For anyone who wants to see them, I’ve finally managed to upload the slides from my SXSWi talk “Taking over the World: the Flickr way”, a broad-sweep view of some of the issues and solutions we encountered whilst taking Flickr from an English-only site to supporting multiple languages.

You can find them over at the talks page, along with the details of my next scheduled talk at XTech in Dublin on May 5th 2008.

(Photo of me by Gareth on Flickr, used by permission)

This year at SXSWi, I was invited to take part in 20×2, an event where 20 people are given 2 minutes each to answer an “open-ended question”. The question this year was “What is the difference?”

I was blown away by the range and quality of the other participants’answers. This was my humble effort, delivered as a straight-up talk.

The difference, in a word, is passion.

In all our pursuits and endeavours, it is passion which leads to the creation of the genuinely great, or the superlative experience.

Thank about it – who do you most associate with passion; Steve Jobs and his irritatingly exquisite products, painstakingly put together by folks who care about the minutest details or… well… Bill Gates?

I’ve seen the effects of passion in the panels I’ve attended here at South by Southwest. All of the best panels have been hosted by people with a genuine passion for what they’re talking about.

In all honesty, some of them have had so little real content that they’ve actually subtracted from the sum of human knowledge.

But when that nebulous non-content is delivered with infectious passion, it still has value. The raw emotion itself inspires, leading us to new insights and ideas.

One day – one day – I’ll actually find a coherent theme, and a workflow which means that I post here regularly, and it’s interesting, and people are so enthralled that they actually subscribe to the RSS feed.

I’ve started vague plans in that direction which will hopefully coincide with my rapidly-approaching 30th birthday.

But in the meantime, I’ll be at South by Southwest in Austin TX from this Thursday. The interactive portion of the festival will mean actual work for me, schmoozing with people who make me feel tremendously stupid in comparison, and speaking a couple of times.

If you want to see me and my new haircut fumbling their way rustily through public speaking, you can catch me at the following times:

Monday March 10th, 7-9:30pm – 20×2 at The Parish, 214 E. 6th St., Austin TX

Tuesday March 11th, 5-6pm – “Taking Over the World the Flickr Way“, Room A, Austin Convention Center, 500 East Cesar Chavez, Austin TX

The second event is the one which has me stressing manically over slides, being an hour-long presentation by little ol’me on exactly how we turned Flickr from an English-only colossus into a globe-spanning 8-language slightly-bigger-colossus.

I promise that, as much as such things can, it’ll be fun.