Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

SxSW 2006 Day 4

Mon­day morn­ing was actu­ally more like Mon­day after­noon after my 6:30am return to L’Auberge De Welles­ley, so I missed the first few pan­els (which was unfor­tu­nate, since I really wanted to attend CSS Prob­lem Solv­ing and Micro­for­mats: Evolv­ing The Web, but as it turns out I didn’t miss much: the gen­eral con­sen­sus seems to be that the CSS panel was a mix­ture of bor­ing and not use­ful, and that Micro­for­mats are an inter­est­ing idea that just doesn’t seem to have a lot of prac­ti­cal use out­side of the blog­ging uni­verse at this point in time… I’ll def­i­nitely be keep­ing an eye on those guys though).

Thus my first ses­sion of the day was Craig Newmark’s Keynote Inter­view (for the 3 peo­ple read­ing this who are still liv­ing under that rock, that’s Craig as in craigslist). He’s def­i­nitely an inter­est­ing indi­vid­ual, and it was fun to hear him (and inter­viewer Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia) speak on all sorts of top­ics (both related and unre­lated to craigslist), though Craig def­i­nitely bounces around a lot so it was easy to lose track of his train of thought. How­ever, I thought it would have been nice if he crossed his legs or sat side­ways or some­thing (if you were in the audi­ence, or at least if you are Scrivs, you know what I mean ;)

I skipped the next ses­sion, mostly because I wasn’t inter­ested in any of the top­ics, but also for an attempted lunch date that never was… again, I don’t feel as though I missed any­thing, since the panel I would have attended (Design­ing for Com­mu­nity with “Zero-Advertising” Brands) wasn’t good enough to hold the inter­est of those I spoke with who sat in.

Next came Design Eye for the List Guy, a panel I was really look­ing for­ward to, not only as a user of craigslist, but also since Didier helped start the whole “Design Eye” con­cept. This is one panel I’d love to be on next year (hint-hint). It didn’t dis­ap­point, though I felt the pre­sen­ta­tion was a lit­tle dis­jointed when com­pared with Holis­tic Web Design. Kudos to Andrei (who was “vir­tu­ally” in the room thanks to iSight), Cameron, Paul, Ryan and Dr. Keith for tack­ling the most chal­leng­ing Design Eye project yet.

The rest of the evening involved more par­ty­ing (sur­prise), but most impor­tantly it fea­tured the 2006 Aval­on­star Bowl­ing Extrav­a­ganza — hands-down, this was the sin­gle most enjoy­able and all-out fun event of the entire week. Bryan def­i­nitely hit one out of the park, and that opin­ion is shared by every­one in atten­dance (some peo­ple opted out in favor of 20 x 2 or the Blog­ger Party, but they missed out). Check out the pics. I didn’t know about it until talk­ing with Bryan on Sat­ur­day night, so I wasn’t offi­cially on any of the teams, but I did pinch-hit for Team Aval­on­star, and later for Team Kurafire (thanks Faruk! — btw, the licorice was tasty :). The evening also gave me the chance to meet some more folks in per­son, like Ryan (con­grats on the high-score of the night!), and hang out with Steve (who also filled in at the last minute for Team Kurafire).

The Buz­znet party at the Red Bull House wrapped up the evening party-wise (that place is a trip — Steve and I rocked out in the “music room” for almost an hour), then Steve and I headed back to the Hilton with Bryan to help with his Day 4 pod­cast (check it out — it’s about 45 min­utes long, and every­one was slightly ine­bri­ated, but there’s some good stuff there). Thus ends the penul­ti­mate day…

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Sunday, March 19th, 2006.

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