Marketing and Nerdom collide in glorious fashion this week in Austin, Texas, site of the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. And because Red Square lives at the center of both worlds, we’re there.

Digital wunderkinds, Karen Sullivan and Jeff Whitlock, are on hand to absorb as much knowledge as humanly possible. They’ll be tweeting, facebooking, blogging and flickr’ing the whole deal, so stay tuned. If you want to catch up with them in Austin, hit ‘em up.

Also, a small aside: We are quite humbled and excited to be on the list of finalists in the interactive awards show for our BCBS work. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

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Our digital work for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama has been selected as a finalist for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Awards. Please excuse the serious tone with which that intro sentence was written, but this is some seriously awesome recognition. SXSW is the digital/media/tech equivalent of the Super Bowl. The awards “uncover the best new digital work, from websites to web applications and beyond, while celebrating those who are building tomorrow’s online trends.” Just to be considered a part of this movement is pretty amazing.

Our “Be You” social sharing site was selected as one of five finalists in the business category. Awards are given in an assortment of categories, and notable nominees include (watch your feet—we’re droppin’ names) Groupon, The Social Network, US Census, Unilever, Jay-Z, the Pepsi Refresh Project and Conan O’Brien.

We’ll be deploying to Austin in March to absorb as much knowledge and inspiration as our brains can handle, and hopefully we’ll bring back some well-deserved hardware for our great clients at BCBS.

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Recently Damian Kulash, lead singer of OK Go, wrote a piece in the WSJ entitled The New Rock-Star Paradigm. The article is an astute summation of the present state of the music business, specifically how the business has changed in the face of maturing digital communications. The guy isn’t your typical rock group frontman. (more…)

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Finally a reason I might buy an iPad: Flipboard. Billed as your own personalized, social magazine, it gathers all of the social web content you care about into a single, pretty slick-looking application. Here’s an overview video.

Kind of a creepy video, though. Particularly when the half-asleep hipster dude tells me that Flipboard knows who my friends are. Reminds me of this.

You can download the app here. (P.S. Thanks to the nice people at Flipboard for sending me some press pics.)

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A friend emailed me about an article entitled “Closing the Digital Frontier” in The Atlantic and wanted to get my reaction. Here’s what I wrote back:

I still believe the web is the modern day Wild Wild West; in fact, I call it that around the agency. What we’re seeing now is the adolescence of the Information Age. An equally awkward time for those who create content and those who sell it.

Here’s my take, from a media standpoint: the media (newspapers, magazines and to a much lesser extent broadcast) didn’t take the web seriously enough in its infancy. It was something “they” didn’t understand, and it was thus cast off. To be nice they called it “added value” to their offerings. Content was free, because that was fair market value for online content. Now they are trying to move to charge advertisers more and creating paid content sections for visitors.

The real problem is: how do you shift from an environment in which the content is free to one in which you charge for it?

Meanwhile, companies like Apple and Google were visionary enough to understand the coming seismic shift in consumer behavior. Apple and Google have figured out how to monetize the web, and it isn’t magical–they each basically framed a conduit to corral and distribute the massive amounts of content in an orderly fashion. This creates value. If I want a song, I go to iTunes. If I want anything else, I go to Google.

The move from free to fee is going to be interesting to watch. I suppose you could call the last fifteen years or so “product sampling,” but that’s probably a stretch.

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