Picking panels for SXSW 2010

SXSW was good but some of the panels weren’t – too many sessions were the result of concerted ballot stuffing by well-connected and determined groups of people (especially that one about the LA tech community).

However, this year I’m aware of various friends and acquaintances who have panels shortlisted in the Panel Picker – SXSW would undoubtedly be improved by their presence so I’ve voted for them. These are they:

• Making Life Playable through Data: Social Games and Playing Outside
• Pervasive Games and Playful Experiences: Rendering the Real World
• Seeing Round Corners: Artists as Innovators in the Corporate World
• Community Building: Organization Without Organization
• #kebab Presents… Whose Panel Is It Anyway?
• New Ways of Collecting: Digital Archives and Contemporary Historie

You can sign up and vote for these folks too if you like. Either way, good luck to Capsule, Mudlark, Clare Reddington, Andy Gibson and Lloyd Davis.

And in case you were wondering this isn’t matey ballot-stuffing. Nothing at all like that.

Links for 8 July 2009

• VideoLAN – Open Source multimedia and streaming solutions – The only media player you’ll ever need (although you may want others). It loads quickly and plays everything and has just been released in it’s first proper full version
• FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson – The manifesto for making money by giving stuff away. True to form Anderson’s put the book online for free via Scribd
• Thomas Moronic – There’s just something very cohesive and unfussy about the layout of this blog, especially the ordering of the sidebar. When you spend your time reading RSS feeds you miss seeing the content in the context it was (most likely) intended. I’ve followed Thomas’s writings for a while, inherited when I nabbed Pete Ashton’s OPML file for CiB but rediscovered the blog itself when looking for examples of good writers’ blogs to point to
• Socialreporter – Crowds, tribes, teams: Tuttle turns to consulting – Interesting business model this. Tuttle is the name of a weekly social media get-together in London (from which the format for the Birmingham Social Media Cafe was lifted pretty directly) – “Tuttle has been going very well, and has now spawned The Tuttle Team. This is an innovative consulting approach to discover and understand client needs using a process of refinement through three forms”