SXSWi 2006
Three weeks after the event, I must be the last person to write aboutSXSWi 2006. As I gained so much from the experience I thought I must share a few words however late.
Early this year I was talking to a director of a large UK publishing group and he passed the comment that it must be nice to work in an industry where people share knowledge. Events like SXSWi are why I answered simply, yes it is. The conference had a real sense of community where people shared beers ideas. Over the last few years I have fostered a growing scepticism about large industry conferences, but SXSWi provides a unique environment in which to learn and meet people.
Out of the vast number of talks and panel discussions, Rashmi Sinha’s contribution to the “Tagging 2.0” panel (good notes) has stuck in my mind. Her concise deconstruction of the differences between tagging and categorization has really added to my understanding. Rashmi carried on to talk about why tagging is so much easier than categorization for users. It was a shame she only had 10 minutes.
To me SXSWi 2006 seems to have a number of unscripted themes. The tagging discussion became part of a much wider theme centred on social network /> architectures and collective intelligence. The centre piece being James Surowiecki talk on “The Wisdom of Crowds”. James Surowiecki has put together a fascinating argument about the power of collective intelligence which goes to the heart of why so many social networks on the internet work well. If you have not read the book I would recommend the podcast of his SXSWi talk.
One of the other strands of discussion was bootstrapping and building web applications. Jason Fried (37 Signals) talked about using the skills, passion and creativity of our industry to build new types of businesses. He terms the phrase “the how of entrepreneurship” as a description of his talk. It’s fascinating to see how entrepreneurship is being embrace by designers and developers. There where many evangelising the “bootstrapping business model” of starting small, keep it simple and don’t use venture capital. Although listening to the subtext of a few speakers, you should add the last step “sell everything to Yahoo or Google and retire”!
Tantek Celik talked about BarCamps which was a nice tonic to the entrepreneurship of Jason Fried. To those who do not know what a BarCamp is; I love the Wikipedia definition: “BarCamp was created as an open, welcoming, once-a-year event for geeks to camp out for a couple days with wifi and smash their brains together.” The summer of love all over again, but with keyboards!
I hung out with the infamous Britpack. Travelling to Texas to meet people who only live a hundred miles away is a bit strange, but fun. There was also a sizable contingent from Brighton with both Andy and Jeremy giving talks. Unfortunately I missed Andy’s superheroes talk, but I did see Jeremy’s “How to bluff your way in DOM Scripting”. Jeremy’s talk which had an air of an amateur dramatics production, not because anything Jeremy said, but the old armchairs and props that had been placed on the stage.
I am already saving for next year.
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