SXSW Day 2

I hope everyone enjoyed the panel today. It was definitely fun to tell the history of how Open AIM came about, most people just think it was something that happened, but in reality it was 8 years in the making. If you missed it, well maybe I will be doing it again soon.

One panel I caught today that I really enjoyed was LonelyGirl15: A Case Study. On the panel were the three creators of LonelyGirl15, Miles Beckett, Mesh Flinders, and Greg Goodfried. Their story of how they pulled off LonelyGirl15 was really awesome. Miles was studying to be a plastic surgeon, Flinders was an out of work writer who lived at his grandmother's apartment in Hollywood, and Goodfried was a lawyer. Miles Beckett is definitely a techie wanna be, and came up with the idea to do an "Alternative Reality Game" (ARG) video story. He bought a $130 web cam and spent a great deal of time making sure things like the lighting and sound were right.

It was interesting how they describe they never set out to keep up the charade of Lonelygirl's story for very long. Basically they used the comparison to Orson Wells' War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Their position is that the technology is so new that the citizens trusted it was real, much like back in the 1938 when radio was such a new technology.

When the cover was taken off the story, they ramped up the plot and added to the production quality of the video. They claim that this was planned all along. The way the story is told, by including user feedback, makes for a unique brand of writing, as a result they have turned down offers from studios to take LonelyGirl to network television. As a result they basically admitted they ran out of money this winter, but just recently were funded by investors. Now they are looking at product placement ads as a way of making money.

During the presentation, they actually published the latest video live, which was very gutsy. It was done to make a point about how fast traffic swarms to the site when a new video is pushed live.

So some of you have asked about what Austin is like and who is this mystery person I referred to yesterday. Well I have been hanging with Morgan Spurlock, known mostly from his movie Super Size Me. Combining this conference with movies has made for some very interesting bump ins, like litterally running into Bill Paxton who was presenting yesterday morning. In any case, I am going to be releasing some code tomorrow for everyone to try out, so check back then.