Birds of a feather flock together

There are so many good things about SXSWi but the best thing for me – by a long way – was the people.

I know, it sounds a bit soft but I’ve come back feeling totally inspired and re-energised about The Web and what we do - and it’s all down to people and the non-stop, super-social whirlwind of South-by. It was relentless and provided a very welcome opportunity to trade up the online relationships formed in the preceding 12 months. Hundreds of Twitter avatars became real people. We got to know them a bit in real life. We played Foursquare with them – winning badges and tattoos. We chatted like loons, we ate chili-dogs and tacos, we drank quantities of Tequila, and we danced…for real, in meatspace, and it was good.

In the weeks before SXSW, I’d been reading Jonathan Zittrain’s book The Future of the The Internet about the slow strangling of the generative Web – it’s a great book, but a diet of misery supplemented with lots of blog posts about Continuous Partial Attention disorder and how our fragile biological brains are getting frazzled and can’t cope and stuff. All pretty gloomy stuff.

But then you go to South-by, and there’s nothing like the self-reinforcement of being sealed into an echo chamber with 14,000 geeks to make you feel better about things. I feel thoroughly awesomeized – it’s a rough, alchemical magic that lifts the soul. It’s heartening to see how much we prefer real to mediated. There’s no need to worry.

I take great joy in the brilliant network of people I work with and have met through Twitter and blogging, plus all of the friends they introduced, and the total randoms we crashed into along the way. That’s what I’m talking about.

I’m already missing the reality of my new friends. Thank you one and all.