Christian's Blog

SXSW is nearly a week over, and it seems that there is still so much to process about the event. A quick hashtag search for #sxsw on Twitter shows that I’m not alone, and people are still dissecting and discussing everything from media trends to hot music to the best parties and more. For me, [...]

Some of the more interesting panels I attended had to do with interactive infographics. For those not in the know, interactive infographics are the largely flash-based informational charts or pictures that many news sites use to represent events and data. Breakaway building blueprints and easy to manipulate demographics data, real-time trending maps and voting information, [...]

Looking at the panels this year, there really has been this general sense of disappointment in how they have gone. Even aside from the Umair Haque Incident, panels suffered from a syndrome of poor presentation, poor preparedness, and lack of engagement. Of course, there were some gems, but I expect SXSW to skew heavily on the side of hits vs misses. This year the balance seemed skewed to the point where we missed more than hit altogether.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Pepsi + Blip.tv + Anyclip party at Cedar Street  on the 14th. The weather was amazing, and we couldn’t have asked for a better venue for our event. We were fortunate enough to have a lot of great people working there at Cedar Street, the staff was [...]

I’ve spent a couple of days wandering in and out of the SXSWi Trade Show in between panels or parties, just to get a feel for it. As a company looking to continue growing our social media partnerships, it gives us an opportunity to look at some real and mostly functional products, and some exciting [...]

Memory is something I’ve always struggled with. My noggin seems to have a way of pushing aside the useful and intricate in favor of a Jeopardy-like assortment of random trivia facts and a pile of $64 words of which William F Buckley, Jr. could be proud. When it comes to remembering important things, like task lists or that critical e-mail you need to send when you get back from lunch, my brain functions pretty effectively as my own worst enemy. So when I was perusing the various and sundry panel offerings at SXSWi, I was delighted to see the “Memory Matters: How Do Elephants Do It?” event hosted by Mark Channon and Paul Duncan from the BBC.

It’s always exciting coming back to Austin. As a once long-time resident of the River City, I’ve come to think of Austin as my “home town”. Having lived in Dallas for the last six years or so, the return to Austin is laden with a sort of nostalgia usually reserved for returning to your childhood home, the kind that mixes a comfortable familiarity with a sort of gnawing discomfort at the changes that have slowly overwhelmed your memories.