Once upon a time in the West (well South by Southwest actually)

By Nick Lockey on Mar 5, 08 10:49 PM in Media

A casual visitor to Chez Lockey tonight would be forgiven for thinking that I was in the middle of clearing up after a major break-in.

In fact I'm in the midst of an epic packing session in preparation for Friday morning when I'm due to hop in a taxi at sparrow's fart a.m. bound for BHX where a big shiny plane is scheduled to whisk me off to sunny Austin, Texas.

No, I'm not about to give up my new-found love of blogging to join the rodeo, I am in fact off to the South by Southwest interactive festival (or SXSWi for those of you with a vowel aversion), the biggest, geekiest tech-fest on the planet.

And in the true spirit of interactivity, you get to have a say in what I see and do at the conference as well as following the action via an ambitious experiment in collective reporting.

You see I'll be accompanied on my quest by six equally bleary-eyed Midlanders from a range of creative industry backgrounds who will all be looking at the festival from their own distinctly Brummie perspectives.

Rather excitingly, we'll be joining forces to create a bit of a conferencing first: under the collective banner of "SXSWM" (South by South West Midlands) we'll be posting blogs, photos, videos and twitters documenting our individual experiences of the festival, all of which will be collated into one combined newsfeed that anyone can follow.

Even better, anyone gets to have a say in what we get up to over the course of our five days in Austin. All you need to do is check out the SXSWM website and leave a suggestion for a session or event that you'd like us to investigate.

Whilst we obviously can't guarantee to fulfil every request that comes our way, we'll certainly do our darndest to cover as much as humanly possible.

And it goes without saying that you can expect to see plenty of action right here on the blog throughout SXSWi as I report back with all of the latest news from the conference.

I'll be checking out all of the cutting-edge stuff happening in the online world, playing around with some great new technologies and hopefully hob-nobbing with the great and the good from the hottest software and web development firms around.

Who knows, I might even find time to check out the rodeo.

Comments (2)

Older/Newer

« TV and the Web: Two Tribes Go To War | What really goes on at MIPIM »

0 TrackBacks

Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Once upon a time in the West (well South by Southwest actually).

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.birminghampost.net/cgi-bin/mt421/mt-tb.cgi/457

2 Comments

Sid Langley said:

I know you'll be doing all sorts of techie things, but on Wednesday (Mar 12) at noonish Brum rock heroes Johnny Foreigner are playing at 505 East 6th St. Sure they'd appreciate a home crowd dropping in ....

March 7, 2008 7:58 PM

Nick Lockey said:

Unfortunately I think I'll be somewhere over Canada on my return flight home by then. I'll be there in spirit though!

March 8, 2008 4:48 AM