This is incredibly late, but it seems I went from the airport right back to work after SXSW. Lots of stuff happening all at once. More on this later.

I did want to quickly note that SXSW this year was fantastic. The quality (and number) of panels seemed to double from last year to this year, making it more difficult to choose who to see. It was certainly weblog-centric, but that's fine by me.

My one complaint about the conference in general: audio. It was often difficult to hear the speakers (myself included). This is certainly minor and easy to fix. But I felt bad that people had trouble hearing me. I will shout next time.

Highlights included:

• Hearing Joe Clark ask why Jason Santa Maria wasn't captioned during an impromtu Virtual Stan viewing at the "Does Design Matter?" panel.
• Getting decent BBQ at the Iron Works (conveniently located right behind the convention center. I have no idea how I missed this last year).
• Meeting lots of cool people for the first time.
• Seeing those I met last year again (a whole year is too long).
• Jeremy Keith and Andy Budd's hilarious "How to Bluff Your Way in CSS" panel. (I had been in Austin all of a half hour when I sat in on this -- the perfect way to kick off the conference.)
• The Design Eye Guys. Another entertaining panel -- humorous, yet really informative to hear about each process involved.
• Microformats. Tantek gave a great presentation, rounding up all the microformats out there. There are a lot them. I love the independent spirit that is attached to the development of these.
• "The Flash vs. HTML Game Show" panel for reasons already well noted.
• The dog wandering around Club DeVille.

I could go on... So that said, if you're kicking yourself for not going this year -- start planning for 2006. It's become the largest gathering of like-minded web geeks around.