Austin is awesome!

Within 30 minutes of being wheels down I was eating barbecue and drinking Shiner Bock! Just freakin' awesome.

Friday was a slow day, just half a schedule in the afternoon since people are still rolling into town. There is so much to see at SXSWi that unless you were to shadow someone for the entire time, your experience of the conference is going to be completely unique.

The tech highlight of Friday was Erica O'Grady's birthday party.

Hmm... birthday, tech highlight... how does THAT happen. Let me explain.

Erica had The Go Game set up a game for her birthday party attendees.  The Go Game is a company that builds a real world scavenger hunt + challenges + puzzles + freaky interactions with actors game that is enabled by mobile devices (i.e. cell phones) and cheap digital cameras. Awesome!

Oh yeah, I guess I should mention that our team WON!

It was very fun and a good example of how by mashing together a whole bunch of stuff like a web platform for authoring missions, cell phones for receiving missions, and cameras for proving the outcome of missions, you can make a kick ass game.

We just need to figure out how to do that for project management.  :-)

Saturday continued to bring the awesome.

The Privacy Panel in the morning was okay. A bunch of the stuff they covered was really interesting, but it was a little early (and still a little to close to the end of rum fueled networking) for such a heavy subject.

Judith Donath said a couple of things that still have my mind churning, "Online, history is the equivalent of the body" and, "The history of online data makes it impossible to recreate yourself."

See, kinda weighty stuff.

Best of the day?

Why Microformats believe it or not.

Now, I'm kind of a microformats novice. I only know a few things about them, but Tantek Celik (who was moderating the panel) and Jeremy Keith gave a demonstration of Huffduffer, a site that Keith built for making podcast feeds of mp3s, that was a compelling demonstration of the power of microformats.

With VERY little information gathered as part of an account signup process, Jeremy is able to use microformats to discover things like other sites in which you participate, the avatar you use on those sites to represent yourself, and other stuff like that. The key is that it requires very, VERY little coding on his side. And because he's not calling APIs or screen-scraping those other sites, it is very easy to maintain (in fact it is very close to no maintenance I would imagine).

Unfortunately I had to duck out early for a client meeting, but there was certainly some awesome being served up.

In the afternoon the Designing for Irrational Behavior panel was kinda hit and miss. I was really hoping to see more examples of places where users behaved irrationally and good design helped return them to the path of making good things happen.  Unfortunately, not so much.

I think this panel had a LOT of opportunity (and by the packed hall at the start so did a lot of other people) but just kind of failed to show us compelling examples of irrational behavior that had been designed for well.

They did have some interesting examples from the green-tech space. But that was a poor consolation prize.

Well, hi-ho-hi-ho, it's off to the first of tonight's parties I go.