SXSW Day 1

When I attend a conference I try to gravitate to new people I have not heard speak, and so far at SXSW that has definitely not been a problem.  Between the film and interactive panels there is just too much to choose from.  Being able to share conference space with a person like actor Bill Paxton, but also see developers and designers like Cindy Li and Jeremy Keith, is very interesting as they are all super stars in their own right.

Today the highlight panel for me was "Tag Your It."  Led by Heath Row (mediadiet.net) the panel of George Oates (flickr), Ben Brown (consumating.com) and Thomas Vander Wal (Mr InfoCloud),  tackled the issue of trends in tagging and its implications in building social networks.  The interesting fact I heard in this presentation is that Flickr now handles 3000 picture uploads a minute.  That is A LOT of data.  I am an organizing freak, though you may not always believe it looking at my desk in Dulles, at home and on my computers, everything has to be organized just so.  That is what makes Flickr so appealing to me, I tag/geo-tag photos, and I can sort on basically any combinations of these things.  Of course that is very self-serving, and a tag that I assign a photo, you the viewer may disagree with.  So there was a discussion of whether or not communities should police tags (I say no.)

Thomas Vander Wal then shared what got the biggest laugh of the panel.  If you check out amazon.com and navigate to Kevin Federline's "Playing with Fire" page you can now tag what this CD means to you.  Most of the tags I cannot repeat here in this blog space since this is a PG/PG-13 blog, but needless to say they are hysterical.  Building in tagging into generic products is a very interesting rating system.  In case I had been in a coma for the past 2 years, I now truly get an understanding of what people think of Federline.  But tagging provides an extra layer of meaning, because you can view other things that are tagged "talentless," or what a person who said Federline was talentless said about other things.  Building a spider web of networks via tags seems very natural, as the possibilities are endless.

Consumating.com, does exactly this.  I tag what I find interesting and then build a network of people who match my interests.  The system then also provides a chance for the person to tag me on what they thought I was like.

Just a reminder, tomorrow is my panel at 5PM, I would get there early as all the panels I have been too or seen from outside the door have been packed.  I will be posting some pictures tomorrow morning from the first few days here in Austin, including my run-in with a famous director/producer/actor who took on the ultimate eating challenge.