Local Texans in Austin are either grumbling about the slew of youths and db’s about to infiltrate their fair city, or rubbing their palms together for the tourist payday as the 24^th Annual Music & Media Conference, South By Southwest, gets going (or should I say, growing). With social media, networking, technology, branding power, and everything else expanding faster than child obesity, so does SXSW and the amount of attendees.

The Interactive and Film portion kicked off on March 12^th with trade shows, conferences, discussion panels, celebrity interviews, and film screenings, industry parties, etc. The big balls officially drop on the 17^th, as bands from far and wide will melodically mount and rotate the 80-plus stages in downtown Austin. It’s hard to imagine the scope of planning that goes into the non-stop schedule, and if you think you have your itinerary all mapped out, think again. It’s going to get messy once the texts start pouring in – “Go see this show”, “Come to such-and-such film” – and your days become 90% planning, totally souring what should be a liberating mood.

So, we can all count our blessings for phones with email and the “what-the-f*ck did we do before” invention of text…but, like the dearly departed Corey Haim, everything has its limits. For example, if you’re at SXSW, you might text a group of friends, and then you get a text back, you respond, you get one from someone else and you fill them in on what you already heard back, and thus begins the chaotic cycle of simply trying to meet up with your goddamned friends. Sucks to be popular, don’t it?!?

Well, for you high-in-social-demand types, scratch the above time-consuming malarkey. With the new Brightkite Group Text, you can hit all your loyal buddies at once and start a big old text-versation – including pics.  You can use it from your computer, iPhone, iPhone touch, even if you’re not a member of Brightkite. With it, you can still text back from your phone and it will go to everyone on the list in the Group Text. It’s like the “Reply All” of texting. But the awesome thread is still saved with Brightkite, if – unthinkable as it seems – you can’t remember last night.

But for those of you looking to downsize your phone bill, you can cancel that bastard and use Brightkite’s Group Text for all your texting needs. Then meet up with your friends and borrow their phone!  Bite me, Verizon – can you hear me now, bitch?

If you were on Twitter during the last few weeks, you probably ran into a trending hashtag at one point called #OMGFacts. This tag was used to state trivial facts, ranging from the mundane to the insane (as if Twitter doesn’t already have enough of these uninspiring trending topics). While I don’t know how this trend got started, I do know that it spawned its own Twitter account. I did not follow the page (nor care) until January 18th, when people began retweeting this from said account:

Now, people are asking who would post such an incendiary message. I’ve come to find out that the owner of the account is @AdorianDeck, a 16-year-old male from California. He’s the one responsible, not only for the OMGFacts Twitter account, but also for the OMGFacts blog. Upon tweeting this gem, he caused an uproar. The backlash was so intense that he not only took down the Twitter account, but the blog as well. He then tweeted the following message from his personal Twitter page:

“Deleted it. Only cared about #s and $ recently. Greed. Stopped thinking about things, I’ll just say…I’ve learned so much. No regrets. – @AdrorianDeck” Read the rest of this entry »

What does Kanye West have in common with author Dan Brown?

Although both love seeing their names printed in italics and are obsessed with ancient artifacts (in Kanye’s case, his reputation), both have a link to the theoretical subfield of noetic science. Dan Brown’s latest novel, “The Lost Symbol,” delves into this discipline which studies vast quantities of information that can, when dissected, support the existence of a collective consciousness. This theory is the basis for outings like We Feel Fine, Global Consciousness Project, and the Web Bot Project, which crawl the internet looking for recurring keywords, phrases, and data that can reportedly detect the underlying “mood” of the masses.

What does this have to do with Kanye? On Wednesday, Kanye fell victim to the noetic field yet again after being beset with the hottest hashtag, #RIPKanyeWest, on Twitter. Read the rest of this entry »