SXSW

Written on March 21, 2009 by george

Thanks to a lucky draw at dConstruct last year I bagged two free tickets to this years SXSW. I decided to invite Jim along for no other reason that he was likely to be the closest to the event. I’d never been to Texas before and despite hearing many bad reports, word was Austin really wasn’t quite as bad.

And what a surprise it was – a laid back city with fairly liberal attitudes. Once I got over the English-American language barrier (swap line for queue, register for till and give me for can I have) things seemed to go well. The line up of talks was amazing – Gary Vaynerchuk was awesome although sadly I only caught the last 20 minutes (good video of him here at FOWA), Brian Brushwood did an excellent talk based on his scam school series, James Powderly gave a fascinating talk of his grafitti art and getting detained in China, and there was an extremely useful panel on how to give good presentations. That’s one of the parts I enjoyed the most – the sheer diversity of talks. In addition there were more informal talks where the presenter started off for 10 minutes before opening up to the room – going freelance and becoming productive were two of my favourites in this format. Of course due to the sheer volume of talks many good ones were missed – Larry Lessig seems the prime candidate here. They’re going to make all the talks available for download so I’m looking forward to catching what I missed.

The talks are only half of Southby though. The night life is great and there’s loads of parties with free drink and beer flowing. These seemed quite hit and miss with the Digg party being awful and the queue to get a signature from Kevin Rose a really quite distressing sight. But for every flop there were some good ones that provided entertainment as wide ranging as Burlesque and live photoshop drawing.

I met plenty of new interesting people, and bumped into quite a few from England although I know of least two out there who I didn’t bump into all week. Other highlights included the weather, free wifi everywhere, a film called Burma VJ we randomly caught and England destroy France in the Rugby. More random things included drive through banks and a gig featuring a hip-hop group I strangely enjoyed. And the downers? Well I can’t finish without digging just how awful the all american diet is (suprisingly I didn’t want my meal in a sea of melted cheese but gee thanks). Overall though a great experience and well worth it if you’ve never made the trip.

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