SXSW 2 - Identity Issues

Greetings from rainy Austin Texas, where we've just finished Day 2 of the South by Southwest Interactive festival (and Night 2 of partying/networking is soon to begin).

Twitter continues to be the service that has everyone buzzing - literally in my case. I had to turn it off on my mobile phone as I was getting 'twittered' every 30 seconds with posts from strangers telling me where they were having breakfast. But Twitter neatly illustrates two of the emerging themes of SXSW, the myriad of ways that people are using online tools to 'form and manage their identity' and the dramatic increase in how much of their lives people (and especially young people) are willing and even happy to expose online.

All fascinating stuff, but what of books? Have they had a look in? Well the blogs to books phenomenon got a panel of its own, featuring Tucker Max who advised the wannabe blookers in the audience that 'nothing is more important than good content' but also that 'nothing is more important than driving traffic to your site'. At Penguin we've already published a couple of bloggers, and more will follow this year and presumably in future years as writing a successful blog demonstrates both the ability to write engagingly and to connect with an audience.

There was also a fascinating panel on fictional bloggers, featuring Odin Soli who blogged for three years wrote as a young woman until the fiction he created was revealed to the not inconsiderable audience that had developed for the soap opera that was Layne Johnson's online diary. The panelists did point out the dangers and pitfalls of creating online fictional characters, and generally we encourage authors to blog as themselves, rather than as their characters, but fanfiction does suggest that there are a good number of readers and writers who want an ongoing relationship with a character rather than an author. Another question of identity management I guess...

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher