I’m in Austin TX this weekend for SXSW Interactive: part of an annual mega conference for the web, film, and music industries.

The first session I attended was “We F*cked Up”, with a panel of web consultants discussing failure: recoverable and unrecoverable failures they’ve had, their definitions of failure, etc. Points that stuck with me:

• We need failure more than we need success. Failure breeds innovation, but success just breeds more of the same.
• Don’t be afraid to have the difficult conversations with your clients. Own your mistakes, apologize, know when to end a working relationship, etc.
• Greg Hoy talked about creating “snippet” designs, like 300px square instead of a full screen mock-up, for a project that had gone through too many rounds of revisions and still wasn’t feeling right to the client. The snippets let him try a whole bunch of ideas quickly, they hit on something the client liked, and then the design team was able to flesh it out more from there.
• When SEO consultant Wil Reynolds feels like his clients should have reached better results than they have so far, he calls them and tells them to stop paying for Seer Interactive’s services. The firm keeps working without pay until the client sees those results he expected for them.
• Reply-all is a dangerous thing when someone on your team has the poor sense to speak ill of the client. ‘Nuff said.

This afternoon I heard Ze Frank talk about The Creative Lifestyle. He’s one of those guys, it seems, who just can’t help but be creative. Even in conversation and answering people’s questions, he had us laughing a lot.

Ze makes a lot of creative things that he shares online: some audience participation, some just him riffing on yet another strange idea he’s had. He highlighted a few briefly:

• A childhood walk - where you find a walk you used to take on Google streetview, and narrate it.
• Angrigami – when he got his first really strong hate mail*, he didn’t know what to do with it. After a while he made origami templates with the text of the hatemail, and invited people to make beautiful things with it.
• The hate mail was received in response to 52to48 which are photographic gestures of reconciliation across the democratic-republican divide in the U.S. (about 52to48 )

Today’s keynote was danah boyd, an ethnographer who researches how people use technology. In a nutshell, she talked about how privacy isn’t dead. She implored those of us who make systems to understand people’s expectations of privacy. That information we make public isn’t necessarily something we want publicized. That the behaviour of tech companies making bad privacy decisions for their users (Facebook, Google Buzz being the cases in point), has real and terrifying implications for some of their users.

Aside from that, today I learned that Texan food is definitely different from what you get in my part of the world. I had a waffle cone with bacon and scrambled eggs in it for lunch, which seemed more my speed than the breaded, deep fried jalapeno sausage on a stick.

Tonight I’m looking forward to a meetup hosted by Chris Guillebeau and hoping to meet some of my online pals there. Time to get ready!