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From the DDM blog …

So, I’m at SxSW … you know, THE conference for web geeks such as yours truly? I have my list of panels all picked out already and I came here with a lot of expectations about how amazing it was going to be. Well, I’m not giving up hope quite yet, but I must tell you that my first experiences here have been anywhere from frustrating to inane.

To set the stage, let’s go to the conference center to register and get our badges. The line is mammoth. I mean, it snakes back and forth around two floors of the huge conference center. We stand in it for about an hour. Occasionally people in SxSW t-shirts yell at us to move this way or that. We inch along. The woman in front of us has a big fight with her partner. He leaves, he comes back, he leaves again. A prolonged anguished phone call ensues and tears are shed.

Finally we make it upstairs and as we inch along through that maze we are given little green registration cards to fill out, and along with them we are given tiny pencils – the kind you would commonly find in libraries circa 1980 – with which to fill them out. Hmmm … not very “interactive” … in fact, it seems pretty archaic, as far as technology goes. I mean, just earlier this morning I was able to receive my Southwest boarding pass at the airport simply by inserting my credit card into a kiosk, but now here I am filling out little green cards with library pencils at the premier “interactive” technology conference.

At last we reach the photo stations where we have our photos taken for our badges. Michael goes first, then me, then Kevin. We are told to wait against the back of the wall until we are called to pick up our badges. The back wall where we stand is maybe 10 feet from where our photos were taken. It is very noisy here – a big, open space, infinitely high ceilings, no carpeting, hundreds of people. Slowly I pick up on a din above the chatter. This din is the noise of the photo takers screaming out the names of those whose badges are ready. It is honestly a challenge to distinguish which names are being screamed. We have to strain to determine whether it is our names being called or not. Was that “Michael Phillips?” Or “Michelle Wilson?”

Kevin’s badge is the first to be ready, mine is next. Michael, even though he went first, is still waiting. We wait, and we wait, and we wait. Finally I go ask a photo taker if she can help us find Michael’s badge. Long story short (or medium as the case may be), it takes about another 20 minutes to finally get Michael’s badge. During that time he has to fill out another green card, and he might have accidentally knocked a camera and it’s tripod onto a photo-taker’s head. Ok, so that actually happened … but it WAS an accident!

Alright – at LAST we have our badges! It’s taken 75 minutes. We are now ten minutes late to our first panel, How to Rawk SxSw. We frantically try to locate the room where the panel is being held on the map. I discover that it is on the first floor in the corner. We make our way away from the photo takers, across the quite large convention center, down the escalator, and around the corner. Hmmm … we are unable to locate room 9ABC. We walk all the way to the other side of the convention center, thinking we must have been turned around on the map. Huh … we are still unable to locate the room. We inquire with a SxSW personnel, who informs us that the room is actually upstairs, where we just came from.

We head to escalators, ascend to the second floor, go back past the photo takers, to the end of the convention center. No room 9ABC can be located here either. Again we inquire with a SxSW personnel, who tells us that the room is actually upstairs on the third floor. We head past the photo takers, again, all the way back to the other side of the convention center and around the corner, where we find the elevators that will take us to the third floor.

On the third floor now, we head to the end of the convention center and FINALLY discover room 9ABC. Only, before we can go in the room we are informed by another SxSW personnel that the panel has actually been moved to the second floor right by the photo takers where we had started off so long, long ago. Arrrggghhh!!! Michael and I make an agreement that if it’s not actually there when we arrive that we will at last give up. However, it is there, and we arrive at our first panel, after 20 minutes of searching the convention center literally high and low.

Ok … our first panel … despite our grueling ordeal, I’m excited. I immediately recognize Tantek Celik (the creator of Microformats and the box model hack, Chief Technologist at Technorati, and general web standards celebrity) as one of the members of the panel. We find a seat, and catch the tail end of some sort of talk about Flickr. Next we move on to a talk about Twitter, which appears to be the MySpace for folks that are out of their teens, yet still want to waste time posting brief, relatively meaningless blurbs that all their “friends” can see. Things like, “In Austin and hungry for BBQ.” (That was an actual copy/paste from Tantek’s Twitter page.) The panel jokes with each other, teases each other, has long awkward pauses, swears at each other, then one by one reveal their Twitter names, so that all of us can send meaningless text messages to them if we want to.

Next is a discussion of Dodgeball and it’s relative merits as a way to figure out where the “hot parties are happenin” as well as how to “geoposition” them. I soon realize, as the outline of this presentation is shown on the overhead, that this is the gist of this entire presentation. The description was, “Panels or parties? Sleep or another trip to Starbucks? Experienced pros give their insights on making the most of your next few days in geek wunderland.” That sounds pretty cool, right? But it probably should have read, “How to use the latest social networking trends to be able to text message as many people as possible in order to make sure that you’re at the most exciting party possible at any given moment.”

Needless to say, I left there feeling kinda … well … old. Hopefully tomorrow will bring better things.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Fun, Networking, Personal, SxSW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.