In the last few days, I had the pleasure of having lunch with Kelly Olexa, went to a fantastic Chicago meet up hosted by Katie Zimmer and met some fantastic folks at Len Kendall’s meet up for the 365 website,  Stuart Foster and Edward Booches were among them.

It’s been amazing to me how many new folks I’ve met from Chicago while here in Austin everyone from people who work at Tribune interactive, to consultants, to Gen Y bloggers. It was amazing  to connect (albiet briefly) with Chuck Hemman at Lauren Fernandez and David Spinks meetup, two folks who both inspire me to do more with social media everyday.

There are so many more folks I’ve met over the past few days, but the entire list probably isn’t of interest to you.

Panels:

Today I panel hopped. I attended “Blah Blah Blah: Why words won’t work” by Dan Roam. Here’s a quick video that will give you some idea about what I learned:

I jumped over to the Facebook Developer garage party, where developers from Gowalla and Seesmic talked about how they integrate Facebook into their services. Facebook also briefly touched on “multi platform gaming”– where, no matter your device or console, you can still compete with your social graph though Facebook.

I just got out of the panel “Search Patterns: Tangible Futures for Discovery” led by information architect and consultant Peter Morville. The panel covered all aspects of search — from design to utility.

There is just so much information, meeting new people, parties, and swag. It’s hard for me to breathe. But I’m also having a fantastic time. Lots on the agenda for tonight, will check in tomorrow with a full panel recap of “social search, a little help from my friends”. I will also have other updates throughout the day, and night, on our Posterous and Twitter streams.

The Mad Men Liveblog is almost here, and we are preparing ourselves. What does that mean? Well, we’ve caught up on past seasons, we have visited MadMenyourself.com incessantly and have outfits and cocktails picked out. You should see how skinny my tie is, it’s like it’s not even there. What are you doing to prepare yourself?

In any case, we really hope you join us on Sunday night, here is the link to get a reminder delivered in your email!

Live Blog!

Also, because we hit our July goal, the office is having a rooftop BBQ and party today. It will probably look something like this: