All right, so today was the first day of the SXSW tradeshow! I spent this afternoon at Knowbility’s booth giving demonstrations of jaws and talking to a lot of people about accessibility. I also got to sit in and participate in a barcamp discussion on accessibility and its importance in social media.

Which leads me into my first two comments about today. The first one is not directly related to SXSW, but it is about Facebook. I went to bed last night, and Facebook was working normally, then this morning it was completely different, and I’m not real crazy about the changes. I’ll have to do more experimenting with it and get back with details later. Ok, enough negativity.

One of the first demos I did was on nutshellmail.com.  This is a really neat site where, once you have registered, you can link your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc. profiles to it and you will receive e-mails every few hours of your friend’s status updates. You don’t even have to go to the website to see them. And it looks like you can comment and reply to them by clicking on links in the message. I registered, which was a fairly painless process and now am getting those e-mails. One thing I will surely recommend is that those e-mails have the option of being sent as text rather than HTML documents. I am so far having some trouble viewing the messages in outlook. But what a fantastic idea!!

Another site that was exciting was WebbChange.com.  This site allows you to register and search for websites and groups, based on varying criteria. You can also see the most popular sites, and even donate cyber coins to “invest” in a site, and people can see the site’s value rising, kind of like the stock market… we’d like to see that rising more often right?

Just a few more of the sites I saw and demonstrated jaws with included:

Empressr.com

Isitedesign.com

Rebeccayoung.org

SA4Mayor.com, which is maintained by journalists and there may be a posting on this site regarding accessibility and why Mayoral candidates should care.

Spiceworks.com

Uservoice.com

And Vectorform.com

So you see, I had a very interesting first day! And those were just the people I talked to, not including those who got demos from our other fantastic team members!! So if you’re at SXSW and haven’t yet, come on by and chat with us!!!