We are working hard in the big chairs in downtown Austin as we are gearing up for the weekend. Right now we have some primetime real estate with the best seats in the house (pictured below). I am afraid, albeit in a good way, that we are going to have to cut our weekend short because our orders are piling up for You Design It and Defy Distribution. We went to dinner last nite with some friends, Lance and Jessica, and they let us stay at their house.

Lance recently received “Austin Runner of the Year” and you can check out his team at 3 Stories Racing. Nice site…

Right now I am literally writing this while driving on 71 past Columbus on the way to Austin. My meeting is at 3:00 and I should have some time to spare before I get there. It is going to be game time when I do get there though. I just wanted to post this to say that I should be posting frequently throughout the weekend to give shout-outs to the people I meet at SXSW. Make sure you come back regularly…..

I am headed to South by Southwest Interactive this weekend. I was also fortunate enough to get a big meeting in Austin on Thursday for Defy Distribution that could be major for us! I am leaving tomorrow for that meeting and then staying in Austin for the remainder of the Interactive portion of SXSW.

There are a lot people that I have chatted with over the internet that I looking forward to seeing in person at SXSW. This will be my first time though so my expectations are low. I will be carrying cards representing You Design It, Defy Distribution, Bliggy Bank, and BlakePoutra.com and that always makes it hard for quick introductions. Enough posting for now, I need to start getting ready.

Last night, while I was still in town for meetings, I visited the Social Media Club in Dallas. The topic of discussion was social media’s effect on political campaigns. Two of the main issues were the Dallas mayoral election and if the blogosphere can influence the upcoming Presidential campaigns at this stage of its growth.

In the Dallas mayoral election, one of the candidates is a guy named Zac Crain. He is considered a longshot because his previous job was music editor of the Dallas Observer……not exactly groomed for the oval office or anything. However, because he has embraced the internet as his soapbox, he is beginning to gain steam. His campaign is very progressive and is probably an indicator of what is to come in the mainstream political process.

On the national level of the Presidential campaign, we looked at Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean. Check out Barack’s website and tell me if the icons remind you of a similar look. I wonder who the target market is for that feature - my.barackobama.com??

Finally, it is time for me to give some shout-outs. Here are some of the people I met last night….they were Tony Wright of Kinetic Results, Jake McKee of Big in Japan, Sunni Thompson of Advertising Ourselves to Death, and A. Blaine Collins of Stronger Teams.

The subject matter at Refresh Dallas was all about Amazon Web Services. This proved to be fairly irrelevant for me business-wise but yet interesting enough to keep my attention. The three services focused on the most were EC2, S3, and the Mechanical Turk. EC2 was a bit too developer related and S3 as a backup bulk storage service is still considered unstable because Amazon won’t comment on the future of the service. S3 sounds promising because the cost is so low and the method of transfer reaching torrent speeds is so fast, I think I will still try it without using any mission critical data.

Finally that leads us to the Mechanical Turk……Amazon’s version of artificial intelligience. The service is still in beta but there are some simple success stories from those that have used it. The system is a way to put out a request for a service/opinion that can’t be automated by a machine. The instance used last nite was tagging images with labels that only humans could describe such as a man having a beard. You can set up the project with a price you are willing to pay per image and the turks sign up for that project. Something like 200,000 images for $.10/image and you can have a whole catalog tagged and ready for indexing in a few days.

I can think of a few ways that this could be time-saving and very cost effective, especially when you have grunt work that can’t be handled by a snippet of code. Someone needs to create a platform for this that makes it easy to integrate it into proprietary systems and we can all begin to unleash the turks.