Friend of BoF and Community Guy extraordinaire Jake McKee has been kind enough to include me in a panel he is hosting at the upcoming SXSWInteractive conference in Austin, TX. I will be discussing my experience with the Fiskateers and joining managers from communities as varied as Discovery Education and SuicideGirls.com to discuss how to work with fans to create a thriving community ecology.

I lived in Austin for 8 years and never experienced SXSWi so I am, as you can imagine, very excited to participate. I started going through the myriad of panels in detail, carefully planning my time there to make sure I get the most out of the speakers. I stopped dead in my tracks when I got to one speaker name: Ze Frank.

Last summer, BoFer Joe Dannely told me about this wacky guy Ze Frank who blew the doors off a design conference keynote. He also told me that he posts a 3-5 minute podcast daily on his site. “The Show with Ze Frank” contains the wittiness of a 22 minute Daily Show distilled into 4. His fans, self-identified as “Sports Racers” support his show by composing music, sending story ideas, creating a new intro for each day’s show, and using Ze’s signature rubber ducky in their sites to signal that they are part of the clan. Ze also features a host of other interactive projects that you may have seen including the birthday invitation that started being passed around virally and kicked of Ze-mania: “How to Dance Properly“. As you can tell, I’m a fan.

The professional side of me is very pleased to be presenting at SXSWi because of the credibility it gives to our community, the crowd, content, etc. The rest of my brain stopped at “I could be in the same room with Ze Frank”. If you haven’t “met” Ze before, do yourself a favor, check out his site, and get a sense of why this man has such a devoted following that has given him interactive celebrity status. Hopefully you’ll see a follow up post from me in a few weeks of my brush with interweb greatness.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 10:25 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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