So at the risk of being redundant, here are some tips that you may or may not have heard already.

1. I usually to say forget about the schedule. What I mean by that is don’t worry about making it to all the panels or all the parties. Just go with the flow, you’ll have more fun that way.
2. But a certain amount of scheduling can be good. For example: If you really want to spend some quality time with people, put a meal on the books. Schedule time to meet up, sit down, and eat something.  This way you will actually get to spend time with the people you want to see. I will be holding Ohours at SXSW for this very reason!
3. If this is your first time going to SXSW If you are going to SXSW, you should fully expect to be worn out when it’s over. Make sure to drink lots of water and take extra vitamin C, to prevent getting really sick when you return home.
4. You will walk….a lot! Everything is usually close to the convention center, but that’s going to mean a lot of walking for you. Be sure you are comfortable with what you are wearing.
5. Enjoy the serendipity. South by can be a very serendipitous place. Crazy things happen, you end up in awesome conversations with amazing people, and when this happens just enjoy it and stay in the moment. You don’t need to take pictures and tweet while this is happening (let’s be serious, you can tweet about it later)
6. Don’t forget to eat! It sounds silly, but with everything going on it can be very easy to forget to eat. My advice, schedule meetings around meals. This insures that you give yourself a brake, and get a chance to eat.

A little tip on what to eat at SXSW from your friendly vegan friend, Sarah Cooley (hey, that’s me!).

Remember to eat your veggies! At SXSW, there will be tons of free BBQ to partake of (in fact MapQuest will have a bus trip to Salt Lick BBQ) So I understand that it might be more difficult to fit veggies into your meals. But do your best to try and eat some greens at least once during the day. Trust me, you will feel better because of it!

I’m thinking of putting together a small casual vegan meetup at SXSW (vegans and non vegans welcome). If you would be interested, leave me a comment below. If there is enough interest we can figure out a time and day in Austin that works for everyone.

If you want to meet up in Austin, feel free to sign up for one of my Ohours slots. Or you can try more traditional methods of tracking people down at SXSW, but that usually doesn’t work.

To qualify for press credentials, you must:

• be affiliated with a nationally or regionally recognized media outlet and;
• hold an editorial title or;
• hold a position as an industry analyst

To obtain your press credentials at the show, you must present either:

• a business card, or
• copy of masthead show name and title, or
• letter from editor or publisher assigning bearer to cover the event

You do not qualify for press credentials if you are:

• a publisher
• a sales rep
• any other non-editorial personnel

To request a press pass, please email events@mediabistro.com, and include: name, title, publication, URL, and full contact information.

The plan was pretty simple: Find a company that needed help during SXSWi and work for them for the week in exchange for a conference pass and accommodations. It was a plan that I had seen many other people execute before so it didn’t seem to difficult to me. However, over the last few months it has become very clear that this year we are dealing with SXSW recession edition.  More and more, companies didn’t have the same big budget for conferences that they once had. They were going to try and get by with as little as possible. And in this economy who can blame them.

But I still have a problem: I have a plane ticket to Austin and no conference pass. I am planning on shooting a few episodes of my show What’s it all about: Web 2.0 at SXSW but this all requires a sponsorship that I don’t have. So, I have come up with a new SXSW recession plan. I will be there for all 5 days of the conference. So I am looking for 5 Companies who would like me to represent their brand during the conference. (This idea was totally inspired by Girl in your shirt and I Wear Your Shirt)

The plan is simple: Each day I will wear the shirt of a different company. On your day I will be required to wear your shirt all around the expo and to any events I attend that evening. You would send me a company shirt along with something about your company that I would tell people every time they asked me about my shirt. I will be your active brand ambassador for the day. In addition to talking about your company, I will wear the shirt on my show that will be seen by many more people than just people physically in Austin attending SXSW. Your company will be the sponsor of that episode. All of this would only cost you $150 for the day! Seriously, I know you have $150 in your budget to sponsor a totally deserving blogger to go to SXSW!

UPDATE: In addition to having me wear your shirt and talk about the company for a day, and a sponsor spot on What’s it all about: Web 2.0, I will blog about your company before SXSW in a post about my SXSW Sponsors, and a post after SXSW, thanking my sponsors with links to all the photos, and videos taken of me during the conference. You will also get ad space on Random Sarah for the month of March. (125×125)

Why should your company do this? That’s easy! Because it would cost you a lot less than paying for my whole pass and hotel stay, and you get a up and comming girl in the world of social media to talk about your company all day. This is especially great for companies that may not have the budget to attend SXSWi this year. I will attend for you!

If you are looking for more information about me you can check out the rest of Random Sarah which is my personal blog, including my old video blogs. Check me out on Twitter and Tumblr. And check out my old episodes of What’s it all about: Web 2.0

Please contact me if your company is interested in me being your brand ambassador for the day.

Related links:

Want a brand ambassador for SXSW, meet Sarah (Sanford Dickert, Social Engineer)

Today I really want to talk about something that Fred Wilson said during his presentation on truth. He predicted that Harvard university will not exist in 50 years, that everyone would be able to create their own form of education. This is something that is very interesting to me, and I sincerely hope it comes true.

A few days ago I re-blogged this video on my tumblr titled: Learning to Change-Changing to Learn this video was produced by the Consortium for School Networking. Founded in 1992, the Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) is the premier professional association for school district technology leaders. CoSN is committed to providing the leadership, community and advocacy tools essential for the success of these leaders. Their mission is to empower K-12 school district technology leaders to use technology strategically to improve teaching and learning.

Some of my favorite points from the video:

Education was ranked the lowest industry in IT intensiveness!

Kids are rich content developers!

Every turned off device is potentially a turned off child!

We live in a “nearly now” space.

We have a classroom system when we could have a community system!

This is the main reason that when I have children, no matter where the education system is, they will be home schooled. Having been in the education system for the majority of my life so far I can tell you that it is useless. I have learned more by asking questions, talking to the right people, and attending events like SocComm, than I have in entire semesters of higher education.

Social tools have the power to teach us anything we want to learn. The Internet bridges the physical gap between me and a school in France. I should be able to take classes whereever I am from the BEST Professors in the world! This future, and the future that we are all building for the next generation is what makes me wake up in the morning.

I know that I am a part of an industry that will shake every other industry as we know it – from Publishing to Government, from Education to Hospitality. Everything is about to change and I have NO IDEA where the chips will fall and when the walls will crumble, but I can’t wait!

Related articles by Zemanta

• To my friend Jon Arnold: SocComm is right for these times (pulverblog.pulver.com)
• SocComm Videos – Febuary 10th, 2009 NY (webmetricsguru.com)
• Attending SocComm and Search Engine Strategies NYC 09 (list-your-blog.com)
• Pulver’s SocComm. Feb 10, NYC (saunderslog.com)
• Shelly Palmer: Why You Need to Translate Value Into Wealth (prevential.com)
• Why Obama Can’t Ignore Education Tech (businessweek.com)
• Is Traditional School a ‘Must’? (chris.pirillo.com)

Mass media is probably what we all deal with the most. You read it, you watch it, you listen to it.

(via wikipedia)

Mass media is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. It was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, although mass media (like books and manuscripts) were present centuries before the term became common. The term public media has a similar meaning: it is the sum of the public mass distributors of news and entertainment across media such as newspapers, television, radio, broadcasting, which may require union membership in some large markets such as Newspaper Guild, AFTRA, & text publishers. The concept of mass media is complicated in some internet media as now individuals have a means of potential exposure on a scale comparable to what was previously restricted to select group of mass media producers. These internet media may include:

• Blogs
• Message boards
• Personal web pages
• Podcasts
• Television
• Video hosting services

The communications audience has been viewed by some commentators as forming a mass society with special characteristics, notably atomization or lack of social connections, which render it especially susceptible to the influence of modern mass-media techniques such as advertising and propaganda. The term “MSM” or “mainstream media” has been widely used in the blogosphere in discussion of the mass media and media bias.

We all consume media in different ways. You may DVR a bunch of shows for the week and sit down for a nice long Sunday afternoon watching them all. You might constantly hit refresh on your favorite blog while sitting at a desk at your boring job.

We all have different media habits, but the ways in which we consume and even create different types of media make us all unique. A little more than a year ago if you asked me what was the first thing I did when I got online in the morning I wouldn’t have said, checked my email, I would have told you that I read my feed reader which, at the time, was full of only apple rumor sites. That was the most important type of media to me.

Many people think that consuming large amounts of media is a waist of time. I have heard many people say that throwing away their TV added hours of productivity to their day. But what do you do when it becomes part of your job to keep up with all this media? How do you keep up with it all?

Many of my close friends find it fascinating that I can go on and on about popular culture at it’s connections to mass media at the time. They wonder how I keep all this information in my head. Well that is easy:

#1 I am a Media Studies major, so while everyone else is taking chemistry, my professor’s would reference last weeks episode of the L word so it would benefit my grade to know what was going on.

#2 I make it my job to read tons of  technology, pop culture, and social media blogs every day. Why do I do this? Because that knowledge becomes valuable when I can make connections to why some things work and others failed. For the same reason that we study history (so that it won’t repeat itself) we all should keep a closer eye on the patterns in Media.

I decided to take a look at the tools I use to keep up with all the media that we all see every day. Inspired by a post by Chris Brogan who was inspired by John Jantsch I decided to write out my “social media system” Mine is a little more inclusive however to describe how I keep up with other forms of media as well.

The Workflow:

• Constantly – monitor twitter: I use tweetdeck when at home and Twittelator Pro on my iPhone. I also have certain people’s tweets as well as DM’s pushed straight to SMS. This helps me not to miss anything important. I use twitter favorites a lot to help me remember tweets that had links I wanted to check later or tweets I wanted to follow up on.
• Constantly – check email and respond: I’m one of those people who can’t leave unread message notifications bothering me on my phone. I need to check to see what it is.
• Constantly – monitor Tumblr (if I’m home): Tumblr is another thing that keeps me in the loop. A lot of the time I will see something on tumblr first. I’m a very visual person so I am much more likely to remember something if I see it in my tumblr dashboard than I am to click through a link on twitter.
• Twice daily – Go through Google reader: I try to skim in the morning while sharing and staring items that I want to read later on. In the afternoon or evening I will read it all in depth.
• Daily – Watch new podcasts: I subscribe to over 20 different podcasts, most of them aren’t daily but there are always new unwatched ones I need to catch up on.
• Daily – Write blog posts: While I may not post something new every day I am always working on something. Evernote helps me a lot with this. I can keep writing and bring in photos and different reference links.
• Less daily – Swing by Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn and check for new content and respond to messages.
• Less daily – watch new TV content
• Weekly – Read the Sunday Times Magazine, and the week in review.

In the background:

In order to watch as much video media as I do there are some very important tools I use. iTunes is how I manage all my podcast subscriptions. This way I can always catch up when I am away from my computer on my iPhone.

While I do have a DVR, sometimes it just isn’t enough. It can only record on two channels at once and on Monday nights that just doesn’t cut it. I use a great program for OS X called TVShows. TVShows is an application that automatically downloads torrent files for your favorite shows. Manage your subscriptions and preferences from within the TVShows application, and TVShows takes care of the rest: a background process is automatically launched at a regular interval to check for new episodes. This allows me to keep up with shows I watch regularly and watch them on my computer via Boxee anytime I want.

So that is how I keep up with all the media that I consume. What is your media flow? Write a post on your blog and post a link!

I wrote down in my book that I felt the same way about the social media world I had stepped into. I know that things I do today as part of my normal everyday life, will completely change the face of media forever. It is hard to see what affects this will have, but I know that it has an affect.

Today there was a story that College age kids make up less than 25% of Facebook. Last year 42% of facebook users were 18-24. It just goes to show that social media is always changing and the game will never stay the same. This made me realize that now more than ever, everything I do has the power to really change the future of media.

Some days I think I must be crazy to keep up with so many different social networks, and different blogging platforms. But at the end of the day, every single one of those communities is teaching me something. There are people with valuable knowledge everywhere and I always want to learn more. If a day goes by that I do not learn something new, that is a waste.

However, I would like to start networking on a smaller level. I love talking about social media and tech, and I always seem to be full of random ideas and references relating to media. So if you are in the NYC area and have any interest in meeting up with me in any capacity let me know. Even if you want to just get together and bounce ideas around, or if you are interested in getting into blogging or podcasting, I would love to meet you!

I am also looking for a company in need of a brand ambassador to attend SXSW, so if your company, or anyone you know, fits that bill I would really like to talk to you. I would love to work at your booth or do videos for your company.

The best way to reach me is to email me at: sarah.k.cooley [at] gmail [dot] com or contact me on twitter

A few things to note:

I am also available to talk via video conference if you are not in the area.

I am available for consulting at a small capacity.

I look forward to meeting more people and expanding my view of this world we call the social web.

“If ratified by our members, the ridiculous “New Media” clauses will guarantee that the vast majority of New Media productions will be made non-union for decades, if not forever. What little New Media production our members do under this contract will not be paying fair residuals into our Health and Pension Plans, if they pay any residuals at all (most will not). And on top of that, our members will have to negotiate their own rates, conditions, crew size, job responsibilities, etc., ON THEIR OWN, on a PRODUCTION BY PRODUCTION BASIS, since the proposal does not contain any of that.
If our members must negotiate their own employment contracts in New Media, and the majority of the members have little chance of ever getting health coverage, just why is it we need a union, anyway? For the magazine subscription?
And forget the new “organizing” plans – what have we got to offer the crews on New Media (most of whom will already have IATSE cards in their pockets) to help us organize? No wage scales, no working conditions, and virtually no chance at health coverage? Good luck with that.

….

Let’s send the negotiators back to DO THEIR JOBS, and bring us a contract that protects our members and their families, and that guarantees that New Media productions will be made by our members under a fair contract with fair residuals.”

Now to fully understand how I feel about unions you would need to know more about me than most people do. My father is a SAG member, and has been my entire life. When I first started doing internet video he immediately wanted me to join the union. At the time that made absolutely no sense, especially since I was just doing a video blog. But as time went on and I started producing more internet content he really wanted me to take a look at SAG union contracts to make sure I was getting paid fairly. I still had never taken a look at anything that SAG had to say about New Media, because I was sure that it didn’t apply to me.

However, after reading that letter today it really got me thinking about unions in traditional media, and how it will all shift over when the lines become more and more blurred.  So I went digging through the SAG website to see what they had to say about New Media. I have to say that I was surprised by what I found.

“Screen Actors Guild has been busy both getting out the word on its contracts for New Media and collecting information from producers and others working in the space. Here are a few of the events SAG has attended over the past year.”

This all really got me thinking about productions that I am currently involved in. Currently I am a creator/producer/talent for my own podcast that is in production with a new online television company. This company certainly falls into the category of a start-up, and I never really thought to bring up SAG or the IASTSE in any of my conversations with the founders there, and I still am not convinced that I should have.

If these contracts were to become standard across all podcasts, and web video projects; would we all really benefit from it? Or would it just squash so many bright hopeful start-ups right out of the gate just with rules, contracts and pay scales.

I admit that I have zero experience with unions, and I would really like to start a discussion here about what this all means for our industry.