I am in Austin, Texas at the SXSW Music, Film and Interactive Festival this weekend attending panels and moderating one of my own. I had a chance to sit in at a panel about "App-vertising." The premise of the panel was the large and increasing amount.

At the keynote today at SXSW , Microsoft 's Danah Boyd placed a lot of emphasis on Google's privacy "fails" with Buzz. The topic of the keynote was the relationship between privacy and publicity, and she certainly covered much more territory and social media in general, but it was interesting that Google Buzz was essentially the first thing talked about. A lot of people will love Buzz, and will use it, but that doesn 't mean Google didn 't mess up in terms of privacy,

[Just as a reminder: everything below is my personal opinion. I haven't sent it to anyone else at Google for a review, etc.] Valleywag used a recent podcast I did as material for two points in Six Delusions of Google's Arrogant Leaders . The two assertions that used my comments as material were "Google's wealth means Google 'gets it'" and "Google must sacrifice user privacy to grow." Valleywag has either misinterpreted what I said,

This weekend, thousands of WordPress users and developers are among the people attending the South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive conference in Austin, TX. To celebrate this, we’re throwing a WordPress BBQ at SxSW tomorrow so that there’s a place for us all to get together.

If you’re a WordPress fan attending SxSW (or you just happen to be in Austin), please join us for lunch after 12pm* tomorrow, Sunday March 14. We’re getting the BBQ from Rudy’s and the red velvet cake from Central Market. Yum! Come, eat, talk about the cool things you’re doing with WordPress, let us know what we can do better, gossip about Mark Jaquith’s new hairstyle, whatever. Think of it like a WordCamp without presentations. I’ll be there, lead developers Mark Jaquith and Ryan Boren will be there, core contributors will be there, plugin and theme developers will be there, and basically all the most intelligent and attractive people from SxSW will be there. You should be, too!

Location: Conjunctured coworking space, 1309 East 7th St., Austin, TX 78702. From the convention center, walk up to 7th Street, hang a right, and walk until you get to #1309. If you’re tired of walking, taking a cab is a decent option. Note that this is on the other side of I-35 from the convention center.

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* We’ll keep serving until we run out of food, so probably until around 2 or 3? We’ll have a hundred pounds of bbq meat, a bunch of sides, and dozens of gallons of iced tea, so come hungry.

I'm sitting here in the exhibit hall at SXSW getting ready for the opening remarks keynote, which is getting ready to get underway. It will be delivered by Danah Boyd of Microsoft Research Her SXSW Bio: One of the world's foremost authorities on social networks, boyd works at Microsoft Research New England and also serves as a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Note: Please forgive he typos that are sure to occur in this liveblog.

The search never stops! Here are the search industry headlines of the week, brought to you by Pandia. China warns Google to obey or 'pay the consequences' Web censorship battle rumbles on (techcrunch March 2010) SEO Professional FireFox Toolbar: Tracks Yahoo! Backlinks SEO stats as the page loads, stats tracking, on-page diagnostics help, etc (SE Journal March 12 2010) Can Google Stay In China And Still Save Face?

After a long morning of travel and SXSW preperation, WebProNews popped in on an interesting talk from writer and tech watcher, Kaiser Kuo (here's his bio ) about what might happen with the whole Google/China situation, which has essentially remained at a stand-still for the past two months, since Google made its famous announcement about a "new approach to China." Kuo said right out that he doesn't have the "inside dope" about what's happening within Google,

SMX is arranging expos and conferences for experienced search engine marketers in Seattle on June 8 and 9 and in London on May 17 and 18. The idea is to have knowledgeable practitioners meet to discuss search engine marketing without having to go through all the basics. In the audience you will find advertising budget holders, in-house search marketers, brand managers, paid search advertising planners and buyers,

The AltSearchEngines site on alternative search engines will no longer be updated. The editor, Charles Knight, managed to cover some 4000 search engines in its three year long life. To Federated Search Blog he says that AltSearchEngines had reached a plateau: "There are only so many people interested in a daily dose of niche search engines. Not only that, but after 4,000 posts, I really felt that we had found most of them.

So here I sit in the DFW airport hanging out with David Berkowitz waiting for my connection to Austin. What better way to spend that 45 min than to write a helpful blog post?  A big part of my "mission" for SXSXi is to create content after all. I have several other goals like networking (reconnecting and especially new contacts), competitive research, recruiting and potential client prospecting. But content marketing is our bread and butter.