I just got back from South By Southwest -- or "South By" as the masses of Brits called it -- a little poorer (but astonishingly not that much; the food that we did have to pay for was incredibly cheap), voiceless, and weighed down by business cards.

Some observations and other things I learned...

-- Any festival that attracts luminaries from the New York alt-comedy world like Eugene Mirman (who emceed the Web Awards) and Mike Birbiglia, as well as Dan Maccarone from the sketch group Slightly Known People (and co-founder of Hard Candy Shell web design), plus Amazon's (AMZN) Jeff Bezos, who just attended for fun, is worth considering.

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