SXSW – Jumping Sharks, Hunting Snarks, Punting Sparks and Something Stark

Back again in the UK, after some time to reflect on SXSW. This is not so much a conference as a fully immersive experience. Downtown Austin is pretty much taken over by the Internet Tech crowd – and the not inconsiderable PR circus that surrounds it. In addition, as broadband becomes another distribution channel for artistic media, the line between the rest of SXSW – film and music – is increasingly blurred.

Anyway, here for what its worth is an impressionistic view, a series of points that, when viewed at a distance will, like a Seurat painting, hopefully come together into a whole picture.

Jumping Sharks

Before I came, a number of people opined that SXSW had jumped the shark, and passed its sell by date. I don’t think that was the case – SXSW as a festival of interactive digital technology is merely a stage on which the never ending dance of internet evolution is played out.

But have some of the individual dancers jumped the shark – absolutely! There were panels that were just dire. These were often by “A List” people who, although still having great reputations, are really living off past laurels and need to be retired and put to grass. It was often exacerbated by them using comfortable crony corroborators on the panels, forming mutual admiration societies up on the said sad podia.

But can you blame the organisers for this? Partly, to get the punters in they have to pimp the stars. But just remember, the punters voted for those panels as well. And we could have booed those people more actively.

And when it came to questions, were these panelists put in their place by some sharp retorts from the floor – no, all too often some dickhead would basically use the “question” time to pimp their company, or launch into a presentation of their own. It’s at the point the panel chair should have been far more sharp - If you haven’t asked a question in 30 seconds, get off the microphone. Guy Kawasaki charging $20 a question was a way of acknowledging that this was just Ad serving. (Incidentally, given the universal loathing of the company pimps, I’m surprised that they carried on much past the first day, but they did )

One of the pities was that the discipline of hashtagging individual sessions was lax, so its quite hard to split and define the Twitterstream to get a better idea on which panellists should be quietly dropped from next year, no matter how much they huff and puff about their whuffie.

Hunting Snarks

In fact, if I had a criticism of the audience, they were just too darn polite. Crap questioners should have been booed and lame panellists heckled (OK, it happened on the Twitterstreams, but there was surely something that could have been done more assertively.)

And of course behind every Old Time A Lister is a coterie of worshippers (and in some cases PR Ho’s ), filling the air and aether with their worshipful comments when the actual situation on the ground was dire.

In a way the 2 Hash-Kebab NonConferences organised by the Britpack were a reaction to all this, with people voted on or off the panel by the audience depending on the strength of their contribution and questions. I recall with pleasure Tom Coates being hounded off the panel - “Off! Off! Off!” they cried when he went on and on ad nauseam, and Danah Boyd getting a toilet roll hurled at her when she too hit the upper reaches of academic gobbledygook to explain some fairly simple stuff. Nothing should be sacred

In this world of User Generated Content, it is our responsibility to generate the discontent too. In short, SXSW needs less respectful listeners, and far more snarks

Punting Sparks

The thing is, SXSW is a huge stage, so quality will out - despite the whiff of entrenched Whuffie, there was a lot that was new, fresh and fascinating. There were other panels which were superb, often (especially I’d argue) those hosted be relative unknowns, who are those now pushing the envelope. Also the discussion groups by and large worked well, again often relative unknowns driving fascinating topics, members of the audience contributing enthusiastically and furious debates breaking out.

In terms of sparks of the New, here are some more observations:

- Real Time (or, strictly speaking Near Real Time) systems – the ‘Net is speeding up, the Next Web is going to be about far more real time transaction messaging systems

- Faster Client systems, especially browser based – much of today's client software was architected for a slower web, this will change dramatically over the next few years

- Fast means filtering – the experience this year of trying to use #sxsw to schedule anything, given its high volumes, showed graphically that search is not the issue, filtering is.

- Increasing blending of media and broadband distribution. The old business models are in collapse, the new ones still emergent, but this trend is not going to stop. The sheer number of people I met staying on for the film and music festivals, because that was what their startups/apps dealt with, is testament to this, never mind the one man (or girl) Web TV stations roaming around.

- The Great Privacy fight is gearing up – this was one of the most heavily argued areas, between the Ad-pros and Privacy pro’s.

- Location is a White Elephant – it will be sucked in to the above privacy arena, processed, and spat out as part of a broader emergence of profile management.

- Wholesale restructuring of the startup funding industry – in downtimes, things change! The reduction in cost of company startup vs the non reduction of dealmaking transaction costs has been hanging in the air in the gogo times, but now we will start to see major restructurings emerging.

- The emergence of Not-For-Profits as a new type of structure in the space – these enterprises will take money from governments and foundations and enjoy higher public approval (aka free marketing) and lower oversight, at least until the first Fund-The-Founders-Follies scandals emerge

- Not all Markets are Conversations. This was really brought home to me when selecting a seat flying home, and it was a $10 upgrade for a nice seat with legroom. My conversation was with a computer booking-in machine. (This is poignant, as Airline Seat Choice is a favourite example used by Conversation Marketeers, who believe that having a conversation will allow one in some mystical way to have these better seating outcomes without paying more)

- Not all Conversations are Markets - the adulation of Zappos was, to an old school business strategist like me, very odd. There are very few barriers to entry or sustainable competitive advantages to what they are doing (flogging shoes over the web with better customer service from the average). What they are doing however is using new media to PR themselves as a “More than this” show as hard as possible, and “PR’ing the PR” (to quote Ben Ellis) , by using others to amplify the message very cleverly. But this, too, will be copied. The question is will they have established market dominance by then?

- Social Capital is too important to leave to the Social Capitalists. Whuffie et al is just the first step, the systems at present are woefully inadequate in their feedback loops, operating currently to amplify the early-in players without being able to moderate for their defection (eg resting on laurels, as noted above).

- The Future of Mobile is, for now anyway, the iPhone as it is the only system in the West that allows a DoComo-like value chain to emerge for upstream application development at present. And everybody has one, where everybody is about 1.1% of all mobile owners! (Update - nice article on this by El Reg's Andrew Orlowski)

- Algorithm systems increasingly have curation limitations (I tried to get Techmeme's Megan McCarthy to talk about why she needs to exist, but she kept schtum and scuttled off sharpish!*)

(I'll add more as I go through my notes too)

Something Stark

Guy Kawasaki did a masterful laceration of Chris Anderson’s FreeConomics thesis (Quote of the Week – 20th century Freeconomics was economics, the 21st century's is Semantics). As readers will be aware, we think much of Freeconomics is more akin to Voodoonomics (Update - as does the Economist), but we will respond to this in more detail in a following post.

But in summary even though the Dumb Equity Funding Party is over for now, much of SXSW's panels still seemed to be a last Hurrah for the Good Old Days. I’m not sure its all beer and loathing in Austin, to me it seemed more that there was still widespread denial of The Crunch, with only a few panels dealing with such grubby terms as Returns on Investment.

Bruce Stirling noted that many of the people at SXSW would not be around again next year. He meant those that would not be able to afford to go, but I think we will also see many of this years’ panelist has-beens and mountebanks also cruelly exposed by the crunch of the next year. In tough times you get the Reverse Machiavelli Effect, as supporters of the old orders start to abandon it and adopt the new in more than a lukewarm manner. Just as real capital values have fallen, I suspect so will some social capital over the next year.

* Thats the end of our career on Techmeme I guess