Highlights of last day or two at SxSW

Yesterday, I went to hear Larry Lessig talk on campaign finance reform and how it’s relevant to everyone, no matter what your political afflilitation or pet peeve. The message was that the sub-standard handling of climate change, the financial crisis, Iraq, and any other issue, is a symptom of a government implicitly beholden to the lobbyists who finance re-election campaigns.

There seems to be a zeitgeist emerging from the Obama campaign of the people reclaiming the government for themselves. His election promises of more transparency and accountability definitely resonated with a lot of people; hopefully the much bigger challenge of campaign reform will be able to ride the wave.

Later that evening there was an interesting moment at the Digg party. It turned out that a queue of 150-200 people were all waiting to get an autograph from (Digg-founder) Kevin Rose. Meanwhile, Lessig walked in and no-one batted an eyelid. Kevin’s a smart guy and everything, and Digg is a great creation with legions of fanatical users, but there’s something wrong when a guy who has worked selflessly for copyright and campaign reform for more than a decade gets less respect than the poster-boy of the current fad.

On the bright side, I just saw an absolute flash of genius here. A company called Jungle Disk, instead of printing and distributing shiny flyers like everyone else, simply put their URL on a small piece of plain printer paper. They then stapled the paper to a $1 bill and threw handfuls of them off a balcony onto people emerging from the Nate Silver keynote.

Companies are giving away stacks of flyers here – the table I’m at now is entirely covered to a depth of 2 or 3 thick, matte card adverts. The problem is that people just take them and throw them away immediately without even looking what they are – there are special recycling bins just for this purpose. So to see a crowd of people actually rushing to grab flyers, rather than dispose of them, shows they really hit something there…