So now we’ve got a mission statement for SXSWi 2008. Or at least I do. What are the supporting themes that are going to shape and direct this media adventure? From the hip: Personality and Participation.

The first formal panel I attended on Saturday was “Quit you day job and start video blogging” chaired by Next New Network’s Tim Shey. The panel featured Shey along with a host of video blogging pioneers. A couple of interesting points worth noting. First off, all of these people were talent and talented, knew how to act in front of a camera and crucially had something more interesting to say than the “fed-the-cat” stories that many blogs consist of. Whether the distribution medium is network tv or online vod, talent is talent. You simply can’t succeed without it.

The second more interesting point taken from this panel was I think mentioned by an audience member (note, the audiences at SXSW are the best in the business, but more of that later). The current state of play for online video producers and aggregators was likened to that of CNN and the cable networks in the US thirty years ago. The cable nets were a new game in town, run by young entrepreneurs who could think quicker move faster and than their counterparts in CBS, ABC and NBC. And crucially the FCC had limited jurisdiction meaning that there were virtually no limits on what the programmers could do. They utterly changed the rules of TV. Well guess what, that’s what it looks like to those working at the likes of Next New Networks. As the barriers to entry for online video networks lower, the truly creative are taking over from the truly geeky. The talent is spending more time on the shows and not worrying about html, bandwidth and hosting. And the likes of NNN are putting in place a layer of professionalism to bring in the revenue and quality control.

One question that has only occurred to me since SXSWi relates to the level of audience participation these new video producers are bringing to their shows. It would seem that they should be ahead of their network cousins. Are they? The subject simply didn’t come up.

That the old networks still don’t understand their audience isn’t even a question. Exhibit A: the text and phone scandals that hit BBC hard and brought ITV to its knees in 2007. Had these institution a clue about how to communicate with their viewers the voting rip-offs simply couldn’t and wouldn’t have happened. But back to Texas…

I suspect participation has been a theme of SXSWi since its inception; come on, ‘i’ is for interactive. But let’s take a quick look at what participation meant in 2008. Every single one of the tech companies that I’ve highlighted here have mass audience participation as either key USP or a key functionality component.

I’ve already mentioned audience participation. During every single keynote, panel and talk there existed back channel conversations involving the live audience. These conversations were formally or informally hosted by the likes of Meebo, Twitter and Utterz. The more astute chairpersons paid attention to these back channels and directed conversations accordingly, props here to Robert Scoble and David Dylan Thomas amongst others. The less astute and plain bad (I’m thinking Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg here) simply lost control to a collective intelligence in the auditorium that was simply too powerful for them to handle. It was amazing to be in one of these auditoriums, filled with maybe 2,000 normally sedate tech people, and be part of a collaborative revolt against the person meant to be directing proceedings.

If this behaviour is going to happen anywhere on Earth it’s going to be SXSWi, where thousands of the earliest adopters are gathered trying to out-geek each other. But there will come a point when these technologies and behaviours go critical and spread to the outside world. This was the participatory theme of 2008.

SXSWi finished a fortnight ago. Over those two weeks I’ve traveled home, read what others have had to say on the event and tried to pull some of those thoughts together. No apologies for the delay, there have been some advantages to waiting this long before writing about SXSWi.

Below I’ve attempted to distil and bottle my version of the SXSWi elixir. Maybe it’s easier to start off with what for me SXSWi is not. It’s not a tech conference in the manner of E3. It’s not a West Coast think-in á-la TED and it certainly isn’t an economically driven cock-fest such as Davos. It shares common factors with all of the above, as well as some PodCamp, BarCamp and any other kind of tech/media trade camp show that you may care to list. It takes elements from all of these, cross pollinates and spits them back out into one very social and sociable long weekend in Texas’ capital. What struck me most of all was the insights into current media culture on display. By that I mean media in its truest form, as extensions of our senses, not the definition of media limited to depressing discussions on the state of our commercial mass media such as network TV and the newspaper industry. I was so taken with this big picture look at media that since the event I’ve dusted off “Understanding Media” and gone back to McLuhan to structure some of my thoughts.

Of course I’ll put an asterisk against the opening words here. This is my take, there are a thousands others many of which will show deeper and more informed insight than myself.

It is human nature to look for patterns and assign themes where only true randomness exists. I’m most definitely guilty of that below, but I think it still worth while to look for common threads across the five days of SXSWi. Reading the discourse coming back on the event online one concept is calling out over all others. With the year that’s in it let’s call it “the audacity and urgency of intimacy”

Through posts on the themes, technologies, events and questions of SXSWi I intend to show that the out of control freight train that is new media is pushing social communication into truly new places and there isn’t anybody out there who really knows where it will ultimately take us too. Not Mark Zuckerberg, not Eric Schmidt and certainly not myself.

So let’s take my newly minted paraphrase backwards. The Intimacy comes from the new level of connectivity society is embracing, particularly those under 20 and living in the West. We’re connecting and sharing our lives at a base level never before done through a mass medium. This is urgent in that we’re pushing these connections right now and regardless of consequence. The teens of today may be in their thirties before the ramifications of this new connectedness comes homes to roost (that sounds like a warning, it isn’t, I’m optimistic for this Bebo generation). Finally the audacity. Anyone who has heard Mark Zukerberg speak his enthusiasm for Facebook’s mission can’t help but describe him using the adjective ‘audacious’. He believes he’s fueling a media revolution not seen since the dawn of the modern newspaper. And he thinks that despite the very public pushback the likes of Facebook’s Beacon are getting. Zukerberg may well be right though.