<![CDATA[Valleywag: julia allison, SXSW]]> http://cache.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/valleywag.com.png <![CDATA[Valleywag: julia allison, SXSW]]> http://valleywag.com/tag/julia allison/sxsw http://valleywag.com/tag/julia allison/sxsw <![CDATA[ Julia Allison is not dating Pete Cashmore ]]> Mashable's Pete Cashmore and geekophile Julia Allison are not seeing each other, they'd like you all to know.

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Tue, 11 Mar 2008 08:00:30 PDT Owen Thomas http://valleywag.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=366343&view=rss&microfeed=true
<![CDATA[ SXSW bar crawl begins in earnest ]]> AUSTIN, TX — A confession: Between the rain pouring down and the rumors pouring in, I didn't even make it to the Austin Convention Center today for any of SXSW's official programming. A show veteran granted me absolution: "No one makes it to the third day." The third night, however, was not optional. The hot ticket: Facebook's Get.friends party at Pangaea. The Crush party at Six Lounge a half-block down Colorado Street was the chill-out alternative. Scott Kidder and I hopped between the two, snapping pictures all the while. Mazyar "Mazy" Kazerooni of OpenHulu fame joined up for the party tour. At Six, I found myself sandwiched between Sarah Lacy and Julia Allison, SXSW's two controversy magnets. Back at Pangaea, I spotted Dave McClure grooving ecstatically to BT, the electronica artist Facebook evangelist Dave Morin picked for the event. (Don't tell Morin: BT has a MySpace page.) The afterparty? It took so long to get going anywhere that we ended up having it outside on Colorado Street, where Wired's Megan McCarthy administered breathalyzer tests. More photos:

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Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:12:37 PDT Owen Thomas http://valleywag.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=366240&view=rss&microfeed=true
<![CDATA[ Sunday-night cocktail recipe: Sweet Caroline, dash of bitters, stir ]]> Think of a high-school reunion held the day after you graduate: That was the vibe at the Side Bar Sunday night, where Gawker Media (publisher of fine weblog media products) threw a party for Valleywag and our sister sites, io9 and Lifehacker. We won Twitter praise for the free beer and minimal line out front, despite the wall-to-wall crowd in the Side Bar's expansive patio. Valleywag alumna Megan McCarthy, whom I never see in San Francisco — yes, she's been avoiding me — showed up toting Wired's award for best website started before most SXSW attendees were born.Vile videoblogger Loren Feldman showed up and didn't say anything truly nasty, to my disappointment.Julia Allison appeared, dressed as Julia Allison with a furry, green hat. Scott Beale and Brian Solis were on hand lensing everyone; Beale caught me and Caroline McCarthy of News.com having a moment, above. More photos, after the jump.



Loren Feldman and Owen Thomas

Were you there, too? Or just want to add a caption? Leave a comment here or on the photo page.

(Photo of McCarthy and Thomas by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid; Loren Feldman and Owen Thomas by Brian Solis; gallery by Noah Robischon)

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Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:40:30 PDT Owen Thomas http://valleywag.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=365952&view=rss&microfeed=true
<![CDATA[ Julia Allison crashes SXSW, explains it all ]]> Professional funnylady and amateur gossip Heather Gold just invited Julia Allison, professional gossip and amateur tech event crasher, onto her panel on — ha, ha — Gossip. "Explain to Shaila [Dewan, New York Times correspondent] what you do again," asks Heather, "since her coverage is of real disasters and not the Internet." Her response?

Julia explains it all

Provided by an audience member: "How much did you pay Julia, Owen, to come up here and make Valleywag more sympathetic?"

Update: The audience is now actually liveblogging our liveblogging. We stand by our "slutty, cheap" headline about her panel crashing, including the photo accompanying of the official SXSWi admittance badge hanging around her neck.
As for the rest of the crowd?

We Are All Anil Dash Now

Six Apart's Anil Dash thinks it's all of our fucking faults.

Lane Is Full Of Love
Lane Becker of Get Satisfaction says "this was the best SXSW panel ever" —

midfinger.jpg
— and then thanks Valleywag emeritus Nick "Leave Julia Alone!" Douglas for running that hot tub photo years back.

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Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:17:58 PDT Melissa Gira Grant http://valleywag.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=365674&view=rss&microfeed=true
<![CDATA[ Mark Zuckerberg SXSW keynote ]]> AUSTIN, TX — 1:53 p.m. Central Time: Facebook PR director Brandee Barker gave me this exclusive scoop: CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who's due to take the stage for his SXSW Interactive keynote in minutes, is not wearing his famous Adidas flip-flops. No Adidas?In other news, Julia Allison just chewed me out and then gave me a granola bar. Daft Punk is playing on the sound system.

2:05 p.m.: Zuckerberg and BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy, who's interviewing him, have taken the stage.

zuckonstage.jpg

2:07 p.m.: Zuckerberg says now that Facebook's available in Spanish, people are using Colombia to organize resistance against guerrilla armies. Wait — does that mean it's actually a tool of oppression?

2:08 p.m.: Facebook is about communicating "efficiently," Zuckerberg keeps saying. Efficient? Does he even use Facebook?

2:09 p.m.: Lacy asks Zuckerberg about terrorism. "Facebook has a relatively large population in London," says Zuckerberg. "Terrorism comes ... from a lack of empathy and understanding. People are growing up, they're relatively poor, they spend a lot of time studying with their imam. At the same time, they'll go out with their friends and drink on Friday nights and try to meet girls. Then they take pictures of themselves with their religious leaders holding guns. There are people who are at a point in their lives, a crossroads, deciding whether they're going to pursue terrorism. And people have told me that Facebook has helped them maintain connections with friends in Europe, in America, and maintain that empathy."

In other news, Zuckerberg's shoe:

zuckshoe.jpg

2:13 p.m.: Lacy recounts the first time she interviewed Zuckerberg. "He's wearing a white T-shirt, and he was so nervous, he was sweating through his shirt," says Lacy. "The first time I inteerviewed Mark, I kept asking broader and broader questions, trying to get him to talk. Finally he said, 'I don't know how to answer that question. It's too broad.' I said, 'Mark, I'm trying to get you to say more than two words.' Mark said, 'That's really hard.' I said, 'Three words.'"

Right after Lacy's tale, Mark said, "What was the question?"

zuckwide.jpg

2:16 p.m.: I think Zuckerberg is talking about how antipoverty activists used Facebook to organize protests at a senator's church, home, and office.

2:18 p.m.:"We're running the business at breakeven," says Zuckerberg.

2:19 p.m.: Sarah Lacy just totally stole Zuckerberg's line. "So you're launching in France tonight," says Lacy. "How'd you get to that before me?" asks Zuckerberg. "Sorry, Brandee," says Lacy. Anyway: Facebook en français, tout de suite. Chouette!

2:23 p.m.: "There's this sense that you have this revenue from Microsoft that's not sustainable," says Lacy. "Are they happy with the deal?"

"I'm very sure that they're very happy with it," says Zuckerberg.

2:24 p.m.: Lacy asks Zuckerberg about his infamous "once every hundred years, media changes" line. "We got a little ahead of ourselves," he says. "We hadn't figured out as much as we thought we had."

2:26 p.m.: "Let's talk about Beacon," says Lacy. "WTF?" Zuckerberg's long answer:

Beacon isn't even a part of our ad team. It's part of our platform team. We think these large social networking sites are going from large monolithic sites like facebook.com ... to social services. A lot of them aren't even things we're building. Some of them are going to be inside facebook.com. An increasing amount of that is going to be outside facebook.com. What we were trying to do with Beacon was taking the first step with letting people take actions on other parts of the Web and feed back into what their friends are doing. It also ties into the ad system, because it can be an endorsement — someone you care about is doing something, that's much more effective.

2:29 p.m.: Lacy makes the apt point — argued earlier in Valleywag — that complaints about News Feed were much larger than Beacon protests, but suggests the larger concern about both features is privacy. Zuckerberg points out that people are much more likely to put their cell phone on Facebook because they're allowed to control which people see it.

2:32 p.m.: Why do I feel a strong urge to take a nap whenever Zuckerberg talks about "platforms" and "ecosystems"? I think he's saying he's trying to reduce application spam with algorithms. Because that worked so well with email, right?

2:34 p.m.: Lacy asks about rumors in the Financial Times that Facebook is talking to the record labels about building an iTunes killer. "What's up with that?" "I don't know," says Zuckerberg, deadpan. He then concedes that Facebook is talking to several companies, but there's "nothing to announce."

2:36 p.m.: "So you're Forbes's youngest billionaire," says Lacy. "We're just not focused on that," says Zuckerberg. Can't he just play a recording of the soundbite? That seems easier. The $15 billion valuation, he says, came about because the company wanted to raise the most money with the least dilution. "High expectations are tough," he concedes. "Having such a focus on money in the business can be tough for us, because it can self-select for people who are interested in that. We don't want people to join the company because they're going to make money very quickly."

2:39 p.m.: Ah, the IPO question. "It's not that we're opposed to going public," says Zuckerberg. "[The $15 billion valuation] throws down the gauntlet" to potential acquirers, observes Lacy. "For certain companies, that's the goal, to go public" or get sold, says Zuckerberg. "Yahoo offered us a billion dollars a few years back. The primary analysis that we were doing wasn't, 'Are we worth $1 billion?' We said, we have a chance to build a platform that fundamentally changes how people connect or communicate. How many times in your life do you have that chance? So we decided to go for it."

2:43 p.m.: "Did you get rid of some people who wanted to [sell to Yahoo]?" asks Lacy. "We made some management changes," says Zuckerberg. Is that a reference to recently departed COO Owen Van Natta? Or former CFO Mike Sheridan, who was replaced by Gideon Yu?

2:45 p.m.: "Let's talk about Sheryl [Sandberg]," says Lacy. "She's been called the token grownup." "We just passed this mark where we have 500 employees," says Zuckerberg. "That's crazy. I feel really lucky to have her."

2:46 p.m.: "How do you think she's going to negotiate that male-dominated environment?" asks Lacy. "She has a great track record of doing that. I don't think that will be an issue," says Zuckerberg. I note that Zuckerberg didn't dispute Lacy's observation.

2:48 p.m.: "Is it hard from you to step back from product management? Because you'd really be working on the product, right?" asks Lacy. (Zuckerberg recently tapped longtime Facebook executive Matt Cohler to run product management.) "CEO is more of a full-time job than I'd admitted," says Zuckerberg. "The CEO sets the tone for the organization. Being CEO is a good way to make sure the company focuses on that — that people keep their eyes on what's important."

2:52 p.m.: "You're a computer guy and you write longhand on paper," observes Lacy, who reveals that Zuckerberg takes notes in bound books. "Fantastic question," quips Zuckerberg, which provokes howls of laughter from the audience. Zuckerberg then takes away Lacy's glass of water, just to be safe.

2:57 p.m.: Audience questions. First one up is your typical privacy-and-sharing paranoiac. "I think the reason we don't have a lot of that stuff yet is that we haven't come up with both controls and good default settings so people don't have to do a lot of work," says Zuckerberg. "Facebook is still relatively constrained as a company. Things take time. We've realized that it's an issue."

3:00 p.m.: "Other than really rough interviews, what are the toughest obstacles Facebook faces?" asks a wiseacre. "Is he making fun of me or of you?" Zuckerberg asks Lacy.

3:02 p.m.: "Do you think Google's pissed that you have so much data trapped on Facebook?" asks an audience member. "They don't get pissed," says Zuckerberg. "They're nice guys." Then he gives some incredibly boring answer about "semi-private" and "semi-public" information. Five-word version: Good luck with that, Google.

Additional Coverage:

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Sun, 09 Mar 2008 12:00:19 PDT Owen Thomas http://valleywag.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=365644&view=rss&microfeed=true
<![CDATA[ Spring break for Web developers ]]> Hey, wait a second: Why am I the only one working at SXSW? For everyone else in the Valley, the Austin conference is just a sanctioned spring break party. Clearly, I'm an idiot. I just spent three hours snapping photographs at SXSW's Bit 16 opening-night afterparty, without so much as a beer touching my hands. The Scoot Inn, a dingy dive bar east of downtown, hosted the event. I ran into Julia Allison first thing. I heard Kevin Rose was there, too, but I never spotted him. (Curious.) I chatted up Automattic's Matt Mullenweg, and Mashable's Pete Cashmore, as well as Glenda Bautista, Mullenweg's ballsy Bronx belle (pictured here with friends). It was a good time. But the ROI on SXSWi? Hard to spot, if you don't run an Austin bar, restaurant, or convention center.

I took this up with Sarah Lacy, who was on hand — finally, someone else at work! — filming for Yahoo Tech Ticker. I asked her, do people come to SXSW and party because they're too busy when they're home to go out and socialize? "No," laughed Lacy. "They're partying at home, too." There goes that theory. Pictures from the party:

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Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:35:56 PST Owen Thomas http://valleywag.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=365593&view=rss&microfeed=true