16
Mar
Blogging from SXSW – Monday
Alora

SXSW 2009Today seems to be the opposite of my previous two days. After deliberately taking everyone’s advice on taking a ‘go with the flow’ approach to the SXSW experience, somehow today has proven crazy-ass busy.

10:30 panel: Beyond Aggregation
This was a great panel where we got to hear wonderful speakers, including blogger Louis Gray, discuss some very tactical tips and tricks they use to sift through excessive amounts of online information, make their own content more findable, and how they track down the best content available for their own blogs/sites. There was a LOT of great stuff in this standing-room-only panel, and I’ll write it up in more detail in the next few days, once I’ve had the chance to test drive a few of the things they discussed. Very cool stuff, though, and one of the most practically useful panels I’ve been to so far.

11:00 panel: Start-up Management (technically a “Core Conversation”)
This was actually my back-up, because I had wanted to go to the CMS ‘showdown’ between WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. Unfortunately for me, so did a TON of other people and they were smart enough to get there early enough to get in the door. C’est la vie. However, having said that, Start-up Management was also worthwhile. The founders of Dogster.com (where I have a page for Zeka, and have for 2 years this week) discussed the growth of a startup where the founders go from developers to managers. Some great dialogue, and much of the same advice (on a micro-level) to what Tony (Zappos CEO) said on Saturday during his keynote: protect your culture; hire slow and fire quickly if you realize someone is a bad fit; don’t fall into the trap of ‘just find a warm body’ because you’ll regret it. Also some good advice for small company layoffs, working with partners, and managing a product roadmap.

Some of the interviews I couldn’t get slotted in yesterday are scheduled for today.

This afternoons panels (which I’ll update about later) are scheduled to be “SEO for Startups” and “Tools to Know Your Users” — of course, this is SXSW, so anything could change.

More later!

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Category: Entrepreneurship, Lessons & Epiphanies, Mentors, Miscellaneous  Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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  • http://www.louisgray.com/live/ Louis Gray

    Alora, I am looking forward to your full writeup on the panel! I wish we could have gone 2 or 3 hours to talk as much as we could on such a big topic, and to take more questions. Glad you could find value.

  • http://www.alorachistiakoff.com Alora

    Louis:

    I’m not sure which to thank you for more: the absolutely awesome tips on today’s panel, or the great write-up on the “Ditch the Valley, Run for the Hills” panel yesterday. From a practical standpoint, the Google Reader tip is also my starting point, but you distilled some great other points that I am particularly excited to get to using when it comes to my work for Social Computing Magazine.

    And I’m totally blown away that you’ve been able to do so much blogging in the middle of SXSW. I know I’m handicapped by not having my computer with me (after interviewing Penelope Trunk today, I stood at the public machines trying to write up an article), but even if I did, I’m honestly not sure how on earth I’d find the time to write while there or the energy to write once I get home at night. Staggeringly impressive.

    ~Alora

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