I can’t really say I went to SXSW this year. 24-hours is hardly enough time to have been there. But I did have a fun, albeit nutty short time. Some highlights:

Breakfast with Stanford University’s JJ Toothman

JJ tweeted me as Stanford has been looking at Clearspace for their Intranet. Had a good coffee and chat at the Hideout. JJ is a cool guy.

Portland: North enough to be Canada

Austin thinks that Oregon is…well…somewhere up there (waves hand). You know, in Canada. Don’t believe me? Check out my badge.

Zuckergate

For sure the convention center was a-buzz about how horrible the Zuckerberg/Lacy flirty, rambling keynote was. Mark’s “you’re supposed to ask questions” and Lacy’s “screw you guys” pretty much were the shot heard ’round the SXSWosphere. Sarah then spent a lot of time covering tracks.

The Tao of Stowe

I then hit Bloghaus (which was packed) and ran into Chris Saad and Stowe Boyd. Stowe brought me up to speed on a cool sounding company who has taken his blog posts to heart and used them as a product development roadmap. Then Chris admitted that Stowe had inspired a lot of his thinking on Particls, too. Chris then demoed Particls, which is very freaking cool.

Mzinganet

Those Mzingas. They actually socially network in real life. Aaron Strout and Jim Storer were great about introducing themselves to me and tons of others. We talked a bit about how important co-opetition was and that we hoped more vendors focused on the enterprise social software space.

Interview Alley

I don’t know what show was interviewing people in Bloghaus, but it was a parade of bloggers. Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Jeremiah Owyang, Charlene Li and a ton of others stepped under the french fry lamps for some quick interviews.

My Macbook Cover

Laura “Pistachio” Fitton stopped by to complement my Macbook cover (she has the same one) without knowing who I was. We then laughed about it and kept missing each other. Coffee next time, Laura.

Chris Brogan “The Human Digg”

I finally got to meet Chris in person. He was by far the highlight of the trip for me. He’s a hell of a nice guy and single handedly introduced me to way too many people for me to remember. Chris not only knows a ton of folks he also has a nose for what’s cool, as anyone on Twitter knows. He didn’t earn the “Mayor of Twitterville” title without reason. He invited me to join a pack of people for dinner at Stubbs which turned into a 1.5 hour wait. I got called away by some ex-Dell coworkers to join them at Green Mesquite (below) so dodged the Stubbs debacle.

BBQ Direct

It had been years since I had seen some of my coworkers from Dell and guess what? None of them work at Dell anymore either. All have moved on to very cool careers at very cool companies. It was great catching up and there was no line at Green Mesquite. So it was an easy and fast dinner (sorry, Chris).

The Parties

I stopped by the Blogger and Gawker parties for a bit (they were packed). After I saw someone act like they saw a Beatle after meeting Valleywag’s Owen Thomas I decided I was pretty much out of steam. So, I went back to my room to catch up on some work since Jive is moving back to Exchange after a bout with Zimbra and I wanted to make sure I had email on Monday morning, again. All in all, it was a fun 24 hours in Austin. Maybe next year I’ll actually stay long enough to make some stronger connections.