The SXSW conference rocked on right through the weekend, so Saturday morn I was up and at the Austin Convention Center. The first session I attended was The Contextual Web. I went into it thinking it would be around the web semantically defining relationships through blog post context and user behavior (think Sphere), but instead it was more about mobile computing. It was pretty interesting, but not really the information I was seeking. Some takeaways, though, were:

• Styling a website so that the markup is more mobile friendly and quicker to load.
• Optimizing the UI for the device being used.
• Focusing on content and it’s readability on a mobile device.
• Watching the iPhone as this is were the mobile environment is going.

The Saturday key note speaker was Henry Jenkins. This portion of the conference was by far the best segment I saw at SXSW! He addressed technology and pop culture, of which some of the takeaways included:

• The interviewer, Steven Johnson, asked if Jenkins sometimes saw new technology and just thought, “that is stupid!” (Come on… who hasn’t thought that at some point?) Jenkins response was that even though that might be his first response he believes that people are not stupid and create things for a reason. The first approach should be to contemplate why someone would take the time to create a certain tool and why it is interesting to others.
• Johnson commented on the amazing things people have created online and how these folks seem to have an unlimited amount of time in their lives. Jenkins responded around the idea of what is wrong with America that so many people are so under utilized at work that they show their intelligence elsewhere. He posed the questions of how we should go about capturing this intelligence and putting it to work for in this collective intelligence society.
• An audience member asked how literal he meant the term “collective intelligence”. I loved Jenkin’s response on this question as he answered that it can mean that everyone still has experience and knowledge, but the collection of all this knowledge creates something that couldn’t have been created otherwise.
• Another inquiry from the audience was the question about society and how we all now have these online friendships and identities. Jenkins emphasized that this isn’t part of a problem but rather part of the solution as people are able to maintain friendships and social investments, augmenting their social encounters.

After the Jenkin’s key note speech I headed to the ARG’s panel. ARG is the acronym for Alternate Reality Game. Supposedly this is a big thing in the marketing and film promotion realm, but I had never heard of it and it was very intriguing. These no rules games encompass many different forms of media (online and offline) and are a new way of telling a story or figuring out a puzzle, combining reality and game. They can be based around a story or movie or just solving a puzzle, and the time fame can be from a couple days to years. Whew. Seriously, this is all so new to me. One such game was Majestic that was shut down after 9/11 due to terrorist themes and another one created by Microsoft, The Beast, was tied into the promotion of a Steven Spielberg movie and was essentially a marketing campaign for the movie. The panel was extremely interesting…. but … probably not an idea my firm would be looking to invest. =)

Line for the Google party.  This was taken after we had moved up in line about 1/2 a block.

That evening I went to the Google Party with the Louisville crew, Charlie, Robb and Lucas. I met the the MyBlog / Yahoo guys, Eric and Todd, who were hilarious and smiling every time I saw them. I chatted briefly with Blaine from Twitter and had a great conversation with Charlie. Best of all, I sat in the most comfortable massage chair ever.

Robb and I hanging out on the best massage chairs.

After the Google party I snagged some dinner with Lucas, Robb and Josh and then called it an early night around 11′ish, heading back to my hotel. No 16-bit party for me. By the way, why didn’t they advertise it as the 0000000000010000 party? I personally would have thought that was cooler…