kartooner

Admit­tedly, I’m a bit behind as far as my planned “psuedo-real-time” updates for SXSW 2006. The rea­son for this is twofold. One, because I’m still jet­lagged from last Thurs­day and haven’t got­ten a lot of sleep and two, there’s been so much going on that it’s been dif­fi­cult — at least for me — to pin­point what to write about exactly.

That said, it makes sense to tell you that while I’ve been hav­ing a blast here in Austin, TX with newly made friends, I also miss my fam­ily. My daugh­ter is only two years of age and has been ask­ing about my where­abouts since I left. I’m not sure how to han­dle that, but I’ll say that she, along with my wife and new son, have been on my mind alot.

Apart from that, it’s been extremely reward­ing to par­tic­i­pate in these pan­els and for once in my life to pay atten­tion to what’s being said with­out drift­ing off into a trance. A wealth of infor­ma­tion is being shared by industry-leading peo­ple, many of whom I admire.

That in itself is par­tic­u­larly cool espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that up until a few days ago I only asso­ci­ated myself with var­i­ous atten­dees and pre­sen­ters solely by dig­i­tal means (ie IM’ing, email, Skype, etc.) instead of hav­ing face-to-face conversations.

I’m not sure that I’ll go into extreme detail about the pan­els I’ve attended because it would only be a rehash of what’s been dis­cussed on sites already. Rather, I’ll just say that what I’ve got­ten from these pan­els is not only knowl­edge of design, code and busi­ness prac­tices and tech­niques, but also a new­found appre­ci­a­tion for those who are at the fore­front of all this, express­ing their opin­ions and knowl­edge with a great deal of pas­sion and understanding.

As far as the peo­ple I’ve met and had the oppor­tu­nity to chat with, they’ve all shared the same char­ac­ter­is­tics that I noted above, but most notably pas­sion, which dri­ves most of us towards our intended (or unin­tended) goals.

Sure, there’s the notion that a good major­ity of the atten­dees of SXSW are here for net­work­ing pur­poses and that fits within the con­text of the event, but there’s another ele­ment here that’s dif­fi­cult to iso­late. The fact that most peo­ple want to put a face to what­ever online per­sona they’ve become famil­iar with due to blogs, com­mu­ni­ties and forums.

It makes peo­ple more com­fort­able to actu­ally share a con­ver­sa­tion in per­son instead of just rec­og­niz­ing an avatar or nick­name and then shoot­ing an email off, hop­ing for a mean­ing­ful reply.

I’ve got­ten more from the human aspect of this con­fer­ence than what would oth­er­wise be attend­ing a few pan­els and exchang­ing busi­ness cards. This is a life chang­ing event and I know the true effect and end result will grow expo­nen­tially over time.