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A sea of tote bags waiting to be carried around for days by guys with ponytails and very bubbly girls

Apparently SXSW has panels, not just tote bags and parties. And apparently the hot topic this year is location-based social network games, not the latest cheese fries recipes (darn). But location-based social network games is also apparently the hot topic every year. 

• A line for a panel with Quentin Tarantino about genre cinema winds around three corners of the conference room floor. But Tarantino doesn’t show up to the panel. Someone muses that he forgot to buy two airplane tickets for himself, and everyone probably laughs.

• Fittingly, the first panel we managed to get into on Saturday was called Playing with Place: Location-Based Games and Services.. One exciting part was when Catherine Herdlick of the real world game company Scenic Route and Seth Priebatsch of SCVNGR talked about the social value and ethics of location games (there aren’t many). “Not all of social media feels not that social,” said Catherine. “So far we haven’t done a good job of reflecting the complexity and nuances between people, between people in their cities. What is my role as a bus rider, as an employee, as a mom?” The question gets more complicated for Second Life, where presumably you can be all three of those things.

• The "*moral hazard of game play*" was the next topic, courtesy of Seth, citing the video game professor Jesse Schell his recent lecture here). The Big Question: if you get two points every time you brush your teeth, at the end of the day, you’re washing your teeth for the two points, not for ethical or health reasons. What happens when we take away the points?" I don’t know about points, but if I can keep getting free SXSW t-shirts…

• 2 PM: danah boyd (yup, lowercase like ee cummings or kd lang), the social networking anthropologist, delivered the keynote address about how privacy and publicity intertwine on the internet. And she did so in a warrior princess getup. Key points, starting with a Zuckerburg smackdown: “No matter how many times a privileged whtie male tells you privacy is dead, it’s not dead… Google managed to make the social network version of the Uncanny Valley … There are two types of personal information: personal identifiable information and personally embarassing information… The wired world is seeing a move from private by default to ‘public by default, private by effort.’.. Chatroulette fascinates us because it mashes up the boundaries between privacy and publicity.”

• The guy next to me is watching me type this, hi guy. Overheard on Twitter at the same time: “jonlee11 Aw nuts…. spent the last 15 min looking at hilarious *Chatroulette* screenshots instead of listening to #danahboyd#sxsw.”

• Newspapers may be dying, but the theme of newspapers-are-dying isn’t dying. Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies included people from the New York Times itself, including David Carr, who talked about producing his own videos and all the mad scientists they’re employing to digg their way out of this mess (tablets!). Also discussed: the future of publicly-funded investigative reporting and paying random people almost nothing to report the news. In fact, earlier today, Aol’s new Seed offered me $5 (American dollars) to write a blog post about the nerdiest shirts found at SXSW. Heh, I’m gonna be so rich…

• Speaking of dying: At the hotly-anticipated (but tellingly under-attended) panel entitled Moon 2.0: The Outer Limits of Lunar Exploration, Cariann Higginbotham, the space cheerleader behind Spacevidcast, said "quite frankly, NASA can be a little bit boring." And then she pointed out, rightly, that a rocket launch is simply one of the most amazing thing that humans do, but the news media only cares if “something goes boom.” The two NASA employees – Nicholas Skytland and Veronica McGregor (a former CNN producer) – took it in stride, pointing out that they don’t exactly have the manpower and money and bureacratic leeway needed to make NASA sexier, but they rely on the fans. Skytland, who runs the interesting fan-sourced site OpenNASA, added, “NASA’s budget is completely up to you. I don’t know how excited we are as a society at being a leader in space flight. We’re not China, India…” But Dave Masten and folks from the SpaceX Prize were there to remind everyone that the private sector is trying to get in the game big time. 

• The panel Doing it Wrong: Recently Possible Technology" with Bre Pettis and Tal Chalzin features LEDs, lasers, and a toilet that tweets – the Twittersh#tter. Bre: “I find knowing how to do something is a major impediment to getting it done.” And “What’s the future of hackerspace? It depends on what individuals think is really cool…” (See our episode on Pettis’ NYC Resistor.)

• It turned out that the title and use of Carl Sagan footage in What Carl Sagan Can Teach Us About the Web, a talk by Twitter’s Mark Trammell mainly just cheap space web geek bait for a humdrum talk. Hey, with so many panels, you need a way to draw people to your self-promotion.

• Chris Shifflet and Ed Finker waxed about the psychology of social web security- notable concepts introduced include ambient signifiers (ex: the Tokyo subway systems warning chime “playlists” and other graphical and audio signals that let you know you should stop doing that right now), “paving the cow path” and background change. “Facebook Wants To Be Your One True Login” gets an obligatory mention.  

• We missed Ze Frank talk about himself , but this time we felt bad.

• Also couldn’t make it to the talk by m00t, the creator of 4chan, but had a feeling that would mostly be short awkward quips about cats and the importance of anonymity online, which he spoke about at TED. What he added this time, with help of tech historian Jason Scott, was the idea that 4chan is a game. If Wikipedia is “a game” played with millions of others in competition over who knows what, on 4chan it’s a contest to post the best, most viral, and sometimes grossest stuff. “4chan is like an RPG that mounts a quest every 30 seconds,” said Scott. Poole, who occasionally deletes posts and does minor moderation, explained what might happen if he shut down the site, letting loose 8 million rabid users on the Web: “They would just (expletive) steamroll the Internet!”

- ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY MICHAEL BYRNE