Version 7.0Tue 13 Mar
2007
Southern Fried
Whew. I’m back from the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival and feeling a bit burnt out, in part because the show was bigger than ever this year. While I can’t say that its ferocious growth has caused South by Southwest to lose its singular usefulness as the friendliest and most thoroughly stimulating of digital conferences, scaling up nevertheless has its pluses and minuses.
That’s getting ahead of myself, though. I’m a little too fatigued to fully expand on that, but you can expect a post about this year’s experience in Austin in a day or two.
In the meantime, I’m going to offer up a little something from one of my appearances at the festival: my presentation at Monday night’s 20x2 event, the annual adjunct to the festival proper in which twenty participants are asked to answer a single, purposefully vague question in two minutes flat, using whatever creative powers they can summon.
Interestingness You Can Eat
This year’s question was “What if?” and there was the usual variety of two-minute answers: some people sang songs, some people played pre-recorded video skits, and others ad libbed responses that ran the gamut between humorous and poignant.
For my part, I worked out what I thought was a kind of businessy response, a deck of slides originally conceived as an absurdist venture capital presentation. But as I kept revising the idea, it turned into to be more of a satirization of the Web 2.0 world, as applied to a family theme restaurant: I call it T.G.I. Interwebr’s Grill.
You can download the full Keynote deck in PDF format and have a look for yourself, but I’ll post the first few slides here for you to get the idea.
Remarks 9 total remarks were added before the post was closed.
Rick Curran
I like it. We could share small bite-size snacks via 'Fritter'!
essl
You are a very strange man.
David Guillory
Ha! Good stuff, especially the user generated content.
Kirk
yet another reason to be very sad about missing SxSW this year.
Ethan
Please say we get to 'tag' our favorite dishes. Nice idea.
David Sleight
I give it 5 days before you actually get venture funding.
Summer
Yummy. If it saves me a few calories, even virtual ones, I'm all for it!
Brion
Hi Khoi! Very interesting perspective on eating -- too bad I already had lunch.
By the way, are there any resources from your session about designing with grids; particularly the yahoo! remake?
Thanks in advance.
- Brion
Khoi Vinh
Brion: thanks for asking. I'll be posting that stuff soon. Stay tuned.