NEW YORK--Tuesday evening was the first night on the job for at least one of the waitresses at the brand-new Standard Hotel, a Los Angeles import straddling the about-to-open High Line elevated park in Manhattan's downtown Meatpacking District. And it must have been quite the trial by fire when several dozen unexpected patrons showed up for an impromptu Internet Week New York gathering.
That's the thing about Internet Week. It has no centralized location, and events can vary wildly by geography. (It seems like half the panels and conferences are in midtown hotels and the other half are in downtown NYU lecture halls.) So after-parties seem to be where everyone winds up.
This one was the work of The New York Times social media marketer Soraya Darabi and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who invited a few people to the outdoor bar at the Standard. Guests "checked in" to mobile networking site Foursquare, their friends dropped by, and soon the place had snowballed to such an extent that the guests decided to give the bar staff a break and relocate to the notably less highbrow Hogs & Heifers Saloon across the street.
On the bright side, I'm expecting that some of the well-off dot-commers in attendance at the Standard, including billionaire Mark Cuban, probably tipped well.
However haphazard it may seem after-hours--Monday night, for example, featured an installment of the Ignite geek-talks series, a TechSet party at champagne bar Bubble Lounge, and the festival's official kickoff event hosted by YouTube and the New York Observer--Internet Week has an agenda.
"New media and Internet technology are very important to the city of New York, certainly important to the film, television, and advertising world," Katherine Oliver, commissioner of Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, said at a small opening event at the new, Google-powered New York visitors center in midtown. "All of our mediums are converging, and we're exploring ways that we can help these companies."
That's pretty clear at some of the events, like reviews site Yelp's party on Tuesday night, which aimed to showcase and promote local businesses in the Chelsea neighborhood, or the old-meets-new media partnership of YouTube and the Observer for the kickoff party, or Tuesday and Wednesday's convergence-themed Mediabistro Circus conference.
It's less evident, say, at 2 o'clock in the morning at Hogs & Heifers, where one of the primary objectives seemed to be convincing the people who'd flown in from San Francisco to get up and dance on the bar, as is customary in the establishment. (They didn't.)
The impromptu SXSWi party at the Driskill Hotel, one of the many sporadic parties that have been redefining the conference's nightlife scene.
(Credit: Brian Solis, via Flickr)AUSTIN, Texas--Over a lunch of fajitas at the Iron Cactus restaurant Sunday, one of my friends here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival shrugged and said, "I'm just not into the party scene this year. It's all a little weird."
I had to concur. SXSWi, after all, is known for its wild parties. But two nights in, I've clocked in a total of 20 minutes at them before opting to hang out elsewhere, and I'm not the only one.
There are obviously a ton of people going to this year's bashes--the line at the late-night PureVolume House was ridiculously long on Saturday night, I hear, and the Digg party was packed with fans eager to see Diggnation hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht do a live taping of the show. But many people I've talked to, especially veteran SXSWi-goers, say they're skipping many of the big, planned soirees.
There are a couple of reasons, I think. First there's the fact that budget cuts have meant that admission to a party no longer guarantees access to an open bar. That's enough to make some people just want to hang out somewhere random where it won't be as crowded.
Then there's the fact that SXSWi has gotten simply huge: last year's long lines led to impromptu offshoot parties, and the heavy influence of Twitter and the half dozen location-based networking tools people are using have meant it's easy to find out where your real friends are. On Saturday night, for example, it seems like everyone wound up at the downtown Driskill Hotel via word of mouth.
It's not just the bar scene. Conference attendees have been shaking up the whole panels-by-day, parties-by-night model with surprise cupcake giveaways, scavenger hunts, games of geek Bingo, and something called "SXSW Star Wars" that I don't quite understand. GirlGamer.com wired an RV with a Rock Band game and has been conducting mobile karaoke excursions. (You might've seen me with some friends on Friday night running up and down 6th St. trying to catch it and get onboard. We succeeded.) Honestly, it's sort of more fun and unpredictable this way.
But who knows? This may all change on Sunday night with Facebook's big annual bash.
The final Media Meshing party on Thursday night.
(Credit: Kate Miltner (flickr.com/photos/loggedhours))NEW YORK--I hereby insist that we all stop using the "Recession? What recession?" line, which seems to be used every time any company has thrown any moderately lavish party in the last two months. Not only is it overused, but I think folks have caught onto the fact that things have legitimately changed.
Here in New York, the last blowout launch party in the city was for T-Mobile's Android phone in October. Company holiday parties have been scaled back like mad, leaving fewer opportunities for that great New York sport known as party-crashing. But socialization hasn't stopped; it's just changed its tune.
There were a few events of note this week. Note the trend: no more open bars!
The Goods for Good charity event at the downtown City Winery.
(Credit: Goods for Good)• On Monday night, a relatively new nonprofit called Goods for Good held its annual benefit (read: everyone paid to get in) at a new downtown venue called the City Winery. (It is, in fact, Manhattan's only winery.) Goods for Good's mission is to gather unwanted corporate supplies en masse, from pens and notebooks to conference swag, and donate it to schools in developing countries.
It wasn't a tech event, per se, but there's a reason I'm including it here: The organizers said that they're not really on Silicon Valley's radar, but would like to be. At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year, we saw the emergence of SchwagginWagon, which encouraged conference attendees to donate the free stuff they got on the show floor and then didn't want. Goods for Good's angle is a little different, since they are interested in bulk supplies that would otherwise be thrown away and that could actually be put to use in a classroom. Check 'em out if you're interested.
• Blip.tv, a video-sharing platform that pulled in another round of financing just in time, threw its holiday party at a low-key downtown bar on Wednesday night. There was no open bar; company executives were surreptitiously handing out drink tokens instead. Within a couple of hours, the place was pretty much a mosh pit--even when the free drinks ran out.
• Prankster-slash-boulevardier Richard Blakeley, by day the video editor at Gawker Media, decided earlier this month to call off his series of monthly "Media Meshing" mixers. There's never been anything lavish about Media Meshing; it's a cash-bar event at a relatively divey bar called Sweet and Vicious. But Blakeley's rationale was that it's a bit gauche to be throwing a series of media parties while people continue to lose their jobs. Gawker itself has gone through rolling layoffs this season, sparing Blakeley but axing many of his cohorts.
So Thursday night was the final Media Meshing, at least for a while. There are persistent rumors that someone else with less recession sensitivity will take the reins. Or not. But in either case, the economic reality has clearly hit the after-hours scene.
"I haven't had a drink all night," one of Blakeley's Gawker colleagues told me, shaking his head. Knowing that such behavior was uncharacteristic, I asked him why. His reply was, "Because nobody's offered to buy me one yet."
DailyCandy crowds a SoHo bookstore for its book launch party on Tuesday night.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)NEW YORK--Tuesday night was the first time I'd been to a digital-media-related event at a bookstore, unless you count the time that Google threw a conference at the New York Public Library.
It was the launch party for girly e-newsletter DailyCandy's new book, The DailyCandy Lexicon: Words That Don't Exist But Should, at the McNally Robinson bookstore-cafe in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. Refreshments consisted of rum cocktails and, not surprisingly, candy.
Sample entry in the book: "textual frustration: a late-night text exchange that fails to result in old-fashioned lip-locking." DailyCandy staffers told me that about half the entries in the book are wholly original, and the other half are sourced from "Lexicon"-themed DailyCandy e-mails from over the years.
The party was mostly full of DailyCandy's own sundress-clad legions--the company employs about 60 people--and their friends. Fellow blog folk were few and far between, though a handful of people from nearby new-media companies like Flavorpill and Gawker showed up. So did Bob Pittman, the MTV executive turned AOL executive turned Pilot Group chief, whose investment firm owns a majority stake in DailyCandy. (Regrettably, Pittman left before I had a chance to ask him about his reported foray into the tequila business.)
I also didn't get a good answer to this question: Why is there such an impulse to turn a blog (or, in DailyCandy's case, an online newsletter) into a book?
This blogs-to-books trend seems to keep chugging along, despite the fact that none of their predecessors have been particularly successful. Gawker Media's Guide to Conquering All Media sold dismally, as schadenfreude-happy blogger Jeff Bercovici gleefully pointed out. Options, the book takeoff of the wildly popular Fake Steve Jobs blog, wasn't exactly a chart-topper, either. And now there are books either just out or on the way for blogs Stuff White People Like, I Can Has Cheezburger, Postcards From Yo Momma, Passive-Aggressive Notes, and a heap of others.
For a popular blogger, somewhat ironically, getting a "dead-tree tie-in" (to quote Bercovici) seems to be the way of knowing you've made it. But is that canceled out if it doesn't sell well?
DailyCandy, for what it's worth, has a much more longstanding brand than the likes of I Can Has Cheezburger, and it already has an earlier book (DailyCandy A to Z, published in 2006) under its belt. But the question still stands: why venture offline when the online brand seems to be doing just fine on its own? Will it really convert enough new readers to offset the cost and energy of book publishing? Is a "blog book" really just an ego boost?
The world may never know.
Las Vegas: Where pasty geeks stand out even more than they do otherwise.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)In the tech community, Las Vegas has somewhat of a bad rap. Sin City, after all, is home to so many large-scale industry trade shows (case in point: CES) that just mentioning the name is bound to induce a headache, and not in the I-got-plastered-and-lost-all-my-money sense.
The guys at Thrillist, the e-mail newsletter for 20- and 30-something dudes, may have changed that a bit. To celebrate their recent launch of a Vegas-centric newsletter (joining New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and soon Miami), as well as the fact that trendy airline JetBlue is one of their biggest sponsors, founders Ben Lerer and Adam Rich opted to fill up a party plane and let loose 150 New York digital folk into the land of casinos and showgirls. (Disclaimer: It wasn't a "press trip," per se, but I opted to pay for my ticket.)
Clearly, online ad recessions weren't anywhere on the radar--but in opting for heavy sponsorships rather than straight-up paying for everything, Thrillist was likely cutting some costs.
So what went down? Well, when you've got a crowd that includes representatives from Gawker, the Huffington Post, Coolhunting, the Onion, and a dozen dot-com start-ups, some scandal is bound to surface. Here's the G-rated version.
JUICIEST NEWS: Insiders tell us that Bob Pittman, the MTV co-founder and former AOL exec whose Pilot Group investment firm has a big stake in Thrillist, has a fun new project in the works. The media veteran is working on launching his own tequila label, thus putting him in the league of Jimmy Buffett. Guess that means Pilot Group's portfolio brands, which also include DailyCandy, Spongecell, and (to a lesser extent) Buzznet, won't need to hunt for liquor sponsors for their parties much longer.
Upon reaching the Thrillist pool party, Richard Blakeley immediately found some arm candy.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT: Videoblogging Star magazine columnist and rumored reality-show-star-to-be Julia Allison didn't bring her ubiquitous dog, Lilly, along for the trip. (But Lilly didn't stray too far from New York media-land: the white Shih Tzu was in the care of Fimoculous blogger Rex Sorgatz.)
BEST STYLE: Gawker Media producer and new-media boy-about-town Richard Blakeley showed up for Friday night's parties in a white suit that was one part Tom Wolfe, one part Colonel Sanders, and one part Pillsbury Doughboy. He then jumped into the pool and seemed to be having a blast until management asked him not to swim with clothes on.
It was the second time this year that Blakeley had been unceremoniously dismissed from a Vegas venue. Remember, he's been banned for life from CES.
BEST SPONSORSHIP: Like any good dot-com party, there were plenty of sponsors. But the one people will probably be remembering is over-the-counter mainstay Alka-Seltzer, which provided guests with ample quantities of its new "Wake-Up Call" hangover remedy.
NEW YORK--The 12th annual Webby Awards Gala on Tuesday night was, unsurprisingly, an evening devoted to all things Internet. "Without the Internet, someone like Tila Tequila would have five or six friends, max," host Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live quipped about the Web's ability to roll out cult micro-celebrities. "Without the Internet, only Ron Paul would know who Ron Paul is."
The quotable Colbert: 'Me, me, me, me, me.'
(Credit: Comedy Central)The glitzy ceremony, held at a Greek Revival building that once housed the New York Stock Exchange and New York Merchants Exchange and now houses the upscale Cipriani Wall Street event space, celebrated just that. In a pastiche of entertainment awards shows, a moderately impressive red carpet featured Internet-famous folk in the line of "Obama Girl" and Ben Huh, the twentysomething guy from Seattle who's responsible for "I Can Has Cheezburger, as well as a few "real" celebrities like rappers Ludacris and Will.I.Am, and music icon David Byrne.
It was a marathon ceremony. With two awards given in each of a seemingly endless number of categories--a judge-chosen Webby and a vote-chosen "People's Voice"--there were so many winners that, in Webby tradition, each acceptance speech was limited to five words. So here, in an attempt to sum up the awards show without taking three more hours to do so, here are the Meta-Webbys: the best of the best of the Web's acceptance speeches.
Most memorable acceptance speech: Browser start-up Flock picked up the judge-chosen Webby in the Social Networking category, and the company founder used his five words to say, "No s***, we beat Facebook!" (Facebook went on to win the People's Voice award in the same category.)
Most predictable acceptance speech: Geek hero Stephen Colbert, receiving the Person of the Year award for his portrayal of an egomaniacal blowhard pundit on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, went onstage as Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." played, and proclaimed, "Me, me, me, me, me!"
Corollary: Colbert's pop-culture influence was reflected in Facebook's acceptance of the People's Voice award in the Social Networking category--"One million strong for Colbert!"--as well as FactCheck.org's acceptance speech in the Politics category, "Where truthiness goes to die." FactCheck won another award later in the evening; the site's second acceptance speech was, "No, Obama's not a Muslim."
Most productive speech: "We're hiring, send us resumes" from ad agency Tribal DDB in one of the Interactive Advertising categories.
Worst play on words: Conde Nast's Style.com picked up an award in the Fashion category and used its five words to say, "Guess we're still in fashion."
Runner-up: VH1's Best Week Ever, in the Celebrity category, "Who let the blogs out?"
Most professionally appropriate speech: The American Bar Association's ABA Journal, in the Law category, "Had we lost, we'd sue."
Geekiest acceptance speech: A representative from ad firm Saatchi & Saatchi picked up an Interactive Advertising Webby for a Toyota Tacoma ad campaign, held up the Slinky-like metal trophy, and said, "My robot costume is complete."
Best onstage stunt: Picking up the People's Voice award in the Best Practices category, Digg marketing manager Aubrey Sabala chugged a glass of champagne and proclaimed, "Webbys 'dugg' for the free drinks."
Best use of two awards: The "Happiness Factory" ad campaign for Coca-Cola picked up two awards; the representative accepting the award from agency Shift Control Media used his first five words to say "Seth, your fly is open" and his second, an hour later, to say, "Still down, Seth, getting creepy."
The "And it sounds even better in your sulty Greek accent" award: Liberal news pundit and IADAS member Arianna Huffington, receiving the award in the Blog - Political category, proclaimed "President Obama sounds good, right?"
Least shocking surprise of the evening: In between rounds of awards, host Seth Meyers said he was going to show a video tribute to members of the Web community who had died in the past year, and showed part of Rick Astley's corny "Never Gonna Give You Up" video instead. Seth, Rickrolling is so over.
Most shocking surprise of the evening: In an interview on the red carpet, Ben Huh, the owner of kitty humor site I Can Has Cheezburger said that he's allergic to cats. Clad in a white suit and a massive hat shaped like a cheeseburger, I guess he also gets the Best Dressed nod.
NEW YORK--If there were a meter of Internet "fameballing," as Gawker likes to dub those fine folks who get famous on the Internet for something and keep getting more and more notorious even though most people aren't really sure why, it would've been flying off the charts on Sunday night.
The reason? Two of the tech-gossip circuit's most popular poster boys, dapper Mashable exec Pete Cashmore and eccentric Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick took the stage together in a game of Rock Band.
The performance of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps," with Cashmore on vocals and Lodwick on guitar, took place at an Internet Week New York party thrown by video studio Next New Networks and blog platform Tumblr. Emcee Justin Johnson, a video producer at Next New, had encouraged a band full of Rock Band newbies to amass for the evening's final performance. With some prodding, Lodwick and Cashmore took the stage along with Mashable blogger Alana Taylor and Tumblr user Maria Alegre.
They didn't exactly rock out, as the game classified the performance as a "fail." But hey, they looked great in the process--and it'll certainly provide some fodder for tech-industry gadflies who like to poke fun at Cashmore's suave-Brit attitude and Lodwick's hipster philosophizing.
At Barcade, the Wiimbledon finals. Facing the TV in hot combat are Dylan Romero (in white) and Corey Craig (in bumblebee hues). Romero emerged the winner.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)NEW YORK--This past weekend, the professional tennis world may have been focused on the antics of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. But in the burgeoning sport of Wii Tennis, all eyes were on Brooklyn on Saturday.
It was the second annual "Wiimbledon" tournament, which took over the cavernous Williamsburg bar known as Barcade--yes, it's filled with vintage arcade machines--and pitted 128 Wiimote aficionados against one another in a tournament centered on the wildly popular Nintendo console. The idea was concocted by two members of the local tech community, Thrillist editor Steve Bryant and Morris King publicist Lane Buschel, and this year's tournament happened to coincide conveniently with Internet Week New York.
But the crowd that Wiimbledon pulled in wasn't particularly Internet Week-ish. Rather, the folks who showed up were a decidedly Brooklyn set, some wearing T-shirts promoting their small wacky-culture blogs and Web video shows. Costumes were encouraged, which meant that the bar was filled with people in ironic-preppy seersucker, goofy tennis outfits, and undersize gym shorts with knee socks and sweatbands.
The campiness of the tournament was reflected in the selection of winners: the Best Costume award went to Adam Samtur, who showed up dressed as the "Professor Chaos" character from South Park in a cape and an aluminum foil hat; the Most Dangerous Player award went to BushLeague.tv employee Matty Hirsch, who showed up with an entourage dressed up as Cobra Kai from The Karate Kid; runner-up Corey Craig played in a black-and-gold ensemble that looked like something off a basketball court in the late 1970s.
The winner, however, was slightly more low-key. Dylan Romero, who took home a boatload of pimped-out tennis equipment and Nintendo games, was dressed head to toe in white--which is what the average snooty tennis club mandates, anyway.
The view from Hearst Tower at Founders Club.
(Credit: Marc le Clef)NEW YORK--Thus far, my experience with the Internet Week New York party scene has one of dichotomies. On Wednesday I went from a lively dance floor to a room full of awkward male Kevin Rose groupies. Then, on Thursday, the social agenda involved one event that was impeccably classy and one that was so consciously puerile that it could only have come from CollegeHumor.
One more inch and this photo of America's Hottest College Girl (left) would be NSFW. She was honored at a party that coincided with but was not affiliated with Internet Week New York.
(Credit: Amandalyn Ferri)The earlier gathering was the latest installment of Founders Club, a series of quarterly events that pull together a bunch of local A-list entrepreneurs with the VCs who fund them and the big-media folks who want to get to know them. The Founders Club circuit kicked off last winter, fueled by the contacts lists of popular local digerati like Blip.tv's Dina Kaplan and IAC exec Jason Rapp. While its original digs in an investor's penthouse were nothing to scoff at, the events have grown more upscale in venue, this time taking over a 44th-floor space at the tower occupied by publishing stalwart Hearst.
For most, it was an escape from the Internet Week fray and a chance to catch up over an organic vodka-on-the-rocks with the likes of Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, News Corp. M&A exec Jeremy Phillips, digital-politics guru Andrew Rasiej, and Greycroft Partners' Alan Patricof. A few out-of-towners were in attendance too, like Digg founder Kevin Rose, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Facebook/Napster/other-stuff-in-the-Valley veteran Sean Parker.
The crowd at the Founders Club event on Thursday night.
(Credit: Marc le Clef)The most prolific topic of conversation: the fantastic views of Central Park and midtown Manhattan, including The New York Times building further south on Eighth Avenue--two arguably unstable exhibitionists had attempted to scale the outside of the building earlier in the day.
But the open bar and live jazz trio at Founders Club tapered off around 9 p.m., and several taxis full of fun-loving partygoers headed downtown to the flashy, chandelier-adorned Flatiron District nightclub known as Room Service, where the IAC-owned CollegeHumor was having its annual Hottest College Girl in America Party. The 2008 honoree was 19-year-old Alison from the University of Wisconsin, who eventually wants to be a high school English teacher. (Note to Alison: Those photos on CollegeHumor might make the average American high school think twice when you submit your resume.)
You know, it's kind of unfortunate that CollegeHumor co-founders Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen hadn't scheduled their party for the previous night. I would've paid a few dollars to see Alison and her barely-clothed friends transported to the Digg party; maybe then those Digg fanboys would've diverted their attention to something other than their lionized Kevin Rose.
Revelers at Thrillist's 'Information Superparty'
(Credit: Nick McGlynn/RandomNightOut.com)NEW YORK--Predatory women of the Samantha Jones variety would've done well to hightail it to Brooklyn on Wednesday night. Social news site Digg took over the massive Studio B nightclub for an Internet Week New York party and live taping of the Diggnation video podcast, and the place was filled almost exclusively with men under the age of 30. There were more getting turned away at the door. Ladies, I'm sure they could've used some hugs.
It was an event that the Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer described as "two thousand sweaty dudes in a room in (the Brooklyn neighborhood) Williamsburg, paying $6 a beer to watch Digg founder Kevin Rose and sidekick Alex Albrecht perform 'Diggnation' live." There were also a few announcements: sister company Revision3 Networks has picked up the popular video show Epic Fu, and New York is officially Digg's biggest market with over a million visitors a month.
(Side note: Maybe that's why it's so infamously hard to find single men in New York. They're all sitting at their laptops hitting the Digg button on every story about the iPhone they can find.)
At the Digg party, founder Kevin Rose (right) hangs with buddy and wine guru Gary Vaynerchuk.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)Kevin Rose was also completely hounded by fanboys with cameras after the Diggnation taping, something usually reserved for female tech celebrities. He retreated to a back room where he was spotted among digerati buddies like wine guru Gary Vaynerchuk, who was reportedly behind the presence of several bottles of Diggnation-branded wine.
Earlier that night I'd stopped by the Hiro Ballroom nightclub for another Internet Week soiree thrown by newsletter start-up Thrillist, which has the kind of wild-party reputation in New York that Yelp does in San Francisco. There was a '90s-vintage "Information Superparty" theme, which meant that everyone got to bounce around to "Gettin' Jiggy With It" and "Steal My Sunshine" while a VJ mixed visual accompaniments of Lewinsky-era Bill Clinton and Web 1.0 AOL IM conversations. (There's a backstory to the AOL homages: Thrillist co-founder Ben Lerer is the son of former AOL exec Ken Lerer, and the start-up is part of the Pilot Group, the investment firm run by ex-AOL president Bob Pittman.)
While it's geared toward the "dude" market that Digg has captured, Thrillist managed to pack its party with a far more mixed-gender crowd. Good show, fellows, good show.
