i’m hanging out right now in the platinum lounge at sxsw- it’s quiet and a great place to write a couple of things before i head over to wait in line for kathy sierra’s keynote. my first session of the morning was on turning your internal, fun projects into revenue generating businesses. this is my first sxsw, and i’ve been struck by two things so far– the oddly comforting feeling of being in a room full of people who are just like you, and the extent to which business and play mixes here. one of the guys asking questions during the session was from ebay, and he was responding to a comment by ted rheingold of dogster (which I really have to think about signing indy up for) about how affiliate marketing was not, in general, a good way to earn revenue for a site. the ebay guy was talking about how much success that the ebay affiliates had had with various kinds of auction programs and what not, and it was an interesting perspective– he didn’t come off like a shill for ebay, which he of course is, so maybe that’s a complement to how exceptionally good his shilling technique was.

the conversation also focused on selling, marketing, and building out a company, and i thought the most interesting comments were by the panelist who seemed most out of place– gabe rivera of techmeme. the techmeme family of sites is exceptionally cool and addictive, and gabe does it all by himself- all of the tech and all of the ‘business’ oriented stuff. i think that’s a large part of the appeal he has in the tech community- he makes something cool, and he does it in that idealized lone-gunman style that so many of us wish we could emulate– he serves as the counterexample to the annoying business folks who say we can’t do it without them– and geeks love counterexamples.

i think the one thing i would have liked to have heard gabe talk about is why he went with sponsorship for techmeme, instead of doing contextual advertising. i can think of my reasons– his site is really as much of a webapp as it is a content site, and since seo is hard for his site, i could see where good contextual advertising would be as well. the predictability of the sponsorship model must also be nice from a stability perspective- especially as he indicated that he went without salary for a year in order to get techmeme going. it might also just be that a sponsorship-oriented advertising model fits better for techmeme- so many geek bloggers have an obsession with getting a post on techmeme’s front page in as large a font as possible (an obsession i share, i’m not afraid to admit), that it’s become an important hub of buzz for all of us, and companies want to grab a piece of that mindshare on a regular basis and are willing to pay for it. the sponsorship seems to fit in best with what techmeme is all bout– and maybe that is really what the point of that talk was all about– doing a business built around something you would do for fun is a great way to figure out what you’re all about, and that’s the core thing we’re all after.

P.S.– I’m finishing this post up after hearing kathy sierra’s talk on usability, which was amazing and I’ll try to say more about later, but the one practical effect it’s had on me right now is i’m very conscientous of using contractions in my writing now, so as to sound as human-like as possible.

Labels: sxsw

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