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.