Tag Archives: austin

sxsw

SXSW Interactive Party at Beer and Blog

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Are you going to Austin for SXSW Interactive in March? Not going, but wish you were going and want to hang out with other geeks? Want to learn more about SXSW so that you can go next year? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, you should join us at a special pre-SXSW party at Beer and Blog on Friday, February 26th from 4pm – ??.

Since this is a community organized event, you’ll be buying your own drinks, but it will be just as fun! We’ll be pairing up with Portland Beer and Blog for this event, and it will be a great opportunity to chat with others about sxsw. We can find out who else is going and talk about ways to stay in touch at the event. If you are new to sxsw, you can get some tips from the experienced attendees. SXSWi is my favorite large tech event held every March in Austin, TX. SXSW is also referred to as spring break for geeks, not that I expect the parties to sway your decision to attend (*cough*).

The Details:
Friday, Feb 26, 2009 from 4:00pm – ??
Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub
928 SE 9th Ave, Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP on Upcoming

sxsw

SXSW Interactive Portland Meetup on January 19th

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Are you planning to attend SXSW Interactive or considering attending?

I was just talking to Hugh Forrest, SXSW Interactive Event Director, and he told me that they are organizing a meetup here in Portland on January 19th. I can say without hesitation that SXSW is my favorite event (outside of Portland). It is also affectionately known as spring break for geeks due to the large number of parties every evening, and the sessions never start before 10am to accommodate our late night partying.  The Austin BarCamp also runs in parallel to SXSW at a nearby location, so many of us hit BarCamp along with the main event. In other words, it’s a great event. You should join us at the meetup if you want to learn more:

January 19
6–8 p.m.
Fez Ballroom: 316 SW 11th

Here’s the catch: If you want to attend, you must RSVP to interpress@sxsw.com. Please be sure to put Portland in the subject line of the email (they are doing a few of these in various cities).

This will give you an opportunity to learn more about SXSW from the people who organize it.  If you’ve never attended or were on the fence about attending, it’s a great opportunity to learn more. For those of us who already love SXSW, it gives us an opportunity to get to know some other Portland people who plan to attend.

On another note, a few of us plan to use Shizzow to keep up with each other at the event and find the best sessions, parties, lunches, etc. If you don’t already have an invite and would like one, please let me know in the comments, and I’ll hook you up with one.

Tons of Portland people attend SXSW, and I strongly encourage you to think about going. It’s in Austin (the cool part of Texas), really smart people attend, there are great parties, and the sessions are amazing.

General

Don't Miss Any Important sxsw Tweets this week!

I was a little bored sitting in the airport at 5am, so I thought that it would be fun to use Yahoo Pipes to help make sure that I didn’t miss any important sxsw tweets during my trip. I thought that other people might be interested in using it, too, so I built my Twitter Filter for sxsw using a user input field. You just enter your “with friends” Twitter feed URL, grab the RSS feed output, and put the feed in your favorite mobile RSS reader. Now you can make sure you don’t miss anything!

How it works:

  • You enter your Twitter “with friends” feed (it defaults to mine).
  • It searches the feed for these 2 keywords “sxsw” and “austin”
  • It outputs only the tweets with one of those keywords

Keep in mind that you can clone this pipe and add some extra keywords. Good candidates might be “party” or “werewolf” 🙂

For those sxsw’ers on Twitter, a bunch of us are writing similar filters, so you might want to make sure you include the text or hash tag “sxsw” in your Tweets.

Related Fast Wonder blog posts:

sxsw

sxsw & BarCampAustin Bound

For the next few days, I’ll be heading to sxsw and BarCampAustin. I’m trying very hard not to overplan before I get there, but I do have a few things on the agenda:

  • BarCampAustin: On Saturday, I’ll be splitting my time between sxsw and BarCampAustin. I also plan to lead some kind of session about Community Management during BarCamp. After we build the agenda, I’ll tweet the time for anyone interested in joining me in the discussion.
  • PDX Web Innovators Breakfast: Sunday morning
  • Geeks Love Bowling: On Sunday night, I’ll be sharing the lanes with a few amazing women like Erica O’Grady, Tara Hunt, and others on the “Hot Babes of Open Source” team 🙂
  • Austin Werewolf: The Portland Werewolf group (we meet monthly to play here in awesome pdx) will be hosting a Monday night werewolf game. I am NOT a werewolf!

That’s it! No more plans!

If you want to get in touch at sxsw, the best way is by sending me a direct message on Twitter. While I’m not planning things, I’m definitely open to the idea of spontaneous lunches, dinners, etc.