I was lucky enough to get a day pass for Monday’s panels at SXSW Interactive. I’ve been meaning to post this for a couple of weeks, but both of my kids picked up some sort of stomach flu and then I came down with the SXSW Plague, aka SXSARS. I attended five panels that day:

• Scalability Boot Camp
• A Critical Look at OpenID 
• Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again?
• Transforming Hospital Systems: The Digital Future of Health Care
• Building Portable Social Networks

Before I get to the recap of the panels that I attended, I thought I’d highlight some general things about SXSWi this year. The big news that’s already been hashed to death was the audience revolt during the Mark Zuckerberg interview. Apparently, the Frank Warren (PostSecret) keynote was pretty good. Zappos gets the marketing genius award for being prescient enough to hand out ponchos during a downpour around lunch time. At one point as I walked to Taco Shack for a quick lunch, nearly every single person within sight downtown was a walking advertisement for Zappos. Sorry, didn’t get a shot of it, but there are plenty of photos on Flickr.

Oh, the parties. I did manage to make one or two of the insane number of parties. I went to the Laughing Squid / blip.tv thing on Friday night. It was completely packed with people overflowing into the Tap Room (formerly B Side). I attended the Frog Design Party on Saturday night. There was plenty of space there with the outdoor bars and performances. I caught a couple of songs with Groupo Fantasma. The bar lines were long throughout the night with people throwing down mixed drinks and green beer. I’m assuming the green was for frog and not an early nod to St. Patrick’s Day. I was turned away like many others by the massive line at the 16bit party at Scoot Inn. Apparently, the capacity had shrunk since booking the event. I returned to the Scoot Inn later in the week for the music festival and thoroughly enjoyed myself however (more on that later). We had the Metroblogging Meetup at Rio Rita on Sunday.

I brought my 9 year old to ScreenBurn Arcade on Sunday as well. It was all Guitar Hero and Rock Band this year . Dell had a bunch of real guitars modded to play guitar hero. The Boy also got a chance to play Smash Bros. Brawl on the Wii which had just been released that day.

Check out the panel notes with photos after the jump.

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Three things of note for those traveling to Austin in the next two weeks for SXSW.

1. Weather - Looks like we’re going to have another small cold front later this week before most people arrive and then start a warming trend through the middle of next week and the start of the Music portion of SXSW. It’ll fairly cold Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, but we’ll really start warming up Sunday and into early next week, eventually reaching the high 50s at night and low 80s during the day. Those coming for Interactive will need a jacket. Those in for Music, not so much. Locally, you should watch Jim Spencer on KXAN (the NBC affiliate) or if you have access to TimeWarner cable, Burton Fitzsimmons on News8Austin, the local 24 hour news channel.
2. Maps - Those using Google Maps for navigation, be careful when using the the satellite feature. Google’s satellite photos of Austin are very out of date. As near as I can tell, the ones of downtown are from late 2003 or early 2004. If you look, City Hall, the Frost Bank building and the Hilton near the Convention Center are all still under construction in those photos.
3. Parties - Jeremy’s got a good map of the SXSW Interactive parties. Austin360 has a good list of the side parties for the whole festival.

I spent the Monday of SXSW Interactive attending panels. I went pretty geeky this year.

First, I hit Mobile Application Design Challenges and Tips. The panel was moderated by Kevin Cheng of Yahoo!. It included Simon King, who works on ZoneTag for Yahoo! Research, John Poisson of Radar, Matt Jones from Nokia and Anita Wilhelm from Caterpillar
Mobile. I personally haven’t done a lot of development for cell phones. I’ve watched the mess that is J2ME and the consensus on this panel was that things are still a bit of a mess. It’s difficult to deal with the carriers. There are still a lot of problems with compatibility. I learned that there’s a version of Apache for Symbian 60 phones called Raccoon. The consensus also seemed to be that Flash Lite is no good for applications on the phone. Matt Jones seemed to be a bit of a comedian. I did like his mention
of the carriers as a “proud pipe”. I remember Russell Beattie mentioning Anita a couple of years ago as someone to pay attention to for mobile application design. The panel assembled a group of smart people with a lot of experience in mobile application design. I think it could’ve been moderated a little better though and kept a bit more focused. Small Surfaces was mentioned
as a good mobile design site and more than one person mentioned that Brian Fling’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Mobile Web…but Were Afraid to Ask. I’ve been hoping a podcast of that one would appear, but it hasn’t yet. You can watch for it here as well.

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I didn’t get to do nearly all that I would’ve liked at SXSW 2007. I suppose it’s that way for everyone. I missed both Turbonegro shows. I missed all of Thurston Moore’s shows. I missed all of Tom Morello’s shows. I missed Bruce Sterling’s annual rant, although I can re-live that through the SXSW
podcasts. SXSW is also posting video from the conference. I didn’t see any films. I heard King of Kong was awesome.

Here’s a small sampling of some of the things that I’ve seen posted over the past week or so that I think are worth checking out.

• Neil Gaiman plugs Hera’s SXSW performance
• The Smoking Gun on SXSW buzz chick Amy Winehouse
• David Byrne recaps his panel and his travel woes on the way home
• SuicideGirls SXSW Surveillance Parts One, Two and Three
• Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser gets arrested at the Holiday Inn
• Bob Mould recaps his SXSW experience
• SaintMurse recaps the Donnie Davies performance at Emo’s
• MTV News take on the Stooges performance at Stubb’s
• I missed Dorkbot. I hear that they had a line around the block. Make has some video and a recap and BBC’s Digital Planet was there as well.
• Wired’s Listening Post has the best videos of SXSW 2007
• Dylan from the Seattle Metblog posts from SXSW.
• The Register did a roundup of SXSWi, complete with the one other thing besides Twitter that I couldn’t seem to escape this year…those two dudes dressed like Superman and Hulk.
• Matt Dentler, a SXSW Film organizer has roundups of SXSW in the news, part one and part two.

The big controversy this week is the shutdown of several of the parties held outside the normal SXSW schedule. It’s been happening for years and has become its own little cottage industry. John Kelso wrote a column in today’s Statesman. Austinist has an open letter from the owners of Factory People about their encounter with
the fire marshals with a long comment thread and a post speculating about the death of the afterparty, but I can’t link it at the moment because they’re inaccessible for some reason (it appears Austinist had some issues over the weekend).

Louis Black does his own recap in an editorial in this week’s Austin Chronicle.

SXSW Baby has the dates for next year.

Since there were so many possibilities for a meetup during SXSWi, I decided to declare Nuclear Taco the Metroblogging Meetup location for this year. I’ve always meant to attend and never made it over there.

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Only having managed a day pass for Monday, I had to get creative with my participation in this year’s SXSW Interactive. I decided to hit Austin Rock N Romp, relocated to Mohawk from the usual Ruta Maya, with my two kids. Page Maguire, who organizes Rock N Romp and also writes for Austinist, has a recap on her blog. Neal Pollack, who read from his new book Alternadad, elaborated on the audience participation of my eldest.
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I went and checked out Neal Pollack at Bookpeople tonight. He read a few excerpts from the book, Alternadad, a memoir set mostly during the time that he lived in Austin. He read a bit from his blog at the end. He followed the reading with a Q&A which included a question about his reaction to the David Brooks column that slammed his book without actually mentioning his name. Nice.

He’ll be appearing two more times: once at the Rock n Romp at Mohawk on Sunday and once during his SXSW panel on Monday.

I recognized Amanda Marcotte, who made the news recently as the blogger who was hounded out of the John Edwards campaign, in the audience along with Michael Barnett who used to write for Austinist and, apparently, several of Pollack’s old neighbors. From one Alternadad to another, I gave him a copy of my band’s CD. I picked up a copy of the book and he inscribed it “For Tim, there’s nothing in here you don’t already know. Rock On.”

Rock on, indeed. He’s here until Monday. Check him out if you have the chance.

In my household, you’d think SXSW Music is the only festival coming up in the next couple of weeks. But SXSW also includes an interactive and a film festival. There are lots of industry types coming into town for all three festivals, and Jette Kernion has conveniently put together a guide to the film venues. Even if you’re a long-time Austinite, you can find out some strategies for enjoying your SXSW film festival experience, including where to eat, where to park, and where to get your wireless fix near the 6 official theaters.

Former Austinite Neal Pollack posted on his blog yesterday that he’ll be at Bookpeople to promote his new book, Alternadad, on Thursday, March 8. Mark your calendars.

He points out that 3/4 of the book takes place in Austin though he moved to Los Angeles a couple of years ago. He also announced that he’ll be at SXSW Interactive this year, but doesn’t have schedule information yet. According to the SXSW Interactive site, he’s scheduled for Monday, March 12 in the afternoon.

Wired magazine has passed its wired, tired, and expired date, but I read it anyhow, out of long habit. Austin appears in the form of preliminary SxSW Interactive promotion and in editorial copy as well. In a multipage “green home” segment, an entire page is devoted to a five-bedroom residence as an exemplar of eco-freako housing (January issue; page 116). This seems like a dubious proposition given the apparent size of the structure, but I do like the fact that the air-conditioning is supposedly quiet, since most is so noisy. The number of square feet in this paragon of energy-efficiency is not mentioned. Austin is reported (pages 154-55) to be one of the USA’s ten “best geek cities,” earning points on several scales (available free Wi-Fi, for instance), some of them odd (dorkbot attendees). Austin, unlike any of the other cities named, is gratuitously dissed. The fault found with our fair city is that it’s “surrounded by Texas.” Why did “they” pick on Austin? There are so many more “downsides” to Raleigh-Durham, Pittsburgh, and Orlando, just to name three. This issue isn’t on line yet. Remember; it was just a month ago that our live-music status was unilaterally taken down a peg or two. We should all toughen up to be ready for the next time those big mean bullies kick sand in our faces. Yeah!