SXSW 2004

(Yes, this is getting posted a bit late, but you'll see by its length that I put quite a bit of time into it. There are also accompanying photos here.)

At its core, South by Southwest is about the people. And as trite a statement as that is, most of what I took back with me from Austin was vignettes, conversations and bizarre interactions from four-or-so days of non-stop interaction. I had no idea my body could still function on so little sleep -- and it turns out it can't, as evidenced by my walking zombie-ness the day after I got home.

So, from the beginning.

After work, Cinnamon met me at the airport to take the car home. I got there a full two hours before my flight was to leave -- or so I thought. About 45 minutes before departure, I noticed that there was a gate change. I walked to the next gate and sat down next to a guy who was busy working on CSS for a website. He turned out to be Dave Shea, creator of CSS Zen Garden, on his way to SXSW from Vancouver. We talked for quite a while, facilitated by the three delays and two additional gate changes we endured thanks to some malfunctioning brakes. We finally got in the air at around 9:45pm, an hour and 40 minutes late. I spent the planeride editing AHATPOLS -- got about halfway done -- before arriving in Austin at about 12:15. By the time we got our bags and I called my roommate for the conference, Alison, who was circling outside, it was 12:45. Alison was nice enough to take Dave to his hotel, then we checked into the Hampton Inn and dashed back into the rain in search of friends.

Ryan had left a message that he and the others were at the Omni, but by the time we got there, they were gone. We did, however, run into Nikolai and Brad while Alison checked for new messages on her cell and tried to reach Ryan. Nikolai did a double-take when he saw me, and it dawned on Brad that we had met before only as Alison and I headed to The Paradise, where Ryan and the others supposedly awaited us. They weren't there, of course, but we stayed there anyway and hung out with the few who were present. The Paradise ended up being "the new Omni" -- the homebase where everybody (in our group, anyway) hung out and drank after any other festivities. (I felt sort of strange calling it the new Omni, since I'd never been to the old Omni, but it was just shorthand, so I went with it.) The bar closed at 2am, and we headed back through the rain to the hotel and crashed.

The next morning we wandered down to the surprisingly good "continental breakfast buffet" for coffee, where I met James. Our sights were set on something a little fancier (and the buffet was closing) so we went down to the lobby and waited for Ryan, Jared, Leonard, Michael (who Alison kept calling Buffy Michaelton) and Shaun and headed to Las Manitas Avenue Cafe for breakfast. Although I was a bit groggy from a combination of travel sleep-loss and the decongestants I was taking to kill off a cold, I still managed to maintain a witty rapport with Ryan and Shaun while we ate our assorted breakfast tacos and migas.

From there, we headed to KICK!, the annual kickball game organized by Anil, in a nearby park. The game had already started and the field was a bit muddy from Friday's rain, so I opted against playing. I caught up with Nikolai out in the outfield for a bit, then wandered over and mingled. I met Jish, a blogger from Richmond VA, whose name and URL I promptly forgot (Rannie says it was Ste from Wanderlost, and he's right) and a few others.

From there we headed to the conference center to register, then downstairs to pick up our "big bags." We sorted through the schwag, tossing about half of it, then headed upstairs for the first panels. I went to one titled "Small Media to the Rescue," which discussed ways independent media and blogs were holding their own against media conglomorates. the highlight was an argument between Cory Doctorow and Jason Calacanis about how blogs can make money, cut short by panelist Rusty Foster, who suggested "pistols at dawn, gentlemen."

I skipped the opening keynote, which was packed anyway, and sat in the hall with a bunch of other people. The section of wall between Room 18 (the big lecture hall) and Room 17b was the default meeting and resting place for the group of people I hungout with. We guarded the electrical outlet where we charged our laptops, we napped, we talked about what to next. Consensus-building was the name of the game down there. I think it was Cameron who likened the process of getting people to move to an invisible thread connecting everyone in the group; the person who's trying to get the group to move is pulling on the thread, and slowly everyone feels the tug.

I headed back to the hotel on my own to regroup a bit ahead of the evening's many parties. First up was the Handshake party hosted by Milkshake Media at the Lucky Lounge. I arrived alone and didn't see anyone I knew, so I had a free beer and wandered around, taking a couple photos, until somebody I recognized came in. (Turned out there were a couple people upstairs that I knew, including Jish, but it was so dark I didn't see them.) We split up and headed for dinner; I went with a group (Ryan, Shaun, Michael, Leonard, Jared, Wes, Jish, Dinah and me) to Spaghetti Warehouse -- hey, it was close and consensus-friendly. Many jokes were born, including "ball gag" and "the fruit basket of Damocles." Three or four other tables claimed to have birthdays, and we joked within earshot of our waitress that it was Jish's birthday -- she offered to sing. We said we were just kidding, but we wouldn't want "happy birthday" anyway. Somebody suggested "Free Bird," and our waitress volunteered, in all seriousness, that Lynyrd Skynyrd was her favorite band.

We then went to the opening night party hosted by Frog Design. On the way I had my sole (non-blogger) celebrity sighting of the trip: Christina Ricci passed us on the street. The Frog party was weird. There was a casino theme -- we were each handed $10,000 in play money when we walked in -- with gambling tables scattered about. The company's offices are in a former bank, so it kind of looked the part, but it was still a bit off. Two DJs were spinning, but one was only audible in the former vault he was spinning in. In another room four people played a shoot-em-up videogame on two big-screen TVs. Beer and wine were free, but the bartender charged Michael $2 for his Coke. A back room -- it must've been the employee breakroom when the space was a bank -- held the line for the two bathrooms. A pair of geisha girls and some people in semi-circus garb wandered the crowd; as we were leaving, they all ended up onstage, so it's possible they were some sort of oddly themed band.

On to Book Punk X at the Longbranch Inn. We got there early, which meant we got seats. I met fellow Chicagoan Claire Zulkey, there to read from her new book, and Ben Brown and Neal Pollack. Claire and Ben read a portion of her book, then Neal introduced the first band -- The Unbearables, who truly lived up to their name. Unfortunately the next band was only marginally better, so we took off and headed for The Paradise, which we closed again.

I got up bright and early (ie 9:30) Sunday morning and headed off to a panel about "city guides" websites. The panel featured Craig of Craig's List, one of the founders of Flavorpill and Sooz from ExploitBoston, with Kevin Smokler moderating. It wasn't a great panel, and the only site that came close to resembling GB was ExploitBoston, which is pretty much just an event calendar. But it sparked some interesting discussion and made me feel even better about what we're doing with GB. After lounging for awhille in the hall, I went to a panel titled "Building Even More Buzz," which was pretty useless -- former Hotwired.com editor June Cohen reminisced about the early days of that site and hawked her book, which is apparently full of common-sense self-promotion and usability concepts. I checked email and surfed the whole time, half-listening to Cohen's spiel.

Afterwards, a group of us headed to Mekong River on 6th street (which was a sort of mix between Bourbon Street in New Orleans and High Street in Columbus -- lots of bars and restaurants that were pretty tame by day, swarming with drunken college students by night) for lunch. The restaurant was playing a strange CD of Vietnamese pop songs sung in English, and whenever there was a lull in conversation we'd be taken aback by the music and its seamless transitions from one song to the next.

Back at the conference, I managed to nab a seat for the keynote by Zack Exley and Eli Pariser from MoveOn.org. They were introduced by Molly Ivins, who was more interesting than either of the MoveOn guys. They each explained how they got involved in the online political action scene, which in both cases boiled down to "I created this meme and everybody loved it and it grew huge and kept going and, well, here I am." I just wanted one of them to own up and say, "Yeah, I founded this organization and took charge." Their message was that we could all take charge, too, but it got a bit lost in their inability to claim ownership over their project.

I skipped the next round of panels, instead preparing GB articles for Monday, but I popped into "Replacing Billboard, Bestseller Lists and Editors with Robots," which featured Paul Bausch, Cameron Marlow and Erik Benson. It was an interesting discussion -- see Erik's presentation here.

I spent the evening with Brenda, first heading to Hotel San Jose, where we hung out on the patio with Molly Steenson, Adam Greenfield, Trevor and a few others. Molly helped spur conversation by asking everyone what was one thing we knew a lot about but no one ever asked us about. Mine was electrocardiography (and later the Faust theme in literature); Brenda's was pin-up girls, while others mentioned such arcane subjects as the rule structures of anarchist communes in Chicago (there was a surprising number of people with a Chicago connection at the table). The party eventually broke up to get food, and Brenda and I had dinner with Mike, Molly's boyfriend(?), at a little diner that turned out not to be so diner-ish, what with the fancy cuisine and the three-piece jazzabillie band and all. From there we took a cab over to the Red Eyed Fly for Fray Cafe. We got there just in time to hear Michael tell an amazing story about scaring off a child molester who had been harrassing him (but who had not yet touched him) -- baseball bats a far more versatile than most people realize. Lance Arthur came on next to tell his story of being a newly minted hottie on a date with a guy magnitudes hotter than him (and the surprises that lay instore in the bedroom) to much applause. Brad followed it up the best he could with a story about picking up a gross of condoms at the HIV clinic (they were for a theatre production). A couple other people read, then Brenda and I headed to the other room and talked for an hour.

We eventually walked with a bunch of other people to The Paradise for a couple more drinks and a few rounds of Boggle. Who knew Boggle was such a good bar game? I won two out of three or four rounds, mostly by luck -- I was the only one who spotted "maid" written straight across the grid, for instance.We closed the bar again, and Cameron, Erik, Alison and I went to Erik's hotel room and talked some more along with Erik's roommate Lia. Around 4am Alison and I stumbled back to our room and went to sleep.

Monday was another early day, despite my growing sleep deficit -- I wanted to catch the back-to-back CSS panels. "Hi-Fi Design with CSS" was pretty interesting and gave me some interesting ideas. The Q&A led to some oddness -- one guy insisted that all the standards-compliant tricks the panel presented were "hacks," and another guy berated the panel for not explaining how to use InDesign (which produces very dirty code, despite Adobe's claims of XML compliance) to create sites and images. He wouldn't take the hint that InDesign wasn't good for what they were talking about, and sternly asked "What version of InDesign are you using?" -- to which Dave Shea responded, "I use Photoshop CS." "CSS: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" gave us a sneak peak at the future of CSS and a few more interestng techniques.

After that it was time for the Bloggies. Nikolai rapped! a song about weblogs and the Bloggies to kick it off -- it was incredible. Boing Boing won three awards, for which Cory delivered actual written speeches. Rusty went up instead of Matt to collect the Best Group Weblog award for MetaFilter, which got surprisingly few laughs. Nikolai had another trick up his sleave -- a very witty video about weblogs parodying Van Halen's "Right Now" music video. It was pretty great.

Afterwards, I got Cory's new book signed for Dave, as requested, and when I wandered out of the tradeshow floor and couldn't find anyone, so I headed outside to find lunch. Lucky me, I ran into Alison (who had slept in), who invited me to lunch with her and a group including Anil, Min Jung, Kathryn, Colin, Jason, Lia and various other people for fish tacos. Alison, Anil, Jason, Shannon and I squeezed into a cab, and Min Jung gave Alsion, Kathryn, Colin and a woman whose name I never caughtJane a ride back in her tiny rental car. The woman whose name I never caughtJane lay across our lap in back (immortalized here). In between, I had some amazing fish tacos. Yummmm.

Back at the conference center, I decided to go to the panel on the "aesthetics of social networks." I have to admit, I didn't enjoy it, but others seemed to, so maybe it was just me. Next was "Neal Pollack Explains It All to You," "moderated" by Ben Brown. It was sparsely attended, and only about a half-dozen people (including me) actually laughed. Sucks for Neal.

After some waffling over whether to go to dinner first or head straight to 20x2, we split up, and after a brief visit to the hotels Cameron, Erik, Rusty, Michael and I headed to La Zona Rosa for the show. Which was great. I ended up winning a laptop buddha for coming up with the worst URL: nakednader.com. I beat Rusty's RateMyCyst.com, which I would have voted for if it were up to me, but oh well.

Instead of heading to the various parties all scheduled at the same time (including one for Blogger where they were giving away t-shirts), we headed to The Boiling Pot for cajun seafood. Michael told us about the various challenges on Stink Factor, which prompted Cameron to eat a big chunk of butter.

After demolishing the pile of boiled shrimp, crab and crawfish, we adjurned to The Paradise, where a lively discussion of technology ensued. And this, for me, was what was so great about SXSW: here I was, sitting with the creators of some the most popular sites and services in the blogosphere -- All-Consuming, Blogdex, Kuro5hin -- and I was fully an equal. (I got all excited and mentioned this to the guys and kind of embarrassed them; they didn't feel they were so special, so I sounded briefly like a fanboy. Fortunately I regained my composure and they all relaxed.)

People slowly joined us from the various parties, and we of course closed the Paradise again. However, the manager bought all 20-or-so of us a round of shots for hanging out the whole weekend, virtually ensuring that we'll all be back next year. Michael went to bed, and Cam, Rusty, Leonard, Ryan, Shaun, Jared, Erik, Alison and I headed back to the Hampton. The party continued in Ryan, Shaun, Jared and Leonard's room, but around 4 in the morning we all headed to the pool, which was on our floor, to catch some people from the film conference skinny-dipping. The naked people were gone, but Erik said he'd pay $10 to anyone who jumped in the (heated) pool. Alison jumped right in, followed by Shaun and Ryan and eventually Jared and Leonard. Cameron and Rusty ran the treadmills in the workout room, and Erik and I took lots of pictures. Erik later joined Cam on the treadmills for awhile, then slipped away without paying anyone. We all headed indoors around 4:30, and Alison and I talked for another hour before falling asleep.

Amazingly, we managed to get up at about 9:30 the next morning, and I lounged around in the hallway until Bruce Sterling's stream-of-consciousness ramble, after which a group of us went to Jazz for lunch. Lisa, Shaun, Ryan, Alison and I went to Tesoros to pick up some interesting goodies and to kill some time.

Alison gave Jared and I a ride to the airport at around 3, where I overheard that shocking conversation.

I think that brings us up to date. More later; I'm going to bed.

Posted by Andrew Huff at March 25, 2004 12:24 AM