South By Southwest: A Little Late, But a Wrap-up

Attending SXSW for the first time is just as overwhelming as everyone says it will be. The number of sessions, people, and taking in Austin is really a lot to do. It’s also great. Experiencing the community that is defining some of the most successful areas of the web is a wonderful thing. It’s sheer size is quite overwhelming, though. Most conferences I’ve attended have been easy to meet people and see them again just by happenstance. At SXSW, if you meet someone interesting, you need to plan to meet them again or chances are, you might not see them again.

The sessions were really great, for the most part. There were sessions of higher and lower quality, but that’s to be expected. It’s of course much different attending the event than only listening to the podcasts. (Side note: the podcasts for SXSW 2008 will be posted here.)

Apart from the session notes and stack of business cards from the show, I now want to order a stack of Bloxes and I’m not even sure what they’d be for. Seeing the “sketchnotes” from Mike Rohde makes me wish I would have taken my notes in a similar fashion :-D