Posts by matt

Little bit late, so I’m going to get right down to it:

I’m going to watch some horror directors and film writers talk about what’s to come in the horror film genre. And you can watch! Woo-hoo! Speakers: Scott Weinberg (managing editor / Cinematical, Jason Eisener (Hobo With a Shotgun), James Wan (Saw), Emily Hagins (My Sucky Teen Romance), Nicholas Goldbart (Phase 7), Simon Rumley (Little Deaths), and Ben Wheatley (KILL LIST).

Respect the jump …

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Patrick O’Keefe, founder of the iFroggy network, is going to take us on a rambunctious tour of ways to kill your online community! As usual, I will attempt to summarize this for my esteemed Snarkpublic. After the jump.

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By popular demand, I’m liveblogging R/GA’s session about the Internet of Things, a.k.a. “everyware.” (Everyware, btw, is a much better name.)

Description: “Why have smart refrigerators failed to take hold? Where are the smart tables that were supposed to fill our homes? Smart products with embedded sensors are poised to share their intelligence, but lack of connections among products and services have limited their usefulness. Until now. In this session, we will showcase emerging smart products and break down the design and technology that will separate the wheat from the chaff. We’ll examine the connections these products will make with our lives by bringing more sensibility to sensor-based products.”

Speakers are Chloe Gottlieb, R/GA’s VP of Interaction Design, and Will Turnage, R/GA’s VP of Tech. Read more…

Update: Dropped in the wrong embed code. I wondered why it was so quiet! Fixed.

Must not sleep. Must liveblog Ze Frank.

Will post metadata after the panel. Session description here.

I’m flying my journalism colors for a little bit, liveblogging Jay Rosen’s solo presentation: “Bloggers vs. Journalists: It’s a Psychological Thing.” If you haven’t yet, read Jay’s introductory post: “Why Bloggers v. Journalists Is Still With Us.”

Here’s the session description: “I wrote my essay, Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over, in 2005. And it should be over. After all, lots of journalists happily blog, lots of bloggers journalize and everyone is trying to figure out what’s sustainable online. But there’s something else going on: these two Internet types, amateur bloggers and pro journalists, are actually each other’s ideal “other.” A big reason they keep struggling with each other lies at the level of psychology, not in the particulars of the disputes and flare-ups that we continue to see online. The relationship is essentially neurotic, on both sides. Bloggers can’t let go of Big Daddy media— the towering figure of the MSM — and still be bloggers. Pro journalists, meanwhile, project fears about the Internet and loss of authority onto the figure of the pajama-wearing blogger. This is a construction of their own and a key part of a whole architecture of denial that has weakened in recent years, but far too slowly.”

The sole speaker is Jay Rosen; the esteemed Lisa Williams is helping with the setup and backchannel. And without further ado:

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By popular demand, I’m blogging a session on “Brand Journalism.” This will be useful research for the ONA session I’ve proposed with the inimitable Megan Garber. (More on that soon.)

Here’s the description for this session: Hard to believe it’s been 11 years since The Cluetrain Manifesto, and we’re still doing the same f***ing panel. And we’re still trying to teach big companies and ad agencies how to communicate like humans, how to listen, and how to use transparency as a messaging tactic. Brand Journalism is a way to take those decade-old ideas and incorporate them into actual campaigns (we know, we’ve done it). The first step is to teach agencies and clients to think like publishers instead of marketers–it’s not a new idea, but it’s one that is rarely executed well. In this panel, Brand Journalism pioneers will share some of the secrets, successes, and obstacles of their award-winning campaigns.

Speakers: Bob Garfield, Brian Clark, David Eastman, Kyle Monson, Shiv Singh

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By popular vote, I’ll be covering a post on the U.S. military’s mad science. Here’s the session description:

For more than 50 years the mad scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—aka DARPA, the outrageous research arm of the Pentagon—have been launching the most disruptive technologies on earth, living up to their mantra of “high risk—high payoff.” We have DARPA to thank for the personal computer, the Internet, the Berkeley Unix system, most of NASA, and countless crazy military innovations. Their mission is to think beyond the possible and forever be three decades ahead. In this talk we will dig into, and present the relevant parts of, DARPA’s $3 billion-dollar budget, pulling out the most amazing and most-likely-to-reach-fruition projects. Think electromagnetic bazookas, telepathic soldiers, ape-inspired robots, memory chips in brains, shapeshifting planes and boats. It might sound like sci-fi, but given its inspired history it seems that analyzing DARPA’s current projects will give us one of the clearest views into our future reality. Fasten your seat belts.

Speakers: Christie Nicholson, Christopher Mims, John Pavlus

Liveblog after the jump!

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I need a little help figuring out what to attend (and live-blog!) at SXSW this year, so I figured I’d turn to the smartest crew I know. Help me decide, after the jump. Read more…