IT Buoy

From Speakeasy : How underwhelming was Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’ keynote address at Austin’s South by Southwest interactive festival on Monday afternoon? Shortly after the event ended, Williams personally tweeted : “I heard on the backchannel that people want me to answer tougher questions. What’ya want to know? Will answer 10. Go.” No backchannel was needed to gage the public’s tepid response to the event, in which Williams announced the launch of Twitter’s @anywhere function and was subsequently lobbed softball questions by interviewer Umair Haque of the Harvard Business Review. (Haque, ironically, is the author of a book entitled “The Awesomeness Manifesto.”) Bored audience members — many of whom started lining up for the initially SRO event an hour before it started — began shuffling out of Exhibition Hall A after the first 15 minutes, with a mass exodus of bodies (and mobile devices) soon to follow. Several tech blogs, including TechCrunch immediately started compiling a list of the best tweets, which ranged from the factual (”The guy behind us is snoring”) to the snarky (”Notorious fluff-slinger Umair Haque seems to be more interested in hearing himself speak than asking @ev meaty Q’s) Not that Williams was that much more engaging in his post-keynote answers on Twitter; responding to @starbucks that his favorite cup of joe is a soy latte doesn’t exactly qualify as “tough.”

The iPad pre-order madness began this morning at 5:30 a.m. PST, but has the bloom fallen off the iPad for Seth Goldstein ? The co-founder of SocialMedia tweeted earlier this week that he’s “no longer amazed by the ipad” and attached a blog post stating, “The Blackberry has always been the best device for reading and writing email.” *** Good thing Anna Kendrick’s character from “Up in the Air” didn’t try firing people via VoIP while up in the air. Federated Media chairman John Battelle tried to talk to his kids on iChat while on a United Airlines flight, according to his tweets , and was told “cameras not allowed.” (Coincidentally, the film showing in-flight was … “Up in the Air.”) Prompting two “WTF?”s from Mr. Battelle. *** Just in case you’ve been living under a router, South by Southwest (SXSW) kicks off this week in Austin, Texas, where entrepreneurs and established names from the music, film, interactive, and tech world converge for geek speak, panels and parties. It’s where Twitter entered the scene in 2007, where @Foursquare started to make its mark in 2009, and where everyone, this year, will be looking to the next noteworthy consumer technology service to move beyond the tech crowd, reach critical mass and still grapple with profitability. Laura Fitton , CEO of oneforty.com , tweeted about the must-use Twitter apps for SXSW, while Chris Dixon , co-founder of hunch.com , offered a “ sxsw panel picker helper ” Author and video blogger Gary Vaynerchuk is just bringing “ straight thunder .” Hopefully, by “thunder,” he means bandwidth

On Monday night, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley posted a Flickr photo of a BlackBerry screen featured on the latest episode of the red-hot television potboiler, “Gossip Girl.” The text message on the screen (which I took a picture of here) reads, “Elizabeth Fisher just checked in at the Algonquin Hotel.” Wrote Crowley in the image title, which he also posted on Twitter : “Checkins on Gossip Girl? No mention of foursquare, but hey, still pretty hot.” Not hot at all, actually, because there have been zero checkins on Foursquare in the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite as yet! If you watched the show, you also would know they are too busy hooking up in an endless round-robin, with an occasional Belgian prince drug dealer thrown into the mix, to claim domain mastery of Geisha or Henri Bendel. (If you don’t believe me, see a clip from this episode, titled “The Hurt Locket,” below, in which Blair Waldorf is dressed up like a porn version of “Anna Karenina.”) But way to try to ride Serena van der Woodsen’s hip Prada coattails, Dennis. In fact, the note–which was sent to billionaire playboy Chuck Bass, who is searching for his possibly-not-dead-in-childbirth-for-which-he-has-blamed-himself-mercilessly mother, after running into a suspicious lady at his father’s gravesite on the first anniversary of his tragic car-accident death, who was carrying flowers and then dropped a locket with an engraved “E,” for Elizabeth, which was also his mother’s name…you get the idea–was from Bass’s private investigator, simply telling him she had checked into the hotel. As in, “Gimme a key and extra towels.” And not as in: Trying to be Mayor of the Algonquin Hotel. None of the characters on “Gossip Girl” would try to be mayor of anything, since they own the town . Which is also pretty clear if you watched the show–which just returned from a painfully long hiatus–as closely as BoomTown does. And who am I, besides a keeper of the “Gossip Girl” integrity?

Digits will be live tweeting the Shorty Awards — the “Oscars” of Twitter — this evening from New York. This year’s awards might not be as controversial as they were last year , but they do have an announcement from William Shatner — and acceptance speeches limited to 140 characters. Twitter Updates follow jenvalentino on Twitter

Some of this week’s biggest tech-industry tweets came not from Silicon Valley but from Russia. Associated Press “Rustechdel” — for Russian Tech Delegation — was hash-tagged by people like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey , start-up investor Esther Dyson and actor Ashton Kutcher , who joined the U.S. State Department technology delegation in Moscow for a week of extolling the benefits of social media to Russians. From Mr. Dorsey , an observation on a deep difference between Russia and the U.S.: Tweeting about the complete lack of mobile phone usage in Russian bars & clubs #irony From Ms. Dyson : #rustehdel. Now at akadempark in novosinirsk talking w local entrepreneurs: easy to find tech talent, management talent not so much … And from Mr. Kutcher , a tough question about transparency (or is it transperency): How can the Russian government use technology to create transperency in practices #rustechdel *** We also read quite a bit about techies’ run-ins at restaurants