Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > March > 17 > Entry
Looking back on the SXSW Interactive we missed
After going home for some major baby time and watching a lot of TV, I’m finally allowing my brain to go back to South by Southwest Interactive, that joyous, overfilled pot of multimedia goodness that by Tuesday afternoon felt like it had spilled itself all over the Twitterscape and the blogging world.
There is so much to cover at the festival (especially this year, the largest SXSW Interactive ever) that even a team of several people working full time can only hope to capture a fraction of it.
Here are a few things we missed that still deserve a second look:
The Web Awards and the Bloggies: Every year I plan to go to the Web Awards and every year something happens to thwart those plans. This year, it was posting a video of Sarah Lacy that kept me in the Hilton lobby, away from my planned evening of laughing over what I expected would be hilarious jokes from Eugene Mirman. There’s a picture floating around Facebook of winners from the Web Awards partying while I sit in the background against a tiny corner, hunched over my laptop editing video, like some SXSW Smeogal, fascinated by the glow of my precioussss. You can find the winners of the Web Awards, and the next day’s Bloggies at their respective houses of Internet worship.
The On Networks/Greenlight Awards: Same excuse as above. The Lacy story was breaking and I had to cut bait on a lot of Sunday night events I’d committed to. Here’s the winner, incidentally, and a photo from the event that the organizers were nice enough to send afterward. Former Austinite and creator and star of “The Guild” Felicia Day is second from the left.
Photo by Mary Sledd
The closing night party: If you went to this, you either have much more stamina than I have, or you just didn’t party quite as hard the rest of the week. Cheers to those who went. I was at home, entering the beginning stages of a deep coma.
Sched.org: We used this marvelous little scheduling application throughout the festival but didn’t write much about it. (The iCal exporting made my iPhone happy, and I felt very organized having it in my hand at all times.) One of the best parts of the festival was when I showed it to Michael Barnes for the first time and saw his eyes light up. (He’ll be writing more about it today in his Out & About blog.) I will be very disappointed if there’s not something this useful at every major future Austin festival, including Austin City Limits and next year’s South by Southwest.
The Facebook people party: I missed a lot of good stuff Monday night because of a detour to Trudy’s. I had already seen Mark Zuckerberg the night before at a Pangaea party and just didn’t feel like I needed to do that two nights in a row. Besides, if I had gone to Pangea, would I have gotten this picture with Eric from my favorite Web site, Icanhascheezburger.com? Nope, I didn’t think so. Plus the photos posted to Facebook from that party later don’t make me feel like I missed too much.
Phizzpop Design Challenge: Another one I missed due to “Going with the flow” Monday night. I blame the “How to Rawk SXSW” panel for planting that idea in my head.
Barcamp: I was only there for an hour, but I saw enough fun being had, that I left reluctantly, sure that the people attending were going to be having the time of their lives.
Music? Apparently, there was some sort of music festival that broke out right after Interactive? Did anybody hear about this? Huh. Maybe I should check that out next year.
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