I’m halfway-listening to the Craig Newmark keynote, halfway-coding my Ruby/MediaWiki/TextMate pipe dream. It’s not that the interview is boring — far from it — but these sessions have been more abstract than concrete, for the most part, and I need to ground myself every once in a while. Couldn’t SXSW do a handful of coding sessions, organized by language, wherein experts train novices and everyone learns something practical that they didn’t know before?

Visualizing the SXSW backchannel. Be snide in real time! Join us at irc.freenode.net/#sxsw.

First of all, I feel like whenever I meet someone at SXSW whom I’ve heard of, I end up inadvertently reenacting The Chris Farley Show. Secondly: how cool is it that there’s a Wikipedia article for The Chris Farley Show?

I did, in fact, make it to the boozy parts. The web awards were pleasant but bizarre, the after-party was sweltering but enlightening, and my feet are weary but well-worn. Pictures to follow whenever I’m not completely exhausted.

Just came back from a great “geek lunch” with some smart people, including Wilson Miner and Andy Budd. Purportedly it was about adaptive user interfaces, but it ended up being an extended conversation about web apps and Ajax in general. I like the idea of having structured blocks of time set aside for unstructured conversation, if that makes sense; sometimes geeks have to be forcibly grouped together before they start talking to one another.