Most of the conferences we have attended tend to be along the 2-3 days long, SXSWi is an marathon conference with 5 full days of sessions, panels, keynotes and of course parties; lots of parties. This makes for a long, but exciting week/weekend.

Day four brought us beautiful weather for the first time at SXSW so far.  The sun was out and made our adventure to the BBQ Crash Course that much better.

Sunday was supposed to be the first nice day, but we woke to grey skies and rain.  We decided to punt on the 10am panels and hit Moonshine again, for their brunch.  It was well worth the break to get a good meal in to start the day:

Day Two (Saturday March 14th 2009)  of SXSW Interactive kicked off at 10am for us.  Head over here for a recap of Day One.

As promised, here is a more detailed breakdown of the "oooh That's Clever" panel. This panel was presented by Paul Annett the creator of a very popular site that shows some cool CSS called  Silverback App. In this panel Mr. Annett explored a wide range of company trickery that gave customers a joyful surprise when discovered. The examples ranged from company logos, to secret message on the bottom of juice bottles ("stop looking at my bottom"), to website easter eggs. The idea behind the session was two folds. First to show designers (and developers, that's me!) some creative "easter eggs" that inspire creativity. Second was to show how these little gems could help channel potential customers to your product or service through a viral "did you see this" pattern. Here is a list of as many examples as I could write down and/or research.

In the past, James has written SXSW posts on his personal blog, Vivisecting Media, which were in-depth long hour by hour editorials of the experience.  This year, our goal is to do more condensed notes, just because writing long recaps at four in the morning is kind of exhausting and we know you want the real content.  So we will try to link audio and video of the presentations as they become available by SXSW.

DevelopmentArc will be attending the 2009 Interactive South By Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas.  This will be the first year that Aaron and I have attended the Interactive conference.  I have been to the Music portion of the conference for the last three years and I have throughly enjoyed it.  We are looking forward to seeing what the Interactive conference has to offer and to meet fellow industry members.  If you are attending SXSW and would like to meet up with us, let us know!