SXSW 2007 Program Proposals

There’s 173 programs proposed for SXSW Interactive, March 9-13 2007. Go vote for the ones you most want to see at Lindsey Simon’s super cool picker. Round one voting is going now. (Also note the really good use of semantic markup in the HTML download version (which I’m embarrassed to have sullied a bit in this representation).)

  • Podcasting - What’s it going to Take to Mainstream the Technology?
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · web audio / web video
    Over the past twelve months, podcasting has exploded among tech savvy individuals and organizations However, what’s it going to take for podcasting to evolve from its current state as a delivery system for specialized, longtail content to a widely-adopted media distribution system for mainstream users? This panel will focus on the different business models and mobile technologies that are allowing podcasting to be pushed farther into mainstream adoption

     

  • Designing for Convergent Devices
    wireless / digital convergence · usability / accessibility
    How do you provide a consistent user experience across various devices (web, TV, handhelds, cell phones) that reinforces the concept of convergent services? A panel of design experts discuss the goals and benefits of creating a consistent user experience, and examine the challenges that lie in presenting those services across mediums.

     

  • Alternate Reality Games: Friend or Foe?
    branding / marketing · gaming / virtual worlds
    All the cool marketing kids want one. Those in the know want their clients to sign off on one. Those who’ve done it once want to do the next one. Alternate Reality Games motivate people to spend hours solving their mysteries. Do they reach people in a bold new way, or do they narrow down to only a loyal few? Do they work as a marketing tool? Discussion. Debate. Resolution?

     

  • Build a Better Food Blogger
    blogging · content
    The ethics of reviews, freebies and reservations are muddled indeed. How can you make sure your site isn’t tainted by the advertisers, the food you’re reviewing and the wine sent for free. How can you take surreptitious photographs in a restaurant? How can you keep a balanced point of view?

     

  • Sports Content: Team Success vs. Web Success and Can They Co-exist?
    content · miscellaneous
    With content becoming more and more important on the web, how do sports leagues and teams walk the fine line of protecting the information they share vs. providing unique and behind-the-scenes information to create passionate users. Listen as representatives from the NFL, NHL, NBA and NASCAR discuss the rules/practices they adhere to within their sport and within their own walls. While the session will be covering sports, the conclusions of this panel will apply to all kinds of proprietary online content.

     

  • Introduction to Web Kaizen
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · miscellaneous
    An introduction to the philosophies and principles of Web Kaizen: a structured way of looking at web standards that involves all of management, developers and marketing in the aspects of web production, and aims to turn web production into a gradual, constantly improving process with a people and process-oriented focus.

     

  • The Digital Ethnorati
    branding / marketing · politics / social activism
    Polls have shown that the fastest growing segments of new media adopters (mobile, internet, computers) in the United States are Asian, Latino and African Americans. Liza Sabater has identified these wired minorities as the “Digital Ethnorati” and in this panel we will explore how members of the new majority are changing the rules of political engagement with the net.

     

  • Spam of all Kinds: Dealing with Online Abuse
    education / sociological · how to
    Spam, spim, spit, comment spam, referrer spam, splogs, software exploits, viruses, worms, phishing, dictionary attacks, cross-site scripting, social engineering: does everything new we do online have its own categories of abuse we have to protect ourselves and our users against? Can anything be done to stop it, or at least to defend ourselves against it? Listen to the experts as they discuss the solutions, for better or for worse.

     

  • You May Already Have Won!
    content · miscellaneous
    Online sweepstakes are the French fries to the internet’s seagulls. They’ll increase traffic, bring visitors back and allow you to collect lots of user information. At first. How can you make sure your site sweepstakes is legal, accurate and won’t break the server? What’s the best language? How can you check for nefarious attacks and sneaks? The focus of this session is food, but the lessons we will talk abotu apply to all kinds of web content.

     

  • The Global Microbrand: Are Blogs, Suits and Wine the New Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll?
    blogging · branding / marketing
    Blogger Hugh MacLeod has espoused the notion of “The Global Microbrand” or a small, tiny brand that sells globally. The Global Microbrand is nothing new but with the advent of the Internet and blogging it’s much easier for merchents and even consultants to reach a global audience. For many, blogging is an avenue to creating apersonal Global Microbrand and getting off of the corporate hamster wheel. This panel will focus on the two most well known stories — English Cut and Stormhoek — showing how blogging has changed the rules and allowed small players to break out and play to a global audience.

     

  • Ajax Building Blocks - Frameworks and Toolkits
    hacks / programming · how to
    In the past year it has become easier to develop Ajax based web pages thanks to the release of several toolkits and frameworks. But how do you know which one to pick for your projects? Which one will offer the most flexibility and will be the easiest to learn? This panel will offer an overview of the major toolkits and hopefully help you decide which one is right for you.

     

  • This Bridge Called My Blog: Across Cultures, Countries, Languages
    blogging · politics / social activism
    What are the issues when you blog across languages, cultures, and countries? Let’s talk about models and examples of transcultural blogging. What’s worked as a way to build bridges, to be hosts and guests, tourists and guides, educators, students, and friends? The flip side shows us invasions, cultural appropriation and exploitation. Bloggers from Latin America and elsewhere talk about translation, automatic translators, and bilingual blogging, marketing, ads, and tagging.

     

  • The Internet: Worst Invention Ever
    education / sociological · social networks
    This panel discusses the incredible commercial and social potential of the Internet, and how those capabilities have been cast aside in favor of a time-sucking, productivity-sapping isolation engine that continually saps away some of the brightest minds from human interaction and relegates them to inhabitors of their second-life alteregos. Society used to work together to identify, occasionally ostracize, but eventually elevate the brightest minds among us. Now they’ll never leave the basement. Panelists include members of the gaming, political, dating, and educational communities, as well as a sociological historian.

     

  • Social Networking in Real Life vs Cyberspace
    education / sociological · social networks
    As president of the Austin IBM New Hire Network (a club of about 450 people created to improve employee satisfaction and retention), I am interested in the comparison of social networking in the real world to online social networking. What types of relationships are formed in each venue? The most interesting speakers for this panel would be a combination of people who run online and real world social networks.

     

  • Scaling Your Community
    community · how to
    You’ve got the servers, the money, the legal junk worked out — now how do you scale your community? How do you address ever-expanding needs without becoming bloated, expand your audience without alienating early adopters? Stay cool/indy while going mainstream? Maintain your vision or let the community guide you?

     

  • Outside is the New Inside
    community · content
    As mass media splinters, audiences gyrate into new, smaller flocks. Often, fringe players — junior staffers, anonymous scribes, homemakers — become the new hubs for these communities. Will these outsiders be coopted by incumbents, or will they retain the radical perspectives that make them popular?

     

  • DITA-XML Based Documentation: Planning, Deploying, and Standardizing
    how to · CSS / standards
    DITA is an XML-based architecture for authoring topic-based technical documentation. Using DITA, you can create reusable information and specialize the markup to apply to unique information types. Our organization within IBM has been using DITA for about two years, and this panel would discuss the issues faced by a large organization deploying DITA, such as preparing for deployment, migrating from legacy formats, and standardizing DITA for content development.

     

  • Net Politics: The Internet Can Make You President
    community · politics / social activism
    This panel will consist of Internet directors of ‘08 Presidential Primary campaigns, which will be in full swing by the time SXSW2007 rolls around. We’ll pick two of the most interesting from both the Republican and the Democratixc fields. The session itself will focus on what kinds of strategies, tools, technologies and trends campaign are using to get out their message, raise money, organize ground troops and Iowa and New Hampshire, and get out the vote across the country on Super Tuesday.

     

  • Portals & Standards: The End of Intolerance
    hacks / programming · how to
    Previously, the most widespread portal was a gruesome mess of unnecessary HTML, IE-only behavior and modification techniques which were confusing at best. With careful tweaks and informed planning, it’s now possible for a Microsoft SharePoint-powered site to benefit from semantic markup and work properly in every modern browser. Here’s how to expand your options - and probably your client base - without feeling dirty.

     

  • How Tech Dweebs Are Preventing the Next Enron
    education / sociological · politics / social activism
    Greed ran amok. What brought it down? Accounting weenies and network admin geeks. The demise of Enron begat Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, and in the age of SOX, the techie is the new Elliott Ness. Starting in 2007, *every* publicly traded company must comply with certain standards of control. This session explains the art of control and what every cluetrain disciple needs to know about doing business with Corporate America.

     

  • The Great Web 2.0 Hoax
    content · web 2.0
    Is “Web 2.0” a legitimate new paradigm, or a wave of hype?

     

  • To Flash or Not To Flash
    hacks / programming · web design / graphics
    The debate has raged on for years. Do we leverage the rich media capabilities of the Adobe Flash Player, or do we stick to web standards in the interest of accessibility, search-ability, and browser-friendliness? This session brings together some of the industry’s leading advocates for both sides of the debate in an attempt to reach an agreement once and for all. Come see for yourself. Is there a right answer?

     

  • Can We Talk? Community Storytelling & the Web
    community · content
    It only seems like the Internet has something to do with computers. Online tools are ideal attention allocators, knitting people from everywhere together with stories that matter. Whether we’re talking hurricanes or burritos, adoption or Net Neutrality, social media tools are powering intense, far-flung communities. We’ll look at the impact of and insights gained from our experiences in building online communities through captivating stories.

     

  • Accessified! Practical Accessibility Fixes Any Web Developer Can Use
    web design / graphics · usability / accessibility
    There is a lot of confusion surrounding WCAG 2.0 and few developers have read or want to read the guidelines. But accessibility is, at its core, eminently achievable. This session will look at real-world accessibility problems and show how they can be fixed using tools and add-ons that are freely available. Less talk about stuffy documentation and specific checkpoints, more hands-on action to solve the underlying problems

     

  • Better than 1,000 Words - Video on the Web
    content · web audio / web video
    If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is online video worth? Ten thousand words? A million words? Adding video to your web site can convey much more than static pictures and truly engage your site visitors. This panel will cover how and why to move video content online including discussion of various video formats and digital rights management.

     

  • The Design Economy — Online
    DIY / creativity · web design / graphics
    Increasingly, everyday it seems, there is a shift to a place that we have all come to know as online. In this panel we will discuss Concept and the importance it has on the end design. Does lack of concept, or do watered down concepts create stale creative/design? Is the lack of concept or the virtue of stale design have anything to do with over saturation? . . . or is saturation the reason for some of the best campaigns we see today?

     

  • Your Customers are Screaming: Are You Listening?
    branding / marketing · social networks
    With each download, shared file, profile update, blog entry, comment, and interaction, users are expressing their preferences. How can marketers use social networking sites to learn more about their customers and their brands perception.

     

  • Space, the New Frontier
    miscellaneous · wireless / digital convergence
    The Internet provides a form of communication that transcends nations and places, forming a territory-less knowledge space. Yet the proliferation of mobile devices and locative technologies heralds a return of place-based communication. Is place-based digital media providing a stronger connection to physical and social space or is it part of a deepening riff between people and the physical world? Speakers will be leading location-based thinkers from the tourism, education, gaming and film fields along with a startling skeptic.

     

  • Being Green in 2007
    miscellaneous · politics / social activism
    Will a web-based “movement as network” or a Viridian Design Movement transform the environmental movement?

     

  • What’s Next for Podcasting
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · web audio / web video
    Podcasting and videocasting have developed at a lighting fast pace. So now that people are starting to get podcasting and RSS what’s next? How will radio really respond to the competitive challenge of the emerging podcast industry? What new podcast ready devices and services will emerge? This panel will discuss issues facing radio and podcasting as the podcasting industry begins to mature.

     

  • After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration
    DIY / creativity · web design / graphics
    You’ve received the creative brief; now what? Learn how to draw creative inspiration for your web design projects from a number of likely and unlikely sources. Using examples from our heros? work as well as our own, we?ll demonstrate how successful projects have benefitted from the use of all five senses, a keen understanding of history, and a little luck.

     

  • Unleashing CSS: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Internet Explorer 7
    browsers / web apps · CSS / standards
    With the advent of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7, web designers can use more advanced CSS design techniques to a larger audience than ever before. In this panel, attendees will learn about CSS techniques that impossible to do under previous browsers to ride the next wave of web page designs for modern browsers.

     

  • Deadlines, Clients, and Cashflow: The Business Side of Web Design
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · work / career
    There’s a lot more to running a web design business than HTML and Photoshop! In this panel, representatives from industry-leading firms will be discussing wide-ranging issues affecting web professionals, including managing projects, dealing with clients, marketing your services, finding work, writing contracts, improving efficiency, and organizing your finances.

     

  • Little Big Blog & the Accidental Entrepreneur
    blogging · business / funding / entrepreneurial
    Business that were built with nothing but a blog, how they found success, what they failed at, and what they’ve learned.

     

  • Why Simplicity Always Wins (Eventually)
    web design / graphics · usability / accessibility
    Simplicity is becoming the most important quality for a winning web service. From Google search to PBWiki, the easier it is to use a web service, the faster it will win the hearts of users. However, few companies make simplicity their top priority, because of old habits, organizational politics, or misunderstanding of market opportunities. What is simplicity? And why does it matter, especially today? How can you make simplicity a priority in your company? Our session will address these and other questions.

     

  • Premium Communities
    community · content
    Is the concept of community contradictory to paid content? Or can the creation of paid membership communities create more stimulating dialogs amongst these self-selecting participants? Using the high profile “bet” of Times Select as a jumping off point, this panel will explore the conversations between the Times and its readers, and amongst its subscribers.

     

  • Open Science 2.0 — Results, Discussion, Collaboration
    community · user generated / open source
    Scientific progress and its oversight by society depends on sharing information. Several initiatives are promoting free access to current knowledge, the latest scientific results, tools, reagents, commentary, and critique. Their success depends on building a heterogeneous community of individuals with interest, expertise, and/or common sense who can access the information AND contribute to it. The panel will discuss ideas and ongoing efforts to integrate the various initiatives.

     

  • I Am A Dorkbot
    DIY / creativity · community
    Dorkbot, a geek talent show for people doing strange things with electricity, gives a soapbox to artists, designers and engineers pushing technology in new, beautiful, and sometimes dangerous ways. With 50 international chapters, including Austin, dorkbot is the first public airing of many innovative technology projects. This panel features dorkbot participants and project demonstrations to show how they feed into commercial applications, MAKE magazine, and MAKEfair.

     

  • Web 2.0 to Web 3D
    gaming / virtual worlds · web 2.0
    Is Neal Stephenson’s “metaverse” here, and is it the Net’s next generation — or just a glorified game? Once gamer-only turf, 3D virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft are now attracting millions of players– and millions of dollars from corporations, academia/non-profits, and government agencies, interested in the marketing, research, and prototyping possibilities. Is this the future of the Internet, and if so, where do we go from here?

     

  • Searching for Simplicity
    usability / accessibility
    Why is getting to SIMPLE so hard? Companies are so busy adding features to their already-cluttered interfaces, they forget their audiences altogether. Products and services must be simple, well written, and really darned easy to use. Learn from the masters of simplicity–Google, Technorati, and Apple–the behind-the-scenes battle to get simple and create interfaces that merge with the way we actually live.

     

  • The Future of Universities in a Digitally Convergent World
    education / sociological · social networks
    Focusing on new ideas or methods universities can use web technology to act as a catalyst for change or bring people together from divergent fields. From an interactive network of blogs for researchers and professors to open source alternatives for classroom management, this panel looks at the future of online learning and collaboration at higher education environments.

     

  • When Does User-Generated Video Become Independent Filmmaking?
    user generated / open source · web audio / web video
    What’s the difference between a video blog entry and a 4-minute short film? What are the standards/criteria and who decides when they’ve been met?

     

  • Catching Up to Search Engine Optimization
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · web design / graphics
    Your position in various search engine rankings is easy to worry about but hard to change. If your business is just beginning to think about how to optimize your site for the best rankings in search engines, here are some practical tips on how to make an impact.

     

  • Connecting Social Networks Together
    community · social networks
    This panel will demonstrate and discuss the various open standards and techniques utilize to inter-connect social networks together Representatives of both large and small social networks will discuss their networks policies and support of this notion. Authentication, IMPORT/EXPORT and a wide range of “inter-connect” verbs will be shown - including create a friend, create or join a group, send a message or post content

     

  • Pimp My Legos: Teaching Kids to Program
    education / sociological · hacks / programming
    Children famously pick up consumer technology faster than grownups, but what about real programming? Geek parents and educators discuss and demo the best platforms for fostering skillz in kidz, from LOGO turtle programming to Lego Mindstorms, from BASIC to HTML, Flash, Perl and Ruby.

     

  • Turning Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses
    DIY / creativity · business / funding / entrepreneurial
    Whether your intent is to start a new business or simply make some money from existing projects, generating revenue from online services is rarely straightforward. Making money from your sites usually requires creativity, passionate understanding, and lots of trial and error. Whether your goal is to cover expenses of a side project, quit your day job or to cash-out and retire early, this panel will explore real-world success stories of making website into web companies.

     

  • Shun VC!
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · work / career
    Contrary to what venture capitalists tell you, their investments reduce a company’s odds of survival. Sure your reward is potentially magnified, but your company is more likely to get killed by distracted management, aggressive burn, and rushing an embryonic idea to hugeness.

     

  • Blog Novels: The Impact of Fiction
    DIY / creativity · blogging
    Technology and markets are converging to support the blognovel/blognovela, and the net, given the right tools, could be poised to disrupt big publishing houses. What are book publishers not getting about blogs? What did your fiction blog-personas allow you to say that you couldn’t say as yourself? How are “character blogs” are being used by corporations as a marketing tool. In blogging, does art trump truth?

     

  • Web Vector Graphics: Myth or Reality
    browsers / web apps · web design / graphics
    The ability to draw within the browser, without a plugin, has been a significant shortcoming of web development for many years, until now. What’s possible now, and what challenges are there with implementing vector graphics in the browser.

     

  • Mobile Entertainment: Rockin’ Your Phone
    branding / marketing · wireless / digital convergence
    Unlike other media types, the mobile phone, always on and always available provides the music world the opportunity to establish the long sought after one-to-one dialogue with the consumer. This session will explore the basics of mobile marketing and how to integrate this hot new channel into your marketing initiatives - focus on entertainment, fun and personalization. Attend this session to learn what’s hot and what’s not.

     

  • How we Got the Big Money at the Bottom of the Pyramid
    DIY / creativity · business / funding / entrepreneurial
    G|META is a group of internationally collaborating entrepreneurs who focus on building web application modules, through a single, socially networked, community portal which serves the real needs of the ’so-called non-profit? community. We believe that by cost-effectively lifting up those who can’t help themselves the “digitally-rich” can help the digitally-poor? excel. This panel is an exploration of our story, the story of our clients and the web-based products we produce.

     

  • Accessibility Super Heroes
    web 2.0 · usability / accessibility
    Today accessibility is as much a part of a solid web strategy as usability, design and programming. Each role on a web team should pay careful attention to accessibility and understand when and where accessibility issues may arise. Who are the accessibility super heroes, how did they learn their craft and what do they recommend you know in this new Web 2.0 world. From learning basic accessibility techniques to participation in the W3C this session will help you become a accessibility super heroe.

     

  • Tag, You’re It
    social networks · web 2.0
    Services such as Delicious, Flickr, and others allow users to tag various kinds of content. Some people use the tags for personal information management — making things easier to find — and others use tag to discover certain kinds of content — such as pictures of puppies. But are people tagging the content with that use in mind? For use by others? Or just for personal use. This panel will consider trends in tagging, as well as the _possible_ social value it can bring. (This panel will not look at how cool and important folksonomies are; it will look at how people actually behave inside them.)

     

  • Passionate Web Entrepreneurship
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · content
    A look at the trials and tribulations of running a niche content-based website and the never-ending pursuit of “success”. We’ll examine the time it takes to design, build, operate and grow such a site… as well as look at advertising and how it impacts (and supports) what we do. In a nutshell… why we do it, how we do it and when we do it.

     

  • The Death of Viral Marketing
    branding / marketing · miscellaneous
    The over-saturation of the viral market space and the growing demand of viral content from marketers have diluted the effectiveness of the form. Instead of creating something exciting and contagious–truly viral–much of it is simply online creative. If you replace the word ?viral? with the word ?awesome,? will your campaign still have legs? Today’s top marking minds converge on SXSW to discuss life before during, and after the viral craze hit the internet

     

  • Data Shrapnel
    miscellaneous · web 2.0
    Data just wants to be free. This can be a big problem for precision-intensive scenarios, like high security applications. The answer is to create a single source-of-record across distributed, loosely coupled applications. Gartner Group among others has identified Consumer Data Integration (CDI) technology as a category poised for explosive growth. This session explains why CDI is the technology that will make possible the data version of web 2.0 mash-ups.

     

  • The Future of JavaScript
    hacks / programming · web 2.0
    We’re starting to understand DOM Scripting and Ajax, but what’s next for JavaScript? Numerous companies are starting to use JavaScript as a true programing language, taking it beyond the browser and into Dashboard Widgets, IM clients, web servers, and even Photoshop. Several of the field’s luminaries discuss what the future holds for JavaScript, examining its role both in and out of the browser.

     

  • Can Social Networking Build Your Brand?
    branding / marketing · social networks
    User generated content in a community framework has been a hot topic in the last year. Sites subscribing to these theories have been entities in themselves, existing for their own sake. What can companies learn from Web 2.0, and how can its theories be applied to a brands online presence to generate a deeper connection with customers.

     

  • How to Bluff Your Way in Web 2.0
    how to · web 2.0
    Don’t know your Ajax from your elbow? Feel left out at parties when the talk turns to web 2.0? Then this session is for you. We will walk you though everything you need to know about web 2.0, from the hottest buzzwords to the latest design trends. In just 60 short minutes, we’ll have you talking like Jason Freid and one step closer to being bought by Yahoo!

     

  • Stick It to the Man with AJAX
    browsers / web apps · hacks / programming
    Tired of the same old cluttered layout, Byzantine user interface, and intrusive advertising? Our panelists show you how to use Web Services and Developers APIs to grab exactly what you want from a Web site, repackage it, and post it on your own. It’s free, legal, and (best of all) they can’t do a thing to stop you! Web services is a fast-growing area of the web that isn’t well understood by the average user or web developer, yet offers tremendous potential benefits without much effort.

     

  • Web 2.0 Business Models, or If You Build It Will They Pay?
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · web 2.0
    Your brilliant mashup concept is just a few days from launching, you know it’s going to get the marketing buzz and dedicated userbase - but now you need to figure out what, if anything to charge. Ad-supported or “Freemium”, Subscription or Per-click, Seat License or Master License are all ideas that will be explored in this panel.

     

  • Can Online Video Replace Your TV?
    content · web audio / web video
    As online download services, distribution channels and playback interfaces improve, more and more people are turning to the Web for their television and film programming. In an increasingly On Demand world, can the web replace tv?

     

  • Outta Control: Does Education Matter Anymore?
    education / sociological · social networks
    Do social networking tools eliminate the role of faculty and other authoritative sources? Are courses dead, replaced by referential webs and empowering wikis? Or do the tools threaten a chaotic “yellow learning” environment where the most connected claim is given the most credence? Taxonomy versus folksonomy, lecture versus discovery, AOL versus myspace are but a few of the microrevolutions representing this shift in how we will learn tomorrow.

     

  • Who Are the Citizens?
    blogging · user generated / open source
    News stories about “Citizens Media” usually rely on journalists and J-school professors, rather than the citizens themselves, to define the movement. Let’s talk with some citizens to see what’s up.

     

  • Self Branding 2.0: Building your Personal and Corporate Brand
    DIY / creativity · work / career
    How would you rate your personal brand? If you are in the technology field personal branding is an absolute necessity. This is doubly true if you are a start-up or thinking about starting a company because early on, the brand of a company and its founder will be one in the same. This panel will discuss ideas and techniques for building and maintaining a “true” personal brand.

     

  • Designing Interfaces for Ajax and Comet-based Web Applications
    hacks / programming · web design / graphics
    With the proliferation of Ajax, Comet, event-driven programming, and the blurring of the lines between the desktop and the web, recent focus has mostly been on the technology and not the implications on design. We will explore the major changes, issues, and benefits involved in advanced web application interface design.

     

  • Don’t Assume They Know What You’re Talking About: Publicity and DIY Marketing For Geeks
    DIY / creativity · work / career
    Knowing how to talk about your project is the first step in getting other people interested. Too often, we make the mistake of defining ourselves by what we don’t do. Thoughtful wording about your new venture or freelance skills will generate interest, and even personal introductions can be more beneficial with a bit of marketing insight. Panelists will debate how to market yourself and discuss your work with peers and media.

     

  • The Marketer’s Dilemma: The Rise of Social Multimedia
    branding / marketing · social networks
    Marketers are struggling to manage the explosion of commentary created by consumers about brands in social media platforms, from message boards to blogs and social networking sites. Now that consumers trust consumers more than advertisers, and expression is dialing up to a more emotional level through social multimedia — including images, audio and video — how are marketers facing the implications on traditional marketing practices and customer relationships?

     

  • Under 18: Blogs, Wikis, and Online Social Networks for Youth
    education / sociological · social networks
    Online life is rich with positive intellectual and social experiences; yet, we frequently focus on how to keep young people out of online places that adults don’t know or trust. Designers can play powerful roles by refocusing the discussion on supporting creative and social online experiences. Panelists discuss design opportunities to amplify young voices and enrich young peoples’ lives through emergent technologies like blogs, wikis, and social networking sites.

     

  • 2006, The Year in Web Design
    DIY / creativity · web design / graphics
    How does the recent history of Web design fit into the larger history of the craft, and where is it going? This panel will try to sum up the design zeitgeist by looking at 2006’s developments in creativity, technology and the world around us. We?ll look at the past twelve months in new launches and redesigns, and spot the innovations, trends and cliches that have defined the year.

     

  • The Growth and Evolution of Microformats
    browsers / web apps · web 2.0
    In its first year, microformats.org ushered in the rapid adoption of key formats for publishing and sharing tags, licenses, contacts, relationships, events and reviews on the Web. See what new microformats are being developed for resumes, classified listings, music, and media, as well as how tens of millions of established microformats on web sites of individuals, companies, and organizations are driving innovations in desktop applications and advancing personal data portability.

     

  • Pwned! Girl Video Gamers Teach You the Facts About Successful Marketing
    branding / marketing · gaming / virtual worlds
    In competition, they?ll kick your *!*#$. In real life, they?re master marketers. Learn how girl gamers promote their teams to gain members, publicity, and break down barriers. From word of mouth to sponsorships to appearances and more, girl video game teams are making headway in a male dominated field. Learn from these successful marketers how to market your company and grow your audience. It’s real advice from real marketers.

     

  • Context, Culture, and Change: Designing for Lifestyles
    web 2.0 · wireless / digital convergence
    How are companies such as Apple, Google, and Yahoo! incorporating ethnography to encourage innovation? Usability is only part of the full UX toolkit these days. As designing for lifestyle becomes a requirement, companies have to find other ways to use research to understand customer needs, freeing them to create products based on how people actually live. Hear from web, mobile, and product experts on how leading lifestyle brands are meeting their customers? needs.

     

  • Why Go to the Office, When the Office Can Go With You?
    miscellaneous · wireless / digital convergence
    Mobile technology increases customer interaction, maximizes employee time and expands possibilities for how we work. With 20 million mobile device users, today’s workforce challenges yesterday’s notions about the traditional workspace. Companies that recognize and adapt to increasing mobility at work will stay competitive. Hear from notable mobile technology futurists how collaboration, persistence and presence technologies are converging to create the closest approximation in the virtual world to your real office

     

  • eMuse Me: Can Web 2.0 Break Down the Walls of Museums?
    user generated / open source · web 2.0
    Is Web 2.0 welcome in museums? Should you be allowed encouraged to tag objects and share your opinions and discoveries? Or is online museum design best left to expert curators, art historians and museum educators? Can rich media, tagging and blogging deepen your connection, or does it cheapen and distract from the museum experience? Explore fascinating research into museum technology including tagging, (steve.museum) online interactives, blogging and delicious handheld content.

     

  • Noisemakers or Newsmakers
    content · miscellaneous
    Quotable or crap? Compelling or repugnant? Bearded lady-esque or Anderson Cooper-ish? Bring your opinions, air horns, and cast-iron stomachs to this SXSW debate as panelists examine what makes great web content. In addition to panelists? personal favorites, audience suggestions will be filtered on the fly in this cross between the Gong Show and Cramer’s Mad Money Lightning Round. Who knows - you may be witness to the second coming of Craig.

     

  • I’ll take Internet Standards for $1.966 Billion, Alex
    education / sociological · CSS / standards
    Leaving the W3C to set Internet standards is a little like letting a three year old child set the dinner menu for the family. No non-profit group will ever be able to set rules and regulations that have a real impact because they don’t have skin in the game. Let’s stop arguing about CSS 3.0 and how 7% of the world uses Firefox. It isn’t getting us anywhere. Building sites using profit-based plugins like the Flash Player ensures that a multi-billion dollar entity cares about my user experience. Browser’s back button doesn’t work? Need to access it via screen reader? Adobe could solve those problems by the next release if they saw the return on such an investment. Let’s acknowledge and start working through the real system to accomplish real goals.

     

  • Spin and Agitate
    community · politics / social activism
    The interactive era has spawned a new generation of hyper-networked voters who are more informed, resourceful and active than ever. Weaned on a 24-hour news cycle and always-on broadband, they demand quick accountability, instant communication, and truth from their elected officials - but are often forced to find it somewhere else. This panel will explore how politicians, voters and the media are evolving within this new social model.

     

  • Living the Metaverse: Virtual Worlds and the Future of Connectivity
    gaming / virtual worlds · social networks
    As virtual worlds, online games and geospatial technologies increasingly converge, a new kind of connectivity is emerging, one that is changing the way we use the Web — and how we live our offline lives. A look at the changes taking place as metaverse technologies like Second Life, Google Earth, GPS and RFID give people new ways to interact with the physical world and connect with each other.

     

  • Advocacy 2.0: Movement-building in the Age of Connectivity
    politics / social activism · social networks
    The technology shifting our culture is also changing the context for political and issue organizing. Nonprofits and community groups have been getting on the cluetrain. New organizing strategies leverage today’s tools to empower and connect activists and volunteers to each other and action. Call it user-oriented, bottom-up, network-centric, or web 2.0. Campaigns must encourage their supporters to express their voices or they’ll take their time, opinions and dollars elsewhere.

     

  • Design and Business: Practical Tips for Using design to Define and Realize Business Value
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · work / career
    In this session a group of grizzled veterans share their experiences in demonstrating the value of good design to business folk. We will cover how design skills can help to inform strategy, how to speak the vocabulary of business (it’s not just ROI!), how metrics can help/hurt, and how to have the conversations that allow good design to happen.

     

  • Mobile Gaming Revolution: Bringing Gamers Together in a Wireless Community
    gaming / virtual worlds · wireless / digital convergence
    Emerging Wi-Fi-enabled devices and public Wi-Fi hotspots offer new venue opportunities for gamers of all ages. Users can now play Wi-Fi enabled Nintendo DS games wirelessly at McDonald’s restaurants powered by Wayport’s high-speed Internet service. Nintendo fans can play in McDonald’s around the country, face-to-face or online with other gamers worldwide, in a fun/familiar environment. Learn about impacts of wireless devices and retail destinations on Wi-Fi usage and mobile gaming.

     

  • Ghost in the Machine: Spirituality Online
    community · miscellaneous
    Sex, politics, and religion: the three things you’re not supposed to talk about with people you don’t know. And yet we find lots of all three on the web, although religion is arguably the least visible. How does the blurring of the boundary between public and private space online affect the way we talk about spirituality? How do online faith communities differ from traditional offline ones? All this and more…

     

  • What Does the Future Hold for Video on the Internet?
    content · web audio / web video
    We are on the cusp of a sea change in how video is produced and consumed. Cameras, processing power, bandwidth keep getting cheaper. Broadband is ubiquitous, hosting is free. Editing tools are cheap and easy to use. Can this last? Will a two-tiered Internet emerge and stifle innovation of the past 2 years? Will incumbent big media companies figure out what the Internet generation wants depriving independents from access?

     

  • Terraforming the Internet: Are Virtual Worlds The Future of the Web?
    community · gaming / virtual worlds
    This panel will explore the rise in popularity and sophistication of online virtual worlds such as Second Life. The discussion will probe the (somewhat contentious) idea that participatory online worlds offer a glimpse of the way people will interact with information and with each other in the future. The panel will highlight the competitive necessity of developing a strategy for moving web work into virtual worlds.

     

  • Users vs. Editors: Future Trends in Online News
    content · user generated / open source
    As the major news aggregators continue the battle to become the most “meta,” a more subtle blurring between original and aggregated news is taking place among the major news sites. Organizations like The New York Times, producers of staple news content, are increasingly seen making forays into aggregation - while aggregators like Netscape are seen making forays into editorial control. Can the two types of news content live harmoniously together under one roof?

     

  • A Panel for Web Designers who Need to do Print Design. Sometimes.
    how to · web design / graphics
    Sometimes, just sometimes, a web designer will be asked to produce design for print. Print design production is a complicated place for a designer who doesn’t know his blind-embossing from his spot PMS. This session will cut through the complexity and offer some advice, hints and tips for designers who sometimes need to get something printed, but lack the production knowledge to do so.

     

  • What’s Accessibility Got to Do With It?
    web design / graphics · usability / accessibility
    An array of tools has emerged to help small organizations understand and expand the social web. Online tools that make it easier to collaborate and serve broad array of constituencies include CMS, podcasts, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and more. What are the consequences when accessibility is a second thought or left out entirely? What discourages developers from including accessibility as a foundational element of tool development?

     

  • The New Social Networks and Massively Multiplayer Online Sharing
    social networks · user generated / open source
    Early social networks (Friendster, LinkedIn) were all about mapping relations between people. Next-generation networks put objects at the center of interactions between people- pictures [Flickr], videos [YouTube], events [Upcoming]. A panel of experts will examine models of social interactions, e.g., viral sharing on YouTube, watercooler conversations around Flickr event tags. What types of interactions suit which context? How do these social interactions provide access to the long tail? How does taste-making occur on such systems?

     

  • Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web: The Impact on Scientific Publishing
    miscellaneous · web 2.0
    New publishing technologies challenge the traditional structure of peer-reviewed scientific journals. For hundreds of years the “article” has been the primary vehicle for conveying scientific information - but semantic markup, tagging, and wiki are reconstructing scientific publications into a flexible and evolving concept. This panel will look at the social and legal implications of “Web 2.0” and “Semantic Web” as they impact science and scientific knowledge.

     

  • Why We Should Ignore Users
    web design / graphics · usability / accessibility
    User-Centered Design has been the predominant method for the design of successful experiences for years, but Donald Norman’s notion of Activity-Centered Design advocates ignoring the idiosyncrasies and demands of specific user types to instead focus on the user’s whole activity. In this session, experts in the field of Interaction Design and Usability come together to debate the merits of each approach and find the solutions that work.

     

  • You’re It! Tagging is so over! It’s the People, Stupid!
    social networks · user generated / open source
    Resolved: the tagging meme has overstayed its welcome. No, tags aren’t going away but they are not a user-experience panacea. Are we folksonomic yet? Some ideas about the next frontier in malleable, emergent information architectures and classification schemes. Plus, how to apply the lessons of the global social internet to more niche oriented web application development projects. Tag pioneers, theorists, and skeptics beat a dead horse.

     

  • CMS Showdown: What’s the Best Choice?
    content · web design / graphics
    This panel will take a close look at some of the popular choices for Content Management (Expression Engine, ModX, Joomla, Mambo and others) available. Should you use open source, build or buy? Explore how to choose the best CMS for your project or organization. Explore how you can use CMS to manage all aspects of your web site including blogging and podcasting.

     

  • Never Die While Typing Again!
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · gaming / virtual worlds
    Who hasn’t had a friend die in-game because it took forever to type “Look out for mage in back!” It would be much more effective to just shout and be heard instantly, “LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!”? What good is in-game communications if you can’t save your friends? This session will address how today’s integrated voice tools within MMOGs are enhancing the immersive experience and driving new business opportunities for developers.

     

  • Keeping the Conversation Alive
    browsers / web apps · community
    New tools are constantly emerging that help us better interact with others, whether for fun, learning or the improvement of our society. But these tools bring massive fragmentation of conversational threads across online forums, blogs, wikis and instant messaging. These conversations often lack persistence and die on the vine. What personal tools and standards are emerging to help people track and evolve conversations?

     

  • Ten Years of Net Art
    DIY / creativity · user generated / open source
    One could say that net art was the last of the 20th century avant garde art movements. With a mix of hacker culture and punk aesthetics, the pioneers of net art mashed up, remixed, hacked, shredded and rioted online way before these online expressions became illegal. Come meet some of the people that made the web the fun place it is today.

     

  • Show Me The Money! Consumers Get Paid for Video Content?
    blogging · web audio / web video
    The power behind TV entertainment is shifting, moving consumers from behind the remote control onto the screen. User-generated video content is taking a step to the forefront of personal entertainment, changing the way the world is thinking about broadcasting. Learn how the latest web technologies are working in conjunction with everyday people allowing them to create their own profitable shows through targeted advertising, sponsorships, etc..

     

  • Consumer-Generated Mistakes
    content · user generated / open source
    Today, with the flourishing of user generated content, consumer’s opinions are heard on a global scale. But are companies taking these opinions too much to heart - at the cost of innovation? “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” said Henry Ford. This panel will explore the emerging role of consumer opinion in business and attempt to answer: “What’s the right mix of customer input versus good old fashioned innovation”?

     

  • From Blog to Book
    blogging · work / career
    Can your blog really make you a star in the world of book publishing? This session includes feedback from a variety of bloggers-turned-authors whose recently-released books have propelled them to the top of the best-seller lists. Online humorist John Hargrave, author of the new comedy book “Prank the Monkey,” moderates this hilarious and informative session.

     

  • Get Unstuck
    DIY / creativity · work / career
    Why some companies are mired in goo and muck and old-school thinking, and other companies are light, flexible, and innovative. Get unstuck by a panel of formerly-stuck experts.

     

  • Whither SXSW
    community · miscellaneous
    Adding this public iteration to SXSW’s panel creation taps the community’s wisdom and energy. What other brainstorms might keep SXSW growing the 51 weeks a year most of us are ex-Austin?

     

  • Web Hacks: Good or Evil (or: Welcome to Web 2.666)
    hacks / programming · CSS / standards
    Since its inception, the Web’s been repeatedly destabilized by misuse of its original intentions. Gray-hat implementations like leeched images, scraped screens, and hacked-up script tags gave rise to the business models that made the Web profitable, most notably, banner ads. Standards purists go all pale and weak in the knees … but the bizdev guys just love ‘em. In this panel, we discuss the philosophical implications of the best-known hacks and what businesses are doing to protect themselves or take advantage of them.

     

  • TV: The Next Generation
    content · web audio / web video
    The days of the old-fashioned network channel are numbered. When anyone can make content, who will be the top content creators? Who will distribute? How will consumers choose? Do we need Hollywood? Do we even need aggregators?

     

  • Preserving our Digital Legacy and the Individual Collector
    content · education / sociological
    Many great art, book and manuscript collections survive because an individual had the foresight or good luck to save the good stuff. Libraries and museums owe a debt to individual dealers, collectors and packrats for saving illustrated Czarist plate books from the Soviets, and WWII letters from the trash-heap. Who are today’s collectors? What are they preserving? How will they manage fragile born-digital collections long enough share with future generations?

     

  • Designing for the Edge: Making Stuff in a Hackable, Hyperconnected World
    user generated / open source · web design / graphics
    It’s one thing to buy the idea that our sites, feeds and content are increasingly microchunked, aggregated and remixed. It’s an entirely other thing to reset our expectations about strategy, product development, design and communications in order to actually thrive in this new environment. This panel of Edge Workers will talk obstacles, opportunities and the best new moves for involving communities in a Web of their own making.

     

  • The Remixing Explosion
    miscellaneous · web audio / web video
    With the proliferation of affordable, intuitive music software, everyone and their dog is now a remixer. This panel takes a look at how music fans can acquire a capella vocals from commercial hits, create their own original remixes, then distribute these tracks via the web - all with the semi-tacit blessing of artists and labels. The panel will also discuss the impact this has had on the professional dance music community.

     

  • Swarms
    content · web 2.0
    Real-time web-ennabled information transfer among thousands of minds generates novel ideas, energy and trajectories. How does the emerging science of swarms — 1000s of leaderless individuals governed by simple rules and generating what appears to be higher order behavior — help us understand the new environment?

     

  • Design Patterns: Defining and Sharing Web Interface Design Languages
    usability / accessibility · CSS / standards
    This panel will take an in-depth look at defining and sharing Web design patterns. In particular we?ll explore communicating when and how specific design patterns should be applied, what it takes to develop a usable design language, and how disparate lists of design patterns can converge into a shared online resource. The content will be based on an ongoing online conversation started at: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?347

     

  • Angel Investment: The New Black in Startup Financing
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · work / career
    You’re too large for friends, family and credit cards, but too small for VC’s - so how do you find and deal with Angels effectively? What’s the difference between Professional Angels and VC’s and how do you protect your fledgling company from both of them. What are Angel’s looking for and what you should be looking for in an Angel.

     

  • There’s no Such Thing as the Mobile Web (or Is There?)
    how to · wireless / digital convergence
    Is “Mobile Web 2.0” about mobilising existing web 2.0 services, or creating new mobile communities? Can the mobile browser deliver a good enough user experience, or does the mobile environment call for a different approach? When is it necessary to build a mobile client application, and what’s the best way to go about this? Do I have to get into bed with the wireless carriers?

     

  • Blogging Where Speech Isn’t Free
    blogging · politics / social activism
    Many nations have no tradition of free speech, and in those contexts, blogging can be extremely dangerous. How can those bloggers protect themselves, and how can we help them?

     

  • Just Get It Up There: New Tools and Methods for Online Publishing
    content · how to
    Expectations of online publishing have changed. Content contributors are being empowered with publishing rights. Websites now must accommodate multiple authors, content contributors and editors. How can this be managed without implementing cumbersome and expensive content management systems? Our panel of entrepreneurs discusses the choices available and important considerations for selecting online publishing tools and how to manage a multi-contributor process.

     

  • Hear Without Fear!
    community · social networks
    After months of texting back and forth online, your dream-date turns out to be a dud in person. What’s worse, you’ve exchanged phone numbers, and you now fear this person will continue contacting you - even though you don’t want them to.This session will address how IP-based, context-specific communications enhances texting, chatting and video, giving millions of online dating users a safe environment to interact and make safe connections.

     

  • How to Shoestring Your Startup
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · work / career
    We all know that now is the best time to start a company, but how do you do that without a rich uncle or a dotcom sale warchest? This panel will give practical advice on the actual costs in both cash and effort of launching and sustaining a technology based startup in today’s business environment.

     

  • Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online
    blogging · education / sociological
    No privacy? Spy on yourself and commodify your attention stream! Countless representations of ourselves flood the net with information daily. What is happening to our models of attention? trust? reputation? Rate my new fighting style unstoppable and I’ll trade you this artifact I forged in Worlds of Warcraft… Expect a lively debate from noted experts on attention and identity and skeptics who think most of the sentences above are content-free.

     

  • Face to Face Interaction
    community · user generated / open source
    There isn’t someone like you in between your web app and the user anymore. Your UI is going straight to regular folk, who are now empowered in a feeding frenzy of participatory media. Great design is as important as ever, but there are key elements that cannot be overlooked. Join online community professionals and designers to hear how your interface designs can shine in the bright light of social media.

     

  • Building the 3D Web: Real Companies Discover Virtual Worlds
    business / funding / entrepreneurial · gaming / virtual worlds
    With retail and media companies like American Apparel, Universal Records, Warner Brothers and Fox seeking a presence in virtual worlds, a new crop of 3D online services companies has sprung up, doing for the metaverse what designers have done on the Web for years. In this session, virtual world services executives, administrators and content creators share their secrets for winning business, getting the job done, and designing for the metaverse.

     

  • User Generated Content and Original Editorial: Friend or Foe
    content · user generated / open source
    In the past few years, online media has embraced user generated content as king. Now that the volume of user generated content is becoming deafening, can media place an authoritative editorial filter on user generated content to give a context to user opinions and content? Can original editorial and user generated content work together to bring the best of both worlds?

     

  • Identity 2.x
    education / sociological · web 2.0
    Discussing the status of discussions and work toward a global identity framework for the web

     

  • Why XSLT is Sexy
    browsers / web apps · hacks / programming
    With two excellent libraries released in the last year from Google (AJAXSLT) and Manos Batsis (Sarissa), client-side XSLT in Javascript is becoming a more usable option for web developers. By providing device independance and platform independance, XSLT is perfectly suited for working with web services generating XML and XHTML. By being able to leverage the same technique on the client and server, developers can really get more bang for their buck. Panel moderators will show you how easy it is to do XSLT in Javascript, or on the server, as well as when to and when not to.

     

  • When Avatars Get Hungry
    community · gaming / virtual worlds
    Ever wish you could have a pepperoni pizza delivered to you in level 10 of 30 of the marathon dungeon quest of your favorite MMOG? Wish no more! Your elf can make the call, just after he re-charges his manna. This session will address how the line between the real and virtual world is blurring, and how context-specific IP communication will forever change online community communications as we know it.

     

  • Dueling Ajax Toolkits: Don’t Reinvent the Window
    hacks / programming · how to
    The number of Ajax Toolkits on the market seems to be outpacing the number of solid Ajax developers. Join us as the developers of the leading Ajax Toolkits square off to show you why you should choose their toolkit instead of creating yet another Ajax toolkit.

     

  • A Decade of Style
    web design / graphics · CSS / standards
    It’s been just over ten years since CSS1 was finalized, and almost 11 since the first CSS-supporting browser was shipped. A small group of grizzled veterans reflects on a decade of successes, triumphs, failures, disappointments, reversals of fortune, and just plain fun in the world of CSS and web design. Warning: may include surprising historical information, residual kvetching about past mistakes, and context for interpreting the next ten years.

     

  • Industries That Need a New Web
    miscellaneous · web design / graphics
    The web has taken some big steps forward over the last couple of years, but