Name dropping is a necessary evil when attending a schmooze-fest such as SxSW. In fact I've always felt it to play a rather significant role in initial contact with a new person. It allows the other to quickly get a gage of the people you've linked with and who may have linked to you. Real-space blogrolling, in other words. It is one more device in the trust/authority toolbox available to us in our social engineering.
Of course, as with all things, moderation is the key.
So let's see... Earlier in the day I, not knowing who he was, helped Steven Champeon get an IP on the lousy wireless network in the lobby. As I now understand it, Steven is in charge of WaSP? Later in the day I spotted Karl in the audience of David Weinberger's keynote. When it ended, instead of going up and picking some bones with Mr. Weinberger, I hooked up with Karl who, well, just by his presence was a who's-who magnet. (Sorry Karl, but it's true!) Bang! I'm talking to Adam Greenfield and Joe Clark. Adam seems to like me; Joe, not so much.
At this point I was supposed to follow everybody into the "High Accessibility" talk given by Mr. Clark, but at the last second ducked into Kevin Warwick's "I Cyborg". Oooooohhhh WOW. Brilliant, absolutely fantastic. At the end, after I raised my hand and made what I though was a rather clever observation about how it stands to reason that feeding the brain data directly with some context should allow it to learn anything, I very very nearly volunteered to be a guinea pig for him. I may yet do that.
The evening was spent walking long distances to parties, chatting with various interesting folks: Michael Schmidt from K10K (who surprised me by informing that he and Toke Nygaard's web work is standards compliant - we need to advertise this I told him), two very interesting folks from Toronto whose names I shall have to get (Jason Nolan was one), Tantek Celik and of course the eminently wonderful Karl D. :D
On a sour note: my cold is now in my head, and my right leg is in excruciating pain. The muscle injury which seems to resurface from time to time is making walking very painful.
