SXSW Health Track: One Day to Submit Your Panel

I’m honored to have been asked to serve on the Advisory Board for the 2011 SXSW Interactive Festival’s one-day health track.

From everything I’ve heard, the social health unconference in March was fantastic, which is what led Hugh and the SXSW gang to go for the full-day health track.

My problem with SXSW is the timing; it’s always around the first week of Minnesota’s high school basketball tournament, and I have a son who will be lacing ’em up for the Austin Packers for the next three years. Depending on the date for the health track, I may be able to attend, but it’s questionable.

Which makes me, I guess, a good Advisory Board member, since people serving in that role can’t be speakers or panelists.

So…I look forward to seeing lots of good panel proposals, and helping in some way to shape the event. And even if I can’t attend, I’ll definitely be following the Twitter conversation.

I’m keeping this post brief because I want to get it out as quickly as I can: the submission process for panels ends tomorrow, July 9.

Go to the SXSW Panel Picker to submit your panel today.

And I DO mean TODAY!

Or tomorrow.

No later.

Thanks to Reed Smith and Tom Stitt, co-chairs for the health track, for nominating me to the Advisory Board.

Why I’m glad I’m not at SXSW

Watching some of the tweet stream, I’m sure I would have really enjoyed being in Texas for South by Southwest. But I’ve had a lot of fun this week watching basketball, including Wednesday night when my son Joe, a high school freshman, got his first game action with the varsity team in the first round of the Section 1AAA Minnesota High School Basketball Tournament. Here’s a snippet of his play:

Joe isn’t the guy who nailed the three in that sequence; that was Connor Gunderson, a senior who scored his 1,000th career point in the last regular season game.

Joe only has 998 to go.

Tonight the Austin Packers, seeded third, travel to second-seeded New Prague for the semifinal. I would definitely feel badly if I were missing it. I’ll have to rely on @EdBennett and others for the #SXSW and #SXSWi scoop.

Update: The Packers made a valiant run at it, but came up just short after falling behind by about 20. They cut it to 5 but couldn’t quite make it.

Is SxSW Swamping TwitPic? Or is TwitPic just Unreliable?

Until yesterday, my experience with TwitPic had been quite good. If you’re not familiar, TwitPic is a utility that lets you upload pictures from your iPhone (if it’s available for Blackberry, please let me know) to Twitter using clients like Twitterific or Twittelator, and publish a link to the photo as part of your tweet. TwitPic was profiled in Twitter 121.

For example, it worked well on Saturday when I attended the Austin boys’ section semifinal basketball game at Rochester’s Mayo Civic Center, and uploaded a picture just after the game started. Here was my tweet:

picture-10

And the photo was just as I had expected.

But yesterday I experienced something, as Monty Python would say, “completely different.”

I snapped a picture of a slide from presentation I was watching, and uploaded it with this tweet:

picture-6

Let’s just say the photo my Tweeps saw when they clicked the link wasn’t what I had uploaded.  (The second time it worked.)

A similar thing happened a bit later when I took a photo of a a former colleague during our dinner:

picture-7

Here was the photo that showed up:

picture-8

That picture doesn’t look anything like Chris! And it gives the impression that he was having digestive difficulties. 😉

I’ve heard that all the iPhone users at South by Southwest (SxSW) 2009 have overwhelmed the network capacity at the location with their TweetingDo you think this might have had anything to do with the TwitPic failures I experienced yesterday? That maybe lots of pictures were being uploaded at once, and somehow the links got switched? Have you had any problems with TwitPic?

I know that based on this experience I’m going to be extremely reluctant to upload work-related photos to TwitPic, until I find out what caused this problem and what has been done to resolve it. If you can’t trust that the photo you’re uploading will be the one linked in your Tweet, how can you use TwitPic?

TwitPic = FAIL