Over the next week or so I’ll be working my way through notes from the panels and such I attended. Suffice it to say SXSW 2007 was a fantastic experience – lots of good panels, lots of good food, lots of good parties and lots of good people.
I flew into Austin Friday night, but got in too late for picking up a badge, and too late for the New England Dinner – maybe next year.
So, I’ll call Saturday Day One.
Started out the morning at a panel on Emerging Social Trends.
Moderator: Laura Moorhead Sr Editor Culture, Wired
Laura Moorhead Sr Editor Culture, Wired
Andrew Blum Contributing Editor, Wired
Robert Fabricant Exec Creative Dir, Frog Design
Eliot Van Buskirk Columnist/Blogger, Wired News
Peter Rojas Engadget
Daniel Raffel Product Mgr, Yahoo!
You can also get the podcast of (I believe) the whole session.
All in all, it was an interesting panel but I was left wishing the panel had more time to go into some of the specific topics they mentioned – having five panelists plus a moderator in a one hour session just leaves too little time for any one in particular to develop much of a thought, or present any specific arguments about what they are seeing.
I would have loved to have had more of a discussion around the topic of open hardware, and end-user hacking of hardware for unintended uses. I would also have loved to have talked more about the developing infrastructure outside the US in places where leapfrogging is happening and folks are getting access via cellphones because they’re aren’t enough landlines.
Finally, I wish the panel had spent some time on what seemed to me the most obvious, dominant trend of the conference – twitter. Fabricant, from FrogDesign, joked about it at the beginning of the panel, but it was clearly the dominant mode of backchannel conversation at SXSW this year. Maybe that makes it too much of a current trend rather than an emergent one?
Favorite moments of the panel (these are really loose notes – not precise – more like liveblogging, but the wifi was too crappy to actual liveblog – feel free to correct me in the comments):
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