Digital

Joey and I are flying up to Austin, Texas today to attend the annual SXSW conference.  What was once a one of the largest music festivals in the world, it has since become an interactive festival that focuses on emerging technologies and a breeding ground for new ideas and creativity. 

So who's involved in this year's SXSW festival. Plenty. 

The focus this year seems to be on mobile, mobile wallet (NFC) and interestingly the future sports audience and over the last few days and nights, I've been feverishly trying to organise my conference schedule.  Who and what I'd like to see, and have come to the realisation that in every hour, I need to be in 4-5 places.  I think it may be a case of just going with the flow and try to get to as many interesting presentations as possible.  

In addition, there has an influx of emails, facebook messages, invites and snail mail from SXSW and the 500+ Aussies that have signed up to attend this festival.  All uber geeky, all uber excited.

Social Media is fast becoming one of our most dependent communication tools.  The emergence of smartphones is allowing us to be constantly connected to our friends, families, celebrities, political figures and the guy around the corner that owns the milk bar.  

It is also allowing brands, large and small, to engage with their customers, enabling them to be able to get insights that was once impossible. Being able to check-in to places, "like" brands, engage in open dialogues, is allowing marketers to understand consumers better than ever.

However, being constantly connected may be great for engagement, but is it making us more anti-social in the real world?

A few weeks ago, my friends and I encountered an issue that has been brewing for some time.  Every time we go to a restaurant it ends up being like this:

The moment we sit down, it's phones out, check-in, update status, comment, likes, upload photos, the list goes on.  Banning phones from the table didn't work, as the urge to visit facebook was too strong.  

So we decided to on a challenge, an group experiment.  The 7-day Social Media Ban.

The rules were simple.  No social media for 7 days.  If you made it through the week then you get 'kudos'.

Video killed the radio star. Videos, according to a lot of experts, were also meant to kill cinema, but the truth is the experience of cinema is something that we all still enjoy. Cinema is more than just the 120 minutes of film. It’s the Choc-Top, the Maltesers, the person in front with the too big hair-do, the velveteen seats, the curtains opening for the ads- then opening wider for the feature, the trailers, the dolby surround sound, the crackling leader with the film rating, the laughter or screams of people around you.

Cinema lives. Cinema thrives.

Newspapers are going through a tough time in every part of the world and the talk of their imminent demise is deafening. But as Mark Twain once said: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Three years ago if you asked me who I followed, I’d say Glasgow Celtic in the Scottish Premier League and Manchester United in the English equivalent. Simple.

Now I might offer up Stephen Fry, and I would not be alone. More people now follow Stephen Fry on Twitter than buy The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Telegraph and Financial Times combined. Yes, we all know newspaper readership is in decline, but that is a staggering stat all the same.

Fry talks about how he was a fairly early adopter of Twitter in 2007, but he didn’t use it for a year. Then, on September 10, 2008, just before flying to Africa on a documentary project, he announced that he intended to tweet while filming. By the time he landed in Africa, his twitter followers had increased from 5000 to 11000. Three years later, on November 30th, 2010, Stephen Fry sent a tweet to someone called Jonathan from Dundee, who had become the two millionth person to follow Stephen Fry. As at today, January 25, 2011, the number is 2,149,725 and growing. Why?