Official Richart Ruddie Blog - Internet Entrepreneur

Rich Ruddie Featured at SXSW

Thank you to the wonderful and weird city of Austin, Texas and SXSW for putting on a great event. If you call it a conference to the attendees they may give you a sly eye like one who calls Burning Man a festival. Grit Daily a startup and business news website hosted thousands of in person guests throughout the week and live streamed to hundreds of thousands more who were able to stream the interviews and virtually attend the first SXSW event in three years.

During the event Rich Ruddie was able to discuss about brand and reputation protection services, do's and dont's and covering detailed questions about the influence of artificial intelligence and deep fakes.

To watch the video of Rich Ruddie speaking at The Grit Daily House in Austin discussing reputation resilience click here.

About SXSW

South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly and has been one of the biggest events in the great state of Texas. It was cancelled due to covid-19 in 2019, suddenly in 2020 due to it being a mid March event, and again in 2021. It was welcomed back in 2022 but attendance is still well below it's peak years earlier.

ZOZOBRA - Fiestas de Santa Fe Burning Man Origins

Was really interesting to find out that New Mexico has an event that goes back to the 1700's for Fiestas de Santa Fe. It's where a man is burned similar to the "Burning of the Man" at Black Rock Desert for the annual Labor Day Week counter culture event Burning Man. The event in New Mexico today is called ZOZOBRA which means Old Man Gloom.

The similarties are really cool to read about and makes me wonder why I haven't noticed any of these similarities before when attending Burning Man.

Read for yourself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zozobra

Burning Man 2017 Story

Burning Man comes with a lot of amazing experiences and stories for a first time visitor. It's a place where you need to go and see for yourself.  The one story I'm roughly journaling out for my own memory is about my first experience to the Temple in 2017.

Temple is known as this deep spiritual place on the playa where people share their personal messages through letters, prayers, and there own artistic inspirations to showcase things that have a deep meaning to them. For example there were writings on the wall that said "I Love you Dad. Sorry I didn't call you more." The most striking thing that happened as I walked through was a girl reading a poster on the wall and as shes emotionally reading and looking at the photo somebody says to her "What is the story behind the poster you put up and are reading."

Her story is as follows:

This is our friend Joey (Name possibly incorrect) from Salt Lake City. He came with us every year to Burning Man and was a big part of our camp. He was always so joyful and kind dancing around. Last winter he was shoveling snow for his neighbors during a snow storm and a new neighbor in the area didn't know who he was so she called the police and it was two cops who showed up when he got frightened and defensive with his shovel and the rookie police officer puled out his gun and accidentally shot him in self defense not realizing it was a shovel. She said it was very sad and he was with them every year at burning man but this year he's still there in spirit. I then said wow. Thats truly amazing. So you just put up this poster to honor him?

She says oh no. Not at all I just happen to be here right now at the exact moment you were and saw this. I have absolutely no idea who put this up....