yep, seven years, three states, and 35,892 psd files later, I’m finally staring down the joy of taking part in the sxsw interactive festival this year. oh joy.

so to give this monumentous event the care and energy it deserves, I will be sharing a bit of my preparation on the blog here, with a desire to facilitate a conversation, more than prescribe a plan of attack for others. if 2011 will be your first year attending as well, welcome fellow newby! or maybe your a veteran and could recite the last ten years keynotes in your speech. if so, i would love to hear tips and advice, as well as what your looking forward to as this year’s shindig. or maybe your in the same boat as i have been up until this point, and you can’t make it to tehas this year. even so, i’d love to hear your thought on the topics and have you join in from afar!

Enough preamble, here’s a rough look at the topics I want to cover in this series of posts:

Topics I’m interested in

Reading list in preperation for #sxswi

People I’d like to share a pint with

hidden gems to find while in Austin

daily thougths (during the conference)

post-conference wrap up

I hope you join me in my preparation. And as always, if you have any thoughts, suggestions, or gems of wisdom to contribute here, share away!

i know it. you know it.

we experience it everyday.

so if your reading this. i’m genuinely honored. thank you.

so in a time when there is never a shortage of things to read, watch, or play with, how does an individual, brand, or organization measure their own influence on the world?

how do we know the difference between adding to the noise, or actually contributing to a greater conversation?

a two way conversation.

i know, by just using the over hyped word “conversation”, you might be extremely tempted to stop reading.

but that’s exactly what i’m aiming for when i communicate. and i hope you are too.

though i’m not the best at it. i want to engage, listen to, contemplate, and thoughtfully communicate with others.

so i’m not really interested in a popularity contest, whether measured by twitter followers, friends, retweets, or any other number.

it’s cliche, but it truly is about quality. it has never been about quantity.

but maybe your thinking, it’s really hard to measure quality, especially in the digitally social spheres that we are daily engaged with.

how can we measure the meaningful influence we have? is your brand / organization actually communicating with customers? or just using a bullhorn to annoy the masses?

enter a sweet new website i found recently, http://www.klout.com

though not perfect, i’m finding it really useful and interesting. sure, it’s easy to see that so and so has 1,000 followers, or a brand has 13k followers. But again, how much of that is noise?

i’m excited to see this service, along with others yet to be launched, grow and evolve into a deeper way to look into this tricky subject.

before jumping into my early favorites, i do want to note one choice that the sxsw organizers took, that i thought was really classy and cool: there is no vote count or leaderboard for the proposed panels! very very cool, and a great attempt at keeping this from becoming a bandwagon ready popularity contest. thanks sxswi!

that being said, here is an early list of my favorite panels i’ve found so far, and as always i would love to hear your thoughts on these and / or other panels:

Interaction Jones and the Template of Doom
Organizer Naz Hamid, http://www.weightshift.com

Collaboration Nation: How Side-Projects Can Keep You Relevant
Organizer Phil Coffman, http://springbox.com , http://methodandcraft.com

Crazy, Cool, and Interesting Uses of GeoData
By Elad Gil, http://twitter.com

Congratulations! Your Brand Is About to Become Obsolete.
Organizer Andrea Ring, http://www.rga.com

How to Whup ‘Em with the Leroy Stick
By Hawk Thompson, http://www.springbox.com/

Branding Reinvented: Creating Engagement in the Digital World
By david lai, http://www.hellodesign.com/

Listen To Me Dammit! I’m An Expert!
Organizer Chris Mayfield, http://springbox.com

Better Ideas Faster: Effective Brainstorming for Interactive Design
Organizer David Sherwin, http://www.frogdesign.com

Apps or Mobile Site: How to Choose
By Adrian Taylor, http://www.springbox.com

Design as Lifestyle: An Honest Day’s Work
Organizer Duane King http://www.kingduane.com

Interactive Branding and the Built Environment
Organizer Jamie Monberg, http://www.hornallanderson.com/

Let’s Go: The Evolution of JetBlue.com
Organizer Michal Pasternak, http://www.hugeinc.com

Can Design and Technology Fix America’s Education Problem?
Organizer John Kolko, http://www.frogdesign.com

Switch: from Freelancer to Entrepreneur
Organizer Matthew Smith, http://www.squaredeye.com

From Storytelling to Technology and Back Again
Organizer Barry Wacksman, http://www.rga.com

Stop Talking, Start Making
Organizer Will Turnage http://www.rga.com

How Does Scifi Influence Our Future Cities?
Organizer Igor Schwarzmann, http://www.cognitivecities.com

Storytelling in an Age of Industrialized Content
Organizer Upendra Shardanand, http://www.daylife.com

Digital Bookmaking for Designers & Developers
Organizer Brian warren, http://begoodnotbad.com/

Websites Aren’t Enough: the New Interaction Design
Organizer @danielmall

The New Loyalists: Measuring Brand Advocacy Today
Organizer Luane Kohnke, http://www.rga.com

by alex bogusky and john windsor

If advertising is not your chosen profession in life, why the heck would you want to read a book written by two of the top leaders in the advertising world? (alex bogusky, @bogusky , longtime creative director at crispin porter + bogusky; and John Winsor, @jtwinsor , former head of product innovation & cognitive research at cp+b)

Because I believe the authors are on to something. And it’s not advertising. I want to say it’s way past advertising, but it’s actually pre advertsing.

What?? Sound confusing? Let’s jump into the meat of the book.

Though I passionately disagree with both authors on the value and practice of crowdsourcing, here are a few of their points from @bakedin that stuck with me:

+ Let’s cut the crap of lying and false promises about products, and instead design a useful & beautiful product / experience that meets the users exact needs & wants.

+ Stop spending 3,4, or 8 years in r & d, and instead prototype and test early, and revise what works and throw away the rest.

+ Listen to and know your audience, and make a product that fits, instead making a mediocre product and then trying to advertise the crap out of it.

+ Incrementally changing a mediocre product each year to be (slightly) new & improved is a flawed business plan. Let’s innovate! Let’s create something new! Let’s create something beautiful! Let’s create something useful!!

So if you have any interest in providing a useful / beautiful / wow product or service, do your future self a favor and pick this book up!

Also, a big thanks to @jtwinsor for sending me a copy of the book to review!

I remember the first time I saw a video of @garyvee giving a keynote talk ( if you haven’t watched one, you should, right now! here ), and I really didn’t know what to think.

1st – is this guy on crack?

2nd – whoa, I’ve never thought about ______ that way. Or that. Or that…

3rd – this might be half way insane, but he’s passionate, driven, and genuine.

So naturally when I heard he was writing a book, I was eager to check it out, although I was skeptical that it would be engaging all the way to the end.

I’m happy to say I read the whole thing, and enjoyed all of it! Know that it was a nice and brief weighing in under 140 pages!

The content was a really good mix of gary’s personal story, a motivational punch in the mouth ( the good kind of course, that get you riled up and in arms ), and practical real life advice on how to use specific tools like Twitter and facebook to share your passion.

Although I enjoyed hearing his story most, running a close second was the honesty with which Gary approaches advice on using social media tools. Instead of claiming to be a “social media expert”, he starts with the fundamentals of one knowing your passion & your DNA, and then offers some take them or leave them tips / best practices on specific tools.

Though I don’t agree with Gary on a number of finer points, I could not agree more with his core message:

Find your passion. Craft your presentation medium. And never forget that content is king.

if you know me, you know any talk of government bailouts makes me sick, but after having this reaction, i then began to think of this whole notion of mediocrity, laziness, and an unwillingness for a company / industry to change to meet the market’s demands.

so i naturally thought about my industry: web design. while i can easily point out the big three’s faults, it gets much touchier when i took a closer look at web design & development, the state of the industry in the U.S., and my own work aptitude.

If you look around our industry much, you will see that much like the auto industry, their are now many cheap, international web design players / shops popping up every day. if your like me, you might be thinking ‘yeah, there are alternatives, but they don’t speak english, or the western world’s cultural and visible language, so therefore nobody will ever use them’.

but i argue not so fast. I / we can’t get lazy. the big 3 never thought toyota, honda, or hyundai could ever produce a viable product for the american people. obviously, they were wrong. and they got lazy. they stopped innovating. and they assumed america would just accept whatever crap they produced. oh how they were wrong.

so true, i believe we are still along way off from the international market taking over the U.S. web design sphere, but we can’t lie to ourselves and believe it’s unthinkable. it’s almost as if we’re in the 1983 state of the auto industry. we’ve done a lot of great things in the near past (muscle cars / gorgeous flash experiences), but we can’t sit on our butts and be proud of ourselves.

the world is changing, people are consuming and creating content in new formats, in new ways, and with new expectations.

if we / i don’t lead the way, someone else will.

the choice is ours. everyday, with every project, and every client relationship.

we can do the comfortable, predictable solution. or we can stretch ourselves beyond what we thought was possible. or 20 years from now we can write a sappy country song bemoaning the fact that our industry has passed us by.

i’ll choose to fight. it’s the american way. innovation. grit. and hard work.

and besides, it’s more fun to be the leader anyway.