1999 2.0: “Silicon Alley 2.0″ (via: Dylan Stableford, who has other, better suggestions for names.)

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Hello, my name is:

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SWSX hack - predicting how crowded a session will be: Last night, I decided to wade through the intimidating SXSW panel lineup to get a sense of which panels I might attend. To help cope with the paradox of choice, I used a “toolbox” feature on the SXSW website that allows users to create a customized calendar of the sessions they’d like to attend. After creating it, I synch’d it to iCal.

In addition to giving me a nice graphical display of all of the sessions I chose, I noticed that the iCal comments frame displays how many people have added the event (session) to their calendars. While this does not reveal how many people will actually attend a session (for example, I’ve double-booked several sessions and I’m sure only a fraction of attendees are using the calendar feature), it nevertheless should be an indicator of the relative interest in different sessions taking place at the same time.

By the way, the most “added to calendar” sessions I’ve chosen (as of Friday evening when I synch’d up last) is the Jim Coudal/Jason Fried Opening Remarks, which 323 people had added to their calendars.

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del.icio.us not acting so deliciously: I wish the folks at Yahoo!, who now own del.icio.us, would get their act together. The service is down, which convinces me the service is not ready for prime-time for “mission critical” usage — and displays the downside of a Web 2.0 business model that depends on mashing up the content (RSS feeds or APIs) of others. I still believe in the model, but it’s based upon a potentially del.ica.te (buzzword-meme of the week) ecosystem.

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Recurring question: Is it okay to piggyback someone’s wifi? Today, a NY Times story asks, “Is it okay to piggyback on someone’s wireless?” Last year, I pointed to this NPR interview with NY Times Magazine “ethics columnist” Randy Cohen during which he answered the question (from an ethical point).

Cohen’s take: If you pay for Internet access somewhere (i.e., for your DSL connection) then you’ve made your contribution to the network. So, it’s okay to use free wi-fi you may encounter floating around. (However, don’t abuse your neighbor’s generousity by doing anything that may clog his or her bandwidth … and you’re a mooch if you don’t pay for access somewhere.)

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Travel day: Heading to Austin later today. We’ll see how the blogging goes. I’ll be pointing to lots of others who’ll be blogging. And I’ll be posting to Flickr. But my blogging from SXSW will be more social than insightful.

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