SXSW is a hot word at the Media Lab. So when asked to report on a story we “can’t report on in person,” I took the opportunity to learn more about an event I didn’t know much about, but still wanted to be at.
Like others, I used Storify in this assignment: http://storify.com/kzh/sxsw-startup-hatchery-and-battleground. Storify is a fantastic resource and was surprisingly seamless. SXSW is all over social media also, so finding sources was not a problem.
However, my initial goal of covering all of SXSW was quickly blown to pieces — there is just too much going on. I narrowed down the problem to covering start-ups at SXSW, which still turned out to be a problem in curating content from an ocean of Tweets. Furthermore, I found that it was difficult to find multiple perspectives of the SXSW start-up scene on social media. I’ve heard in person that it encourages a narrow, pitch-able view onto start-ups, and encourages this view through press and awards. But I wasn’t able to find much online sharing this same idea.
Nice job Kevin. I’m impressed you were able to give us a coherent flavor for the start-up scene at SXSW given the outpouring of social media from the event. You might want to check out Julia’s story this week as she also reported on SXSW and tried to give us synopsis of a single panel through the tweets about it:
http://partnews.brownbag.me/2014/03/11/introvert-survival-skills-at-sxsw/
Covering “startups” at SXSW, broadly construed, is quite the task you gave yourself! But also totally doable as long as you grab a slice or try to get a flavor of what the coverage is doing. You seemed to go with the flavor approach, sampling SXSW history and current panels and pitches and marketing. Great that you can get such a broad array of things thanks to the huge amount of social media coverage of this particular event.