It was a hard fought battle.

“The idea that every tech company needs to be in the Bay Area is dead and buried. May it Rest in Peace.”

In a recent video interview at Streaming Media East Viddler’s own President Rob Sandie made this point too. We’ve built Viddler in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (and in Krakow, Poland, Phoenix, Arizona, Iceland, Australia, etc.) and have used the Internet to keep ourselves up-to-date with some of the things going on around the world in tech.

FriendFeed is leading the way in many areas. Their API is really, really well done. The stuff they do real time is great. The fact that they have groups, allow for aggregation, photos, different types of media, and are generally built ontop of a phenominal platform are among the ways that they excel.

I respect the work that FriendFeed has done. There is no doubt that they have some of the most brilliant minds on staff and that they are doing really, really great work. I was having this same discussion with Rob Sandie and I described FriendFeed as a brilliant, genius-level scientist. Except, instead of that scientist working hard to cure cancer – they are working on making better ice cubes. Surely they are doing good and interesting work – but no one really needs better ice cubes.

So who uses FriendFeed? They have a ton of users. I have an account. But who really uses it? Robert Scoble, who is a self-proclaimed FriendFeed addict, starts discussions on the service and gets an incredible amount of feedback. That’s all well and good – for Robert. But what about the rest of us?

On FriendFeed I have 311 followers. Not a lot by today’s social-juggernaut standards – however, 311 people is a lot of people. Think of the room you’re in right now being filled with 311 people. If you stood up in that over crowded room and asked a question you’d probably get at least a few people to answer you. Especially those close to you.

Well, I did that very thing – nearly a month ago – on FriendFeed and got zero replies. I do polls on Twitter (where I have just over 1,700 followers) all the time and I get a bunch of replies. Sure, 1,700 is much more than 311. But out of 311 not a single response?

So my question is: Does anyone really use FriendFeed? If so, how?

Viddler all-star Kyle Slattery (right) is back from his semester in Germany. He’s already back at work and back to eating Gombos from The Goose. We’re happy to have him back and to feed him.

Oh yeah, Rob Sandie is in this photo too.

Random 60: What can save newspapers? | Favorite on Viddler.

Can anything save newspapers? Today I’m joined by Rob and Bernie, two of my coworkers, and we all have simple ideas that may help save the newspapers for us. For Rob he thought he needed to see more talk about technology in his local newspaper. Bernie said the main reason he gets the newspaper, like so many others, is to help his family save money using coupons. For me, I’d much rather an online solution by giving my local news on my phone or with alerts.

What would save newspapers for you? Would you subscribe to them in paper form or online?

I’ll spare you from boredom. Here is my day in under two minutes.

I haven’t done a MeToday video, or any video for that matter, in many months so I was happy to use the Board Meeting as an opportunity to just bring along the Flip camera and take miscellaneous shots to stitch together. The music I chose for this particular MeToday was Happening by The Supremes.

Some blogger I am, I didn’t even mention that I was going to go to the New Media Expo in Las Vegas.  Well, I did. And it was great. And you should have been there.

But now onto my point and why I used the above photo in this post.

Las Vegas is like Podcasting.  Sure, it is pretty well established.  There are very professional, glamorous, and dare I say elegant examples already in place. There are, of course, some “not so good” examples too – we’ll call them coolers – which inevitably show themselves in such a place.  But there is a fact which rings true and ever clearer in my ear now that I’ve attended the New Media Expo this year; it is still getting bigger.

Both Las Vegas and Podcasting are continuing to grow at a rate that seems fairly hard to calculate with any metric other than potential.  I was really happy to hear Gary Vaynerchuk say in his keynote speech on the first day of the Expo that people need to exercise patience and work hard to achieve their goals in podcasting.  And that mantra ran right through until the very last day.

People were very, very excited about the new tools, gear, the growing community and seeing each other’s faces – but more importantly they see that they can build a viable commodity all on their own, so long as they’re willing to work at it.

I was there, of course, with the Viddler team including Rob, Donna, Kyle, and Brandice.  We all had a great time sharing a booth with TubeMogul, meeting up with tons of Viddler members, and helping people set up their customizable Viddler players.

For weeks prior to the Expo we helped the New Media Expo team by setting up the video portion of their official site.  It ended up being a big hit for both the Expo and Viddler, and anyone not able to attend the Expo.  We consider video at these types of events to be the most powerful form of media for a backchannel. If you’re going to a conference, organizing one, or would just like information on how we put this together, be sure to drop me a line.

On the very last day Kyle, Brandice, and I created a show on-the-fly called Two Minutes at New Media Expo.  We did this by doing 2-minute interviews with as many people as we could on the last day of the Expo (which only went until 1 o’clock).  In that short amount of time we interviewed nearly 30 different expo attendees, companies, and even Kings. We have a bunch more episodes coming out so stay tuned! How did we do all of this? I’m planning on writing a post called “How to build a video podcast in 24 hours.”.  If you don’t see this by the end of next week yell at me.

I think I can speak for the entire Viddler team when I say that we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves at the New Media Expo this year and that we’re looking forward to the next one.  Viva la New Media Expo!

Mmmm. BBQ chicken pizza. Rob had a salad. Cosi is good.

Having a teleconference with ten people in Pennsylvania, New York, and Crakow, Poland.

We were able to give away a fair amount of Viddler tshirts, in only a few minutes, at the DiggNation Meetup in Brooklyn, New York to those waiting in line for the live taping of DiggNation.  We did have one stipulation, however, that you must wear the Viddler tshirt right now in order to get one.

It was great to see so many Viddler tshirts within the first few rows of the crowd for the entire night.  Even one girl wearing a Viddler tshirt was up on stage in front of, what we’ve been told was, a capacity crowd at Studio B.  So it was a definite WIN.

Hope everyone enjoys their Viddler shirts!

The iPhone helped the cabby find Brooklyn, Ha!

Some 14yr. old skateboarder dude was sleeping next to me.  His head kept bobbing and hitting me, so Kyle laughed.

Waiting for the bus in Hellertown, PA with Rob and Kyle. We’re headed to New York City for the DiggNation Meetup.

Rob, a Monster drink, and a laptop. The usual scene here at ViddlerHQ.

Early Saturday at Indy Hall
View more photos from Indy Hall.

Independents Hall is nested nicely in Old City, two-floors above Strawberry Street (or what could be called an alley), and is now the venue for the future of coworking in Philadelphia. Spending the better part of the day there, on a Saturday, working with a few other people is a real joy. The space, the people, the weather – all factors in inspiring productivity.

My main reason for coming to Independents Hall on this day was to be part of the judging panel for the Viddler MealToday contest and to use the space’s grand opening party as the backdrop for the announcement of its winner. Alex Hillman, and the rest of the coworkers at Indy Hall, were all extremely accommodating – allowing us to take over a few of their desks for the day, a good portion of their second floor, their projector, and their board room. Really, we couldn’t have asked for better hosts.

I had a ball seeing all of the people in Philly again and had a great time judging MealTodays with Scott McNulty, Marisa McClellan, Rob Sandie, and Gary Vaynerchuk. We’ll be releasing a video later today We’ve released a video on the Viddler Spotlight (our blog), which shows what went on that night and that should give you a good glimpse into what it was like to be at Indy Hall’s party and to be judging the MealTodays.

With well over 100 people in attendance there is no doubt in Philadelphia’s interest in coworking and community (and probably champagne). Such support makes me both jealous and inspired to someday setup a coworking space further north of Philadelphia. But that won’t be until I have time to settle down.

If I didn’t get to say hi to you while in Philadelphia, sorry. I’ll be in again this weekend for Podcamp Philly.

Which leads me to my response to a post by Michael Meiser who has some Ramblings about Viddler’s time based commenting and tagging… among other things. Michael has some really great ideas on how Viddler could improve commenting (he doesn’t really get into rambling about tagging) – but perhaps he’s missed our first step to solving his problem. Michael says:

Viddler’s time based tagging and commenting is interesting but let me know when they get the comments out of flash and use the blog API (blogger.com, moveabletype, wordpress) to post them as “real comments” to your blog post where they belong? where they can be read with the rest of the comments, where they can be tracked with co.mments.com and other trackers, where they can be syndicated with RSS? where I can actually READ them instead of them being in a tiny little 320×240 little window.

The bottom line is there’s two different conversations here. There’s the one in viddler, which is? whatever? can’t follow it. And then there’s the one in the page? which is awesome and useful?. and I can actually read? and which I will actually get responses on because I?m tracking it with co.comments.com.

When I started at Viddler in January of this year, one-month after the site went live, this was my primary complaint about Viddler. The comments were trapped. The conversation was stifled because the UI didn’t lend itself to inline responses. So, we set forth a roadmap to fixing these issues. The first step was improving the timed-commenting interface and creating a way to thread responses. This improved conversations inside the flash-player very much. The second step, which was completed and launched during our last major version upgrade, was to pull the conversations out of the flash player and onto the page to make them much more readable.

Michael’s suggestions fall on the heels of his watching Chris Messina‘s excellent rant about Mozilla. A video that has received a great deal of attention and with that – a good deal of conversation has been had on the timeline. Some 26 comments have occurred on the timeline, mottling up the interface a bit (something that Viddler is always striving to improve upon). Looking at the main video page for Chris’ video it becomes very easy to follow the conversation happening on the timeline.* So in a way, we’ve already taken steps to improve the ability to follow conversations.

Let’s say, however, that Chris wanted to keep his conversation completely on his site so that he could keep track of it much more easily. All he’d have to do is adjust the options for his video to turn off comments on his video and post the video to his weblog. Or, if Chris wanted only timed comments, he could have easily turned off comments on his blog post and pointed everyone to Viddler for commenting. But Chris chose to allow both, knowingly or unknowingly I don’t know.

Michael also remarks that he’d like comments to be “…syndicated with RSS?…”. This, again, was one of the first things we took care of in our latest revision of the system. Every single video has a feed for subscribing to comments (just like most weblogs do). Simply append /feed/ to the end of any video URL. For example, to subscribe to the comments Chris’ Mozilla rant, you’d use this url. The feed will not only syndicate the comments made on the video, but also will link you to the moment in time the comment was made. Perhaps we do not have enough of a visual indicator for these feeds (since we only broadcast their availability via “feed detection” enabled browsers). If this is the complaint I’m sure we could update the site to make the existence of these feeds much more apparent.

So what is the next step regarding Michael’s ramblings? Will Viddler start using the MetaWeblogAPI to post comments made on the timeline onto the user’s blogs? I am not sure that is the clear cut answer. I think the interface for that could get a little crazy and most people’s weblog designs wouldn’t really work to link back to the moments in time that these comments happened (but that doesn’t mean that Michael’s thoughts on this haven’t gotten my brain’s wheels spinning and I hope to address this in greater detail with the Viddler team in the near future). In the meantime though, perhaps improving the way some of the options are worded, or perhaps some more tips are in order? Maybe explaining to the content producers that if they’d like to keep their conversations in one place, that the best way to do that is to either turn commenting off on Viddler or on their blog. Either would work. Lets not lose sight of the fact that Viddler is doing something very new with timed-comments – and that it will take some time before all of the dust settles and the right solutions for these problems become very clear. Remember when Trackbacks started mottling up Comments? Now every blog has trackback support, but each of them “shows them differently”, but yet most of the time they work for what they are. Viddler is taking steps to allow trackbacks, perhaps the trackback API would be the next evolutionary step to keeping conversations in one place? We’ll see.

Ok, enough about that – lets address Michael’s next rambling:

One last thought on viddler. While the interface is interesting there’s a lot more to a company than a cool flash interface? look at blip.tv. My fav video blog host. The key to blip’s success thus far is serving the core videoblogging community? which unlike youtube.. wants to have their own domain? their own blog, the ability to monetize? to OWN their own content and have control over it? to not have it deleted or removed because of some arbitrary DMCA notice. Anyway? none of that has to do with a slick interface. It has to do with strategy and architecutre and business direction. Then again.. blip could REALLY stand to have a slick viddler flash interface? maybe the two should partner? of course maybe viddler sees blip as competition. They shouldn’t, but maybe they do.

Lots to chew on here. I’ve been asked several times what I think of “our competition”. I’ve had entire conversations on how so-and-so is “doing this” and why doesn’t Viddler “do that”. This “Us vs. Them” type of attitude (UVTA) can very trapping. In every company I’ve ever been apart of, the UTVA has always been omnipresent. Some have used it in inspirational ways while most of been trapped by it.

When I worked for a securities trading firm it was Us vs. Ameritrade. Constant comparisons between how much Ameritrade “paid per account” and our method of gaining accounts. When I moved onto a sports memorabilia agency it was always Us vs. The Bigger Company. Comparing athlete contracts, etc. Then came 9rules where comparisons between Us and other weblog networks would constantly be drawn. Other weblog networks would even begin to debate the idea of whether or not 9rules should even be considered a weblog network. Talk about worthless chatter. In every case described above there has been some level of balance and imbalance. In one case it may have been one executive of the company that would get completely trapped by the UVTA, while another executive would swoop in and rescue the other. I’ve even seen entire teams get sucked into this line of thinking and begin to lose focus on what they wanted to accomplish. That is the trap.

The point is – the UVTA can be used to either help your company progress or could end up trapping your company from making any progress on its goals because you get sidetracked. Each product is typically built to solve a problem or set of problems. When that focus is lost by trying to keep up competing products, everyone suffers. Especially the original goals set out by the founders of the company/product. The balance of paying attention to your competition and remaining on a course to complete your own goals is very difficult to strike. A moving target sometimes. But not impossible.

After over five-months with Viddler I think they do an incredible job at this balancing act. Does Viddler consider other video sharing sites competition? Perhaps competition for your attention, but not necessarily from a feature or business perspective. Are other video sharing sites doing some things that Viddler should be doing? Absolutely. But here is why comparisons are completely unfair and should never be harped upon too much. Viddler has only been live since December 2006. There are several sites that have been around much longer, have a larger team, and great resources. I’ve never heard these reasons used by the Viddler team as an excuse, or a crutch, to under-perform. But these facts remain.

In other words; Any comparisons drawn between Viddler and any other service will be taken seriously from the standpoint of trying to improve Viddler’s platform. Playing catchup is nearly impossible and Viddler doesn’t consider itself behind the 8-ball. We’ve got our roadmap. Rob Sandie is quite possibly the best product manager I’ve ever met and he’s only 24. Did I mention the service has only been around for 6 months? Go take a look at Viddler again. Dive deep. Six months.

To Michael, thank you very much for jotting down your ramblings. They definitely got me thinking about the next step for Viddler in trying to both revolutionize commenting on the timeline of video – and trying to create seamless conversation. But comparing two services this early on in development is really unfair and getting stuck in that attitude would do more harm than good. The Viddler team is dedicated to helping our Viddlers have the best possible experience using the product envisioned by its founders – and that will continue to be our mantra.

* Most of the “comments” on Chris’ video was him using the comments feature as a way to inject URLs into the timeline of the movie. This is something we are working to fix in a future version of the player that would give the producer of the video the ability to add clickable URLs on the timeline which would, in a way, remove the need to “hack the system” in such a way.

Rob will be giving a presentation on Viddler and three other presenters will be demoing some of their stuff. I’m looking forward to all of the presentations, but mostly I look forward to making Rob laugh in front of 300+ people! Aren’t I a great friend?

If you are in New York City, or can get there before tomorrow, try to make it to the meetup just to say “hi”. But you’ll need to RSVP pretty quickly, since there are only about 84 “slots” left as of my writing this. You can RSVP via Meetup.com.

Looking forward to Video 2.0 and hopefully seeing you there!

Update: I’ve got Eliza, Mike, and Andrew in my car already. And, “rumor” has it that I’ll have a few more friends coming that you may want to meet – stay tuned…

Another update: Guess who is crashing Video 2.0? Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV. Now you’re getting your calendars out and erasing that business meeting you had tomorrow night, aren’t you?

[tags]video 2.0, meetup, new york city, event, viddler, rob sandie[/tags]
[slug]event-nyvideo2[/slug]

Thursday, March 8th

12:33pm – In preparation of the trip from the northeast, to south by southwest (fittingly) – I picked up some shorts and got my hair did (photo). I managed to get these two tasks done fairly quickly and get back to my office for a few “last minute” things that I need to get done before we set sail.

Right now I’m waiting on the WineLibrary TV crew to get their latest episode completed. I’m helping them integrate their show with Viddler‘s system so that they get the most benefit out of it. Yesterday’s show was a huge success and today we’re hoping to add even a little more value for the Vayniacs.

People are really coming around with how Viddler works in situations like this. I think WineLibrary TV’s episodes are the perfect candidate for Viddler’s technology. Check out this comment.

“Man, after being a naysayer yesterday, I have to say that these new tags are awesome, and I’m now a total convert!” — Kent I

As this service matures, I think many people will start to enjoy interacting with their video in this manner. Stay tuned – because today’s episode should have a few new features that I think their audience is going to love.

2:35pm – I think it is amazing how many people are going to this thing. I’ve gotten more instant messages and emails today than I have in a very long time, and most of it is about trying to get together in Austin. In one hand; exciting. In the other; overwhelming.

I’m still going over our itinerary with a fine toothed comb. I have a lot of friends that are speaking on panels, and it’d be really nice to see all of them on stage, but I doubt I’ll get to see anyone since they are mostly there for “Web dev stuff” and my primary focus will be on Internet video while I am there. Well, back to the calendar.

4:20pm – I had the privilege of helping to prepare WineLibrary TV Episode #196 using some new Viddler features. Things went really smoothly and so far it seems that their audience really enjoys it.

Now I’m packing my suitcase, going to see if I can get a small nap in this afternoon before I pack up all of my “technology stuff”. I have to leave at 4:00am..

10:51pm – Just packing up my “tech stuff”. Heading to New Jersey in 5 hours or so to catch a jet plane to Austin, TX. My next update will probably be from an airport or something.

Friday, March 9th

11:02am – On Continental Airlines Flight 350 at 34,000 feet: Our ride this morning was, well, interesting. I was supposed to be the navigator for Mike and I to get to Viddler HQ, pick up Rob, and head to Newark, NJ to catch our flight.

Mike and I got to talking and I managed to allow us to pass a few exits, a few times, so we did a lot of U-turning. Then, after we finally met up with Rob – we were on our way to Newark International Airport and Rob forgot his wallet. Another U-turn.

Morgan Spurlock and I
Newark, New Jersey

We finally made it to the airport, all of us having to pee like crazy, and managed to get on Mike’s flight (we were on standby for this flight). Mike is about five rows behind me right now, looking at some girl in a rather inappropriate way probably, and Rob is next to me (photo). Next to Rob is a nice guy named Jeremy who is also heading to South by Southwest with Morgan Spurlock (of SuperSize Me fame), who I had a chance to meet and have a short chat with. (I will upload a photo once I dump my cameras contents).

James Bond: Casino Royale is currently playing on the screen as I am listening to Dan Benjamin interview Cindy Li on the latest Hivelogic Radio. I’m going to finish listening to Hivelogic Radio before I move onto watching the latest episode of Heroes that I downloaded before I left.

4:38pm – @ SXSW – 2nd floor: – Just got registered. Going to see if we can fit in a panel here at the convention center. The first panel we wanted to see is at a different place.

6:14pm – From the back of Austin Cab 451: – Rob and I are in Best Buy parking lot, in the back of a cab. We just bought some things we needed for the HD camera (since we now have a press pass), and we want to be able to tape some of the panels we’re attending.

I was twittering with Chris Messina and I saw him and Tara sitting at a table. If it wasn’t for them I would have never figured out that there was “big bags” to get full of cool trinkets. Most of them are purely marketing material, but that’s cool. There was piles of papers that people threw out of the bags onto the tables.

I just met up with David Seah just before leaving the convention center. I did an interview with him while he was trying to put together some legos. Video coming soon.

9:21pm – At the Double Tree Room 609: – Just got back to the hotel after eating at The Boiling Pot on 6th. Very cool place, nice and spicey. Alex, Rob, and I ate crawfish, potatoes, corn, and other stuff that was spilled out all over the table. Sound familiar Eliza?

Now we’re trying to get our Internet connections working. Here are some photos that I took today.

Rob and I in Taxi

Rob and I in Line

David Seah

The Capital Building

Wanna ride?

Our food

Poor guy

Friday, March 9th Gallery

I have some more photos, but I’m only going to do a few a day until I can get home and have the time to go through them all.

Saturday, March 10th

8:43am – At the Double Tree Room 609: – Woke up fairly refreshed this morning. Definitely need some breakfast and a coffee before heading to SXSW. Anyone having breakfast anywhere?

10:15am – @ SXSW 2nd floor – Room 12AB: – In the Video is worth more than 1,000 words panel. Going over some of the trends, some of the history, and some of the future of social video.

11:13am – @ SXSW 2nd floor – on the floor: – Panel is over. Met Chris from Adobe. Still can just barely get the internet. Port 80 sucks.

11:56am – @ SXSW 2nd floor – Room 19AB with Jeremy Keith and Andy Budd: – Just published my interview with David Seah on the Viddler blog.

7:10pm – @ Logan’s on the Sixth: – Ate some dinner, talked to my brother-in-law on video chat for the first time. Having a Logan’s Lemonade, very good. More video on Viddler coming soon! Stayed tuned.

8:05pm – @ Double Tree, 15th Street, Room 609: – Dumping photos, video to our hard drives. Checking a few things, getting a shower, short nap – then off to see the Ze Frank + BuzzFeed party, then to the Virb party till 4am supposedly? Should be fun, we’ll shoot video.

9:15pm – @ Double Tree, 15th Street, Room 609: – Just posted our Saturday lunch update, and our Saturday night update to our Viddler blog. Here are some photos from today.

Alex

Chris and Rob

Shawn Grimes

Jonathan Snook

Matt Mullenweg

Greg Storey, Paul Nixon

Anton Peck

Lunch update

Nathan Smith

Erik Sagen

Tag, You’re It

Overlooking Austin

Mike Stickel

“Niero” Gonzalez

Free beer w/ Zach

MeToday

Saturday, March 10th, Gallery

4:14am – @ Double Tree, 15th Street, Room 609, after the Ze Frank party: – Ze Frank, BuzzFeed and another company threw a party at the Molotov Lounge. It was pretty good, Ze did a funny bit on airplane safety (which will be on Viddler later). Then there was free drinks for a few hours. Thanks to all the sponsors, it was a cool place to hang for a bit.

Here are some photos of the people I met at Ze’s little bash.

Bill Streeter

John Gruber

Irina Slutsky

Ze Frank

Jeremy Keith

Mike Stickel

Shaun Inman

Adam Michela

Peter Flaschner

Garret Murray

Ze’s Party Gallery

It was really great to finally meet everyone. It kinda makes me wish we all could do this every month if for no other reason than to bounce ideas off one another and chat about the stuff we love. The world is such a small place, thanks to the Internet, yet it remains so large that I feel as if I am going to lose “contact” with everyone the moment I leave South by Southwest. We’ll see…. I guess I can still Twitter spam for Adam.

Sunday, March 11th

10:58am – @ Double Tree, 15th Street, Room 609: – Stayed up until 7am playing around with something “special”. Alex and I will put some polish on it today/tonight and release it. It is the culmination of the brain power of myself, Rob Sandie, Adam Michela, Peter Flaschner, and several other contributors. Should be fun.

Now I have to get over to the conference center so that I can show up fashionably late to the second panel of the day after finding some coffee and a muffin or something.

1:14pm – @ PF Chang’s for lunch: – Spent most of the morning getting things prepared for the rest of the day. Had a great discussion with Molly about some of the stuff she’s able to accomplish with Microsoft, I definitely wish her all the best with everything professional and otherwise.

Now we’re eating and planning the rest of our day.

4:50pm – @ SXSW Ballroom F: – Waiting for the next panel to start, so I might as well fill you in. (I won’t have time for many links or photos so I will update this from the hotel later). I finally was able to meet up with Irina Slutsky to do The Vloggies Show (which is a new show she is doing so be sure to stay tuned as it will air this week). Spoke to a guy from Microsoft about Expression Web… he said there was a lot of things going on in the pipe and that the initial release is only the beginning. Being an ex-Frontpage 98 user, I hope they are able to build something that is relatively solid for their audience.

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks.com asked what the little black guy was in the big bag you get here at South by Southwest. I figured it out. If you go to the exhibit hall, find Vital Stream’s booth, you can throw it at a dart-like board and win a shirt. I got a bulls-eye on the first try and won a shirt.

We only were able to attend one or two panels so far today, and hopefully tonight we’ll be able to see Morgan Spurlocks doc “What would Jesus Buy”.

11:28pm – @ Hilton Lobby: – Just had a nice conversation with Irina and two guys that did not give me their cards because they had run out of them (if you are reading this, email me your contact information). Talking about ad networks and how to display ads based on content within a video on Viddler rather than just the content on the page. Pretty cool stuff.

We’re sending all of our HD video that we’ve captured to a professional video editor, so I am excited to get all of that back and have it up on the Viddler blog soon enough. If anyone would like to do an interview, or has not signed my shirt, please grab me. I’m hoping to have content being published regularly over the next few weeks.

Monday, March 12th

3:00am – @ Double Tree, Room 609: – After hanging in the Hilton’s lobby for a few hours I heard through Twitter that the 9rules crew was hanging out in the bar. I ran over, had a drink with Molly (thanks for the shot Molly), Paul Scrivens, Mike Rundle, and Mike’s fiancé Eleni.

Back to work though as we headed for our hotel and I featured a video that was taken during one of the panels here. Rob and I managed to record many of the panels we went to, and we’re hoping to get that video up slowly over the next few days. We have someone helping us with that too, which is great – because Rob and I are stretched pretty thin.

Even though I am starving, I am going to head to bed and see if I can’t get up on time tomorrow.

10:22am – @ Double Tree, Room 609: – Awake. Slept in a little, somehow our wake-up call never happened. Today will be another busy day. I didn’t have the chance, nor the energy, to go through all of my photos from yesterday and get them posted, but I will try to do that if there is any downtime during the day.

Remember, if I “know” you, but I have not met you yet, please make it a point to run over to me. I’d like to meet everyone at this opportunity. I’ll be the blonde guy in the Viddler tshirt.

2:46pm – @ SXSW Room 12AB: – Just ate lunch at the Spaghetti Warehouse for a discussion about OpenID. Very interesting stuff and I am definitely going to recommend that Viddler make it part of their development roadmap. For anyone that has not looked into OpenID be sure to do so, especially if you’d like to be prepared for the future of online, cross service, authentication.

On my way back from the lunch, I saw Paul Nixon running and we both said I should have been running with him. Damn him and his Nike+ package and the motivation to run while in the Texas heat.

Right now I’m in an interesting panel about whether or not User Generated video is considered film or not. Sounds really niche, and it definitely is, but it is also incredibly interesting as a discussion topic – and I never ever thought it would be.

Tuesday, March 13th

Robert Scoble

10:33am – @ Double Tree, Room 609: – Good morning! Sorry that I haven’t updated since early afternoon yesterday but things went a little hectic there. After watching Luke W‘s panel on the various interface libraries (which was absolutely packed and should have been much longer), I needed to be outside in front of the convention center to go to The Salt Lick, which is a BBQ pit about 45 minutes outside of Austin, with Robert Scoble, Chris Aarons, Sarah Beck, and Patrick Nichols of AMD, an extremely nice gentlemen from AT&T’s Web department, and Jim Posner from IBM who was in Apocolpse Now (more on all of this later).

After that I headed to the Great British Booze up, which was just about ending at the time. I hooked up with the entire Forty Media crew (there is a lot of them), and went to the next party where I ended up spending most of my time talking to Larry Halff about all things Ma.gnolia and Ruby on Rails. It was a great discussion and having never used Ma.gnolia – I can say that it seems like a service I should have been using for years. I’m going to give it a try the moment I can find some free time with wifi (aka: when I get home).

So now I gotta hop in the shower because Rob and I are going to do a Lunch Meet.

2:03pm – @ In the Hilton Ballroom, 6th Floor, for Will Wright’s keynote: – Our lunch meet got postponed by a few hours. Hard to get everyone in one place at the same time. So Rob and I are recording the Will Wright keynote. I am definitely looking forward to seeing a demo of Spore.

Tuesday, March 14th

10:44am – @ Double Tree, Room 609: – The demo of SPORE was really awesome. Will Wright’s keynote alone was very good, but the demo just tops it off that Will actually does what he feels.

I have a ton to more write about. I’ve kept this “live blog” as up-to-date as I could considering the circumstances with time, internet connectivity, etc. So instead of writing a huge wrap up to what is already one of my longest posts ever, I will be writing single entries that highlight very specific panels, discussions, lunches, and parties after I get back home to Pennsylvania.

As a short overview of what happened since yesterday’s keynote – We recorded one or two more panels, went to Logan’s again for dinner, then hit up the VIP at the Media Temple party.

After that it was a bunch of sad goodbyes, as most of us know that we’ll only be in contact virtually for awhile… but overall the experience was good.

Thanks to all that kept up with me over the conference. Those that came over to say hi, those that signed my shirt, those whom I met for the very first time, and those that I will be friends with for a long time to come.

Sorry to any of you that were looking for me, or didn’t have a chance to talk to me for whatever reason… send me an email and maybe we’ll get together sometime.

Stay subscribed, a ton of stuff to come.

[tags]sxsw, austin, texas, pennsylvania, new jersey, travel, conference, festival, live, winelibrary tv, viddler, photos, video, robert sandie, alex hillman, rob sandie, john gruber, shaun inman, ze frank, adam michela, mike stickel, ma.gnolia, larry halff, openid, the salt lick, bbq, robert scoble, amd, chris aarons, Bill Steeter, Irina Slutsky, Jeremy Keith, Peter Flaschner, Garrett Murray[/tags]
[slug]live-sxsw07[/slug]

Chris at Ten Stone Bar – April 15, 2006

So far Eliza, Mike, and Chris are coming with me. It looks like Rob, Tom, and Marisa are definitely going. Andrea and Jason might be going. And sadly Tony G. can’t make it. Update: Happily Tony G. is able to make it!

And, it appears we’re going to have a fairly full house.

If you are in the Philadelphia area (heck I’m 2 1/2 hours away and I’m still going) and you’d like to meetup with some great people to discuss WordPress, blogging, Viddler, or just sit back and enjoy a beer – sign up to the meetup and we’ll see you there.

Note: You can add this event to your calendar program of choice since this post is marked up using hCalendar. Enjoy.

Note addendum: It appears that the above link won’t work for Outlook users? Not sure why – probably because Outlook sucks?

[tags]philadelphia, meetup, webloggers, blogging, wordpress, event, pennsylvania, viddler, rob sandie, chris fehnel, mike stickel, colin devroe, eliza devroe, tom kim, marisa mcclellan, andrea, jason santa maria, tony green, microformats, hcalendar[/tags]
[slug]meetup-021706[/slug]

9:30am – Woke up around 6, left at around 7:30, arrived at Viddler HQ – hit up Starbucks for Rob to get his “fix”, and now we’re at the office.

The first order of business? Update the featured videos on the explore page for the week. These videos are hand picked by internal staff so if you see a video highlighted there, you know we all really like the video and the use of Viddler.

10:00am – Donna just got here and now it is time to go through some community strategy.

10:09am – Before we head off to the conference room, maybe any of you could leave some suggestions.

12:37pm – Great strategy meeting. Hopefully some of the ideas we generated during it will be put into play pretty soon. Exciting things not only for Viddler but anyone that wishes to promote their video online.

Rob, Donna, and I at the Viddler HQ

1:09pm – Rob just ordered some lunch (I’m starving). I’m getting a “huge salad”.

Donna is sitting next to me on a brand new HP laptop running Vista. Donna is no slouch when it comes to computers and she’s spent about 30-minutes trying to get a printer running. I think Vista is showing its true colors for sure right now.

Maybe I can get the Viddler team, since Andrew and I are already running Mac OS X, to switch? Oh wait, Rob needs the nipple (more on this later).

Be sure to check out the new featured header I created for this post.

2:26pm – Lunch was good! I’m actually really full. Now back to writing today’s blog post!

4:09pm – Finished today’s featured videos blog entry (look for it on the blog after it is reviewed). I can’t wait to be able to create those types of posts much quicker with some of the tools I envision…. more on this later.

For now, enjoy a photo we got right before lunch. It is the serious version of the one you see in the new header promoting this post.

5:06pm – The featured video post for this week has been published. It is nice to have all of the featured videos in one location to quickly flip between them.

5:36pm – I’m on my way home. Good day.

[tags]viddler, bethlehem, pennsylvania, live, video, photos, windows vista, donna demarco, colin devroe, rob sandie[/tags]
[slug]live-viddlerhq-again[/slug]