SXSW - the Spice Girl Cometh

Day One at SxSW - and the first thing I did was to follow Ove Klykken - not on Twitter, but physically. I met him at the hotel, and Ove has been to SXSW several times and knows the ropes and led me through a seamless process of registration, coffee, schwag collection and lecture finding. Everyone needs to follow someone like Ove on their first ever day at something as big as this (9,000 people and counting).

I've come to SXSW with 3 main objectives (apart from meeting people) which are:

- To see if one can discern the "shadow of the future" - its my view that the Web 2.0 / Social Media scene is now moving into its maturing phase, where it either has to get large scale adoption or dies - or more usually te useful bits live on and the rest don't

- To understand what impact the credit crunch is having, and what strategies people are now adopting to deal with it - or not. Part of this is to get views of the current funding market

- Drink Margaritas

Anyway, taking the second one first - there is still a strong "Its still 2007" contingent judging by one of the talks I went to which was all about making yourself interesting, but unfortunately resolved into talking about the panelists' current startups and lots of homilies like "be awesome" et al, and only one of them (Kristina Halvorsen) seemed to realise that the landscape had changed in a major way. As another Twitter post noted:

is Halvorson the only one on the panel who realises there is a recession on and the days of doing "experiments" are sadly over?

However, there is also quite a lot of realism too - there was a very good talk by Steven Johnson on the future of the news media which was a far more realistic appraisal than much of the wailing on the blogosphere I've read. In essence, Johnson notes that the "New Media" is in its infancy - the Tech and Political sectors are good examples of new media areas that are in the forefront. At the same time, the economic structure of the Old Media is collapsing faster than the new media can replace it. (Clay Shirky wrote a similar piece today on Thinking the Unthinkable)

As we showed in our work on the Future of Online Video, there will be a 2-5 year interregnum period of "creative destruction" in which life is going to be very hard for people in the Olde Media. Print looks like it will be very similar in its evolution.

There was also a panel on how to implement social media and how to justify it to "The Man", which was good value as it was reflecting a level of reality that has certainly been absent in much of the thinking to date. In realitu, if I replaced Social Media with "MRP", "ERP" or "CRM" the advice from the panel would be much the same as it has been for the last 40 years - as one of the panellists put it:

"Return on Conversation is all very well, but if you can't link it to Return on Investment it won't fly"

A return to the metric system

So - quite a lot starting to occur on recalibrating matters to the new reality, but also still some denial.

As to the shadow of the new, well the picture above is hardly a shadow - a babe in a Spice Girl dress wearing a red nose is pretty up-front - but Hermione Way's TechFluff TV is part of the future, as its a one-girl TV show. Technology today allows her to run her own show, independently, from pretty much anywhere in the world - and most of her back end (as it were) is totally automated.

Another shadow of the new is the use of systems like Twitter to continually keep in touch with whats going on in this huge arena - it debuted there 2 years ago, and its now used like an electronic skein - "the matrix" to which we are all connected. You can start to see how this will play out as mass adoption occurs

And as to Margaritas - we started off in fine form on a 3 hour delay in Charlotte airport after taking 2 f****g hours to clear immigration