Twenty years ago, (March 10th-15th 02006) we gathered in Austin, Texas for the SXSW interactive festival. As we think back to that event, it is one of those pivotal ‘sliding doors’ moments. It felt like a big wave was swelling and we did well to get right in front of all the action.
To put things into a bit of context, this was 02006, the iPhone was still 10 months way from launch. The world was Blackberries, Nokias and Palm Pilots. We split a hotel room with 2 other people. As reimbursement, we wrote a physical cheque to pay for the hotel stay.
This is what most of the web used to look like before mobile devices and stacked layouts! We had columns and tiny text. Call out buttons, banner images, navigation tabs and more.
Web 2.0 and AJAX were buzz-words. There was a certain expectation of how we’d use a website. This is pre-twitter, Facebook was only 2 years old and just started to allow anyone besides .edu email address to register.
Tagging and Folksonomies were also something new and exciting. The ability to create ontologies from the bottom-up rather than top-down was creating a stir. There were several panels on the topic. At the time the photo sharing site Flickr had tags and started to create super-groups based on tag clusters. We vividly remember sitting in one session where they explained how they did this with k-means clustering, and then in another some panelist swore it was so good it must be human curated. If that were today, it would be the opposite, the default assumption would be LLMs and AI made the tags and when it’s actually human curated we’re surprised.
Oh the crazy parties. It seemed like every small venue turned into some interactive party or off-venue party. We met so many interesting people. We remember talked with someone from Robo Co-op about their sites 43 Things, 43 Places, 43 People, etc. We were avid users of the sites so to meet someone who created it was amazing. Then at another event, a WordPress meetup, we meet Matt Mullenweg the creator. WordPress was less than three years old and they were still evangelizing the software. We also remember standing in a parking lot outside of a venue and met Joshua Schachter who had created Del.icio.us which we were an early adopter of. He was chatting to someone else, and we just listened, border-line weird.
The hot new geolocation Dodgeball was all the rage. As people you followed checked-into venues you’d get an SMS. One minute we were sitting having a drink, then everyone’s phones started to buzz and they all moved like a string of ants to the next party. While technology connects us and does great things, it was our first reminder that sometimes what’s right in front of you is just fine. Always searching for where the grass is greener isn’t necessarily the best way to live life. We experienced that with people too. SXSW brings together ALOT of people who you’d never normally see or get access too. There were times someone was engaged in a conversation in our group, saw someone “more famous” and stopped mid-sentence and walked away. It was bewildering behavior, but another lesson learnt.
We were there because we’d volunteered working on Microformats. This was a way to embed a bit of extra hints at what your HTML content was representing using already established means. Human-readable text then could be extracted by machines and converted into other formats, like calendar events and contacts. It was certainly picking-up speed compared to the more complicated and machine focused RDF.
We made a lot of new friends on that trip. Many of which we are still in contact with today. That lead to working professionally with and for many of them. Browsing through the nearly 10,000 photos on Flickr tagged sxsw06, there are a lot of memories, people who are no longer with us, some things people probably wished weren’t online, products and companies that have come and gone, and more. That time at SXSW was unique. The event continues today, but it isn’t the same.
In this post-pandemic, war-torn 02020s, conferences and events like SxSW06 are hard. In the last 20 years, everyone’s realized the importance of the Web and internet and there have plenty of grifts, NFTs, Crypto, ICOs, Web 3.0, and AI are just some of the big ones. To gather so many like-minded, energetic people in once place and not have it ruined by corporate greed felt unique.
We’re happy we got to attend and in some small way would like to think we’ve left the Web a better place because of it.