Tomorrow morning I leave to go to South by Southwest, one of the biggest festival/conferences in the tech scene (and the music and film scenes). I’ve never been before, so I’m pretty excited. There’s one main reason that I’m going, but that’s just my official excuse — I’ve wanted to go to SxSW since I first heard of it, about 3 years ago. Last year I even promised myself that I’d go this year, but then I thought I was going to be in Chile, so didn’t get tickets. Then things changed, this year rolled around, and a matter of days before it starts, I found myself with adequate motivation and reason to go, so I bought tickets.
My main reason for going?
The reason this is specifically important for me is that I was on the WordPress team that’s competing/presenting on this panel. We put a heap of work into building a website/system based on supplied specifications/designs and will go head to head with Joomla and Drupal during that panel.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m also really excited to attend a bunch of other panels, and of course the parties, but this one panel is my main reason. Oh, and I get to stay and hang out with my good buddy Ray Hernandez as well, so it’s all good. I’ll try to post a summary here when I get back, but in the meantime you can follow me on Twitter for live updates on what’s happening.
Idea: Comment Aggregation via WordPress
There are lots of “conversation platforms” out there, and more arriving daily. FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader (now that it has commenting functionality); you name it. These systems are all great for getting your content out there and exposing more people to it, but the problem (in my opinion) is that it becomes really hard to follow the conversations on all of these different platforms. They all generally act as either a kind of content aggregation platform (e.g. FriendFeed/Google Reader), or as a unique content creation/delivery system, which is heavily used to redistribute existing content (e.g. Twitter). With all this aggregating going on, why not do the same thing in reverse? Mashable has just started doing something along these lines and that prompted me to finally publish this draft post.
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