Today my friend Avi posted a link to a New York Times article about how the little girl who sang China’s national anthem in the Beijing Summer Games was lip-synching the voice of another girl who wasn’t cherubic enough to be the face of China.

This set my mind in motion about the whole nature of communism and it’s necessary deconstruction of the individual in order to support the communist collective - the U.S. and China are so different culturally in this basic way. It’s completely fine to have more than one little girl contribute to the idyllic image of China from the Chinese perspective, while in the U.S. we get concerned about the impact on her self-esteem and her ability to feel strong and independent as a result of being deemed “not pretty enough.” Of course, being an Atlas-Shrugged kind of guy myself, it gets me riled up. But nevertheless there is something to be said for a culture that can put themselves completely aside and rejoice in selflessness.

Also, an interesting contrast from elsewhere in the ceremonies - the impressive synchronization of thousands of Chinese drummers and dancers against the individual Chinese athlete who rises by himself, suspended hundreds of feet in the air, to light the Olympic torch. Which image do you think is more impressive to the Chinese, which to Americans?

For me the takeaway - without getting too political - is that we have much to learn about and from each other, and that both feats, the selfless and the selfish, have their places in the world.

Photo Credit: Left, Agence France-Presse; Right, Zhou Liang/Xinhua (via the New York Times)

I recently got sent this very well-written article by Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com and a this video of Eric Schmidt from Google both answering the question “What is Web 3.0?”

Well, not surprisingly both definitions are highly biased toward the bets that their respective companies are making. Marc thinks it’s cloud computing, or SaaS, or a world without deployed software. Hmm, Salesforce.com is not beating a new drum there. Eric also think it’s cloud computing, but a huge number of point solutions launched and tied to together with open architectures. That sounds awfully like Google’s product strategy.

Of course, I don’t think either of these guys is trying to requisition the term “Web 3.0″ in a greedy or underhanded way. Their corporate directions are only a logical result of where they genuinely think things are going - not vice versa.

But I think they’re both wrong about Web 3.0. To see why, you just have to climb into Marc’s article a bit. In it he defines Web 1.0 as “anyone can transact,” Web 2.0 as “anyone can participate,” and Web 3.0 as “anyone can innovate.” The problem is he switched what he meant by “anyone” in the Web 3.0 instance. The first two were sea changes for everyday users, and I like and agree with his definitions there. The third one is a sea change for developers, which will arguably go unnoticed by users. And sadly, there are still a lot more users than developers. So his definition is more like Web 2.5.

That said, I don’t know exactly what Web 3.0 will be. But I do think the following things:

1. There will be one. A 3.0, that is. The Internet is not reaching maturity, more like just headed into adolescence.

2. 3.0 will come about as a result of another sea change in the user experience, not just the developer experience.

3. It will have something to do with the reversal of informational flow. Instead of you searching to find it, it will find you.

In the meantime, Web 3.0 could be whatever you want it to be. Which means your web company is headed in exactly the right direction.

My related post over at The Engaged Consumer: Marketing 2015: Where Everybody Knows Your Name

As I mentioned in a previous post, Twitter’s best application for me so far has been for business - and that continues to be the case. Noticing this past weekend that I was twittering from ProductCamp Austin, the editor of the Austin Startup blog and area entrepreneur (Bryan Menell) asked me to write a guest blog on it. I did, and it’s up now with a byline for my current company and company blog.

The Austin Startup blog played a key role in allowing me to assess the startup community in Austin and find job opportunities here when Megan and I decided to become Texans (again, for me) 8 months ago. For that reason, it’s a real pleasure to be able to make a contribution back to it.

In my work experience I’ve been in all different spots in companies - I’ve worked in sales, marketing, customer service, and engineering - managed others for five years and been managed for eight. All of that to say that I have been in a lot of interesting and challenging positions with people I reported to, peers, and people who reported to me.

During that time I have run across many coworkers who I admire because they communicate in a candid, genuine way and are as transparent as possible with others. I think this is something we all try to do - but no one is perfect and sticking to it isn’t always easy. There are always temptations to go over to the “dark side,” to find yourself unwittingly sucked into a political battle or accidentally complicit in working around or over others.

Of course, I’m not talking about doing things that are clearly unethical here, like lying or concealing things deliberately for your own gain - that’s the very dark end of the dark side. I’m talking about the gray area in working with others that we all have to negotiate daily, and it is mostly around maintaining the appropriate flow of information through your own inbox to others that balances your desire look out for them personally, look out for the best interests of your company, and look out for yourself.

To that end, one of the guidelines I follow is the no-BCC rule. In my mind, using BCC at work is like getting $300 out of an ATM at 3 in the morning. You may have a legitimate reason to do it every once in awhile, but it is likely that the reason you are doing it is something you should rethink.* Not that the BCC itself is the problem, that’s actually a useful little tool when you are doing things like sending out mass contact information updates. it’s more of an indicator of where you’re starting to go mentally - kind of like a dark side canary-in-the-coal-mine. So when you see yourself hit that BCC button, stop for a second and check yourself.

*I have to credit Chris Rock for that one: “Why the #$%^ is an ATM open 24 hours a day?”

Captain U, a site co-founded by my good friend and ex-bandmate Avi Stopper, finished first in the running at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business’s New Venture Challenge today. The New Venture Challenge is one of the more prestigious new venture competitions in the U.S., where the final 10 teams present and are judged by a pretty brutal panel of 15-20 high profile venture capitalists. $50K is up for grabs to the top teams. Captain U is also a finalist the MBA Jungle biz plan competition.

Captain U is a social networking site that allows high school soccer players to network (and be recruited) by college coaches. It launched last year and is picking up great momentum! Congratulations Avi and team. Gooooooaaaaaaaaalllllll!!

When I heard of and experienced Twitter at South by Southwest Interactive 2007, I groaned. Wow, another way for people to waste time online, I thought.

Twitter, for the uninitiated, is an online messaging service that allows you to broadcast short, 140 character updates (termed “tweets”) to a waiting audience of other users who are also posting updates. The updates are meant to be “what you are doing” at that moment, but really contain all types of short-form content that are as diverse as the users who write them. On Twitter, though, you select the people whose updates you follow, building an aggregated “twitterstream” of the people who matter to you. Similarly people may or may not follow your updates.

I finally started using Twitter a couple of months ago when I saw that it was not, in fact, merely a diversion for internet geeks (in my defense, there are many out there). It has staying power. What I noticed, once I started to use it, is that hidden in Twitter’s simplicity lies a game-changing adjustment in social communications that could end up reinventing the way we do a lot of things in our personal lives and in business. That’s quite a bold statement, so bear with me.

Back in my days as a software developer I worked for a company who did and still does publish a suite of sophisticated tools for managing the business flow of a commodities trading business. Along this business flow we had organized the software into many parts that matched the real-world process. The contracts subsystem would allow users to enter buy/sell agreements, the distribution subsystem then allowed them to match those agreements to the required physical distribution, and so forth into invoicing and accounting.

One of the big issues we contended with early on was the communication between the subsystems. The activities of one always affected another, so when something changed in one domain the others had to be alerted in real time. This was a painful process to code. Which other subsystems needed to be alerted of what, and when? It was even more painful to maintain as the system grew and evolved new capabilities.

In response to this issue, our team rewrote the messaging architecture to what in programming circles is referred to as a publish:subscribe model. This model created a virtual broadcast system where every subsystem would publish its activities (um, “what it was doing”) to the entire system and the other subsystems could choose what messages to pay attention to and which ones to ignore.

This approach was far superior, for many reasons. Here are my top three:

Transparency is rewarded.

First, the higher number of status messages developers published to the broadcast system, the more they were rewarded by not having to worry about what other systems might need. This allowed for a high degree of transparency within the system about what every part was up to at any period of time. This became very helpful for troubleshooting and performance tuning (oversight) of the entire software package.

Autonomy = efficiency

Not having to worry about communicating to other specific subsystems allowed developers to have more autonomy and focus on the more important work of making their specific piece of the system work better and faster. It saved time, and money.

Spontaneous innovation happens.

Availability of more activity information than you think you need leads to creative thinking about how you might actually be able to use the extra stuff. Early into the publish:subscribe model we found developers using information in unexpected ways to make their particular domain more powerful and useful.

So you might be able to see where I’m going with this. Twitter is the publish:subscribe model applied to personal instant messaging. As a result, it is superior to the other existing tools (basically any other IM client), which are based on the de facto one-to-one messaging model - for the reasons I mentioned above. In the Twitter world each person is like a miniature subsystem, broadcasting information it thinks the world might be interested in. And others listen, selectively.

The important thing in understanding Twitter’s importance is to focus on certain contexts for Twitter, not on the platform itself. Without context the tool does seem frivolous. Unless you are a researcher you wouldn’t care about listening to the global twitterstream. It would be an overwhelming torrent of which you might find a miniscule percentage relevant to you.

It’s also important to note that the default approach – to subscribe to your friends – is actually one of the less useful applications of Twitter. I love my friends, but many of them just aren’t doing things minute-to-minute that are of any relevance to me. Personal details for the purpose of friendship don’t usually require instantaneous communication (unless you like to stalk your friends), which is why social networking websites and one-to-one IM work just fine for those purposes - not to mention old-fashioned and still far superior technologies like using a phone or (gasp) actually spending time together. Plus, real friendship is forged and bolstered by the slow-moving plate tectonics of our lives, over the long term – not by the daily humdrum of changing moods and insignificant occurrences.

The best application I see is actually at the workplace, or really any club or organization that has to get things done. In the same way that my old company’s system had parts, so organizations have departments, and departments have people. People at work benefit greatly from timely transparency with each other. The more autonomy every department/person can have, the more resources it/he/she can focus on the appointed task. And the creativity that leads to broader capabilities and innovation is fueled by an understanding of what others are thinking and doing.

So Twitter-like technologies might allow workplaces to function more efficiently and creatively, but why am I making the wild claim that it will reinvent the way we do things? Well, if you had an internal Twitter and a profile page to post longer documents, photos, and files at the office, would you even need email? How often does a lack of transparency, either intended or unintended, hinder your group accomplishment? Think about it.

Would you need a boss? Would your boss really need a boss? Would you ever need to have a meeting? Or would, through Twitter, the organization be able to function more democratically, instantaneously solving problems? Given a couple of “elected” leaders and judges, could organizations become almost completely flat and dispense with the immense overhead of traditional command-and-control management? Consider it.

What if you injected the twittering of your customers into the mental collective? Could your whole organization provide customer service? Could getting your product or service to market become extremely agile, taking input from your body of customers in near real-time?

How we do business in the future (Enterprise 2.0?) could be radically changed, in a way that makes us all more productive, and more satisfied, all because of a little website cutely named Twitter.

UPDATE: Strangely, Max Kalehoff published a good post with exactly the same title as mine, on the same day. Not implying any shenanigans, our posts are very different. Just saying it must mean that a lot of people are figuring out that Twitter “matters.”

Back in the late 90’s I worked for a small start-up software company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was my first job out of undergrad college, and I loved it because I worked with a bunch of other fresh-outta-college people in a 30-person company where we dreamed big.

Around this time, one of the first (and probably the first that gained really wide popularity among people who weren’t traditional “gamers”) massively multi-player online role-playing games came out - named Everquest. A MMORPG (yes, that really is the acronym) is a game where you can go online, log in, and play as a character in a completely immersive 3D virtual fantasy world. The world is populated by other virtual characters controlled by other gamers doing the same things you are. It’s fantasy gaming with a social element. The most popular MMORPG now is World of Warcraft which is reported to have 62% of the market, which means they have approximately 10 million monthly subscribers.

A few folks at work tried it and got into it a little bit, but there was one guy who REALLY got into it. After awhile, his door at work would remain closed as he spent hours upon hours (and lots of company time) playing Everquest. His workplace gaming started to cut into the real work he was supposed to be doing, and worsened until the inevitable happened and he was laid off. It was a shame, and it left the rest of us searching for an explanation.

I myself have had unnatural urges to play everything from Starcraft to Minesweeper (yes, Minesweeper) - but nothing that ever interfered materially with my ability to hold down a job, be in a relationship, or eat regularly. Yet my friend from that job isn’t alone. A couple of weeks ago at the South by Southwest Film Festival I got to see the debut of Second Skin, a documentary film which followed a couple stories where people destroyed their lives playing online games. One guy lost his job and his family, not minding “as long as he could keep the lights on and the internet connected.” Games can be horribly addictive. But why?

I’d never heard any really good structured reasons explaining why people can get as addicted to games as they can to drugs or gambling - until I heard another talk at South by Southwest Interactive from game designer Jane McGonigal, who offered some fascinating insight.

Jane observed that these games are increasingly designed to mimic the real interactions between people (people get married and have funerals in these worlds), but they seek to separate themselves from the real world environmentally (dragons and trolls and damsels in distress). The goal is clear - to create a world that is more interesting, more fulfilling than the real world by keeping the meaningful pieces and throwing out the rest. And because the economic purpose of game design is to get you to play more, designers have gotten exceptionally good at understanding the triggers within people that generate that interest and fulfillment.

As a game designer with a philosophical streak, Ms. McGonigal has spent a great deal of time thinking about what those triggers might be in a universal sense. She shared with the audience why she believes people get addicted to games, particularly the immersive role-playing variety. What is unexpected is that these reasons have nothing to do with cool graphics and sound, imaginative monsters, or compelling plotlines. They have to do with the satisfaction of more basic human needs, and there are four of them :

1. There is satisfying work to do (accomplishment).

2. There is an opportunity to be part of something bigger (significance).

3. There is a chance to be good at something (expertise).

4. You get to spend time with people you like (relationships).

The best (most fulfilling) games are very clear about how you can do the things above (instructions), have better features for allowing interaction (community), and give frequent, quality feedback (milestones).

The implication is that people who become addicted to games are finding much more satisfaction in the dimensions above than they are in their real lives.

So have game designers become the new experts in the psychology and sociology of human fulfillment? I find the theory fascinating - and I believe it holds water. Psychologists and sociologists are already studying gaming environments and learning important things from them.

If we spend more time capturing what we learn from game worlds, and applying what we already know, we might just be able to use those lessons to restructure the real world to be more fulfilling. To be more like a game. Wouldn’t you love it if your real life, especially the part of it you spend at work, could be something you could get addicted to?

UPDATE: My friend Josh aptly messages: “those 4 things also describe working at Google.” One of the many reasons why they are probably on the Fortune 100 list of best places to work. Jobs at Google.

One of main reasons I like to watch biopic movies about bands or musicians is because I like to see two scenes that are always part of those movies - the scenes that have to do with discovery.

The first scene is the part of the story where someone first listens to the music and realizes “damn, this is good.” It’s that scene in Walk the Line where the producer first hears Johnny Cash play, or when Ray Charles finally gets to take centerstage in the movie Ray. It usually takes place in a smoky club or a tiny, ramshackle recording studio. It’s that first intimate moment of virtuosity and greatness. The best biopics usually place that as the first time the viewer gets to see a full performance as well, so as you watch you share in the wonder of the first person who discovers a future legend. It’s the best expression of the importance of music to the listener.

The second scene is the part of the story where the public-at-large first listens and realizes “damn, this is good.” One of my favorite movie scenes in this category is in the cheesy-but-lovable That Thing You Do, where the band (The Oneders) first gets played on local radio (in the 1950’s, mind you). All of the band members are going about their normal non-rock-star lives in town, cleaning shop floors or running errands, and suddenly their song crackles to life on the radio. They all drop what they’re doing, drive and run to the drummer’s parents’ appliance store where they turn every radio in the place on and dance wildly in collective victory. It’s not an intimate type of discovery, but it does mean they have found an audience and now have that ability to finally afford to do what they love for a living. It’s the best expression of the importance of music to the musician.

The interesting thing about discovery is how it has changed. Now that first intimate moment might happen in a lonely, out-of-the-way website or MySpace page. The second moment, when an act hits it big, might happen on YouTube when a homemade music video “goes viral” or when a big brand like Apple picks up your song for a commercial spot. Where the first and second moment might have been a couple of years and hundreds of thousands in marketing dollars apart a decade ago, now they might be a week to a couple of months apart as friends share with friends and everyone from ad execs to label execs comb social sharing sites looking for the next big thing.

Also, the idea of where that discovery might lead has changed. Of course you will still have your big success stories - the U2’s, Coldplays, Kanyes, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. But the internet has given birth to a musician middle class, where artists distribute cheaply, find fanbases all over the world efficiently, play more, smaller gigs and publicize them to local fans easily. A musician can make a good living as a mid-sized band without ever needing to really hit it big 1950’s style. And there is more variety and inspiration for all of us.

Some people say that the internet is killing the music industry. Yes, the economics that depend on mass physical distribution and mass marketing are going the way of the dinosaur. But the economics that depend on those magical moments of discovery, and the best expression of what is important to listener and important to musician, are thriving in ways they never did before.

I realized recently that I had just passed the one-year anniversary of my first blog post, a day that will go down in history I tell you! That first post was for my previous company closerlook, on their Work + Play blog. I enjoyed it enough that a few months later, I started this one.

Most of the time I’m writing for other blogs along with wicksite, most of them associated with my current or past employers. Alas, the hazards of working for someone else for a living. Here is where else you can find me, and a comprehensive list of posts from other sources up until now. This is a big dump of links, going forward I’ll try to cross-post or link out as I write them.

The Engaged Consumer (Powered’s corporate blog) - We just recently started this blog, and so far, so good.

Five lessons from social marketing disasters (March 12, 2008)

Social networking vs. social commerce (February 22, 2008)

Outspend or outteach? (February 15, 2008)

The new focus groups: social networks (February 1, 2008)

The two voices of social commerce (December 14, 2007)

Work + Play (closerlook’s corporate blog) - We started the blog in March of 2007, and I left in September to move to Austin. It’s a great blog at a great company!

It’s no fun to be alone! (August 7, 2007)

Gmail goes viral with “behind-the-scenes” video (August 3, 2007)

Firing a customer? Are you crazy? (July 12, 2007)

Keeping the questions golden (July 3, 2007)

Paying something for nothing (June 22, 2007)

Viral campaign freaking my mind (May 30, 2007)

Seth Godin and The Dip (May 22, 2007)

The strategy disconnect (April 28, 2007)

Now I finally know what Kurt Cobain was singing (April 26, 2007)

Saying “I do” to your customers (April 11, 2007)

Gimme some IMAX (April 7, 2007)

The trap of “what clients want” (April 6, 2007)

A song heard round the world (April 2, 2007)

Starbucks speaks its own language (March 30, 2007)

Often when you eat so much that you are uncomfortably full (my most frequent experience with this is at Fogo de Chao) it takes some time to digest. Such is the case with my first experience going to the Music portion of South by Southwest here in Austin, which ended over a week ago. The Music festival follows closely on the heels of the Interactive festival, and overlaps with the back end of the Film festival, starting up on Wednesday and heading straight through to Saturday night.

Not only was I already a little worn out from the Interactive festival to start with, but I dove right into the Summerbirds in the Cellar on Wednesday at 8 p.m. and didn’t stop until I watched a bleary-eyed Nada Surf set at midnight on Saturday night.

But much like the aforementioned meat overdose you experience when you go to Fogo, the live music binge is so tasty that you don’t really recognize the cost until you collapse on the couch and sleep all day Sunday. I remember descending into downtown on Saturday for the last day with as much excitement as I did on the first day, hearing the blend of music from the nearest venues wafting toward me with as much allure as ever.

So what did I find at South by Southwest? Well, here is a blow-by-blow summary of all the bands I saw and my post-mortem on their sets (I included live tracks/video where I could find them, though they aren’t sometimes from the exact shows I saw - if you have your own please post in the comments):

Wednesday

Summerbirds in the Cellar (Stubb’s): These guys were good, solid rock. Nothing groundbreaking but a good way to start the festival. One of the guitarist’s amp blew out halfway through, but they forged on. (3 of 5 stars - listen)

Johnathan Rice (Stubb’s): Talented guy, rockin’ crossover blues. I’d suggest him if you like crossover blues-rock, which unfortunately doesn’t hit my sweet spot. (3 of 5 stars - listen)

Papercranes (Stubb’s): Solid performance by a good rock band fronted by a goth-lead songstress (wait a minute, that’s Rain Phoenix!) whose vocals added softness and form to the fray. (3 of 5 stars - listen)

Dead Confederate (Stubb’s): Ear-splitting straight-ahead angst-rock that is hard without becoming metal. Reminded me of Brad Pitt saying “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” Drummer destroys drum kit with no mercy. (3 of 5 stars - listen)

R.E.M. (Stubb’s): It took lots of standing in place to get to see an R.E.M. show from about 20 feet away, but it was worth it. They played a lot of new stuff, the band was super-tight, and you understood why they’ve done as well as they have for so long. (5 of 5 stars - listen)

Thursday

Body of War (Stubb’s): I didn’t really know what this was when I got in line, I just knew who was going to be there - Tom Morello (from Rage Against the Machine), Ben Harper, Serj Tankian (from System of a Down), and Billy Bragg. It turned out that Body of War is an anti-Iraq-war documentary made by an ex-marine who was paralyzed in combat, and these notable musicians all contributed songs to its soundtrack. Each of these songs, most of which were soulful and heartfelt, some of which were angry and rebellious, were fantastic in their own right. The stand-outs were Ben Harper, who sat and played a solo steel guitar while the sun went down while his soaring voice took the crowd to another place, and Serj Tankian, whose highly creative musicianship on the solo piano and unique, plaintive voice is even more striking when it’s not laid over System’s typical speed-metal. I also really thought a lot of Mason Jennings. The rousing and memorable ending was led by Tom Morello, who got all the musicians out on stage to sing “This Land is My Land” while the crowd jumped up and down mosh-pit style. (5 of 5 stars, the most “this will never happen again” event of SxSW for me - summary video - movie review)

P.S. Apparently Eddie Vedder was supposed to make a surprise appearance, but didn’t make it at the last minute. That really would have blown the lid off the place, but as it turned out Eddie’s services weren’t needed.

The Wilders (The Ale House): I came here for Liam Finn but caught this set as a happy accident. This honky-tonk bluegrass quartet out of Kansas City absolutely got down Oh-Brother-Where-Art-Thou style, and I was loving it. (4 of 5 stars)

Liam Finn (The Ale House): Liam is Neil Finn’s (of Crowded House fame) son, and immensely talented. Great songs, and it turns out he is a superior drummer on top of his talents at vocals and guitar. The big problem with Liam is he needs a band. He played using a loop station (in case you don’t know what that is, it allows a musician to play a riff and have it looped back while he or she plays over it - a modern one-man-band crutch) and had just one woman there backing him and playing some percussion. The impact his music would have had with a full band made me mourn that shortcoming. If you are a drummer or bass player please call Liam immediately. (4 of 5 stars, 5 of 5 with a full band - listen)

Jens Lekman (Mohawk Patio): I am going to go ahead and call Jens the Swedish second coming of Morrissey. His band was decked out in matching ABBA-esque robes with key-shaped pendants, and his vocal and songwriting style is that same whimsical, nasal-mellow crooning. I’d like to say that it didn’t work, but it did. As much as you wanted to mock the guy, he was supremely confident and had a panache all his own. (4 of 5 stars - listen)

Black Mountain (Mohawk Patio): It was 1:30 a.m. before these guys went on, but I had stayed up late for them even though I was looking zombie-like. They rocked. With rare exception the rock was droning and textural, sprinkled throughout with some great driving riffs. The one thing that bothered me was their woman lead singer, whose stage presence was so bad that it detracted from the musical performance. She looked like she had gotten lost and wandered on to the stage. Oops, I’m the lead singer. (4 of 5 stars, 5 of 5 if they get Rain Phoenix of the Papercranes to replace their current lead)

Friday

White Williams (Emo’s): Cool set from a solid rock band. I’m starting to notice that every band has a keyboard of some kind now, which is something you would never have seen even 5 years ago. “New Violence” is a great song. (4 of 5 stars)

Film School (Red-Eyed Fly): Good Cure-influenced rock, but didn’t leave a lasting impression on me. The Heidi-Klum-look-alike bass player is downright distracting. I spent less time listening and more time trying to figure out which of the other geeky band members had the good fortune of calling her his girlfriend, if any. (3 of 5 stars)

Rogue Wave (Red-Eyed Fly): I love Rogue Wave’s new album and really had high hopes for this set. It was absolutely great. The band is very tight, and the built-up end of “Lake Michigan” had all five members of the band singing harmony that made the back of your head tingle. (5 of 5 stars)

Times New Viking (Emo’s): I was here to see Yeasayer, but for some reason they didn’t play. But these guys were pretty good. Their drummer was just relentless. (3 of 5 stars)

Shine a Light (the Rolling Stones Scorsese-directed Rockumentary Debut): Tired from all the standing, I took a suggestion from Dave (a friend I made at SxSW, who says you just get live music for your trouble?) and we went to see this at the Austin IMAX. It was absolutely great, although it spends most of its time covering a recent concert by the Stones at the Beacon Theater. Don’t get me wrong, the Stones are still great, but the periodic cutaways to older Stones footage and interviews made you want more of that. Appearances at the concert by Buddy Guy, Jack White, and Christina Aguilera were highlights, and the IMAX experience really makes you feel like you are at the show (many people in the audience were clapping at the end of songs). Also telling was when they filmed Keith Richards up close and you could hear his guitar - that guy is barely holding it together. Dave made the good point that Keith has been barely holding it together from day one. (4 of 5 stars)

Vampire Weekend (Antone’s): This show was probably the most hyped of the festival, and I’d have to say it lived up to it. These guys, who all look like they just got excused from a long day of class at an expensive prep school, put out contagious music that just makes you smile. Very inventive songs and lyrics, ska beats, and reggae vocal influences make for a live show that just kicked butt. I predict great things here. (5 of 5 stars - listen)

Saturday

Grand Archives (Cedar Street): Arriving early for Sea Wolf, these guys from Seattle were a nice surprise. Tight and plentiful vocal harmonies over great rock tunes, worth checking out. (4 of 5 stars)

Sea Wolf (Cedar Street): I had heard a couple of Sea Wolf’s songs, and wanted to hear more. They didn’t disappoint. Mixing good keyboard work and cello over a pretty traditional rock arrangement made for some non-traditional results. (4 of 5 stars)

Kate Nash w/Billy Bragg (Cedar Street): I was going to leave after Sea Wolf to catch the elusive Yeasayer clear across town, but I ran into a British guy (Rick) who seemed to know what he was talking about (he knew a lot about beer, at least) and told me that the word on the street was that Yeasayer had been terrible live thus far. Then the Cedar Street folks announced that Billy Bragg would be making a surprise appearance with Kate Nash and I was sold into staying. Kate is a British solo songstress whose striking and occasionally profanity-laden songs are so honest and well-acted (she’s not just singing them, she’s in character) that you get sucked in. I totally dug it, and then it got better when Billy joined her. Another nice surprise. (5 of 5 stars)

The Redwalls (Rio Grande): I stumbled downtown for the final time to catch the back half of this set from a solid Chicago group. Blues-inspired but not too bluesy, it was a hearty helping. (4 of 5 stars)

Nada Surf (Maggie Mae’s Rooftop): I made it into this club after standing in line for awhile, as the band schedule in general had gotten uncharacteristically weak and Nada Surf was getting mobbed. To my disappointment, Nada Surf was playing an acoustic set. Under normal circumstances, this would have been cool, but not in the middle of sixth street where the sound bleed from other clubs nearby was pretty bad. The bar just next door appeared to have a death-metal band going. The Surf was still good though, with some new songs that are pretty strong. (4 of 5 stars)

My South by Southwest experience overall was great and unforgettable, and although in future years I may choose my spots more carefully instead of submerging myself as I did for this one, I plan to come back, year after year. One impression that came home to me again is how powerful the live music experience can be when compared to recorded albums. So many artists showed how they can transcend your music collection and become a living, breathing, rocking experience. South by Southwest is truly a music lover’s paradise.

Vampire Weekend photo credit: Joel Didriksen of kingpinphoto.com