Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog

I had the pleasure of getting to know some of the awesome guys from Freshbooks at Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Miami.   We chatted over drinks and they told me about how they planned on taking South By Southwest (SXSW) by storm and they sure did.

Saul Colt, one of the guys on their marketing team, wrote up a great post on what Freshbooks did to get their name out at SXSW.   It’s fantastic and will serve as a guide for me for next year.

So Twitter was a big success at SXSW for bringing people together.  As was laid out by Jeremiah Owyang, it was used to revolt against the Zuckerberg/Lacey interview, improve panels, and to find/start parties.

But what empowered Twitter to be so helpful? Most of it’s users were in the same geographic area.

I have Twitter friends from all over the country… all over the world.  There are times when I want to be able to see what everyone in my “global neighborhood” is doing.  That is fine.

There are other times when I want to go grab a beer and I’m curious what everyone else is up to.   What my friends in Boulder, Colorado are doing doesn’t help me find beer drinking company here in Washington DC.

It’d be cool if there was a mobile app that would append my geo-location or maybe just my zipcode on to the end of all my and my friends’ Twitter messages.

In addition to saying I always want to get SMS messages from certain twitter users, I could get SMS messages when tweets happen in my same geographic location.  Seems like this would be useful.

This make sense?

It seems like this year the DC tech community was at South by Southwest (SXSW) in force.

As I mentioned before, when I got into town on Saturday after just walking the conference halls for 5 minutes, I ran into sooooo many DC people.

Other folks were noticing the massive Washington DC presence.   I’d meet people and mention that I was from DC.  They’d say “DANG, I’ve run into a ton of DC people here.”

The lyric from the Bob Dylan song “Ballad of a Thin Man” is so appropriate.

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Something is happening here in Washington DC.

Well I have to say that among the conferences i’ve been to this has by far been one of the best.  South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive is AWESOME!

Among the conferences that folks go to,  it seems like most go here.  The first hour I was here I walked the halls and ran into so many friends of mine.  It’s great!  The Web community is so much fun.

Man and the Web community knows how to party.  There were lots of parties, like 5 or 6 a night.  It was a great chance to meet people I didn’t know.  Probably some of the best parties were the adhoc ones.

Next year I definitely want to do more.  I think any company could get a lot of mileage out of having a presence at this event.  You can gain a lot of awareness pretty quickly.

Seems like every year there is a company or app that gains a lot of attention which everyone is excited, last year it was Twitter… I’d posit that this year it’s Gary Vaynerchuk and Wine Library TV.   I went to a panel and 3 out of the 5 members were wearing Wine Library TV wristbands.  He also threw an adhoc wine party that everyone was talking about and made some news.

Well… I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts to share later.

Did you go to SXSW?  What was the highlight for you?

I’m finally at SXSW! Praise the Lord!  It took so long to get here but it sounds like I’m not the only one who had travel horror stories.

I’ve only been here for a few hours and it’s so wild.  I’ve seen SOOOOOOOO many people I know.  Everyone is here.  It’s crazy.  Like everywhich way I see people I recognize.  It’s out of control.

Right now I’m sitting in a panel on hacking your body with Gary and AJ Vaynerchuk.  The panel is pretty cool.  It’s about trying new and interesting things to stay healthy.  Lots of tips I could use.

I wanna meet up with everyone.  Where is dinner tonight?  Who’s going to what party?

This morning at 6am I was supposed to be on my way to Austin, TX for South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive with a connecting flight in Dallas.

Apparently, Dallas was crazy yesterday and got snow!  My flight was cancelled.  What the heck!  Isn’t Texas supposed to be crazy warm?!?  Where’s this global warming stuff when you need it?

Well all of the airlines’ flights getting into Dallas and Austin are all messed up.  They can’t get me out of DC and out there till 6am tomorrow.

All of you who made it to Austin, have fun!  See you tomorrow (unless my travel agent can do a miracle.)

So this will be my first year attending the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas and it’s already promising to be a really special event.

The Library of Congress blog, which I helped get going, is a finalist for the blog category of the SXSW Web Awards.  AWESOME!!!!!

The fun doesn’t stop there.  My friend and renowned designer Samantha Warren is also a finalist in the blog category of the SXSW Web Awards for her blog Bad Ass Ideas.

But wait, there’s more. Ficlets, the collaborative story telling Web app written by my friends Kevin, Jason and Cindy, is a finalist for SXSW Web awards in the CSS and Community categories.

The winners will be announced the evening of Sunday March 9th.  Whomever wins, the first celebratory pitcher of beer will be on me.

I’m really excited because this upcoming March (in 200 will be the first time I go to the South by Southwest Interactive conference (SXSW). :-)  I just noticed that they announced a preliminary list of some of the panels that were selected.  Some of the panels that look interesting are:

• Building Portable Social Networks (Jeremy Keith)
• The Elephant Online: Digitally Expanding Information Memory (Joshua Schachter)
• Scalability Boot Camp (Jakobj Heuser)
• Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing (Brian Oberkirch)

Are you going to SXSW?  If so, what panels are you excited about seeing?

(Thanks to Brian for pointing out the programming announcement)

2008 will be the year that I go to my first South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference. I’m not really sure why I haven’t gone yet but I know I’m not missing this one.

I was taking a stroll through the panel picker application, where you can vote one which panels ideas (there are 688 of them… WOW!) you think look interesting and that you’d want to attend. I quickly started to see the names of people I recognized as well as my friends.

These are some of the panels ideas that stood out for me (NOTE: I voted for many more than this)…

• Know Your Users: People Who Like AJAX, Also Like Beer - By Sarah Culberson, eBay
• Browsing Without Boundaries: The Rise of the Ubiquitous Web - By Hakon Wium Lie, Opera
• I-TV: The Revolution That’s Changing What People Watch - By Jim Louderback, Revision3
• High Performance Web Sites - By Steve Souders, Yahoo!
• Why Do We Need Libraries Anyway? - By Danielle Cunniff Plumer, Texas State Library and Archives Commission
• Building Portable Social Networks - By Jeremy Keith, Adactio
• Blind Bloggers, Deaf Designers: Just Doing It - By Shawn Henry, W3C

What panels look good to you? Which ones would you be excited about? What ones do you think I should vote for?