SXSW Day #1

Today is the first day of the SXSW Interactive and I am most definitely in attendance. I got in last night around 7:30 PM but didn't get to the hotel until 8:30. The flight(s) were fine, had a quick layover in Denver, but the flights were pretty unremarkable. I mostly read. I did not, however, get an opportunity to eat much of anything the entire day. So the first order of business after getting to the hotel was to find some food. Which I did, in the form of some rather crappy pizza. But at least it was food. Connolly is here in town for his job so we met up last night and I showed him around 6th St.

I have a horrible time getting a good night's sleep on a hotel bed. So, I woke up at 9 AM (7 AM Pacific) and did not at all feel rested. I tossed and turned for another 2 hours or so before I finally gave up and got up, screwed around online and then decided to brave that is the hell of SXSW registration. Of course, first I had to find the registration area. They moved it from where it has been the past 2 years into the big giant center ballroom area. At first I despaired at the length of the line, but, actually, it moved pretty quickly.

So, I attempted to see two panels today. And I succeeded in seeing 1.

The first was his panel: Jacks of All Trades or Masters of One. Essentially it was seeking to give clarity as to what makes a person naturally a generalist or naturally a specialist. And they had a pretty good talk about that. But it's also a really hard question to answer because I think it can change over time. Some people are probably hard core generalists. Others are specialists through and through. But my hunch is a lot of people are somewhere in the middle. Myself, for example, has some definite specialist tendencies, but my area(s) of interest are so broad (and at times completely unrelated) that I behave like a generalist much of the time. This also prevents me from getting too deep into any one field, which I always thought was a draw back but, it turns out, it may not be.

Evidently specialization, at least in the tech industry, has a tendency to limit your career growth. That is to say, generalists can manage specialists, but specialists can't manage generalists. I don't agree with that rule 100%, but I think it's broadly true.

Anyway, it was a good talk and it gave me some meat to digest.

The second talk I attempted to see was Pay TV vs. The Internet -- The Battle for your TV, which featured Mark Cuban (famed internet dick and rich asshole) and Avner Ronen from BOXEE who was going to argue that TV will ultimately be distributed via the internet and, probably, a host of other interesting things would come up. I hoping to verify that Mark Cuban really was a dick (which I did), and more hopeful that we could get into an interesting discussion about distribution models without it devolving into too much name calling free for all.

Unfortunately, 10 minutes into the presentation, just moments after I had tweeted that "Mark Cuban really is a dick", the fire alarm went off and we were forced to evacuate the building. Connolly and I took the emergency exit because we figured "when else are we going to be able to do this?" and then got outside... just in time for us to be told it was a false alarm (surprise!) and we could go back inside. Deciding, instead, to "fuck that shit" we went back to our respective hotel rooms where I have proceeded to write this blog post, taunt people on IRC and send text messages to various internet peeps coming into town over the next few days.

All in all not a bad start to this year's SXSW.