You can't be in the business of advertising without considering technology because it inspires design and creative thinking, Lincoln Bjorkman, Digitas chief creative officer told MediaPost Saturday. Bjorkman and I had an informal discussion on the balcony outside the Austin Convention Center at SXSW. The intersection of technology and creative will become the way digital agencies support clients and their customers. It could turnaround those consumers looking to opt out of services and programs more often, something Bjorkman sees more often these days. When I asked how the agency approaches situations around consumers shutting down their Facebook page to start …

During his opening banter while interviewing Al Gore at the SXSW Interactive festival this afternoon Wall Street Journal tech journalist Walt Mossberg recalled his old days with Gore, inspiring Gore to wax nostalgic about his days in the House when he was focused on energy and the environment and then technology, and how Mossberg was simultaneously covering those beats. It almost sounded as if Gore was about to quip that Mossberg was the one who invented the Internet, but we know the urban legends associated with that one.

Asked (on camera) by MRM's Erin Hughes whom he'd most like to meet, MediaPost columnist and "Can't Buy Me Like" author Bob Garfield offers a surprising answer. (Okay, if you know Bob, it's actually not that surprising.)

If you want to watch a really uncomfortable pause, check out whatever video eventually gets uploaded from Chris Anderson's interview with SpaceX founder Elon Musk at SXSW Interactive, especially when he fielded the last question from the audience ending the interview. The question: What was the biggest mistake he ever made.

If you weren't able to make it to SXSW Interactive to see MediaPost columnist and "Can't Buy Me Like" book author Bob Garfield's keynote at OMMA Social there on Friday, you can read a pretty nice post-mortem interview here, courtesy of a Tumblr blog post by MRM's Erin Hughes. The Cliff Notes version: "Don't be a dick."

Of all the things Elon Musk has done -- PayPal, Telsa, Spacex, you name it -- the thing that seemed to most impress SXSW Interactive keynote interviewer Chris Anderson was that he has figured out a way to be with his young children and correspond by email at the same time.

Recalling the earliest stages of his SpaceX venture, Elon Musk said he was a bit naive about how to launch a new business -- especially one that launches things into deep space. Fresh off some big-time monetization from PayPal, the digital entrepreneur said he initially tried to buy existing off-the-shelf products to get his venture off the ground.

Most entrepreneurs have some anxiety around the time their venture launches, but Elon Musk has more than most of them -- about a million pounds of dynamite's worth. I mean that literally, not figuratively, because Musk is CEO and founder of SpaceX, a startup that has an emphasis on up - up - and away! Like above the stratosphere away. You know, into space.

I'm in awe. World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee shares his thoughts during a presentation at SXSW. Today's online marketers owe their livelihood and many entrepreneurs their business to this man. He said those designing WWW did so ignoring questions like how people would use it to send email or retrieve files. He's a little technical stepping through http, JavaScript and HTML, but worth the time to hear him speak.

Something marketers may not often think about is the shrinking world that will converge languages. There are about 7105 languages spoken in the world today, according to Kevin Scannell, citing stats from the UNESCO. About half the languages spoke today will be gone in about 100 years. One of the big obstacles is overcoming the fact that many languages are not suitable for computing and connectivity.