Well, again with the whirlwind trip to Austin.

With 34 sessions going on at anyone time its a frustrating experience. Now All I do is pick 3 that are relatively close. I run to the first one grab the twitter hash tag so that I can watch the tweets about that session while attending the second. Then I’d leave 10 minutes before the end and try to run into a third room and grab the links, and hashtag off of that one.

One frustration is when you pick 2 sessions and you leave the first one because it was “meh” and find that there’s a long overflow line up at the second.

GAMEIFICATION

But I saw as much as I could. I learned quite a bit about the concepts of gameification, and putting a game layer on the world. SCVNGR will soon be the next foursquare, which was kind of the next twitter last year.

This year there were a lot of sessions bout educating our kids through games. With a 5 year old at home already on ixl.com for math, headsprout.com for reading, and getting ready for www.khanacademy.com, I wanted to see what was coming next. How we will be educating our kids through games. Fablevision is coming soon (already checked that it was a private company so I can’t buy stock). Thats just the beginning

BLOGGING and the future of Journalism

The Sheraton conference center had 4 simultaneous sessions 4 times per day dedicated to this topic for 5 days!

I want to expand on this so I won’t write much now but it was enlightening to say the least. especially the session on “Bloggers vs. Journalists: Its a psychological thing”. Lots of blogging for money and companies, and the standard - how to value your blog and get unique visitors up.

Writing for food bloggers, writing for web and some other amazing sessions

The Rest

I do like the quality of life sessions as well. Ones like “Live like a Sprinter”, “How to deal with ADD” - SQUIRREL! and a few others that give some great tips on productivity that I will struggle to implement throughout the year. I unfortunately missed the ones on local gov’t and interactive media but I hope they will be online over the next year as my SXSW pass allows me to access them as they go online.

Hopefully over the next few months I will be posting about how some of what I learned can  be applied to local issues

There was a session on how to