Great infographic from Moontoast. Also worth reading their post on the The Facebook Fan Engagement Spectrum

Day One – Friday March 11th

• [Badge Registration]
• No Child Left Inside: Mobile Tech Meets Education #mobncli
• Google’s Marissa Mayer Presents #marissagoogle
• Why Would We Think Social Media Is Revolutionary, Clay Shirky #talkingcure

• Brave New World: Debating Brands’ Role as Publishers #curatedebate
• The New Sharing Economy #shareable
• Brand Journalism: The Rise of Non Fiction Advertising #brandjo
• Opening Keynote from Seth Priebatsch #gamelayer
• Lurkers: Your Most Important Community Members

• Radical Openness: Growing TED by Giving it Away, June Cohen
• Stop Dreaming, Start Doing: Tips for Execution #behance
• The Art of Enchantment with Guy Kawasaki #enchantment
• Keynote with Christopher Poole, 4chan #sxswmoot
• Chinwag’s Global Grill – UKTI Networking #globalgrill

• How to Personalize Without Being Creepy #seenocreepy
• Creation, Curation and the Ethics of Content Strategy # csethics
• Apps, APIs and Syndication: Creativity in the Post-Website Era #sxswapis
• The Thank You Economy with Gary Vaynerchuk
• Beyond the Giant Double Rainbow (New Tech Network) #ntnsxsw

• Learning 2025: School is out Forever #futureofed
• Online Learning and the Classroom of the Future #sxswedu
• Keynote with Blake Mycoskie, TOMS Shoes #sxswtoms
• Reid Hoffman Presentation: Data as Web 3.0
• Building School 2.0: Creating the Schools We Need #school20

That might seem a reasonably impressive list (it’s pretty intense going to so many sessions over five days as there is just so much to learn and see) but to give you some sense of the scale of SXSW for those who haven’t been – the number of sessions that I wanted to see vs. the number of places I was physically able to be at any one time made for some difficult choices. These are the ones I was interested in but couldn’t make it to:

• My Kindergartner Markets Better Than You #kidsmarket
• Education 2.0: How Media Drives Your Child’s Success #teenedu
• Not My Job: The Ultimate Content Strategy Smackdown #notmyjob
• The Potential of Augmented Reality for Education #eduar

• How Many Rungs? Social Change and the Engagement Ladder #howmanyrungs
• Using Twitter to Improve College Student Engagement #twesearch
• Marketing in the Moment #mktgmoment
• Are Your Customers a Crowd or a Community? #zappos
• Coming of Age Social: Opportunity of Teens Online #comingofage
• Social Media Data Visualizations: Mapping the World’s Conversations
• Bloggers vs Journalists: It’s a Psychologial Thing #bvj
• All These Worlds Are Yours: Visualizing Space Data #realspace
• Web Anywhere: Mobile Optimisation with HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript #html5mobile
• Welcome to the EGOsystem: How Much are You Worth? Brian Solis
• The Secret Lives of Content Sites #skimlinks

• Too Small, Too Open: Correcting Wikipedia’s Local Failure #localwiki
• The Science of Influence
• Influencers Will Inherit The Earth. Quick, Market Them!
• Media Tomorrow: The Message is the Messenger #personalbrand
• Recommendation Engines: Going Beyond The Social Graph #discoverytalk

• Method Tweeting for Non Profits (and Other Players) #methodtweet
• I’m So Productive I Never Get Anything Done
• Everyone’s Wrong About Influence. Except your Customers #sxsw-influence
• Curation Nation #curationnation
• OAuth, Open ID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices #authenticatoindesign
• Visualizing Our Future: Space, Media and Web Exploration
• The Future of Content is Personal

• Innovating and Developing with Libraries, Archives and Museums #sxswlam
• Branded Entertainment: Do Brands Hurt Good Storytelling #brandsvsstories
• Flexible Morality of User Engagement and User Behaviour #moralflex
• Real-time Marketing in a Connected World #sxswrealtime
• The Death of the Brand Website #sxsworgbrandsites
• Steve Krug Explains It All for You #skrugsxsw

Hopefully I will hunt down some info from the sessions I missed to post here also. If you went to SXSW and attended any of the sessions I didn’t make it to, please do post a link to your notes and let me know your thoughts!

And just for a bit of filtering… my highlights were:

• Opening Keynote from Seth Priebatsch #gamelayer
• Radical Openness: Growing TED by Giving it Away, June Cohen
• Stop Dreaming, Start Doing: Tips for Execution #behance
• The Art of Enchantment with Guy Kawasaki #enchantment
• Creation, Curation and the Ethics of Content Strategy # csethics
• The Thank You Economy with Gary Vaynerchuk
• Learning 2025: School is out Forever #futureofed
• Keynote with Blake Mycoskie, TOMS Shoes #sxswtoms

Being surrounded by clever, inspirational, fun people made me feel so alive and highlighted for me how much I like to live by the “work hard, play hard” philosophy. There isn’t really any other option in Austin!

I’m heading back out to Texas tomorrow for my second SXSWi and i’m really looking forward to it! You can see an early attempt at my schedule here but you will notice that I currently need to be in about 6 places at once to go to all the talks that I consider to be interesting or useful.

To see which ones I do end up at, follow me @ellielovell or wait for a blog post when I return (although I can’t promise that!).

SXSW is a massive festival in Austin, Texas which includes interactive, film and music events. I was there for the interactive element (12th – 16th March) with a great gang of people from the West Midlands and have come back with a few things to say about the experience. I thought a good place to start would be a list of the sessions I attended (with links to the event details on the SXSW website)…

Friday

1. The Young and The Digital (Book Reading), S. Craig Watkins (details)
2. Content Strategy: What’s in it for You?, Margot Bloomstein (details)
   
3. DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (Book Reading), Anya Kamenetz
4. Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For, Rachel Lovinger, Karen McGrane (details)
   
5. Wave and Communication’s (R)Evolution: Better Than Being There, Jay Cuthrell, Daniel Raffel, Jared Goralnick, Casey Whitelaw (details)

Saturday

1. The Era of Crowdsourcing: Guiding Principles, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Scott Belsky (details)
2. Universities in the “Free” Era, Glenn Platt, Peg Faimon (details)
   
3. Mind Control: Psychology for the Web, Ben Scofield (details)
4. Opening Remarks: Privacy and Publicity, Danah Boyd (details)
5. BBC Digital Planet Live, Gareth Mitchell, Michelle Martin, Bill Thompson (details)
6. New Publishing and Web Content, Jeffrey Zedelman, Erin Kissane, Lisa Holton, Mandy Brown, Paul Ford (details)

Sunday

1. Africa 3.0: A Look at the Future of a Connected Africa (details)
2. Influence and Innovate: Transforming Media Education, Cindy Royal, Tyson Evans (details)
3. CrowdControl: Changing The Face of Media or Hype, Lila King, Pete Cashmore, Randi Zuckerberg, Joseph Kingsbury, Jason Rzepka (details)
   
4. Sunday Keynote with Valerie Casey (details)
5. Fans, Friends and Followers: Creating Your Own Cult (of the Non-Apocalyptic Variety), Scott Kirsner, Gary Hustwit (details)
   
6. Improving Social Media with Live Streaming Video, Brad Hunstable USTREAM (details)
   

Monday

1. Open Science: Create, Collaborate, Communicate, Tantek Celik, Natalie Villalobos, Ariel Waldman, Jessy Cowan-Sharp, Kirsten Sanford (details)
   
2. Indirect Collaboration: Collective Creativity on the Web, Tom Lillis, Joe Alterio, Andrea Grover, Joshua Glenn, Riley Crane (details)
3. Student Start-Ups: Entrepreneurship in the University, Hung Truong, Ellen Chisa, Ben Congleton, Rishi Naryan (details)
4. Gary Vaynerchuk Presentation (details)

Tuesday

1. UKTI Digital Mission Great British Breakfast
2. Pervasive Games and Playful Experiences: Rendering the Real World, Simon Johnson, Clare Reddington, Nina Steiger, Duncan Speakman, Toby Barnes (details)
3. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr (Book Reading) (details)
4. Interactive Infographics, Eric Rodenbeck, Casey Caplowe, Ben Fry, Shan Carter (details)
   

(The ones in italics were the most enjoyable/relevant to me and I hope to elaborate on them in a future blog post)

It was a rather packed schedule with so many sessions to choose from for each time slot that it was often hard to narrow it down. Sometimes I would find myself sat in a presentation watching the tweets from another session and having a bit of session-envy! Fortunately much of the content should be available online for me to look up but it doesn’t compare to actually being there!

Anyway, I hope to spend a bit of time over the next couple of days hunting for links to presentations online, reflecting on some of the things I learnt, and writing a few things down including the social aspects and some general comments on SXSW and things I would do differently next time… so please visit again in a couple of days (and hope that my blogging mojo is still with me!)

So it seems I ran out of steam/inspiraton on my blog a little while ago but if you want to find out where else I am active on the internet, check my “Where?” page. Who know’s, I might get my blog mojo back one day…

Presentation by Marta Kagan of Espresso

You can see a large version of this image on the Gaping Void website

Making of the ‘Let It Shine’ advert