Notes on South by Southwest Interactive: Day 1
12/03/2011This is my first time attending South by Southwest Interactive and to be honest, it’s both pretty amazing and pretty ridiculous. On the amazing front, pretty much every time block on the schedule has at least two or three overlapping panels that I want to attend. On the ridiculous side of the spectrum there is the whole 6th street scene and the slight hint of which-party-are-you-going-to one-upmanship that goes along with any of these events. Some have said that this is somehow worse at SXSWI, but having been to conferences big and small (from the behemoth CES to the tiny and now defunct Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association Show, keynote: Don King,) I find that hard to believe. With the show starting in earnest tomorrow, I guess I’ll be finding out soon enough.
Throughout the conference I’m going to publish notes on the blog to both help me remember key points and to share with anyone who is interested.
The first thing to note is that South by Southwest was able to quickly team with CauseVox to set up SXSW4Japan, a fundraising site for the Japan Earthquake in a matter of hours. The site was announced at the 2:30 PM session and has raised nearly $4,000 with a $10,000 goal. Admirable and impressive.
O’Reilly on Brands
Yesterday afternoon’s featured speaker was Tim O’Reilly who sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Jason Calacanis covering everything from the history of UNIX to open government and presidential politics. For me, the most interesting portion of the talk was when O’Reilly discussed what makes a great brand. The principles O’Reilly laid out basically boiled down to creating something everyone can take part in. He said the best brands are inclusive and belong to everyone who uses them. He went on to stress that the best brands create an identity that people can be a part of.
As examples of these types of brands, O’Reilly pointed to the the “maker” movement spawned by O’Reilly’s Make magazine and the open source software movement. According to O’Reilly, both Make and open source transcended their brands and became movements, which is the ultimate sign of success for a brand.
Other notes from O’Reilly’s talk:
- He feels the one thing he is good at is “pattern recognition,” which has given him an ability to look forward and get a broad view of what’s to come.
- The animal illustrations that grace the O’Reilly covers — and are key to their brand — were given to the company by a graphic designer who was a roommate of an O’Reilly staffer.
- Cisco once tried to buy O’Reilly’s publishing group saying, “You’ve been there first more than anyone else, but you always fail to exploit it.”
- O’Reilly is not interested in exploiting, but rather he wants to fund “interesting work from interesting people” which he does through O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures.
- The most interesting start-up to he’s seen recently is fluidinfo. (Full disclosure: After reading Fluid Info’s site, I have no idea what they do.)
- O’Reilly has kept his company small (and refused to sell it) because he’s always wanted a “lifestyle business” — one that fits his lifestyle.
- He believes running a large organization would be very hard: “I have a lot of sympathy for how hard it is to change large organizations.”
Matt Mullenweg: The Unhappiest WordPress User in the World Talks About Tumblr
There’s lots to say about Matt Mullenweg’s session — which was conducted in an interview format with John Battelle posing the questions — but what I want to say right off the bat is that Mullenweg seems like a really solid dude. He is not pretentious, he does not pretend to have all of the answers, seems to genuinely admire his competitors products and knows that WordPress is not perfect. At the same time he’s honest and clearly loves WordPress, with good reason. (Hey, I’m using WordPress right now!)
Not surprisingly, the conversation began with a rehash of the “Is Blogging Dead” nonsense, which Mullenweg quickly dispatched noting that, on average, WordPress adds one blog every two seconds and 12 percent of the web is now built on WordPress. Mullenweg wants to see the majority of the web built on WordPress. Rather than blogging being dead, Mullenweg said, the medium is simply facing increased competition (which is all good and healthy, by the way) and that more people on the web are becoming creators. Mullenweg noted that about 1 percent of web users are creating content, but that number wil tick up with the continued rise of blogging and services like twitter and especially Tumblr, which give users the ability to create content quickly and easily.
Mullenweg had lots of nice things to say about Tumblr, which in some respects is becoming a chief rival to WordPress. He praised Tumblr’s great design and simplicity saying it’s fantastic for photos while noting it could take users away from Flickr. He also said that Tumblr is doing an unbelievable 90 pageviews per unique user (which really doesn’t sound right) compared t 12 for WordPress and that WordPress needs to work hard to close that gap.
Tumblr’s secret sauce, according to Mullenweg, is the reblog button which has closed the gap between creating and consuming content. But he also noted that the reblog phenomenon might drive away people who are serious about publishing because it takes their content, and hence traffic, away from their site. He noted that The Daily What recently moved off of Tumblr and onto WordPress for this very reason.
Mullenweg also talked candidly about ads on WordPress, which he clearly is not altogether comfortable with. He noted the add distribution on WordPress.com is very limited and he feels that putting ads on people’s blogs is “like coming into their living room.” He did express some interest in models used by twitter and facebook which he said do a better job of “creating ads that are endemic to the content” — promoted tweets are still tweets after all.
He also touted JetPack and Guided Transfer as moves that will put WordPress.com and WordPress.org users on more equal footing, reiterating that users of both services are part of the WordPress family and should be treated equally.
As for future developments on WordPress, Mullenweg said he would like to see the service do a better job handling media (photos, video, audio) and wants the service’s full screen writing mode (which he said few users even know about) to work better. He noted that his hope for WordPress is always that it is “great for authors first.” He also expressed a desire to make system upgrades more seemless, noting that users don’t know what version of twitter their on, but it’s very obvious when WordPress users have to go through an update.
Mullenweg was pretty harsh on the WordPress mobile apps saying they are simply not good enough. he said his goal for the mobile apps on WordPress is that when you open them you see something interesting in the first ten seconds and can post something interesting within 30 seconds. He said mobile app development has been difficult because it requires developing across five platforms and in five different code bases.
Other notes from Mullenweg’s talk:
- The WordPress business model is about selling upgrades to users. Creating value for them and charging for a portion of that value.
- On JetPack and Guided Transfer pushing content off the WordPress.com network: “The more I’ve given away, the more I’ve gotten back.”
- Mullenweg believes “coding is the new literacy” and that those who know how to write code will have a distinct advantage over those who don’t. Just as literacy was a differentiator at the turn of the 20th century. (This insight has given me lots to think about.)
- In describing his pursuit of perfection, Mullenweg referred to himself as “the most unhappy WordPress user in the world.”
- To help run a distributed office, the Automattic team uses the P2 theme to gather, share and archive information.
- WordPress deletes as many as 5,000 blogs per day (and an average of 3,000-4,000 per day) due to spam, scraping and link farming.
- Mullenweg cited colourlovers as one of his favorite social network sites.
