What if you'd bought Apple stock instead of their products?
— spoiler: you’d be rich via bits.blogs.nytimes.com #Dreamhost CEO shares his heartbreaking, preventable homebirth story
— a huge warning to anyone considering home births via Delicious #Instapaper goes social with 3.0 version
— sharing, editor’s picks, and browsing your friends’ likes via Kottke #Browser DNS prefetching harmful for sites with many subdomains
— a single meta tag reduced Deviant Art’s DNS queries by 10 billion per month via Paul Bausch #Ushahidi launches open-source location service
— roll your own Foursquare; here’s the requisite SXSW example running on Crowdmap #Bytejacker goes to GDC 2011
— great episode; interviews with the creators of Sword & Sworcery, Indie Game: The Movie, and Cave Story via twitter.com #The Content Farm launches new website
— “written by people with a passing knowledge” via twitter.com #Kellan predicts the year of the anti-social SXSW
— software scoped to friends-only favors intimacy over serendipity #South by Southwest Homesick Blues
— “Don’t need Zuckerberg to know when the bubble blows” via twitter.com #Chicago Tribune feature on Kickstarter and crowdfunding
— some great stories about how it’s impacting Chicago artists #Clay Johnson on why he joined Expert Labs
— yay, crazy excited to work with Clay; also: I made a video intro to ThinkUp #Lanyrd releases Chrome/Firefox extension to instantly hide all SXSW tweets
— if you’re not in Austin, you’re going to need this #NYT on the Groupon clone cottage industry
— Yipit, an aggregator of 335 daily deals sites, spawned 20 copycats itself #Jason Kottke introduces Stellar.io
— I’ve been playing with it for a while, and it’s great for surfacing interesting stuff #Colbert interviews Dan Sinker, the journalism professor behind @MayorEmanuel
— “time vortexes are funny things”; the whole thing needs to go to print via twitter.com #Windows 7's Microsoft Paint executable interpreted as audio
— surprisingly listenable via r/reddit.com #TIME's video feature on the indie gaming scene
— nice trend piece interviews the people behind Babycastles, Area/Code, and Osmos #Thanks for Trumpet Winsock
— used the essential Windows app in the mid ’90s? make it right by paying for it now #Lanyrd adds Firefox/Chrome extensions to see SXSW sessions in Twitter
— hey, that guy in the second screenshot looks familiar #Anatomy of a Crushing
— Maciej’s entertaining postmortem of the mini-exodus from Delicious to Pinboard via Nelson Minar #Slipstream, Chrome addon hides tweets by user or keyword
— not going to SXSW? you’re going to need this via twitter.com #Foursquare releasing 3.0 for iPhone/Android tonight
— now with recommendations, an overhauled leaderboard, and new ways to explore #Adobe's Wallaby, experimental converter from Flash to HTML5
— for Webkit browsers only; before and after via Hacker News #d3.js, Javascript library for manipulating data-driven documents
— some of the examples are jaw-dropping #The Million Song Dataset
— massive data dump from Echonest and Musicbrainz; this is begging for some large-scale infoviz #The IF Theory Reader
— free book collects thought-provoking writing about interactive fiction via MetaFilter #Auto-Tune the News takes on Charlie Sheen
— last two links about him ever, honest: NYT gets meta and, importantly, his history of violence against women #Waxy Goes to SXSW Interactive 2011
Every year, I think it’ll be my last, and every year, I keep going. Why? Because what makes SXSW Interactive special isn’t the panels, parties, BBQ, or endless free alcohol (though those all help). It’s the unique group of creative individuals that shows up in Austin every year — a wonderful mess of people, all stuck in the same city at the same time.
Those unique set of circumstances create a serendipity machine, and the people I meet each year keep me coming back, even as it busts at the seams. To that end, please track me down or say hi! That’s why I’m there. And here’s where you’ll find me:
Worst Website Ever II: Too Stupid to Fail
Monday, March 14 at 11am
Hilton, Salon D
After a three year absence, I’m bringing Worst Website Ever back to SXSW with an all-star lineup of designers, developers, and entrepreneurs. Join us as these very talented people pitch their worst website/app/startup ideas to a live audience in short, five-minute rounds.
This year, the lineup’s pretty amazing:
Gina Trapani (Lifehacker, Expert Labs)
Jeffery Bennett, (BetamaXmas, 2008’s runner-up with Image Search for the Blind)
Josh Millard, (Metafilter, viral musician)
Jonah Peretti, (Buzzfeed, Huffington Post)
Mike Lacher, (Wonder-Tonic, Wolfenstein 1-D, Geocities-izer)
And like last time, it’s judged by a real VC, Rob Hayes from First Round Capital. Winner gets funded!
ThinkUp: Austin Meetup
Saturday, March 12 at 5pm
The Ginger Man, outdoor patio
Curious about ThinkUp, or want to meet the people behind it? I’ll be joining Gina Trapani, Amy Unruh, Jed Sundwall, and other developers/users of ThinkUp at our second SXSW meetup. Come on out! We’ll be in the back patio of The Ginger Man, if weather permits.
Stalk Me
This year, I’ll be tracking interesting sessions on Lanyrd, and evening events on Plancast. And, of course, I’ll be mentioning any unusually great activity in real-time over on Twitter.
See you there!