The annual South by Southwest conference in Austin is happening this month and as usual, there’s a strong Vancouver showing. From local social media companies like Hootsuite to bloggers and digital media enthusiasts, our city’s technology elite migrate to Texas at this time every year.

Vancouverite Kris Krüg on a SXSW panel. Photo credit: kk+ on Flickr

A little while ago I was approached by Chevy to build a team from Vancouver, hop in a car, and drive to SXSW completing challenges along the way. Unfortunately I had to decline but I recommended this opportunity to my friend John Biehler, a true SXSW veteran and past speaker who knows of all the best BBQ locations.

Biehler signed on as Vancouver’s team captain and has since put together an enthusiastic group (with media, blogging, and PR backgrounds) who will all be piling into a Chevy vehicle next week for an unbelievable two week road trip. They’ve called themselves the “Eh Team” (in true Canadian fashion).

Eh Team Members
John Biehler – @JohnBiehler
Wayne Racine – @WayneRacine
Amber Turnau – @AmberTurnau
Leila Pejman – @ThePej
Michelle LeRoux – @MichelleLeroux

“After being offered (and accepting) the roll of team captain for the Vancouver entry in the 2011 road trip, I immediately scrambled to find others that met a pretty simple criteria,” John Biehler told me. “They had to be going to SXSW, they had to have a place to stay in Austin, and I had to be able to ‘live’ with them for days on end in the vehicle.”

Biehler & Ben Huh from the “I Can Has Cheezburger” empire. Photo: John Biehler on Flickr

One by one, he signed on teammates who fit his ideal descriptions to a tee. “Amber & Michelle were already going, thanks in part to my suggestion after talking to me shortly after I returned from the 2010 SXSW. They even booked their flights, rooms & bought their badges last summer after my insistence that rooms go quickly. Needless to say, they jumped at the opportunity to participate in the road trip.”

Once the dynamic duo from Whistler was confirmed, Wayne caught up with Biehler when a SXSW badge pretty much fell into his lap. “Leila was the last to confirm her participation,” Biehler added. “We had chatted at the SXSW mixer at the Waldorf Hotel a few months back about attending and once schedules and everything else came together for her, she was confirmed as the 5th team member.” I think it’s pretty safe to say that this is a ‘super group’ of local talent.

The Eh Team will be competing against 10 other teams from around North America who will also be making their way to Austin. To add to the excitement (and competition) they will also be fundraising for Raise a Reader with donations made through their team site.

You can follow along with their adventures down to SXSW on the Eh Team Blog or by searching #EhTeam on Twitter. They will also be hosting a send off party in style next weekend at Local Public Eatery Sunday, March 6th from 3:00pm to 5:00pm.

South by Southwest is a music, film, and interactive conference. The team will be attending the interactive portion (or SXSWi) March 11th until the 15th.

Not up for writing a post this morning, or yesterday really for that matter, I sat down at our iMac and recorded a quick 17 minute video podcast. Basically I wanted to wrap up the SXSW series, give some shout outs and name drops, and show off a few new tshirts thanks to John Biehler.

I did edit out all my coughing and you can actually see my hair getting dryer as the video goes on but just remember, I’m not a professional, this is just for fun.

Also, I’m having a few issues with Viddler as this video isn’t actually working for me, although it does look like it’s uploaded. Hopefully the good folks over there will be able to figure this out, but in the meantime here it is in lovely flash player form (although now the audio and video are off *sigh*)

Update: It seems as though nothing it working at this point so here’s a photo of the SXSW shirt supplied by John.

Also, here are some links to names of products I mention in the episode:

- VistaPrint.ca
- Altoids
- Vancouver Metblogs
- Utterz

Contributed by John Biehler

Once again, SXSW Interactive dropped a huge pile of swag on all attendees.

The first year I attended, I ended up having to get an additional bag for all the goodies on the way home. Where possible, I brought extra swag for coworkers that didn’t make it to the conference and it was much appreciated…even if it ended up as a cubicle feeding frenzy once I dumped it out on my desk.

Last year, I planned ahead and had a lot of extra room in my main bag (I packed lighter for the warm weather) and which was overweight upon checking in at the airport to come home (by 5 pounds) so I simply pulled out some magazines and put them in my carry-on.

This year, I just brought a bigger suitcase and was still 16 pounds over upon leaving. I brought an extra carry-on for all the books and pulled it and the paper goods out….and the check in attendant let me go even though I was still about 4-5 pounds over.

Aside from a pile of free t-shirts from all kinds of places, here’s a few shots of some of the stuff that was picked up on the trade show floor – a few purchased items from the Make store or via donations to Creative Commons (CC/Mozilla Moleskin FTW!) and a few trinkets from my brief stopover at BarCamp Austin:

Photo Credit: John Biehler on Flickr

Photo Credit: John Biehler on Flickr

Here’s a video of me dumping out and going through the swag bag you get as an Interactive attendee. If you attended the Music, Film or had a Gold/Platinum badge, you’d get additional bags for those events too.

I shudder to think how much paper was wasted (and not recycled) from the thousands of bags issued to attendees:

Photo Credit: John Biehler on Flickr

Contributed by John Biehler

Contributed by Colleen of Shot Heard Round the Web

By now, if you pay attention to the tech news at all, you’ll have heard about the absolute train wreck the Mark Zuckerberg keynote was at South by Southwest. I’m not chiming in with anything particularly new I don’t think, but I did want to offer up my take, especially after taking some time to digest it and talk to some people about it.

Photo Credit: Kris Krug on Flickr

The general consensus is that Sarah Lacy of Business Week did a shite job. Her interview was pure fluff and was completely lacking in actual questions. More than once, Zuck said “was that a question?” It was almost as though she went out of her way to embarass the poor guy and was more interested in landing a piece of him for herself than she was in actually asking questions that mattered to the three rooms full of geeks watching.

Zuckerberg has been very very carefully media trained, and whoever he worked with did a good job. He stayed on message, never ever deviating, and was about as flat as he was on 60 minutes. I think that’s his “interview” face. Or his schtick – one or the other. He’s still very young and needs some more time to become better at the interviews, better at answering questions without sounding like he’s simply repeating what he was taught. I don’tparticularly like it, and agree with the twitterer in BlogHaus who said “Zuckerberg is about as articuate as a rock”, but I’ll cut him a tiny bit of slack because he is so young.

My problem was with Sarah and the fact that she acted like a ditz; twirling her hair, asking about his thoughts on his “Forbes Youngest Billionaire” status and doing the leg-uncross-recross-and-lean-in-show you my-cleavage move. Telling stories about Mark that sounded like she was trying to prove to the audience that she knew him and that in turn, managed to embarrass him. There was nothing good about the interview (scratch that, it wasn’t an interview; it was a conversation between two people, only on stage) and it set twitter on fire with people talking about it and riffing on the in room hecklers.

QueenofSpain (Erin Kotecki Vest) [@queenofspain], HuffPo contributor among others, has offered her take here; Brian Solis talked to Sarah herself to find out what her thoughts were. There’s lots more. Just Google it.

The one redeeming thing that Zuck did was to co-opt some time at the Facebook Developers conference and do an Open Q&A. I haven’t heard, or looked for, many response to this move yet, but I’m applauding the move from a PR point of view.

Contributed by Colleen of Shot Heard Round the Web

Contributed by Colleen of Shot Heard Round the Web

Austin is fabulous. I officially love this city.

Photo Credit: Chris Heuer on Flickr

This is my first SxSW experience and it’s nothing at all like i expected. I stopped going to the panels after my first two (tho I did make an exception for Blame Canada…) and hung out in the hallways, on the tradeshow floor and best of all, in the AMD sponsored BlogHaus.

Difficult little room to find, but once you got in there, snacks, beer (or coffee in the morning) power strips, internet connections, Guitar Hero III and internet A Listers abounded. The Austin Conference Centre is laid out in the oddest way. When you first come in, you go from the first floor directly to the fourth. Bloghaus was on the 3rd floor. For the first day, I was actually fairly convinced that Texas just didn’t bother to use the numbers 2 and 3. It’s not that everything is bigger in Texas, it’s just that they can’t count.

I met a good portion of my Twitter friends on this trip, and hung out with the Vancouver tech contingent more in Austin than I do at home. John Biehler, Peter Andersen, Tod Maffin, Phillip Jeffrey, Roland Tanglao… there are a TON of Canadians here. Last year, Twitter was the rock star of SxSWi, and everyone was trying to predict what this year’s Twitter would be. Canada is this year’s Twitter. 2008, we’re the rock stars of SouthBy.

I could have told them that tho.

Contributed by Colleen of Shot Heard Round the Web

Contributed by Colleen of Haute Culture

I completely started a trend at SouthBy this year. I didn’t mean to, it just happened!

We were headed to the Red Eyed Fly for the Fray Cafe Sunday evening. Walked past this fabulous tattoo parlor and decided just to go check it out. Called True Blue Tattoo, it had a very cool vibe and best of all it was relatively empty. Mind you, 8 pm on a Sunday evening, and I suspose that’s to be expected.

I’ve wanted to get Latin for breathe on my wrist for a while now. Spur of the moment decision, on Sunday night, I got it done. Quite small, inside my wrist, and in a great script, i now sport new ink “inspire”. Totally love it. I was with Greg and he decided to get a tattoo as well, and began designing his while waiting for me. Justin, whom I met through Twitter and then face to face at the Sundance Film Festival this year called while I was waiting to get it done and came over to watch and be my official photographer. He went and got his done on Monday night. Greg went back to Jim at True Blue and got his done on Tuesday night.

Definitely not the souvenier I expected to bring home from SxSWi, but hey, it rocks!

Contributed by Colleen of Haute Culture

Everyone is talking about it, from musicians to geeks and social media fanboys and girls, it’s the uber popular SXSW (South by Southwest) festival and it’s happening next week.

The SXSW MUSIC AND MEDIA CONFERENCE showcases hundreds of musical acts from around the globe on over fifty stages in downtown Austin. By day, conference registrants do business in the SXSW Trade Show in the Austin Convention Center and partake of a full agenda of informative, provocative panel discussions featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature. [SXSW]

The Flaming Lips @ SXSW 2007 – Photo Credit: Kris Krug on Flickr

Phillip beat me to the punch on listing all Vancouverites/Canucks who will be in attendance so here’s who he has listed so far:

My favourite Vancouver musician and yours, Matthew Good will also be performing on March 15th at Momo’s and be sure to watch out for Raincity’s party, representing Canadians and lovers of a good time everywhere (read more on Raincity’s SXSW 2008 preview).

But there’s more than just parties and concerts, there’s also the interactive portion. To give you an example of ONE day’s schedule here’s a link Tod passed along including such sessions as: How to Bluff Your Way in Web 2.0, New Dogs, New Tricks: New Media Goes to the Movies, Unleashing CSS: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IE 7, Commercialization of Wikis, Ruining User Experience, From Tags to Riches: Life After Code and hundreds more! Did I mention this is all just from one day out of ten? Yeah.

Photo Credit: Robert Scales on Flickr

To keep all of us insanely jealous folks back home up to speed on the goings on in Austin I have recruited two bloggers who will be guest posting and cross posting their updates and entries from their own sites: John Biehler (iPhone master, tech and gadget guru) and Colleen Coplick (the queen of PR). Watch for their entries next week when SXSW gets underway. If you are attending and would like your name added to the “blog watch” simply leave a comment below or over on Phillip’s post.