Business Insight Zone

One of the intellectual hazards of attending SXSW Interactive — especially as a blogger — is that you’ll encounter a firehose if ideas that you couldn’t possibly digest in real time. This year is no exception.

To be candid, my luck with panels this year has been spotty: I’ve seen a couple of good ones, including a great one yesterday on giving better presentations, but also too many near-misses that didn’t quite deliver on the promise of a snappy title or impressive lineup of speakers.

By contrast, my luck with people has been better than ever: over the past couple of days, I’ve had more better / deeper / enriched conversations than at any previous SXSW, which is saying something. Some of these happen in the halls of the Convention Center between sessions; some happen over a meal; some are one-on-one; some are in a group; some are fueled by Twitter; some happen in a quiet corner of one of the many, many parties that dominate SXSW’s nightly schedule.

The commonality: all of these tete-a-tetes are serendipitous. Before the conference started, I told myself not to overschedule — to let events unfold rather than trying to force them into any particular path. (Hard experience tells me that you can burn out halfway through this thing otherwise.)

That approach has worked beautifully, and as I enter the last day of SXSW for this year, I’m already toting around more ideas — for blog posts, for Hoover’s social media efforts, etc. — than I could implement in six months. I look forward to sharing some of those ideas here, though I hope to bring them to you as a flowing stream, rather than firehose-style.

Are you at SXSW? (Or have you been before?) How do you digest the mountain of ideas from it?

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Photo by Phil Whitehouse, used under Creative Commons license. No, I didn’t get to play with the massive pile of Legos this year.

Category: SXSW