10 days since I got home from South by Southwest Interactive 2007, but real life stuff like buying a home and doing work kept the wrap-up unwrapped until now.

I won’t do detailed notes, you can listen to an expanding number of the panels as podcasts if you’re interested. Here are some impressions:

Will Wright - gave an I’ve-got-a-lot-of-stuff-here-and-you-better keep up keynote on story and gaming, which (so far as I could keep up) was pretty intriguing. The demo of Will’s much anticipated evolution game Spore was really cool. I’m a very occasional gamer, but seriously worry about my productivoty once Spore finally arrives.

Bruce Sterling - a somewhat toned down closing rant from Bruce this year, compared to last, I thought. Still well worth a listen though, and a great way to recalibrate from the all too easy ‘web 2.0 will save the world’ with a generous serving of ‘we’re all doomed, and here’s my eloquent and well researched opinion on why’.

Alex Steffen - I’m a big fan of the Worldchanging ‘bright green’ philosophy for how we deal with the global challenges we seem to face in abundance right now. I had seen this same presentation when Alex was in town for the Worldchanging book launch, but the message and messenger are engaging enough to stand repeat viewing. I liked ‘green you geek’ as a suggested approach to the ‘ok I need to change, but where do I begin?’ question. That is, you change in the thing you really care about in life, you stand a better chance of influencing others by example if you try to green the thing you are really passionate about.

Henry Jenkins & Danah Boyd - This was another one I could only barely keep up with, but what I followed was pretty consistently interesting. Henry and Danah ranged over the culture of fandom, mashups and the horribly damaging culture of fear in US politics.

I had a great time in Austin, and expect to be back next year. Sunshine, tech, grackles, beer and cool folks (nod to Michele and David) are a great way to get the year rolling.

Sunday morning I caught the panel Game Perverts: A Robot, a DS and a Dot Matrix Printer Menage a Trois.

The guys on the panel were all doing some really cool stuff with hacking consumer hardware, an idea I like a lot. For she shear I -can’t-believe-he-got-that-to-work ingenuity I was really impressed by Paul Slocum’s hack of an old dot matrix printer, to make it into a musical instrument. By changing the timing of the pins hitting the paper he could generate musical notes with a printer.

I also really liked the work Bob Sabiston had done with a homebrew drawing/animation app on the Nintendo DS gameboy. The app seemed small but perfectly formed and he is working on plans to se the DS’ wifi capabilities to be able to share drawings through the web from the device. The image above is of a full sized canvas print of pixel art that Bob drew in his app, apparently while watching TV - obviously a talented guy.

I have a quarter-baked idea about tying in the DS/drawing/WiFi thing with the ideas we’re kicking around at Wireless Toronto for developing local engagement/creation aspects of our 30 location specific portals. More to come on that I hope.

This was my first panel of SXSWi 2007. Featuring: Ted Rheingold, Top Dog, Dogster Inc.; Tara Hunt, CoFounder & CMO, Citizen Agency; Gabe Rivera, CEO, Techmeme; Shanalyn Victor, Owner/Designer, Pixelgirl Shop; Ryan Carson, Carson Systems.

The title didn’t excite me, but the panelists seemed like an interesting bunch so I thought I’d give a try. Glad I did, it was a really energetic and interesting discussion.

The general drift of the conversation was that it’s cool to just start doing something online because you think it’s cool or important, and then figure out how or if to attach a business model later on. The exception to that rule was Ryan Carson, who has had failures in the past trying to graft business model onto a successful project, so now starts with the model baked into the idea.

There was lots of anecdote and personal experience, which for me lifts a panel above ‘I could have read that on a dozen blogs’ to ‘yeah, that was a worthwhile human experience’. Unfortunately I don’t report that anecdote stuff well, but here are a few quotes I liked (paraphrased to match my not taking rate).

Tara Hunt - ‘it’s cheap to fail, so fail often’. Seems right to me, it’s an often mentioned driver of web 2.0 that open source and cheap hardwcompanies are (amongst others) allow one or two people to build a web site/app/thing quickly and cheaply. You don’t need to borrow $1mil to get it going, so it doesn’t matter so much if your thing turns out to be a big thing or not. So you can try often and fail often, searching for the thing that works and hopefully having fun along the road.

Asked by an audience member ‘What’s your exit strategy?’ Shanalyn answered that she didn’t really have one ‘the premise of Pixel Girl is that it’s stuff picked by me, and I can’t see anyone else being me.’ This seemed to be a theme, Tara said something similar and again Ryan was the exception to the rule saying that all companies should be built with the intention of being sold (not sure if I got that right, if I did then I disagree, depends on what sort of company you’re talking about I guess).

I really liked the tone of the talk in general. The message seemed to be that you should do something you love (and accept that, at least to start, you may be the only one who loves what you’re doing) and you can’t go too far wrong. With that message, brought to you my Disney Corp., I’m closing the browser to go see the first panel of SXSWi day 2.

I’m at South by Southwest Interactive for the next five days, so I expect by brain to be buzzing non-stop (except when it’s quieted by free, web 2.0 sponsored beer).

I’m going to try to blog in bite sized chunks during the conference, as there will be no shortage of interesting material but a significant shortage of time. So this is a warm up, be warned - there’s no story arc here, this post is all exposition.

I love buildings (at least the potential of buildings, if not the common execution). From my recent Amazon purchases you might even say I’m a wannabe architect (Pattern Language, Architecture of Happiness and Design Like You Give a Damn).

I enjoy the the idea of small but superbly designed houses, discussed here. Maybe I’ll build one myself one day, I do have some relevant skills as I did a 2-month apprenticeship in timber framing a few years ago (big timbers, lots of powertools and no metal fasteners, very cool building technique).

One day maybe I’ll build that timber frame cabin I have the plans for. Until then, I’m looking for ways to work my architectural interests into my web development life.

If you’re running WordPress 2.1.1 then you need to upgrade to 2.1.2 immediately, as 2.1.1 has a major security breach. And of course I installed 2.1.1 for a client only yesterday, Sod’s law, the upgrade only took a couple of minutes though.

Usually I wouldn’t do these security warnings on the Hogtown blog (although it would certainly raise my post frequency) but WP is a widely deployed blog platform so I thought this one was worth a mention.