Cerebra

The majority of all the sessions I attended had one key point - explaining how humans behave on the web, and how we can take "advantage" of that behavior.

Sounds easy, but it seems most of us, as much as we use the web, take little notice of the finer human nuances to how people share, gather, read and talk. In a talk about cyber bullying with the creators of itgetsbetter.org, they highlighted the fact that in certain communities people enjoy being anonymous. This simple human truth - that we all have secrets and don't necessarily share everything with everyone - is why many LGBT forums exist, allowing people to come together in a closed community and talk about their challenges or fears. Community, even in anonymity, is strong.

Anyone who knows anything about SXSW knows that it is a frenzied week of interactive conferences, film and music. This year it is even bigger as its the 20th anniversary of the event, which means there are over 5000 events in the city of Austin.

Born in 1987 as a music festival only, the organisers added the film festival and interactive conference in 1994. Johnny Cash was the keynote speaker in 1987 and in 2013 the main keynote was Elon Musk.

This is a clear indication of how the super conference has evolved over the years from music dominating the scene up to 2009/2010 to the switch to interactive becoming the biggest pull for people. The numbers speak for themselves, as you can see in the table below.

A big discussion point at SXSW is the learning and innovation around social and television. The US pretty much leads the entertainment business and their social media integration into their television series, reality, sports and news has been quick to market. Stepping back to look at trends and what has worked shared her insight, as well learning’s from the social team at WWE.

The most tweeted about categories are still Reality TV, Sports, Series and One time special events. Interesting insights:

- Reality TV & One Time Events – The selection of hosts and the conversations around them show there to be more conversation on social media than the actual contestants. This could be a strategy from the producers

We’ve often heard that if it can’t be found on the first page of Google, then it doesn’t exist. Believe it or not, it does. I have identified several ways to optimise your searches on Google – through Boolean Operators, Phrase Searching and Google Search Tools.

If you’re searching for something specific the following tips will yield better results:

1. “Word word word”: This search will yield pages containing the exact search phrase you have placed in inverted commas. For example, if I had typed “Panda bear on a tree” into the search bar, only items with that exact wording would have shown up.
2. ‘-word’: The hyphen lets Google know you want this word excluded. I wanted to search for pandas, but I didn’t want to search red pandas, so I added the ‘-‘ before the word ‘red’.

If you use TweetDeck via your mobile device or through an app, take note: Twitter announced recently that they will no longer be developing and updating their TweetDeck mobile and computer apps using the API version 1.0 . In other words, use the web-based version or the latest and PC version or nothing at all.