We've been keeping a close watch on what people are saying about my.SXSW and trying to respond to as much of the feedback as possible, either directly from us or via the folks at SXSW.
It's no surprise -- in this "2.0" world of hypersharing and total transparency -- that we've seen literally hundreds of blog posts and tweets about my.SXSW, but we've only received a handful of e-mails.
We don't really like e-mail anyway, so this is cool.
The SXSW help desk has received a lot of support requests via e-mail, with issue #1 being that the welcome e-mails and password reset e-mails aren't showing up, most likely due to downstream spam filters. Ah, the irony! Again, this is why e-mail sucks, but it's sort of something that's hard to live with and also hard to live without.
So, how are we tracking and responding to feedback?
We're using a jury-rigged system of free tools: search.twitter.com (remember Summize?), Google Alerts and Google Reader.
This "system" only takes a few minutes to set up and it can be used to track virtually anything being said about anything in a public space on the interwebs.
Basically, you can set up "comprehensive" Google Alerts and have them "delivered" via feed (or e-mail, but you already know how we feel about that). You can do the same with search.twitter.com.
Simply plug the feeds into Google Reader, organize them into folders/tags and voila, your feedback tracking system is ready to roll.
We're searching for terms like "SXSW," so obviously we get a lot of false positives. However, it's easy to manually "star" or "share" items in Google reader and then publish the resulting list of shared or starred items back out as a feed to share with your team via a web page or, if you like, put it back in Google Reader. (Yikes! We know that sounds like it might be infinitely or mutually recursive, but actually, it works -- trust us, we've tried it.)
So, here it is: a pretty comprehensive list of all the good, the bad and the ugly things people are saying about my.SXSW. Hey, it's all public information on the interwebs anyway, so why not republish it all in one place?