As I stated before, I was most excited to see Facebook.com Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, give his keynote talk. I wrote a post about my experience on my company’s blog called, The Infamous Mark Zuckerberg Keynote at SXSW. It was quite the keynote with a unique audience reaction.

I was also surprised to learn just how many people out there are using Twitter. If you are not familiar with Twitter, it is basically a mini-blog with 140 character posts similar to an IM away message. Without being a member of the site, I always thought it was a waste of time. However, seeing its incredible popularity by SXSW attendees of all ages, I think it might play a pivotal role in the future of communication. Check out my other LevelTen article, Is Twitter the Future of Communication?

I also learned in one panel called “The Female Takedown of Casual Gaming,” that more women are playing “casual” games than men. The term casual game, refers to desktop, mobile and internet based games; basically any game that is not played on a console unit. Females prefer to play games on computers and 62% of the PC casual only gamers are women. I had never considered myself a “casual gamer” before, but the fact that I was one of the women who purchased the 6th most popular game of 2007, Diner Dash by PlayFirst.com, made me realize that I fall into this category. Yes, I can admit this.

So the issue now with many of these companies that make casual games and market them to women like PlayFirst.com, is how to get more women designing, producing, and programming the games. At one point Pogo.com, whose users are 60-70% women, had absolutely no women working there. At PlayFirst.com, currently 26% of the designers and producers making the games are females but there are no female programmers.

Another interesting statistic for virtual worlds, is that half the avatars are women but it turns out that only 10% of the actual users are female. I never would have guessed that so many men like to play with female avatars, but I guess that is why games like Laura Croft Tomb Raider do so well. The attractive female character.

The panel believes that this female market is not just a trend. Females will continue to drive this casual gaming market especially as it becomes more social with chat boxes and forums integrated into the games.

Here are a few photos from the trip:

This was at Club de Ville.

Here I am hard at work, blogging and chatting with other participants in the SXSW Meebo chat rooms. (Photo taken by Stephanie Norsworthy)

This was the Lego play area, not only for kids.

Some of the LevelTen girls and myself.

Stephanie and I at the Google Party.

Beautiful downtown Austin (taken by Stephanie Norsworthy and edited by the creative Alice Noyes)

This Friday, some fellow LevelTen employees and myself will make the trek down to our capital of Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. This 5 day event includes many educational panels and keynote speakers from industry innovators and leaders. In addition, there are nightly parties for those who are looking forward to experiencing Austin’s famous downtown nightlife.

I will be blogging about my experiences on the LevelTen Design blog and will hopefully learn some new things while I am there. The highlight of the trip for me will be to hear Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook.com’s Founder and CEO, give his keynote talk on Sunday. Check out the entire panel schedule on the SXSW website to see all the daily events.

And for those who are attending, check out this online scheduler to help you keep track of the events on each day.  It has some great features and gives descriptions of each panel or event. I thought it was also easier than looking up all the panel descriptions on the SXSW website.

A recent turn of events involving a blogger and Facebook, have brought about a very important question regarding the ownership of information that is available on social networking sites.

As reported by MediaPost, Wednesday night blogger Robert Scoble was kicked off of his own Facebook account for using a new feature of Plaxo to gather the names, e-mail addresses, and birthdays of his 5,000 Facebook friends. The ever popular social network claims that running this type of script to collect a large amount of data goes against the site’s Terms of Use. A recently created Facebook group that is campaigning to get Scoble’s account reinstated has more information on the matter.

While I understand that preventing scripts like this from running on Facebook is a necessary way to keep out spammers, I am left wondering why Facebook feels they have the right to stop you from collecting your friends’ information. If an individual creates a Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn profile complete with their name, e-mail, sometimes address and phone, they are making the conscious decision to put that information in a public domain. I know you are probably saying to yourself that you have “privacy” settings, but your information is still in a public area (the world wide web=very public). But the real question that is likely to be debated heavily this year is when you put your information on a profile, does it become the property of the website/social network?

In my opinion, the answer is no. That’s the whole idea of the Web 2.0 era: websites with content generated by the users. It is the user’s content, not the network’s. Social networks would be blank pages without the information provided by the users. Facebook certainly shouldn’t think they have the right to own that information and do with it what they want. I know they do share some of the resonsibility to safeguard their member’s information, because otherwise people would be aprehensive about joining and creating that content. However, the information is not theirs, the do not own it and they cannot simply use it for their own advertising purposes (as it was recently thought they might).

So, what’s the moral of the story? Social networks need to respect the users who generate their content and realize it’s not their property, while users need to safeguard themselves and not put information on the web they don’t want the world to see.

**Article originally published on LevelTen Design Blog.

People are no longer using the main search engines to locate the information they seek. They are turning to social media, social bookmarking sites, RSS feed-readers, specific vertical search tools, and multimedia. Both large and small corporations have created profiles on MySpace, groups on Facebook and lenses on Squidoo. Of course, traditional SEO techniques are used in these socials media sites to insure that people can find the information you want them to find about your company.

Likewise, the whole element of reputation management goes along with a company’s involvement in social media. Search engines are turning into a reputation management system. You may not be able to control the negative articles written about your company, but the more positive articles your company can distribute through social media sites, the better off they will be. With this comes the fact that SEO firms must be able to manage what is said about their client, both positive and negative, in every media form possible.

As the search engines begin to reach out to social media, they have also introduced their own extension called Personalized Search. Personalized search can basically be summed up as an SEO’s worst nightmare, because individual search results are reordered based on the searcher’s previous search behavior, their home page content, bookmarks, search history, web history and so on. This will have a large impact on keyword analysis since one company could be the #3 result for one searcher and the #11 for another. SEO firms must be willing to adapt quickly as this change is happening now.

In his article, Hedger points out that placing calls to action leading to social or browser based bookmarking and building smarter link/tag networks, along with the traditional SEO tactics, will be the key to optimizing personalized search. So, for all of the companies out there who have not yet gotten involved in social bookmarking, start now.

With this growth of social media, companies will have to rely on the expertise of SEO firms that offer all of the above services as more and more people will turn to these social media sites for information and more engines will offer the dreaded personalized search. Because as we have learned today, the information seeker will always be interested in search, but won’t always be interested in the traditional search engines as their preferred means of search.

**Originally published on LevelTen Design Blog.