First of all they need to rename the Interactive portion of SXSW to Waste of Time. What I expected from SXSW was a social experience where you met a lot of people, network and get a lot out of the conference tracks. The conference tracks last year where 50% pitch, 25% the person had no clue and 25% awesome. The evening events for the most part are so loud that if you want to talk to someone you have to yell, terrible food and bottom shelf liquor. Meeting new people is ok sp long as you self initiate a 100% of the time, 90% of the time people had their heads buried in their phones and laptops not a lot of interaction. Be prepared for a lot of looks of why are you invading my space.

If your going to cover CES as press, here is my suggestion, bring your DSLR that can record video and interview some of the upper echelon celebrities that go, do not focus on vendors or many of the unknown session speakers. You should be prepared to deal with attendees that are rude, and interrupt interviews just so they can say hello to someone they admire. The best press thing I attended was a SXSW sponsored 10 minute pitch session where 6 vendors pitched the press for 10 minutes each.

They had an exhibitor area at the show, which I was able to walk through it in about 30 minutes. From that walk through I think I stopped to talk to one company, who today is not even on the radar map. Everyone says it is the place to be, well everyone else can go, and I will read the self centered blog posts from the comfort of warm and sunny Honolulu.

My experience with SXSW last year was not worth the money spent. SXSW is very expensive from a attendee standpoint, and hotel accommodations are simply grossly too expensive as compared to standard Austin pricing. Does SXSW have some good points, sure, but overall my experience in attending the interactive portion sucked.

Just a few minutes ago, I left my third session in 2 days because the speakers were pitching their companies. SXSW better get a handle on this! I have spoke at a number of conferences over the past 5 years and have been very careful to never pitch my companies products, during what is supposed to be educational sessions. Pisses me off big time that I could have attended another session of which there are many competing for people’s attention. He SXSW get a handle on your speakers and BAN them if they do this from ever participating in SXSW again!

I will have some more details on my next podcast, but here is a lineup of some sites launching at SXSW

• www.funtweet.it
• www.flavors.me
• pro.wholinkstome.com
• www.awarenessnetworks.com
• upstack.com
• www.pearanalytics.com
• www.edoorways.com
• www.phonebooth.com
• Pubstop by www.imagespacemedia.com

Yesterday in the last session of the day at SXSW Mark Cuban and Avner Ronen had what I consider to be one of the better debates of the show so far. While it was a bit over the top and some ego’s in play, both made great points about the future of how we are going to be consuming media from traditional broadcast sources. Mark contends that the web in it’s current state cannot support large segment of subscribers getting there HD content via an IP connection which is probably true. Avner contends that the younger generation wants their traditional content via Internet.

From Mark’s comments it is obvious that the only way he would make HDNet available on the net is by guaranteeing 500,000 subscribers a month and the entity would have to pay base card rates for the right to get the content aka $2.00 to $3.00 per subscriber.

Mark feels the Ala Carte model will never scale and doubtful that companies like ESPN would make their programming available anytime soon to companies that would like to make it available to consumers on the net.

I will have a much more detailed commentary and sound bites on my next podcast because the breadth of the conversation was pretty wide.

The first true sessions are about to kick off, but I want to relay to you my experience over the past 4 hours have been just hanging out and talking to people. One thing is for sure we live in a very small world. I have run into no less than 30 people I know personally in the new media space. I talked for a few minutes with Tim Street, Leo Laporte, Mark McCrery and a host of other familiar faces. I have also met no less than 20 new folks that will be fun to follow on Twitter and also potential business clients.

I read someplace that the best thing to do is say Hi to everyone. Folks tend to be a little shy until you say hello and wow some great conversations have resulted. The networking power of this conference for me thus far only 4 hours into is living up to the reputation I expected.