We got to see Frank Warren, founder and curator of the Post Secret Project speak on monday. His pitch drew a standing ovation and a combination of cheers and tears from the crowd here at SXSW.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, Warren encourages people to send him anonymous post cards with their secrets on them. He receives 100-200 a day and has a collection of over 200,000, some of which have been published in 4 books. Warren has also created a blog where the public can view and discuss the cards and the secrets they contain.
During his talk, Warren touched on the idea that everyone has secrets and the importance of being able to let them go anonymously. Some of these secrets are extremely personal and we couldn’t help but get a little choked up ourselves.
If you’d like view an anonymous strangers personal secrets (and seriously, this is hard to resist) you can check these 4×5 works of art at postsecret.com.

There are a lot of people at SXSW hawking a range of new ideas and as you’d expect, some of them are better than others. One of our favs here was online personal publisher Blurb.
Blurb can publish one off books (or multiple copies) and the quality is professional grade. We got up close and personal with a sample copy and you can bet the first thing we did was look at the half toning as closely as possible. In a nutshell, we were pretty impressed.

While the sample we had was that glossy coffee table book stock we are not particularly fond of, the printing quality was top notch. We were told they are planning to offer a variety of paper options and we got to inspect a hard back cover that looked as high quality as any mass produced book we’ve seen.

Blurb provides it’s own software publishing system that works on Mac or PC, and you can import layouts from iphoto or indesign. You can also import flickr photostreams, entire posts from your blog, and invite friends to submit photos.

We think this is a godsend for any artists (photographers in particular) who want to self publish. They also offer drop shipping, so you can sell a book on your site, and send the order to Blurb who will make a copy and ship it to customers for you. We expect to see a lot of this in the near future, if you’d like to get started you can check out the options at Blurb.com.

We’re on the ground at the South by Southwest Interactive conference so our posting may be a bit sporadic over the next few days. It’s been pretty exciting for the most part and we may eventually fall over from sleep deprivation.

Highlights so far include-
1. Getting to hear Michael Lopp describe the design process at Apple, and John Gruber talk about the benefits of designers being assholes.
2. Getting to finally meet Heather Armstrong, who really is as funny in person as she is on her site (and really nice to boot).
3. Getting taken in by the unbelievably cool people at JPG, who deserve several posts on their site and their magazine. If you like digital photography, you MUST check them out.
4. Watching an angry mob take shots at Sarah Lacy while she interviewed keynote speaker Mark Zuckerberg (founder of facebook.com). For the whole story, check out the video on valleywag (skip to the part about 6 minutes in if you just want to catch the trainwreck).

If you’re in Austin for the show we’ll be at the design eye for south by panel at 3:30. Holla!

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