It’s day 2 of SXSW 2010 and we’re kind of late to announce that bubblers are attending the conference this year. Peter and myself are here in Austin for supposedly one of the best web conferences out there. And now we know why SXSW is such a big deal every year. It’s buzzing everywhere. People are passionate, excited and the whole thing just feels right somehow.
The combination is a killer. An incredible amount of prominent, very able speakers, perfect, summerly weather, a wifi that seems no trouble to handle the thousands of attendants and of course the evening parties that seems to come up in every conversation at one point or another. Jeff Jarvis tweeted today that SXSW is more of a tribal gathering than a conference and there is certainly something to it. People do talk about business, yes, but it also feels like the almost always distributed hive mind is coming centralizing itself in Austin for a few days to be even more productive than usual. It feels right, it feels exciting to be here and there is a lot to learn.
Just take danah boyd’s keynote today. It was incredibly articulate, precise and charismatic – her thoughts and privacy are very important and will be discussed vividly over the next days, weeks and month. It’s important to think about those issues, because companies like Facebook, Google and the rest of them grew at such a fast pace that gives them the assumption that what they are doing must be right since so many people are using their services. In fact, it’s the complexity of the system and the fact that most users aren’t informed sufficiently that leads to those assumptions. danah presented some valuable insight into the mindset of random people that shows very clearly: privacy is not dead.
We are – as you probably assumed already – not going to live blog from the SXSW. We’re here to gain insight into the US sphere and to learn from the experience. But we will blog about SXSW as much as possible.
