Friendships

Selfbubble by Heather Clisby of ClizBiz

This is what you end up doing during the first hour at SXSW --you sort through all the schwag and crap. What's funny about this photograph is that it is one of at least 4 pics taken within an hour by passersby. People were whipping out cameras and cell phones to click me in my bubble of schwaggarific mess.

SXSW is all about the generalist influencers. There's a lot of tech, media and political conferences that litter event calendars but SXSW is the place to go for the people who are experts cross disciplines. So you'll have people with strong practices as technologists, desgins, mediaologists, enterpreneurs, activists. I honestly do not know of any other conference in the United States that has the quantity of influencers that SXSW has.

Deanna Zandt, Lynn D. Johnson, Robert Scoble, Elisa Camahort, Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardin, Christopher Carfi, Thomas Van der Wal, George Kelly, Baratunde Thurston, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Chris Norton, Nancy Scola, Rachel Krammer Bussel, Erica Mauter, Jason Tooney, Christian Crumlish, Noel Hidalgo, Mary Hodder, Min Jung Kim, Tony Pierce, Steve Garfield, Chris Pirillo ... and I know I am missing a lot of other people I personally know, but the coffee and the new daylight savings time are screwing up my short term memory.

Which brings me to the toy of choice for SXSW : TWITTER.

OMFG!

Talk about early adopters. It's hard for me to explain how addictive it is, but, just so you get a taste for it, keep this window open for about an hour. Make sure you refresh every 10-20 minutes.

Then you'll understand :