Too Much At Once: SXSW 2013 Report from the Trenches

Arrived in Austin late Saturday night in time for a beautiful, noisy thunderstorm—a sparkling deluge that soaked the parched earth and was welcomed joyously by the grateful natives. It left behind a clear blue sky and a cheerful sun blazing benignly over all these tens of thousands of folks who have flocked to town for SXSW to grab and probe at the newest and coolest, to wait in line and dash from session to session, to be in the know and be able to say we heard it here first and then to go back to their respective somewheres enriched and inspired.

Truly it is too much to take in at once.

Surely there are things I will learn that will make it easier for the next time—like that if there is a really, really long line to get into a session that I should neither wait in that line nor forgo the session but rather wait until everyone has entered and the line is gone and then just breeze right into the room.

And what have I learned and seen thus far, other than that Austin is the land of food trucks, that Sixth Street is a perpetual frat party, and that Samsung will give me a new battery for my Galaxy S3 rather than make me wait while it charges? Well, here are some snippets from sessions I have heard so far...

Dan Gardner (Code and Theory), Alex Breuer (The Guardian) and Dave Rupert (Paravel) on responsive design: Scrolling is a reading style that went out with papyrus… the key is modules: small, flexible, moveable, able to be reworked based on need, platform, content… different needs will determine the orientation toward image or typographical orientation… content determines design (hurrah for content!)...

David Carr of The New York Times on the Gates of Heaven, Gates of Hell, i.e. gated content. Works for NYT, and those gates are intentionally leaky, btw. Even though Google is two times bigger than the entire news industry, their number of paid subscribers is nothing shabby. Carr says, in that special way Carr says things: "Don't give your sh** away for free."

And in the interest of not missing anymore of the deluge of content here, I shall take my leave for now... (you here too? what have you seen/heard of interest?)