I went to SXSW in Austin this month, but once again I struggled to attend as many panels and sessions as I'd wanted to. So I decided to use the Web to find out what I missed, content wise, at SXSW. Here's what I found.

Presentations, Notes & Write-ups

To track presentations, Slideshare is a great place to go. Most (if not all) of the slideshows linked by Lanyrd came from Slideshare.

One of the most compelling features of this year's SXSW sessions was the live cartooning done by digital agency Ogilvy. On its Ogilvy Notes web site, all of the "visual notes" from SXSWi have been collected at one place. It'd be wonderful if visual notes became commonplace at conferences, as they're a handy way to get a quick summary of a panel or keynote.

Here's a visual note from a session I went to at SXSW, Jeffrey Zeldman's Awesome Design Panel:

For write-ups of sessions, you can't go past a good ol' Google search. I searched for "Zeldman panel SXSW 2011" and found this great summary by Guardian staffer Paul MacInnes, on a special Tumblr blog. Indeed the Guardian had stellar coverage from SXSW, with a posse of Tumblr blogs tracking the event. See also ReadWriteWeb's coverage from SXSW.

Audio & Video

Conferences these days often record panels and (if we're lucky) put up the audio on their websites, either during the event or after. Many of the SXSW sessions were recorded and are available as audio on the official SXSW website. For example, here is the full audio from Zeldman's session. The audio player unfortunately doesn't have a download option.

A suggestion for large conference organizers: create podcasts for each stream, so that people can subscribe to them. I'd love to subscribe to a 'media' podcast from SXSW, so I can hear media-focused panels at my leisure on my iPod.

Video from SXSW is scattered all around the Web. There are specialist video programs, like WebBeat.tv - who interviewed me during the event. SXSW has a YouTube channel, but there's not much coverage on it. Fortunately for me, there is some video of one panel that I wanted to see but couldn't: Rebooting Iceland: Crowdsourcing Innovation in Uncertain Times. But generally, you'll have to search the Web and hope that someone took video of the session you're after.

Social Media Coverage

Finally, of course, there is social media coverage from conferences. Twitter and Facebook are great tools to use during the event, but even after the event you can review conferences using services like Storify. ReadWriteWeb's Community Manager Seamus Condron did a virtual scrapbook of SXSW, using Storify. It pulled together coverage from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and other social services.

Overall, tracking conference coverage from afar or after the event isn't a one-stop shop experience. Lanyrd is the closest it comes to having one online destination, but you'll likely want to get your Google search on to compliment that.

Let us know in the comments if you have found other ways to get at the meat of conferences, virtually.

With apologies most sincere to John Donne, CEO, Fixed Form Enterprises

The canned and careful words they speak,
Or parrot off the teleprompter,
Do not waft so much as reek
With all the freshness of a dumpster.

They bear the same relation to
Ideas as an eight-bit version
Of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit"
Does to a violent execution.

CEOs and marcom jocks,
Salesmen and specialists:
Spare us all these vapid talks
Before we're forced to slit our wrists.

And journalists (an you love God)
And bloggers, pod- and broad-casters,
Why must you applaud this fraud?
Refuse and you'll get drunk much faster!

Keynote speakers, stand relieved
(though not as much as those you've bored),
You've done your bit, you've made your stand,
It's time to hit the conference floor.

Better yet, the bar's through there,
Take a load off, grab a beer,
One-on-one, we'll lend an ear
And face-to-face we might just hear.

Nintendo photo by Matt Williamson

The Economist magazine featured in its current issue a special report on Smart Systems, underlining how rich, and important these ICT solutions have become, and how they will in the future sustain value added services for a wide set of vertical application areas.

The Internetome conference - held at the posh if surprisingly glowing red Park Plaza Westminster Hotel, right across the Big Ben, and on the London Eye's side - was introduced by Philip Sheldrake, its organizer and Master of Ceremonies. Philip mentioned that if China was building an IoT city (!) from the ground up, and putting together a five day conference on it with 5,000 delegates and 12 parallel tracks, then the U.K. was probably also ready for such a conference, and hopefully applications, and deployments that would emerge.

The tweetup the evening before the conference at a Soho pub was attended by a total two people, Philip, and the author, indicating either that the subject is still pretty exotic, or that tweetups haven't become a popular way of organizing an ad hoc informal meeting. (Truth to be told, a third person called us when we already left the pub, headed for some excellent Indian at the Red Fort. If you are in London check it out!)

The number of nodes, or at least their order of magnitude, was also the subject of some friendly banter, and easy self-irony, as the various speakers competed to quote larger and larger numbers: John Woodget, worldwide director of telecommunications at Intel opened with 15 billion, and other speakers quoted other numbers, but all were apparently swept aside by that by Justin Rattner, CTO of Intel, not present at the conference, who with 7 trillion nodes in the IoT network in ten years, is apparently the current champion of this strange sport.

Woodget presented fairly rich and elaborate slides on the way Intel sees the development of the field, predicting a tenfold increase in machine-to-machine (M2M) communication applications in five years, with 70% of them on wireless personal area network (WPAN) connections.

The business model for WPAN M2M applications still has to be found, but the example of SMS text messaging, worth tens of billions of dollars per year, shows that it is possible.

He also announced that next year Intel is going to bring to the market an Atom-based reference design platform for M2M applications, which being affordable, will enable a large number of developers to prototype applications in a flexible environment rich with connection options. The reference platform, which apparently won't have a name -- one wonders how annoying it will be to search for it or to place an order for it exclusively by its SKU -- will have 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, zigbee connectivity built in, based on the now ubiquitous SIM card model.

He concluded saying, "We do not know how these tiny chips will transform our lives, and that is the beauty of it."

Next on stage was myself. I'm the founder of WideTag and advisor of the Singularity University, and I talked about the Future of Social Objects and how the units of the IoT networks will form structured groups, effectively societies, with certain necessary characteristics of autonomous communication, and decision making. I also spoke about the complexity of the deployment, and management of future IoT networks, and the barriers to their full potential which are not only technological, or infrastructural, but also social, and legal. The technology of Google's autonomous robotic cars is ready: what is not ready is the insurance framework that will enable the smooth management of liabilities for the accidents which will unavoidably occur.

Next page: From smart grids to wireless cows

Robin Hearn, director of strategic marketing at Qualcomm described how cellular communications are at the heart of IoT, showing numbers that -- as Sheldrake gleefully remarked -- actually agreed with those from Intel. He also showed a fascinating gamut of IoT applications, from smart grids to wireless cows, with this last one being also the subject of an apparently unbeatable ROI calculation: CowDetect, the application for networked cows, adds $350 per year to the yield of each animal. Sheldrake on Twitter was quick to comment that if the same were applied to the citizens of the U.K., the entire national debt could be quickly payed down!

Gert Kortuem, of Lancaster University, underlined the need for IoT to take into account the human factor, and to build a livable environment where people can make sense of the data that is collected. He also highlighted the unexpected nature of human behavior, exemplifying it with the counterintuitive result of an experiment, where those smart meter equipped homes, which were of Republicans who did not express specific interest for the environment, would increase their energy consumption, when told that they were using more electricity than their neighbors. He also spoke about the need of designing easy, understandable, non-geeky user interfaces for IoT applications.

Gus Hosein of Privacy International described a post-privacy world, remarking that there is no such a thing as non-personal information. Supposedly anonymized data sets, when connected with others, will always enable the pinpointing of the individual. Consequently all information has to be treated as sensitive. As an example he presented the consumer backlash against smart meters, when it became apparent how their readings could lead to fine grained analysis of behavior. Hosein concluded with a provocative call to design devices that can cheat. He said that if we don't allow for anonymity, society will fail.

Philip Sheldrake shared a proposal about four levels of data treatment, from delete, sustain, stats, to archive, which combined with other parameters on sharing he cleverly represented on the Internetome Privacy Dial: a visual representation of contractual agreements between consumers, and service providers for a clear management of data collected.

[[ Embed http://slidesha.re/9lhvzL ]]

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino of Tinker London presented a wide range of stimulating, funny, provocative creations based on Arduino, the consumer level electronics prototyping platform, where smart objects, and networked sensors enter the everyday life.

Fraser Davidson, IBM VP and U.K. lead of the Smarter Cities initiative concluded the talks presenting a rich series of analyses about the flow of data, energy, and goods in a large, complex system as a city, when better understood by the applications of smart networks. He said "76% of the apples consumed in the U.K. come from overseas, traveling 3700 miles to reach us," and pinpointed Peterborough as the leading smart city in the U.K., with fascinating visualizations.

Tony Fish followed moderating a panel, where he took the stance of the provocative contrarian, remarking the dangers of the complexity of the systems that compose IoT: "The iPhone is now so complicated that people don't use it!"

The closing remarks of the conference were delivered by the author, David Orban, as a call for action. The Internet of Things will only happen, if we together, when the conference is over, put in practice what we heard, at our University, department, or enterprise, and through education, experimentation, and the application of open, interconnected systems build it one step at a time.

The next Internetome conference is planned for Spring 2011 on the West Coast in the USA!

That tech industry mainstay, the conference, was the first element affected. One of ReadWriteWeb's writers had his trip to Funconf rescheduled.

Although the damage to the airline industry might well be in the billions of dollars, and the damage to fruit and flower growers also significant, what about the delivery of high tech hardware to, from and through Europe?

Most companies employ what's called just-in-time inventory and delivery strategy. The positive is they save money, especially on storage. No warehouses either at the source nor at transit points or points of sale see smartphones and laptops gathering dust. Instead, they're sped in at the last moment. But when the transportation industry is compromised, just-in-time becomes where-the-hell-is-everything?

We wrote about Apple's delay in opening international sale of its iPad tablets. Will this geological tour de force force the delay further?

Reuters reports that high-tech hardware manufactured in Asia has bottlenecked.

"Across Asia, freight forwarding firms and exporters faced stalled delivery of goods typically transported by air, including mobile phones, high-tech consumer electronics, luxury fashion items and advanced Asian electronics components critical to production lines in Europe."

Slashgear reported a delay in the delivery of the first 1,000 Pandora open-source handheld gaming consoles.

"That volcano has brought all Pandora and iControlPad shipments to a standstill," Tweeted Pandora dev Craig Rothwell."A bloody volcano is the latest delay, crazy"

If anyone in the ReadWriteWeb community knows of other delivery delays or conference cancellations (alliterating like a Saxon), let us know in the comments.

Photos by Frid Geirsson

They might think about networking opportunities or learning experiences, but all too often, these are brushed off as mutual admiration societies and redundant, unoriginal chatter. I've heard every critique imaginable about some of the best-known tech conferences

Aside from the pure serendipity of meeting new people (or meeting online friends in real life), I have found that the main benefits of conferences are those I create for myself.

In other words, when I have complained that the content was boring, I am to be blamed for not seeking out content that was interesting or, in a single-track show, for not participating in the conversation and helping to make it more interesting for me and my fellow attendees. When we say that a given show is good for nothing but parties, well, that's a pretty good sign that partying is more of a priority for us than gaining real value. If we say a conference is populated by "the same old douchebags," as one person recently said to me, then perhaps we're not taking the time to socialize and network outside our zone of comfort and familiarity.

To be blunt, bad attendees make bad conferences. An engaged, interesting and curious person can go to the exact same show and, in most cases, can derive huge benefits from it though a little effort and a lot of great attitude. There's no show too big, too small, too boring for that person to not be able to learn something from it.

What do you think? Have you ever been to a truly, in-and-of-itself bad conference? Would a shift in your own focus have helped? How would you characterize the best conferences of your career to date? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

The ReadWriteWeb crew have collectively planned to take over the world next year by honing our nerd super-powers. From programming in Python to building AI houses, we've resolved to be smarter, more curious, more technical and way geekier than we were last year. Read our resolutions, and definitely let us know what you plan to do to be the best geek you can be in 2010.

"One of my goals for 2010," he said, "is to experiment with Internet of Things in my own house and life, using tools like Pachube and sensors. We'll see how that goes..."

We wish you lots of luck, boss! If all goes well, you'll be a prime candidate for the first episode of Geek Cribs, and we'll all be very, very jealous.

Our own ReadWriteStart warrior, Dana Oshiro, is going to be a busy bee this year.

"I'm finding that the coolest ideas come out of academic institutions and enthusiast groups before they're ever thought of as business-related products. In 2010 I plan on attending more hackathons, dev camps and emerging tech conferences like SIGGRAPH."

In addition to all that conference-hopping, Dana's going to be doing some web work of her own. "Honestly, I need to revamp my personal website Villagers With Pitchforks. I haven't changed the design in years."

Alex Williams, our resident enterprise expert, is also known in certain circles as an experienced podcasting pro. His resolution is something the ReadWriteWeb team would all love to see happen.

He told us that he wants to use 2010 to "make an informative and entertaining podcast for ReadWriteWeb Enterprise that is lively, smart and fun."

What do our friendly readers think? Would you like to listen to awesome news about what companies and people are moving and shaking in the world of enterprise technology? What folks do you most want Alex to talk to, and what topics would you find most interesting? And where would you be most likely to listen to a RWW podcast? At your laptop, in your car, while walking your dogs? Let us know in the comments!

Our newest startup blogger, Chris Cameron, said he wants to use 2010 to press the flesh and put faces with names, so to speak.

"Since I'm the new kid on the block and fresh out of J-school with my M.M.C., my new year's resolution is to get acquainted with as many people as possible in the web/tech/startup industry and develop a healthy amount of sources."

As seasoned journos, it's our sworn duty to protect cub reporters from no-account rabble rousers, so we asked Chris who he specifically wanted to meet this year. He replied, "I'd love to develop some contacts from the bastions of the Web (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Digg, etc.)."

You're in good company, kid. We'd like to meet those guys, too. Just kidding! As a RWW blogger, you're sure to have Kevin Rose and Biz Stone on speed dial in no time. We wish you luck.

Another ReadWriteNoob is Abraham Hyatt, our intrepid Production Editor. He's got a full slate of resolutions this year.

He told us he wants to have more one-on-one time with "the bloggers I read every day, the people whose tweets I look forward to, the friends who surprise me with what they post."

He also said he's going to start paying attention to things outside the tech sphere and his geographical scene. "I want to change the fact that I have no idea what's changing in journalism in China."

And finally, Abraham let us in on how he's keeping his finger on the pulse of technology. "I want to learn from my 5-year-old niece as she begins using the Web. I just hooked her up with her first kids browser and the way she interacts with the Web will be a hint of what's to come for all of us online in the next decade."

Add in learning how to code and blogging more, two of his other resolutions, and Abraham's got a full dance card for the rest of the year!

As for me, I plan to learn Python this year. I've realized in 2009 that it's harder to be a tech writer when you don't have a hacker-esque depth of understanding about APIs and web apps. After talking to Leah Culver, Mark Jeffrey and a bunch of other really smart programmers, I think Python is a great place to start learning about programming languages. So this year, I'm tackling a 900-page O'Reilly book, and I'm not giving up until I have a working web app of my own! Next up, Haskell.

Via Twitter, we heard from a few of our friends, including entrepreneur Renato Valdés Olmos, who pointed us to this pretty web app for those without resolutions who yearn to start small. And everyone's favorite O.G (that's "original geek" in these parts), Chris Pirillo, just couldn't resist the opportunity to get sassy. "My geekiest new year's resolution," he said, "is 2560x1600."

So, what great and glorious plans have you got for 2010? Will you be hacking your way to entrepreneurial greatness by starting your own web company? Will you be building hardware? Are you resolving to start a new career path, go to a new conference or meet a lifelong tech hero?

Let us know your resolutions in the comments!

The researchers found that the majority of conference attendees already had a Twitter account (95.1%) and many of those who did actively used it to tweet during the conference (67.5%). 74.1% of the attendees send between 11 and 20 messages per day and 51.2% discussed topics via @ replies and DMs.

As to what the conference goers shared, it was discovered that nearly half the tweets were simple plain text messages while tweets with links to web sites only accounted for 10% of the messages. In other words, the Twitterers were using the medium to share the information they were learning at the present moment as opposed to posting links to information already available on the web.

The participants were also asked open-ended questions like "Why do you think Twitter encouraged the discussion about topics?" and what the added value of Twitter at conferences was. In response, the survey participants answered that Twitter gave conference goers a greater sense of community and encouraged discussion in the backchannel, often allowing them to discuss things in more detail than the "guys on the stage." Other participants noted that Twitter helps you connect with people who have similar interests, provides networking potential, and allows those who could not attend to gain value from your experience.

Unfortunately, the data collected comes from only five conferences and forty-one different attendees, so the sample size isn't what we would consider to be large enough to draw any definite conclusions. However, based on these initial findings, it does seem to show that a good majority of conference goers today use Twitter to share information and interact with their network when attending these sorts of events.

Structure 08

Our friends at GigaOm are holding the first annual Structure 08 conference on June 25, 2008 in San Francisco. It will focus on innovations in Internet infrastructure and speakers include Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, and Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems. ReadWriteWeb readers can get a 10% discount to Structure 08 - register here and enter the discount code "RWW".

Google I/O

Google I/O is a two-day gathering for developers "to share knowledge about Google's own developer products and web application development in general." Google I/O will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on Wednesday, May 28th, and Thursday, May 29th, 2008.

ReadWriteWeb has 10 free tickets to Google I/O to giveaway, valued at $400 each. Simply leave a comment (with an email address - not published) to be in to win. The first 10 comments that say "I can attend, gimme the ticket" will win.

2008 Semantic Technologies Conference

Now in its fourth year, SemTech 2008 will be a great place to learn about the commercialization of Semantic Technologies.

TECH cocktail

TECH cocktail is a series of mixer events founded by Frank Gruber and Eric Olson, "open to bloggers, technology enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and other business professionals interested in the technology arena in under recognized technology communities."

The next conference will be held May 29, 2008 at Loyola University, Kasbeer Hall, 25 East Pearson, Chicago, Illinois. RWW readers can get a discount by entering "rrwrocks".

Those are just some of the excellent Web Tech conferences upcoming. If you know of others, please add to the comments.