Terribly Happy

For about a month and a half, starting at the beginning of February and ending less than a week ago, my whole life was pretty much South by Southwest Interactive.

The festival takes place in Austin every year and for the last two has been growing at a rate of more than 35 percent, year-over-year. Like smartphones and apps, it’s become one of those things that only becomes a bigger and bigger part of my job. It’s not just a national tech story that publications like Wired, CNet, The New York Times and others pay attention to, it’s a local story for us. And as the lead reporter on it for my paper, I get really, really competitive and territorial about our coverage. It’s probably the only time of the year that this journalistic bug hits me, where I turn into one of those guys with the hat with “PRESS” on it and bark things out like, “You’re not gonna scoop me, ya out-of-towner, see?”

The “See?” is probably unnecessary.

But it really does take over my life for a good while. I turn down freelance assignments and other offers to do stuff with, “I can’t. South by Southwest.” We coordinate a schedule of babysitting help for my wife with the explainer, “South by Southwest.” When I go to get a bite to eat at a restaurant and they ask what I want, I say, “South by Southwest.” Then they bring me back a soggy sandwich and I wonder if perhaps I’ve gone too far.

What is the festival? I don’t really know anymore. It was once a funky, centralized festival for CD-ROM producers, digital artists and people dabbling in online porn (“dabbling” is a good word for that, don’t you think? It’s dirty-but-not-quite-dirty-sounding).

Today, it’s a massive social media event, a place where start-ups try to get a foothold with early adopters and a place where huge companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their brands in front of bloggers, top Twitterers and the press.

For me, personally, it’s the hardest I work all year on any one project. It’s also the only time of the year I have a free pass to stay out as late as I want for a whole week and to really throw myself into coverage.

I won’t bore you with the play-by-play because I pretty much did that with Twitter for a whole week (and then some) to the point where I wondered if one more post with the hashtag “#SXSW” was finally going to drive my friends away for good.

I took last Thursday and Friday off after the fest and am scheduling some vacation time soon.  You’ll see why below.

Here’s a lot of what I wrote in that blaze of pre-festival, mid-festival and post-festival activity.

• The Monday that the festival ran, I did a piece with NPR on trends at the fest.  We recorded it via Skype from the press room of the Convention Center (which was much more convenient than going to the studio where we usually record).
• Before the fest, I did a profile of 4chan and Canvas founder Christopher Poole that ran in our Insight section and covered the actual keynote. I also profiled SCVNGR chief ninja (and founder) Seth Priebatsch, who ended up doing a great job on his keynote.
• On the Saturday of the fest, I had a story/essay run about so-called “Social Media Gurus” that featured a photo of me that all my editors found very amusing.  I just tried very hard to avoid making eye contact with the photo.  Overall, I thought it turned out really well. It’s a piece my editor and I have wanted to get into the paper for a while.
• I also wrote about the backlash against the festival in 2010 and how Interactive is dealing with growing pains and emerging as a huge social event. (2011 would eventually prove a lot of this even truer). I was surprised to see that piece pop up on Techmeme.
• A Tweet I posted about Apple’s surprise pop up store became a Twitter top Tweet, featured on the front page of Twitter.com! (It wasn’t even linking to a story I wrote. Our great real estate writer Shonda Novak covered that.)
• We covered a ton of panels, posted lots of photos and just did a lot of write-ups on the fest programming.
• Post-festival, I wrote about how it grew to more than 19k attendees and how SXSW Interactive can be fixed for 2012 (not that it’s broken).
• At the fest, I was in videos for Access PR and Gen Connect, being interviewed about SXSW Interactive.
• I created a Flickr set of some of my SXSW photos as well as the Statesman Texas Social Media Awards, where I was a judge. I’m still tweaking pics and putting more of them up.

• I shot a video of Trey Ratcliff’s amazing downtown Austin photowalk. Bonus was that I got to hang out with Jackie Danicki, a long-time Internet friend. You can also see a video I shot of an IBM Watson demo and a stand-up I did wrapping up the fest embedded below.

There’s a segment on the Extra Hot Great podcast called “Tiny Triumphs” about little victories that we have in our lives. I was blessed to have one this week; I wrote a piece for CNN.com that was published early this morning and appears to have struck a nerve. As of this writing, it’s earned more than 700 comments and I’ve gotten lots of e-mails and Tweets from people who read the piece. That hasn’t happened before, even with the piece I did on Facebook and religion.

The editor I work with at CNN e-mailed me to tell me that at one point today it was the 3rd-most-popular piece of content on the entire site.

Last week, a trailer for the video game Dead Island was released (my brother Pablo sent me the link) and it earned near-universal praise on gaming blogs (and some mainstream ones as well). But something about it just didn’t sit well with me and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t have a problem with just this trailer, but with several video games that are using the deaths and torture of children as central plot points.

I pitched the column to CNN and they were able to get it published pretty quickly. I don’t know if what I wrote is right or wrong, I just know that the best stuff I write typically comes from a strong feeling I have and the need to explore what that feeling means and where it came from. This was the rare piece where I got to do it for a very popular site and get the idea out in front of lots of people.

I’m embedding the original trailer below. Warning: it’s VERY gory and potentially disturbing. It’s also well-crafted and haunting, an amazing piece of work. And there’s part of the problem.

The makers of the 'Livestrong Austin Marathon and Half-Marathon' App. Photo by Jay Janner, Austin American-Statesman

This post is about a week overdue, but that’s probably a good thing because there’s a lot more to add. Last week, a “There’s a Creator for That” feature ran in the Statesman about the Livestrong Austin Marathon and Half-Marathon app (the marathon itself happened yesterday; I’m running a bit late).

I also had two more pieces in the paper that day, one about Google’s campaign to make its Places and Hotpot services take off in Austin for Tech Monday and the other a reverse-publish of a blog post I wrote about digitizing our old VHS tapes.

Last week, I hosted a live chat with organizers of South by Southwest Interactive and then wrote about Saturday’s TEDxAustin conference. I didn’t go last year, but this year we made the effort to attend and the Statesman was able to pay for my ticket. We did a pretty extensive preview of the event and today I posted a very lengthy wrap-up. Tried to explain not just TEDxAustin, but the whole TED phenomenon and why it’s taken off so quickly.

We weren’t allowed to bring laptops, digital cameras, video cameras or anything larger than a cell phone and even texting and Tweeting were discouraged during the speaking portions of the day. That made for an interesting reporting challenge since I’m so used to covering conferences live, but it also freed me up to really pay attention, take careful longhand notes and really think about what I thought of the event before I posted something two days later.

Right now things are in a weird balance between me being very much a homebody — I’m loving being here with the girls, taking them to the park, going to the local Children’s Museum, catching up on TV with my wife when they go to bed and playing video games or watching my own shows after everyone else is in bed.

But for TEDx, I had to spend an entire Saturday away from home; it was also the day after we went to Austin for a concert. As I left Saturday morning, Lilly followed me to the door and told me not to go. Carolina is old enough now to recognize when I’m here or when I’m gone and she’s been especially affectionate lately. The older they get the more I miss them when I’m not here and more valuable the time seems when I’m not off working. It’s made it a lot easier to turn down extraneous projects, unpaid speaking gigs and anything else that takes me out of the house when I’m needed.

But then tonight, I attended a Town Hall for SXSW Interactive and got home late. Carolina was asleep and Lilly was already curled in bed, waiting for me.

In just a few weeks I’m going to be gone 24/7 for practically an entire week. I wish I could say I’m completely pleased that the fest is growing and drawing more and more attention every year. It’s my home turf and I get very competitive covering the fest; I love that I’m usually in the top tier of reporters covering the event and rarely get scooped in mid-March. But I’m also a little resentful that Interactive is expanding in both directions, with pre- and post events that are stretching it from 5 days to at least 7 and as many as 11 depending on how we choose to cover it all. Four nights away from home are hard. Six I’ve never even tried before. I’m a little worried.

I’ll take time off after the fest and probably a day or two beforehand to make up for the long hours, but as my wife is fond of saying, I’m not 25 anymore.

I can’t deny, though, that at events like TEDx and SXSW, I love being around people. I love seeing friends who are in from out of town and people I only ever see online through Twitter or Facebook. I love staying out late and seeing people speak and having a few drinks and getting to process it all and put it back out there in writing.

Maybe it’s good that I have a job where I can compress nearly a year of that fun into about a week. It’s exhausting, but it’s also a lot of fun and maybe necessary given what the rest of the year is like.

I’m not gonna lie, I missed podcasting.

I’ve been listening to so many of them in recent months, from Extra Hot Great to Kevin Smith’s stable of ‘casts (Tell ‘Em Steve Dave is really surprisingly good) to Comedy Death Ray and the very irregular Out of the Game.

I was also feeling a bit of malaise with Digital Savant, I think, trying to figure out ways to keep it fresh and keep myself from feeling like I’m just shoveling text every day.

So, with some software setup help from Glark, I recorded my own first attempt at a podcast with Wesley Faulkner, a test run of what a Digital Savant podcast might sound like. The self-imposed criteria was that it be under 20 minutes, easy to edit (it took less than an hour, including sticking in images and other iTunes-friendly metadata) and that it be loose and fun.

I love talking to Wesley; he’s a good friend and he was such a huge help helping me get this done. I owe him.

In the future, I’m hoping to keep the format as 1-on-1 interviews, but with the same fun, goofy tone of Digital Savant. My bosses at the Statesman seemed to like it and there’s even the possibility that we may put it up on iTunes once I’ve got a few more episodes under my belt. That may be a a problem with South by Southwest Interactive coming up. Overall, I’m pleased with the result given it was all done with my aging Macbook, two cheap USB mics and just a few pieces of software in addition to GarageBand. You can download the podcast-formatted AAC version here or download it as an MP3 here.

The other thing that happened this week is that I broke a little news about Google in Austin and the first of some video reviews I did with Kirkus last week have started appearing on YouTube. You can view two of those below.

Yesterday, a segment I recorded for NPR’s All Things Considered about children’s storybook apps (a subject I’ve been knee-deep in since about last August) aired. We scripted and recorded it a few weeks ago and in the time I was waiting for it to go live, I became increasingly convinced that it would be met with disapproval from the same NPR commenters who think it’s crazy to have sensors monitor the health of senior citizens or that iPhones are destroying civilization.

I wasn’t disappointed! The comments on the NPR page for the piece have ranged from a smattering of “Hey, it’s fine” comments to a more consistent drumbeat of readers and listeners who think I’m destroying my 3-year-old’s imagination and rotting her brain and eyes with these dangerous apps.

Memorably, one commenter suggested we let Lilly sleep with the iPad under her pillow or on her chest so she gets cancer. He later said he was joking, but despite my love of dark, disturbing humor, this one didn’t strike me as particularly humorous. Maybe I should lighten up!

Anyway, this time I had decided not to respond because I knew the comments were going to be as wild and vicious as the ones that accompanied the CNN.com piece I wrote about religion and Facebook.

But then I responded to one commenter’s question about CD-ROM adaptations and, well… let’s just say you shouldn’t wish cancer on my kid, OK?

Apart from all that expected mess, it was nice to be back on the air after a long break and very cool to see Lilly’s face on the front of NPR’s website and to hear her voice on the airwaves. I thought she did wonderfully and the audio is something I’m already coming to treasure.

The other stuff I’ve been working on, apart from gearing up for SXSW Interactive, are a possible podcast I may start doing at work for Digital Savant, trying to go to the gym more often (we have a new fitness center at work), shedding our VHS tape collection and doing more stuff with Kirkus Reviews on the iPad app front. Or as the commenters see it, ruining my daughter’s life.

You know, tomato, to-mah-to.

Image courtesy Grog LLC's 'Animated Knots' app

I don’t know if it was the vacation I took from work in late December, the fact that I just purged out my desk at work and moved to a new one (more on that in a sec) or just a general sense of delayed New Year’s reflection, but I haven’t felt this content, centered and focused in a while. It just makes me realize what a nervous wreck I was last summer and fall as I was galloping to try to catch up on major writing assignments at work (and at home) and balance it with a toddler on the brink of being potty trained and an infant in the house.

Whatever the reason, the last few weeks have felt really good in some weird, undefined way. The air seems scented with possibility and at one lull in my December vacation, my wife joked about how relaxed and laid back I was, something she rarely gets to see.

“Oh, don’t get used to this. Relaxed Omar will be gone soon. Say goodbye. He’s great, but he’ll disappear by mid-January,” I told her.

I think she may have cried.

The 2011 good mood is partly because a lot has been resolved of late. The Kirkus Reviews project, which started back in October, is finally wrapping up, at least in its current phase. I committed to write 50 children’s app reviews, which at the time seemed like a ridiculous, theoretical number, the kind of challenge a competitor at the Coney Island 4th of July hot dog eating contest might accept. I just didn’t think I could do it, no matter what the offer was on teh table. So I did it anyway.

Breaking it down to five reviews a week (and then, when even that seemed daunting, breaking it up to three reviews written by Sundays and two by each Monday) really worked. I turned in my last two reviews with a week to spare (we agreed to have 50 reviews done by the end of January) and I was lucky enough to work with a great editor, Vicky Smith, who guided me through the unfamiliar territory of children’s literature and gave my short write-ups careful, witty, knowledgeable edits. It was a good experience and I may stay on doing app reviews (but in much smaller numbers) for Kirkus as they continue covering the emerging digital book market.

The other major loose end was that, on my wife’s solid suggestion, I called up my contact at NPR to find out what was up. It was a great conversation and, as it turns out, my fears that I had been unknowingly put out to pasture and was unworthy of being on the radio anymore were unfounded. The stuff I do for them in the future will likely be different than what I was doing before, but in a really good way. I wrote up and recorded a segment for them that is scheduled to air on Monday, Jan. 31 on All Things Considered. We’ll see how that turns out, but it was nice to find out that the door hadn’t been shut on me. It relieved a lot of anxiety I was having (but was trying not to acknowledge).

In general, I feel an easing of tension, a lack of nervousness and anticipation. In the past, I’d have interpreted it as feeling that my life was boring and I was being unambitious, but lately, I’ve come to embrace having a little free time and room to breathe.

Meanwhile, my day job continues as usual (or, hey, better than usual). We’re already preparing for South by Southwest Interactive in March, but in the meantime, I’ve had a few stories in the paper. On Monday, I had a piece on the front page of the Statesman about an Austin-related lawsuit filed against Courtney Love. I got to talk to some lawyers about libel law and how it relates to social media. Read it if you want to know if your Tweets and Facebook posts could get you sued.

I also did a “There’s a Creator for That” app feature about “Animated Knots,” an iPhone app that is about knots and how to untie them.

I got quoted in a Huffington Post piece about the 30 most underrated tech innovations of 2010 and the book I wrote the foreword for was featured in a New York Times Magazine article and on an NPR Fresh Air segment. So those things were pretty cool.

Also did a short piece about a new order-from-your-seat technology at Austin’s Frank Erwin Center called Bypass Lane and on Digital Savant, I covered a little breaking news about layoffs at Junction Point Studios.

Next week, we start up a new season of Trailers Without Pity with our first new video since early November.

At work, I switched desks, which was an occasion to completely clear out my old desk (as well as the new one) and to wipe both of them down and get all the grime and dust and disorganization cleared away. We’re doing the same thing in our home office; January for me has been a time to throw old stuff away, donate whatever I can and think about how I want to live and work and exist in my space.

It’s been very liberating to come to work and not face stacks of paper and books and just schmoot all over the place. I know it might not last long, but right now everything fees like its in the right place, that things are focused and correct, relaxed, but poised to act.