So many people think like me that I had a realization today about this conference: SXSW is like a live Twitter experience.

Before you laugh, let me explain.

In Twitter, you can follow conversations and join in at any time. It’s a fun way to meet new people and share thoughts. It isn’t rude to interrupt. It’s common to just talk. That type of experience happens all the time at SXSW.

After I talked about the SXSW experience with a first-time-to-SXSW friend who traveled to Austin with me today, I had this big aha moment. We spent two hours in the car driving to the airport discussing the conference experience. By that point, I was in “SXSW mode” and caught myself randomly talking socially to someone in the bathroom as if I was already in Austin. There is this flow of conversation here that you can’t have anywhere else. It’s the ebb and flow of ideas that can course through every nerdy location across this downtown area.

I brought this up to a few people after I had picked up my badge and became and official conference attendee. They seemed to agree with my vision.

SXSW is a live Twitter feed. And if people I randomly talk to at this conference don’t like it… Well, they’re missing out on the core fun of this event! #SAST

I like checking in. I love the badges. I love being a mayor. (I fluctuate mayorships between 23 and 26 locations.) I am really busy with work in my newsroom, campus and taking my kids all over the place for activities. I rack up the points, the badges and the mayorships. I love it. I also love the simplicity of sharing my location on Twitter or Facebook if I think there’s a reason behind it (to talk about a sale, concert, activity or something else my friends or followers would like). I’ve met people through Foursquare by checking in and finding other people at that location. I’ve met up with people I know by discovering they were in the same spot as I was just by checking in. It’s all a bit self-centered, but I enjoy the fun behind it. I’m obviously competitive and this is a simple competition to play throughout the day. During SXSW 2010, I discovered the joys of Gowalla and blogged my thoughts about it after the conference. I clearly love this stuff.

But I hit a snag last summer when I had knee surgery. I was stuck in a chair with ice on my leg. I couldn’t check in. But that’s when I discovered the point behind tools liks Miso and Get Glue. You have a chance to check into the media you consume (and with Get Glue, you can also check into the wine you drink) and earn badges. I’m a big Get Glue fan and I’ve earned many “stickers.” You can show them off on Twitter and Facebook just like the location-based tools, but Get Glue also encourages you to play with the site and you can earn real stickers. (Although I’ve requested my stickers a couple of times and they’ve never shown up at my house. I do know other Get Glue users who did get their stickers.) I loved the chance to continue with my checking in obsession but with different material. I instantly envisioned opportunities for broadcast news outlets to encourage people to watch the show live by offering stickers.

But rewind a few months earlier and the Huffington Post started offering badges of honor for people who interacted with the site at a certain level. The Type-A Parent site started doing the same thing recently where members can earn “achievements.”

I’m listing all of these earning opportunities because I think I might have an idea to help engage my local audience as we head into the 2012 presidential campaign season. I’ve written before about how I have learned from failure of my Smart Decision ’08 project where I combined newsrooms to deliver an incredibly deep amount of information leading up to the 2008 election. The biggest problem was I never found a way to engage with news consumer and I could not get people who were interested in educating themselves through out site to participate and share. But what if I worked with a community of engaged citizens and used their help to encourage other people in our market to join in with the help of social awards. These would be badges of honor that would prove a person is educating himself or herself leading up to the election. Those badges could be posted on Twitter, Facebook or even their personal websites. I think it could be a really fun way to share, collect and encourage news consumers to participate in an election project. I’m just throwing this idea out there… but I want to find someone who wants to play! This could grow into a really fun project.

So that had me talking to my Twestival partner Scott Wendling about what we can do next. During my time in Austin for SXSW, a number of people were encouraging me to bring Ignite to my town. The idea is to let people pitch their favorite topics five minutes at a time. The premise is sharing the thing that gets you motivated and out of bed each day… What lights your spark? What ignites you? You have 20 slides and five minutes to run through it. The more I read about it, the more I really want to do this in Columbia. I met a bunch of folks from Arizona who take part in Ignite Phoenix. They had an event last week. Check out their site to see the fun topics presented. Their events are HUGE. I’m thinking a little less produced for my town… But if it grows, and I think it could grow, it could get as big as Phoenix.

I’d love to hear from folks who put together Ignite in their towns… And what people in mid-Missouri think. This could be fun!

Speaking of fun. I forgot to share a fun conversation I had during the last night I was in town for SXSW. It’s on the RenMen Show about the “Cool Kids” of SXSW. I had a blast chatting with everyone that night and I recommend checking out the RenMen – Very cool ideas on cutting down your work load so you can spend more time with your family.

Enjoy the conversation:

But in the last few years, I’ve started encouraging more people to use WordPress.com and those who are willing to purchase server space of their own, I send them down the WordPress.org path. (The difference? The .com version is hosted by WordPress and it isn’t as customizable or as easily tinkered. The .org version gives you total control of the look and content you place inside the blog system.) I get a few more questions when my colleagues, students and friends use WordPress, but it’s become an industry standard in some ways. I don’t want my friends and students to miss out the knowledge of using a tool that is helpful in their careers.

But after SXSW, I’m starting to think a little differently. I was walking around the Google booth on the trade floor and started talking to the cool folks that work in Google-land. First I explained to the woman working at Google Voice how my whole brand (@jenleereeves) is based on the Gmail I picked up back in 2004. I also explained how Google Voice has changed my entire life workflow. (I actually return calls… I was terrible about that before that time.) Then I walked over to the Blogger guy thinking it wouldn’t be much of a conversation… but then he shows me this:

I looked at him and said: “When did Google start thinking about Blogger? I might actually recommend this again.”

Why is the new version of Blogger so cool? The design is customizable in ways I’ve never seen in a blog tool. You can change the width of the main section and the sidebars. You can choose how the widgets will look and where you can place the elements. You can even add static pages – which I really love with my WordPress sites.

I might have to answer a few more questions when someone builds a Blogger blog and uses some of the extra features, but I won’t mind helping. I’m curious to see what can come out of the new version. If you want to check it out, visit Blogger in Draft (http://draft.blogger.com). You can sign in with your normal old blogger accounts that you left a while ago and tinker around with those sites. That’s what I did!

But that changed in January when it opened up to everywhere. So I jumped in feet first. Why? Because I was curious. And after I added locations and checked in during a busy day or three, I was quickly a points leader and a mayor of every location I visit the most (work, preschool, elementary school, grocery story, ect.). Silly and fun right? There didn’t seem to be too much of a point beyond competing with my fellow community members.

I’m having fun and when I have fun in social media, I start looking for ways to bring a newsroom to the fun. How can KOMU join in? Well, with Foursquare, you can leave tips for people who check in nearby locations. For example, Columbia has a well-known restaurant that burned down a few years ago. It was rebuilt and looks almost the same except for the patio on the roof and the lack of a very old cigarette smell that always lingered. It would be cool for our newsroom to leave tips like that around town. The newsroom could encourage a local swarm. That’s when 50 people get together in the same locations and check in with Foursquare. You get a badge in honor of that experience.

(By the way, there was a SXSW badge that required 250 checkins. I got it at my first conference party) Businesses have had a lot of success with coordinated swarms. Why not a newsroom-sponsored swarm. Meet people from the newsroom! Get to know members of the community. Sounds great to me. I also like seeing how a number of companies are teaming up with Foursquare for brand-specific badges… Including Starbucks, Bravo and even the city of Chicago.

I clearly like it… and I see great potential here. And I’m obviously a Foursquare addict. But during my time at SXSW, I found some awesome ideas for Gowalla – another location-based game. I’ll blog about that next. But I figure I’ll stop this rant and take a break!

My friend and I called the company and were told that maybe I’d hear from them in a week.

Yikes.

I guess I could have gotten really upset, but I’m lucky to connect my phone through MobileMe. I complain about the $99/a year but it’s suddenly worth it since a lot of the information I had inside that phone is also available online and in my personal computer. I lost photos from SXSW. I lost great notes I had taken in my little iPhone notes section. (Hey MobileMe – could you sync that too someday?) It’s just technology, right? My friends and family are way more important. What hit me in the face was how I don’t have the funding to get a new phone.

So I started a crusade in honor of Shirky. In his first chapter of Here Comes Everybody, titled “It Takes a Village to Find a Phone” he explains how a woman in New York City got her phone back from a teenager thanks to an organic online uprising of pressure that saved the day. I realize I may not have a good enough story to get an entire city to support my error. But it was worth a try. So, during my last night in Austin, I launched I Lost My iPhone @ SXSW (or http://sxswlostphone.com). I wanted to share my story, explain why I really need my phone back and see if I could awaken enough of the SXSW village to help me out.

So I tweeted about it just before I disconnected and drove to the airport. I noticed a few retweets almost immediately. My first came from Ryan Sholin (thanks Ryan).

I hopped into a car toward the airport completely disconnected and hoped for the best.

Disconnected is something I should do more often. I look more people in the face. I actually bumped into people I knew at the airport without needing phone connections (of course they happened to read my Facebook and knew I’d be in the airport disconnected – so they kind of looked around for me).

Right before hopping on board my first plane, I decided to log into the wireless on my computer and started a Twitter campaign: @sxswlostphone. It was worth a try, right? It also made it easier for me to send people to the website URL. It doesn’t have many followers but it gave me a way to drone on about my lost phone somewhere other than my @jenleereeves Twitter page. Sure, I’ve retweeted most of the @sxswlostphone posts… But I kind of feel better separating the two.

In the end, did I find my phone? No. But it was an efficient way to get the word out that I’d be tricky to find for a few days. I currently found my old 1G iPhone (you know, the original that was 4gigs) and I’m trying to get it to connect to my iTunes and actually work. (I snagged a new SIM card from AT&T) I’m hoping to save up some money to get a real replacement. I honestly don’t have the money so I started a little crowdfunding experiment with my Facebook friends. I’m collecting $.50 per friend I can see face to face (because Paypal charges wouldn’t lead to much of a collection). It feels a little wrong… but with the healthcare expenses in my personal world and an already expensive year due to fun trips, I thought I’d give it a try.

Thanks to the many people who have checked in to see if I found my phone and the amazing number of people who were just curious about what the heck I was doing with this little Shirky-esque campaign.

My big take away from this HUGE experience is there are so many things happening in different niches… But there is a similar conversation.  (You can see the list of all of the panels here) I took the advice of Thom Singer who told a small group of people at the start of the SXSW Interactive conference to make sure we spread out and speak to people outside our circles. I did just that. I went beyond my comfort zone of journalists and journalism researchers. I went beyond marketing professionals. I met people who are a part of the Open Source movement, bartenders, event planners, members of startups… I could go on and on. I met people randomly in lines, in the hallway and at a couple of social hang out spots on the first floor of the conference center.

I also had a few ways to meet people thanks to a little pre-planning. I brought a power strip and plugged it in as often as possible to keep my iPhone charged (I was obsessively playing around with Foursquare and Gowalla). Any time a person plugged into my power strip, I asked for one thing – to have that person introduce themselves to me. I didn’t require a card swap or official networking. But I did at some point decide to declare a hashtag in honor of some cool people plugging in: #powerfriends. It was silly, but I had suddenly discovered a new way to network with people. Less pressure, but we could easily find one another if we followed the hashtag. Silly? Maybe. But I met people who may want to chat with me again some day. (Including @schneidermike who I met randomly and shared a Gowalla OneTaco coupon with)

I met people I’d known a long time but never in person (@JessicaKnows) and got to know people who I’d seen in passing on the Internet but I didn’t really know how great they were until I saw them in person (@gawthrok, @jodiontheweb) and I got the meet some really wonderful new friends (including @inmikeswords, @moniguzman and @bradflora). And beyond that, I saw people I adore and have met at conferences and through the Internet before. (That list would go on and on)

I learned a lot of things in panels and outside of panels. But in the end, while some people say SXSW stunk, I think it’s a once a year event I hope I don’t miss. The opportunities for random meetings and discussions are unlike any other conference or meetup. It’s the low tech side of SXSW that wins me over. All of the face-to-face meetings mean the world to me.

Expect a number of postings where I hope to brain dump ideas and thoughts. But I wanted to summarize the experience itself before I start on my ideas.

Here are a few pictures to share from the fun and nerdiness of it all:

1) Prepare your schedule. The trip won’t go exactly as planned, but knowing which sessions to attend will keep you motivated to wake up on time each morning. It will also help you with conversations when you meet new people. (“What session are you attending?” “Oh! I hadn’t thought about going to that event. Let’s meet up afterward and compare notes”) SXSW has great tools to help conference attendees keep up with the full schedule. I used a few mobile tools last year and it’s the only way I was able to keep up with it all.

2) Meet new people. There are so many people from so many different industries that attend this conference. Most events I attend are for journalists. SXSWi (which is short for South by Southwest Interactive) is a space for anyone with interest in interactive media. There are so many minds and products out there that you may have never thought could be useful for your profession. I learned a ton last year. Yes, I ended up meeting a lot of journalists, but I met others from marketing and software organizations that I would have never known met without this conference.

3) Socialize inside and outside the conference. SXSW is in Austin, Texas – a mecca for entertainment. There are amazing social events where I met and spoke to people I would have never met in conference sessions. It’s a wonderful opportunity to have fun, meet new people and pass those business cards around.

4) Follow up. I am terrible with this. I race home and spend time sharing the information I gathered from SXSW, but I didn’t sit down and contact each person I met. I wish I had. I’m actually planning on attending a session that may give me better tips on following through with the follow up.

I’m lucky to be connected to the Missouri School of Journalism and its many alumni. There’s a small gathering I’m planning while I take part in SXSW to give the Mizzou connections a chance to chat. I’ve found any opportunity that puts me in a different city, I have a great reason to bring alumni together.

By the way – I just stumbled onto this link about SXSW food. Yum.

Twitter
I used to lifecast a lot more than I do now. As my number of followers jumped and as those followers were more and more involved journalism and technology, I became more mindful towards what I wrote and started to mindcast more. I explained my thoughts on lifecasting/mindcasting earlier in 2009. I think I still believe in a combination of mind/lifecasting. But I toned down the life portions. Twitter turned into a more professional venue than when I joined in 2007.

I also took Twitter and made it a mainstay in our newsroom. Thanks to the CoTweet tool, I have multiple people helping manage the tweets from all of our daily general assignment reporters in the newsroom. Feel free to check out how I explained the use of that tool if you’re curious. (Hootsuite is another option if you are curious about other options that offer similar benefits.) My focus on newsroom Twitter use quieted me down a lot on my personal account.

Facebook
I have always used Facebook as a place to connect with people I have met face-to-face. I’m more open about the information I share about my children and I post a bunch of pictures. I tend to connect with friends and family in this space. But in the last year, Facebook became a more powerful tool on a professional level and for my newsroom. I started friending more people in the industry and I picked up my use of fan pages for my newsroom. I plan to start using some of the settings that allow me to regulate security based on groups when I have a little time to myself. (Good luck to me.) I haven’t perfected a process of using Facebook on a professional level for the newsroom at this point, but I look forward to getting better at it in 2010. The one thing I do know about Facebook is I moved a lot of my lifecasting from Twitter over to Facebook in 2009. I also started looking at how a fan page may be more useful for certain businesses over building a blog or Twitter account. Of course it all depends on the target audience or customer. But I found myself recommending the creation of Facebook fan pages for the first time in 2009.

Blogging
I run three blogs. I have this one and blogs about each of my children. My son’s blog is mainly aimed towards family members. It hasn’t picked up a lot of organic viewership. I don’t market it… but it’s a sweet space to share his life updates. My daughter was born with a physical difference and it has gained followers organically through my membership in online communities and support groups. (I help co-moderate a support group in Yahoo Groups) After my trip to SXSW in 2009, I started considering taking her blog up a notch and actually working on SEO and increasing its marketability. I’m still not sure if I will go in that direction. My trip to SXSW in 2010 will probably convince me. Of course I have this blog. I wish I could give it more love these days. The newsroom job and my efforts to put my thoughts into practice are really important. I would love to spend more time writing out my thoughts on our work. These are excellent goals as we head into the new year.

The one major change I made in my blogging practice in 2009 was to move my mom blogs to WordPress. (This blog has always used the WordPress platform.) I spent more time playing with templates and learning the potential of this CMS for other news-focused websites. I played with the Money Commons site and there is a possibility the project could come back to life this year.

Mobile
I’m an iPhone user. I’ve had one since it first came out. Lately I’ve found I use it even more. The expansion of applications help me run a mobile version of almost every tool I use on my computer. I can work entire days without opening my laptop. I am not ready to travel without my computer, but I can see that happening in the near future if it becomes possible to upload the photos I take from my SLR camera or the HD video from my point and shoot camera to my phone.

Online Portfolios
I have taught an Internet-based course for the last four years and a major focus of it has been to teach my students the skills needed to build an online portfolio and know how to keep up with it when they graduate and move on with their careers. That way they can continue to promote their work online without needing to spend extra money or rely on someone else to build a website. In the last year I really focused on showing students how to take advantage of open source CMS or free tools (with the opportunity to upgrade) like Wix and Weebly. My tools page expanded this year to include document sharing and collage making tools. Since moving away from Dreamweaver and into more user-friendly tools, I’m seeing more of my students continuing to update their online portfolios and keeping potential employers interested in their work. These days I’m also talking more about why LinkedIn is a helpful tool. I’ve also expanded my use of these tools personally. I used Weebly to build a personal family holiday website and I’m starting to just jump in and use these tools to help friends expand their career potential online because I think what I’m teaching is useful for any career – journalism or not.

Other Tools
There are more and more tools coming out to help us communicate. In the last year, I started finding ways to use Ning, Livestream, Qik, Cover It Live, Google Wave and Google Voice. My goal is to constantly try these kinds of tools, offer my newsroom opportunities to test them and put them into the workflow of our newsroom if and when it is appropriate. In the meantime, I’m also hoping to find more opportunities to use these tools in the classroom. In 2010, I hope to allow my students the chance to live blog, tweet, stream… Whatever we can think of… Just to give them the experience of playing with these kinds of tools.

Happy new year to everyone and I’d love to hear how you’ve changed your use of technology in the last year.

In an Iron Chef-like match up, a team of developers from each CMS had 100 hours to build a website based on a specific list of specifications and design. Then representatives of each team would appear face to face to show off their hard work during the South by Southwest Interactive festival. I had the chance to attend the face off and found it to be very fun to watch.

It was a battle to the end. With a mix of good humor and serious competition, leaders from Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress met face to face during a Monday session called “The Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny” at South by Southwest. The panelists included Steve Fisher (Joomla!), Colleen Carroll (Drupal), and Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) and led by George DeMet of Palantir.net. The room was packed full of CMS fans, with a heavy emphasis on WordPress. You could hear a small group of men chanting for their favorite CMS before the event got underway. The mood was festive but there was an air of competition brewing as each person threw CMS taunts at each other.

DeMet came up with the idea and explained how each team of developers were given the task to build a website for a community leadership program in Elgin, Illinois. The developers were asked to use a number of web-based social networking and collaboration tools. The end goal is to build websites that are general enough to be able to be downloaded by organizations and communities to meet their needs. All of the specifications are listed on Palantir.net’s blog or available in a PDF format. The teams were also expected to stay true to a site design created by Mark Boulton who is well-known for his web design and book, “Five Simple Steps: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web“. Developers could only use freely-available software to build the sites and function on a shared hosting space (Linux/Apache/MySQL).

A lot of time was spent talking about how the teams worked together on the site creation and the effort it took to build the sites. The Joomla! team never met face-to-face. Developers spanned across the globe and spent most time talking over Skype or conference calls. The Drupal team started with a face-to-face sprint to get the site started and then they worked together to finish the rest of the work. You can follow how Mullenweg’s WordPress team completed their tasks by visiting  a site they built to keep up with the project. Here is a comparison of how the sites came together under deadline:

DeMet mentioned how most validation errors were minor. But Carroll said the Drupal Community learned a lot from the discovery of those errors and they were able to put in a number of new patches to help improve the overall CMS. Mullenweg and Fischer said this project helped in similar ways. Mullenweg talked about how his team had a great time outside of the development by adding Zoolander-related content. The added fun was not a requirement. The Drupal and Joomla! teams added filler to populate their sites.

The crowd seemed pretty disappointed when it became clear there would be no live demonstrations of the websites. All of the sites can be viewed from the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny website. They did get to hear reactions from Boulton and Senior Program Officer Marybeth Schroeder from the Evanston Community Foundation. DeMet had worked with the organization before and used its needs to launch the competition in the first place. The crowd enjoyed watching her reaction as she looked through each versions of the website. Schroeder had no CMS preference before looking at the sites, a perspective that was not easy to find in the SXSW session. There was an attempt to record how she used each site. In one screen capture video, you could see her trying to figure out the WordPress dashboard. In the case of the Joomla! site, Schroeder had a hard time adding a location for an event.

From the designer perspective, Boulton said he favored the WordPress and Drupal sites for how they stayed true to his design. He gave Joomla! a hit for not following all of his typography. Fisher countered that they made that decision because the Joomla! team didn’t like it. Boulton did not say anything specifically about the usefulness or user experience of the sites.

In what was expected to be a dramatic end to the competition, DeMet asked the crowd to vote on who should win. Many people yelled out how they felt they did not have enough knowledge of the sites to pick. Others yelled out the CMS they already supported. That indecisiveness let to a draw. DeMet announced all three CMS won and tried to figure out a way to share the belt-buckle award.

There may be no defined answer on what is the best open source CMS. It was clear this project helped motivate the open source communities to team together and come up with products that can help non-profits launch a website that meets their needs. Each development team will make their work available for anyone to use. The Joomla! and WordPress teams even created help videos on the showdown website. The event at SXSW was also a great way to talk about CMS and get open source products more play among a large and growing population of tech-minded people who are looking for a new way to share information online.

DeMet plans to talk about the showdown again in April at a pre-conference event for the CMS Expo in Evanston, Illinois.

A couple of fun things came out during this session. First, the WordPress song is TOO funny. Also, you can enjoy this Drupal song. There was a Joomla! song but I can’t find it online, plus it’s instrumental and a bit boring compared to the other two!

(You can see a similar version of this post at CMSwire.com)