Core Conversations

An exciting addition for the 2008 event

The informal discussions that pop up in the hallways between, during and after panel sessions are one of the most productive parts of the SXSW Interactive Festival. The new Core Conversation program will make it easier for more attendees to participate in these hallway-type exchanges of information by letting them know what kind of discussion is happening when and where. The Core Conversations room will feature six concurrent discussions during each hour-long timeslot.

We invited Core Conversations organizers to produce a short podcast to introduce the issues they plan to discuss. Listen to all of them via the 2008 Podcast Blog.

Currently confirmed list of Core Conversations is as follows -- check back frequently for updates:

Accessibility
Cooking up Accessible Video for the Web (Pat Ramsey)
Get Rich, Remain Accessible (Martin Kliehm)
How Accessible Should Your Site Be? (Jeff Beckham)

Blogging
Blog on Company Time Without Getting Dooced (Daniel Hope)
Blogging for Dollars - Blogging’s a Profession? (Ed Shull)
Diaper Diarists (Susan Kirkpatrick)
Pet Blogging: Not a Fluffy Puppy Story (Christie Keith)

Business / Management
Building a Startup You Love is Hard (Gareth Knight)
Career Rev 342: Dabble Dabble, Toil and Kick Ass (Amy Hoy)
Coworking and the Evolution of the Independent Worker (Alex Hillman)
Examining the Different Ways We Can Work (Joshua Lane)
Growing Pains: Your Web Company’s Getting BIG (Allen Mendelsohn)
GTD for Startups: Getting Things Done in the Real World (Scott McDaniel)
Make Your Art Work for You! (Eric Nail)
Specialization vs. Doing it All (Brian Warren)
Start-up Management 2.0 - Keeping Teams Motivated, Productive, Happy (John Vars)
Startup or Sellout: Should I Stay or Should I Go? (David Crow)
Stories of Failure: Surviving Start-up Mistakes (Michael McDerment)
When Your Partner is Your Partner (Dori Smith)
Working Over the Web: Managing Distributed Staffs (Andrew Huff)

Design
Blueprinting Your Project: Put it on Paper or Just Start Coding? (Stefan Smagula)
Designing for "Oh No!" (Aza Raskin)
Feeding the Creativity Beast (Dan Saffer)
Five Things Elite Designers Should Stop Saying (James Reffell)
The Web Standards Confession Booth (Jenifer Hanen)
Your Mom 2.0 (Dylan Schiemann)

Education
Can .edu Act Like a .com? (Richard Wood)
Next Generation Education: Bringing the New Web to Campus (Samuel Felder)
Some Serious Fun: Interactive Media for Children (Marni Sandler)

Gaming / ScreenBurn
Community & Loyalty: Gamers to Flamers, Lurkers to Workers (Rebecca Newton)
Creating Passionate Games: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Sande Chen)
Do Virtual Worlds Need to be 3D? (Lauren Bigelow)
Improbable Pursuits: Why Video Games Fail in Corporate Training (Tyler Womack)
Marketing to Real People in Second Life (Mark Linder)
What Can the Video Games Industry Learn From Alternate Reality Games? (Tony Walsh)
What Teens Want - In a Game (Anastasia Goodstein)

International
Flat World? Secret Strategies, Tips and Tools (Catherine Crago)
How to Build Facebook in Bangalore: Outsourcing 2.0 (Sandeep Sood)
Global Design: Web Sites for the World (Glenda Sims)
Opening the Web to Linguistic Realities (Stephanie Troeth)

Marketing / Metrics
10 Easy Ways To Piss Off A Blogger -- And Other Mistakes Marketers Make (Rohit Bhargava)
Beyond the Page View: Measuring Social Media Engagement (Cameron Shaw)
Design Metrics: Better Than “Because I Said So” (Micah Alpern)

Mobile
The Future of Mobile Video (Rajeev Raman)
Mobile 2.0: Why the Third Screen is Taking Center Stage (John SanGiovanni)
Mobile Media You Can Move To (Michael Epstein)
Mobile Manners: Mobile Presence and the Undefined Etiquette (Jared Benson)

Music / Video
Managing Media: Is Your Music Collection About to Become Extinct (Daniel Raffel)
Record Labels -- What Were They? (Raymond McGlamery)
Rock'n' Rebirth: The Future of the Open Media Web (Rob Lord)

Programming
A Developer's Cookbook to Leveraging Virtualization (Kimbro Staken)
Open Source or Open Pit (Justin Beals)

Sex & Relationships
Adult Conversations: Sex, Intimacy & Online Relationships (Twanna A. Hines)
Breakups 2.0 (Kevin Cheng)
Pink Ghetto Blasters: Destigmatizing Sex via Online Community Building (Elizabeth Wood)
Sexual Ethics, Interactivity and Virtual Worlds (Cory Silverberg)

Social
Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done? (Ryan Freitas)
Online Identity: And I *Do* Give a Damn About My Bad Reputation (Christian Crumlish)
Perma-Live-Vlogging: Vicious or Victory, Hell or Sweet? (Hank Jones)

Youth Market
Are You Smarter Than A Wired Teen? (Amy Looper)
Raising Web 2.0 Enabled Kids in a World Afraid of MySpace (David Parmet)

Updated: 1/28/2008
All subject to change