It’s been almost two years since I’ve posted on this blog. Too long, way too long. So I thought I’d start with a fairly straightforward post with a bunch of links.

SXSW 2011 Interactive: http://sxsw.com/interactive
Many people know about the music and film festivals at South by Southwest in Austin, but not everyone knows that there is also a part of the festival for web folks and tech heads. SXSW Interactive draws some of the best and brightest from the web. There are many, many presentations on topics like web typography, mobile, interactive narratives, ux, augmented reality and the list goes on.

I’ve always wanted to go. I didn’t get to go this year but someone who works about 8 feet from me did get to go. Fellow Media Arts & Technology faculty member Jody Culkin, @jodyc, got to go and you can read about it (and see some pictures) on her blog: http://www.jodyculkin.com/tag/sxsw

Slideshare is a popular place for SXSW presenters to share their slides. You can find all slides tagged as sxsw2011 here: http://www.slideshare.net/sxsw2010/tagged/sxsw2011. Unfortunately there is no audio on them. By the way, Slideshare has an AIP now: http://blog.slideshare.net/2011/01/24/its-here-our-shiny-new-javascript-api/ and a WordPress Plugin that takes advantage of it to allow you to show presentations on  a WordPress site.

There is audio on this presentation from sxsw2011: http://www.opennasa.com/2011/03/12/the-next-rocket-scientist-you/. Nick Skytland from NASA created the presentation titled “The Next Rocket Scientist: YOU.” For everyone who has wanted to be a part of space exploration in some way, or if you’re interested in how large government organizations can make themselves more open, watch this presentation.

That presentation was done with SlideRocket, a Slideshare competitor, who has an option to allow you to add voiceover to your slides. They are also the official slide sponsor for SXSW. Funny thing is I can’t find a page on their site with a links to all of the presentations made using their software. Here is another one about visualizing temporal information an interactions (there is sound in the first couple of slides, but no voiceover, so beware)

http://portal.sliderocket.com/ANUNT/It-s-About-Time-Visualizing-Temporality-03-12-11

The presenter, Joanna Wiebe, posted the text of the presentation on her blog: http://onemind.com/2011/03/14/text-of-my-sxsw-presentation/

SXSW does have a YouTube channel, but most of it is on music and film and the interactive sessions are shortened. Here’s one with Matt Mullenweg talking about the future of WordPress: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETAaVZrGkog.

And I want to end with a link to the Johnny Cash Project: http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com. I came across it looking at links from sxsw and it’s pretty cool. Its a kind of massively multiplayer art project. Basically people can go to the site and be given a frame from the music video of his last studio recording. Then they can paint over that frame to create a new original image. Enough people have done this that there are multiple drawn images per frame of video. People can then watch the video with these hand drawn frames in a few ways (random frames, by style, by most liked, and a curated version). A wonderful feature is that you can pause the video and see who made the frame and play back their creation of the frame. It’s a great song and a great video with thousands of different possible permutations.