We're all back from Austin now and busily trying to catch up on everything from the last week. Our participation in the SXSW Interactive tradeshow was an outstanding experience. We are very pleased to have met so many new people and to have the opportunity to show LightCMS to them. Thanks to the hundreds of you who came by our booth and took the time to check out LightCMS.

We also enjoyed spending time with some of our existing LightCMS customers who were in the area. What fun to finally put some faces with the names we know so well.

We received a lot of very positive feedback and we also got a lot of great ideas for ways to continue enhancing the product. One thing is for sure — the best days for LightCMS are still ahead. We see a very bright future for this product and our other products and, as always, we are committed to their continued development and support.

If you have any questions or suggestions for us, please just let us know. You can drop them on our LightCMS user forum or email them to support@publishpath.com.

I've pasted in some pictures from SXSW below for all to enjoy.

Here's a look at the booth before things opened, with our lovely "Web designers are sexy" shirt displayed out front.

Here's a look at the booth in full swing. Ashley's demoing in the "sit down" station, Amine is on the iMac, and I'm just talking my head off about a brochure. Andrea was there too, but she's taking the picture. The crazy (and wonderful) thing is it was busy like this almost all the time.

This doesn't really have anything to do with us, but Google's booth was next door and you can see here all of the crates involved in tearing down their setup when the show was over. You can see that Ashley is nearly drowning in crates. Scary.

 

Well, we made it to SXSW Interactive and we're set up and ready to go. The trade show opens at noon Saturday and runs through Monday night. If you're in the area, we hope you'll come out and visit the LightCMS booth.

Just for fun, I've attached a picture of our booth as it looked after setup. Enjoy.

 

Introducing the all-new LightCMS limited edition T-shirt.

also available in charcoal gray

We know what you're thinking — "I must have one." Well, if you're at SXSW Interactive next week, you can swing by the LightCMS booth to claim one as your own. A few will also be given away at OpenBeta to the presenters and award winners there.

Win the shirt on Twitter

So, you're not going to be at SXSW or OpenBeta and you still want a shirt? We've got your covered. We're giving away five shirts on Twitter over this upcoming week. Here's what you do for a chance to win:

Tweet something about LightCMS

That's it! Just include "LightCMS" in your tweet and you'll have a chance to win that day's shirt. We'll select a winner from all of the qualifying tweets each day. Oh, and we're giving away shirts on Friday (March 6), Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Each day is a new chance to win. You'll need to send out a tweet on that day to be eligible for the day's prize (tweets over the weekend will count toward Monday's prize and tweets today count toward Friday's prize).

Make sense? Great! We'll see you on Twitter. And extra points for you if you help us spread the word about this giveaway (those extra points aren't really worth anything, but still ...).

As an exhibitor at the SXSW Interactive trade show, we have a few complimentary trade show tickets available to give away. These are one-day passes to the trade show only. If you already have a full SXSW registration, you won't need one of these since you can already access the trade show.

But, if you don't have a registration and would like to spend a day or part of the day at the interactive trade show in Austin on March 14th, 15th or 16th, send me an email with your name, company name, and mailing address to tim@elementfusion.com to request a one-day trade show pass. It'll be first come, first served until they are gone. Please only request one if you plan to use it.

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you at SXSW.

I know it's still a couple of months away but we're already shoring up the details for attending SXSW 2009. This year, we'll be exhibiting LightCMS at the interactive trade show and we'll also have a few of our team attending the interactive conference as well.

Just wondered if any of you are making plans to be there? If so, let us know. We'd love to see you there. We'll be posting more about SXSW as we get closer to the event.

One of the great things about SXSW is the amazing number of books you hear about. Whether it's a presenter citing a reference, or an author promoting his work, it seems like everywhere you go someone is telling you about a great book. Here are some of the most interesting:

The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
by Clayton M. Christensen.

The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
by Clayton M. Christensen.

The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works
by Ricardo Semler

Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace
by Ricardo Semler

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
by Timothy Ferriss

Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0
by Sarah Lacy

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath

A Smile in the Mind
by Beryl McAlhone

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
by Dan Roam

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life
by Rosamund Stone Zander, Benjamin Zander

Book Readings

For more SXSW books, check out this list of live book readings that took place throughout the week. I don't know if any of these will be available to listen to after the fact, but either way it's a great list.

Day 4 of SXSW was primarily a travel day as we made our way back north to Oklahoma City. But before we left town, we did have time for a couple of morning sessions:

Content Management System Roundup
This panel featured evangelists of several popular content management systems.  This is the key - they were evangelists and not representatives of the organizations so they could be open about their impressions. Each panelist discussed the good and bad of their favorite CMS systems. It was a great way to learn more about the ways that they differ and the features for which the public is clamoring.

How to Rawk After SXSW: Staying Inspired
This consisted of both SXSW verterans and rookies who shared their strategies for taking the information and inspiration gained at the conference back home to their lives and work. There was lots of great information about taking the overwhelming knowledge, amazing inspiration, and raw energy back to work. Attending SXSW is a special experience and it's our job to take what we've learned back to those who didn't get to go.

Since Day 4 was short, this is a good place to share some of my favorite links from the conference:

• BrightSpot Information Design
  Live visual notes that accompanied the opening keynote.
• BrightQube
  Beautiful web UI for browsing stock photography
• Vidoop
  These guys are based just up the road from us in Tulsa. They say their product is the end of passwords. I think I believe it.
• Bitstrips
  A fun website that lets anyone create and share comic strips - no artistic skill needed.
• Opera Dragonfly
  Opera was all over the conference teasing this new product with a Spinal Tap-style metal motif. My guess is that it's a developer tool/debugger similar to Firefox's Firebug extension.
• Blurb
  Blurb showed off an online tool for making beautiful books - especially for photographers. Real books. Remember those?
• SocialThing!
  SocialThing! is a new social aggregation tool that takes similar tools like FriendFeed a step further by allowing you to follow anyone with an RSS feed - even users who don't use SocialThing!
• Flickr tag: SXSWi
  Public photos from the conference via Flickr.
• 2008 SXSW Web Awards Winners
  Be sure to take a look at the best of the best. There are lots of great websites here.

Day three at SXSW greeted us with a massive thunderstorm and torrential rains. It was an adventure getting to the convention center without getting soaked. We saw another day of great content and filled a few more pages of notes. The day ended with the annual Nuclear Taco Night. For the uninitiated, Nuclear Tacos are an Austin staple and one of the spiciest things you'll ever eat. They look like a typical taco with ground beef, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, and sour cream; but they taste like molten lava - the kind of spicy burn that continues to burn even after it reaches your stomach (Even several hours later - it's after 10:00 pm as I write this ;). They're definitely worth the hurt.

As before here are the programming highlights from today:

The Care and Feeding of Your Startup
This one leaned a bit more toward business than I would typically like, but it did address lots of issues regarding the motivation of creative workers and creating an effective corporate culture. In many ways this was the opposite view of Jason Fried's thoughts on the topic earlier in the week. That said, it did extend a recurring SXSW theme of creating passion inside your organization for your product. That's a lesson that can't be taught enough in my opinion.

Social Networking and Your Brand
This panel discussion concerned personal branding both in terms of self promotion and the caveats of sharing too much. It was interesting to see how large companies like Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Apple encourage their employees to actively develop their online persona.

Monday Keynote: Frank Warren
Frank Warren is the founder of PostSecret, a community art project with roots in social networking both online and off. The project consists of post cards anonymously sent in revealing secrets by their authors. During the keynote, Warren shared many examples of the cards along with touching stories of community and changed lives. It was an inspirational hour that truly exemplified the power of community.

10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment
Presented by Adaptive Path, this panel explored they ways that creative industries (other than the web) foster the creative process and create an environment where creativity is at its most effective. There were lots of ideas here to take back to the office.

Core Conversation: Feeding the Creativity Beast
Our last session of the day was our first opportunity to explore the core conversations format which is new to SXSW this year. The core conversations consisted of four independent discussion groups happening simultaneously in one room. The popularity of this format made getting in close enough to hear a little tough, but the content was great and was a nice break from a standard presentation.

Tomorrow leaves us time for a few early morning panels, then it's back on the road to Oklahoma City.

Day two of SXSW Interactive was a long one. It included a full day of programming plus the opening of the trade show and capped with the Web Awards show in the evening. Dustin and I were up early and ready to go, despite the time change. Here's a quick look:

Everyone's A Design Critic
Happy Cog's Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert teamed up for yet another great design panel. This year they tackled the issues designers face when presenting their work to clients. The panel was full of great advice about presenting, defending and getting the best work out of these tough meetings. These guys are always top-notch.

From Frustration to Elation: Getting Emotional by Design
This panel explored the ways that our customers' relationships with our software are many times not unlike relationships with people. This was a cute way to look at ideas for approaching application design in a more human way that allows users to form more lasting attachments.

Keynote Interview with Mark Zuckerberg
This was a highly anticipated keynote with the rarely interviewed Zuckerberg and the largest room was absolutely packed. Unfortunately, this was a very disappointing session. Zuckerberg really didn't share anything of tremendous value and, to be fair, at 23, he really lacks the wisdom to have the impact of past speakers. But that aside, things really went south by the end of the panel. The audience openly heckled the interviewer, Sarah Lacy, whose softball questions and overtly flirtatious, unprofessional manner really killed what could have been an interesting discussion with a truly notable web superstar. This will be widely talked about.

Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users
Kathy Sierra was back this year with another great presentation that expanded on last year's theme of humanizing our applications. My favorite theme of the hour was the idea that customers don't care about companies or products or brands - they just want to use things that make them "kick ass" at whatever they do.

SEO 3.0: Optimizing Search & Social for 2008 and Beyond
This one was for Boeckman ... most of the SEO jargon was way over our heads, but presenter Bill Leake managed to share a lot of common sense tips despite playing his humor to a tough room. I'm sure Justin will understand our notes.

We spent our lunch hour scoring tons of swag and meeting tons of great companies. I especially enjoyed meeting the guys at Vidoop, our neighbors just up the road in Tulsa.

We rounded out the night with the SXSW Web Awards presentations. It was tough to learn anything about the winners in such a brief show, but MC Eugene Mirman and guest presenter Ask a Ninja, kept things really fun. Congrats to the winners!

It's been a long day, so it's time to sign-off. More tomorrow. If you're in Austin, we'd love to meet you. You can find us in the online registrant directory.

The Element Fusion crew arrived in Austin, Texas this morning for the first full day of the SXSW Interactive Conference. The weather in Austin is warm and we jumped right into the fray along with 7,500 interactive conference attendees. Here is a quick look at what we saw today:

Opening Remarks with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson
This was the opening keynote to kick off the conference. Jenkins and Johnson delivered a broad, intellectual look at social interaction in the web and society, the next generation and today's youth, and the social implications of the high tech world we live in. Lots of high-level ideas here, but maybe lacking in the tactical things we often expect from these sessions.

10 Things We've Learned at 37signals
Jason Fried delivered a practical, no-nonsense extension of 37signals' Getting Real in this compelling presentation. Fried discussed the truths, processes, and business philosophies the company has honed over nearly 4 years of developing their incredibly popular web applications. This was a must-see.

A General Theory of Creative Relativity
Jim Coudal, of Coudal Partners, provided another great session immediately following Fried. Coudal's tongue-in-cheek theory explored the business of creativity and the ins-and-outs of idea generation. Thoughts about the source of inspiration, ways to find ideas when you don't feel creative, and how to foster a creative environment in the studio were presented in Jim's frank, self-deprecating, and humorous style. This is sure to be another highlight of the entire event.

After all of this inspiration, it was time for some authentic Austin Tex-Mex and to pour over the schedule for tomorrow's panels. We'll be back with more highlights tomorrow.

Coming up next month, Element Fusion will be once again making the trip south to Austin, TX for the 2008 South by Southwest Interactive conference. 

SXSW is actually three conferences in one, covering Interactive, Music, and Film during SXSW Week, March 7 - 16, 2008. SXSW Interactive is really the premier event for people working in the web industry. The conference features nearly five full days and offers panels, keynotes, a trade show, and other events featuring the top minds in the field. SXSW covers a wide range of topics from business development on the web to social networking to technology, design, and even tactical topics like HTML and CSS. In years past, SXSW has been a favorite launching point for new "Web 2.0" applications. Nearly anyone working on the web can benefit from something at this conference, even if it is only for the opportunities to network. And like many conferences, some of the best information is found in the form of meeting and sharing ideas with the smart people you meet throughout the week.

I'm looking forward to panels on design, social networking, CMS systems, and web startups. Speakers include: Jason Fried, Jim Coudal, Jason Santa Maria, Kathy Sierra, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jimmy Wales with keynotes by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, community artist Frank Warren, and futurist Jane McGonigal.

While in Austin, we'll be looking to line-up meetings with customers, partners, and new friends. If you'd like to meet us at SXSW, you can find us in the online registrant directory. Send an email or leave your contact information below and we can provide email, phone, twitter, or other ways to reach us while at the conference. Hope to see you there!