Watch out, starting today, a large number of the people on your Twitter stream are going to be obsessively posting about "SXSW". If you don't know what it is, it's a conference in Austin, Texas (SXSW stands for South by Southwest). It's best known for being a music festival, but it has expanded to being a film festival and a tech conference, known as SXSW Interactive, SXSWi for short (although if you really want to be down, you'll call it "South By").
The conference, now in its 14th year, tries pretty hard to be all inclusive: a percentage of panels going up is decided by a voting process held last summer, but being a tech conference, it can still look pretty dude-centric. If you're going to SXSW this year or if you're following along at home, here are a few lady centric panels to watch out for. The big theme this year is apparently privacy and how much of our personal lives we're putting online. Some highlights from the schedule:
1. A Brief History of Growing Up Online
Okay, it's my very own panel! We're going to be talking about the history of blogging and the teen early adopters that pioneered self publishing back in the late 90s. We're also going to be talking about personal vs private and that dirty word, "overshare".
2. Bloggers: How Not To Get Fucked
Oversharing is so hot this year at SXSW. This talk is by Zoe Margolis, the "girl with a one track mind", who had her entire life changed when her anonymous sex blog was outed.
4. That's Not My Name: Beating Down Online Misogny
Ann Friedman and Samhita Mukhopadhyay of Feministing are amongst some of the women on this panel, discussing the best ways to "survive the anti-feminist Internet".
5. Why Is Professional Blogging Bloodsport for Women?
Rachel Sklar, formerly of The Huffington Post and Rebecca Fox of mediabistro talk about the criticism women face when sharing their personal lives online.
6. Are Women Taken More Seriously On The Web?
After all of these "it sucks to be a woman" panels, here is one on how women can use web 2.0 and blogging to improve the way women are viewed online.
7. Girl Gaming Goes Mainstream: Cliches, Reality, and Community & Gaming as a Gateway Drug: Getting Girls Interested in Technology
One panel dicusses how women make up 40% of the gaming market and the other talks about how to get more women interested in "technology". I'd be interested to see the latter panel, if only to see what they say -- clearly women are interested in the technology, look at all these panels about um, women using technology. But I'll reserve judgement on it until I can see what the actual content of the talk is.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg. The number of panels is truly overwhelming. You can check out a complete list of the Interactive programming at the SXSW website. I'll be checking in from the festival at my Twitter and right here on BitchBuzz, including a few snippets from the Film festival.