A few people are probably wondering why I'm here (or, rather, in the Bay Area) instead of Austin, where every weblogger ought to be right now. It's South by Southwest time, and at this moment a few thousand online journalists, strategists, pundits, and cyberliterati are sitting on and partaking of panels, telling stories, and partying it up.

I'd be there too if I wasn't a dork.

At last year's SXSW I had a cascade of good fortune, taking me from someone whose award entry didn't make the finalist cut and who was debating whether to attend, to an award winner and emergency panelist. Time of my life.

This year I was invited to emcee the first annual Iron Webmaster competition. I gladly accepted, and things started to go south. The even staff and I never really made the communication channels that we should have. Team selection happened late, and if I had actually lived up to the legend of Kaga Takeshi (or even William Shatner) I would have reigned in a lot more control, marshalled my forces, planned entertainment that would make good use of the 90 minutes allotted, a period to short to make a decent web site, and too long to try and entertain an audience.

I was still up for it though. Brainstorming with Derek gave me some great ideas, and the organizers asked me if I'd mind having a co-host in the form of the illustrious Ben Brown, a person I hadn't known until a month earlier when I became an instant devotee of the short-lived Ben Brown Show.

Part of the problem was that everyone had the strange idea that, like the organizers, and Ben, I lived in Texas. I didn't realize this until about three weeks ago, when they tried to schedule a brainstorming lunch to start shoring things up. Around the same time I came down with the flu, and a 103-degree Kevin had to miss work for a week, putting me behind on an already aggressive schedule at work. All told, things started looking a little dicey for a five-day Southern romp.

So now most of my weblogging friends are in Austin, and the others are complaining that their web traffic has gone down by 40%, since most people who read weblogs have weblogs, and many of them are down at the interactive face-to-face love-in.

Not so bad though, I got to spend time with friends this weekend, seeing a student production of a stage interpretation of Dante's Inferno (heh, more on that later), having dinner at Zachary's (mmm... Zachary's...), and going hiking at Black Diamond Mine natural park, trudging through sticky wet dirt that still clings to my shoes as I'm on the train to work.

The first report, thirdhand, about Iron Webmaster wasn't promising. I really hope it went well, but it sounds like some of my fears were well-founded. Also it seems that there was a debacle with the Fray Cafe 2 storytelling, and people were turned away at the door because it was full. Apparently even several of those scheduled to tell stories were turned away.

I'm sure there will be comments on other weblogs as webloggers drift from their hotel rooms to the cybercafe at the convention center. As for me, I'm still sorry I'm not there, even more so since I recently found out that despite being a major corporate sponsor of the event, Yahoo! doesn't have the travel budget to send all those interaction designers who want to go to the CHI 2002 conference in Minneapolis next month, and I'll be staying home then too.

I should probably refill my calendar module with other events, considering that the only two things I've had in there for the last four months are conferences I end up not going to anyhow.

Hey, in good news, my video camera should be delivered today! It's supposed to arrive at home, which means Jim the Manager might sign for it. Otherwise I'll probably pick it up at the depot tomorrow.

No matter what else, I had a great weekend, looking forward to a good week. Hope the same is true for you!