Last week we were in Austin, Texas to speak at SXSW Interactive. We also went to hear other talks, to meet up with friends and to investigate taking Newspaper Club to America.
We thought it would be a good idea to print a newspaper while we were there and seeing as our panel was at the end of the week we thought we would include content generated during the conference.
Things Our Friends Sent Us For Printing contained articles kindly written for us by Matt Jones, Bobbie Johnson, Clay Shirky, Warren Ellis, Dan Hill and James Bridle.
Chris Heathcote made a Buzz Word Bingo for our panel, David McCandless sent us a beautiful infographic, we included some Noticings from the week and we added a Walking Paper for Austin.
But my favourite bit was the centre spread. Foursquare and SimpleGeo very kindly gave us some anonymous checkin data from which Michal from Stamen made this gorgeous map of foursquare checkins during the conference. If you checked in on Monday, this was in the centre spread on Tuesday afternoon.
To make the newspaper we found this little nook inside the conference centre and set up a mini BRIG studio for two days.
The panel seemed to go really well and people seemed to like the newspaper which we handed out at the end.
Because our panel had Spime in the title, Bruce Sterling himself turned up. Luckily Twitter seemed to think he liked it.
One of the things we spoke about was analogue friction. Problems you encounter when making stuff in the real world as opposed to just on the web. We experienced this first hand as we neared the deadline for our newspaper just as Ev Williams started his keynote.
First they nicked Michal’s chair.
Then Engineering started to feel the pressure.
Then we tried to upload the files just as all the @ev’s brought the conference wifi to a halt. Eventually we had to go outside and upload via Michal’s MiFi.
We made it just in time.
We had a great time. Thanks to everyone who helped with the paper and thanks to everyone who came along to the panel.
