So I felt obligated to share my experience of the past week at the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, TX. For those not aware, this festival was first established as a music festival but has, over the past years, converted to a full on media festival. And since I fall into the ‘geek’ category of those types the interactive part of the festival was right up my alley.
Last year was the first year I went to it, feeling a bit outside of my comfort zone since this conference consists of mainly design/developers, and since I don’t fall directly into either category I felt like an outsider. Nevertheless, it was a good experience and I learned a lot!
Now as far as this years festival is concerned, I was going to do a panel-by-panel breakdown but it seems as others are doing a good job of that already so no need to recreate the wheel. I will say I felt like the conference was just as good as last year but not many new topics were discussed and felt like the business side of the web wasn’t touched enough. Also, one of the things I really want to see, and I’m considering doing the panel myself next year, is doing a session on business-to-business web apps instead of consumer-facing. Almost everyone on the panels were running successful consumer-facing sites but let’s talk a bit about the business/enterprise world, eh?!
So what I’d like to discuss about the conference is for next year. If you are planning on attending next year, here a five things you might want to consider preparing for before getting on the plane to Austin:
1) If you don’t know anybody, bring a friend. At the last minutes, our Rails programmer Mark Mcspadden decided to join me on the trip and it made the whole trip much better. Especially those long road trips. Having someone, especially in the industry, you can discuss ideas with and continue the panel discussions outside of the sessions was great. Thanks for going Mark!
2) Bring a decent camera! It has been two years in a row that my pictures have come out as crap b/c I was using too basic of a camera. I missed a lot of good shots b/c of my ‘point and click’ camera couldn’t handle the environment and everything would come out blurry. BLEH!
3) Be social. This year I really wanted to get out of my shell and meet people that I’ve been talking to through the blogosphere for a while now. So I was happy that I got to meet people like George Oates, Jeremy Powazek, Brian Oberkirch, Ryan Carson, Bryan Veloso, Brian Warren, and others.
4) Bring plenty o’ business cards. I ran of out freakin’ business cards because I didn’t pack enough to begin with…DUH! Side point: And remember your hanging out with designers, so make sure your business cards look cool. 
5) Resign yourself that you can’t do it all. It’s not a physical endurance thing, it’s a impossibility thing. There are just two many panels/parties/functions going on all day and night that you want to attend and won’t be able. So go into it with your top few ‘must-do’s’ picked out and then just wing it once you get there. It is supposed to be the geek’s spring break after all!
Technorati Tags: SXSW, 2007, sxsw interactive, mark mcspadden, george oates, jeremy powazek, brian oberkirch, ryan carson, bryan veloso, brian warren, brad garland
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