Spring Break for nerds.
Tomorrow morning, I’m headed on a plane to beautiful Austin, TX for the South By Southwest Interactive Conference, also known to some as Spring Break for nerds.
This is my first trip to SXSWi, and I couldn’t be any more excited. In fact, my focus has been totally lost all afternoon because I keep thinking of things I want to try to accomplish while I’m there for the next five days.
As with many people that attend, I’m taking this as an opportunity to meet with some of the people I admire in the industry. I’m going to take it a little farther than pure fanboyism, though, and have some meaningful discussions with a purpose if possible.
For those who aren’t too busy to give me a minute, I’m going to be working on a short video about creative failure. We are always defined by our creative successes, our ADDY/One Show/Webby/FWA/etc. awards, but our failures are just as an important part of who we are and the things we make. I want to talk to successful creatives about their embrace of failure.
So far, I’ve gotten Hugh MacLeod to agree to spend a couple of minutes with me, but I’d love to get two or three more people. I’m going to be around a lot of Happy Cog people (see next paragraph), so maybe a couple of minutes with Greg Storey or Jeffrey Zeldman wouldn’t be out of the question. Three minutes on camera with Merlin Mann would make my year.
Of course, it’s not all going to be panels and seminars. I’m going to be competing for all manners of nerd karaoke glory at the second annual OK! Happy Cog’aoke 2 at the Scoot Inn on Saturday night. There will be video later on.
If you are planning to be in Austin for the event and would love to talk about creative failure, or anything really, come find me. You can find out where I am on Twitter, Gowalla and Foursquare.