blogging sxsw (or not)

Obviously, I've not been doing much conference blogging on this trip. I was thinking a bit about why that was, and there are a number of factors. First is that I'm starting to oversaturate on conferences and travel, so it's harder to get excited enough to want to blog anything. Second is that while I've heard some interesting things here, not much of it has been been really new to me--there's a lot of overlap between the presentations I've heard thus far and the things I've heard at other conferences this year. Third is that there are other people doing a marvelous job of blogging some of the presentations I've been at--most notably Heath Row, who's blogging the sessions he attends at Fast Company and the sxsw conference blog. (If you haven't seen Heath's conference blog reports before, you're in for a treat; he's amazingly good at capturing not only extensive detail from a presentation, but also the tone and context.)

Thus far, SXSW for me has been less about the presentations and more about the people. I'm having a chance to meet a lot of people who I've long admired, but have never met in person, as well as getting to know some people better who I'd only met briefly in the past.

I'm hoping that tomorrow and Tuesday bring some new ideas and inspiration--but even if they don't, the interactions and connections are well worth the trip. Relationship building, in the long run, is worth a lot more to me these days--professionally and personally--than information consumption.