Today was a day of non-stop action at the SWSWi interactive conference in Austin. I began my day riding from my A-frame bungalow in South Austin's Bouldin Creek neighborhood (man, could this website use a white-label social network). I met up with Charles from Ning and Nick Douglas (Gawker) and his girlfriend Melissa Gira for breakfast over at the South Congress Cafe. One of the best eggs benedict I've had in quite a while. Man, would that place do well in the Bay Area. They even had three different types of coffee on tap. We talked a lot about what's happening at Gawker (Nick's their Internet correspondent) and the work that Melissa is doing at Valleywag. That audio interview should go up in a few days, most likely cross-posted to Exclamation, LaunchSquad's storytelling blog.

[We should have an extended feature on sex and social media in late March.]

Then, I hung out at the Convention Center for a while, and went to meet the directors of Natural Causes, to interview them over yummy Mongolian BBQ. The real highlight of the afternoon was the slightly unnerving Mark Zuckerberg keynote; in this interview with Business Week's Sarah Lacy, a lot of people came in wanting insight and strategy. A lot of them walked out feeling as though they'd just watched a really uncomfortable writer at odds with a heckling audience. Zuckerberg held his own, and talked intelligently about the Facebook platform, but I left with little more vision than I came in with, regarding its growth or growth potential. I was expecting at least a minor announcement, or an in-depth exploration of some of the brand's core values. My tweets pretty much sum it up: when you take control away from users, they get ticked off. Great, thanks. I agree, but we already knew that.

Later this afternoon I sat down with Jessica and Joe from Mochila to watch them talk with John Havens from BlogTalkRadio. They're a really cool LaunchSquad client; their company is pretty much the iTunes of media content. They have a really great network of big-name publishers (AP, some huge magazines, some BBC content) and their model just works. It was really cool to listen to them talk about both the publisher and the advertiser side of the content economy.

Unlike yesterday evening, when I went out and saw a great funk show at Antone's (The Scabs, who are like the Band meets G Love & Special Sauce), tonight is gonna be an iTunes movie rental night.

My Schedule For Tomorrow:

9:45 Breakfast @ Magnolia Cafe with Ning, hopefully

10 The Art Of Self-Branding

11:30 Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing Of No Marketing (gotta love a panel with Deb Schulz, Jeremiah Owyang, Chris Heuer and Tara Hunt)

1 BBQ

2 Judo Moves for Defending Your Reputation Online (Thor from Satisfaction)

I'll likely play it by ear for the rest of the afternoon, but the evening will definitely include the TCG Party @ The Iron Cactus and the Heather Gold show. Wow. What a week. So many amazing people.