I arrived yesterday at the much anticipated SXSW 2008 Interactive festival and conference.  The conference is one of the largest discussions of technology, design, and culture and I am very excited to be here.  While I came down alone, I am sharing a room generously offerred by Adam Duvander, my parter in MomHub Hal Newton is here, and Rick Turcozy wrote about the many other folks from Portland that are here.  The biggest challenge I now face is deciding what panels to attend - there are about a dozen going on at any given time.

Session #1: Filching Design

Discussion about the pros and cons of borrowing designs and ideas from other sites.  The crowd was about half designers and half developers and, not surprisingly the developers felt it was alrigh to steal designs, and the designers code.  Jarred Spool was in the crowd and pointed out that the panel was mincing concepts by confusing trademarks, patents, and copyrights.  Hal later pointed out that the panel was fun and all, but really a bunch of designers playing lawyer

Session #2a: Contextual Web

Session #2b:e-commerce lessons from Zappos.com

Session #3: Keynote - conversation with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson

Session #4:Jason Fried - 10 things we learned at 37Signals

Evening Events

Frog Design opening party at the Mexican American Cultural Center.