
So we got home tonight from SXSW Interactive, the web-internet marketing festival, having learned a few things. Facebook is emulating the Twitter live “stream” (to become the Experian prospect database of the now). Mobile advertising still doesn’t exist in any scalable form (but like the Great Pumpkin may be just around the corner). Quants can predict outcomes of baseball and elections but not stock movements (because too many public companies lie). The psychology of game play can guide better design (in web sites, product usability, and marketing campaigns).
But the real finding is the web is now merging with reality.
This is both a good and bad thing. Bad, in that people no longer pay attention. The geeks (OK, and us) spent much time ignoring elite speakers to type their own commentary on iPhones or laptops into Twitter, with hashtags (brief codes beginning with an “#” symbol) allowing others to search for the backchannel snark. Everyone justified this as a new way of adding personal value to the presentations, but face it, if you’re typing you can’t listen, or at least listen well.

The good spin, though, is sometimes the backchannel created a powerful overlay on reality — real insights from your peers on the current debate; the contact who finds you in a room of 1,000 people after you text your shirt color; the location of the person you need to meet on the roof of the Mashable party. We think Todd Sanders did it best — this Wisconsin-based webmaster couldn’t make SXSW, so had friends email him photos with vacant areas allowing him to be photoshopped in. The entire series is hilarious, bordering on art masterworks. Here, Todd arm-wrestles Plaid interactive agency president Darryl Ohrt over a booze bottle, when Darryl was actually holding nothing. Soon numerous people were staging photo shoots to feed Todd; uberblogger Chris Brogan posed with his arms around air; Todd became a meme within the SXSW hip crowd, who in turn looked for his next photoshopped feed back.
It’s scary people don’t listen. It’s cool that ideas, moving from the virtual web community into reality, give us new things to listen to.