SXSW Day 2

What a kickass day of sessions at SXSW. If I haven't mentioned it on twitter already, I have to say that this is the most intelligent level of dialog that I've experienced at a conference in my life. In this "most" I'm including two NTEN's, a barcamp, two Drupalcon's, a Nonprofit Project Management conference and a Nonprofit Developer's conference. That's not to say that there weren't intelligent people at those gatherings, it's just to say that the level of dialog here is consistently rather than sporadically intelligent. It's just badass.

Part of that badassity (credit @TheLastLow for the word) was today having had the honor to witness (in order):

(1) A presentation on how to create faster websites by Steve Souders, the creator of Yslow (an app for figuring out why your page sucks at loading quickly) and now a Google employee, who got right into real, actual code to show how to asynchronously load and execute javascript instead of thumb-twiddling.

(2) A presentation on why changing American democracy to be a citizen-funded election system is the first step to solving the corruption of good souls in our government, given by Lawrence Lessig, the creator of Creative Commons and all around brillance machine. Do checkoutchange-congress.org and sign up to refuse to donate to any more political campaigns until politicians stop accepting money from lobbyists and other special interesting groups.

(3) A presentation by one of my favorite shtars of zee veb, Merlin Mann, on how to publish creative content with credibility. He gave it alongside John Gruber and it was well thought-out, intelligent, creative and engaging - all with no slides.

All three presentations were amazing. Mann's presentation was, for me, the closest I've ever been to a celebrity. Granted, he's more of a micro-celebrity (Rose has no idea who they are) - but in my world Mann, Scott Simpson and Adam Lisagor of You Look Nice Today are three of the more hilarious people that I've ever heard and today I got to meet and really talk to all three of them in person after the presentation.

I don't usually affiliate pictures of me with the blog, but this one I couldn't resist:

I did also get to tell John Gruber of Daring Fireball that I'd procured the shitsandwhich.es domain, after hearing him mention his own post regarding the iPhone's lack of SDK announcement at the 2007 WorldWide Developer's Conference as a "shit sandwich". I offered to hand it to him for free... he didn't bite. Alas.

Time for bed. More tomorrow...