SXSW 2009

Though this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, got off to a slow start in the keynote department, and often drove us to distraction with its near-unilateral avoidance of external factors such as the nation’s crumbling economy and the continued deterioration of the media-industrial complex, it picked up steam courtesy of the many smaller presentations and panels surrounding community, social interaction and ways to share and make portable online data and identity.

In our view, however, the biggest payoff at SXSWi didn’t stem from any one announcement, launch, speech or celebration, but instead spanned many of them, often at the same time…

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Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Barring any Wi-Fi upsets, of which there have been many out at SXSW, our managing editor Rebecca Fox will be live-tweeting the closing keynote talk, in which Alltop’s Guy Kawasaki will interview Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.

Follow Rebecca on Twitter here.

Fresh off today’s launch of his site’s new customizable My.Alltop service, we video interviewed Alltop founder Guy Kawasaki prior to his SXSWi ’09 closing keynote, in which he’ll be interviewing Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson to discuss the latter’s upcoming book, Free, advocating open and available content to help make companies money.

We asked Kawasaki about the future of print media, the fate of free, how Alltop’s new offering will aid time-crunched users, and why he has yet to acquire a Kindle for those trashy novels he claims he just can’t quit. Watch what he has to say here.

Transparency, openness and community emerged as governing themes at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference — and no, not just in the softballs thrown by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh in his opening remarks on Saturday. At the same time, the conference created no small amount of cognitive dissonance for those with a mind toward the largely-unmentioned ‘e’-word here in Austin — the economy.

From the open APIs that dominated last year’s sessions, the conversation has turned to openness in data, identity, and information sharing, as panel talks and smaller-scale ‘Core Conversations’ centered around freely exchanged information transferable across sites, properties, and platforms, regardless of their owners and operators. Still, the barriers aren’t entirely permeable yet, despite the efforts of groups like OpenSocial, due to “fear of loss of control, fear of losing quality control and ability to filter and moderate content,” according to MySpace’s Max Engel, since it “has severe content implications.” In the talk “Becoming Open,” MySpace developer Max Engel, charged with overseeing the social networking site’s open ID and offsite APIs, acknowledged, “opening out is still happening much more than opening in.” Touting his veteran bona fides, a Thomson Reuters participant urged, “Maybe we can get the story out to old, big media companies that open doesn’t just mean stuff you can download,” pointing out its applications in software portability, data portability, personal identification portability, and business model portability.

Other evolutions from last year’s conference: Facebook’s plunge from superstar to sad-clown status, and Twitter’s total domination and elegant absence…

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We’re hoping thinking the sensation-filled talk at SXSW ’09 — this year’s ‘Gossip’ panel, if you will — promises to be Twitter book compiler Nick Douglas‘ and our buddy, Sexerati blogger Melissa Gira Grant‘s ‘Sex Lives of the Microfamous’ talk Monday at 3:30pm Central, 4:30pm Eastern. So, for your potentially NSFW delectation, we’ll be liveTweeting it then here. Follow if your boss isn’t looking…

BusinessWeek‘s Stephen Baker interviews political prediction prodigy, FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver in a Sunday keynote at SXSW (via)

Toothless: That was the assessment of many in the 1,000+ audience to hear Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh‘s opening remarks Saturday at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival. Known in the tech set for its “customer service above all” ethos, Zappos.com is considered a model by many for its early embrace of Twitter to fuel customer service, and for its emphasis on transparency.

In an address with a hearty helping of self-help, Hsieh told the crowd he turns reporters loose when they come to visit the company for a story. “We believe so strongly in our culture, we’re not afraid of what employees will say,” he enthused, describing the “weirdness” and individuality Zappos seeks in employees. “If [reporters] talk to three different employees, they’ll get three different answers to what it’s like to work at Zappo’s.” Given Hsieh’s fanatical-sounding approach to recruitment and training in the interest of alignment, this reporter finds that tough to believe. All that indoctrination doesn’t seem like the recipe for the diversity Hsieh was touting. We found ourselves wishing the format for Hsieh had been an interview with a tech/business journalist who could ask him pointed questions about what happens when the economy takes a dive and people are clinging to their jobs like life rafts — can the same sincerity and singularity of purpose persist when employees are forced to consider the bottom line in their own lives?

What of FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver, number-crunching ingenue and presidential prediction prodigy?

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Mediabistro.com’s managing editor Rebecca Fox is headed to Austin for the SXSW Interactive Conference. She’ll be on the lookout for stories on digital media innovations and about how the economy is affecting the industry. Her stories will appear here on WebNewser through the weekend and into next week.

Rebecca is also heading up a core conversation, along with Rachel Sklar, entitled, “Why is Blogging Bloodsport for Women.” That’s Sunday morning at 11:30amCT, if you’re there.