pelago

This year the Pelago team will be attending the Interactive portion of South by Southwest in Austin, TX. This year will mark the fourth year that we have attended, and we’ve noticed that over the years the Interactive portion has lost much of its technological raison d’être and has become a bit more of a marketing wankfest wrapped up in a celebration of geek culture. Even SXSW itself seems to acknowledge this downward trend.

Granted, as I’ve often said, SXSW is an idea factory, and it really helps you stay abreast of the latest and greatest emerging trends in the tech industry. And if you dig hard enough, it is possible to find truly great panels with amazing speakers with tremendous insight to lend. But if you’re not careful, you might just end up in a panel that quickly devolves into an abyss of marketspeak douchebaggery (last year I was granted the special privilege of hearing from a panelist who was engaged in “hypervising neural networks”).

One of the emerging trends from this year’s panels appears to be games, so to help you make an exciting adventure of the highs and lows of this year’s SXSW Interactive, we’ve put together a list of items to keep an eye out for. Check off as many as you can, and post your results in the comment section of this blog post. The person with the most items checked off will win a free Intervals t-shirt. If you have any items to add to our list, let us know in the comments section.

So here, without further ado:

• Someone very conspicuously using a new iPad2
• Hipster wearing a vest or chunky Ray-Ban sunglasses
• Someone wearing a fedora
• Someone wearing a Threadless t-shirt
• Someone wearing a ThinkGeek t-shirt
• A dude with a HUGE (6+ inches) beard
• Microsoft Silverlight promotional material clinging to its last vestiges of significance
• Someone wearing more than one phone on their belt
• Someone running Ubuntu on their laptop
• A CR-48 Chrome notebook (the Google notebook)
• A laptop with so many stickers, you can’t tell what brand it is
• A 300 pound man using a tiny netbook
• Free beer
• Any mention of the following words from a speaker or panelist:
  • 4chan
  • Wikileaks
  • Libya/Egypt/Tunisia
  • Linux (or any Linux distro)
• Someone taking notes with pen and paper
• An attendee over 40
• Pink fixed gear bicycle
• Violet Blue sighting
• Christopher Poole sighting (keynote doesn’t count)
• A protester or soapbox evangelist carrying a sign

TIEBREAKER: A completely meaningless marketing buzzword/phrase (most syllables wins)

Let the games begin!

Google Trends is another voyeuristic tool to see what others are searching for. I decided to check a few key words in our industry. Here are the results:

Web Dev

Web Design

Ecommerce

Web Applications

Summary: A whole lot of over seas action…

TextSnippets.

562 users tagging and storing useful source code snippets.

Very useful IMO. Its like my proto site on steroids.

Jaime

If you are like us, some of your clients have a difficult time grasping the nuances of email marketing options. “Can’t I just send an email with my current email program?” Well, yes you can send an email to 1,500 people via BCC in Outlook, but how do you manage the list? What about spam concerns? Does it convey the professionalism that you want?

This article from idealware.org does a great job of covering the gamut of options. We’ve used PHPList for many of our clients, but it is well suited for a Dedicated Hosting environment. The limitations most hosting companies place on outgoing email volume make it a little tricky to scale in a shared hosting environment. PHPList also lacks advanced metrics that a lot of the paid services offer.

Here’s a tool/lifehack that might be useful:

HassleMe

Not eating enough fruit? Forgot to feed the fish again? Need a little help keeping your New Year’s resolutions?
Tell us what to hassle you about, and we’ll nag you via email at semi-unpredictable intervals.

Jaime

Here’s a game to try on your work break.

Game instructions:

It loads ten images that all share a common tag, one by one, and you guess what the tag is. When you guess right, the tag will turn blue. Then you can watch the pictures until the next set begins. The faster you guess, the more points you get. The points are reset every five minutes.

If you’re not familiar with tags check out this definition, and if you haven’t visited flickr yet, you may do so here.

PC World outlines a lot of the “best of web 2.0″…for lack of a better term. They talk about how the Internet is becoming centered around participation, as opposed to the browse and view world we currently live in. If Web 2.0 still seems like a confusing topic, I recommend reading this article and clicking around on the various offerings. It’s a great way to get a glimpse of where things are going…

- Michael

A good primer on how the web differs from its print predecessor.

Google the great gives us glimpses of insight into their growing empire.

A slide show of where Windows started and how far it has come. Hat tip: Jon Walker