Huge conferences like SXSW are hard on introverted nerds like me, but it all starts with having a great roommate or conference buddy. I got to do SXSW Waxy-style with my co-worker Andy, and just being able to spend IRL time with him alone was worth the price of the flight. (When you work remotely it's too easy to forget how great it is to talk face to face.) Andy also drinks good beer and knows where to eat. Seriously, look at this mound of shrimp, crab, crawfish, sausage, and corn at The Boiling Pot. We ate that with our fingers, directly off the table on Friday night.

I don't really go to SXSW for the panels and talks, but on Saturday Matt Haughey's solo talk, Lessons from 11 years of community at MetaFilter was well worth the shuttle ride across the river to catch. Happily Matt did his talk with slides online on Vimeo, so you can see it, too. (Note to self: do this with my upcoming CodeConf talk.)

On Saturday evening Andy and I headed to Ginger Man for the ThinkUp community meetup. In-person meetups of online communities can be nerve-wracking, and I was worried that there was so much going on in Austin that we'd have a hard time getting people to show up, but the turnout was incredible. Here's a recap of who came, what we talked about, and thanks to Andy, we got to enjoy some yummy beer, too. After the meetup, sadly I missed the TWiT "meat dinner" at Fogo, but I did get to have a brightly-lit gin and tonic at the Gizmodo party, chat about life hacks and life in general with Danny, and afterwards partake in a SXSW tradition 3 years and counting—a chocolate sack with some old and new friends.

On Sunday, Leo, Jeff, and I did TWiT live from Momo's, a very cool Austin bar with a giant outdoor patio and plenty of room to chat with people. The show included a parade of ridiculously internet-famous guests, like Baratunde Thurston, Gary Vaynerchuck, Pete Rojas and Ryan Block, Lisa Bettany, Cali Lewis, Brian Brushwood, Sarah Lane, and Tom Merritt. After more than a year of being on TWiG, it was my first time meeting Tom, Sarah, and Lisa in person. So fun.

You can listen to or watch the show here. Before the show started, there was a booth for show hosts, where I got to sign my first gadget—a Droid—and a couple of books and postcards. I also got to take photos with several awesome listeners. Getting treated like a celebrity is something I'm not used to at all, and it just speaks to the powerful platform that Leo has built at TWiT.

Post-Momo's I stole away my pal Kevin Purdy for some Buffalo wings and one-on-one time. In a shameless grab for a certain Foursquare badge, we hit 5 bars in under 3 hours. I don't remember much from later on in this bar crawl, except Kevin saying something along the lines of, "If this is 3-beer Gina, I wonder what 4-beer Gina is like!" and consequently being grateful I'm no longer Kevin's boss. Back at the hotel room, I rehearsed my talk with Andy, who seemed impressed that I was able to articulate sentences after 4 beers and 1 diet Coke. (Thank you, ibuprofen.)

On Monday, Andy's and my session, Worst Website Ever ||: Too Stupid to Fail, was scheduled for 11am in a very small room at the Hilton. The room was so small and the session so popular that the the line to get in stretched to the escalators and the organizers had to turn away dozens of people. Thanks to Andy's tenacity, we got to do an encore later in the day at 5pm.

Even though my worst website pitch was only 5 minutes, I was super-nervous about this talk. I've never done anything close to standup comedy, and the prospect of attempting to be funny after comedic geniuses like Mike Lacher and Ze Frank was scary as all hell. It turns out that hearing laughter in a room while you're on stage telling jokes is a special kind of high. Mike blew us all away with his hilarious Fax App Store pitch (Fap store!) but everyone's pitch was fantastic, and I was so grateful to be included in such a talented group. Thanks especially to Andy for his help refining my pitch and landing my jokes. We got some good reviews on Twitter, too.

Nerves got me and I wasn't thrilled with how I did at the 11am session, but by the 5pm encore I was so tired I didn't have the energy to get anxious, and I think that improved my delivery. Andy's planning to put together video with the slides from the session as soon as SXSW releases the official audio. I'll update this post when it's out. For a preview of some of the bad ideas, here are Ogilvy's notes:

Also inspiring: Felicia's keynote interview—seriously, how do you not love that woman?— and watching Gary V whip Ballroom D up into a frenzy with his passion and speaking skills. Here are all my photos from Austin.

• My panel proposal: How'd They DO That? Secrets of Web Superstars --a thinly-veiled excuse to interview my online idols and mentors
• Adam's panel, which I'll be on: Coding for Pleasure: Developing Killer Spare-Time Apps--in which the hows and whys of spare-time apps like MixTape.me, Texter, the Better Webapp extensions, Todo.txt CLI, and Twitalytic will be discussed
• danah boyd: Understanding Lies, Deception, and Truthiness in Social Media
• Jim Coudal and John Gruber: Online Advertising: Losing the Race to the Bottom
• Andy Baio: Gaming the Crowd: Turning Work Into Play
• Jen Bekman: Inbox Hero: Why Newsletters Matter More Than Ever
• Josh Clark (creator of the Couch to 5k program): Nerds on the Run: Tech and Casual Fitness

Post your picks for panels you've given the thumbs up in the comments, so we can help make the good stuff come to fruition in Austin this spring.

As a part of their SXSW coverage, The Austin Chronicle quoted me as saying,

For a blogger, crowd-sourcing is just outsourcing your research. Without fact-checkers, why not?

Since the reporter asked for a definition to go in his "glossary with a sense of humor," I said that with tongue lodged firmly in cheek. The truth is that crowdsourcing research--and editing and even fact-checking(!) the results--is a serious subject with lots of issues. Because I felt like being cute, I crowdsourced what "crowdsourcing" means, by asking about 9,000 people on Twitter. My followers didn't disappoint; several nailed some of the thornier aspects of the issue in their 140-character responses.

Here are a few things people said (some of which I edited--haha).

Crowdsourcing means:

• two heads are better than one, times a million.
• getting fans to do something for free
• asking the people you know will tell you what you want to hear
• torches and pitchforks
• conducting a survey and stealing all the good answers
• the smart Mom who asks her kids what they want for dinner B4 spending hrs cooking something they won eat!
• a red flag meaning "LOW STANDARDS AND BUDGET ISSUES"
• a technique originally pioneered by Tom Sawyer
• "too lazy to do real research"
• delegation, using your audience's combined knowledge to save time and do work that would take you longer on your own

I'm particularly stuck on the third item, the great point that crowdsourcing done in certain ways creates an echo chamber. That happened at Lifehacker all the time, especially with our weekly Hive Five feature: we'd rave about Product X that does Y. Then, weeks or months later, we'd ask, "What's your favorite product to do Y?" Unsurprisingly, readers would mention X. There's obviously a lot of danger in asking people you know to tell you what you want to hear.

I think I may be the only person not from the art world on the SXSW panel, so I'm hijacking the word "curation" to describe what I did at Lifehacker and do here and do with my open source software projects--which is to be an editor, to pick out the best stuff to include, and ignore the rest. It should be a fun discussion. If you're going to be in Austin I'll hope you'll attend.

Now, it's only appropriate to ask you to post what makes you most excited (or freaked out) about the brave new "crowdsourced" world--in the comments.