Today I got up bright and early … that’s a story alone (remember that we had the time change last night so the 6:30 AM sunrise became 7:30 AM sunrise–enough said)…to go to Darren’s panel on online advertising.

Sure I’m not really the target and, yes, Darren is my boss–so I was there as a supporter.  Member of the team you know.

Back in the BlogHaus I did some impromptu video with Loren Feldman and later with Gina Tripani.  That’s my goal for today.  Video interviews for Intruders Canada—that’s a big priority.

You know me though, my videos are pretty rough cut.  One take, not staged.  I like it that way, hope you do to.

The rest of the day … few more networking events and, this should be funny, Geek Bowling.

Tired?  Yes.  Rather.  And there are two more days to go?

While the BlogHaus is awesome.  It’s also buzzing with activity.  Lots going on and very hard to focus.

Overheard here in the press room “I think SXSWi has jumped the shark…”  are we getting conferenced out?  Or is just this one person jaded?

Frankly, not a lot of the sessions seemed interesting to me.  Tomorrow and Tuesday those are the days that I’m going to be doing more session time.  Now picking which sessions to go to … yikes

Post from: EveryJoe

SXSW thoughts from a first time attendee

The Montreal Gazette ran an article called Silicon Island on Saturday talking about the growing tech and start up culture on the island of Montreal.  Heri of MTW, Joey at Global Nerdy, and Rob at Techvibes all picked up on it rather quickly and built on the whole Montreal buzz.

A few common threads keep coming up in the articles (oddly enough no one commented on Montreal’s weather, which in winter is pretty harsh).  I’ve talked about the need for more VC funding up here and the need for people to take more risks in trying new startups as well.  But I have this nagging feeling that we’re still missing something.  Some piece of the puzzle just isn’t there.

Maybe we just don’t have the concentration of tech people in one location to get ideas going.  Maybe we need some kind of start up incubator city or something.  Of course I wouldn’t move to Ottawa, Toronto, or Montreal even though they are all lovely cities to visit.

Regardless of these questions and musings, I’m glad Montreal is getting some attention for their booming tech scene.

Speaking of which, you might like my DEMO videos on Intruders.tv Canada, since most of the Canadian companies presenting were from Montreal.  Just because he’s a friend of mine, and a former blogger here at b5media, I have to post my interview with Ben Yoskovitz here.  Ben might cringe at this (he seemed a tad embarrassed on Twitter, but said his hair did look good), but hey I’m proud of the guy!

Post from: EveryJoe

No doubt, Montreal is a hopping place for technology

Interview with DEMOgod winners xtranormal

The remainder of the videos are going to go up over the rest of the week.  Just keep an eye there, I’m not going to post every video here, just my favourites.

Post from: EveryJoe

My first Intruders.tv Canada video is up!