unwiredben

Going over my schedule for the last ten days, I've computed my final tallies, with highlights in bold:

14 films - My Big Fat Independent Film, Seoul Train, The Aristocrats, Cavite, Promedio Rojo, Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic, The Puffy Chair, The Fearless Freaks, SXTV, Highway Courtesans, Max and Grace, Kissing on the Mouth, Comedia Shorts, Culture Clash in AmeriCCa

13 bands - Sonya Kitchell, Mike Doughty, The Thermals, The Album Leaf, Sleater-Kinney, Apollo Sunshine, By Divine Right, Trashcan Sinatras, Beangrowers, Love Tractor, Magnapop, Chris and Thomas, Ditty Bops

6 Interactive Panels - Open Source Marketing, How to Grow Online Communities, Ana Marie Cox, Al Franken, How to Trick-Out Your Blog, Taking Your Act on the Road With Mobile Technology

3 trade shows - Film/Interactive, Music, Flatstock

15 ideas for improving the SXSW Palm OS schedule

5 business cards from people I had conversations with at the conference

AWARDS
Best Swag Award goes to TalentMatch.com that was giving out copies of both the Elmore Leonard novel "Be Cool" and the soundtrack to the movie. Runner up is the 40 free downloads card from eMusic.com.

Venue with a View Award goes to the 18th Floor Lounge at the Crowne Plaza. It's a great place to see the lights of Austin at night with big glass windows.

College Music Never Dies Award goes to the Magnapop showcase. I've got to pull out "Hot Boxing" and listen to it ASAP!

You Need a Badge Award goes to the pigeon that strutted around the Convention Center theater before "Cavite".

Excellent Way to Take Advantage of a Business Opportunity Award goes to Thai Passion on 7th Street which stayed open until 3AM during the festival.

Tonight was a two showcase night, but what a pair they were. The venue was the 18th floor lounge of the Crowne Plaza hotel, just off 5th Street next to IH-35. The showcase was sponsored by San Diego's KCRW and hosted by Mr. Morning Becomes Eclectic, Nic Harcourt. First up was the 10:00 spot with Chris and Thomas who played lots of instruments and sung really soulful pop songs. Very enjoyable. Then at 11:00, Amanda and Abby, a.k.a The Ditty Bops, went on stage. First impression: Amanda is unnaturally tall. Second impression: they're so adorable. Third impression: utter amazement at their instrumentation and vocals. I already loved their record, but the live experience is so much better. They've got a great sense of humor while performing. The gig got a warm welcome from a mostly non-Austin crowd, and after the the show, I got to personally ask Amanda to bring the group back to Austin to play as soon as possible. I picked up a couple of stickers from them too -- one will soon be on my car's bumper :)

I got home about 2:30AM from a night of musical fun!

9:25 - Get to Exodus after dinner and see the last three songs from Apollo Sunshine. They rocked.

10pm - watch Canadian rockers By Divine Right tear up the stage with a great performance. I'm in the front row, leaning on the monitor speaker. Many thanks to the thoughtful orangepaisley for bringing spare ear plugs.

11pm - get to see Trashcan Sinatras from the same vantage point and really dig their hypnotic Scottish pop/rock music.

11:50ish - see the last song by the Beangrowers, a cool band from Malta that's just finishing up at Lava Lounge. I snag a CD from their manager.

12:15ish - Love Tractor, historic Athens, Georgia jangle-pop group, finally goes on after futzing with their equipment for a long time. They're pretty good, and I trade a palmOne business card for a promo copy of their about-to-be released CD, "Black Hole"

1am - My religious experience of the evening begins as Magnapop start their show. Lots of new songs, but also some great ones from their original three albums, ones I know by heart and can totally sing along to. I'm right up by the stage, right next to the speaker, and seeing them play these songs just feet away from me makes me giddy. After the show, I say hello to Linda, the lead singer, who's really friendly, telling her that I've followed them since hearing "Merry" on Album 88 while at Georgia Tech, then I pick up their 2005 CD "Mouthfeel" from a stash that Linda was keeping in her SXSW Music bag.

I've been seeing tons of Treo 600s and Treo 650s here at SXSW, and I've spotted half a dozen users of the SXSW schedule application. It's nice seeing people use our program; it feels like we made their lives a little better.

I just posted a baker's dozen of photos from the Mike Doughty show over at my SXSW mobblog. Check it out at http://www.splashblog.com/unwiredben. It was a great set, featuring some of my favorite songs off of Rockitty-Roll and some new stuff, along with a cover of Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" that I correctly called, earning me a high-five from another audience member.

Now at Emo's with a growing crowd anticipating the Sleater-Kinney show.

Just posted a few not-very-good pictures from the Al Franken talk on Monday. Click through to Flickr to see them. I didn't get any Wonkette pictures, as I was busy making notes during her talk.

At yesterday's screening of "Cavite", we were surprised to see a pigeon walking around the floor in front of the screen in the Convention Center theater. It then flew up and over the audience, flew in front of the screen at the end of the SXSW intro clip, and just stayed quietly out-of-the-way for the rest of the film.

Five days down, five to go.

So far, I went to three films on Friday, nothing on Saturday, two panels and Frey Cafe on Sunday, three panels on Monday, one panel and three films today. Here's my brief impressions of the films and my snarky summaries of the panels.

FILMS
My Big Fat Independent Movie - pretty funny film that parodies and references dozens of indie films of the last fifteen years. It won't play well if you've not seen the source material, but if you love "Pulp Fiction", "Amelie", "Swingers", "Memento", or "The Good Girl", you've got a lot of laughs here.

Seoul Train - amazing documentary about North Korean refugees and their struggle to escape into China, and then get out of China to a country that won't return them to face capital punishment. Heartbreaking. I hope this gets picked up by PBS.

The Aristrocrats - I couldn't stop laughing at this movie about one particular dirty joke that's been passed around the comedy world and keeps getting longer and filthier. Paul Provenza and Penn Jilette directed the film, and they find ways to make even Carrot Top and mimes be funny.

Cavite - the most intense eighty minutes of film I've seen. Harrowing narrative about a Filipino-American who returns to his home country and gets used by insurgents that have captured his mother and sister. I found it to be full of tension, and fifteen minutes after it was over, my heart was still beating quickly.

Promedio Rojo- disappointing teen sex comedy about nerds in a high school in Chile. This started with potential and borrowed from films like "Better off Dead" and "One Crazy Summer", but the characters both were too broad and too cruel, and I started to actively dislike the film in the last third.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic - it's a concert film, mostly, with Sarah doing her comedy act, mixed with a few songs and skits. She's outrageous, but I've heard most of this before, and it doesn't play as well on the second hearing.

PANELS
Open Source Marketing - how do you get your users to market your product for you? Make a good product and give up control.

How to Grow Online Community - don't invest is special technology, just let your users build their own social norms and find simple ways for people to report mischief. It worked for Craig's List and Metafilter.

Keynote Interview: Ana Marie Cox - apparently, Washington, D.C. is fascinated by behind-boinging (to paraphrase). Oh, and bloggers aren't journalists unless they discover and publish new information.

Conversation with Al Franken - Al mumbles; he probably will run against Norm Coleman for the 2008 US Senate seat in Minnesota, and he thinks the right wing media does a poor job of fact checking.

How to Trick Out Your Blog - install this plugin, write this JavaScript, rework this graphics. Oh, and by the way, it doesn't matter since all of your readers are using RSS anyway.

Taking Your Act on the Road with Mobile Technology - ringtones, wallpapers, and SMS, oh my! Myspace is free, and you shouldn't pay them for marketing. Buzznet is like Flicker, only with lots of disjointed communities.

Participants:
Christian Crumlish, Mediajunkie
Rob Davis, Haerman & Associates
Jason Calacanis, Weblogs, Inc.

( my loose and long transcription )

Participants:
Craig Newmark, Craigslist
Matthew Haughey, MetaFilter
Molly Wright Steenson, Girlwonder.com

( my loose and long transcription )

Earlier on LJ, I mentioned the storytelling event called Frey Cafe that has taken place at the last few SXSWs, and pointed you to Frey Cafe #5, which happened earlier tonight. I met up with lizardprincess at the Convention Center about 6:10, and we walked over to P.F. Chang's where we had a delicious meal of veggie lettuce wraps and Ma Po tofu. We kept cracking up about our waitress who kept adjusting things at our table, including pointlessly replacing the napkins under our drinks and stealing an appetizer plate while it was in use.

We get over to the Red Eyed Fly about 7:30, and no one is there, but things got started around 8:15, delayed a little because of the Webbie Awards ceremony. Now, we'd never been in the back room of this place before, so we didn't know that it was open to the outdoors and susceptible to a strong breeze. This resulted in lizardprincess borrowing my jacket to keep herself warm and some significant use of her as a huddle heater, not that I minded :)

A total of about 20 storytellers made their way on the stage over the next three and a half hours, and most of the stories were well worth hearing. I really liked the story of how Cinnamon got her name from her parents; how a guy witnessed a car crash and tried to help the drunk driver; how a skateboarder got to be an extra in the film "Gleaming the Cube", taking the role from a young Spike Jonez; and how playing a little Mexican boy who missed the pinata got a guy excused from going to church as a kid.

Inspired by the first couple of stories, I put my name on the open mike list, becoming Frey Cafe speaker #14 for the evening. This was my first public performance in a non-professional role since I did open-mike poetry at Flipnotics back in 1995, but I handled myself well. I wish I'd made more eye contact with the audience and went for a few more laughs, but it was pretty well received. Some of the other speakers had taken phonecam pictures of the audience from on stage, so I decided to top them by having lizardprincess capture my performance using my Treo 650.

Ben at Frey Cafe 5 (4MB, 5:39): This cuts off the first minute where I introduce myself, I talk a little about my hometown of Dalton, Georgia, and I talk about how I would go to both Catholic mass and Southern Baptist services when I was growing up until my parents both converted to Methodism as a compromise. Then I talk abut Governor's Honors, Valdosta, Core Wars, Georgia Tech, Tower Dorm, the Bareass 500, Hanson Dorm, my Campus Crusade for Christ roommate, the Wesley Foundation, Dr. Bill Landiss, getting a room at the WF, inviting friends over for RPGs, and getting reprimanded because someone left a beer bottle under one of the couches in the sanctuary.

It was a good effort, but I think it needs a lot of polish before I do it again. Trim some stuff, punch up some details, and a better flow. Still, I didn't have any problems addressing the crowd and I made them laugh a few times. I'm definitely going to be back next year; the storytelling bug has bitten me hard.

I'm testing out SplashBlog, a nice mobile blogging application that supports the camera on the Treo 650. It comes with an account, so I'll be posting pictures and commentary while out-and-about at http://www.splashblog.com/unwiredben/. There's just one entry so far, but I'm going to try to capture as many interesting moments as possible over the next ten days.

I just got home from SXSW registration. It was moving along smoothly -- the line for registrants involves filling out a green card with your info and waiting in a single queue until you get to the front where a volunteer directs you to an open badging station. It's like the checkout queue at Fry's, but without the cheap electronics upsells.

One of the benefits of being a registrant is getting the big bags for each of the conferences. I just picked up the Interactive and Film bags this afternoon; the Music bag will be available on Wednesday. So, in the interest of being a Platinum-badge-wearing-bastard, I thought I'd list what came in each bag:

( Interactive Bag contents )
( Film Bag contents )

The swag level feels lower than last year, although I'm sure there will be more interesting stuff on the trade show floor. The ultimate big-bag is the Music festival bag; it usually has more stuff than the film and interactive bags put together. Also notable is the absence of Hyde Park Bar & Grill and Schlotsky's coupons; they've been in the bags the last three years.