Matt Van Hoven

Sunday, day three: One of the major themes this year has been sustainability. Though this isn’t a new idea, the term has slipped through panelists’ lips like an elephant on ice. And although the issue is a major topic of conversation, one thing is obvious: sustainability is not a practice.

This is nowhere clearer than around the conference’s many events, in the various gift bags and hanging from each attendee’s neck: most of what is being given away here will be thrown away. SXSW is a microcosm of America: a big wasteful beast parading as the future.

Today’s keynote from Valerie Casey‘s was called Systems Design and Inspiration. Casey is a consultant in the area of organizational processes, helping organizations, government and companies optimize their behaviors in a sustainable way. Often, she said, change is only possible when a unit’s internal structure is changed. Applying this rule to SXSW itself, the event will never be environmentally friendly if it continues to allow sponsors to waste paper, plastics and energy so rampantly.

Casey (site) referenced an enlightening case study from a research project done by students at California College of the Arts’ URBANlab, which broke down how far the ingredients of a locally bought taco traveled. The 19 ingredients traveled a total of 64k miles, or about 2.5 times around the globe.

Again, let’s apply this to South by Southwest. A few days prior to the event, the New York Times published a story deeming Austin the breakfast taco capitol: “When it comes to breakfast tacos, however, Austin trumps all other American cities,” the paper reported. Since arriving, all we’ve heard about are these breakfast tacos. Locals eat them every day, but for the 15,000 attendees who have descended on the city, it’s a safe bet half are jonesing for the “local” dish. I’ve had no fewer than four since arriving.

If URBANlab’s calculations stand up (and let’s assume that Austin’s tacos use a combination of locally and internationally sourced ingredients), food I’ve consumed has potentially traveled 256,000 miles &#151 or 10 times around the earth.

Certainly, tacos aren’t the only food with such a well-stamped passport. Rather, much of what we eat, wear, and otherwise rely on has traveled unfathomable distances to land in our laundry hampers and refrigerators. The problem is all anyone at South by (and at home) is doing is talking about how astonishing that is. Including me. Worse yet, the sum total of hearing and talking about tacos has made me hungry for another &#151 and so the wheel turns.

My only hope is to find a locally brewed beer and a locally distilled shot of vodka to wash away the weight of my desire for tacos. Who knew that indulging in a local treat would have such global implications? I’ll have to submit that as a panel idea for next year’s conference.

We don’t normally post comments but this one was too good to pass up. Responding to a post on Webnewser sibling blog PRNewser, Mediabistro Community Manager Seamus Condron writes:

“There is a lot of noise and bullshit at SXSW, but that’s true with any enormous event or enormous collection of data,” said Condron. “What’s true for content online is true for offline: you need to work hard and make decisions regarding what you choose to consume. This morning I walked out on three panels (note I said panels, and not core conversations or keynotes). I was frustrated to say the least, but I just got back from a keynote by Danah Boyd on privacy, and it was phenomenal. It made up for my shitty morning of ‘experts.’

The story Condron was responding to was a quick bite about PepsiCo Digital Director B. Bonin Bough‘s remark regarding South by. “People just don’t understand the event,” he said. “This is the Davos of digital…the reason why we’re here is this is the center of new thinking in this space.”

More From SXSWi: “Owyang: ‘You Can Never Hire Enough Community Managers’”

<img alt="cat.gif" src="/webnewser/files/original/cat.gif" width="180" height="236" class="alignright" vspace=3 hspace=5/Josh Clark is the application designer and developer who wrote the forthcoming O’Reilly title Tap Happy: Designing Great iPhone Apps. For the last ten years Clark’s been working as a design consultant out of France, but recently he took some time to sit down with some of the best app designers and discuss their processes. ‘Tap Happy’ is the result, and it’s meant for everyone from developers to the marketing types who likely need the education.

Clark is one of many doers attending SXSWi 2010. He explained that the book is meant to extol the importance of fluid design without sacrificing purpose.

He told WebNewser that because application design and development are often done by one person, his job was made easy. He spoke with designers of some of the best known iPhone apps, like Facebook in hopes of tapping into the logic behind these ubiquitous tools.

Click here for more about the book.

More From SXSW: “Who Owns User Data Stored in Cookies?”

During Friday’s panel, Smackdown: Consumer Privacy vs. Advertiser Revenue, panelist Jordan Mitchell was asked who owns data collected in cookies. Towing the industry line, Mitchell responded, “The user, obviously. But you don’t know what it’s tied to in some back-end database. Users should have total control over that and legitimate companies agree with that.”

The problem that the panel keeps coming back to is unscrupulous marketers that don’t disclose how they use your data, where and how it is stored, and whether or not they’re selling it to third and fourth parties. The issue is being discussed on a Federal level but as panelist Jay Habegger notes, “Marketers that behave badly with privacy probably won’t follow Federal regulations.” And that serves to tarnish those companies that are acting under the law.

Of course there are larger companies wrapped into this issue as well, like Google. One of the more interesting cases revolves around the White House’s use of embedded video on their site (which began last year) and the problem it caused for some users. ie their data was made public to Google, somewhat unwittingly. As CNET reported, the administration fixed the problem &#151 but if even Google and the White House are having issues, imagine the thousands of lesser known entities facing the same. Without a looking glass trained on them, the aforementioned “unscrupulous” marketers may not feel pressure to conform.

More SXSWi “GSD&M Has 35 ‘SXSurrogates’ at the Conference”

In the third and final segment of our interview with Mashable.com Editor-in-Chief Adam Ostrow we discuss Apple’s lack of transparency and whether or not it matters.

“Apple doesn’t tweet, it’s not as active on social media sites as some companies,” he explained. “But I think that’s part of what makes them interesting.” Like with the iPad, “you never know what’s going to happen.” Transparency for a company with highly sought-after products adds to its allure, and since there’s only one Apple, it makes sense for them to benefit from that.

Later, we asked Ostrow about privacy issues Facebook has dealt with of late. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said that people don’t care as much about privacy online than they used to, to which Ostrow responded, “I think people do care a lot. Unfortunately a lot of them don’t really realize they care until it comes back to hurt them.”

He continued, “Facebook’s goal was to encourage people to share publicly as much information as possible because it builds a richer search engine. It makes them more competitive in this real time search space everyone’s trying to get a piece of.” The problem seems to be finding a happy medium that protects information &#151 no small task &#151 while still running a viable site.

PART 1: How Mashable works can be found here.

PART 2: How pay walls will affect social sharing: negatively.

Media Beat is mediabistro.com’s interview series with the movers and shakers of the media world. View all past episodes at MediaBeat.com.

In part two of our conversation with Mashable.com Editor-in-Chief Adam Ostrow, he explains that pay walls will prevent social content sharing because “people don’t like to share stuff their audience has to pay for.” The result: pay walls essentially prevent protected content benefiting from social sharing.

Another tactic used by Mashable is syndication. Right now their content lands on CNN’s Tech page. Ostrow implies that although larger publications may not need or want syndication deals, pay walls would prevent that form of marketing as well.

In PART 3, we’ll ask Ostrow about last year’s rumors that his site was going to be sold to AOL.

PART 1, on how Mashable works, can be found here.

PART 3: The effects of dwindling social privacy and Apple’s extreme lack of transparency.

Media Beat is mediabistro.com’s interview series with the movers and shakers of the media world. View all past episodes at MediaBeat.com.

Mashable.com is a force both in the Web journalism and social media worlds. By leveraging the Web’s social capabilities, Mashable has built a reputation as a go-to source for all things social &#151 using the same techniques they write about to achieve staggering growth. Adam Ostrow has orchestrated much of that success, and as editor-in-chief is tasked with ensuring the site continues to burgeon.

In this first portion of our three-part interview, Ostrow lays out the more technical aspects of his newsroom. What once was a post-it-as-you-get-it site is today a pragmatic entity looking to branch into investigative journalism. “As we’ve grown it’s become a much more professional structure,” explains Orstow. It may seem funny to say that every post is now seen by an editor, but anyone with a hint of blogging experience understands how difficult it is to be “first” with news.

Covering the social media sphere is an instant win for the publication. “It’s almost a perfect storm,” said Ostrow. “When you cover the social media space people are inclined to share articles. It’s this whole…snow ball effect.” With 2 million Twitter followers and a couple hundred thousand Facebook fans, it’s safe to say Mashable has stuck its flag firmly in the social media sand.

PART 2: We discuss transparency and social media.

PART 3: We discuss Apple’s lack of transparency and Facebook’s privacy issues.

Media Beat is mediabistro.com’s interview series with the movers and shakers of the media world. View all past episodes at MediaBeat.com.