Geek March Madness, SXSW 2001!
 

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Tuesday March 13, 2001

Panels today were a bit hard to take; the "Weblogs: Microcontent" one was particularly disappointing. Moderated by Jason Kottke, it was pretty much hijacked by Lance Arthur. Not that Lance didn't have some good things to say (in fact, he's obviously extremely intelligent and articulate). It's just that I didn't feel Jason kept things on topic or even clear. Sadly, for me, meeting Jason was one of the more disappointing things about this year's conference. It's not that I thought we'd become best buddies or anything. It's just that he didn't seem very personable, not just with me, but with anyone. He's even mentioned it on his own weblog: "In general, I had an OK time @ SXSW this year. I didn't get to meet very many new people, which isn't that unusual for me, being as wallflowery as I am, but was disappointing nonetheless, contributing to the feelings of weirdness and uneasiness I felt after I got back to SF ("It was fun, wasn't it? It was supposed to be fun, right? Then why wasn't it?"). There's always next year, I suppose." I continue to read his weblog, where he's a lot more friendly.

I gave away all my compilation CDs, though, and got one to each of the Pyra folks who were there (PB, Matt, Meg), as well as to Heather (& Derek), Rebecca (& Jesse), Mike (& Dineen) Wasylik, Michael (& Ari) Brown, Tim Thompson, Nikolai Nolan, Julie O'Neill, Dinah Sanders, Anil Dash, Jish Mukerji, Dave Linabury, Leia Scofield, Brad Graham, Susan Kaup, Denise Czaja, Dan Budiac, and Jess Cook. So I was happy about that. Today definitely felt a bit melancholy, though. Things are winding down.

Dave, Leia, and I met Michael, Ari, and Julien Brown for dinner at Shady Grove, where I had Chicken Fried Chicken again and lots of Shiner Bock. After dinner, we headed over to the Waterloo Brewing Company for the unofficial launch party for Adaptive Path, a group of funky consultants including Jesse James Garrett, Jeff Veen, Peter Merholz, Janice Fraser, and Lane Becker.

The party was amazing, just the right number of people and everyone feeling chatty. Denise introduced me to Cory Doctorow of OpenCola because he is from Toronto and lives there half the year. He's an incredibly smart and energetic guy and I hope his company does really well. I said my goodbyes to quite a few people, including Mike and Dineen Wasylik, who are off to Ireland from here (I gave them lots of suggestions and Mike gave me a t-shirt!). Also, had a really nice talk with Rebecca and Jesse. I encouraged him to write a book about his area of expertise, information architecture, something he has been considering. When they left, Rebecca went around and hugged and kissed everyone. She made a good point, that so many webloggers live in San Francisco, that she wanted to spend time with people that she won't see that regularly. She was incredibly nice to me, and I really appreciated that. As it cleared out, we moved inside and started playing pool, which went on until the place closed, sometime about 1:30 am. I had to say goodbye to Anil and Dan and Nikolai tonight, but it will be fun reading what they have to say about SXSW.


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©2001 by James McNally and Consolation Champs.