, while PyCon really does need some more thought put in to the social side of the conference. I hope to attend both again next year.

Tags: conferences, pycon, sxsw

Choice SxSW quotes

2005-03-18T01:59:17+00:00

My American adventure is ongoing; I'm still in Austin at the moment, but I'll be off to Washington D.C. in a few days and there's a small chance I'll get there via Dallas. This doesn't leave much opportunity for online shenanigans, but there were a few things from SxSW that really needed a mention. The conference, as ever, was awesome - if not for the panels then certainly for the socialising. If anything I stretched myself too thin this year trying to keep up with the Brit Pack, the WaSP crew, some ex-colleagues from Lawrence and the people I met in San Francisco back in May.

I met a lot of new people this year as well. Since David Nunez had pointed out that "what do you do?" was a bit of a dull opening question (not to mention a conversation killer for people who dislike their job) I stuck with "So what are you excited about?" instead. It worked pretty well - I got a whole bunch of great answers, with the most random probably coming from the guy who was excited about mopeds (it turned out he runs the world's number one moped site).

The most entertaining panel by far was the Home Star Runner one, in which the Brothers Chaps finally revealed the secret to their animation success: motion capture! I'll have to post a few pictures once I get back on a high speed 'net connection; suffice to say the constant laughter from the room was heard throughout the convention center.

Anyway, on to the quotes. The first two are from Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

PHP is like a beautiful woman... with syphilis

Maintaining badly written code is like trying to solve a crossword puzzle set by someone who can't spell

I also like this one from Jeremy Dunck, who was justifying sharing your ideas with people at the conference despite the risk of other people implementing them first:

It's like the lazyweb in meatspace

The credit for the last one goes (I think) to Yvonne Adams, who made the sage observation that:

South by South West is spring break for web geeks

It certainly is. See you all again next year!

Tags: conferences, sxsw

Transcript of Bruce Sterling at Microsoft Corporation

2004-05-22T20:35:54+00:00

Transcript of Bruce Sterling at Microsoft Corporation

Bruce Sterling on scaling up his annual SxSW party. I can’t believe I missed it htis year.

Via Boing Boing: Sterling's Microsoft Research talk

Tags: bruce-sterling, microsoft, scaling, sxsw