It was a good, chill day. There are a LOT of people here. They have started marking certain panels as “popular” so you at least know you have to get somewhere really early to get a seat.

I started off with “Simple Ways to Massively Increase Your Content” with a social media manager for Oracle and the social media manager for NBC Sports. While I do not work with anything on the scale of the Super Bowl or the Olympics, there are definitely things to learn from giant corporations. Something that stuck out is the egalitarianism of social media. Yes, NBC has a lot broader reach and the benefit of being a television network, but they use the SAME tools we do. They use Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook. They make “in the moment” videos. They take fan generated content and re-post it. They threw out the stat that in 2008 there were 1 trillion indexed web pages on Google and now, in 2015, there 67 trillion. Massive growth that is not stopping, and everyone from Susan Gibson to NBC Sports needs to figure out how leverage these tools to make a noise and find their community and interact with it.

Next panel was “The Emperor’s New Wearables,” simply because I was interested in it. One panelist was from Intel, which – did you know Intel was making smart watches now? Me neither. The panel was mostly discussing the need to make a watch that looked good first and was a smart watch second, as many people don’t want to wear a clunky looking sci fi watch on their wrist. Fashion over function, I guess? Also the potential for usefulness is growing…imagine wearing a Jawbone on your wrist and it knows when you are waking up so it adjusts the thermostat in your house before you are even awake. Stuff like that is the practical immediate future of wearables.

After that was Paola Antonelli, a Senior Curator at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) gave the keynote. Sometimes it’s good to just sit and have someone blow your mind about things you don’t know anything about, and that is what she did. She talked about Quantum Design…like quantum physics…but design. Multiple realities and experiences happening at the same time. Ambivalence and ambiguity in design that actually sharpen our interactions as humans. Biology making art. Check out this video she showed us about artists that spent time researching the algorithms of silkworms…how they build. Then the artist designed a framework for the silkworms and set them loose, and they built something. Amazing. Key point…some artists are great artists. Some artists are not great artists but they are great connectors…that lead us to the truly great artists. A place for everyone.

Next up was Storytelling Superheroes with Maria Hinojosa from NPR’s Latino USA and PBS’s America By the Numbers…joined by Alison Bechdel (artist, author) and Joshua Oppenheimer (filmmaker). Sometimes these discussion panels take a rather loose format and that’s what this was…some discussion about how stories come out in different formats and the merits of each. Alison is the creator of The Bechdel Test which is an interesting thing to think about when you consume media. More info here, but basically a film/show/book/etc. passes The Bechdel Test if there are two women characters who have a conversation and that conversation is not about a man. You would be surprised how few movies pass that test.

Last up was “The Art of Social Media” with Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick. Guy is one of those social media phenoms and I hadn’t seen him speak before. He was very engaging and so was Peg, though I didn’t really learn anything new here. Don’t be fake, don’t have someone else do your social media, don’t buy followers, yadda yadda. Stuff I have been preaching for years and enact via Social Thinkery. Still cool to hear them talk, though.

A successful first day! More on the horizon.