“Just when you are out, they pull you back in.”  And so goes my experience at SXSW this year.  After saying I was going to give SXSW one last chance, the conference totally redeemed itself.  I think a big part of my change in tune was knowing how commercialized the conference became in 2010, which was a disappointment back then.

Best Interactive Panel
The best panel this year was about the work NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs was doing to monitor near Earth orbit objects like asteroids and comets. Amazing data science work goes into predicting when these objects may hit us and which ones need to be classified as truly dangerous. They also spent time debunking that the Earth will not end in 2012 as the Mayan calendar predicts.

Best Movie Panel
I did not get to as many movie panels as I’d like but my favorite was the Seth MacFarlane talk where he analyzed and compared Family Guy clips as well as introduced the world to his new movie “Ted.” Mark Wahlberg also made a surprise appearance.

Best BBQ
You can’t go to Austin and not have BBQ. This year Stubb’s takes the award.

Best Music
How could it be anything but Jay-Z?

Best Poster at SXSW
The guys at Adult Swim came up with a great looking poster that they gave out at the Turner tent.

Worst Weather
Never in 9 years have I seen weather worse than I did Friday and Saturday in Austin. The half mile walk I had from my hotel to the convention center was brutal, especially on Friday.

Worst Registration Process
The registration line for SXSW on Friday was 90 to 120 minutes long. For a technology conference you would think we could have some forward thinking ideas about how to make registration faster, but here we are 6 years later still filling out green index cards to pick up our badges.

Worst Hotel Situation
Unless you were sponsoring, speaking or knew someone at SXSW you were not getting a hotel room within a few block radius of the convention center. Sure you could have picked up a room at the Hampton Inn one week before the conference for $1700 a night, but most people were resigned to long walks or cab rides. One set of friends decided to stay in San Antonio and drive in each day figuring the party scene at Riverwalk was going to be just as good.

Best Redemption of a SXSW Conference
After leaving woefully disappointed in 2010 at the complete sell out of the conference organizers to the sponsors, SXSW totally redeemed itself in 2012. Yes, the sponsors were still there, but knowing this going in made the event that much better. The best part of these sponsored events, not having to pay for food or drinks the entire weekend. Thank you to all the sponsors out there!

And with that, SXSW goes back on my list as a must attend event. I can’t wait to get back to Austin in 2013, though my hotel room is getting reserved as early as possible this year.

The annual trip to Austin is less than a week away, and my schedule is definitely rounding in to shape.  After saying SXSW had “jumped the shark” on Friday, there are still worthy parts of going and this year has potential.  So here are the events I am looking forward to most.

Interactive

• Keynote with Frank Abagnale on “How to Read the World” – Abagnale was the con artist that had a movie made about his life called Catch Me If You Can. I have always been fascinated by his story so I can’t wait to hear his talk.
• Brian Solis’s talk on “The End of Business as Usual” with Billy Corgan will be neat to see the Smashing Pumpkin’s new album launch happen on stage.

Movies

• “The Last Fall” is a movie about what happens when an NFL journeyman finishes his career. Most NFL players careers are over after only a few years in the league and the average age when a player retires is 27 years of age. I hope this movie by Matthew Cherry, a former NFL player, sheds light on what happens.
• “Marley” is a documentary from Academy Award winner Kevin Macdonald about the life and times of Bob Marley.  The footage includes never before scenes and interviews.

Music

• Santigold and Theophilus London at La Zona Rosa. I am only in Austin until Tuesday, but this show is going to rock. I really love Theophilus London when I first heard him in the SXSW 2010 Artist Showcase.

Surviving SXSW is not going to be that difficult with a line up like that.  Plus with 21 Jump Street premiering and Seth MacFarlane’s talk it could be a good week, that keeps me coming back to SXSW.

It is that time of year again, the annual pilgrimage down to Austin, Texas to SouthBySouthwest (SXSW).  This will be my 9th SXSW out of the last 10 years and it may be the last one I go to.  Many posts have been written about how SXSW has “jumped the shark” and in 2010, I felt that it definitely had.

When I started going to SXSW in 2003 it was a different conference than any others that I had been to.  The conference was much smaller and led by developers and designers.  The panels were voted on by the community and they tended to be led by thought leaders.

As the decade moved along things slowly changed, some for the better.  The conference got bigger, we saw great product launches there like Twitter and FourSquare.  But something else happened, no longer were panels solely chosen by the community, and by 2010, it felt like most of the panels were allowed to speak thanks to their company’s sponsorship.  I saw this first hand with the panel I was on with Naveen Selvadurai and Josh Babetski.  Our panel was not picked until AOL brought it to SXSW’s attention that we were major sponsors that year.  Magically our panel was added to the program.

So why am I going this year?  I wanted to see if anything has changed.  It does not look like it on the surface, but I remain hopeful.  I am excited to see a lot of friends, our publishers and service providers all in one place.  Of course the parties and the city of Austin are another great part of SXSW.  Later this weekend I’ll put together the panels, parties, movies and bands I am looking forward to seeing.

The weekend in Austin was truly fantastic My favorite moments from this year at SXSW:

• Kevin dyeing his hair blue for International Day of Awesomeness
• Leah Culver from Pownce saying that secure authentication is unnecessary and slow during the Developer Friendly Web APIs talk on Sunday was comical. Not having SSL auth devalues your site, but more importantly your users, especially sites that screen scrape address books etc.
• Seeing 300 geeks bowl was truly amazing. The Mapquest team bowled 5 foot bouncers down the lane while other teams bowled in full costume.
• Learning that teens realize that websites need advertisements to make money was refreshing; but having them view ads that they could care less about is wasteful for all of the web industry. For example, a 16 year old viewing an ad for Miller Lite on NBA.com in between videos is pointless for both Miller and NBA Interactive.
• Doing an interview with the Download Squad on Open AIM was really great; Grant and team do a fantastic job.
• RockBand was definitely the game of choice at SXSW, as everyone was rocking out on the trade show floor.
• Seeing Kal Penn, John Cho, and Neil Patrick Harris talking about Harold and Kumar was hysterical

Will I go back next year? Is there any doubt, SXSWi is truly one of the best weekends of the year, now I just need to find a way to stay for the music.

Yesterday was a really exciting day at SXSW. We saw some movie stars, AOL won a prestigious web award, and we took on a bunch of other geeks in a ho-down at the bowling alley. A few years ago, Arrested Development was my favorite show on TV (old episodes can be found on hulu.com), and without a doubt that show launched the career of Michael Cera from Superbad and Juno, and it also reinforced the fact that Jeffery Tambour was one of the best comedic actors around. Today he was at SXSW and it was very cool to meet him.

This evening, Kevin Lawver‘s Ficlets which was nominated for two web awards at SXSW, won the award for site with best CSS. Congrats to Kevin and all the folks who worked on it. For those who do not know, Ficlets is a community short story fiction writing site where stories can be strung together and shared with others.

As the web awards were going on, the Open AIM group here attending the conference went to Bowling For Geeks. In a competition between 50 teams bowling two games each, we came in toward the bottom, but had a lot of fun. The folks here in Austin have been awesome this year in getting out and supporting a lot of causes and organizations (of course free food and drinks never hurt).

So far SXSW has lived up to its billing as the most fun and diverse conference out there. Austin provides a great backdrop for all of the action with great music, films and of course interactive discussions. Listening to teens talking about what they want from their online experiences to hearing from Kal Penn, John Cho, and Neil Patrick Harris about what it was like to make Harold and Kumar Go To Guantanamo Bay. Two interesting tidbits to take away from these talks. First, teens do not like advertisements that are not targeted to them, for example, one of the panelists shares he goes to NBA.com to watch videos, and in between clips he sees ads for Miller Lite, he is 16 years old. For Kal and John they talked about how they were surprised that they were casted as leads in a movie like the first Harold and Kumar, basically sharing how much racism there is in Hollywood, but that since Harold and Kumar that they are seeing it change slightly. Seeing a panel debate on which social networking campaign was the biggest flop (HP in my opinion) was enlightening. Overall, SXSW has been as consistent as ever, and you can continue to follow along by tuning into the blog and checking my twitter feed.