My submission made it in even though I didn’t get an email from the SXSW staff.  I’ve been graciously invited to speak on two panels so if you want me presenting out SXSW, please vote for the second panel listed, WordPress: The Small Business Swiss Army Knife , because WordPress and  business is where my heart is.

How to Vote for a SXSW panel

First off.  How important is voting anyway?

Voting accounts for 30% of the final vote on which panels are selected.  The other 70% is split between a SXSW board (40%) and SXSW staff 30%.  Last year for my presentation, “How Sci-Fi Shapes The Internet“, I did very little promotion or “vote begging” and it was still selected.  Cream will always rise to the top.

My advice for anyone who feels strongly about getting votes for their panel is to write up a post expanding on the value your topic delivers to the SXSW audience, ask for a vote in the post and ask people to comment on your panel.

Voting for a SXSW panel

You can vote between August 11th – 27th.
You need an account at SXSW.com to cast your vote.
Here are instructions directly from the conference site:

Just sign-up for an account here. During the public voting phase (August 11-27, 2010) all you need to do is sign-up for an account. Signing-up is free, quick and easy. And your sign-up information remains completely confidential.

The SXSW Panels!

Here they are! I’ll tell you which one I voted for at the end *smile*

What The Government Can Learn From Amazon

Adria Richards, ButYoureAGirl.com
Have you ever bought something on Amazon and wondered, “Why isn’t buying a passport as easy as this?” With over 300 million people in the United States, there is certainly room for improvement how their lives are recorded, updated and exchanged.  If the Arpanet was created to provide a centralized, communications network, why are we not taking advantage of this access to lower costs and reduce data errors? Amazon processes, ships, and delivers packages all over the world and can now predict delivery within 12 hours of ordering. Why does your driver’s license take two weeks? We will explore what advances in digital data records and key benefits including: savings on redundant data entry and mistakes, less identity theft and fraud, rewarding efficiency and creating social benchmarks. The other side of this data coin includes managing expectations, privacy, security and opt-out from such programs. RFID’s in passports, pets and popcorn seem like the stuff of science fiction.
READ MORE
Government and Technology government, Privacy, RFID

WordPress: The Small Business Swiss Army Knife <<<< VOTE FOR THIS ONE FOR ADRIA SO SHE CAN SPREAD THE JOY OF WORDPRESS AT SXSW

Stephanie Frost, Zero-G Creative, Adria Richards invited on panel
WordPress has been steadily growing in popularity as a CMS over the last two years because it’s free and relatively easy to learn–especially when compared with other packages like Joomla and Drupal. But WordPress is more than just a convenient choice — in many cases it’s the only web tool a small business owner is ever likely to need. WordPress isn’t just for blogs anymore, seamlessly handling media content, ecommerce, membership sites, search engine optimization, mobile sites, lead generation and much much more. Our panel of experts will describe the many uses and strengths of WordPress and demonstrate how WordPress is adaptable into just about any small business use.
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Content Management Content Management System, small business, WordPress

What Comic Books Can Teach Mobile Application Designers

Anjuan Simmons, Adverlyze
Mobile application design is a conversation that allows the developer to speak to the user. While manuals are able to guide this conversation, nothing is more immediate and enduring than the user interface of the application itself. Comic books have evolved through the years to maximize their ability to tell a story while confined to two dimensional static images. This presentation will explore the design principles Eisner shared in his landmark book and specifically apply them to mobile application design. Scott McCloud’s book “Understanding Comics”, which built on top of the foundation laid by Eisner, will also be covered as well as McCloud’s later work “Reinventing Comics”. The comic book medium can provide a blueprint for blockbuster mobile applications as well. When attendees leave this session, they will know how to throw some Eisner onto their mobile application designs!
READ MORE
Mobile Applications applications, design, mobile

How to Ensure a Diverse Tech Event

Erica Mauter, swirlspice.com
Social networking is supposed to be the ultimate facilitator of grassroots interaction between producers and consumers. In the tech space, these online interactions go offline at conferences and unconferences around the world.  Are you hoping to attract more diverse audiences to your existing programming or are you tailoring your programming to diverse audiences? How can your product appeal to a diverse audience if you don’t have a diverse group developing it?  Individuals, organizations, conference organizers, sponsors and bloggers will walk away with actionable steps they can take to diversify events. We’ll explore what event organizers like O’Reilly are doing to encourage new people to attend. We’ll explore the barriers individuals face when joining new online communities and when transitioning into offline participation, as well as opportunities for contribution within the community.
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Social Issues Conferences, diversity, Events

Social Media: The Pink Collar Ghetto of Tech?

Keidra Chaney, The Learned Fangirl – Adria Richards invited to panel
With women accounting for the majority of users on social media sites, there are exciting opportunities for women to take leadership roles in social media – as consultants, developers, entrepreneurs and thought leaders. Still, women make up less than 20% of panelists at major tech conferences, while women focused social media conferences like BlogHer, She’s Geeky, and Blogalicious continue to grow. Is social media is seen as a “soft” profession and drawing lower comparative salaries and less room for executive level leadership than other technology – oriented fields? Is this already happening? This panel of women professionals that work in social media will take a hard look at the unique issues women tech professionals face in the age of the social web, and discuss whether social media is helping to crack the “digital ceiling” of the tech world or creating a separate but equal space for women to lead?
READ MORE
Career / Work Concerns digital ceiling, women in tech, women in social media

Under 25 and Rebuilding Communities Using Social Media

Karl Rivera, Teen On Da Rise and Corvida Raven, SheGeeks.net
“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” -Neil Postman, The Di…  “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” -Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (introduction), 1982 As we move into an era of digitalization, today’s youth are poised to reap the rewards they sow (and tweet), and have been given the opportunity make history along the way. The youth are taking the reins on this technological era to generate more options for our lives than ever before. Youth from all over the globe are using digital platforms and tools to transform communities and building our very own empire. Free from financial limitations, cultural pressures, and stigmas, the Internet is serving as one of the biggest platforms to help the youth make impacts in everyday life. We’re creating new jobs, rebuilding communities, expanding networks, developing critical business skills, and learning how to preserve our history. We’re using the internet to “connect the dots” and this panel will take a deeper look at how the youth are making changes.
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New Technology / Next Generation community, Impact, Youth

Ten Sexy Skills for Project Success

Denise Jacobs, PapillonEffect Consulting
What if you knew your project would be a success from the very beginning? What if we could do away with dreading the inevitable scope creep, budget blow-out and overrun schedule, what if every team member could take control of the project outcome and make it a win? Join us for a fun, interactive session to learn solid communication skills, great project management tools, and how to cultivate an effective and enjoyable team culture. Leave the session with a fresh approach to looking at tech and new media projects and ways to apply new management skills to your personal workflow.
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Career / Work Concerns communication skills, project management, team culture

Die Laughing So Your Brand Can Live

Luvvie Ajayi, Awesomely Luvvie
With people facing chaos in their everyday world and the constant threat of layoffs, debt and war, a little humor can go a long way. When people want an escape from daily life, they turn to the Internet for entertainment and laughs.  In this session, learn how to set yourself and your brand apart from the rest by using humor to engage your audience, build value and get your message out.
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Branding / Marketing / Publicity brand, humor

Hater Blocking 101: Your Blog, Your Rules

Panama Jackson, Liz Burr, Very Smart Brothas
Do you author a blog that has engaged in its fair share of controversy resulting in a lot of negative attention and hateration? If so, you’re not alone. “Hate” is a good problem to have. How you deal with the hate can determine if you sink or swim.  Join us for a panel discussion on hateration, how to make the most of it and make it work for you with guests who are no stranger to controversy.
READ MORE
Community / Online Community Audience, blogging, community

You’re Not Obama: Effectively Using Tech for Campaigns

Maurice Cherry, 3eighteen media
Since the 2008 Presidential election, politicians nationwide are realizing that social media can be an effective tool for reaching out to constituents, media, and potential voters. Unfortunately, most of them are completely unaware as to where to begin with integrating social media into their campaigns along with other technologies. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook…how does it all work to get votes? Using best practices and case studies of proven tactics from municipal and federal campaigns, I will show you how to unlock the power of social media and technology to help take your campaign to the next level of engagement.
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Government and Technology Political engagement, Social Media ROI, Technology

The Progressive Web: Let’s Change the World (Seriously)

Andy Stratton, Sizeable Interactive with panelist Denise Jacobs, PapillonEffect Consulting

Web 2.0, social media, digital communities and relationships – what next? Can we be doing more? We’re at a climactic turn for technology and how it’s become an immovable piece of business operations and our personal lives – but: *can we be doing more?* Are we balancing our ability to produce, sell and acquire more with improving the overall quality of life for ourselves and our planet? Or are we making it easier to fit more work into the same amount of time.  Analysis, thoughts, musings, hopes and inspirations from my brain, and the brains of my friends and industry peers who believe in the same things and share the same hopes.
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humanity, progress, social

Cultivating a User-Centered Culture

Nancy Lyons, Megan Wilker, Geek Girls Guide
We’ve all heard about the importance of user-centered design (hopefully). But, how can a person, a team or an organization hope embrace it as a core value if the entire organization isn’t focused on who those users are? How can we bridge the gap between a typical web developer who is male and between the ages of 18-29 (according to A List Apart’s “Survey for the People Who Make Websites”, 2008), and the 45% of the senior population in the US who are now on the Internet (According to Pew Internet and the American Life Project, 2009)? From design to production to project management to customer service and support, this session aims to help web development teams view work product as a direct outcome of a work culture that includes and respects users at every level.  We’ll prove the hard business value of soft, squishy terms like emotional intelligence, intellectual curiosity, collaboration, and vulnerability. But no hugging, we promise.
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Career / Work Concerns social media, users, work culture

Website: BlackBloggingRockstars.com
Twitter Hashtag: #SXSWBBR

For those of you who couldn’t make it to SXSW this year, please come next year!

Want to submit feedback about this panel?  Send an email to inter@sxsw.com

Panelists

Maurice Cherry @mauricecherry (SXSW Panel organizer)

J. Smith @jbrotherlove

Gina McAuley @BWBConference

Deanna “DeDe” Sutton @clutchmagazine

The making of this video
A big thank you to Anjuan (@anjuan) and Amani (@urbanreporter) for their help and guidance on making this video!

This video was recorded on the Canon VIXIA HF20
It was converted to .mov using Prism Video converter on Windows 7
The intro text was created in Screenflow on the Mac
The music was added in iMovie
and then exported and uploaded to Blip.tv
I’m getting better at this whole video thing. Certainly not as intimidating as it was one year ago. I’ll need to learn about lighting, audio and conversion tools.

I saw similarities of the real game and the online mobile app.

Both versions share:

Competition
Who becomes king and who becomes mayor

Strategy
Who can I get out here and are there hidden opportunities to unlock my next badge?

Recognition
Kings have the best square IRL and you become the Mayor of frequently visited locations)

You’ve Been Foursquared

Gillian Renolynds @gillianr

Ewan Spence @ewan

Viral Marketing

This was a great marketing idea as it connected old ideas to new ideas.  Community in real live to online community.  It generated buzz, was fun to play (assumption) and watch (verified) plus people had to “earn” their shirts by participating.

I don’t know how much the chalk was but it was highly visible with low investment of time, maintenance and logistics (“Draw the square there!” — end of planning phase).

He held a beautiful, relaxing wine tasting event Monday evening at SXSW that was just perfect!

It was a wonderful change from the packed, dark parties of SXSW. I invited about 10 folks to join me and had a great time sampling the St. Supery wine. I only tasted the red wines and loved the Elu!

It was a nice venue, not crowded and there was a nice selection of cheese and fruit to go along with the wine. I hung out with Ashley (@hmriskgroup)

and Amani (@urbanreporter). I spotted Calvin (@mayhemstudios) again at this venue.

They had a “wine guy” to talk about the different wines.

If you had seen earlier tweets or foursquare updates, you would have seen that the @Garyvee wineless party (from @Stevegarfield‘s Foursquare) the night before had basically sucked in terms of wine. I had heard that there were 20 cases but when folks showed up, they each grabbed a bottle. By the time we arrived to the “secret wine party” on the rooftop, it was pitch black, all the wine was gone and the music was way too loud.

I certainly plan to take Rick up on his offer when I relocate to San Francisco next month to do a wine tour.

Thanks so much to Lisa for the connection!  Had a great time!

Twitter Hashtags: #sxsw, #nomnomnom and #bacon

I got to meet @iamkhayyam in person again and this time I remembered to take a photo with him!

He’s a great guy to follow on Twitter because he’s constantly linking up to interesting stories, photography, funny stuff and he’s has his fingers on the pulse of social media. I don’t care if that sounds corny because it’s true!

Photo Credit: adria.richards

Snapped this great photo at The Small Business Web SXSW party of the guys from Outright (Ryan Thompson and Paul O’Brian and Outright does your bookkeeping online…for free!) with Nichelle (the cupcake blog gal) and my new twitter friend Ashley (she sells insurance to tech companies). If you ever meet Paul (far right) ask him about WordPress, he has angles on it *smile*

Very nice to talk with “customers of the cloud”. Financial apps are definitely popular among small business owners.

I attended the SXSW 2010 – Saturday Small Business Web party on behalf of Zendesk (customer support helpdesk) and partied with other cloud based companies.

Also in attendance:
Freshbooks, Batchbook, Mailchimp, SurveyGizmo, Handset Detection, Odesk, Wufoo, TeamSupport, OutRight, Shoeboxed, Formspring.

Now, I didn’t expect much in terms of “swag” from the stories of SXSW veterans and that my experience at BlogHer is not representative of an ordinary conference. First, the bag. It’s a nice, plain cloth with an interesting design. I could see myself using this for groceries and around the house.

Now let’s go into the bag and find out what the highlights were

Firefox button from SXSW Swag Bag: The best item in the bag

Crumpler Drink Holder

Is this for holding beer bottles?

Magazine CODE Cloud Computing

Magazine “Technology Review” SXSW Is the Cloud Safe?

Magazine Linux Journal Software Development

Laughing Squid Sticker from SXSW

WordPress Texas Stickers

iPhone Gelaskin

Newegg dust wipe

secret key?

more stickers

They all won a copy of, Dark Matter, which deals with a scientist who is kiddnapped by aliens to help win an intergalactic war:

Dark matter, the invisible substance that constitutes the bulk of all matter in the universe, remains one of science’s greatest mysteries.

• But what if it actually is nothing more than ordinary matter purposely hidden from our view?
• What if we are only allowed to see a small fraction of the stars in our galaxy, because the vast majority of star systems are teeming with aliens who wish to remain unseen?

Marc Zemin, a brilliant student of astrophysics, is the first human to ever stumble upon this startling secret, when his experiments with wormhole travel cause aliens to land on Earth and whisk him away into space. To his astonishment, the aliens want his help in fighting a colossal galactic war that is rapidly spiraling out of control. But as he struggles to survive from battle to battle across the farthest reaches of the galaxy, he begins to uncover a horrifying conspiracy at play, striving to keep the warring civilizations in continuous conflict with each other. A desperate race against time ensues, as he and a handful of newfound alien friends try to stop the war and confront this mysterious, powerful force bent on destroying all life in the galaxy.

I gave away the book for the person who guessed all the video clips correctly.  There was an alcohol + sleep deprivation glitch which caused the Star Trek intro to play with all the others!  Thankfully, the audience laughed and I gave out books to Gianfranco, Debbie and Brett.  They will have the choice of ordering the real book or the Kindle version.

Looking forward to what they think of this science fiction adventure novel!

I’ll be posting more about my SXSW panel, “How Sci-Fi Shapes The Internet” in the next week after I catch up on sleep!

The Twitter and Flickr hashtag is #sci-fishapestheinternet

Find out first hand from successful Black Bloggers what you need to do to take your blog from a distracting hobby to a platform that delivers your message and builds your credibility.  If your content is unique and provides true value then you have the potential to generate revenue and qualified leads too!

Want to submit feedback about this panel?  Send an email to inter@sxsw.com

Thanks to Anjuan and Amani for the video recording and production help!

Panelists

Maurice Cherry @mauricecherry (SXSW Panel organizer)

J. Smith @jbrotherlove

Gina McAuley @BWBConference

Deanna “DeDe” Sutton @clutchmagazine

The discussion was about taking your blog to the next level.  From hobby to professional.  This included monetizing blogs, networking outside your blog topic, trying out new themes and functionality. It was great!

Gina Maculey of Blogging While Brown

Deanna illustrated how she tries out new things to see what works and what doesn’t.  She saw some blogs were using Seesmic which allowed you to leave video comments. She added this, excited to see what sort of movie comments her readers would leave. Turns out her readers weren’t that hot on the technology.

Gina talked a lot about the disenfranchisement of Blacks in blogging and how they need to realize the huge potential to earn money via content. She covered direct ads on the blog, funding for political blogs, funding for 501c3 and direct solicitation.  I hear Gina on this because after I heard Angel speak at last year’s Blogging While Brown, I stepped up and began testing out ways to monetize my blog.

Do Only Black Bloggers Care About Getting Paid?

I see a comment on my blog saying something to the effect “Are these Black blogging issues only?”

No they’re not.  Compensation for skill/time/value is a huge discussion in terms of content.  Especially content created on the web.  Women are also a group that isn’t compensated equally to what men make.  People are taking real life inequalities to the web.  This doesn’t have to be so.  The first step to equality is to discuss the imbalance.  The second step is to plan.  The third step is to act.

Summary

The panel was wonderful!  Full of detailed stories, passion and solid advice.  I was tweeting up a storm and will grab those tweets to insert here.

After the session, there was a big line at the microphone of people who had comments and questions. Baratunde was up first and thanked Maurice and the panel for the session. If you don’t know him, he’s a pretty big deal on the internet, on television and in real life work so I’m going to grab his bio from his site:

Baratunde exists at the intersection of comedy, politics and technology. His official duties include Web & Politics editor at The Onion, co-founder of Jack & Jill Politics and host of PopSci’s Future Of on Science Channel. Basically, he’s a smart, funny, extremely handsome dude.

I Belong Here

I saw a lot of people I had met at other conferences and that was really, really nice since I originally hated going to conferences.  Why did I hate them?  Because I went to conferences where everyone seemed to be socially awkward and not like me.  I felt unwelcome and out of my element.  This is a common feeling for women and Brown people in technology.

While googling, I couldn’t find any stories or posts on Black people or minorities feeling excluded or alienated from technology conferences.  I talked to two women last year who were in tech, active in social media, had serious technical skills and had attended conferences where they not only were in the minority but got that sort of “Why are you here?” type look.  It’s a hard look to face but talking with other women and Brown people has made it so much easier for me that now I simply look back and smile thinking, “I belong here.”

Adria Richards (me) and Corvida Raven

Faith Dow

Twanna Hines and Nichelle Stephens

Adria Richards (me), Twanna Hines, Anjuan Simmons, Liz Burr