Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > March > 16 > Entry
Sunday night parties: Tweetin’, connectin’, breakdancin’ and lovin”
Remember how badly I partied Saturday night? Inexcusable. I was decidedly D-List. Sunday, I tried to party like it was all A-list up in here. (Which it’s not. A-List is actually over there.)
For a half hour before party time, I watched Gary Vee blow people away with his tornado answers on a panel that ran very, very long. Addie Broyles and I hoofed it over to Ballet Austin for the Statesman Texas Social Media Awards.
Now, can I park here for a minute? For a little while, I’ve been a bit reluctant to blog about the TSMA’s (TSMAckies, which have recently lost the apostrophe but retained the silent T). I was a judge, it was a Statesman thing and I thought it might be a little weird to write about it in a news capacity.
Some of that trepidation vanished last night when I witnessed the totality of what had been pulled together. Two dozen amazing people were being honored not only for being good connectors and social networkers, but for making a real-world impact in their communities and being pretty great people.
There was a lengthy drinks-‘n-grub gathering (I stuck mostly to Sweet Leaf Tea) where it was impossible not to have a great conversation with someone. Then we gathered in the theater to give out the awards. The winners were gracious, host Robert Quigley kept things moving and overall winner Michelle Greer gave a speech that had me edging toward the dark part of the stage lest anyone notice I was fighting back tears. The gist was that the people in the room need to DO. Not talk. Act. And get the people in their circles to act and make some sense out of the multiple messes we are in. It was inspiring. And that was perhaps my understatement of the fest.
Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez, AMERICAN-STATESMAN
I got to meet Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell for the first time, as well as Houston Chronicle tech writer Dwight Silverman and many locals I’ve only known on Twitter of Facebook until now.
I could downplay it and pretend it wasn’t a special, huge moment for us and for Austin’s social media scene, but that’s now what my overfull heart is saying.
Brave new Twitter-based headwear via CheapTweet.
After it was over, many were streaming out of the Statesman event headed to Aces Lounge for the Austin Tweetup, an unofficial event that was great for me because I didn’t eat at the Statesman shindig and was famished for chicken wings and beer.
I had two wings and one beer. It was enough.
Although the venue didn’t fill up the way the recent Austin Twestival did, it was still a good time with good music, lots of prize giveaways (a new friend won a gaming keyboard. She does not game. And she won an iPod Shuffle earlier in the day. We wanted to take her to Vegas.).
From there people split off to either the Buffalo Billiards shindig sponsored by IBM or the giant Facebook party at Pangaea.
After some wrangling at the door (“DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!? No? Oh. OK. Cool. I’m not that big a deal, really.”), I wandered upstairs with my laptop bag and jacket into the thick of young, hip, grooving people with post-Nordstrom clothes and an iPhone in every hand.
The music was LOUD and THUMPING and INSANELY INSISTENT. I found a wall outlet and camped out on the sidelines as dancers from Austin’s B-Boy City did their breakdancing, surrounded by a sea of tech peeps. Instead of grooving myself, I opened my laptop and took notes for a future Facebook story. I wrote about how everyone was taking pictures or video-capturing or Tweeting the moment for later instead of actually living the moment. Yet I wrote it two degrees out, even more removed than those who barely moved, lest their cell phone camera images blur.
I stayed as long as I could, letting it play around in my head that the song playing at the Facebook party was, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” I thought about Facebook’s mushrooming global population, probably past 180 million by now. I thought the song sounded about right.
Breakdancing at the Facebook party
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment Categories: SXSW 2009
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By Mirna Garcia
March 24, 2009 5:08 PM | Link to this
Hi. I watched the clip of the breakdancing video you posted, and wanted to know if you had any more footage of that event? Thank you.
By Omar Gallaga
March 18, 2009 1:19 PM | Link to this
Hi Jmac --
It was actually on the front page of statesman.com, austin360 and the front page of the print edition (giant tease + photo above the fold).
It might have shifted off the front of the online pages as the day progressed, but I remember seeing them in those spots the morning after the awards in prominent tease box spots.
By John McElhenney
March 16, 2009 8:54 PM | Link to this
Glad you had fun at your own party R. Congrats to Michelle G. She's a powerhouse.
My question is this, why isn't the WINNER a frontpage story? A SXSW star story? In fact it's kinda buried on YOUR blog. I had to go looking for it to see who won.
Next year let's add some non-AAS folks, okay?
Tip of the hat to all of you involved and all of you nominated!
@jmacofearth