I got a late start to the Austin Conference Center on Monday, March 10, because the EPIC investment meeting is Monday morn and I joined via Skype. Our call takes the majority of the morn, so I made it to the conference center around the lunch hour.

I quickly grabbed some lunch with Alex, Orian and Yuri and then wandered through the TradeShow with Robb and Lucas, talking to many of the CEOs and demo-ing some of the technologies. I watched as Shawn battled through a couple rounds of Guitar Hero in the bloghause (later learning he had won the Guitar Hero competition) and then said goodbye to many of my SXSW crew as Robb and Lucas, the Louisville crew and the Path 101 crew all headed back to their respective cities throughout the late afternoon.

A SXSW attendee demo-ing some 3-d technology.

Shawn wins first place in the AMD Guitar Hero competition, winning the world’s fastest video card with a one-of-a-kind paint job.

That night I headed to the WineLibrary party at Cordk’d thanks to the heads up by the Eluciv Knowledge guys. The party was very enjoyable with even more interesting people, accompanied by fantastic wine that Gary Vaynerchuk had brought in promotion of his site. Yet, by this point I was getting tech’d out. Whew. I had been at the conference four straight days (over what was my usual weekend) and just felt like I needed some alone time. So once the WineLibrary party wrapped up, I headed back to my hotel to finish up some work and to write some java code and just simply to enjoy the silence.

By Sunday, the third day of SXSW Interactive, I had come to realize that the panels were genuinely hit or miss in terms of being completely great versus quite poor, but realized that the attendees were folks I truly was intrigued to meet. So rather than spend the morning sitting in panels, I hung around the bloghaus, talking with people and catching up on some java code I needed to complete.

Heading to lunch with Charlie.

I hit up lunch with Charlie, just grabbing a bite on the 4th floor due to time, and then headed to the Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, keynote. Whoa…. for all of you readers who did not watch the Zuckerberg keynote, please avoid doing so (though I will provide you will this clip below). =) At first it was obvious that Zuckerberg was nervous and perhaps stumbling a bit on his answers. But then it became real apparent that he had all right to be nervous as the interviewer, Sarah Lacy, continued to make small jokes at him, announce (rather than allowing Zuckerberg to do so) the Facebook rollout into France and then, completely to my dismay as a woman, seemed to be flirting with him on stage as she sat twirling her hair. It was so incredibly uncomfortable to watch that soon Charlie and I had to walk out. The most interesting thing about the interview was the dialogue that took place on twitter as the system was inundated with techies tweeting disapproval. A good commentary on the side tracked interview was written by Dave McClure. I also really liked my friend Danielle’s approach on her blog, especially since it was one of her first posts ever.

My blackberry doesn’t take the best photos….

• 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…

Friday was the first day of SXSW so the lineup of events was quite small, providing only two panels for the day. After waiting in the line for my badge and meeting the EchoDitto crew, I headed over to the Dabble, Dabble Toil and Kick Ass career related panel. Nothing new or novel there, but no biggie as it was the first panel of the event. Next I headed off to the Bankrupt Your Startup Panel with panelists Andrew Hyde (startupweekend.com and the recent vcwear.com), Joshua Strebel (Obu Web Technologies), Sean Tierney (Jumpbox) and a unicorn. Yes, you read that right. A unicorn. The panel had so much potential, but none was achieved as the whole event was a joke with Godzilla slides and money being thrown around. Once again, no biggie. Still just the first day at SXSW.

That night I hit up the Friday Night Mix at Six and met some great people such as Michael Pilla of Indie Flix, Robb Wood of an uber stealth project and the Path 101 team consisting of my blogger friend Charlie O’donnell, Danielle Collins and Alex Lines. The crew of us headed over to grab some dinner with some friends of Charlie’s at Opal. The dinner gang included Josh Guttman of Sphere, Jason Falls of Doe Anderson, Richard McGinnis of Radian6, Shawn Morton of CNet and Profilactic, Nick Huhn of Yum! Brands, and Todd Earwood and Nicky “Lindy” Key of DailyIdea.tv. Good times!

Danielle Collins and me.

Jason Falls and Richard McKinnis.

Nicky (Lindy), Todd and Charlie.