Rocking at South by Southwest

I live in Austin Texas. Home of the Longhorns, the democratic fringe, County Line BBQ, Titos Vodka, and MUSIC. This week is South by Southwest. If you are unfamiliar with this festival, familiarize yourself. It is music, music, music, drinking, dancing, music, film, and interactive. The city is completely different during these two weeks of festivities. The locals, or many of them, leave the crowds and noise. And the independent music and film industries move in. There is an entirely different population here right now. And they all dress well and wear cool shades.

I got to go the Interactive part of this festival. I go to a lot of events. We have booths or pods and usually have a BoF or talk of some sort and I am marketing support. But I got to attend this one as an attendee. There were two highlights for me. One was sitting in a session where Henry Rollins was interviewed and the other was the Bruce Sterling keynote. I also got to learn about tags, tagging, tag clouds, tagging 2.0, blogging, bloggers, blogs, and bloggers in love. That last one was unintentionally amusing.

People used the term "open source" a lot. But it had a different meaning. When I hear it, I think about source code, collaboration, licensing and community. I think most of the people using it here were referring to "Cluetrain"-type communication.

Interactive is over and the music has begun. Last night we sat on our deck and could hear the free Echo and the Bunnymen concert that was going on down at Auditorium Shores. How cool is this town?? Very. And I am so excited to live here.

Posted at 02:14PM Mar 17, 2006 by sarad in General  |