SXSWi How to Rawk panel

Min Jung Kim is leading a panel for people at SXSWi for the first time. "How to Rawk SXSW".

The gist of this panel is: We're popular and cool. Here is what you should do: Stalk us. We offer ourselves up as stalkable. Follow us and what we're doing, and you'll have fun.

Their advice is focusing around how to make social contacts and manage them with techie tools, and how to manage a constantly shifting flow of social information.

remember to sleep and eat

Or not, but try not to look like a skeeze. If you show up in the same clothes, buy a sxsw tshirt downstairs!

If you meet someone famous that you hate, hand them your camera and ask them to take a picture of you and your friends. That's what Nick did to Jason Calcanis. (huge laugh from audience)

Glenda: Talk to people you don't know. Don't stick with your clique.

Min Jung: Crash that party. Go to lunch with people who you don't know but whose blogs you read.

The room is packed, and right now the panelists are all making fun of being sanfransocial and the idea of "continuous partial attention". You're at dinner with people who are only halfway there because they're texting with people across town who are cooler than you. What to keep from your swag bag and what to throw away. Keep: temporary tattoos, stickers, the "Make" booth stuff, the sharpie marker, the bag itself. The pocket guide.

Actually I hear that you're supposed to get other people to color in bits of your sxsw bag, which is meant to be colored in.

They're joking horribly about getting the autographs of people who are internet famous.

Sync the sxsw calendar with your iCal or with your phone or ipod...

Twitter, Dodgeball, keeping up with the whirl of activity by tracking or stalking your chosen geek hero or conference cruise director.

Personally I can't keep up with Min Jung! She's a party animal!

I didn't catch what they said about microformats and the hcard markup for the sxswi site, but it looked good. It's somewhere on Tantek's site.

Nick recommends mobile web and using twitter. He makes fun of Tantek some more and Tantek's constant texting. A warning from Lynne Johnson not to run up a $250 text message bill. Use the web site instead (again, twitter...)

I don't use mobile web, but watching everyone do it here tempts me to get it all set up. The sxswi site looks pretty useful.

I've been thinking I should make a Ning thingamajig for a sxswi social network. Not to diss microformats and hcard, but I want everything as a social network so I can remember "I met so and so, can't quite remember what we talked about, but they were a friend of this other person whose name I do know." I could find people again from that, where I can't find them in a dump of a million hcards or even the stack of business cards I end up with post-conference. Now we're looking at Lynne's twitter page. Plazes. More Dodgeball. More twitter. Consumating. How to find open wifi spots. sxswbaby.com, Catherine Yu has put together a great checklist of stuff for the conference that will help you make the most of the conference.

It's the age of twitter. Damn, people! At least I know I'm not alone in my inability to shut up about it.




There is a lot of advice about parties. I like parties, but am not really that into being in bars; bad knees, slightly deaf, and really I like to just be anywhere reasonably quiet, with computers and wireless. So, for the non-party animals, the geeks, the introverts, or the shy, I would say that you can "rawk" sxswi by inviting random people to hang out with you. Go to lunch or dinner with one other person, and make a more in depth connection than one you might make at a huge sxsw party or music show. Have a conversation, write about it and blog it, link up to people, engage with them online a little bit. Maybe make a connection outside your comfort zone, talk to someone you don't know who might not be in your exact area of techie expertise. I believe strongly in the value of that kind of connection and conversation. For me, the point of conferences like this is, Deepen the Conversation.

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