Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > March > 09
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Journalist Sarah Lacy speaks: the video
Journalist Sarah Lacy, who interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for his South by Southwest Interactive keynote, is already laughing off The Incident.
Saying she’s used to rough treatment as a woman covering technology, she seemed in high spirits after the Austin Convention Center was ground zero for a public flogging of the journalist.
She says she’s not too upset: her Amazon.com book rating is through the roof, she says.
See the video below:
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Journalist Sarah Lacy speaks
I just spoke to Sarah Lacy, the journalist heckled at the Mark Zuckerberg keynote. I’ll be posting a video very soon.
Stay tuned
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South by Southwest Interactive panel shorties: Day 2
Here some stuff from Saturday that we’re wrapping up:
Kill Your Mouse/Kinetic Computing — Rather than a mouse and keyboard, will we be using cool “Minority Report”-style floating screens or what? The panel consisted of usability experts and people who are working on the next generation of human interfaces, including Microsoft’s “Surface” table/touch-screen computer and Kai Huang of RedOctane, the publisher of the “Guitar Hero” games. The panel seemed to agree that letting people hack and improve your products is a good thing, but nobody expects the mouse/keyboard interface to go away anytime soon. We were asked to think about what we define as a mouse. The goal is to create an interface so easy and intuitive that you don’t have to think about it. That’s easier said than done, of course. One interesting tidbit: when Huang was asked whether he had any idea if “Guitar Hero” would become such a huge hit, he said “No clue. If I did, I wouldn’t have sold my company (to Activision).”
Girls in IT — We’ve written before about the dearth of women in technology and what local groups are doing about it. The panel reiterated what we’ve heard before: that more young women need to be encouraged to embrace science and technology and that the system is inherently difficult to make that happen. One interesting find: Girls performing more poorly on math tests when asked their gender before the test. Panelists encouraged parents to spend more time making sure their daughters don’t fear math and science and to get more involved with their education. Said panelist J Strother Moore, the Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, “We’re basically ignoring half of the population and then complaining that there aren’t enough workers.” From one commenter on the intra-panel chat room: “I was always really hard on myself about grades too, but I never realized it was because I was female.”
Behind the scenes at the Onion News Network — The online video talent of the Onion media empire spoke on the challenges of writing and producing comedy for online, including casting (it helps to cast soulless, interchangeable talent, they said) and avoiding topics that are too on-the-nose. They said the key is creating a tone similar to the popular print/online newspaper and to stick as closely to the language/looks of 24-hour news networks as possible with high-production values (or at least stuff that looks like it). The group is expanding into a morning-style show, a Sunday morning political-style show and other types of media-aping productions. Most hilarious; the “Ninja Parade” video. The panel ended with a bit of taboo: a video planned for a DVD and never released publicly was shown with lots of warning to audience members. It featured a news report with a window that showed hard-core pornography as the topic of smut on TV was discussed. Even with the warnings, some stunned audience members muttered, “Wow,” when it was over. As usual, The Onion mixed shocks with hilarity.
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Zuckerberg keynote: audience turns on journalist
You’ll hear more about this later, but BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy lost control of her interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and things got ugly.
Audience members began interjecting, others demanded the Q&A start early so as not to hear more of Lacy’s non-questions and finally the audience boo’d and applauded when Lacy tried to defend herself or when Zuckerberg dodged one of her questions or told her he’d answer them better if she asked some.
Zuckerberg didn’t seem to want to reveal much, but he seemed peeved that Lacy mentioned his site would be launching in France before Zuckerberg could make the announcement himself.
The audience revolution was not pretty. Lacy didn’t score points by plugging her book about Facebook (“You should read it,” she advised the 23-year-old billionaire) or by being very chummy, mentioning past interviews and a recent dinner.
UPDATE: Our video has been posted.
Were you at the keynote? What did you think? Please post a comment here and let us know.
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Social change, one phone at a time
“Mobileactive: How Mobile Technology Impacts Politics and Vice Versa” looked at how small devices — mobile phones — can generate big changes in politics and activism.
We couldn’t stay for the whole session, but learned enough to be intrigued and want to learn more.
The main panelist we got to hear was Katrin Verclas of the site MobileActive, which teaches activists how to use mobile technology.
Examples she gave of mobile activism included human-rights videos being spread by mobile phone in Egypt and a campaign to get citizens to call legislators in Argentina. In Sierra Leone, cell phones made it easier to monitor elections for abuses.
She said that in the U.S text messaging has helped spur young people to vote. She also talked about an SMS campaign in California where messages from residents on health care streamed onto a large screen set up near the Capitol in Sacramento.
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Waiting on Zuckerberg
We are front row center, Ballroom A, for the Mark Zuckerberg keynote.
We’ll be posting video highlights later.
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Another slow start, bloggers versus journalists, and Zuckerberg
I woke up this morning feeling like I had been run over by a truck.
Strange, I hadn’t had a drop to drink last night. I wasn’t hungover.
True, I had gone to the Google party. But I had been home by 9 p.m. and in bed by 11:30 p.m. I was downright prudish by SXSW standards.
Then I looked at my clock. I had forgotten all about daylight savings time but my cell phone alarm hadn’t. It was 8 a.m., my snooze had been going off for an hour.
After staggering toward the Austin Convention Center, stuffing an Einstein’s bagel and two Tylenol into my mouth, I arrived at “The Female Takedown of Casual Gaming,” a half-hour late.
The panel was interesting, and included a lively discussion of women “power players” who help their young children “level up.”
But I felt so sleep-deprived I found myself dozing off.
Thank goodness for the next panel: “Top Ten Ways to Piss Off a Blogger.” This panel woke me up, no caffeine required. Hosted by Rohit Bhargava, it included a great give-and take between the attendees, which included a good split between bloggers and marketers. The take-away is this, in no particular order:
-Don’t spam bloggers (what’s interesting to me, is this lesson wasn’t also applied to journalists. So only bloggers don’t like unpersonalized e-mail pitches?)
-Don’t act like you read a blogger’s site when you don’t.
-In the ultimate double-edged sword, don’t treat them like journalists, but don’t exclude them from the privileges that journalists get, either.
-Don’t properly attribute something from a blog.
-No attempt to establish a relationship with a blogger. This includes asking for favors from a perfect stranger, like asking them to blog about a topic and get it up by the end of the day.
-Not formatting movie files, etc. so they can be easily posted.
-Before pitching, make your pitch relavant and find out if blog’s site has a section where he or she writes about the kinds of pitches he or she would like to get.
It was an extremely interesting discussion, especially from my standpoint — what bloggers would call the MSM: Mainstream Media. Many of these marketing lessons, it seemed to me, applied equally to bloggers and journalists.
It was interesting to hear that bloggers seem more willing to demand these things from marketers, and complain when they don’t get them.
Now I’m waiting in a mostly empty ballroom for Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old founder of Facebook, to speak.
I thought this was the most high-profile event of the conference but there is hardly anyone here. Mostly it’s media folks and eager bloggers.
Stay tuned for more coverage on Zuckerberg’s interview at SXSWi.
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SXSWi Frog Design Party: Fire dancers and green beer
The Frog Design Saturday night South by Southwest party was supposed to be off the chain. Grupo Fantasma would be playing, it would be at the Mexican American Cultural Center and there were going to be fire dancers.
How were we to know it would not only be off the chain, it would also be off the entire hook and even off the sheezie?
The party was completely packed. We could hear the music all the way in the Statesman parking lot across the lake. There was free green beer and ice cream (check out ourStatesman A-List photos). Fire dancing. Lots of music. It might go down as the party of the fest (if the Monday Facebook party disappoints).
Here’s some pics and a video.
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