What makes SXSW special is the accidents. The kismet. The little things that you’ve never seen, and won’t again. Off the top of my head: Chatting with Julien Smith about the pros/cons of book co-authorship; being handed free bacon by a kid (also, free bacon soap from Sweet Soaps); being a Karaoke backup dancer; talking hockey with Marcel Lebrun; watching dueling theramins (one on fire) at the incredible Man or Astro Man reunion concert; and Mike Corak eating Habanero chili with jalapeno topping, and Jason Falls footing the bill.

If you come to Austin expecting it to be laid out if front of you, for it all to make sense in an orderly, pain-free fashion you’ll leave disappointed. But, if you embrace the randomness and connect your own dots, you’ll learn a lot about the industry, the people in it, and maybe even yourself. Read more at www.convinceandconvert.com

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – A dozen previously unknown shipwrecks, some of them believed to be up to 1,000 years old, were discovered in the Baltic Sea during a probe of the sea bed to prepare for the installation of a large gas pipeline, the Swedish National Heritage Board said Monday.

“We think many of the ships are from the 17th and 18th centuries and we think some could even be from the Middle Ages,” he said, stressing that “this discovery offers enormous culture-historical value.

Due to its low temperatures and oxygen levels, the Baltic Sea is known as an ideal environment for conserving shipwrecks, which can remain virtually unblemished for hundreds and even thousands of year.

According to Norman, some 3,000 shipwrecks have been discovered and mapped in the Baltic, but experts believe more than 100,000 whole and partial wrecks litter the sea bottomRead more at news.yahoo.com

Like Yahoo, Google doesn’t have a good record in social media. Google Friend Connect () isn’t even close to Facebook Connect in terms of adoption, Orkut () never made inroads in the U.S., Blogger () has nowhere near the traction of WordPress, and other acquisitions such as Jaiku and Dodgeball haven’t panned out.

You’d have a very good argument if you said that Google’s only social media hit has been YouTube (), and that “only” cost the company $1.65 billion. Google has a lot more social properties than many people realize, but it’s a hodgepodge of acquisitions (Blogger, YouTube, Picasa ()) and internally-created services (Orkut, Google Knol, Friend Connect). The company’s batting average, though, has been pretty poor, especially by Google’s standards. Read more at mashable.com

Chatroulette has made The Daily Show, thereby becoming so mainstream that — hear that? Yup, that’s the sad, sad death knell of an expired Internet sensation.

Jon Stewart expertly depicted the current state of infamous video chat site, Chatroulette. As we all know by now, the majority of users are men, and many of those men are, well, super proud of their joysticks.

Yup, everyone from The New York Times to CNN has jumped on the Chatroulette bandwagon, each news outlet sending a brave, hapless Gonzo-wannabe into the fray to experience the site for him or herself. And, as Stewart points out so astutely, it’s getting kind of old

See more at mashable.com

I was chatting this past week with a tech journalist who was in college when Facebook launched. She was not at Harvard but at another ivy league school. She told me that there were “facebooks” launching all over the ivy league that year. Facebook out executed everyone and took the market. That’s how it is done. But they did not come up with the idea that “we should take a facebook and put it online”. They simply did it better.Read more at www.avc.com

LeBron James(notes) isn’t honoring the greatness of No. 23, but manipulating Michael Jordan’s marketing savvy. The changing of his jersey number as a nod to M.J.’s basketball career is a purely fictional cover story.

What about Bill Russell and his 11 NBA championships? Jordan, the greatest ever, cleared a path for the worldly basketball star. But Russell was a black star in turbulent Boston in the 1960s. He anchored the greatest dynasty in the sport’s history, and they’ll remember him as the most dominant defensive player to ever live. In the end, James and everyone else understand this has nothing to do with Jordan or Russell, with No. 23 or No. 6. This is business, and he’s insulting everyone’s intelligence suggesting it’s something else.Read more at sports.yahoo.com

Vimeo has just rolled out a suite of advanced analytics features dubbed Vimeo Plus Stats. It’s only available to Vimeo Plus users at present.

With Plus Stats you can track plays, loads, finishes, comments and likes for all of the videos uploaded on your account over any time period you define. You can break down plays and loads by country, and you can see how many embed loads and plays occur at each domain — Tumblr or Facebook, for example. You can even break it down by high definition and standard definition to see what quality your viewers are choosing to watch.

See more at mashable.com