Jayonline Webdev Blog

Well, the creme de la creme Web Design and Development Conference in Austin, Texas certainly lived up to its formidable reputation.

And it’s hard to put into one blog post an event that encompasses so many aspects of the web, real time social networking, some marketing, and a lot of partying with new friends.

One interesting statistic was that it was thought 20% of America’s iPhone users were at SxSw. There were a lot of iPhones, and Apple products everywhere you looked. It felt like being part of a community just by having similar gadgets with these folks.

I really loved the openness of the event, it’s true - you can sit next to a Vice president of Yahoo! on one side and an A list web celebrity on the other.

I was expecting the conference to get deep down and dirty with web code. However, the conference only really focused on the technical aspects on the web a few times. From demands put on servers at Flickr, to how correctly think about your HTML markup for Accessibility.

Most of the talks (that I attended anyway) focused on the future of the web, and how best to develop social platforms. As well as gaining insight from industry leaders, a very enlightening experience. I find the Americans to be more open and frank with the state of the web which is always refreshing.

Due to the 6000 or so delegates not everyone would have understood the development side of web standards and programming, however, the insightful glimpses and tips into how web startups to corporates operate and learnt from their mistakes was very helpful in learning and assessing our own business development.

‘With 13 tracks running at the same time there was something for everyone’

The keynotes were amazing, and the one of the panels that stood out for me was ‘Design eye for South by‘ a great example into what a bit of thought can do for a conference site like SxSw, using already existing API’s from other social networking sites.

Now that I’m back I’ve been going through a mountain of business cards that need following up, great to receive replies from people and new contacts met.

Meeting the people I did, hopefully leading to increase awareness of each others presence in the industry. I met some extremely useful contacts such as reporters for Mashable and the Guardian. As well as Mr Zuckerberg down at the local pub on 6th. Not forgetting the lovely ijustine.
And of course, planning time off for SxSw09 - See you there

The main message I got from attending the conference was:

‘Let make things as easy as possible on the web’

There are a number of blog posts that summarise the event that was SxSw08 Interactive.

There are videos, here and here.

There are podcasts here.

And lots of photos here and here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at and is filed under geekery, about us, work, web services, web code, fun, marketing, conferences, networking, small business, travel, design, semanticweb, friends, code, bnm, events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.