The four of us from Hammock who attended the 2008 South by Southwest Interactive during the past weekend used the event to experiment here on Hammock.com. In the past, our company has published event "dailies" for clients and on numerous occasions, we've provided editorial support for client websites during events.
However, as we've spent the past few years embracing a wide-array of networked conversational, social and sharing tools, we've felt that online "coverage" of an event should tap into new media tools and platforms -- rather than merely "report" on what's taking place.
What you'll see below are some of the rough notes, photos, "tweets" and random "stuff" we recorded during the event. What you won't see anymore are our constant "tweets" during the event as we've determined they make little sense outside the context of the real-time flow in which they occurred.
Another thing: We purposefully did not plan our coverage -- no one was "assigned" panels to attend so that we'd have it "covered" here. This was viewed as a place to aggregated and share the flow of what we were experiencing -- not "report" on what was taking place.
If we were doing this for a client, it would have been scripted and produced more tightly. That's one of the lessons we learned. Such experiments are where we discover what works and what doesn't. For example, we fell down on our "bookmarking" -- we thought we'd be adding lots of links to websites as we heard about them in sessions. But we found when one is taking notes, twittering and shooting photos, it's hard to also bookmark. We could have done better, in hindsight.
Next time, also, there will be lots of video. Lots and lots of video.
SXSW Interactive has been described as "The Internet's Spring Break." And certainly, there's a lot of fun and since most of it is over a weekend, the "out of the office" pressure is lessened. But, bottomline, South by Southwest is a great place to experience the future of conversational media when those who use these tools each day get together face-to-face.
