#newbigthing

Several weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference. For those who don't know, SXSW is a drunken spectacle where the princes of the Internet assemble to pick the next big thing. Oh, and by "lucky", I mean that I spent $900 of HLN's money to get a ticket.

I wasn't allowed into the meetings where a secret council decided "Meerkat" would join the ranks of "Snapchat" and "Gangam Style" as things the Internet would be very excited about. Had I been there, I might have pitched my startup idea, where people produced and socially post slightly different durations of video. Maybe next year.

But since I'm not MySpace Tom or a Winklevoss Twin, I was left to hobnob with the rest of the people who make things on the web. This meant everything: writers, engineers, managers, artists. These are old professions, forced to deal with a new, moving landscape. We attended a diverse range of sessions, united by a single thread: there is a fascinating and complex universe of things to try, and a dense fog obscuring which of these things will ultimately achieve your goals.

For example, you could throw your chips down on Facebook video, where you can grow your audience and make no money. Or accrue a PHD's worth of knowledge on a shaping an experience with personalization from artificial intelligence ... which might cost a fortune and never outperform more generalized strategies. Maybe invest in content instead? A nice theory, but the main success stories are small publishers with an intangible, unreplicable quality, or new media companies that take content from the public, and pay between next to nothing and nothing for it.

Pretty bleak, right? Believe it or not, this uncertainty is optimistic for publishers. The alternative is a certain slow decent into irrelevance. We still have many things to try and the work in front of us consists of filtering through these options and discovering how media works in coming years. Access to technology and publishing platforms has never been greater and no one has it completely figured out.

To some extent we are already succeeding in this new world. We are bringing content where our audience is, delivering content on social media platforms. We are re-working our web presence to respond to an expansive universe of devices. And we are exploring how to get HLN video on more screens than we would have considered possible years ago.

It would be nice if SXSW had given us a magic roadmap, but instead it is a reminder that there is too much for us to possibly do and we will have to be smart about what we pursue. We had great ideas before, and picked up more at the conference. Some will work, some won’t, and that’s how it is. We will not stop adapting until the robed elders in the secret council of the Internet declare us the new big thing.