SXSW Interactive: Report from the Floor, Day 1

By Sara Smith, Managing Editor, ViaMetric

In which our intrepid girl reporter learns that you can’t make a movie with rodents if the studio already made a movie with rodents this year, that nobody wants to look like a cheapskate on the Web, and that it’s more fun designing for WWE than for Spin.

Day 1

First panel: Making your hobby into a business. Dogster’s Ted Rheingold moderates. One of the new and novel ways to make money on the Web: microsponsorships. Have your readers buy something that makes them feel like part of the community. Am I Hot or Not reportedly sells little digital flowers that you can give to other users. Ze Frank sells sponsorship duckies. People love to buy the very expensive flowers and duckies, probably due in equal parts to wanting to show their support for the site and also not wanting to look cheap.

A PR guy stands up at the end of the session and asks what the panelists’ three main strategies were for getting the word out about their awesome products. All panelists are puzzled. “We just did good work, and our audience found us,” they say. The PR guy is obviously frustrated. This will be a recurrent theme this conference: people who have achieved some measure of online success believe the Internet is a glorious meritocracy. Other people: not so much.

Next up: Douglas Coupland in a room called the Day Stage, which is sort of ironic on account of how the room is shrouded in perpetual darkness. Across the room from the Day Stage is the Day Stage Cafe, where they sell moist, spongy pizzas from Pizza Hut for six dollars. Coupland is distracted by the Cafe. He is distracted by pretty much everything.

Next up: From Blog to Book. A panel featuring John Hargrave from Zug, and Tucker Max. He, too, extols the virtue of quality content (specifically, his own). He also admits that, back in the day, he set up several email personas who would write in to College Humor and ask them to please, please check out the marvelous verbal stylings of Tucker Max. So, you know—quality content plus a little old-fashioned American ingenuity, and the next thing you know you’re moving 2000 books a week.

Last panel of the day: High class versus low-class Web design. This one was pretty interesting, in part because at least one speaker resisted the very premise of the panel. Khoi Vinh of the New York Times kept saying stuff like, “We do lots of user testing, but we haven’t really thought about their demographic. We don’t talk about archetypes. It’s not really useful when you’re trying to get somebody to find a button.” He and the other designers on the panel seemed way more focused on usability than on cultural questions.

Somebody in the audience suggested that lower-class products rely more on direct marketing and statistics, while higher-end products rely on branding and the expertise of a visionary individual (take Apple, for example). This of course cut me to the little lump of coal where my heart should be, because I want to believe that somebody could do statistics-driven marketing and research and still be, you know, classy. New York Times guy to the rescue: “A lot of high-class sites take analytics very seriously, and they’d be foolish not to.”

And yes, Brant Louck of World Wrestling Entertainment said that working at the company has indeed made him a wrestling fan, and that it’s more fun to design wrestling magazines than hipster music publications.

 

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