SXSW is halfway home, and the conference is proving to be another amazing experience.

The Refresh World Meetup on Friday evening was a great first stop on the journey. It was great to meet Refreshers from all over the globe.

Saturday’s highlights included a bit of local flavor as Boulder’s Kathy Sierra gave the opening remarks. Kathy is a fantastic speaker and her Creating Passionate Users talks are always a favorite of mine.

Sunday night brought the Avalonstar Bowling Extravaganza. I was proud geekmember of Team Microformats that also included Refreshers and general web geeks from AOL, Paypal, Linkd’in, The Motley Fool, and others. Our lane assignment for the preliminaries actually placed us between the Refresh DC team and the global Team Refresh. That Cindy Li can really bowl!

Out of the 36 teams, we actually made the field of 16 as the #14 seed in the tournament that pitted us against third-seeded FrogDesign. In our first head-to-head round, we rose to the occasion to knock off the design giants and make our way into the elite round of eight. We finished the evening in sixth place - which was the lottery compared to our expectations.

Look me up if you’re in Austin! Back to Matt Mullenweg’s presentation on Scaling Your Community.