At the risk of sounding like a broken record I'll say it again: SXSW was bigger this year than ever, both in terms of attendees and in the quality of speakers and panels. My SXSW this year started off on the best foot possible. I got to join a cast of awesome people in presenting horribly bad website ideas and it was a total blast. We packed a huge room, made people laugh, and we over the pre-talk dread early on and were able to ride the high of a good talk for the rest of the conference.

And now, while the high is starting to fade, two prominent conclusions are standing out in my memory. I'll summarize both for now with some deeper blog entries about these conclusions to follow shortly.

First conclusion: games are, for the most part, changing the world in positive ways, but we're only barely able to wrap our heads around what's possible.

Second conclusion: there are no users. There are only people. People are intelligent, creative, critical, vocal, quiet, lost, frustrated, reasonable, irrational, tired and excited. Using words like "users", "mobs", "teams", "crowds", or any other collective sort of word doesn't help designers build applications that should ultimately be designed to augment and amplify the abilities of a single person.

For a taste of what's to come, consider my first conclusion and then spend some time at World Without Oil. I can't say there won't be a pop quiz later.

Thanks to Kathryn Yu taking a panorama of my fellow presenters while David Hornik mocked all of ideas in typical VC fashion.