Gossip @ SXSW08
Join me and chief Valleywag Owen Thomas, TMZ.com General Manager Alan Citron, NY Times reporter Shaila Dewan, twitter co-founder Ev Williams and surprise guest and Star on-air personality Julia Allison as we discuss Gossip at SXSW08.
This carousing panel featured so many great moments- Julia sitting on my lap, Shaila bursting Julia’s bubble about fact checking and “respectable” main stream media, and the genuine community response to the Mark Zuckerberg / Sarah Lacy keynote disaster.
(2021 update) Sadly the recordings of this event, one my my favourites of my career, appear to have been lost to the various risks of Internet time. Here are some links to the coverage, which included some early live-blogging. I do believe this was the first time people went to a physical location in response to a lot of people tweeting about it. Of course, a whole lot of the people on twitter at that point, were probably at SXSW.
“The audience is now actually liveblogging our live-blogging. – Melissa Gira Grant, Gawker
Gossip panel deemed ‘best SXSW panel ever’ – Tony Pierce, LA Times
“Notions of authority are generationally changing, Heather noted¦ If we are the media we are now reporting on ourselves.” More quotes and live-blogging of the event in this blog post. – Deirdre Molloy, Innovation Cloud
Given that there is no longer video of it and that this was one of the events that most successfully captured the scaled conversation I worked on for years, I’m also going to include the lovely review Deirdre gave me. I’m proud of it:
“Heather Gold did a tremendous job of chairing. A professional stand-up comic and longtime geek who’s been running her Heather Gold Show in the evening fringe scene at SXSW for a few years, she was the doyen of conversation, getting everyone involved. Like the referee of your dreams, she allowed volleys of audience questions right through the session while still giving each panellist their say. Question Time was never like this.
I like to organise conversations around things that people really care about¦ this will run like a collective inquiry as you all have as much expertise on who you are and on the world as we have on our points of view so you’re all welcome to join in.
Heather, I salute you!”
