Alrighty, I’m finally back home and recovering after a marathon of tech and music that was SXSW. I’m sitting down sipping some hot tea and getting ready for a night time cold and flu Alka Seltzer bath. That’s right, I brought home lots of tech info and a cold from beautiful Austin, Texas. Hey, if you are gonna do it, you gotta go hard or not at all. At any rate I have one more day of summaries to dispatch before I start something new this year. I will go over each talk I went to into a little more depth, more for the benefit of myself more than anything else, as well as give proper respect to the .

The final day saw me head to Ballroom C in the Austin Convention Center for Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information. This was more of a personal joy than most anything else. I use Google Reader on a daily basis and run through an insane amount of information. Any kind of help is much appreciated. I got here when the lady discussed using Yahoo! Pipes, BackType, and Twitter to jumble around real-time information and tune it to your personal preferences. This is gonna be a fun one to go back over and implement.

I do some side work here and there (http://hoketronics.com), and because of this I decided that I owed that side a bit of love by going to Freelancers: You’re Five Products Away From Freedom. The guy who gave the talk is one of the Five Tech Guys in Kilts and also wrote a CodeIgniter book. While geared toward freelancers, I see benefit across the board from this talk. His main idea was that there are tools that cut across so quick to publish and take payments for any type of product, that any idea of fix someone comes up with can be monetized almost instantly. Great stuff there.

My day job does work geared more toward the government side of things. With How Governments are Changing Where Big Ideas Happen, I got a small taste of how governments lure tech companies. Representatives from Louisiana, Europe, Shanghai, and even Austin talked about methods their local governments use to lure talent to their area. It was a refreshing view to see that the public sector is starting to catch up and compete with the private sector in these areas. One thing I didn’t know, Facebook opened up their first office outside of California in Austin, Texas.

After snacking some lunch and raking in the schwag from trade show floor, I dipped into the Reid Hoffman Presentation titled, “Data as Web 3.0.” Reid was the driving force behind LinkedIn and his discussion revolved around the next iteration of the Internet. With describing Web 1.0 as searching data and retrieving it as well as Web 2.0 as introducing social aspects of relations, Reid presented his thoughts on Web 3.0. He claims that the next step is the processing and making sense out of the huge amounts of data spewed out from the marriage of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. He then ran down his top 10 list for entrepreneurs. Again, all great stuff.

Finally, since I missed all of the keynotes this year, I decided to attend the closing speech by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. Bruce was the man behind the cyberpunk culture and he gave a great punkish talk to close out the Interactive portion of the conference. Between his musings, ramblings, and one liners, Bruce laid out his biggest problem today. Progress is moving fast and it’s up to the youth and it’s ability with tech to start taking the lead. I’ll never forget him telling the Baby Boomers to stop trying to hold on and get out of the way.

All and all day 5 filled the few gaps left in my puzzle board of needs for SXSW Interactive. I filled it plenty with some hardcore code and design sessions earlier. Now I had some business and a little more government items to pluck right in. Finally, Bruce Sterling was the last inspirational piece to make my puzzle complete. With almost a week out of SXSWi 2011, I’m still feeling complete and basking in the glow.