Sunday morning was a bit of a white wash and continued the tradition of picking panels that were _not the talk of the day_. Including walking to, but not into the “Is Spec Design Evil?”:http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/03/is-crowdsourcin.html and then opting for a bit more downtime.

To combat the losing streak it was decided that attending some “core conversations on blogging”:http://sxsw.com/interactive/talks/core_conversations would be the perfect ailment for the panel woes.

Core Conversations are round table discussions with experts on a variety of topics. The ones chosen for Saturday were “Is the Personal Blog Dead?”:http://www.sxsw.com/interactive/talks/core_conversations?action=show&id=IAP0900456 and “Blogging Skills and Beyond”:http://www.sxsw.com/interactive/talks/core_conversations?action=show&id=IAP0901320. Both were intriguing in regards to the development of a online Personal brand and the evolution of the blog. But the main synopsis of both panels was that *the concept of a Personal Blog has transformed from a daily log of your life into an element of a selection of applications that creates an online personal brand*.

With “growing presence of Twitter”:http://www.armadillostudios.ca/twitter-for-the-calgary-market/, facebook and other online Social Media applications, the blog has changed in the past three years. The entity it was before has now died. Rather now professionals should be utilizing their blogs in conjunction with other applications for networking and to promote their own professional personal brand.

The Blog should be an entity to promote your services and your knowledge in a long format, while professionals should utilize Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr to connect with people and drive them to the respiratory of your thoughts and ideas which is located on your professional blog.

As a company that specializes in developing personal branding in conjunction with customized blogs, these two sessions where an inspirational take on what has been considered a fading element of the online persona. It was great to see some optimism and some brilliant points.

Saturday’s adventure in SXSW started off with two interesting talks, well it actually started with a trip to “Taco Shack down the street”:http://www.tacoshack.com/subframes/locations.html for breakfast tacos.

The first session dealt with “speed times and how to improve web site loading issues”:http://www.sxsw.com/interactive/talks/schedule?action=show&id=IAP0901285. While the second panel of the day “dealt with the difference between print content and how the speed of the web has lost some of the design of print technology”:http://www.sxsw.com/interactive/talks/schedule?action=show&id=IAP0900291. Neither one was a show stopper, but both provided some great ideas on how to technically improve web site loading times and some neat ideas of transposing the beauty of magazine design in to blog posts.

The Keynote by Tony Hsieh was a one of the best opening day remark sessions in recent memory.

For those unfamiliar with Tony, he is the CEO and brain trust behind “Zappos.com”:http://www.zappos.com/ a large online shoe company that has built and banked its reputation on exceptional customer service.

“Tony’s keynote was widely entertaining and enthralling”:http://www.sxsw.com/interactive/talks/schedule?action=show&id=IAP0901393. It was a great conversation on how to balance the pressures of becoming a large business and answering to the balance sheets with building a great company based on a strong principal of great company culture. It was interesting to hear about their $2,000 offer to quit during training and concepts like using “Twitter to foster an internal corporate community”:http://twitter.zappos.com/.

If your curious a graphical representation of Tony’s Talk can be found on “the main interactive site.”:http://sxsw.com/files/u5/Tony-Hsieh-at-SXSW-09-Sunni-Brown.jpg

!http://sxsw.com/files/u5/Tony-Hsieh_SXSW-09_Sunni-Brown-sm.jpg!

The final conversation of the afternoon was hosted by Jeffery Zeldman on “the transition from Freelance to an Agency”:http://www.sxsw.com/interactive/talks/schedule?action=show&id=IAP0900593. This was an inspirational session filed with great tips for companies in the middle of the transition from a small freelance agency to a big 5-10 person agency.

SXSWisEASY Experiment

And finally what would a SXSW conference be with out a bit of a Social experiment?

Well, the SXSWisEASY collective spent our free time on “Saturday launching out own little experiment.”:http://sxswiseasy.com/2009/03/what-do-you-see-at-sxsw/ we’ve handed out 8 disposable cameras to random people at SXSW and we are asking them to take five-six photos and then passing the camera on to completely random SXSW stranger. Once the camera is finished people will return them to us and we’ll post their images online for people to use.

We’re pretty excited about the idea and think we’ll have some interesting photos from people.

For the second time in 2 years Armadillo Studios Inc. is taking on Austin for SXSW 2009.

We’ll be down there working the conference circuit, meeting old friends and “promoting SXSWisEASY”:http://sxswiseasy.com. Armadillo will also be posting updates and information on a regular basis throughout the conference. Please follow along here on our corporate web site or with our corporate twitter account at “www.twitter.com/armadillostudio”:http://www.twitter.com/armadillostudio We will be learning what is new and emergent in the web design industry and would like to pass that wealth of knowledge on to our valued clientele.

If your at SXSW this year, check out “our schedule”:http://sxsw2009.sched.org/ctoverdrive and come up to us and say hi.

*Update:* Highlights of each day of the conference are now posted.
# Saturday: “Saturday Wrap-Up”:http://www.armadillostudios.ca/sxsw09-saturday-wrap-up/
# Sunday: “Sunday’s Core Conversations & The Future of Blogging”:http://www.armadillostudios.ca/sxsw09-core-conversation-sunday-blogging-and-its-future/
# Monday: “Pictures & Diagrams – Monday’s Wrap-up”:http://www.armadillostudios.ca/sxsw09-pictures-and-diagrams-in-thoughts-monday-wrap-up/
# Tuesday: Coming Shortly

Armadillo Studios is proud to announce that we will be participating in two very important Industry events in the 08-09 calendar.

First and foremost, Armadillo Studios is heading back to Austin for “SXSW Interactive 2009”:http://sxsw.com/interactive. This will be our second straight SXSW and third overall. We’re looking forward to seeing some old friends and getting involved in the international Interactive Community.

Secondly, we will be attending the Calgary Events for “National Media Digital Day”:http://www.irefreshforcontent.com/learn-more.html this Thursday. This includes a meet and greet hosted by “Digital Alberta”:http://www.digitalalberta.com/national-digital-media-day-september-25 and also the “10th Edition of DemoCamp”:http://barcampcalgary.com/2008/09/23/democampcalgary-10-this-thursday/. It should be a great evening and hopefully it brings some much need exposure to our growing local industry.

So if you happen to be in Austin in March of next year or better yet happen to be at Melrose this Thursday, pop by and say hello. We’ll be glad to see have a chat.

We know we’re jumping around a bit on describing SXSW, but it has been a fairly hectic few days since returning from SXSW.

So let’s get back on track, Day two of SXSW was an informative and inspirational day of sessions. As mentioned in the previous post, the very interesting “icanhasacheezburger”:http://blog.armadillostudios.ca/article/sxsw08-guess-the-web-site session really took over the day.

But one of the most important client side sessions came early on Sunday morning. A session simply called “Online Advertising for Newbies”:http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/programming/panels_schedule/?action=show&id=IAP060555.

Here at Armadillo Studios, have been continuously working with our clients to capitalize on various revenue generating streams; it was nice to see some of the recent success stories and to discover some new ideas.

The session provided ample information regarding different avenues in which web logs can transition their content and passions in to revenue. Some ideas were fairly basic and included; the incorporation of “AdBrite ads”:http://www.adbrite.com or “DoubleClick”:http://doubleclick.com ads into a site’s layout. These ads generate revenue for the publisher based on clicks per million visits. (Basically the number of clicks an ad gets based on a One Million views) Or bloggers can align themselves with large professional blogging networks like ProBlogger or “eMoms at home”:http://www.emomsathome.com/blog/, which will pay bloggers who bring their wealth of new readers to their networks. Or even the idea of bloggers selling local banner space to local restaurants and businesses to provide a local connection to their readers.

Some of the more unconventional ideas included incorporating Amazon.com’s referral program or an iTunes referral program to give bloggers a percentage of all purchases directed from the site. Web logs that deal with pop culture issues or deal directly with cooking can greatly benefit from this form of revenue, as it generates income based on content. This idea works hand in hand with sites that promote or review a variety of products.

If you are interested in ways to generate income on your web log, feel free to contact us. You don’t even have to be an existing client; we really enjoy helping people get the best from their web logs.

Hey! That’s why we call ourselves blogging experts.