A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
It looks like SXSW Interactive 2009 has been overrun by social media types. We need to formulate a strategy to save the world from social media parasites.
There’s an excellent article on John Mortimer by Christopher Hitchens.
To celebrate 20 years of the Web on Friday, here is a Semantic Web Layer Cake made out of cake. Awesome or what?
What’s the best way to deal with the presence of the Westboro Baptist Church? Parade around in bathrobes, simulating anal sex to the tune of “I’m Coming Out” by Diana Ross and the Supremes. Other people’s ignorance and Biblical-level stupidity is always a good reason to engage in lulz.
Frances Berriman has a list of the reasons why Wired State was awesome. I agree. The selectiveness of the event was important, I think, and part of the reason I wrote In defense of modest elitism.
So, yes, SXSW is on. And I’m not there. I’d like to be, but I’m too busy sleeping, eating, programming and writing essays about the fundamental nature of reality. I’m also not sure I have the energy to be around so many geeks and social media types. I mean, seriously. I’m not sure why the organisers of SXSW haven’t started crowd-sourcing that information. Just put up a wiki page called “How To Be Cool At SXSW” and let people go at it.
Ian Forrester found an excellent video from Samsung that eschews advertising in favour of just being very nerdy.
