I attended this year’s SXSW festival to get the fair use word out to documentary filmmakers. For those uninitiated to the SXSW scene, in addition to Film, the festival also hosts Interactive and Music sections. It’s an arts extravaganza infused with a big dollop of technology. The film scene was a lot like most other festivals I’ve been to, albeit spread around Austin - since I needed to be at the Conference hub (the Austin Convention Center), I couldn’t get to screenings across town. So in my off time, I found myself socializing with many of the folks attending the Interactive conference who were happily hunkered down at the Convention Center with free wi-fi.

Over several days, I was impressed by how the web geeks had managed to leverage the net and multitudes of software to not only raise their profiles in a business sense, attracting new clients from the (comparatively) techonology-starved music and film folks, but also within their community, they seemed connected to one another via the net.

So, while the film parties were lots of film folks scanning rooms to see who they wanted to talk to, the interactive parties were people running into people they already knew online somehow or another. This wasn’t awkward networking, trying to find a reason to talk to someone they wanted to know; it was identifying them by what they do and building conversation from there. Founders of many now-famous sites and technologies were there mingling with the developers, designers, etc. sharing information, creating new collaborations and generally raising the bar on interactive technology and services.

I was so inspired, I started this blog. I realized that in addition to practicing writing and creating a repository for all things cool in indie film, I might at some point find it allowing me to connect with people I might not have met otherwise. And that has already proven to be true in less than 5 months many times over.

In this time, I’ve started really paying attention to how filmmakers are using techonology. The indie community has seemingly suddenly become acutely aware of this idea of “building communities” around work to help leverage initiatives. Not so long ago, this was called finding your niche audience (it’s now passe to consider the audience as mere consumers; they are users). It has long been guessed that most indie films aren’t appealing toward mass audiences, so the race has been on to build communities around work, in hopes that they will at some point pay for what filmmakers have to offer.

YouTube and Google Video provide housing for whatever video a filmmaker is willing to part with to promote their activities. MySpace provides a hungry audience of sex-crazed teens looking for the next hot thing. They promise massive audience potential but have yet to prove viable financial models to support either the content providers or the host (in the old world, they would be the distributor).

Throw into that mix innumerable options for blogging and social networking. But, as filmmakers are often busy trying to find money to make films and can’t spend all day wading through the net’s murky waters, there are many folks out there looking to aggregate tools and provide them to filmmakers as the solution to “building community,” finding your niche audience, raising your profile as a filmmaker, all in one easy package.

One of the first sites I noticed was indieWIRE’s indieLOOP. They soft-launched it so those of us on the net daily tended to discover it, sign in and suprisingly find each other. I’m not sure when it went live, but I think there were about 500 people signed in when I started in March or April and it has surpassed 2500. IndieWIRE has finally sent out some marketing materials on it to its daily subscribers (see Eugene’s post), so expect a spike soon. Now, it is largely an insider community, but it doesn’t have a bar for entry so at some point, it could conceivably be taken over by people who want to be in filmmaking (this is a huge group of people) not necessarily people who are. In that case, it would become a good place for working makers to market their wares.

Last week, my attention was called back to iFilm by badMike. It’s been around for a while as I remember when it was a big thing at festivals. iFilm was a predessesor to the current video giants, but it has always been geared toward the filmmaking community and those viewers desiring (mostly) quality indie film content online. I believe I remember a staffer saying long ago that Hollywood execs had been known to peruse the site looking for new talent. You can blog the videos, rate them, sort by category and upload your work while watching ads from HBO and MTV to support your habit. The site looks simple, elegant and fairly targetted to my eyes now, though I’m still not a big online viewer.

I also got a message last week about the launch of iklipz. Using a list of filmmaking heavy-weights to attract attention, the site is a lot like indieLOOP although geared to draw non-film people to it with lots of “Indiewood” content (that’s Hollywood that masquerades as indie film). You can find the impressive advisory list but the staff and funding behind the site are a mystery. It provides tools and looks poised to draw eyeballs so it might be a good place for the time-starved indie maker to invest some energy.

This brings me to my actual point. Saving time on workflow is important. You must decide with each new offering if you should “invest” in it. iklipz has a handy tool that allows users to import their MySpace stuff so they don’t have to spend time rebuilding themselves on the site (unless of course you don’t use MySpace). indieLOOP staffers discovered a hack that allows for blog posts to appear in our profile, but these posts do not become iLOOP posts so technically, we have to re-post there.

All of the video sites are fine but you have to have a place to display the video, such as your own blog, which takes lots of money or time to develop. iklipz has included video upload so presumably it is a one-stop shop. But, if you have, like I do, a site already in the works that you have painstakenly developed and specialized to your needs, it’s a huge time-drain to have to go to a site like that and re-enter everything.

I empathize with filmmakers who are trying to navigate this minefield. There is a lot of potential, but in some ways, there is a lot of vapor also. I’m sure financial wizards know better than I the reasons why technology investments burst a few years back, but at the core, it was because people made a lot of claims about what was possible online that turned out to be hollow promises. It seemed for a while that we learned a hard lesson, but I’m getting a bad feeling we might be heading down that road again, though it may be paved a bit better now.

People are online, there is no doubt about that. But what are they buying? If you manage to leverage these tools into a mailing list, for example, can you encourage them to buy from you? Common sense says yes, but how do you keep from investing your precious time with lots of sites that make promises but wind up not delivering?

I guess that is the risk: you invest your energy and hopefully siphon off enough contacts so that if these sites deflate, you maintain any gains you made. The reward would be making the right choices, investing just the right amount of time and finding that your efforts yielded your intended audience who is willing to buy from you.

I’m always curious to hear from people who are making it work, so please let me know if you’ve had any good (or bad) experiences with any of these sites.