Someone's Astroturfing Demand Media

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The following two emails independently crossed my desktop this past week:

Hello Peter!

Kate here, and we've found an interesting infographic that I think you might enjoy. If you haven't heard already, Demand Media has been in the news a lot lately. But just exactly why were they? Well, to enlighten you, or to recap all the facts, all of the necessary information regarding Demand Media was included, from the costs to what it means for you as a reader of the daily news. You can check it out here:

onlinemba.com/demand-media-breaking-the-bank/

Anyways, just thought this might be of interest to you. If you'd like other infographics such as these, or if you also have an infographic you think I'd might like, let me know!

Thanks,


Kate
twitter.com/katehersch

And this:

Hey Peter,

With the recent Google algorithm change specifically targeting content farms, one of the biggest culprits was Demand Media. The purpose was to devalue poor content and improve the valuation of good content news, thereby changing how the search results were displayed. This meant that Demand Media's properties were directly influenced/hit. However, even with the change, Demand Media is still alive and kicking. But exactly what do they do, and how do they do it? Well, we've created this infographic to show you just how their business model works. It lends insight to all you need to know about Demand Media.

You can check out the graphic here: onlinemba.com/demand-media-breaking-the-bank/

Let me know what you think, as I know I was surprised to learn all this.

Thanks!


Rebecca,
twitter.com/rluzenski

Upon receipt, I thanked them for sending and asked if they worked for Demand Media. Here's how they responded:

Hi Peter,

You're welcome, and I hope you liked the graphic. =)
I don't do this as my job, I just like to collect interesting infographics. I stumbled into your site, and thought this one might interest you. That's all! I hope you find some use for it!

Have a great day,
Kate

And this:

Hi again,

Oh, no, I don't work for Demand. I just stumbled onto your site, and thought this graphic might interest you. That's all! I hope you liked the infographic. =)

Have a great day,
Rebecca

WTF?

We all know that Google recently tweaked its search algorithm, which purportedly resulted in significant traffic losses at the major "low cost content farms," including Demand Media. This initial spate of deleterious media coverage led to an all-out media blitz by Demand's CEO Richard Rosenblatt decrying the notion.

Here's the headline from BusinessInsider's Henry Blodget's piece:

"DEMAND MEDIA: Ha! Google's Huge Algorithm Change Hasn't Hurt Our Business At All."

But did Rosenblatt authorize his communications team or agency to unleash randoids under the guise of ordinary citizens to opaquely engage bloggers, yours truly among them? I thought this kind of insidious activity went the way of the Wal-Mart van mall tour.

The company says no. I received an email from Demand Media's CMO who also is befuddled by the source of this less-than-flattering infographic. He writes:

"We have been tracking the dissemination of the infographic across the web for the past couple of weeks. It definitely seems like somebody with a vested interest is out there promoting it. But it surely isn't us!"

I'm still sleuthing a bit to try to get to the bottom of these supposedly independent pitches. To this end, I did notice on the second email an opt-out option from Social Media Today (to which I periodically contribute) and Consumer Media Network. It read:

If you would rather not receive future communications from Social Media Today, please go to http://ConsumerMediaNetwork.pr-optout.com/OptOut.aspx?

Consumer Media Network chief Muhammad Saleem today (Wednesday) informed me that his company has nothing to do with this.

Ironically, I did end up tweeting a link to the infographic after receiving the first email. It wasn't until the send crossed my desktop that my astroturfing antennae went up.

Video's Rocket Men

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"We’re at the beginning of a new paradigm, and you’re going to see a generation of really valuable content properties come out of this," Brian Bedol, co-founder, Bedrocket

Intrepid WSJ reporter Peter Kafka brings us a piece today on the formation of Bedrocket, a new venture from three esteemed content guys with enviable track records. I've never met Ken Lerer though we have many friends in common.

Lerer's name still resides between Linda Robinson and Walter Montgomery on the door of WPP-owned strategic PR consultancy RLM, in spite of Mr. Lerer's subsequent lengthy gigs at Time-Warner and Huffington Post.

I have met Brian Bedol and Patrick Keane. Bedol and I have several close mutual friends and he hired my team at B-M to handle PR duties in the run-up to the launch of College Sports Television (CSTV), the first all college sports cable network, now owned by CBS. I met Patrick Keane during his early days as an analyst for Web 1.0's Jupiter Communications. Keane went on to a successful career with Google, Yahoo! and Associated Content.

Few details emerged from Kafka's piece today, though the pedigree of the founders coupled with the explosion and business viability of original online video programming, IMHO, portends good tidings for this venture. Bedol has the midas touch in identifying programming trends. (Before CSTV, he founded Classic Sports Network and later sold it to ESPN.)

The recent $315M sale of HuffingtonPost to AOL also Midasizes Ken Lerer who explained Bedrock's prospects and its echoes of the early cable years:

"I think this is the next sweet spot," Lerer says. "The distribution is all built out. It just needs to be filled with content. It’s absolutely identical to cable in the 80s...I know much more than I did 6 years ago...I see this one much more clearly than I originally saw the Huffington Post. I think this one has a real business plan from day one."

Even the astute observer of all things digital Peter Kafka acknowledges the premise of Bedrock's business model:

"But their basic premise makes sense: There’s a big–and growing–market for video, and it won’t be sated with TV reruns and dog-on-skateboard videos alone."

I was reminded of this during my recent trip to SxSW where I met the VP of Content for one of the platforms that presumably will compete for eyeballs with Bedrocket -- Blip.TV. Steve Woolf told me that Blip.TV is up to 130 million video views and 32 million unique visitors per month!

One likely difference: Blip.TV hosts user-generated content, while Bedrocket seems poised to serve up more professionally produced programming across different channels of interest -- online and off(?).

Then of course the name Bedrocket is eerily reminscent of Rocketboom, a NY-based pioneer in producing original video for the web. ZDNet recently anointed its founder Andrew Baron as one of the "top 20 technology elite" on Twitter.

In spite of the spawning of countless sites hoping to monetize original video programming, the track records (and collective contacts) of those behind Bedrocket offers optimism for success, or minimally, a reason to keep an eye on the site's development.

Friday's Video Views

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iPad Magic



As Blackberry struggles and the iPad surges, here's a magician with some apps you won't find in the (trademark-protected?) app store. HT @dberkowitz


Slate, Galaxy, PlayBook...

Can other mobile-minded manufacturers catch up to the iPad's first-mover lead in the booming tablet market? Samsung gave a buddy who attended SxSW a new Samsung Galaxy...to keep. The folks at Blackberry seeded its PlayBook at South By as well, while Microsoft launched an ad campaign for its tablet entry, Slate. Here's the spot (via Mashable):




First Movie in the Outernet

Alternate universe, augmented reality, mixed media, integrated marketing... Whatever you want to call it, I love how NBCUni has combined the physical and virtual worlds for this film. (13th Street Universal)




Social Foodies

NY foodie Soraya Darabi gets the TechCrunch founder treatment in the wake of the prominent showing of Foodspotting at this year's SxSW conference. Ms. Darabi was recently the subject of a New York Magazine profile that she din't much care for. I actually thought it was a net positive for her socially driven culinary enterprise.




Gillmor Gang Recounts SxSW and Looks at The New York Times

The big news this week from the media ecosystem had to do with The New York Times paywall that's poised to go up this Monday. Having played a role in the introduction of TimesSelect, at a time when monthly uniques and the monetization of eyeballs had yet to be fully appreciated, I thought the announcement went pretty well, though it did expectedly attract a decent share of naysayers. I sense that people and pundits are coming around to accepting the idea that quality content costs money and those producing it should be compensated. Also, The Times decision to announce the paywall a year ago likely helped grease the skids for when the service actually would arrive. Here are the smarties from The Gillmor Gang (via TechCrunch) weighing in on a variety of subjects, including The Times paywall (at about 11:30 of the 90-minute clip).




Times Square's Jumbotron Hijacked

I;m often asked about holding media events in Times Square or utilizing the Jumbotron to advance a client's communications goals. ore often than not, I advise against such a tactic -- mostly because the Jumbotron is seen by such a randoid group of tourists and passers-by, one cannot measure its impact, let alone know who you're reaching. Separately, virtually every new tech start-up has embraced video as a medium to showcase their techhnologies and apps. Here's a clip that cleverly uses (hijacks) the Jumbotron for a start-up called Tube Mote. Via Gawker HTs Guy Kawasaki and Gizmodo




Sorgatz & Spurgat

During my visit to SxSW, I had a chance to meet the team behind the New York-based start-up vYou, which cleverly uses video (and a cool algorithms) to allow users to engage one another. I was sufficiently enamored to join myself. Here's Rex Sorgatz's SxSW sit-down with founder Steve Spurgat.




Twitter @Five

Here's the clip Twitter produced to mark its 5th birthday. Separately, rumors have co-founder Jack Dorsey, fresh off his Square exploits, returning to the original (but perhaps not only?) micro-blogging channel.




Conan's Take on Biz

And what better way to celebrate a 5th biorthday than to make an appearance on national TV. In this case, one of Twitter's three co-founders Biz Stone swung by Carrot Top's L.A. studios for some light banter.

PRepping the Policy Pundits

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Bill O'Reilly of Fox News

In spite of this new era of transparency in which leakers and whistleblowers are celebrated in many quarters, I'll never understood the compulsion of some communications counselors for self-aggrandizement, often at the expense of their clients. (Actually I do understand it, but have a hard time reconciling it with the interests of the client.)

Take for example this feature story that appears in the "Lifestyle" section of today's Washington Post. It highlights the efforts of left-leaning Media Matters and its outside media training firm to prepare a range of like-minded third-party experts to do public battle with the mostly Fox News-hosted purveyors of right-leaning rhetoric. From the Post:

Ed Schultz of MSNBC

"The primary mission of Media Matters, he said, is to obsessively monitor Fox News and call attention to its distortions. But now it’s moving into the operational phase, transforming from observers to shock troops. The organization, he said, had to “professionalize the training and booking” of a left-leaning counterpoise."


So who benefits from allowing one of the Beltway's most influential news organizations in on the prep session? Do you think for a moment the Republicans would open up their behind-the-scenes messaging and PR strategy sessions for public scrutiny? Doubtful.

The GOP has benefitted by letting the end result, not the means to that end, drive the narrative. Who could forget all those talking-head former generals who fanned out onto the airwaves to tow the party line?

Having conducted or participated in scores of media training sessions over the years, I can assure you that few, if any of my clients want the public to know how the sausage was made. In fact, revealing a client's PR strategy, and in particular that he or she underwent communications training, can be cause for termination.

Today's WashPost piece is faintly reminiscent of that New Yorker piece that took an up-close-and-personal look at the PR "war room" that Wal-Mart built to combat its antagonists. I certainly understood and appreciated the "we've got nothing to hide" motivation for opening the media curtain, but honestly, our industry has a ways to travel before reporters (and the public they serve) will accept the machinations of our professional calling, i.e.,

"Brenner [the expert-in-training] joined the other participants in a wood-paneled room on the carriage house’s ground floor. A camcorder stood on a tripod in the middle of desks arranged in a horseshoe formation. Black and white boards hung on the walls. Brock, with graying hair and blue tie, offered some words of wisdom to the class. Their conservative antagonists had all gone through rigorous media training at the Leadership Institute, he warned, but now they, too, would be armed with the ammunition to compete."

Some justification for Media Matters' decision to open its lair to a reporter (with the caveat to "withhold the names of participants who asked not to be identified") might be found in the long-standing criticism of the Democrats' PR shortcomings. Other than Obama's digitally driven 2008 campaign, the Dems can't seem to muster the ability to fight fire with fire to advance their political agenda:

"Since its inception in August 2009, the Progressive Talent Initiative, or PTI, has trained nearly 100 pundits who have appeared 800 times on television and radio. Media Matters uses that metric to pitch donors for more contributions, but its leadership believes that the surge of camera-ready liberals has recaptured lost ground in the media wars against conservatives."

Perhaps the tide is changing.

Digital Reading Room, Spring '11 Edition

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With the arrival of spring, I thought the time was ripe to revisit the Digital Reading Room to give this blog's more literate followers a digital refresh to their bookshelves, Kindles and iPads. (Anyone using a Nook, SONY e-Reader or Galaxy?)

The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

Engage, Revised and Updated: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web by Brian Solis and Ashton Kutcher

Mediactive by Dan Gillmor

Enchantment: the Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions by Guy Kawasaki

Poke the Box by Seth Godin

Social Marketing to the Business Customer by Paul Gillin & Eric Schwartzman

Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story by Peter Guber

Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business by Ann Handley, C.C. Chapman and David Meerman Scott

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

Friday's Video Views

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SxSW via CNN

If you've visited these pages over the last week, you'll have seen a decent helping of posts from this year's South by Southwest Interactive conference, (i.e., it was overwhelming!). Here's CNN's 3-minute look at the sites and sounds from Austin's (and the world's) biggest geek fest. (Via SxSW Website)




Tyson's Bird Addiction

During his keynote interview at SxSW, the 68-year-old media, entertainment and Internet mogul Barry Diller shared an anecdote with the packed house. He said that when he phoned his famous fashion designer wife at home, he heard a strange noise in the background. "What is that? he asked. She replied "Oh, nothing." When the sound persisted, he demanded to know what he was hearing. Ms. von Furstenberg fessed up. She was playing Angry Birds!




Happy 5th Birthday, Twitter

From your "friends" at Funny or Die.

Twitter Celebrates its 5th Anniversary - watch more funny videos

GroupedIn

GroupMe got the buzz and Ad Age props as one of the top start-ups emerging from SxSW. Still, I like that its similar-sounding rival GroupedIn expanded beyond SMS to Twitter and Facebook in the group messaging genre. Company CEO aspires to make "group messaging personal again." Here are his remarks from Austin. (Via Mashable)




Comment pronounce-t-on LinkedIn?

Parlez-vous LinkedIn? Voici "les hommes et les femmes sur les rues" de Paris.




@Dens on 4Sq's Future

In an earlier post, I summed up Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore's SxSW interview with Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley. (I even included an audio clip of the entire interview. Here's the 3-minute video clip highlight that Mashable culled from the tete-a-tete. (Via Mashable)




Everyone's Savvy Auntie

Our favorite and most savvy auntie Melanie Notkin's new book is (finally) poised to arrive (April 26). Here's the trailer. Love this.




Crowdtap Shout-Outs

Another crowd (and Ad Age) favorite from SxSW: Crowdtap, which held a fab party atop The Belmont. If you like hip-hop and are engaged in the social graph, you'll like this clip ...especially the shout-outs.

And the Winner at SxSW is...

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Unlike last year when location-based services Foursquare and Gowalla dominated the discourse coming out of SxSW, this year's conference had way too many dimensions to declare a single company or technology as the clear winner. Some companies had great marketing and PR, but less than perfect applications. While others had mind-blowing apps, but PR and marketing that simply didn't rise above the daily din.

Mobile group messaging, social media-fueled platforms that engage fans or raise money, and video-sharing/engagement platforms were well-represented. Mashable's Adam Ostrow looked at a few of the SxSW 2011 "battles" [with infographics].

Nellymoser's John Puterbaugh on PSFK Mobile Panel

Still, attendees couldn't help but notice one subtle trend that emerged this year to envelope every aspect of this massive event.

I'm talking 2D barcodes (i.e., QR Codes, Microsoft Tag...) that link the physical world to mobile. My client John Puterbaugh, CEO of Nellymoser and a pioneer in the development of technology that seamlessly delivers rich content to mobile devices, summed it up when he said on his PSFK panel:

"2D barcodes codes are to mobile what the URL was to the Internet."

If you don't believe me (or John), here's a collection of the images I captured at almost every turn during my time in Austin.

Austin Tagged

Tagged Foodspotters

Street Walkers Tagged

Free Download

Tagged "For a Good Time"

Tagged
"For a Free Dinner"

A Tagged Chevy Cruze

Pole Tagged

What the...!

Mashable House Tagged

SxSW Press Room Tagged

Tagged Cup n Napkin

Special Offer

Tattoo tagged

SxSW: A Perfect Storm

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PepsiMAX lot at SxSW

Buddy Media's Michael Lazerow

Buddy Media chief Michael Lazerow took to the pages of the influential BusinessInsider yesterday to anoint SxSW as simply a "must-attend" event. He observed that SxSW Interactive today is larger than SxSW Music in which the legendary festival has its roots.

What has suddenly driven the interactive conference's success? In my opinion, it's a confluence (perfect storm) of three factors:

• The growing ubiquity and utility of social media-driven channels and apps
• The (recession-driven) availability of young, tireless and inexpensive talent - coders and otherwise
• A seismic shift in corporate marketing expenditures to digital and socially-driven initiatives

To the third point, the owner of a very popular restaurant in the heart of Austin's hottest district confided to my wife and me that this year for the first time he closed his restaurant (three times!) during SxSWi for privately sponsored parties, in spite of asking double a typical evening's take. He also heard that Pepsi spent some $1.4M on its popular PepsiMAX lot from where it staged many events and interactive activities.

I suppose there's also the fact that the conference is loads of fun, a fab place to network, let alone hobnob with the social/digital A-list. Attendees will likely get a glimpse of the next big thing. As for me, I just enjoyed meeting and sharing what I know with those building the next-gen of digital companies - companies that would not have been possible five years ago absent broadband penetration and online/mobile social sharing.

Here is a small sampling of the start-ups I met during my four days in Austin:

VYou - A rapidly growing interactive video platform (i.e., "conversational video") that allows anyone (or any organization) to answer users' questions via video.

FanBridge - A turn-key platform that has its roots in the music biz to give artists the social tools to build and engage their fan base. Today, with fans and followers transcending the music biz, FanBridge is fanning out.

IndieGogo - Another turn-key social media-driven platform that let's anyone raise money for any reason. Some 22,000 "campaigns" reside on the site ranging from a young man who needs money to have a chipped tooth repaired to inventors with cool prototypes to documentary filmmakers.

blip.tv - While not a "start-up" per se, I did chat up the head of content for "the next generation television network" who told me that the site is now getting some 130M+ monthly video views and 32M uniques. Wow!

Hashable - I suppose if buzz factor is a barometer of a start-up's promise, the New York team at Hashable should be very pumped about its showing at SxSW. The mobile app aspires to disintermediate the business card in favor of digital connection and relationship management. (All the cool kids I know use it.)

SecondMarket - So you want to invest in Facebook's IPO? Who doesn't? Maybe you should set your sites on another hot privately-held start-up. SecondMarket has upped its game by giving potential investors the tools and market data to get in on the action at an early stage.

Instinctiv - Another smart New York-based music-driven company that has "patented solutions for wireless media sync, smart shuffle recommendations and waveform audio fingerprinting."

Given the cacophony of companies clamoring to rise about the clutter at SxSW, the conference as launch platform can be a tall order for most. I didn't get a chance to meet the team at GroupMe, though I had caught their demo at the New York Tech Meetup last fall. Lots of buzz around them, and a rival called GroupedIn, which recently integrated Twitter and Facebook to its group messaging platform. Mashable reports:

"Grouped{in}, like competitors GroupMe, Beluga and Fast Society, allows users to create groups with which they can group text (you can toggle between SMS and push notifications, which is handy). However, unlike the aforementioned apps, users can also check out the Twitter and Facebook streams of those in their groups as well."

Most will agree that group messaging was "the big story" emanating from SxSWi 2011. Given the record number of companies showcasing their wares, I'd say it's impossible to identify a single winner. I did observe one important trend, though perhaps not as sexy as the others, that emerged from the conference. I'll post on it shortly.

Diller & Crowley @SxSW

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CNN's Poppy Harlow w/ IAC's Barry Diller

Two of the more notable keynote interviews at SxSW happened Monday morning.

The first featured CNN business reporter Poppy Harlow's chummy tete-a-tete with IAC chairman Barry Diller before a packed house at the Austin Convention Center. The second showcased two Twitter-verified luminaries - Mashable founder Pete Cashmore and Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley -- hamming it up on stage.




To Poppy's credit, she managed to cover most of the important topics du jour:

• Diller's support of net-neutrality (with caveats)
• The Newsweek-DailyBeast hook-up's prospects
• The explosion and impact of online video programming
• How apps have changed everything
• The miraculous iPad
• The fates of Netflix, Hulu and others
• The cable monopolies and how indy digital content syndicators may break them

Barry Diller's Notable Quotables:

• On SxSW: "Such a nice vibration that happens here"
• "The Internet is a miracle. You push a button and you publish to the world."
• On net neutrality: "...an unambiguous law. Nobody shall step between the publisher and the consumer."
• "I have a truly emotional thing about the iPad." The iPad2? "It's better"
• "I don't know if the experiment of The DailyBeast and Newsweek will work. We'll see in 6-8 months."
• Rupert Murdoch's "The Daily is interesting, but it does not seem to me to be a competitive product. It's an experiment"
• Start-up valuations are "mathematically insane."
• To digital video producers: "...think about video not just in 3-5 minute clips but in longer forms..."
• On VCs/Start-ups: "Of course, money chases invention...but the accelerated rate of invention is what's exciting now!"
• On the prospect of a tech bubble: "The money that’s going to be lost will be by people who can afford to lose it. So who cares?”
• Is content still king? "Sumner Redstone in his dotage invented this 'content is king' thing because he had the content and wanted to be king."
• Movie companies "sowed the seeds of their destruction with Netflix deal. They're now going to try to kill Netflix."
• On Hulu: "I don't know how it will end up. Good intentions...now what do we do?...tremendous conflict"
• The U.S. is #16 worldwide in broadband penetration. Ever time I think it or say it, I get queasy."

Mashable's Pete Cashmore with Foursquare's Dennis Crowley

After hearing from a 68-year-old media and Internet mogul, we were treated to the musings of a social media mogul literally half his age when Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley took the ACC stage accompanied by the definitive chronicler of all things social media -- Mashable founder/CEO Pete Cashmore. Some of the topics covered:

• What's hot at SxSW
• The next big thing?
• Foursquare's API
• Competitor Gowalla
• With 250K merchants, how to scale
• The AMEX partnership
• Comparisons with Groupon
• Crowley family on Family Feud

Foursquare's Crowley and Selvadurai in Gap Ad

The capacity crowd especially enjoyed the portion of the interview wherein Cashmore revealed SxSW attendees' answers (via MOS) to some burning questions about Dennis, e.g., how much is he worth or how old he is. What do you think of first when you hear the name Dennis Crowley? Someone in the audience blurted out "Bieber!"

Another crowd pleaser: the emergence on stage of a Gap print ad featuring Crowley and 4Sq co-founder Naveen Selvadurai striking a pose. Crowley made a point that the hand in question was Naveen's not his. When Cashmore asked the audience how many want Facebook integration with Foursquare, no hands went up. When he asked how many in the audience use Austin-based Gowalla to check-in, only a dozen of the hundreds went up. (Quite a change from SxSW 2010!)

Dennis Crowley's Notable Quotables:

• "I get excited by mashups on our platform." (Shout-outs to 8bit and the app that aggregates health reports of nyc restaurants).
• "We're growing up and starting to compete against the Facebooks and Googles. They figured out that #checkins are now cool."
• 4Sq's business model? "The stuff we're doing with merchants. No one's doing this."
• On Groupon: "Groupon has unique model by driving newbie merchants. 4Sq going at it from a different angle."
• On Google & Twitter: "We're tight with Google. Lots of my friends work there and lost of our employees used to work there. We're tight with them and we're tight with Twitter."
• What's new with 4Sq? "We're working on a venue harmonization project to unify data across the places database."
• On Yelp and FB Places: Cashmore and Crowley see Yelp's Dukes & Facebook Places as "cargo cults," i.e., "copying without understanding."
• On getting acquired: Dennis dodged.
• Scalability? "We need greater distribution. We have 250K merchants. AMEX is a good partner to scale."
• On what's hot at SxSW: "SxSw is so noisy now. So many companies trying to launch." Shout out to GroupMe. "Group messaging is breaking out."
• On Blackberry: "...a tough platform to develop on"
• How rich is Dennis Crowley? "Not rich enough to never work gain. Our Foursquare staff dinner was held at a strip mall barbeque."
• 4Sq's current valuation: "We won't know until next round financing."

4Sq's Dennis Crowley, Mayor of SxSW

Another high point was when Mashable's Stacy Green emerged from backstage to crown Crowley the Mayor of South by Southwest.

As for me, I enjoyed the first question from the audience - a veritable PR coup. This man took the microphone and told rockstars Cashmore & Crowley how a young women in his company simply loves the two of them and could she come on the stage to give them both a hug??? She's standing right there stage right. Sure enough, they agreed and there she was giving each of them a hug, and her company a plug. "The Today Show" outdoor fans' signage don't hold a candle to this hug & plug!

To conclude, Crowley graciously invited the audience to the at the PepsiMAX lot to meet & greet the 40 of his 50 employees who trekked to Austin. A nice New York gesture.

• Audio of Harlow-Diller

• Audio of Cashmore-Crowley.

Photos: Peter Himler with Canon PowerShot SX20 IS

SxSW by Day

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Austin has its many charms as a city. Not unlike Cambridge/Boston, it has a river running through it with rowers in unison gliding their skiffs under its bridges. The architecture is a mix of the modern and gritty. Some have compared it to Tribeca but without putting a gaping hole in your wallet.

I'm especially enamored with the colorfully old, immensely popular food trucks that serve hearty local fare. They're not unlike the growing gourmet food trucks that increasingly pixelize Manhattan's street grid.

Foodspotting Team at SxSW (Soraya Darabi 2nd from left)

Korean BBQ Tacos

To this end, our NYC friend Soraya Darabi and her colleagues at Foodspotting teamed with Blackberry for a Street Food Fest where a hand-selected sampling of these mobile restaurants served up a super-delicious artery-clogging helping of southwest fare. From the look of the queue, the Korean BBQ Tacos (who knew?) emerged as the clear crowd favorite.

Arrington vs. Sheen

Gowalla Airstream

As hard as it is to get your arms around all that is SxSW, the best way to do so is by foot or pedicab. At left is my favorite pedicab siting just outside out hotel.

I also happened by the Gowalla Airstream where the #2 location-based social network was giving out t-shirts and a pass of some kind.

Inside Austin Convention Center (aka SxSW Ground Zero) where one can easily be awarded with the Super or Super Duper Swarm badge on Foursquare, I couldn't help but notice the "Ogilvy Notes" booth on the third floor. Not sure what I was looking at, I was drawn in by the colorful illustrations and keywords that appeared to reflect the conference. I quickly took this shot and dashed off to my next session.

That night I bumped into my old pal Rohit Bhargava at the Mashable party who explained that Ogilvy's illustrators attended the key sessions and produced these artistic renditions (i.e., data visualizations) from what they heard and saw. Wouldn't Wordle do? I asked Rohit. He said there's nothing like a human touch.

iPad-pa-looza

SxSW attendees are quite used to standing in lines. Every hot party, A-list speaker event and taco stand teaches one the true meaning of patience. I came across this nondescript line in the middle of the city over the weekend. No signage, except for one that read Gold's Gym.

Hmmm. Geeks heading onto Gold's Gym??? I sauntered over, and there it was: an Apple pop-up Store selling nothing but the iPad 2! A bit later, my Social Media Week NY PR collaborateur Andy Morrisinvited me to a private pool party to help his client Conduit make a media splash.

It was held at a fab rooftop venue. (Atop the white building at left.)

Lots of New Yorkers on hand including the four media types in the hot tub below: (left to right: Mediaite's Rachel Sklar, The Times's Brian Stelter, Fashionism.com founder Brooke Moreland and prolific chronicler of all things social (as in parties) Nick McGlynn.

Anyway. more on these pages shortly on the two keynotes I attended featuring IAC's Barry Diller and a tete-a-tete between Pete Cashmore and Dennis Crowley.

Sklar, Stelter, Moreland and McGlynn Hot-Tubbing It