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I wrote a week or so ago about what I wanted to get from South by South West.

Now it’s all over, the hangover has faded but the jetlag is lingering longer than would be ideal, there are a few observations from my first sxsw that I would like to share.

The standout moment for me was Clay Shirky’s talk “Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data.” He captivated the audience for an hour, weaving together seemingly unrelated topics and themes (underwear, weather balloons, spherical trigonometry, Napster and the printing press, amongst others). He created a beautifully articulate argument for how abundance breaks more things than scarcity and raised the question around how much value we can get out of civic sharing.

He even managed to answer some terminally dull, laborious questions with wit and create an interesting point where there was, seemingly, nothing to say. Clever.

As I tweeted at the time, the best presenters are great story tellers. Clay Shirky is an awesome story teller. He also wore a three wolf moon t-shirt for extra awesomesauce™.

I was probably not the only person to leave that auditorium wanting to be a better public speaker.

I think one of the reasons his talk went down so well was that he went very deep into the subject. I found some of the panels merely skimmed the surface and left many people wanting more – which they often found by leaving the session. Either the participants judged their audience wrong or were, dare I say it, guilty of inadequate preparation.

As someone said on Twitter – it’s all a bit Russian roulette with the sessions. Apparently, it always has been.

You’d expect Keynotes to be the pinnacle of the conference though. The interview of Evan Williams, founder of Twitter, was one that fell way short of the mark. It was a weak interview that led to a queue to leave the enormous room. The back channel was alive with protestations at the dullness of it all. Here’s a compilation of just some of our chat.

Poor old Eliot Van Buskirk who had to follow up with an interview of Daniel Ek, CEO and co-founder of Spotify, 24 hours later was visibly nervous as he took to the stage; conscious of an audience that wasn’t afraid of giving its tweets some teeth. But he made a much better fist of the interview than Umair Haque did of his session with Williams. His questions were more pointy and we actually gleaned some information from the interview. Like, for example, Spotify having 320,000 paying subscribers, 100 million playlists – 30% of which being complete albums – laying waste to the myth that the album as a format and concept is dead.

Those panels that did dive deep were a pleasure to listen to, even if at times it was an individual holding the whole thing together. Johnny Lee of Microsoft – Applied Sciences talked, like Shirky, eloquently and concisely when discussing ‘new interaction paradigms’ (first prize for buzzword bingo). His piece was littered with a number of nuggets of detail and insights – fired off too quickly to get down. Will be hunting down the session video when it is available later in the year.

As a side point. How come I’ve heard a number of tremendously switched-on people from Microsoft talking about their work with some awesome advances in computing technology? What’s the barrier between the output of these visionaries and the marketplace? I think that company needs a few more people like Johnny Lee and Blaise Aguera y Arcas and less Balmers.

It’s also worth mentioning Ze Frank’s session. Never mind him working in a parallel universe, I think it’s probably more tangential. He talked about some of the things he’s done over the years exploring human emotions. I took a lot more away from this session than James. Yes, what he does is disposable and often whimsical. But some of it, I feel, provides a real insight into human emotions and he has a great knack of turning a sterile digital space into something quite emotionally charged. His thought patterns, work rate and variety are startling. He makes me want to do more.

But, as Tim says, SXSW is as much about the people you meet. The parties were excellent, the conversation inspiring, Twitter avatars we brought to life and to be frank I can’t f***ing wait ’til 2011.

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