SXSWi 2012: Trends & Panels

Voting for SXSW 2012 ends this Friday, and I’ve been racing to scan through all 3, 278 submissions to try to find the gems, to find friends who are also proposing, to find some clue into the future of tech. I collected a bit of data during last year’s panelpicker process, but never got around to using it, so…tada! Last year was the first time that Interactive eclipsed Music, and there is much consternation every year that South-by has jumped the shark, has become too much about marketing, too many startups trying to launch. But this year the total number of panel submissions is up 40%, and the Marketing category continues to dominate — 11% of entries last year fell into the Marketing bucket, this year it’s 17%. You can also check out this rad data viz of common words & themes in panelpicker descriptions.

With the massive increase in number of proposals, and decrease in categories, it’s totally overwhelming to browse the panelpicker this year, IMHO, even with the seemingly random, “You Might Also Like” sidebar. So, in the spirit of the zillion other SXSWi 2012 panelpicker recommendation posts out there…In no particular order:

Panels I’m Involved In:

• Kill the Follower Count & Embrace Your Mission, me & Gwydion!
• Hashtags and Non-Profit Community Development, Gwydion & I!
• Theatre: Games Audiences Play, 2amt!

Friends, colleagues, & people/orgs I admire/adore:

• Creating a Brand Strategy that Motivates, Threespot
• Create Brand-Aligned Social Change, Ashoka
• Social Media Boundaries: Personal/Personnel Policy, Amy Sample Ward
• How Crowdfunding Changes Entrepreneurship, StartSomeGood
• Making Social Media Measurement Sexy, Beth Kanter
• It’s Not Slacktivism: Truth of Online Organizing, Change.org
• Turning Online Donors Into Change Investors, Geoff Livingston
• Let’s Talk Video for Social Change, InvisiblePeople.tv
• Unleashing Advertising’s Age of Engagement, Deep Focus
• From Hashtag To Hardback: A Book Born On Twitter, Baratunde
• Data Visualization, Policy, and the Arts, Ian David Moss
• The Hills are Alive…With Social Data, Danielle Brigida
• Everything is a Remix, So Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon
• Snackable Content — Working in a byte size future, Jess3
• Shadow Bureaus: Get the News No One Else Gets, Rob Bole
• Streamweaver: I believe you can take me, live, TechSoup Global
• How to Run a Social Site and Not Get Users Killed, WITNESS
• [4 Different Ashoka Panels], Ashoka
• Positively Inspired Change Campaigns, Tom Dawkins

Panels I’m Most Likely To Actually Attend:

• Beyond Chart Porn: Data Vis for Action
• Playing the City London’s Gamified Transport
• HTML5 vs Native Apps — Who Will Win?
• Bizarre User Behavior and How to Explain It
• Agency 2.0: Introducing the Innovation Lab
• How hackdays are shaping the startups of tomorrow
• Maps of Time: Big Data as Narrative
• Real-time APIs: Mobile meets instant gratification
• Click to Continue: Designing for the Community
• Harnessing the Power of the Benevolent Internet
• Do you *know* how influential I am?
• BRAVO’s Mobile-Social Living Room
• The Real World X- Community Management
• Social Game Mechanics: Design Patterns and Metrics
• Daily Deals and The Evolution of Local Commerce
• Fueled by Coffee: Coworking and Economic Growth
• Exploring The Top Startup Accelerator Programs
• Beyond Food Trucks: Where Food Is Headed Next
• Personalization, Serendipity and Filter Bubbles

And a few awards

• Let’s See How Well They Get Along: SSO (Single Sign On): Why does it suck so often?
• Let’s See How Well They Get Along Part 2: Influence and the Art of Data Science
• Actually Forward Thinking: F**k Privacy: Neuromarketing is the Web’s Future
• So Profiles Are Going to be Live by SXSW?: How to Make Google+ Work for Your Business
• Hipster Showdown: Brooklyn the Brand;How The Internet Made BK Famous
• You’re Going to do What to my Cellphone?!: How Zillow Found Your Pillow
• Datagasm: Personal Datastores: The Internet As Graph & Data-Obsessed: Wiring Yourself
• How Transparent Can Facebook Get: The web is dead, long live the web
• Ripe for Innovation: Is That Your Final Offer? Mobile Dynamic Pricing
• Why Aren’t We Already Talking About This?: Socializing the Presidency: Digital Politics 2012
• Same, Same, But Different (than my panel!): Hashtag-Chats: Heretics, Horses & Honey
• Ultimate (Sexy) Nerdery: The Math that Matters in the Real-time Web
• Because They Had Awesome Stories to Tell Last Year: Digital Debauchery with Anthony Bourdain
• Most Likely to Accidentally Involve a NSFW PPT: What’s ‘The Next Big Thing’ in Social Networking?
• Obligatory, “My Girlfriend Works in Water Conservation Law so I Must be Interested in this Topic”: H2uhOh: New Technology Can Solve Water Scarcity
• On With the Schadenfreude: Millions Of Users, Millions Of Problems
• In Which I Might Actually Learn Something Useful at SXSW: The Zombie User Apocalypse Overran Your Database
• Wait Until You Hear the Beatboxing (Srsly): #NoFailWhale: Tweet More, Drop Out Less
• So Bad It’s Good?: The Airbnb of Anything: the growth of P2P markets
• My Life Summed Up: Adding value as a non-technical no talent assclown
• Most Likely To Meet My Intellectual Doppelganger: I Used Data Analytics to Game Online Dating

There are mountains of panels on arts & artists I discovered in my browsing. So many in fact, I predict next year there will be a dedicated category. A longer post delving into the following list will (hopefully! If I can get my act together before voting ends Friday!) follow on 2amt.

The Arts

• Culture vs Technology: Death Match
• Your Arts Organization = A Start-up Business
• Purveyors of Cool: Art, Culture and Brands
• Marketing Museums: From the Web to the Door
• Meetup : Booze, Bites and Branding
• If Bach could Tweet: Why tech will save the arts
• Transmedia Writing for Screenwriters
• Film, Art and Branding in Experiential Design
• Against the wall: Converse takes street art social
• The frontline report of Japanese Interactive Arts
• QR Codes, Technology, and a New Era of Fine Art
• How the 2nd screen changes sports journalism (not technically arts related, but you see where I’m going with this…)
• “But Is It Art?”: The Aesthetics of Social Culture
• Storytelling Beyond Words: New Forms of Journalism (not technically arts related, but you see where I’m going with this…)
• The Public is Present: Exhibition Subsites at MoMA
• Lowering the Velvet Rope: Access, Art, & Internet
• Artists in Labs: Participatory Design at Eyebeam
• Performance and Technology: Keeping Arts Alive
• Cultural Conversation: Do we need Arts Journalism?
• Social Storytelling: Real-World Experience
• Bridging Art & Big Data for Global Empowerment

Not to mention a ton of other lists of great panels you should check out.

Did I miss anything/anyone? Any of you planning on going to SXSW this year? Rock the Vote!

Quick note: I have NO IDEA why wordpress broke my header images. Ignore. Now off to investigate.