Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

What a great BlogHer party at Stubbs BBQ! I flickred some photos including of me with Mary Hodder and Renee Blodgett and Tish Grier.

For more of my SXSW photos, keep track of this set.

For more of everybody’s SXSW photos, watch this public photo pool.

For more about “gargantuan sea monster rampaging through the streets of downtown Tokyo, flame-throwing, bad-ass Aaron Hamre Band” see AaronHamre.com.

So, I flew direct from Boston to Austin this morning, sitting next to a Linux/PHP guy from O’Reilly Books who’s also en route to SXSW.

And what’s playing on my TV screen? Is that MacGyver?

Could geek heaven get more heavenly?

So, join us! I’m Flickring SXSW–got some great photos of tonight’s BlogHer party…

If everyone else listed their things-to-do at SXSW, would you do it too?

Er, no, not really. But if Lisa Williams did it….

Friday, March 10th

• 9:00 pm • The BlogHer party!

Saturday, March 11th

• 10:00 am • Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting Tag Clouds for Grandma
• 11:30 am • We Got Naked, Now What?
• 5:00 pm • How to Create Passionate Users

Sunday, March 12th

• 10:00 am • Respect Your ElderBloggers
• 11:30 am • Tagging 2.0
• 2:00 pm • Keynote Conversation: Heather Armstrong / Jason Kottke
• 3:30 pm • Bloggers in Love: Intimacy, Technology and Mask-Making
• 4:30 pm •  Jimmy Wales gets interviewed in Studio SX

Monday, March 13th

• 10:00 am • Cluetrain: Seven Years Later
• 11:30 am • The Scobleizer is signing Naked Conversations
• 12:30 pm • The Bloggies! (Adobe Day Stage Cafe)
• 2:00 pm • Craig Newmark Keynote Interview
• 3:00 pm • Interviews with Danah Boyd, John Lebkowsky, Bruce Sterling, and Jory DesJardins (in Studio SX)
• 5:00 pm • What People Are Really Doing on the Web

Tuesday, March 14th

• 10:00 am • How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Standards
• 5:00 pm • Bruce Sterling Presentation: The State of the World

I’m not sure I’ll make it to half these sessions, because one of my other goals for SXSW is to interview lots of bloggers, especially (on the one hand) people who can tell me stories about going on book tours and (on the other hand) people who don’t live on either coast of the US. And of course I’m also bringing some work to catch up on….

I’ll be the woman with bright red shoes and ever-growing circles under my eyes…See you there!

Just a few recent finds about SXSW this weekend:

Interactive Playpen

Lotsa LEGOs for grownup geeks to play with when not panelizing. Sooz is among the creators of this fun activity.

Photo contest: find today’s random person

Every day, a new chance to win an iPod and a new reason to look closely at other people (sponsored by style master)

BlogHer Meetup

BlogHers and friends of BlogHers, of any gender, will gather Friday, March 10, at Stubbs, thanks to Paige Maguire

Or–if you’d rather feel SXSW-scared, check out this last-year’s Flickr of “What’s in my bag.” I won’t measure up to that, but then I’m not MetaFilter.

That picture above: just some blogfriends from SXSW 2004 (legend here, and even more people I met
listed here.) Yee ha, Austin–I can’t wait to see you again!

Steve Rubel’s explaining memetrackers* to the marketers. “Look, but don’t touch,” says he. Darn good advice, but not possible in quantum mechanics, where observing any event inherently changes it.

Now, picture Web 2.0 as a Schrödinger’s cat, with more people peeking and poking at her every day. Is she starting to look rather different from what we expected?

Sticking to memetrackers, since that’s what Steve wrote about:

There’s now a huge difference between linking to the last story at the bottom of the page on Memetracker X and linking to the only-slightly-less-popular story that almost but never-quite made it onto that page. This creates a huge incentive for ambitious bloggers to try to link to stories they think will be popular link-targets instead of linking to stories that tickle their interest.

The linkage pattern of profit-seeking bloggers is changed because it’s observed–pulled toward what Kevin Marks called the zero-sum game of traditional media, instead of the what GapingVoid calls the “nice long tail.”

A lot of Web 2.0 Schrödinger’s cats need to worry a bit more about those nice long tails.

* Steve mentions Memeorandum, Tailrank, and Digg. I also love their grand-daddy, Cameron Marlow’s Blogdex.

Can you say that three times fast?

If so, you’re probably somebody like Richard Doherty, research director of the Envisioneering Group, talking in Adage about MySpace.

Ah, to see ourselves as others see us…

Cory Doctorow, looking noir and full of energy in London, waiting to speak at Suw Charman’s February 7 Open Rights Group (ORG) meeting. The corporate push to get “digital rights management” built into future hardware has moved to Europe. IMO, they’d be better off targeting the largescale commercial pirates in other ways! Punishing teens who make mashups to show their friends is a fruitless, mean-spirited use of their shareholders’ dollars, pounds, and Euros.

My favorite Cory-isms on DRM:

• “There’s nobody out there who wants his next TV to be able to do fewer things than the one he has now.”
• “In the US, we killed the Broadcast Flag by convincing politicians it would be unpopular to start breaking people’s televisions.”
• “It’s a bad idea to build your business model on the idea that you can make bits of information hard to copy.”

In addition to Suw and Cory, I met or re-met there…

• Simon Willison (yes, that Simon Willison)
• Natalie Downe (my turn to buy the drinks, next time we meet)
• Ben Metcalfe (thanks for the tube ticket, Ben!)
• Kevin Anderson
• Tom Morris
• Tom Steinberg
• James Cox (Imajes)
• Glyn Wintle
• Michael Holloway

I did not, however, meet “Mike Arrington”, whose name got on the wikilist even though Mr. TechCrunch was in Arizona at Demo…

A good time was had by all–if in London, make your way to the next one!

Dabble, an exciting new startup in the Web 2.0 space, got a great sendoff from Om Malik. Om says that with so many online sources of great video, people increasingly need some way to organize favorites.

Mary Hodder is calling her early release a “balpha“–I’m on the list to play with the beta version, so I guess I still have some time to wait.

Congratulations to Mary and team on a great beginning. Extra praise–from all who are sick of “Web 2.0”–to both Om and Mary for coming up with evocative new words for the rest of us to play with.

p.s. Podcast: Tom Raftery interviews Mary on Dabble’s business model.