Let me start by saying this is absolutely the most incredible conference I’ve ever attended. Its been 5 exhausting days of intense material to grok in the coming weeks, but what a sincere, friendly, passionate and inspiring group of 5000+ people!

People are at SXSW to share ideas, make connections, have fun and even make our world a better place. Its so refreshing to see something pulled off as well as this conference is. I can’t even imagine the amount of work it would take to put this on, but the experience is flawless.

The great thing about it is that there’s no heavy commercial or corporate agenda – just a space for people to come together, share ideas and enjoy themselves. Most people are here because they want to be – not because their employer sent them. If you’ve ever thought about coming to this conference and haven’t – stop thinking and start planning for next year.

So what’s SXSW like?

First off – this thing is massive. I’m bad at guessing numbers, but they claim over 5000 last year – it had to be way more that this year. The conference takes up just about the entire convention center and meeting rooms in 3 hotels. Imagine walking around before a basketball game in the crowded hallways – except more than half the people have their heads down twittering on their iPhones and you’ll have an idea of what it feels like getting to a panel. There are more panels than you can handle – you have to get used to accepting you can’t do it all. They podcast most of the material later so you have to just do the best you can with the time you have here.

What else makes SXSW so great?

You’ll make a ton of friends in a very short amount of time. Sure the panels are interesting, there’s a ton of internet and other celebrities who show up, the weather is awesome, Austin is one of the greatest cities in the world… but the people are the reason to come.

There’s certainly a unique culture here and there are many ways to get the most out of it. Twitter is obviously a huge part of it. Every panel and party has a hash-tag for the backchannel and this really opened my eyes as to the possibilities of using Twitter. In fact, I’ll be honest – this has really opened my eyes to the Twitter being beyond the basic “what are you doing now” stuff. You realize in a situation like this that its not as much “what you’re doing” as it is “what is happening”.

Incidentally – Twitter had its first popularity spike at SXSW in 1997. The conference took daily usage of 20,000 tweets a day to 60,000 and this story is quite a legend here. This year Twitter announced its @anywhere service during the keynote.

I’ll write more in the coming days as I have time to digest information I’ve collected, but for now lets just say I’m already looking into booking a hotel for next year. I’ll certainly be back!