Day Two (Saturday March 14th 2009)  of SXSW Interactive kicked off at 10am for us.  Head over here for a recap of Day One.

• James headed over to see Danah Boyd, Judith Donath, Alice Marwick, and Siva Vaidhyanathan discuss privacy on their panel "Is Privacy Dead Or Just Really Confused."  This had to be one of the best panels James saw here at SXSWi, not just because he knew two of the panelist, but because the discussion was amazingly mind expanding.  The core idea that was discussed is how privacy is a contextual construct that is defined by social and cultural norms.  One of the clearest examples of how privacy is contextual was the idea that when eating at a resutrant, we construct invisible boundries around the table.  It is considered rude to just walk up to a table and start talking to random strangers.  Yet, there is no physical walls... we create this boundry due to our social constructs and therefore in the context of a resturant our privacy at a table is respected.  These contexts are being removed and/or re-defined online and we, as a society, need to define new privacy definitions, create better understanding of privacy and hopefully create policy that best suites all our needs.
• Aaron's day started with a session entitled "Tips For Making Ideas Happen". This session was presented by the CEO of Behance Scott Belsky who's team has been interviewing individuals from many types of organizations trying to understand how some of the most productive people in the world make ideas come to life.  Out of this research Behance has produced many products and services including the Behance Network a network portal for creative individuals to share their work and the Action Method. The Action Method is made up of three basic elements that Behance recommends to help organize in order to make ideas happen. The first element is Action Steps, which are concrete tasks that need to be completed.  References are notes that provide context for Action Steps.  And lastly there are BackBurners, which are ideas that are great, but have no place in the current scope of things.   Scott suggests using this method when taking notes in meetings, to help scope the meeting's results and come up with a better action plan for each key member of the team.  Behance offers notebooks that help breakdown each of the elements and offers a website 100% dedicated to the method.  There's even an IPhone app.
• Next up for James attended the "Microformats: A Quiet Revolution" panel.  Microformatting is a set of standardized tags and properties that are applied to HTML to help define the content the HTML describes.  An example is setting the "rel" attribute, of an anchor tag, to "me" for site links that belong to you (or your company).  This attribute enables a parser to look at a single site, such as a blog and then back reference other links that are tagged as "me" to find the individuals Flickr page, MySpace page, Twitter page, etc.  As more sites use Microformatting new tools can leverage this data to create linkages, data profiles and other import context from the HTML that is not clear unless a human reads the data.
• "Bootstrap Your Startup" was Aaron's second session. Presented by Bijoy Goswami (this slides are here), we walked through the three types of business startups. Cookie-cutter (Franchise), Funding Generated (Venture Capital), and Bootstrapping. The first two have their benefits but lack the control most entrepreneurs seek. Bootstrapping provides an open landscape to allow for a dynamic business model that is constantly changing as the business grows. Bijoy pointed out this was the model of Southwest Airlines which grew it's no assigned seat business model out of necessity of having to sell one of it's first four airlines to generate extra capital but still be focused on covering the same routes as before. In a startup environment you are always looking forward at the upcoming landscape making adjustments when necessary, however you are not racing at a pace that would be set in a Funding given model.   The key point taken from this session was that a Bootstrap model takes the largest commitment by the entrepreneur: personal investment. You must give up something in order to take the step toward your goal. That could be giving up your BMW, or asking your spouse to take a higher paying job, or to live in a cardboard box. But if what you are doing is your passion, the sacrifices will be worth it.  Who knows maybe your idea will make you the next Larry Page.
• James met up with his old friend and co-worker, Larry Gonzales, to catch up and talk about how things are going over at his company, Eye-Fi.  Larry was in town to both attend the conference, but to also shoot a lot of shows using Eye-Fi to post the images in real time.  Thanks for the card Larry, we'll let you know how we use it!
• We both headed over to the keynote to see Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com (follow him on tweeter @zappos), talk about how Zappos is run fundamentally different then any other large billion dollar firm.  The core concept of Zappos is to make customer service and company culture the number one goal.  All new employees, from Accountants to Customer Service must spend 5 weeks in training.  during this time they will spend a week answering customer phone calls and another week in the warehouse filling out customer orders.  The whole time they have a $2000 offer to quit at any time during the training.  By focusing on making sure that people both understand the entire company and verifying that people WANT to work their has created an amazingly loyal workforce and customer base.  They consider this kind of monetary investment marketing, since it makes people want to use Zappos.com.  The best line from the session was "If I had to do it again, I would hire faster and fire quicker". The idea that culture is key and compromise will only lead you down the dark side. Podcast of session...Listen in
• James took a break to have lunch with Larry and then got ready for the evening launch party for StandardAnswers
• We headed over to Stubb's backyard to take a peek at the Digg.com show.  It was amazing (and not neccesarily in a good way) how fanatical the crowd was for Kevin Rose.  We also saw Felicity Day from Dr. Horribles Sing-along-blog there.
• Next up we walked over to Red Eyed Fly for the Standard Answer Launch Party where we caught two amazing bands, Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears and White Deniem. As Aaron said, it was one of the best shows we had both seen in a long, long time.