I just came back from SXSW Interactive, and once again, it exceeded my expectations.  I love Hugh’s message before a few of the keynotes - SXSW is what you make of it.  Absolutely!

As always, there were more activities and connections than I had time to make, but I’m looking forward to going through the program more carefully and perhaps connecting with some of the session presenters I didn’t get an opportunity to meet or connect with.  If you went to SXSW, and even if you didn’t, I’d encourage you to look at the sessions online at http://sxsw.com, and see what you can find.

I’m putting a list in here of the sessions I attended.  I recorded audio for each of them, and hope the quality was high enough to have some of them transcribed.  I will be writing blog posts on the ones that really stood out for me, and including the audio I recorded if it’s of good enough quality, or the transcript if it’s not.  If I have any resource links, I’ll include those, too.

There were a large number of books at the bookstore there, too.  One of the people running the bookstore promised to send me a spreadsheet of the books that were in stock there.  If he does that, I’ll put it out here, too.

SXSW will begin March 9th next year.  They begin taking session proposals in June of this year.  I’m going to come up with at least 2-3 people I’d like to see speak, and encourage them to submit.  I’ll also be submitting some session proposals.  We’ll see what next year brings.

For now, here’s what I went to this year.

Friday

• Tim O’Reilly Interview - Fireside Chat (2pm:  Ballroom D)
• Social Games: Manipulating Your Brain Chemistry, For Good - Panel: Fergusson, Penenberg, Wallace, Brown - (3:30pm)
• Clay Shirky - Why Would We Think Social Media is Revolutionary (5pm: Ballroom D)

Saturday

• Tools and Processes for ADD Project Managers/Entrepreneurs - Jason Ford, De Sellers (9:30am)
• Tony Schwartz - Live Like A Sprinter (12:30pm)
• Seth Priebatsch -  Opening Remarks - Game Layer (2pm)
• Jane McGonigal - Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better (3:30pm)
• Brian Solis - Ego Index Score (5pm)

Sunday

• One Codebase, Endless Possibilities: Real HTML5 Hacking - Joe McCann (9:30am)
• Transmedia Storytelling: Constructing Compelling Characters and Narrative Threads - Barbara Vance (11am)
• Guy Kawasaki - The Art of Enchantment - (12:30pm: Ballroom D)
• Christopher Poole - 4Chan - Keynote (2pm)
• Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Panel - Ballrom D - Zeldman, Black, Brown, Mall (5pm)

Monday

• Can the Games Industry Learn from WebUX - Beaumont, Unwin, Sharples, Fangohr, Robertson (9:30am)
• Barry Diller - Shares Insights On All Things Media - (11am:Ballroom D)
• Enabling New Experiences & Creating Serendipity Through Check-ins- Pete Cashmore interviewed Dennis Crowley (12:30pm)
• Felicia Day - Keynote (2pm)
• Gary Vaynerchuk (3:30pm)
• OAuth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices - James Reffell (5pm)

Tuesday

• Stephen Anderson - Lasting Relationships (9:30am)
• Chris Busse - Beyond WordClouds: Analyzing Trends with Social Media APIs (11am)
• Dan Ariely & Susan Szalavitz - Flexible Morality (12:30pm)
• Blake Mycoskie - Tom’s Shoe (2pm)
• Reid Hoffman - CEO and Founder of LinkedIn - Data as Web 3.0 (3:30pm)
• Bruce Sterling - Closing Remarks (5pm)

I’ll put out a list later of what my favorite sessions were.  What sessions did you attend that really impressed you?  How did they make a difference?

I just wrote a post last week about how much I love Gmail (and Google apps in general).  This morning, NPR (on KUT, my favorite radio station) had an excellent news bulletin for me!

Gmail is going to begin intelligently sorting my email, prioritizing it based on my behavior (um, save your comments here.)

The news report said that the average person sends/receives 110 emails a day.  There must be a lot of people doing NO emailing because I’m well over the 200 email a day range, and I know many others who would skew that number as well.

Rather than me re-writing what NPR already did a fantastic job reporting, here’s a link to that piece. http://budurl.com/nprgmail You can read it, or you can listen to it.  Your choice.

Gmail making an attempt to sort out my priority email, even if it doesn’t turn out to be completely successful is the most compelling reason I can have for using Gmail as my email reader.  If you weren’t convinced by my previous blog post, I think you should definitely have making Gmail YOUR email reader at the top of your to-do list now.

I’ve been using Gmail’s web interface as my primary email reading and sending tool for well over a year.  If you’ve received email from me, though, you most likely can’t tell (unless I’m sending it on purpose from my Gmail.)

That’s because you can set Gmail up to receive and send email using your business email address.  When you do this, Gmail functions as an email reader deluxe for all of your email addresses.

I could write a long list of the reasons you should absolutely do this right now, but here’s my top 5 reasons:

TOP 5 REASONS FOR USING GMAIL AS YOUR EMAIL READER (starting with my personal most important reason)

1) Zero spam.  None.  I’m not kidding.  In well over a year, I haven’t received a single proposition from foreign babes or a link from someone desperately needing my financial help to keep their small country afloat.  Not once have I been encouraged to purchase some pharmaceutical enhancer, nor been forced to delete some weight loss must-have miracle.

2) Your email is available.  All of it.  Anywhere.  On any device.  No more 200 email limit, unless you continue to use your email reader on your mobile device instead of Gmails.  And no more “Oops, I left that email at work”.  There’s plenty of storage for free, and more available for purchase.

3) It integrates with Google Calendar (which I also now exclusively use for a long list of reasons, too.)  And it integrates with Google’s Task List, which I’ve just started using.

4) The filters are absolutely fantabulous!!  There’s the obvious use of filters - sorting things into labeled buckets when emails come to your inbox.  But how about this for a use?  I use it to “friendly filter” emails.  If I meet someone and they, without my permission, put me on their email list, I might not want to offend them by unsubscribing.  But really, if I get 200+ emails a day?  I can’t read all that!  So…I put a filter on the email that either archives it immediately (in case I might want to read it later), or deletes it without ever  bothering me.  And no one knows a thing so there’s no hurt feelings.

And those filters (which are basically email rules) are enforced on your phone, too, as long as you use the Gmail reader on your phone.  If you use your regular email reader, you still get the filtering, you just don’t see those filtered emails - you only typically see your Inbox if you’re not using Gmail on your phone.

Bottom line?  If you use Gmail’s email AND their email reader, no more setting up all those smart folders and rules on your Mac Mail and your Outlook and then having them all blown off on your phone!

(You’re sold, right?)

5) For email lists I DO want to be on, I use Otherinbox.com.   Otherinbox now integrates with Gmail (YAY!), so I never even have to login to Otherinbox to read that email.  Instead I have a set of folders with labels IN GMAIL, where Otherinbox has nicely sorted all of my Otherinbox email for me.

READING and SENDING YOUR EMAIL AFTER THE SETUP

AFTER you have it set up, you can interact with your Gmail (which will now have your regular email in it) in one of two primary ways:

1) Do everything in and out of Gmail’s email reader.  This is what I do because I like all my email sorted and labeled the way I’ve set it up in Gmail now.

2) Stick with your normal email reading packages (like MacMail or Outlook) but have those email applications pop just your Gmail address instead of all your other email addresses.  Because you’ve set Gmail up to read your other email addresses, what goes to your MacMail or your Outlook are all of those emails…only WITHOUT the spam!  You miss out on a few of the benefits of the Gmail reader, but hey, sometimes old habits die hard.

HOW TO SET THIS UP:

I’m assuming you have a Gmail account.  If you don’t, it’s time to get one.

Then..

1) Add your regular email accounts to Gmail.  Here’s a link to a tutorial we wrote about how to do this:

Instructions for Setting up Gmail to read your ‘real email’

This will start Gmail READING your email.

If you want to be able to SEND email using your Gmail account, but have it come from your ‘real email’ address, answer YES to that questions when Gmail setup asks it of you.  Then they’ll send a verification link to that email address, which you’ll need to click on to show it’s yours.  Once you do that, then you can also SEND email from Gmail with that business email address.  Make sure you set your business email as your default email in the Accounts area of Gmail and now everything you send out will come from that business email address, only using Gmail’s software.

2) Mobile Device?  Download the Google App for your mobile device.  I bet there’s one available.  Connect it to your Gmail account, and you’re in business there, too.

3) You’re done if you want to use Gmail’s email reader to send and receive email.

BUT WHAT IF YOU JUST DON’T WANT TO GIVE UP MACMAIL, OUTLOOK, ETC?

USING ANOTHER EMAIL READER TO READ YOUR GMAIL.

Here’s a link that Google’s put together with instructions for every conceivable email reader.

Once you’ve set your accounts up on Gmail, change your email reader (like Outlook or Mac Mail) to read ONLY your Gmail account.

The excellent spam filter on Gmail will do all the dirty work and send nice clean email to your reader.  DON’T forget to DELETE those other accounts off your email reader!  When you’re done with this, you should only have the Gmail account set up in Outlook or Mac Mail.  And all your other accounts should be set up in the Gmail Accounts area.

Want to use your normal mobile email reader?  Do the same thing there - only set up the Gmail account on that reader; delete the others now that you’re running them through Gmail.

ENJOY YOUR SPAM FREE EMAIL EXPERIENCE!

I hope these instructions are clear, and I hope you enjoy SPAM FREE EMAIL soon because of them!  Let us know your experience setting this up or ask any questions you may have.

I downloaded an iPhone game a few months ago called Nutz, created locally by Chaotic Moon Studio.

The truth is, I download lots of games, but I don’t really play them; I generally don’t have time.

But I gave this one a shot, and I got hooked.  I’m now the worldwide high score leader by a large amount.  What does this say about me, having the high score on Nutz.  There’s not enough room on this server for that blog, so I’ll leave that topic alone.

There was another high score person in second place named Pizza4All.  Perhaps it’s Nutz to admit this, but I made up stories for this person.  He was male, worked during the day, off on weekends.  He was competitive like me, trying to catch up.  Someone suggested perhaps he was just trying to keep ahead of #3, but I insisted in my head, it was all about competing against me.

I learned a few things about myself playing this game.  I wasn’t just surprised at my overtly competitive nature.  I was also surprised at my insistence on keeping an adequate amount of high score distance between us.  I didn’t want him to catch up.  I don’t like suspense, and I didn’t want to go neck and neck.

I learned a little about being present, too.  I don’t like to sit still; I could never meditate.  The whole concept of being present now, living in the moment, alludes me for the most part; I’m always scanning the environment for the future or analyzing the past.  But to win at the game, being present is what I have to do.  It’s a memory game.  You have to remember what’s under the little bags and match the nuts, two at a time.  If I pay attention to what’s going on in my life while I’m playing the game, my score suffers.  A nice lesson in the reward of being right there.

And then I learned a little something about community, connection.  An unexpected lesson.  I should preface what I noticed by admitting I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about online community and connection.  Sure, part of it is because this is my job, my business.  But my obsession and fascination with the topic goes far beyond any job responsibilities I have.  The subtleties that no one admits are the ones I look at the most.

Last week, pizza4all stopped playing.  He didn’t just stop playing, he deleted his high score; he’s completely gone.  And I was devastated.  The game became lonely, empty in a way because I wasn’t ‘playing’ with someone anymore.  When I play now, obsessively opening and matching the nuts, I feel a sense of loss for someone I didn’t know, and confusion about where he went, why he went to the extreme of deleting himself.

Sure, I made up a new story for what happened there, too.  He couldn’t handle the competition, he got a new phone and lost all his settings, etc.  But there’s no way for me to find out because we weren’t able to ‘talk’ during the game.  We could submit our scores, and we could pretend we were part of a community, but the missing piece was being able to create our own conversation.  Instead, we were forced to play the game’s game.  We were limited to the conversation the game allowed us to have.

I was interested enough to try to find him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.  Perhaps I did? I don’t know.  But the main point here is that I felt forced to look elsewhere for the means to connect, the way to answer my questions.

This past week, my son and his girlfriend got me hooked on a new game.  Words With Friends.  It’s scrabble.  You can play it with people you know, or you can ask for a random opponent.  It’s a quick play.  They don’t have to be there at the same time, so you can play whenever your time permits. There’s a chat window, too, where you can leave a message for the person you’re playing against.  It’s easy to use, and I’ve connected with several people.  The chat becomes a one-on-one Twitter-like experience, leaving short messages; only you’ve already got something built in to talk about - this game.

Here’s the interesting part for me, though.  It’s not about the words for me. It’s not really even about the competition like it is on the Nutz game.  Instead, it’s about the community, the connection.  When I see who’s played, and I go to take my turn, I always choose the people I know first.  And then…I choose the people I’ve chatted with next, the people I was able to create conversation with.

So you tell me, am I Nutz? Or is it really all about sharing Words With Friends?

This article is on CNN right now, in a section called What Matters:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/06/11/wordpress.outage/index.html

It’s a timely article for us; if you’re hosted with us, you’re probably aware that there’s been a few instances of outages in the last month.  They’ve been for very short periods of time, but it’s frustrating and stressful just the same.  Our overall up-time is still well over 99.99%.  But in this 24X7 world, users and our clients are more aware of outages than they would have been a few years ago.  It’s always an immediate emergency even on a weekend or at midnight.

Several years ago, we moved our clients to servers at Rackspace, an extraordinarily reliable datacenter with truly fanatical support.  We put our clients on servers with each other, so they can have reliable hosting, while we have responsive support from the datacenter that answers the phone whenever we call them, without our clients having to bear the hosting and administrative expense of their own server.

One downside of being on a shared server, however, is that when someone on that server is attacked, it can impact the other sites on the server.  This is what happened in the slowdown over Memorial Day weekend.  The attack was a denial of service domain name URL attack.  A denial of service attack is when someone makes repeated rapid-fire automated requests to a server, literally causing it to be unable to service anyone else.  And the attack was additionally directed at a domain name, rather than at an IP address or a server.  That left the datacenter unable to give them a new IP address, and left the client unable to move to a new server. It was their domain name being attacked, so it would have continued regardless of what server they were on or what IP address they were using.  The solution was to shut that domain name off, wait for the attackers to get bored and move on, and then turn it back on and watch to make sure it didn’t happen again.

Even after the attack is over, and the server is back to normal, we always spend time, and so does Rackspace, trying to figure out how to protect our clients and the servers against any other attack or similar situation, too.

It’s a constant effort keeping in front of viruses, bots, denial of service attacks, and attempts to set up phishing sites on servers. As fast as technology finds a way to close up vulnerabilities, attackers find a new way in.  We can wish attackers found a better use for their time and obvious talents all day long, but as fast as the good guys close up vulnerabilities, the bad guys figure out a new way in.

And this is before even considering potential mechanical and electrical crashes, as mentioned in the CNN article.

When you’re looking for a development team, or a hosting solution…when you’re wondering why a server went down or hosting costs what it does, whether you’re a client of Wildwood or someone else, it’s important to remember that there’s a cost of ownership for a site.  It doesn’t end just because the site is live for the site owner, because it doesn’t end for the people supporting the site.

Servers have to be maintained, attacks have to be defended against, vulnerabilities need to be addressed. Operating systems have to be updated, hardware needs to be replaced and upgraded to allow for defense and expansion.

The software that runs your specific site, whether it’s third party or custom created, needs to be updated to the latest releases, too.  It’s part of being a good neighbor when you’re in a server community, and in the long run it saves you money and time.  It allows you to stay on a community server, which is less expensive, and it saves you recovery time if you’re the victim of an attack.

Reminds me of something Jean Carpenter Backus, the Naked Accountant put on Facebook back in May “Saving Tip $$ Best way to save money is to take care of what you have (example: car)…”

or my example: Server.

Cuz a ‘bit’ of prevention is worth a terabyte of cure. :)  (In my previous life I was queen #nerdpickuplines…remind me, if you’re interested, to share my six-page list of them sometime.  It’s almost as much fun as a weekend of phishing by the River Denial.)

This will be a short one, even though I’ve got LOTS more to say about Google Calendar and why I love it.

Are you using Google Calendar?  If not, you might want to consider it! Here’s two reasons off the top of my head…

<h1>CREATE MULTIPLE GOOGLE CALENDARS</h1>

I created one for tasks, another for events, one for personal, and one for project management.  I chose a different color for each one.  Colors help me see and categorize things more effectively, (although I’m a bit challenged with calendar management anyway.)  If you have Google Mobile Apps installed on your Smart Phone (iPhone, etc.) you can choose which calendars you see on it.  Each item in the calendar shows the color from the calendar, too, so you can even see the categorization there.

<h1>GOOGLE CALENDAR SMS TEXT REMINDERS</h1>

My current favorite feature of Google Calendars is the SMS reminders.  I’m able to ignore pop-ups, haven’t been checking my email as frequently as usual, and can immediately forget what’s on the printed out version of my calendar, but when my Ding goes off on my cell phone, it still gets my attention pretty quickly.

To set it up, go to Settings on the main Google calendar screen once you’re logged in.

Then, choose Mobile Setup.

Enter your cell phone number, watch for the verification code to show up, and enter it on the website.

Then, when you create an event you want an SMS reminder for, go to the Options area, choose SMS and tell it how long beforehand you’d like the reminder.

Works like a charm, making it easier and easier for me to be where I’m supposed to be when I’m supposed to be there.  As my phone seems to be attached to my hand magically these days, it’s the best way for me to make sure I don’t forget something important.

Hope this tip helped you!  If you use Google Calendar, I’d love to hear what you like about it.  Your comments make me feel less lonely out here writing, too.

Our washer bit the dust after 15 years. I suppose we could have gotten it fixed, but the cost of repair was prohibitive.

So off to Home Depot we went. There was a $699 LG Washer we were about to buy. We’d looked at them a few months ago when said washer was acting up. They had free delivery, 10% off EnergyStar Appliances, and free haul-off of the old appliance (no doubt kicking and screaming…I warned it not to act up, but it didn’t listen!) Anyway…

We were about to check out. I got out my iPhone, googled LG Washer 2050, and up came Nextag.

Turns out Sears had the exact same washer for $539 that Home Depot was about to charge $639 for. Now, you can say that I should give the business to Sears. After all, they offered it to begin with at the lower price. But my loyalties to Home Depot run deep, and without hesitation, they agreed to match what I just found at Sears. (BTW what’s REALLY interesting is that since this morning, the price for Sears has gone from $539 to $649, so pretty cool that I found that momentary deal, eh?

Washer bought, it will be delivered next Saturday, and on the way out the door I picked up a Thai basil, Boxwood basil, Sweet basil and dill plant.

Who could ask for anything more? Wait. That’s not Home Depot’s slogan is it!?

As far as Sears go, they’re over by our office. We bought a treadmill from them last year, and when we had a problem with it, they fixed it fast. I will be needing a microwave and a stove pretty soon. So even though I didn’t buy this appliance from them, I’l consider them next time cuz they had the lower price to begin with.

As for Nextag?! GO Nextag! I’ve never used them before to look things up, but I will again in the future. In fact, I’ve been digging around on their site, and they’ve got a nice price alert feature. I have my eye on a few cameras I’d like to get, so I’m going to give setting an alert a try.

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• Blogging to Social Media to Speaker (Core Conversation)