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While at SXSW, I tried to keep track of everyone I met and talked to. I was not entirely successful, but nonetheless here’s the nearly-complete list of everyone I met in Austin this year. This list is XFN-compliant, so someday it might be useful for social network analysis or some sort of “Six degrees of Jeffrey Zeldman” game.

First off, here’s the list of people I met last year and had a chance to talk to again this year:

Simon Willison, Yvonne Adams, Jeremy Dunck, Jason Calacanis, George Kelly, Alex Russell, Nick Finck, Anil Dash, Dave Shea, Molly Holzschlag, Matt Haughey, Kevin Cheng, Eric Meyer

Second, the list of new people I met this year:

Robert Scoble, Meri Williams, Elly Thompson, Andrew Jaquith, Ka-Ping Yee, Kimberly Blessing, Steve Chipman, Kate Chipman, Karina Longworth, Rebecca Hurd, Chris Baker, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Adrian Holovaty, David Ryan, Richard Rutter, Kevin Wen, John Pratt, Dinah Sanders, Jon Hicks, Jeffrey Zeldman, Keith Hall, Craig Newmark, Don Turnbull, Eric Rice, Amit Malhotra, Craig Ogg, Dan Gillmor, Craig Cook, Thomas Vander Wal, Steve Turnidge, Aaron Boodman, Jock Gill, Gokul Rajaram, Charles M. Smith, Bill Flitter, Henry Copeland, Phil Kaplan, Will Pate, Lockhart Steele, Sergio Villareal, Anders Pearson, Jenifer Hanen

As always, there were lots of people I missed talking to. In a way, every SXSW is a very fast succession of missed opportunities—for every panel you see, there are four or five you’re missing, and for every person you talk to there are lots of interesting people you’re missing. Nevertheless I had a great time—thanks very much to everyone I spent time with there, because the conversations with smart people who are just as excited about this whole web thing as I am are even more valuable than the panels.

I’m back from the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. Actually I was back last Wednesday, but it took me a while to get back to writing. The show was great fun—I think I attended about 15 panels and speeches, and in between I had a rare chance to talk to people who understand what I do for a living. While I admire those who were live-blogging the events, I just didn’t have the energy, so I’ll be posting some belated comments about the show this week.

One of the highlights was meeting a number of “famous” people. This began when I ran into Robert Scoble in the hotel elevator on the first day, and it took me nearly 10 floors to realize who he was. (Thanks for the link and the Channel 9 Guy!) Scoble came to the kickball game where I also ran into some friends from last year: Simon Willison (pictured with Channel 9 Guy here), Jeremy Dunck, and Yvonne Adams.

Kickball was the geekiest sporting event I’ve ever seen, and the only one I ever participate in. There were so many digital cameras this year that I’m sure there’s an embarrasing picture of me playing kickball somewhere on the web. If you took it, I’ll pay you to take it offline.

I also met Jeffrey Zeldman, Craig Newmark (of Craigslist), Jon Hicks (who designed the Firefox logo), Dan Gillmor, Matt Haughey (of Metafilter), Jock Gill (who created the first White House web site in 1994), Phil Kaplan (of AdBrite and F—ed Company) and of course Jason Calacanis, my boss at Weblogs Inc. The great thing was that none of these people acted the slightest bit famous. The downside is that now that I’m back home, nobody here has heard of any of them…

The true highlight, though, was all of the intelligent conversation. Outside of the panels, the most educational moment was when Thomas Vander Wall took a few minutes to give us an impromptu presentation on Attention.XML over Thai food—truly something I’m not likely to experience anywhere else. I’ll post the complete gratuitous list of everyone I met at SXSW tomorrow.

The final Geek Moment of the trip happened when I was at the Austin Airport waiting for my flight and I heard the PA system say “Jason Kottke, come to security checkpoint 3 to claim lost property.” Thanks to the web I actually found the rest of the story.

In case you haven’t read enough “Off to SXSW” posts lately, here’s one more. I’ll be in Austin for SXSW Interactive this weekend and part of next week. Actually I’m already there, and I’m posting this late.

I’ll probably post sporadically while I’m here, but then again I may not. Semi-regular programming will resume on Wednesday.

If you’re in town for SXSW, I’d be happy to meet, so drop me a line. (My email should reach me on my PDA or laptop.)