Breadcrumbs are those little links you see on a website that help you to retrace your steps; “social breadcrumbs” is a phrase Jeremiah Owyang came up with (new to me anyway) a few minutes ago to describe the cumulative record of your presence you leave in social media that can be followed up by your friends or others interested in your activities or wanting to know what you would recommend. This was from the best panel I attended today, except it was in stealth mode. Supposedly Brian Solis as sole speaker but @jowyang, @comcastcares and some heavy dude from FourSquare were all up there unannounced talking about how to listen to the customer in social media.
This is what is so frustrating and fascinating about South by Southwest: the unpredictability. Before I got to this panel, halfway done, I had walked out on two completely packed rooms presenting astonishingly basic insights on how Google developers work long distance and what web content is all about. You just don’t know.
My other accomplishment so far is to run into and spend time with the folks from The Startup Bus: “25 strangers board a bus in San Francisco – and at 60 miles an hour and over 48 hours – they are to conceive, build and launch 6 tech startups in time for a SxSW party in Austin.” In other words, you got a free ride to the show in return for agreeing to put together and pitch a concept with several other people you’ve never seen before. The teams are presenting their ideas to a panel of venture capitalists tonight.
Also, the registration process is much less stressed this year, even though anecdotally there are more people. Stay tuned and I’ll report if I run into anything else interesting.