• The audience demands its voice: erasing the line between production and consumption

    That’s what I heard loud and clear at the SXSW Interactive session Creator vs. Audience: Next Chapter in Storytelling. I’m embarrassed that I was unaware of the incredible DeviantArt community and its young founder, Angelo Sotira. Session headline: this is an incredible time when remaining deep-pocketed media conglomerates vote with their money, once they see that the…

  • Attention-grabbing through storytelling at SXSW

    “The unthinkable has happened – a tornado touched down in the center of Austin at the height of SXSW. The epicenter is at the Austin Convention Center, which has been reduced to rubble. You have a flock of frightened conventioneers who don’t know the city, aren’t sure who to listen to or where they should go,…

  • Get on with it: notes from a learning revolution-in-progress at SXSW Edu

    Although we hosted TEDx Seattle in 2010, I don’t regularly seek out TED talks. However, here at SXSW Edu, Sugata Mitra’s Build a School in the Cloud from earlier this month was mentioned as “must-view” on multiple occasions. On top of that, he won the TED prize for his concept of the Self Organizing Learning…

  • Awesome video, music: The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories)

    I’ve been a longtime fan of progressive rock impresario Steven Wilson. From Porcupine Tree to his work as a audiophile’s dream producer of Marillion, King Crimson and (soon) XTC, Wilson is serious about what matters to me: thoughtful music, haunted storytelling, audio and multi-platform, multi-channel media. His new solo album, The Raven That Refused to…